The Suicidemobiles of Tbilisi

The suicide mobile, colloquially known as the “marshrutka”, is one of the primary modes of transport in Tbilisi and all of Georgia. And indeed, if you visit this country without riding in one of these daredevil tin cans, it can hardly be said that you’ve visited this country at all!

2020 was supposed to be the year ending the marshrutka, where Tbilisi City Hall was going to sit down and re-think all the routes, upgrading the majority of them to larger vehicles. This is primarily because the contract for The Marshrutka Company was going to run out. The Marshrutka Company, believe it or not, was a private company, proving that even private companies can be run as grossly incompetent as the government. Well done TMC! Their webpage is a joke, barely working on PC and forget about it on mobile (I mean, really, who would want to find a transit route on mobile?). Many of their routes simply overlaid already existent routes, the things are always overpacked, always zipping across lanes and cutting off other drivers, and always responsible for causing general mayhem on the streets. But then the genius mayor, Kakha Kaladze, a rich footballer who’s never taken public transit in his life, decided to keep the things around and scrap any plans for serious thought put into the transit system. I take that back, he did do a photo op on the bus once, so…

A beautiful marshrutka cruising down the middle land of Rustaveli

We were lucky a few years ago when they at least integrated the payment system, so that you can use the same card for metro, bus, and marshrutka. And even more, some charitable young Georgian made this web page to find routes. Like, seriously, if people have to do this kind of work for free while you do nothing but count your mounds of tetri, you’ve failed as a transit company.

The only time I ever take a marshrutka is when I’m traversing three neighborhoods and the destination isn’t on the same metro line. So from Isani to Pekini, I’d use a marshrutka. Or going anywhere in Vake, because Vake is a void of valid vehicular options.

Traveling across the country

If you’re wanting to go to the countryside, it’s likely you’ll have to take a marshrutka, as the places you can get to via a reasonable method of transit, ie train, are quite limited. Of course, you can always just rent a car as well. Strangely, there are direct marshrutkas to just about every village in the country.

You can always rent a car from these guys, like I do:

There are two main marshrutka stations in Tbilisi: Didube (Okribe) and Samgori. Smaller ones exist at Isani, Station’s Square, Sports Palace, and a few other places. Follow this basic rule of thumb: To get to anywhere in Kakheti or Kvemo-Kartli, just go to Samgori. To get anywhere else in the country, go to Didube. Just be aware that coming back, you might end up at one of those other stations. Never fear though, they’re all on a metro line (possibly the only reasonable thing about marshrutkas).

Okribe, a great place for marshrutkas and shawarmas

Don’t expect a schedule. Sure, they might say “The next masrhrutka leaves at 1:00”, but what they really mean is, “We’ll leave when we’re full.” Don’t stress out about it. Or even better, just buy a beer and sit back. But do remember there aren’t any pissy pauses.

Also, it’s not normal for marshrutkas to charge for luggage. The guy in Kazbegi tried to do this to me and two of my tourist friends. I told him where he could stick the luggage. He backed off and harassed some Asians instead. That said, you’re kind of at the mercy of the marshrutka driver.

That lady's about to wave down another marshrutka (see tip 2)

How do you ride a marshrutka in Tbilisi?

1. You figure out which marshrutka you need to take. The routes are printed in Georgian on a small card stuck in the windshield. Probably it’s better to check that guy’s website first.

2. Wave. The marshrutka will stop for you. Seriously. Unless you’re on a main route, where you have to do this at a bus stop. If you want to look like a local, you’ll actively seek out the most inconvenient and most dangerous place for the van to stop. In the middle of an intersection? Great! On the tightest section of a two-way street where only one car can pass at a time? Even better!

3. You get on and find a seat. Haha, just kidding. You get on and stand, cramped between a fat man and a lady with botoxed lips so far out that you’ve got to duck, and by ducking you stick your butt in some other lady’s face who’s constantly passive aggressively whining about this fact. And fat Georgian men make it a rule to stand up for every lady that gets on a marshrutka, so the aisle is always impassable. Wouldn’t it be a better rule to let these fat guys sit down and get the heck out of the way?

4. Since you probably didn’t get a seat, you’ll have to bend down really low to be able to see out and figure out where you are and where you’re going. And since the typical marshrutka driver is usually on his cell phone with one hand and the other is extended out of the cab with a cigarette or making obscene gestures at other drivers, and he’s swinging the wheel like a boat captain in a typhoon, it’s no easy thing to stay upright.

5. When you’re ready to get off, yell “Gaacheret!” (rhymes with caught). They’ll immediately pull over and stop. Since they like to speed down the middle lane, this often means they’ll cut off two or three lanes of traffic to get you to your stepping-off ground. This is unless you’re on a main road. Then you should yell “Shemdegi gacherebaze gaucheret!”

