Spend a week somewhere you can't read a single sign
The menu in a Tbilisi cellar restaurant has no photos and no Latin letters, so you point at a word that looks promising and a woman brings you khinkali, dumplings the size of a fist, and you eat them for breakfast because that's what arrived. By day three you've stopped translating in your head and started reading shapes: this loop means bread, this one means wine. Georgian uses its own alphabet, Mkhedruli, unrelated to anything you know, which is exactly the point. A phrasebook stays in your bag mostly unopened, useful less for words than for the fact that holding it makes strangers patient with you. What you keep is the taste of dumpling broth burning your tongue at 8am.
Practical
- Cost
- $600–1,200 for a week
- Best time
- Spring and autumn, when Tbilisi is mild and mountain roads are open
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time it takes
- One week
- What people get wrong
- People lean on translation apps constantly instead of watching context, which delays the shift from anxiety to habit; others try to memorise the alphabet before arriving instead of just going and picking it up on signs.
- With
- Alone