Georgia Minute by Minute

I travel once in a while myself and this is excellent advice nearly everywhere.

There are many things that you could be annoyed with in Georgia and for these reason many young people flee the country in search of a better life. I somehow declined dozen of relocation offers on the software engineering roles and stayed alongside my big family, which I don’t regret.

If you ignore some parts of the uncomfortable environment, adapt to some of them and construct the comfort around you and your loved ones, I believe life can be comfortable in many places of the world, unless your physical existence is under danger.

From the other side, living in Georgia has many benefits: dollar-value, cheapness, amazing food, really good and cheap wine (for 10 USD you buy a bottle which costs 25-35 abroad), beautiful and diverse nature, safe environment… and steady flights to the EU countries (which I got to used before pandemic) makes travel very easy… I was literally flying in EU every second weekend.

We went to Gudauri twice, as I remember (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudauri). I recall seeing - and being incredibly jealous of - the heliskiing done by some visiting Austrians, they had access to essentially infinite terrain with just humongous vertical and would fly around all day. Except when a couple of them died in the self-caused avalanche. Oh well, live hard, possibly die hard.

On the second trip to Gudauri, we stayed way up in the mountains near the resort instead of in the valley, like we did on the first trip. It was an excellent choice for first 3 days, but then it snowed straight for a week and produced the largest snowfall I've ever been at. You could only leave the hotel from the second floor balcony, and then you'd fall right through several meters of snow. My brother and I spent a lot of hours jumping from the top of the bus into that snow and trying to swim up. When we'd get tired, we'd play on a really torn up billiards table upstairs.

There was no skiing as the resort was closed, there was no way to get off the mountain, there was no food and at many points no heat or electricity. There were, however, a lot of tough and unshaven guys with kalashnikovs who were stuck in front of the pass that they wanted to go over to do some fun fighting in nearby valley - we're looking at the end of USSR time here, it was Ossetia I think, and the dudes with guns got to eat whatever the hotel still had, but for us my parents just fed us sugar cubes with water for a few days.

At the end of what was supposed to be a dozen days of glorious skiing, all of adults pitched in whatever money they all had and a few of the experienced mountaineers (my father included) left very early, plowed through the snow heading back down and about 6 hours later brought a large MI-6 to get us all airlifted out. To this day this was my only helicopter ride, and a great memory. All of our stuff tossed into this cavernous beast, and just a few minutes flight, and we were back to civilization where I remember how wonderful road-side khachapuri tasted after 4 days of sugar cubes and water.

Anyhow, I highly recommend this country. Incredible people, wonderful nature, great architecture, delicious food, tasty wine. Visit if you can. I am trying to convince my family to do this or Armenia, but it's a difficult sale not least because of the heavy lift to get there from USA.

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Edit: worse, everything seems fine when in HTTPS. Legacy code?

So glad that I do not live in a culture like that, where everybody is trying to defraud the other, even though I could care less for the profits of some faceless corporation.