Mar 19, 2007

To Batumi and Back Again

C and I took an overnight train to the Black Sea coast this weekend to spend our 1-year anniversary walking around Batumi—an off-season resort town with a very strong post-Soviet flavor.

Our train pulled in shortly before 7 AM, and we had the first few hours of the day to ourselves. We left the new Batumi train station (which is a very modern construction made mostly of glass and brushed stainless steel, and, like the new Tbilisi airport, there are pools of water on the floor from the leaking roof) and took a 50-tetri marshrutka to downtown Batumi.

We found one barely opened café, took in a little Turkish coffee and some pastries. Walked the boulevard. Got a hotel (the Hotel Montpelier, which had piping hot water and a very big suite for $80 - hooray for off-season rates).

There is a reason why it's hard to find information on Batumi online. There isn't a lot there. Not that I minded. With the sad aquarium, budding theme-park, and nearby Roman fortress all closed, and the weather patently inappropriate for sunbathing, I didn't feel at all bad about spending most of the day walking slowly up and down Batumi's sea-side public boulevard (est. 1881 or 1884, depending on whether you believe the LP or the sign banning livestock and unmuzzled dogs from the park).

Later in the day, there was a minor gauntlet of gypsies begging by the entrance to the boulevard, and lots of long-lashed teens making out on the public benches, but when C and I were walking at first in the morning, the only people out were people patently out for their sea-side constitutionals: people exercising in public (!), which I haven't seen much of on the main streets of Tbilisi. There are benches all over the place. The metalwork on these is in an art nouveau style, but many of them include www.batumiboulevard.com among their tendrils of weathered-looking metal, betraying somewhat more modern origins. (Interestingly, there is no active website at that address. Strange that the city managed to turn out several hundreds of benches, but no website).

The sky was grey and the sea was grey, too, but there were lots of palm trees and the weather was balmy. Our marshrutka ride back was unexpectedly harrowing, but we made it. And now we are back. And it is still cold.

Brrr.

2 comments:

Hans said...

Cool Blog, Karen !

Hans said...

Even on 10th of July Batumi seems quite abandoned, but come back then 15 days later...