Monthly Archives: January 2024

Georgia day 5: the Old Town and the unexpected wine tasting

Day 5 – or day 2 – began in the usual way. A metro to Rustaveli, cross the road, use the underpass and then walk under the bridge and up the stairs to the Bicycle Statue, thus avoiding three scary road crossings. There were several buses today and the lady from the Georgia Tourist Board who was there to greet us yesterday was there again. Today there were four variants on Old Town tours departing, which meant quite the muddle over buses, people double-checking exactly what their tickets actually said and one person fleeing the bus at the last minute when she realised Old Town Day Tour and Cultural Heritage Old Town Tour were not one and the same. Cultural Heritage meant museums, one of the tours meant a zipwire across the botanical gardens and one was a gastronomy tour.

Mine was just a plain walking tour. We did a quick circle up to the Heroes roundabout and then down Rustaveli to the church round the corner from me. I’d left home well over an hour ago by now and I was back just five minutes from where I’d started. We were going to have a look at the king on the horse. This is the one who founded Tbilisi. Did I tell this story yesterday? Anyway, in the fifth century, King Vakhtang was out hunting, his hawk caught a pheasant and they fell into the sulphur springs and His Majesty decided there and then that he was moving his capital to this place – Tbilisi means something along the lines of “the warm place”.

Then it was back to the bus to cross the river and we left for our “two-hour walking tour of the Old Town”. We did the bath area, the waterfall behind it (blocked off because of recent rockfalls), through the narrow parts of the old town, through Meidan Bazaar, an underground bazaar, an array of churches and narrow cafe-lined alleys, an enamel shop that surely didn’t want a horde of tourists barging in and out again, the Peace Bridge, the Catholic Church and then the Caravanserai for a wine-tasting. Now, she’d mentioned the wine-tasting and lunch a few times and we were suspicious because that wasn’t on our list. Also, by the time it was 12:30 and we were still walking up to the last church, hadn’t had wine or lunch and I couldn’t see how we were going to get back to the Bicycle in half an hour with all that left, I kind of lost a lot of enthusiasm. This was a 10-1 tour. Why wasn’t it finishing? I wanted lunch. I didn’t want to taste wine.

The wine museum is underground behind the Caravanserai, which is a place where travellers on the Silk Road would stop and set up temporary shops on their way back and forth. We had a history of Georgian wine and then we were seated around a large table with nibbles and the wine arrived. The rest of the group were equally baffled, especially as it was gone 1:30 by the time we even went into the museum. The winemaster was astonished by the three of us who refused wine, apparently not knowing that we weren’t expecting this on our tour. There are lots of wine tours on offer and I have deliberately not booked any of them.

After the wine, it was time to get back on the bus and go for lunch. I escaped. I was in the Old Town, I just had to cross the bridge and climb up around the church and I could go home for my lunch of hamburger rolls and plastic cheese slices. I had a viewpoint photography tour at 5 and who knows how long this tour would go on for? It was already running over by an hour and a half and evidently there was plenty still to come.

Lunch, a book, the briefest not-quite-nap and it was already time to go for the viewpoint tour. I got myself to the Bicycle. There was no one else there. No surprise, exactly. This morning, no one had got on the bus until 9:59 although maybe they’d been milling around outside figuring out which bus they were supposed to be on. But there was no bus. What viewpoint were we going to? How we were getting there? Were they taking us on the scary metro? I checked the itinerary. Since I carefully copied everything into my notebook the day before flying out, the start point had moved! We were supposed to be meeting at the lower station of the funicular in… twelve minutes. Ok. How to get there? Rustaveli was the nearest metro. What bus did I need? Where could I get on it? In traffic, it would be quicker to walk. So I walked. It’s 23 minutes, which meant I was going to be late but I had a transport card and a group with big cameras can’t be hard to find. Or I could just go up there and take photos by myself. It’s not particularly far but it’s all uphill and the last stretch up to the road is almost vertical. One of the street dogs seemed to guide me to within the last couple of hundred metres, checking I was keeping up, pointing up the next hill and round the next bend and I enjoyed that. Tbilisi has as many feral dogs as Bucharest but these ones show no aggression whatsoever. They like to lie in the sun and amble around. One joined the Old Town tour, pressing its nose against our guide’s leg as she talked about the Georgian Patriarch and she scratched its ears. I asked why all the dogs have a yellow tag in their ears and apparently it means they’ve been vaccinated against rabies. Well, that’s nice.They’re a bit grubby but they’re pretty friendly and they’re about as undangerous as feral dogs can get.

