Mount Ararat is now clear and the view very nice. Handling in Yerevan is again very smooth and so is the flight. After 45 minutes we touch down in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. The handling here is even faster and within 40 minutes we sit in our hotel room. Never made such good time in all our trips. Our hotel is right on Shota Rustaveli, the main Avenue of Tbilisi. Here are all the good shops, museums and government offices. We are pleasantly surprised: all very nice, very clean and a lot of building/renovating going on! It’s lunch time now and there is a place we hit right away: Wendy’s!! A fine burger later, we get on a hopp on/hopp off sightseeing bus. There is another tourist besides us so we basically have a private tour.

We pass newly renovated quarters (was ordered by the President), visit street markets where they sell old Soviet stuff, stop at view points overlooking the river and the old city and get off in the old town.
Tbilisi grew up below the walls of the Nariqala Fortress, which stand on the Sololaki ridge above the west side of the Mtkvari. The twisting alleys of the Old Town (Qala) are still full of hidden courtyards and carved wooden balconies leaning at rakish angles. Though almost no buildings here survived the Persian sacking of 1795, many date from soon after that and still have the Eurasian character of earlier times.
Tbilisi is also a modern city trying to move forward in the 21st century after the strife and stagnation of the late 20th. Its streets are crowded with pedestrians, construction debris and hurtling or crawling traffic. Flagship building projects, from a new cathedral and presidential palace, to revamped parks and museums, coexist with crowded old markets, confusing bus stations and shabby Soviet apartment blocks.

Dinner at a nice Georgian restaurant with good meat and good wine. Tbilisi - a place we like.