Georgian Food: A Culinary Journey In Tbilisi (Part 3)

(Read part one of trip HERE)

(Read part two of trip HERE)

We finally got to the hostel. It had a tiny blue and black sign that said “private room, dormitory room, welcome”. You could have walked down that street a hundred times and never found it. Above it was a grimy brass plaque that said law office. Another sign offered translation services. Next door was a Spar shop that was still open. I was gasping for a beer and asked Babar whether he wanted one, but he said he didn’t drink. He went in and bought an orange, a banana and a bottle of water. I bought a large can of beer and a bottle of fizzy water.

We walked up a dark side passage into a courtyard, then up some rickety steps to a wooden balcony that led to an unlocked door. We crept in, whispering as we went. Inside was a small kitchen with a large fridge, and a lounge beyond. A man with a beard as big as a hornets’ nest was sleeping on the sofa, next to a large stick. Babar woke him gently and seemed to know him. The man muttered a few replies and said there was a spare bed for me. But he didn’t seem to be awake. 

We sat at the kitchen table and whispered away as Babar peeled his orange and then carefully divided it into segments, removing as much fibre as he could from each. I said I was going out to the balcony for a beer and a smoke. I said I’d only be five minutes. I finished the can in a few gulps. Then I opened the warm one I still had in my rucksack. There was a low table on the balcony covered in ripped up fags and torn packets of king size papers.

I went back in and Babar was cutting his banana into thin slices. We whispered away at the table. I asked if there were lockers, and he said: “You’ve never stayed in a hostel before?” I told him about the last time in Amsterdam. “Oh, the YMCA,” he said. He said my bed would be about 12 lari – less than £4. He told me about the countries he’d travelled in and the prices of the hostels in each. While growing up in Birmingham, he’d become friends with some Bosnian refugees who spoke no English. He’d become reasonably fluent in Bosnian, and due to similarities in the language, it meant he could get by a little in Georgia and a few eastern European countries. He said he liked Romania the best. I asked him about Lithuania, telling him how much I’d loved its capital Vilnius, but he said he’d been spat at there for being a Muslim.

He was heading back to the UK in three days’ time. He said he didn’t like to take too long off work. He worked for National Express, monitoring the CCTV cameras. He said sometimes the police came in and asked whether they had footage of any of the crimes they were investigating. The bus cameras filmed inside and outside the vehicles. Sometimes they captured incidents in the street. He liked looking for murders the best, he said. The work felt important. Sometimes he’d have to go through hours of tape before he found it. I asked whether the police paid for the service, but he said they did it for free. That way the police were there when you needed them. He said only last week one of the drivers had been beaten up by five youths, and was still in intensive care.

Babar took a swig from his bottle and warned me about the Georgian water. He said it tasted of eggs from the hot springs that bubbled under the city. But once he heard the water was good for you, he started to like it. I opened my bottle and took a swig. It had a dusty, salty flavour, then I got a faint aftertaste of eggs. It smelled like a school chemistry experiment. It wasn’t until we went to the sulphur springs later that morning that I truly began to understand what he meant. Once you’ve smelled that odour, you smell eggs everywhere, even on your skin.

Someone from the dormitory came into the kitchen. At first I thought he was sleep walking. He was from Azerbaijan and was missing some teeth. If you can imagine Robert De Niro with a large nose and a protruding jaw then that wouldn’t be far away. He chattered away in a curious tongue while tapping a cigarette on his packet. Babar managed to hold some sort of conversation with him. His Bosnian meant he could get some way and there were other words he recognised from Urdu. The man finished his cigarette and wandered back to the dormitory.

Babar finished the last of his fruit and we crept down the corridor. As we turned the corner, I was suddenly hit by the stench of feet. It took a few hours to get used to the smell. The room had single beds in a row against one wall and six metal bunk beds. None of the top bunks were taken. There was one single bed free. Babar said that was the one he’d booked. His bad leg meant he had trouble climbing up to the top bunks. I picked the one nearest the door. On the bottom bunk was Robert De Niro.

The floor was covered with backpacks. Socks were drying on the radiators and the place hummed with the chorus of snoring travellers. I took my boots off, peeled my socks from my feet, and undressed. I put my clothes and backpack on my bed and climbed up. There was a soiled mattress without a sheet and a duvet without a cover. I lay on the mattress for an hour listening to the noise. After a while you could hear a rhythm. It was like a musical question and answer; a riff and then a response. One snorer would take a few bars and then go silent, and the space would be filled by another sleeper. It reminded me of seagulls, but the noise was much more irritating.

Then a truly great snorer got involved - a big beast from the rip-snorting jungle - and I spent the next hour wondering whether it would ever stop, and whether I could be bothered to climb down the ladder in the half-light and find a toilet. There was a gap between my mattress and the wall and I was worried my stuff would slip down and hit the Azerbaijani, who didn’t seem to be asleep at all. He kept making sighs – more like a tutted prayer – and sometimes muttered a few words. They were melancholic words that seemed to fit his hangdog expression.

The room was hot and I didn’t bother with the quilt. Instead I stuffed it in the gap between the mattress and the wall and put my stuff on it to stop it falling through. I began to feel itchy in just my pants on that mattress. I tried not to think about bed bugs and lice. The more I tried, the itchier I felt. I planned to go to the hot baths as soon as I got up and have a good soak. If sulphur couldn’t kill the little bastards, nothing could. I looked down at Babar a few times. I couldn’t work out whether he was asleep. I wondered where the other bodies were from.

Suddenly the snoring lulled and I thought I might have a chance of sleep, but it had only quietened in deference to a bigger beast. From somewhere in the vicinity of Babar’s bed came an incredible sound. To describe it as snoring would be a terrible disservice. It was like a series of seismic waves. The room seemed to rock in answer. I was sure the metal supports on my bunk bed were vibrating. There was a gap of three seconds of sweet silence between each explosion. It was long enough to make you wonder each time whether the snoring had finally stopped.

The Azerbaijani began muttering something below. I had no idea what the words meant, but somehow in my sleep-deprived state I could understand. They were voiced with the same world-weary suffering a comedian uses for comic effect. It was something like: “Sweet McJesus, and I thought I’d heard all the infernal snoring there is to hear in the seven darkest rings of hell.” He muttered again: “Is there a camel in the room?” There was a pause, maybe 10 seconds, maybe 20, and I tried not to hope. I could feel the Azerbaijani relax through the bed.

Then the Gatling gun started up again. Even louder. Pounding away in the mud and blood of Flanders. After another minute, the Azerbaijani whined again. It was the despairing sound of someone who sees their car on fire and realises there’s a winning lottery ticket inside. “There’s a pig drowning in vinegar,” he seemed to say. “For all the lives I might yet lead, may I never hear those devil’s farts again!”

I must have slept at some point because there was a grey light from the window and the room was cold. Morning was clearly the time the radiators went off. From my bed I could see the far side of the street. It was very different from the night before. The angels and trumpets were gone and the air was diesel grey. People in puffer jackets walked the pavements, wondering how they’d play the cards they’d been dealt. There was very little Christmas cheer on display. The buildings that had sparkled with golden glorious promise now looked the colour of an insomniac’s eye bags.

I fell back to sleep for a while and woke to find Babar shuffling around on his stick. He whispered a few words. The room was still filled with bodies. He asked if I wanted coffee. He pulled a small plastic bag out of his larger plastic bag and said it was ground coffee. I dressed and he returned with a mug of steaming black mud. It was very good. I walked out on to the balcony. Two stray dogs came to join me. They had tags with numbers on clipped to their ears. Then they gave up their endeavours for the day and curled up to keep out the cold.

(Continues HERE...)