September 30, 2026

The fish market opens at four. Not the sanitized version tourists photograph from a safe distance — the real one, tucked behind Tbilisi's Dezerter Bazaar, where the fluorescent lights buzz and flicker and the air carries the cold mineral smell of mountain rivers.

I found it by following an old woman's cart. She moved with the unhurried certainty of someone who has walked this route ten thousand times, plastic bags swinging against her coat. When she stopped, I stopped. The stall keeper — a man with hands the color of river stones — greeted her by asking after her daughter. She answered with a shrug that contained an entire story.

I bought a bag of churchkhela I didn't need, just to stay a few minutes longer.

Georgia does this to you. It pulls you into the periphery of other people's lives and lets you rest there, briefly, like a guest who arrives unannounced but is given wine anyway. The wine comes early here. At nine in the morning, a neighbor pressed a jar of last year's amber into my hands as a thank-you for helping carry groceries up four flights of stairs. I drank it slowly, standing on a balcony overlooking a courtyard tangled with laundry lines and flowering vines.

There's a word — simpatia in Italian, something close to it in Georgian warmth — for the quality of being genuinely interested in the person in front of you. Tbilisi runs on it. The city is crumbling and luminous, Soviet and ancient, and the people carry its contradictions without apology.

By noon I was lost in Sololaki, a neighborhood where Art Nouveau facades lean over cobblestones like old men over a fence. A child offered to show me a cat. The cat lived in a doorway. That felt like enough.

#travel #georgia #tbilisi #wanderlust