I heard of Batumi for the first time in an in-flight magazine on my way from Tallinn to Kutaisi—another place I'd never heard—en route to Tbilisi, a place I'd heard of, but had been spelling and saying wrong for weeks. The magazine described Batumi as "sophisticated and stylish" and I believed it. There were pictures. They showed a sunny, shiny city on the sea—something like Dubai meets Las Vegas meets the French Riviera meets some post-Soviet photoshop magic. It looked, in those no doubt highly manipulated glossy images at least, pretty sophisticated and kind of stylish. Also slightly less than real.
It was early January when we came for the first time, just for a couple of days. On the way to the train station, our Tbilisian taxi driver lost it over our idiotic timing. "Batumi?! In the winter?! You have to come for the summer! In the winter," he said, his face turning serious, "there's . . . nothing."
But there wasn't nothing, not exactly. I mean, there was basically nothing, especially in terms of sophistication and stylishness and normal architecture. But there was also . . . something: an openness, an emptiness. A quietness. The silence of a summer town in the dead of winter. It was perfect, we thought.
We walked miles of seaside promenade and counted fewer than a dozen people. On a perfectly sunny—albeit absolutely freezing—day! We watched dolphins horse around in the bay like puppies at a dog park. We strolled old Batumi's cobbled streets wondering how it was possible for every other building to be for sale or for rent in such an obvious paradise. So what if nothing was open and a pack of street dogs followed us everywhere we went? So what if half the buildings in the in-flight magazine's photo simply didn't exist (yet)? It was clear from day one that what Batumi lacked in digitally rendered "sophistication and stylishness," it more than made up for in "old men fishing off the pier" and "restaurants just waiting for customers." All in all, we thought it was charming and decided to come back in a few weeks for a longer stay, a month at the most. Why not?
We came back on February 9 and we're still here. It's even starting to feel a bit like home. We've named our street dogs. We've waved to neighbors on nearby balconies. We've dipped our toes in the Black Sea (accidentally). I've even been to a dentist. Everything is still closed, or closed again, or "closed" (and secretly open). The streets are somehow quieter than they were a couple of months ago. You can (and trust me, I do) hear a person cough a mile away. People go out, if they go out at all, in masks and gloves. Earlier today I walked by a dressmaker's shop and spotted—through the window and wrapped around the head of a mannequin—a hand-made, made-to-fit, elegantly floral-patterned face mask. The latest in Georgian anti-virus protection. Stylish and sophisticated.