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RE: Exploring Kutaisi's Soviet 'Glory to Labour' Monument

in TravelFeed20 days ago

It's not a place you'd want to live in if you want to live in Batumi or Tbilisi. Living standards are genuinely horrific. Tbilisi is the worst city I've ever been to from noise to food quality.

In major supermarkets you see fruit fall on the floor and they just pick it up and place it back in the baskets. Said fruit and vegetables will be riddled with insects and you won't even notice until you're home and slice into them. The roads are a nightmare where idiots are on their phones all the time not paying attention, so people speed through green lights and will yell at you if they almost kill you as apparently it's your fault for crossing. Endless car horns all day and night. Noise pollution like no other, hearing cars speed through the streets at 4am with backfiring exhausts.

The people in Tbilisi (in Kutaisi people were lovely) are shit. The rudest, unwelcoming people imaginable. You'll try to ask someone in a shop where something is and again they'll be on their phones and totally ignore you. It's a push & shove society in which nobody cares for others. It's genuinely rare that I have a good interaction with a Georgian in Tbilisi. I didn't even mention the crime; I see so many people fighting in the streets, so many people getting arrested witnessed from my balcony at all hours. Georgia was considered the USSR's crime capital. I see it.

Oh, and there is NOTHING to do. It's very expensive for literally zero aspects of culture and events. Book shops are pretty much nonexistent in Tbilisi, the same with art shops. No real cinemas. Just 3 of them in the newly built malls and they show maybe 3 or 4 films all in Georgian. Coffee culture would drive you (yes, you specifically) utterly insane with how bad the coffee is in the majority of places.

While it looks somber and dark considering its history,

The Soviets did a lot of good for Georgia too. The country still massively relies on everything they built here. The metro here is the same old line, same old trains. And the Soviets were also Georgians themselves.

Anyway, yeah, I wouldn't look at that opportunity and jump at it if there are other countries with the same offers. Might be nice to have a place to rent out to someone else or use for brief stays, but Tbilisi and Batumi aren't places you want to be in. I was actually planning to move back to Armenia because of all of this. But I went to Kutaisi and saw how nice everyone was and how much cheaper it was. As well as cafe culture, things to see and do, etc. So the plan is to now move to Kutaisi in the upcoming months for another year.