Buying a car in Tbilisi

This pandemic has taught me many things. One is that you should always have a back supply of toilet paper. The other is that it’s pretty much a requirement to have a car in Tbilisi if you’ve got a kid or don’t live in the town center. With the mass transit shut down, there was really no option to move. There’s no park around where I live for miles – though there is a large greenspace that’s walled off and full of random car parts and shards of glass is right next door.

We were basically stuck in our apartment and this concrete jungle for three months, with no escape. The weather wasn’t so bad yet, but having to walk your baby in a circle around a beton behemoth is no pie in the sky, believe you me.

Buying a car became a necessity, if just to transport the little monster to somewhere a little more interesting.

Buying a car in Tbilisi seemed like a big task at first, but it was really much simpler than one might think.

the car we ended up with

Keep in mind

Georgia does not produce cars or car parts. That means EVERYTHING is imported. If you’re expecting a good deal on cars, stop looking now. And if you already know your way around international shipping, your best deal then is to just buy a car from Germany or the US yourself or online and ship it over.

It also means that you should try to stick to what’s common on the roads. The rarer the vehicle, the harder it will be to get parts, especially as most parts are generally just stripped from other cars.

So yes, whereas a LOT of things are cheaper in Georgia, especially when it comes to the cost of living in general, cars are not, especially after shipping and import taxes are considered, and then whatever repair and middle man fees that people here tack on.

1. How to find a car

Though there are a lot of cars just sitting in lots with signs on them, investigating those will likely lead to excruciating prices and weird histories. You have basically three serious options:

• Ask around: Could be helpful, but this of course how much you trust who you’re talking to and how much you trust who they’re talking to. The reason for that in my next point.

• Use a dealership: Very expensive. Remember that a dealership is already selling cars at a premium cost, and when you have to add import fees and taxes, this often becomes double that premium.

• Look online: There are a lot of online markets. This is how we went about finding our car. You can of course look at Facebook, but it’s better if you go to where Georgians are looking and use a bit of Google translate (though the pages do have minimal English language versions, so don’t be too scared). Just like anywhere else, beware of scams and people trying to cheat. Follow the adage: Trust but verify. Three commonly used sites (we found my car on the first):

  • MyAuto

  • Auto.ge

  • AutoPapa

2. Buyer beware

Georgians make a big business of car import and re-export. They find cars that have been totaled in the States or Europe and ship them here. They then make repairs, double the price, and either sell it here or sell it to people in Central Asia.

This means the car could have been in a huge, horrific wreck and been completely rebuilt, or a small fender bender, or a flood, or who knows.

That means you ALWAYS want to ask for a VIN if it’s not listed in the advert. If the car was imported from the States or Europe, then this can be a helpful number. First look it up via Google. You’ll see lots of nasty pictures, but they’re not always the pictures of the same car, so you’ll have to click on the images and make sure the VIN matches. A lot of VIN websites will make thumbnails of OTHER nasty looking cars, and then want you to subscribe before you can see if it’s the car you’re looking at. Keep that in mind too.

The best free VIN site I could find was Vehicle History. They only do a limited amount of history checks per day though. And of course there’s also Carvin, which is Georgia’s version of Carfax.

Things you want to look for are damage reports and to make sure the odometer matches or is close enough. The data from either page should also show you how well-maintained the car was by previous owners.

3. Drive trains

If the car looks suspiciously cheap, it could be imported from England, India, Japan, Australia, or another country that has right wheel drive trains (because they drive on the left side of the road in those countries and they have very limited options for resale and export). These cars are still legal to buy and sell and drive in Georgia, but there’s a new slate of laws lined up that will soon make them illegal step-by-step.

So now what a lot of Georgians are doing is buying those cars and switching the drive train themselves. This is fine if it’s done by an expert mechanic, but you have to have trust in that mechanic…

after checking the VIN, we found this Vitz had changed the drive train

4. Catalytic converters

I’ve learned that you should always ask about these. There’s apparently a bizarre market for used catalytic converters, and it’s very common for cars to be stripped of these for some extra cash. I can only imagine there’s a collector with a fetish for them, and his house’s interior walls are lined from corner to corner.

Recently they’ve passed a law that in the next few years, cars will be required to have one. A new one can be up to a grand, but you can always buy a used one off another person’s car…

But yeah, check this from the phone. Don’t waste your time going to look at a car only later to find out this is missing.

5. Trust but verify

You’ve found a car you love from the looks of it. It’s got a clean history. It has a catalytic converter. Now what?

