He'd booked me a taxi, and Georgian taxis are renowned for their punctuality. They don't have working seat belts, but they are on time. I had an extensive conversation with the driver:
"Airport?"
"Airport."
There wasn't much traffic for me to enjoy at that time in the morning, but I did experience that fabulous moment when a taxi in a foreign city turns off the main highway and screeches at speed into a dark back alley. Does the driver know a shortcut? Am I about to be bundled into a garage and shot? Thankfully the former, so I felt the shame of still distrusting anything not British despite years living abroad.
Tbilisi airport was quiet, clean, and efficient, and even offered free wi-fi. It's been very nice not having to fill in any landing or customs forms during this trip, a marked difference from flying into the USA or Canada when I have to declare a value on every jar of Marmite I'm carrying. Connecting through Istanbul was again easy, and we landed at Gatwick twenty minutes early.
So there we are! I got into a taxi at 6.10am in Tbilisi and stepped out onto Salisbury train station at 1.45pm. Thank you Muckers for your fabulous hospitality over these all-too-short couple of days, and I'm still shocked that it's some Americans who have taught me that the world is not the scary, inaccessible, unfriendly place that I once thought it was. Although next time, please move to a place where driving causes less extreme spikes in blood pressure.
I leave you with a pic of Vince's favourite statue in Tbilisi. A metaphor for communism, he says, or maybe for international diplomacy.