I made it to the funi. A man was swiping a card to let people through. It wasn’t the blue transport card I had in my pocket. And then I looked at the other man, pushing a group of people through as the turnstile turned. I looked at the huge camera in his hand. I’d made it! The very last one was going through but I’d arrived in time to go up with them!

We went up to the restaurant and TV tower at the peak of Tbilisi, 770m. Looking down, I’d climbed at least a third of the height from the Bicycle before even reaching the funi. It wasn’t actually ideal conditions for viewpoint photos. It was hazy and the sun was hiding behind thin clouds. We walked round through a theme park to the ferris wheel and took some photos through and around it. The sun was setting and making some faint streaks of pink and blue. We got some snowy mountains and towns on the other side and then we retreated to the cafe for hot chocolate so thick you couldn’t drink it – had to eat it from a spoon – and a Napoleon cake the size of… well, I don’t know what size it was. Maybe the size of a cake, except it was supposed to be one portion for one person. Impressive thing.

Back at the bottom, we got three Bolts, which is the local equivalent of Uber. There was a drinks and nibbles thing that everyone had said they were going to pop into just for half an hour, having drunk more than they intended at the welcome drinks on Tuesday that I didn’t go to. I wasn’t entirely planning to go to this one but getting in a Bolt with these people seemed easier than figuring out how to get home without walking 2km in the dark.

At the place, I met a couple of people from this morning’s tour. Dylan gave a nice succint run-down of how the tour had gone and then said they’d done quite well and had finished by 4. Another 10-1 tour hadn’t finished until 5. This is beyond our tour guide’s GMT, Georgia Maybe Time. Anyway, I didn’t stay long. This was another case of “how do I get home from here?” but it was ok. Walk down to the main road. Walk along it until it ceases to be one-way. Stop at the first bus stop going in the right direction. Get on a bus. Bus drops at Avlabari. Home by 9:15, which is the latest I’ve been out – but then again, it’s only the second night. Too tired after a long day to write the blog.

Georgia day 4: Chronicle of Georgia, cable car & sulphur bath

This morning started with a tour out to the Chronicle of Georgia, which is just north of the city but would take quite a while on public transport. It’s a monument, according to the scroll at the entrance, to Georgia’s 3000th anniversary as a state and its 2000th anniversary of adopting Christianity, despite the dates being out by 3-400 years. The Chronice was started in 1985 and abandoned, not quite finished, somewhere around 2009. There are walkways above single-storey buildings curving around the edge of the monument and it turns out these are classrooms and workshops for traditional Georgian craft, including the work of finishing off the monument.

The Chronicle of Georgia is 16 pillars, 35m tall each, with stories from Georgia’s history, myth and from the Bible. Unfortunately, the sculptor didn’t leave a list of what each artwork represents, so there’s a certain amount of guesswork required even for the Bible scenes. It’s a weird and wonderful place, on a hill overlooking the Tbilisi Sea. Apparently this was once three salt lakes, now joined up, but it’s also a reservoir that supplies most of the city’s drinking water. I could see before even doing the reading that this was a reservoir. There are boats on it and it’s a popular place for swimming and watersports in the summer. I had a look – I could see dinghies moored offshore and pedalos on land but no sign of kayaks. I would have liked to do a kayak trip.

Lots of people have compared the Chronicle to Stonehenge and almost as many people have wondered why. It’s because it kind of looks like Stonehenge – lots of upright stones, only bigger, blacker and more foreboding. This is absolutely the place alien overlord will greet Tbilisi from one day. It was freezing when we arrived and there was a heavy mist over most of the view but a lot of it cleared and the sun came out and by the time we returned to the bus I had to take off all my layers so as to not die of heatstroke before we got home.

I went straight back to the hotel for a little lunch and then back out to Europe Square via the church around the corner from me. I’m not entirely sure what kind of church it is, only it’s the kind where I’m supposed to cover my hair (with a scarf from the box outside the door) and you can’t take photos. From there, you have a great view over the river and over modern Tbilisi. A few things stand out. The tethered hot air balloon, for one. The Peace Bridge, which is a great glass curving canopy over the river. The City Hall, known locally as the Mushrooms because it looks exactly like a great big chunk of fungus growing from a tree. And the cable car which goes up to the fortress on the other side of the river. So up I went. It says on my transport pass that it’s valid for the cableway but it isn’t – or not this one, anyway. So now I have two transport passes!

