weekend part II

Decided to split the weekend events into 2 posts to not make it too hard to read...

It was so refreshing to get out of the city on Sunday. First, of all, I'm not much of a city girl to begin with, and second, Tbilisi honestly is just not that attractive of a city in the areas where I live and work. We packed 10 people into a minivan-- neither comfortable nor safe-- driven by Giorgi the driver. We had the 6 Emory Med-ers, Giorgi, Solome, our Georgian lawer friend, Irina, our Georgian doctor friend, and a new friend, Dr. Brian McNally from Emory ER, who came to help set up a new ER in a hospital where many of us are working.

First stop was 1.5 hours away in Gori. We were delighted to read in 2 different guidebooks along the way that Gori is a very unattractive city. In fact I believe the words of one were something like, "mangy dogs poking their noses around in rotting piles of rubbish." The attraction? Stalin's hometown, the only place in the former Soviet Union that still has statues of him, and site of the Stalin Museum. We visited the latter, which had an amazing collection of his stuff- many gifts from other countries during his rule, his personal rail car, his first desk in the Kremlin, and one of 9 death masks cast after his death. If I was more of a history buff, I might have ejoyed it a little more, but really I was a little underwhelmed.

Then came the highlight: 20 minutes outside Gori is Uplitsikhe, a cave city that was built between the 6th and 1st centuries BC! It was built into the rocks, and according to my guidebook, of the 700+ original cave rooms, you can still enter 100 or so of them. It was occupied for many centuries, and in the transition from paganism to Christianity, a church was buit on top in the 9th or 10th centry AD, which you can still go into. The sky was crystal clear, weather warm, view spectacular, and we spent a couple wonderful hours climbing around on rocks and poking into caves.

On our way back into Tbilisi, we stopped at Mtskheta, a town with a number of claims to fame: the captial of Georgia until its annexation by Russia in 1805, the site of the introduction of Christianity to Georgia by St. Nino in the 1st or 2nd century BC, and the hometown of Giorgi the driver. We just visited one very old church called Jvari on top of a hill with, again, spectacular views, one of which I tried my hardest to add at the beginning of this post, but only about half made it. (Pictures are unneccesarily complicated here.) Hopefully you can get a feel for it.

The Georgian countryside is incredibly beautiful, with huge mountains completely covered in green. I can't wait to get out of the city again.

I had some very interesting clinical experiences today, but I'll save that for another time. Cheers!