Day 7- Adventures!

We started the day off with Gvardzia which was an ancient city in a cliff.

It was started by Queen Tamar's father and was completed by her.  The entire project took only 50 years to complete and could house up to 50,000 people and had a water system that could give 120 tons of water a day.

 In peace time, Gvardzia was a monastery.  However during wartime, it was a city of refuge for people.  In the middle of Gvardzia is a temple for the Holy Virgin.  At the end of the 16th century, Gvardzia was conquered by Turkish forces.  They tortured the monks there and then burned them alive inside the temple.  There was some good however to the terrible act because the ash from the fire covered the frescoes on the walls and preserved them.  In 1828, Gvardzia was freed from the Turks by Russian forces and soon after, the monastery began functioning again.

I really enjoyed climbing everywhere and exploring the underground tunnel used for secretly getting water from underground storage during wartime.

We had lunch right next to the Kura river and I tried my first Turkish coffee there.  It was pretty good, but very gritty which I guess is how real coffee should taste.

After lunch, we went down to the river to take pictures and passed some men.  One of them started talking to us and we had the following conversation.
"Hello girls!  Where are you from?"
"Hi...America."
"Nice, but you're from Russia, yes?  What city?"
"Moscow."
"What a pretty daughter you have!  You should make sure no one steals her.  Hey, miss, whats your name?"
"Alisa"
"Lovely name! Like any of the men here?"
"Umm..."
"I have a lovely son!" With this he pushed forward an admittedly attractive young man.  We decided to settle on just a picture with the son.  As we were leaving, my mom asked "You're gonna marry her now, right?"

And that's how I got engaged. :-)

After my engagement, we drove to the citadel of Rabat in Ahaltsikhe, which was was an ancient city of Georgia and was run over by Muslim rulers for about three centuries.

It was a city right in the middle of the Silk Road and so, had a mix of different cultures.

We took a tour of the citadel and the museum and while the tour guide was fantastic, informative, patient, and with a good sense of humor, I wish we explored Rabat by ourselves and just had a tour of the museum.  The city itself wasn't terribly interesting, so the tour went into extreme and esoteric details to make up for that.  Moreover, because the city was renovated a few years ago, most of the actual ruins were gone and the city felt too new.  The buildings were beautiful, but had an almost fake feeling to them.

 The renovation was done very well though, because the French designer who did the project, worked with an archaeologist to make sure that everything was historically accurate.  I did enjoy seeing Rabat and loved the museum.

After Ahaltsikhe, we embarked on a 4 hour drive to Kutaisi, the second largest city in Georgia after Tbilisi.  On the way there, we stopped to look at people selling an immense amount of pottery.  There I found the derpiest hedgehog I had ever seen.

A good end to the day I think.