City life
Tbilisi keeps late hours: wine bars in Sololaki, courtyards in Vera, and Fabrika, a Soviet sewing factory turned into a yard everybody passes through. Batumi answers with its seafront boulevard.
Cafes, courtyards and long evenings
Tbilisi by district
Sololaki, under the fortress, is the old merchant quarter: carved wooden balconies, tiled entrance halls, courtyards you can see into from the street. Vera above it is quieter and full of small cafés. Vake is greener and more residential, Saburtalo newer and taller, and Chugureti across the river is where Fabrika sits — a Soviet sewing factory turned into a hostel and courtyard that half the city passes through at some point in a week.
On weekends the Dry Bridge market sells Soviet cameras, medals, porcelain and other people's photographs, and Rustaveli Avenue keeps the opera, the national theatre and the parliament within a few hundred metres of each other.
Late
Tbilisi stays up. Wine bars, third-wave coffee and 24-hour bakeries selling hot shoti bread are all normal, and the city's techno scene — Bassiani in particular, in the basement of a football stadium — has a serious international reputation. None of it is expensive by European standards.
Batumi, which is not the same
Batumi is a seaside city and behaves like one: a seven-kilometre boulevard along the water, a skyline of new towers, casinos, and a summer season that fills the place and a winter that empties it. The Alphabetic Tower, opened in 2012, wraps the 33 letters of the Georgian alphabet around a 130-metre spiral — a reasonable summary of the city's attitude to restraint.
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