Anyway, up I went. There’s a botanical garden up there which mostly looks like a forest in its January misery and I have no idea how you actually get at it, as all the paths are a dizzying distance below. I only had an hour to get to the sulphur baths and now I was on the right side of the river, I thought I’d make my way down the mountain and hope I popped out in the right place. I skipped the fortress – we’ll be back here tomorrow on our Old Town tour – and zigzagged down the paths and viewpoints and unexpected restaurants until I found myself popping out, sure enough, in Abanotubani, the bath district. This place is unmistakeable – not from the smell but from the weird brick roofs and domes that form the ground around here. Once there were hundreds of bathhouses but apparently there are only five now. I’m not convinced. I’m pretty sure I could see more than that. I had a booking at Chreli Obano, which is the most famous, most spectacular and most expensive – and also the only one where you can book online, although you seem to need a Georgian phone number to verify the booking. For 100 GEL (about £30), I could have my very own spa room with sulphur bath and for an extra £6, I could have a traditional scrub. For £60 an hour, I could have a room with hot and cold baths and two saunas – not a bad deal in itself but split between six people, something to jump on. Anyway, I just had a small room.

The bath is hot and no one ever mentions how much it sploshes over the edge. I watched lots of videos so I knew what to expect but no one ever mentions that if you so much as breathe, the water will pour over the edge and splash so loudly that you half-expect someone to come and see what on earth you’re doing. 15 minutes later, a scrubber person will come in for the traditional scrub. Every room has a tiled slab and they scrub you with a mitt that feels like it’s made out of carpet and then they get a kind of net bag and squeeze it in such a way that it produces mountains of soft bubbles. You get rinsed by having a bucket of hot sulphur water thrown over you and then the scrubber lady takes her 20GEL and departs unceremoniously. Best not to look at what comes off you when you scrub. Anyway, I now have my own scrubbing mitt, so I’ll do that every now and then.

The bath is really hot. They say to cool down in the shower every fifteen minutes but I soon found it had to be every three or four minutes. No one mentioned that reception calls you on the internal phone to tell you when you have 15 minutes left but they do mention how much the baths smell of sulphur. I actually didn’t notice. I half-wonder if that’s because once you’ve spent a certain amount of time in Iceland, you go nose-blind to smelly geothermal water but on the other hand, you can really smell the sulphur in the metro. Liberty Square metro is particularly fragrant. Anyway, it was very hot and when I was finished, I had to run across the river and up the hill and around the corner to get all my cold drinks out of my fridge. You need cold drinks, proper cold ones, for a sulphur bath. I’d like to go again, not to Chreli Abano – not because there’s anything wrong with it but because there’s still at least one sulphur bath I’d like to try out but we’ll see how the rest of the week works out.

Georgia day 3: flying to Georgia

I knew today I wanted to get my walk out of the way while I was still in Cyprus. My flight is 13:40, arriving in Tbilisi 17:30 and I knew by the time I reached Georgia and got in from the airport, I wouldn’t want to go out for half an hour in the cold, whereas I had plenty of time in the morning. So I set my alarm for 8am (highly aware that 8am in Cyprus is 10am in Tbilisi and this time tomorrow I wouldn’t be waking up, I’d be getting on a minibus two metro stops away from home) and went for breakfast. It went better than yesterday. I found the butter so I made two slices of toast and while I waited for the slow but brilliant conveyor toaster I collected up mugs of apple juice, mini croissants, things of jam and a big spoonful of chocolate spread on a plate. I am fed! I am ready to go out for a walk, get a bus and go to Georgia!

I walked. I went back to the prom and walked all the way up to Larnaca beach. It was sunny and I was in a t-shirt but there was a chilly breeze that made me suspect I wouldn’t have had much of a problem with bringing my jumper with me. I got back to the hotel in plenty of time to pack up and then went down the road to the bus stop. I’m irrationally proud of managing to get on the bus – the bus stop sign was only on the other side of the road and although the map said this was the bus stop, I wasn’t certain whether it would actually stop here. I saw it coming. I stepped out past the cars and held out my arm until I saw it indicate and then I boarded!