Don’t just buy it believing that the guy is telling the truth. It’s best to meet the seller at either the main Tegeta Motors or a dealership, and then pay about 60 lari for an inspection. You should also take a Georgian translator along with you if you don’t know Georgian or Russian. They’ll run down a list of all the things wrong or weird about the car. Now with this info, you’re ready to make an informed decision on buying.

6. Import taxes

If you look at MyAuto, you’ll see an option that says “Customs”. You then have the choice of “customs cleared” and “Before customs” (განბაჟებული/ganbajhebuli and განუბაჟებელი/ganubajhebeli, respectively). If it’s been customs cleared, then you have no real idea how long it’s been in Georgia and subject to the harsh Georgian reality. If it hasn’t, that means it’s arrived here at least within three months.

The fee for customs is determined by a whole array of arcane factors, and you’ll see this price being all over the place. You can figure it out for yourself here, though people in general accurately report it.

Upon import, an owner who plans on keeping the car here receives a red license plate and has three months to register the car. When the three months is up, you start collecting a bunch of fees. You also have to pay a rental on this red license plate, so it’s best to go through this process as quickly as possible (though the “rental” is just like one lari a day).

7. Transferring the title and paying the taxes

It’s an easy process. The registration office is in Rustavi (there is no office for this in Tbilisi, Rustavi is the de facto Georgian Capital of Cars) at this place.

You’ll walk in with the seller, and you’ll first stop to pay the license transfer fees and customs. Then you’ll go to another desk to transfer the registration and pick out a license plate (if importing).

If you’re swapping plates, be sure to have brought your red plates from the car with you to turn in. They’ll give you the new plates here.

After this, you will exit the building, go across the parking lot on the left, up some stairs, and stand outside some windows. Then they’ll give you the registration card and you’re done!

Happy driving.

now we're ready with the baby

If buying a car is too much for you, considering also rentals. I know this guy, Temo, who rents out some great 4X4s that are great for the mountains through his Family Cars Georgia company. Check him out! #tbilisi #car #georgia

Easter during quarantine

I can’t speak for the Church here, but for the most part it looks like they took their precautions. Not many people attended mass, and they did appear to actually be wiping the spoons (with at least a cloth, not sure if there was alcohol on that cloth). I was at home watching it on live feed. Which saddens me a little bit, as it is my favorite holiday in Georgia and at Church.

Orthodox Easter is celebrated at a different date than Western (Roman) Easter. I’ve mentioned the Christmas date controversy before – a pope had fixed the calendar and the Orthodox refused to fix it because pope. But after they realized ole Papa Gregory was right and that Christmas was, in fact, drifting off into the summer, they fixed their liturgical calendar and now the Orthodox Christmas is on January 7th (which is December 25 of the old calendar).

Trinity (Sameba) Cathedral at night

Easter on the other hand, is a bit different. By definition, Easter should be on the Jewish Passover, since the Last Supper was the Passover meal. The Orthodox have stayed true to this. The Catholics however, being clever with their calendars and all, invented some strange formulation that has to do with the square roots of the distance between Mars and Venus at the equinox of Alpha Centauri. Or something like that, It’s always a bit confusing. Sometimes these dates line up, other times not, but all that to say Easter is not determined by the regular Christian calendars, hence the dates making a bit of a temporal dance across the years.

Easter in a Georgian village

My favorite thing is to have Easter in a village. I’ll tell you a bit about that for normal years.

Normally, festivities would begin on Good Friday (not really sure the proper Orthodox term). Religious people are fasting during this time and don’t break fast until Saturday night after church. So if you’re not a girl, then you’ve probably started feasting and drinking and partying by this time, especially in Samegrelo, the big region in the West.

a village house

I’m often confused by this. Because I’ll ask, “When do we eat?”

“It is a time of fasting, Saint,” they reply.

“Yeah, but I see some guys outside barbecuing pork and drinking beer,” I say.

“It is a time of fasting,” they reply.

Preparations under way - technically not Easter, but no real difference

And then before I know it, there’s about twenty people over getting drunk. Heck if I know what Georgian fasting is, except that it involves "fasting cake" and "fasting ice cream" – it never makes clear sense to me.

Now, technically, you should hold off until after the midnight mass on Saturday night. Most people break down though, especially those who live in Tbilisi or elsewhere and haven’t seen their childhood friends in forever. Those guys are already 6 days into a 4-day bender.

