Day 9: Batumi

When we went out for dinner last night in Batumi, we ended up in a Georgian restaurant which served the most enormous glasses of Aperol Spritz ever.

As we were walking back towards the hotel after eating, our attention was caught by some pictures of old Batumi on the wall of another restaurant.

Imagine my surprise when I realised that the narrative on the pictures was partly in Esperanto.

I've got absolutely no idea why - there's no obvious connection between Batumi and Esperanto - but it was cool to see!

When we woke up this morning, the weather was definitely not as good as it had been yesterday. The sky was grey and our weather apps were threatening showers in the morning.

We went out for a walk anyway, making our way down the promenade where we'd been strolling yesterday. Everywhere was much quieter this morning than it had been yesterday evening.

We passed all the famous towers again...

...and walked alongside the Black Sea, which looked rather bleak this morning.

There were plenty of statues and sculptures to liven things up though.

Proceedings were also livened up by the stray dogs, a group of whom came charging along, barking and chasing a man on an electric bicycle. They did not seem to like it!

We passed a very bright blue building, which seemed to be something to do with the university...

...and then the weather began to take a turn for the worse.

When I say it rained, I really mean it rained.

If you looked out to sea it was still quite bright...

...but inland the rain was pouring down torrentially and we got completely drenched; needing to wring water out of your socks kind of drenched!

There was nowhere really to shelter so we continued making our way along the promenade, past more tall buildings.

The reason we were walking in this direction was because I wanted to see a specific McDonalds in Batumi. It's won awards for its modern architecture and I even watched a video which said it was the best building in Batumi. When we reached it, we were very wet... and rather underwhelmed.

Never mind, we'd found it now and at least it was somewhere to go inside, dry out for a bit and get coffee.

By the time we'd had coffee, the weather had cleared up dramatically and the McDonalds building did look significantly better in the sunshine.

In fact, everywhere looked a lot better in the sunshine.

While Mom and Dad went back to the hotel in a taxi to dry out their shoes, Helen and I went to explore a bit more of Batumi.

First of all we walked along this artificial lake, lined by tall buildings.

We walked past Batumi's aquarium, where there is a dolphin mosaic.

Then we progressed to this second lake, which is actually natural. Probably one of the few natural things in Batumi!

It was very pretty there and amazing how much the weather had improved within just a couple of hours.

We strolled through a park...

...and came to one of Batumi's most unusual landmarks.

This is the Octopus - also known as Cafe Fantasy - which was constructed in the 1970s.

It's a mosaic sculpture, which features fish, seahorses and other sea creatures.

Helen managed to climb up onto part of it for a photo...

...and convinced me to try too.

We took a selfie as well

From the Octopus we had a view of the blue university building, as well as some of the modern hotels.

We continued walking through a park, past these and back in the direction of our hotel.

We came to a large wooden building...

...which seemed to be some sort of cultural establishment.

Pretty soon we found ourselves back at the fake parthenon where we'd been yesterday.

We walked past the fountains...

...past the fake clock tower in Europe Square...

...and past a rather pretty Armenian Church.

Then we were back at the hotel, where we were able to attempt to dry out those of our things which hadn't already dried in the sun. My currency had all got rather wet, so I spent some time holding individual Euro notes under a hair dryer.

While we were doing all this, Mom and Dad had already dried off and gone on their own adventure, up on a cable car above Batumi.

We followed in their footsteps, passing Batumi's only mosque...

...and then getting to the cable car station. We bought our tickets and got in the queue to board the gondolas. They were quite large gondolas, which could seat six or eight people. Two Indian men, who had been queuing in front of us, got into an empty gondola and we went to follow them, but the cable car attendant held us back saying "пять женщин" (five women) in Russian. We were slightly confused, but it turned out that he wanted us to get in the next gondola with three girls from Germany. Is gender segregation in cable cars a thing in Georgia?!

Anyway, eventually we were on our way!