Airport was easy enough with one snag. I had to check in for my flight at the desk instead of at a machine and then I had to go through the weird passport control with the machines. Got another police receipt. Waited in the queue. Two border guards very slowly checking passports. Then a third arrived and began collecting the receipts and waving people through. I guess everything they need to scan for is on those receipts and someone can sit and process them later? But I wasn’t sure whether that was enough. I have a Cyprus entry stamp. Surely I need a matching exit stamp? Sometimes you can “hope for the best” and take your chances. I tend to believe that’s not the right approach when it comes to borders and passports. I went back and asked “don’t I need a stamp?” He seemed to think I wanted one rather than needed one but stamped without protest and that felt better. Through security and I was sitting at my gate by about 11:20, for a flight scheduled to take off at 13:40. Yes, I could definitely have dithered longer in Larnaca this morning.

I watched the incoming flight online and it arrived about 15m late. Oddly, ten or fifteen minutes later, it still hasn’t arrived at the gate. Boarding was supposed to begin 10 minutes ago and people keep going up to the staff and asking. No, it hasn’t started. No, the plane isn’t here. Boarding will start in about 5 minutes. It’s not looking like an overly full flight at the moment but it has more than its fair share of people who don’t seem to understand how airports work. There’s a woman who’s just sat next to me who can’t figure out how the handle on her case work and there’s a man who dumped his luggage about 45 minutes ago and is walking huge circles of the terminal staring at his phone and passing by every 15 or 20 minutes so I know he’s at least still here somewhere.

The flight was uneventful but very scenic. If you want a fairly short sightseeing flight, I can recommend Larnaca to Tbilisi – two hours of white snowy mountains, ridges and valleys that my inner geologist enjoys but doesn’t have enough training to properly understand.

I was nervous about getting through passport control – I’ve checked and double checked and then checked again just in case and I do not need a visa to enter Georgia but I still worry as I approach the desk. I was a bit suspicious about how quiet and empty the airport was. We were not a full flight but I’d been among the last to disembark and yes, there was a sizeable group around the transfer desk but not 3/4 of a plane-load sort of sizeable. A handful of people ahead of me at passport control and then one single person sitting at baggage reclaim. Of course, the world sprang to life out in arrivals. Everyone is either collecting or they want you in their taxi. “Taxi?” “Nope.” “In a few minutes?” “Nope.” “Ok, in maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.” “Nope”. I knew what I was doing. I’d read this in detail. Go to the orange Bank of Georgia kiosk and buy a blue transport ticket. Go to the orange machine that looks like an ATM and add a week’s subscription to it. Could have done with the addendums “the Bank of Georgia kiosk is to the right when exiting, by the door, and they only take cash” and “it’s add a subscription, not top up transport” but other than that it went smoothly. The bus was where I expected it to be and I boarded it by the back door and scanned my new ticket. The drivers want nothing to do with the money aspect of the bus. Good.

Last, I knew I needed to take this bus to Central Station and then take the metro 4 stops south to Avlabari or jump off at Liberty Square and take the metro 1 stop south to Avlabari if I spotted it. I had my map open and watched the little blue dot and the closer we got to the city centre, the more I began to think “I don’t see any way to get from here to Liberty Square without driving through Avlabari”. And it did. So, jump off at Avlabari, don’t get on the metro and walk 300m down the road to the hotel! Could not have been easier! Good bus!

The room is pleasant enough. There’s a building on my street – next to the hotel – that looks like a bomb hit it. It might be semi-demolished and then abandoned but it’s definitely got something of the look of having been hit by a bomb a couple of decades ago. The moment I saw it, I knew my room would overlook it and it does but you kind of have to peer over the high balcony wall and if you look to right or left, you see the lights of Tbilisi. I’m looking forward to seeing this city by daylight – from the highway on the bus, it looks like a city of lights spilling down a narrow valley in a mountain and maybe that’s what it is. Find out tomorrow. It’s a big room with a big shower tiled in interesting patterned/textured tiles and it has a full-size fridge but it also has a huge step up and then back down into the bathroom and I will fall over it and smash my head in during the next week. There’s another big step out to the balcony and the room itself is up a step from the door. I’m a little nervous that there are sofas and a TV right outside my door – I don’t want to listen to people socialising out there! – but on the other hand, I’ve seen nor heard no evidence that there’s anyone else in the building so far. Not that I’ve been here long. I left my luggage and went straight back to Avlabari to figure out the metro on my way to the big shopping centre and the big supermarket at Liberty Square. Familiar Soviet-style metro, complete with brown plastic-looking escalators, a babushka in a glass box at the bottom and an LCD countdown telling you when the next train is coming. Easy peasy. Irrationally glad my travel ticket working on the bus wasn’t just a fluke too.