The church is not far from my family’s house. We walk down at about thirty minutes till. Then there’s a lot of standing around. People chatting, getting reacquainted with people they haven’t seen in years or days or hours. Then finally some commotion, something like a church service begins. At this point I’m usually pretty toasted, so I’m hazy on the details. But some beautiful singing starts up. And then people start pulling out candles and soon I’ve got hot wax dripping all over my hands and shoes.

The Holy Fire has arrived. Here’s the big event.

The Holy Fire

Every year for Easter, the Orthodox have a big meetup in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they disappear into the chapel above the Empty Tomb. They emerge from the chapel with the fire. They light the flames of everybody present – representatives of different churches from around the world. Those representatives then take the Fire and go back to their home country, where it’s then distributed to each individual parish across the land. What a beautiful tradition! You are literally sharing in the same flame as people around the world. Now that is a Communion if ever there was one.

Holy Fire in hand, we shuffle out of the church. The nice churchy church that stands now was built recently. There is an older one on the other side of the center of the village. It was a house converted into a church used during the Soviet Union. So everyone takes their bit of Fire and walks in procession down to the old church, walks around it, eats some sunflower seeds, has a chat, some songs are sung, back to the first church, and then more singing. At this point, usually around 2 or 3 in the morning, we go home. Others stay as late as 5 or 6 even.

Next to Sioni, Tbilisi Old Town

It’s not over!

Now random neighbors start to arrive through the remainder of the night. In fact, they’ve been doing so while we’re gone at church, so every family has to leave some grandfolks or someone behind at the house during mass to host any guests that might pop in.

When you can’t stay awake anymore, you pass out.

Easter Day

Wake up. Easter’s here! The real feasting and drinking begins. If the pig hasn’t been killed yet, it’s killed now, along with a variety of other animals. You will wake to a slaughter. Fresh wine barrels are tapped, the food is set, neighbors start streaming in. Alternatively, we also disappear to other neighbors’ houses to eat their food and make a bit of a culinary round robin around the village. Last one to keep their sobriety loses.

Mornings in the village

Another game: They die hard-boiled eggs red for Easter, rather than getting too crafty with the colors. In the ancient days, once everyone converted to Christianity, they claimed that the eggs they had been dying for whatever pagan goddess all along actually represented the blood of Christ. True story. And because of that, they pock each other’s eggs upon arrival. Old Georgian tricksters will have made special wooden eggs, and they go around town defeating all the children, laughing as they leave behind a trail of broken eggshells and tears.

Sometime during the day, there's a visit to the graveyards of the different family members. Wine is brought. They pour one glass of wine and place it for the deceased. Everyone there drinks one. People visit the graves of friends as well. Repeat. In Eastern Georgia, they often have full feasts at the cemetery as well.

That’s the normal times. These aren’t normal times.

Now we sit in the apartment. Instead of Communion wine, I’m drinking some cheap scotch.

C’est la vie.

Shopping

People made much ado about the Church going on with Easeter. But Carrefour, the grocery store around the corner, leaves me in much more existential terror.

People are lined up to the street. “Socially distancing” while in line. But with lots of people and still, indoor air… does the virus care that much? You have to wait about 30 minutes to get into the store, and then the store is overcrowded. It’s complete nutso inside. People bumping each other, attendants stocking, kids playing rugby. A mess.

Not the end of the line

And an unnecessary one. The state instituted a curfew. Why? They want people in shops for only certain hours. That means that everyone must crowd in at once, rather than spreading the distribution across the day. I say open the shops for 24 hours, so that people can thin out. Don’t come all at once! Come when people aren’t coming. That makes sense, not the mess that they’re enforcing now.

Whatever. When I saw the line to the street, I immediately called the wife. “Can you do without bread?”

“I’ll try making some.”

She made some. And it was good.

Happy Easter folks.

A Lack of Complaints

It’s been a strange few days. The lockdown in Georgia has gotten a lot more serious, and in general, I think people are beginning to understand why it’s happening. And with understanding comes more compliance.

