Two weeks.
That’s how long we have been in Tbilisi.
And somehow, I feel like I have been here much longer — and at the same time, like I arrived only yesterday.
Tbilisi is not a city that explains itself immediately.
You have to walk through it.
Look twice.
Listen.
And sometimes, simply sit somewhere and let the city pass in front of you.
I haven’t written anything here for the last three days.
Not because nothing happened.
Maybe because too many little things did.
On Monday, we went to the bank to open an account.
A completely ordinary thing.
But when you are trying to build a life somewhere new, even something as simple as opening a bank account suddenly feels like the first page of a new chapter.
And then there are the things you cannot plan.
I bought something that looked like a Brazilian pastel.
I saw it, thought of Brazil, and bought it.
Only to discover that the filling was beans.
It wasn’t exactly the pastel I had imagined. 😂
And perhaps that is one of the first lessons Tbilisi is teaching me:
familiar is not always what you think it is.
Then came the taxi.
It was supposed to be an ordinary ride through the city.
It wasn’t.
The driver drove as if we were late for something much more important than our destination. At one point, the car actually left the road.
My heart decided to discover Georgia before the rest of me did. 😂
But Tbilisi has another side.
A quieter one.
The old buildings.
The hills.
The balconies.
The embassies.
The streets where you sometimes stop before taking your phone out, simply because you are still learning the invisible rules of a place that isn’t yours yet.
And perhaps this is what makes Tbilisi so fascinating.
It is impossible to separate the city from the history around it.
You can sit peacefully in a park in the morning, watch people walking their dogs, hear children playing, and feel completely removed from the rest of the world.
And yet, you know you are standing in a part of the world where borders, wars, occupations and powerful neighbours are not distant stories from a television screen.
They are part of the geography.
Part of the memory.
Part of the silence.
Georgia lives with that contradiction.
And maybe that is why Tbilisi feels different.
There is something incredibly alive here.
People are going to work.
Cafés are full.
Cars are everywhere.
People are laughing.
Life continues.
But underneath all of it, there is history.
You can feel that a country does not forget simply because life goes on.
And then there are mornings like today.
We went for a walk in the park.
No sightseeing.
No checklist.
No big plans.
Just walking.
The city was waking up around us.
For a few minutes, there was nothing to solve, nowhere we needed to be, and nothing we needed to understand.
Just the morning air, the trees, the park — and Tbilisi.
Maybe that is how a city slowly becomes familiar.
Not through its monuments.
Not through the photographs you take.
But through the ordinary moments you begin to recognize.
A street you know.
A corner you remember.
A place where you feel comfortable sitting.
A bakery you start looking for.
A park you return to.
And one day, without realizing it, you stop feeling like you are visiting.
You are simply there.
We have been here for two weeks.
I still don’t know what Tbilisi will become to me.
Maybe I don’t need to know yet.
Because perhaps the most beautiful stories are not the ones we arrive with.
They are the ones that begin quietly, while we are busy living them.
I didn’t come to Tbilisi with a story already written.
I’m beginning to understand it by living one. ❤️
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