I bought bread rolls and butter and juice and chocolate and plastic cheese slices for sandwiches and an actual block of cheese to eat with a baguette (had to stop off at the Carrefour City up the road; Goodwill is a pretty good supermarket but by 7.30pm, it was out of fresh bread) and then I came home and ate my body weight in bread and cheese, unpacked so I could be sure everything had made it after taking three days to get here and now… I think I’m going to not do much until bedtime.

Georgia day 2: in Cyprus

It’s been a mixed day. It started with some good apple juice and some good toast, made with a conveyor toaster – but no butter. Dry toast, apple juice, a bowl of cereal and then out to see Larnaca’s famous salt lake, which the guidebook said looks white. It doesn’t. It looks like an ordinary lake. It’s a great sight, with mountains in the distance and Larnaca on its edge and a mosque at the other edge and if you zoom in with your camera, the white speckles you assumed to be seagulls turned out to be actual pink flamingos. But it was hot. It’s January and based on the temperature of the open walls I found while attempting to depart the fourth floor via the stairs instead of the lift, I thought I’d want my hoodie. I did not. I definitely didn’t want my big boots but that’s all I brought with me. I’m expecting Georgia to be cold. I was expecting Cyprus to be warmer but I wasn’t expecting it to be hot. I spent a while admiring the lake but my plan to stroll some of the way round it wasn’t going to happen. Back to the hotel. Maybe spend the afternoon in the pool.

Actually, the hotel is quite cool and so is the balcony, mostly because it’s not facing into the sun. I was quite chilly, in fact. So I forgot how hot it is outside and decided to go back out into Larnaca. It was a lot more tolerable. I don’t know if that’s because I headed south and walked along the seafront, cooled by a sea breeze or if the temperature really did drop. I walked along the same prom I did last night, saw the sea sparkling in the sun, saw how shallow it is and how clear and wished I could put my feet in it and walked up until I found Larnaca town. I had a quick visit to the castle, which is mostly interesting in that you can go up on the ramparts and look out at the beach and the sea from up there. Then I went looking for a supermarket. Google Maps and Reddit between them seem to suggest there are only two decent supermarkets in all Larnaca. One is just around the corner from my hotel – but closed on Sundays. The other is Lidl, just out of the north of the town. I’m staying just out of the south of the town. The mini supermarket in the centre of Larnaca didn’t have bread. Fine. I still have Pringles and half a bar of orange Rittersport that I picked up at the airport. I can live off that (I can’t live off that). But there was a Burger King. I shouldn’t go in Burger King when I’m away adventuring but I was hungry. I ordered chips & Sprite and then was punished for going in Burger King by having to wait forever because the drink machine had broken. Orders were piling up, trays were piling up, burgers and chips were put on their trays and then taken away and put on the warming tray because the machine wouldn’t work. The audacity of one customer – when it finally began spitting out liquid, two staff began making the drinks to go with about ten orders, getting them out as quick as possible, and this moron looked at this drink that he’d been waiting at least 20 minutes for, at the staff trying to pour as many drinks as humanly possibly from a malfunctioning machine and went “… I don’t want ice in it”. I think I would have said quite firmly “Today you do”. I was out in a t-shirt because it’s warm but you can spot the tourists, they’re the only ones who think it’s warm. The locals are all in jumpers and most of them with coats or jackets over the top. It was cooler than first thing in the morning, or cooler than it was by the lake maybe, but if I had three layer on, I’d probably die. I have no idea how I”m going to get all my warm clothes to the airport in the morning if I can’t wear them.

Anyway, by the time I’d eaten my chips, there was a big black cloud forming over Larnaca. The sky was still blue over the Med and further down the prom but there was a coolish breeze and I began to feel like I’d better get home because it was going to end up as a race between me and the rain. I won, and I took a few minutes out of the race to make friends with a cat. There are hundreds of cats here and this one stared at me and meowed and then came over and rubbed itself on my legs and then nearly came home with me.