First there was a lady in the village of Marneuli who was diagnosed with covid. She had apparently been quite the busybody, going to the celebrations of the annual Azeri New Year (Marneuli is mostly ethnically Azeri), Novruz Bayram, then running off for the anniversary feast of a deceased friend. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, there was news of a Jehovah’s Witness in Zugdidi who had caught the virus. He refused to tell the government who he had been with (I guess for fear of ratting out his fellow Witnesses). On top of that, like any good JW, he was handing out flyers to who knows how many people, each one of those flyers having been handled by his unwashed hands…

Amidst all this, there was the ongoing controversy with the Church. Though many churches did willingly follow some social distancing measures, for the most part they were crowded and pressed inside the chapels (having to make room for the masses of media cameras and crew didn’t help). The Church also made it clear that they would continue using their single spoon during the Eucharist, saying that the Body of Christ was enough to purify the spoon. Other Orthodox Churches throughout the world have since switched to disposable spoons or said you can bring your own, but the Georgians have been very adamant about not following the recommendations of the health officials that seem to have taken charge of the country. Instead of understanding these recommendations for safety, they’ve tried to turn it into a war against the Church. A strange and bizarre time to take on the victim complex, unless they’re actually and literally wanting to become victims…

The thing is though, it would have been possible to get the health message across without it becoming confrontational. Instantly the media picked up on it, and atheists were at the front bashing organized religion and so on, which immediately made the religious posture into an overzealous defensive stance. There are Orthodox sects that don't even use spoons, so spoons are clearly not necessary. But they could have dropped that point and just highlighted the distancing measures – people can get sick by simply breathing the same air, or coughing next to each other. Many Orthodox faithful have already died in Italy in this regard, no spoon sharing required. This is what prompted the Russian Patriarch Kirill to tell people to stay and pray at home (a day later, the Georgian Patriarch announced the same... curious timing that).

Trinity Church (Sameba), main cathedral of Georgian Orthodoxy

When people deal with each other, they approach others with their own set of givens and understandings, often not trying to understand where the other person is coming from. At this point, it's not about winning an argument, it's about saving lives. We have to step back from our own posturing and confrontation in order to get through to the other side. If it means for an atheist to cease his argument, "Your silly spoons won't help, there is no God, you will die!" then obviously that's not going to help either. A religious person would rather die in their commitment to their faith, than to allow an atheist to win on the grounds of there not being a god. And of course, atheists can't understand that either...

Dealing with an entrenched religious organization and a growing realization that Georgian citizens were not going to be able to keep to social distancing on their own, the government decided to declare a State of Emergency. They set up checkpoints outside the major cities, and made a rule that you can’t be in public with more than three people (including in cars, including the driver). Some areas have even ingeniously thrown in the mask rule, to be followed while in a car, because it will obviously help you in filtering out all the recycled air of the people you live with.

Life during coronatime

The rules are understandably strict. No going out for any reason but grocery shopping and visiting the pharmacy or to work at a set of approved locations. No gatherings of more than three people. Supermarkets can only allow a set number of people in. The supermarket next door only lets in 10 people at a time, and they have a regime of sanitation for each incoming person. Some alcohol squirts, some plastic gloves and so on. The supermarket stays pretty well-stocked for now. Unlike in my American motherland, we have access to toilet paper, foodstuffs, and so on. The first immediate rush was for oats and beans – items with long shelf lives – but those have since been restocked. This indicates to me that Georgians will be around much longer than Americans, dirty asses aside.

Georgians are kind of used to these emergencies though. And they have a culture of stocking up for food for six months anyway, as everyone has their farm-grandma who goes nuts bottling, pickling, and/or jamming all the leftovers of each season. This constant stock of some 6 months means that in times of emergency like this, hoarding really isn't necessary. Always ready!

You better believe these two are stocked up already!

Free time?

Scrolling through Facebook has made me somewhat jealous. I see all these people going on about boredom and free time and getting the time now to hone skills that they didn’t have time for before.

I’m blessed enough to have a job where I work from home, but damn, I kind of want some forced vacation.

Actually, this whole ordeal has made me cancel a lot of downtime plans. First my parents were going to come to visit their newborn grandbaby – they were able to cancel, thank goodness, not because of the generosity of the airlines but because the Georgian government had closed the border, forcing their airline to cancel the flight and give a refund.

Then there was this three-person rule. We were going to go to the village and stay with the wife’s family. I had to wrap up a few ends work-wise, where I needed my PC, then we were going to go. Then bam, new rules and we’re stuck here. Of course, had we a car this wouldn’t have been a problem, but since we were relying on a family member to drive us, that would bring us over the 3 person rule. I’d tell my wife to take our son and go, but then they’ve canceled all mass transit, so I’m not sure how I’d follow. At this point, I’m worrying about not taking out the newborn into some fresh air, all of this fart air in the apartment must be getting to him, I’d think.

As these are the worst of my problems so far, I can't really complain. I mean, I can, but it'd be silly, because then I'd literally be complaining that I have a job and a healthy family. And yet, I'm writing this blog. I know what it is, the whiskey supply is running low... #tbilisi #coronavirus