6. Squeeze past all the fat guys clogging up the aisle like corks in bottles.

7. Either give the driver 80 tetri, or a lari or two lari coin (they always have small change), OR swipe your metro card on the glove box until you hear a beep.

8. Step off and go directly to the medical clinic to make sure you didn’t catch the coronavirus after you were sneezed, coughed, and farted on.

Remember to subscribe and never miss an episode!

Also, if you want to tour Rustaveli, get off the marshrutka at Philharmonia and download my audioguide here at VoiceMap.

Riding the Tbilisi Metro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycxhu14g4-M

Watch it or read it or both

The Tbilisi metro is a beautiful thing. It’s a lifeline, it’s one of the few things that keeps Tbilisi chugging along, from falling into utter chaos and collapse. And it’s a miracle it still runs, despite the electric bugaloo that is Georgian politics. I can’t imagine the nightmare this city would be if it were only left to overcrowded suicide mobiles (marshrutkas) and einsturzende autobuses.

This woman prefers death by traffic to riding a suicide mobile ("marshrutka")

It was a mere accident of creation as well. It didn’t come about until the 60s, and for the sole reason of NATO expansion and unbridled Western aggression. You see, back then, Soviet policy was only to build metros in cities that had over one million people. Everyone else could have trams, trolleys, and marshrutkas (lucky them). Tbilisi at the time didn’t have a million people, but Georgia was on the front lines of NATO, sharing a border with Turkey. And that was the argument made: we need underground shelters for the people and military. A very good argument, since everyone remembered how amazing the Moscow metro worked out during World War II.

Into the underground city...

And so Tbilisi got a metro.

Riding the Tbilisi metro is interesting. It’s like a time capsule. It’s like the rest of the world moved on, but goshdarnit, not the metro. It still costs a measly 50 tetri a ride (which at once I’m glad, but also I wonder how it continues to operate), the escalators always look like they’re about to fall apart, where other metro systems have succumbed to Capitalist marketing mayhem on their heavily contended advert real estate, the Tbilisi metro stands true to its Communist roots and barely an advertisement can be seen (again, one wonders how it continues to operate) – that doesn’t mean adverts don’t have their place, but rather even the placards hung for ads often stand empty and broken. Overcrowded train cars, even at weird times like 10 pm on a Sunday, light bulbs that haven’t been replaced for thirty years, train cars that seem to bounce along the tracks, fat ladies in booths at the escalators whose only job is to do whatever the hell they’re doing that usually involves sitting on their cell phone browsing Facebook.

So much unused ad space! City Hall wtf are you thinking?!

When a city says it’s too poor to install a metro (*cough* Denver *cough*) I instantly think of Tbilisi. Not only are they too poor to have one, but by all logic they’re too poor to keep it running. But somehow it keeps going.

It’s like a metaphor for the city itself. The city is always on the edge of collapse. Not because of economics, or because of war or conspiracy theories. But because of the local culture, the absolute “I don’t really give a damn what happens outside my door” culture. It’s what I see America turning into. This urban hellscape doesn’t happen because of a failed economic system, it happens because of a failed morality.

And fellow Georgians, all this said, and I still do love living here.

And I’m still thankful that the metro exists. God I’m thankful for that.

How to Ride the Tbilisi Metro

For the newcomer and the visitor, here’s a short guide on how to ride:

1. You can recognize a metro entrance because there are usually 5 guys standing in the doorway shouting “Telavi!” “Kutaisi!” or other random cities. They don’t move out of the doorways. They assume everyone going to the metro actually just wants to hitch a ride with them. Also, if you’re handicap, you might as well give up and just take a taxi, this metro, like Tbilisi sidewalks, are not for you.

Maybe you want Akhmeta instead of Rustaveli? No?

2. You will instantly be harassed by dudes with trench coats that have a metrocard and want to swipe theirs for you. They’ll charge you the price of the ride. I’m not sure how they make money on this scheme, but ignore them because there’s clearly some funny business going on. Probably the police haven’t cracked down on them because they also can’t figure out why these guys prefer doing this to just effing getting a job at the local minimart. Does that honestly pay more? And if it does, gah, I’ve never been that pro minimum wage before, but I’ve been leaning that way lately.

3. Once in the metro, you have to buy a card. You can buy them where it says “metrocard”, big orange sign, not to be confused with the Bank of Georgia vendor that is in nearly every metro station as well. Don’t be embarrassed if you do confuse them, everyone does one time or another. Go up to the lady and say, “Minda barati” and throw down a bunch of lari. The card costs 2 lari, and every ride on a metro or bus costs 50 tetri (lari-cents) and marshrutka rides cost 80 tetri, so calculate how much you need.

This is the correct window

4. Swipe the card at the turnstile.

5. Ride down the escalator and hold on. These things are steep and fast. Apparently the Commies didn’t have safety regulations way back when, that kind of thing is clearly part of the DC/Brussels nightmare conspiracy. There will be a sign that says which cars go where, read it while you ride. Otherwise you have to go to the center of the hall and look at the wall to figure out which direction is which.