And that’s about all I’ve done today. I’ve planned breakfast, I’ve planned to do my walk in the morning and I’ve planned what bus I need to be at the airport on time. I’ve planned to go to either the Carrefour between the metro and my hotel in Tbilisi or the Spar across the river if I arrive after 8pm and I plan to eat my body weight in bread tomorrow.

Georgia day 1: flying to Cyprus

Here I am in Larnaca, most of the way to Georgia. I got up to Heathrow without any major problems – just when I got to short stay T4, I followed the Parking Meet & Greet lane only for the meet & greet barrier to be closed off, which meant I had to drive through the (ANPR-controlled) drop-off zone and go back round to go into the car park. Dropped off the car, strolled into T4 very happily, looked up at the departure board – and my flight wasn’t on there. It took a good moment for to realise that’s because I’m actually flying from T5 (I’m flying back into T4 at the end of this and I’d rather have the hassle of going between terminals when I’ve got plenty of time on the way than when I just want to get home afterwards). I found the trains – was expecting a Tube train or maybe a special Heathrow shuttle but in fact, I was having my first ride on the Elizabeth Line. That took me up to T1&2 (or is it 2&3?) and then I had to change onto the Heathrow Express (another first) to get to T5.

Security was no problem. Breakfast was. The only place that would do toast was Giraffe and that had a huge queue outside because it’s the first place you come to when you emerge from security. So I got a meal deal and sat at an empty gate for the best part of an hour. The board said my plane would be at the A Gates, which meant I didn’t have to jump on the transit across to one of the other buildings and when it finally came up, I was only sitting two gates away.

The flight was long but uneventful – long for someone who’s never done a flight longer than London to Moscow, anyway. There was a lady in my seat because assistance had plopped her there but actually, she was supposed to be in window seat on the other side. Then the man sitting in the aisle seat was asked if he’d swap so a girlfriend and boyfriend could sit together. He considered it, right up until he discovered he’d be swapping his aisle seat for a middle seat. Nope.

We flew over mountains. I thought I recognised Achensee and Pertisau and Flight Radar 24 says I was correct. I think Ljubljana was the place where the mountains unexpectedly stopped. Well, it happened somewhere, anyway. We also went over Skopje and Sarajevo and out into the Aegean near Thessaloniki. I guessed that one – I could see that the mountains had finally stopped and we were going over the sea. Google Maps obviously didnt work without signal but I could see a blurry part-loaded view of the Greek coast and the islands I could see below me seemed to match one off the coast east of Thessaloniki, with a second weird-shaped island seeming to confirm that. Flight Radar 24 confirmed it for definite. It very suddenly got dark over the Aegean. By the time we landed in Larnaca at just after 6.10pm, I was wishing I’d been able to find time earlier for my daily walk. Passport control was easy – UK passports were allowed in the machines, I scanned my own passport and received a kind of police receipt with my photo on it, which border control glanced at before stamping my passport and sending me on my way.

There’s a supermarket near my hotel but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get there before it closed so I got enough snacks for the evening at the airport and went looking for the bus. The signs said it was out the far side and there were buses there – the pre-booked shuttle bus, tour buses etc. No sign of an ordinary bus. Literally. No bus, no sign, no bus stop, no timetables, nothing. Undeterred, I looked up what bus I wanted to get and took a screenshot. Then I heard a bus! Up to my right, on a cliff! There was a glass walkway sticking out of the airport and crossing to the top of that cliff, which was apparently where the car park is. So back into the terminal, go upstairs, look for the walkway. Bus! I found the bus! I showed the driver my screenshot so he knew where I wanted to alight and I bought a ticket the old-fashioned way, with cash. 15 minutes later, I was jumping off into the Cypriot night and strolling 300m up the road to my hotel!

I didn’t particularly want to go out in the dark in a strange place on my own for my walk but I also didn’t want to break a streak that’s only three months off hitting four full years. So I strolled down the road towards the beach and discovered a well-lit promenade with just enough people walking on it to feel happy. Lots of fish restaurants, a full moon reflecting perfectly on the water, just cool enough that you want the hoodie but don’t feel the need to take it off, perfectly flat and I was back, 2km and 28 minutes later. Now I could actually look at my room, discover that I have a balcony and that the pool is closed and covered right outside. The photos make it look like it’s on the roof but it’s absolutely not. I have white towels for the shower and blue towels for the pool, which suggests it’s open. Whether it’s a suitable temperature to swim in, considering it’s January, I may find out tomorrow.