I had meant to get up early today and visit Gori, Stalin's birthplace. There's a museum about him there and apparently he's still super popular. Unfortunately, I woke up around 11 and that didn't happen. I spent a little while moving hostels. While the last one was nice enough, it was mostly strange Russian guys living there full time and not really the vibe I was looking for. Hopefully this next place is a bit better in that regard. In the afternoon I met up with those people from hostelworld - Alexis, a French guy, and Natasha, an Italian woman. She had made plans to go up to the far northern road in Georgia that leads to Russia, and invited us in on her ideas. She wants to spend the night up there and I'm extremely interested in that since I've hardly done anything of the sort on this trip. We spent most of the day fussing and fretting over exactly which car rental company to go out of (I thought this was stupid since it was mostly a difference of about $5 a person), but ultimately made a choice and reserved a car for tomorrow morning. It rained a little in the evening here and apparently that rainfall was snow up in the mountains. The town that we're planning to visit, Stepantsminda, is going to reach -29 tonight. I don't remember if that's F or C, but at that point it doesn't really matter. We later were told that the mountain pass was closed that night because of the snow and it was unclear when it would be reopened - if it's not reopened by tomorrow, we'll have to find different accomodations, most likely in the small ski city of Gudauri. That's apparently the last section of road that we can count on being open. Natasha has planned out all these things to visit while we're on the route and I'm really looking forward to being properly in the mountains. Tbilisi is a nice enough city, but I'm really in Georgia for the scenery.

After our planning session, I went with Alexis to see the main Orthodox cathedral in the city. It's absolutely enormous and quite impressive from the outside, and became even more impressive when we walked through a small door, down a very long staircase to discover an enormous second chamber underground. The amount of excavation this must have required is incredible. They were closing up right as we got down there though, so we didn't get to explore the whole thing. It felt a little like we shouldn't have been there anyway, though.

I went to get dinner and decided to finally try the most famous Georgian dish, Khachapuri. It's often depicted in a very particular style where it's shaped like a boat and there's an egg yolk in the middle. While that's the most iconic type, it's really more of a western coastal thing and the shop I found only had normal ones. It's some mixture of bread and salty cheese, served hot, that I found amazingly filling. It's really great stuff but you can't eat too much of it. It's also super cheap: for 4 lari (a little under $1.50), I was able to get a huge serving of it that I happily counted as dinner. I went back to the hostel to hang out with people and found everyone much more social than in the last place. There were some good guys there and I had some fun conversations, but I didn't feel much of a connection to anyone I met. A few of them went out to go clubbing and, while normally I'd have joined them, I decided to retire early in preparation for our trip tomorrow.