Hang on!

6. When the train cars come, notice what the locals do and follow. This means that you should push to get on the car before people get off. The more you’re in the way, the more you’ll fit right in and nobody will suspect you’re from abroad.

7. Make sure that you know how many stops you’re going. On rare occasions, the voice announcing the stops has just come back from a Georgian feast and just calls them out at random. And though this is rare, it always happens when you aren’t paying attention.

8. Getting off. This is my favorite part. I like to play the game Metro Chicken. When the doors open, people will try to rush on. This is where I like to stand firm. If you don’t let me off, you’re not getting on. Will they miss the train and you have to go to the next stop, or will they move aside and let you get off?

9. Ride up the escalators.

10. You’re free! Enjoy the rest of your day in our beautiful city.

If you enjoyed this list, make sure to subscribe to get some more insights into Georgian life or just enjoy the ride. And if you're looking for a tour, check out my audioguide of Rustaveli here on VoiceMap.

Bedoba: Your Lucky Day

Today Georgians have a special tradition. It’s the Day of Luck, or “Bedoba”. Whatever you do today is how you’ll spend the rest of the year—though often in a more symbolic day. It’s sort of like a more concrete set of resolutions: You make your resolutions, do them all today, and by luck they’ll stick goshdangit.

Georgians on this day tend to stuff themselves with sweets, especially gozinaki, a kind of walnut or hazelnut brittle. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be eating sweets for the rest of the year, but rather that the rest of your year will be sweet. Likewise, you should do some work today to have a productive year, spend time with your loved ones to have a loving year, and so on.

Last year for instance, my wife and I spent Bedoba in Munich with a 10-hour layover. As a couple of Christmas markets were still open, we spent the day sipping hot wine, eating sausages and schnitzel, and visiting T.K. Maxx for some cheap, decent quality clothes. Subsequently our year was full of wine drinking, Teo got sent to Germany twice on work, and we got a baby (not sure where that fits in).

Sipping on mulled wine in Munich, circa 2019

And that’s why today I’m writing this blog—I’m hoping this year will be productive. I’ve got lots of professional plans, from writing to music, not to mention raising a newborn baby, so my plate is pretty full. That means today I’ll be writing a blog, working on my upcoming Facetious Guide to Czechia, writing a bit on a short story, working on a song, practicing accordion, and last but not least take my baby to a Christmas market.

Last year's Tbilisi Christmas market (2018-2019)

Which leads me to another thing about Georgian culture. The brand of Orthodox Christianity here still uses the old Julian calendar, the same one we used to use until a pope changed it in the 1600s (Pope Gregory, hence the “Gregorian Calendar”). As the Julian calendar didn’t account for leap years, Christmas kept drifting off, and everyone realized it was going to eventually be a summertime festival rather than a winter solstice festival. So Pope Gregory added a day every four years (except on years with multiples of ten or something like that) and fixed it. By that time though, the One Catholic and Orthodox Faith had long since splintered in pretty solid and unfixable ways, so the Eastern Christians (Orthodox) still looked at this new calendar fairly skeptically. Eventually they’d add a leap day themselves to fix it, but not for another couple of hundred years, which meant the Orthodox liturgical calendar is quite a few days off from the Gregorian calendar, and their December 25 is our January 7. To add to the confusion, the Soviets had changed the calendar of every day use to the Gregorian calendar, aligning it with the rest of the secular world. So even though Georgians might refer to Christmas as January 7, it’s actually December 25 on their religious calendar (but still the 7 on their secular political calendar).

At the Tbilisi Christmas market (2018-2019), smoke from barbecue

All that to say that Georgians—who have long seen themselves as spanning Eastern and Western culture in a variety of senses—have found double the reason to party. They’re beginning to embrace the rampant commercialism and materialism that goes along with Western Christmas, which includes the standard Germanic Christmas carols at the beginning of November to Instagram moments with an alien creature known as the Santa Claus (traditionally they have a guy named Tovlis Babua, or Grandaddy Snow, who does the same thing but usually dresses in blue and wears a traditional Svan hat). So now Western Christmas is a Georgian reason to party, and it kind of opens up their Christmas season. Their newly styled Christmas/New Years markets start on December 25, with a Christmas/New Years tree lighting, and they go through the New Years and don’t end until Georgian Christmas on January 7. Which actually acts quite nicely and perfectly for tourism to boot and that for Westerners, even the New Years “season” is quite festive.

Tovlis Babua is quite a different guy than Santa...

Traditional yarn toys for sale. Krokodil Gena from the Cheburashka children's show pictured

So guys, make your resolutions. And plant them in the ground today on Bedoba by doing them and getting off to a proper start. May your year be sweet and full of love!