DLTQ.org

It is past midnight, and I am on an internet cafe on Vazha Pshavela street in Batumi. We arrived Batumi this morning by train from Tbilisi. The night train was quite comfortable, and it cost only $15. We checked in to Pyramid Hotel, went to the beach - this was my first time seeing the Black Sea - and got some breakfast. Then we split up, and I spent the rest of the day untill lunch walking around this sub-tropical city, visiting the Mosque, the Church (Church of the Virgin Mary), the market, and a few cafes. The buildings here are very different from in Tbilisi, and the city overall has a very different feeling from any other city I have seen so far in Georgia.

After lunch we took a cab to a church which is on a hill looking down over the city. It was great to see the city above and to see the building of the church (or was it just being built up again from scratch after a fire?) I will upload pictures once I get back to Denmark.

Our dinner tonight was traditional Georgian; very tasty and inexpensive. After dinner we went to the beach with a watermelon and some vodka, and it was great sitting there on the pebbles on the Batumi beach looking at the stars and eating vodka-drenched water melon with friends.

While there, on the beach, I thought back to these last days here in Georgia. I have now been here almost two weeks. I have experienced a Georgian parliamentary election, I have held workshops at a seminar, I have thought a lot about new media tools in those parts of the world where the internet IS rather slow. It is easy to talk about the wonders of videoblogging if you are on a T1 connection - not quite as enjoyable if it takes 3 minutes to even begin to watch a movie on youtube.

Tomorrow we will go to Sarpi further south on the Georgian coastline, close to the Turkish border. The beach is much nicer there, and I will get my first swim of the year. Tomorrow will also June 1st! What happened to these first months of 2008? Dang.

I will be back in Denmark Wednesday morning, and then it time to work a lot, catch up on things I haven’t looked at while here, and focus on progress on those projects I work on.

But I guess one effect of this trip is that I feel the urge to blog more often. Admittedly, it is mostly rather superficial at the moment, but I cannot always do the deep questions-probing.

I will see if I can get some sleep now and get up early tomorrow to take more footage from Batumi.