Tbilisi is the City I Didn't Know I Needed To See

Ancient wine, sulphur baths, and architecture that makes no sense but somehow works

I'll be upfront: I went to Tbilisi because a friend dared me to pick somewhere I knew basically nothing about. I booked it on a Tuesday, left on a Friday, and came back a different person. Okay maybe that's dramatic. But only a little. The old town is something else. Buildings are kind of crumbling, wooden balconies hanging over cobblestone streets, a fortress sitting on the hill like it's been there forever (it has). The whole city has this texture to it, like it's been lived in, hard, for a very long time. It doesn't feel staged for tourists and I respect that. The sulphur baths in Abanotubani are non-negotiable. You book a private room, you sweat everything out, someone beats you with a special brush thing (it's called a kisi scrub, look it up), and you emerge feeling like a freshly laundered human. Highly recommend. Now, the wine. Georgia is one of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world, 8,000 years give or take, and they make this amber wine agedin clay vessels called qvevri that is genuinely unlike anything I've had before. It's funky and complex and a little weird. I had it with churchkhela (a walnut-and-grape-juice candy thing) and felt very sophisticated. One star off only because I deeply underestimated how hilly it is and my calves were not ready.