Tbilisi Underground

I feel like I am starting to understand this travelling thing. When I arrived a week ago I spent my time looking for cafe lattes and air conditioned hotel rooms. Now I am staying at hostels, cleaning my socks with bars of soap, sharing food, medication, beer and information with other foreigners. It is all very sociable, and my stamina for sweaty buses is improving too.

The volume of snoring last night in the dormitory was really impressive. In the darkness someone tried to stop the snorer by clicking their fingers loudly three times. It was a strange attempt to communicate with someone who was asleep without waking them up. Oddly, it worked for a bit. In the end I fell asleep, maybe even snored a bit too.

This morning I am making a brave effort to learn the Georgian alphabet. The cheapest way to do this is to hang about in the Tbilisi underground, where all the station names are written in both Georgian and English, so you can work out what each of the letters is. Standing on a platform with my notebook, I sketched the strange letters and mouthed them repeatedly to myself as one train after another went past. Later, above ground, I spotted some new letters on a police car, and spent a few minutes staring at them before realising the policemen standing nearby were also staring at me.

The women seem to do most of the service work in this city - in hotels, hostels, offices, train stations, cafes, shops, roadside stalls - the people I've spoken to are by and large women. Men work on building sites, drive taxis and buses, guard buildings and sweep the streets. They also sit around in cafes and park benches, like me. There are lots of people begging in subways underneath roads and at the larger metro stations - both men and women.