- We're leavin', leavin', leavin' on that midnight plane to Georgia -- Tbilisi, Georgia, to be exact, where my friends, writer Amy Gigi Alexander and tour guide Mako Kavtaradze show us around the city.

We'll eat amazing Georgian food and basically fall in love with the place.

You'll have Georgia on your mind, too.

♪ I'm Ernest White II -- storyteller, explorer.

I believe in connecting across backgrounds <i> and</i> boundaries.

I mean, look at us!

We're chasing the sunset!

Join me and my friends... What's going on, boy?

[ Laughs ] - It's kind of a... - ...and discover that no matter the background, no matter the history, the whole world is our tribe.

♪ Come with me.

♪ Whoo!

"Fly Brother."

- Major funding for this program is provided by... Marie Roberts De La Parra -- personal coaching, executive leadership, and self-empowerment.

Courageous Conversation Global Foundation.

Promoting racial justice, interacial understanding, and human healing.

MetalShake by Sweden.

Additional funding provided by the following.

♪ - Tbilisi.

At the junction of Europe and Asia, in the verdant foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, sits the capital of Georgia.

No, this ain't Atlanta.

It's Tbilisi.

♪ ♪ At once ancient and modern, European and Asian, Tbilisi blooms like a garden of mismatched flowers whose colors mingle unexpectedly and delightfully.

And it's in Tbilisi where I get to hang out with a couple of friends and discover a place that I'd only ever read about in history books, a place where the churches look like castles, the dancers jump impossibly high, the food is slap-yo'-mama good, and the wine is -- Well, I don't drink, but the pomegranate juice is delicious.

I've got two friends with me here in Tbilisi -- Amy Gigi Alexander, writer extraordinaire and chief editor of literary travel journal <i>Panorama...</i> and Mako Kavtaradze, Georgian entrepreneur and our official tour guide in Tbilisi.

♪ - Tried so much.

- Hey, you were wonderful.

[ Laughter ] - Name of the country, it's not Georgia -- Georgia, because Greek people, they were calling us as the landowners.

- Okay.

- The name, the real name of our country, is Sakartvelo.

- Sakartvelo?

- Sakartvelo.

- Sakartvelo.

- Kartveli is a Georgian.

- Okay.

- And Kartuli is the Georgian language.

- Kartuli is the Georgian language?

- Kartuli.

Yes.

- And the Georgians are Kartvelo?

- Kartveli.

- Kartveli.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- And Sakartvelo... - Sakartvelo.

- ...is the name of Georgia.

- Sakartvelo.

- Yes.

- Not Georgia, guys.

- Not Georgia.

- Mako, who also owns a spice company -- and Georgians know their spices, trust me -- is also an expert language teacher, with all the patience in the world for barbarians who can't quite get the hang of a language that's unrelated to almost any other on Earth.

♪ Kartuli -- or Georgian, the language -- belongs to the Kartvelian language family, which is unrelated to any other language family in the world.

Spoken by nearly 4 million Georgians within the country, and in Russia, Turkey, Iran, the U.S., Europe, and Israel, there are at least 18 dialects of the language.

Georgian writing uses a beautiful, unique script of semicircles and pointy tails, capturing the very essence and flow of the language in each letter.

While modern commerce and industry are conducted in Georgian, it's the poetry and music of the language that carries Georgia's vivid folklore and culture with it into the future.

♪ Formerly known as Tiflis, Tbilisi has been a valuable commercial and strategic settlement for thousands of years, with the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Russians running through<i> this</i> Georgia like General Sherman through that <i> other</i> Georgia.

The result, however, is a delectable fusion of architecture, food, and culture.

Mako takes Gigi and I around the old center of Tbilisi, replete with a waterfall right in the middle of the city.

We have to look like this in the camera.

Some of the buildings in the Historic District date back to the fifth century, encompassing traditional sites like the old sulfur bathhouse with its healing waters.

Balconies, bridges, and spiral staircases connect the multilevel sections of the city, with newer buildings built atop the foundations of the medieval city center.

These walls have seen it all.

Tbilisi has been the capital of Georgia for almost a thousand years.

The city has a population of about 1.5 million people, and Georgia as a whole has about 3.7 million people -- mostly ethnic Georgians, but also Armenians, Azeris, and other actual literal Caucasian people, as well as Russians, Greeks, and Ukrainians.

Georgia has been a point of constant connection and contact between cultures for centuries.

And because of all this contact -- both good and bad -- Georgians know the value of connection.

Situated along the ancient Silk Road that shuttled commerce and culture between East and West for thousands of years, the lands that would become Georgia were first united as one kingdom in the year 1008.

For the next nine centuries, powerful regents -- such as Queen Tamar -- ruled the country, which had also been prized and captured intermittently by the Mongols, Turks, Persians, and Russians.

From 1921 to 1991, Georgia formed part of the massive Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, before finally regaining its independence.

In fact, the very name of Georgia's national anthem, "Tavisupleba," means "freedom."

♪ Food is one of the more obvious benefits to all this cultural connecting going on, and<i> this</i> Georgia is just as good as that <i> other</i> Georgia at laying out a solid spread that'll put you in a food coma right after.

At Cafe Littera, a quiet, intimate spot where food and literature meet, Chef Tekuna Gachechiladze tells Gigi and me all about the modern spin she puts on old Georgian favorites.

- So, can you explain what these dips each are?

- Okay.

- The green one is...?

- The green one is the spinach with walnuts.

This is called pkhalis.

This is traditional Georgian vegetarian appetizers.

- Pkhalis.

- Pkhalis, which means there are vegetables mixed with the walnut, garlic, and the Georgian spices.

- Okay.

- And this is the version -- more lighter version.

It's made like a dip.

Normally, I always suggest, also the tourism, to bring people first in the traditional Georgian restaurants, try traditional food, and then come here.

Normally, this is the last step always.

Then you have an idea what comes from what, so... - I have been to a traditional one.

This is his first meal here.

- Yeah, so if you know -- Because the pkhalis are, like, very common almost at every table, so it's all eggplants with walnuts, spinach with walnuts, beets with walnuts.

They are more, like, rough, so rough chopped.

So and -- But here it's, like, more airy, more like hummus, baba-ghanoush-style version.

- Ohh.

This is kind of... - This is like eggplant.

So eggplant.

And this is the homemade yogurt, strained yogurt with pomegranate reduction.

And this is the wild trout, wild trout carpaccio with ajika and then the mango salad.

- So it's raw?

- This is raw.

So, this is raw fish, and this is like -- What I'm trying to do -- bringing, like, Western recipes like carpaccio, tartars, but with the Georgia ingredients.

So it's like force-feeding Georgians with raw fish because we did not have this culture at all.

So even though we are on the Black Sea and we have great fish -- we have great river fish also -- we don't have the fish culture at all, so it's very strange.

- Interesting.

- Yeah.

And so this is like... - The sunflower oil.

- Sunflower oil with ajika.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- So we have the big influences from the Soviet food era and Soviet cooking, because during the Soviet Union, it was everything standardized, even though the Georgia were more advanced, but, still, it was big influences, so... - One of Georgia's most recognizable and tasty dishes is khachapuri.

And while some say it's Georgia's answer to pizza, it's really just bread and cheese and butter.

Basically, heaven.

Khachapuri can be round, rectangular, or boat-shaped, with the gooey cheese filling enclosed or open like a convertible.

This recipe is one of countless variations, excerpted from Darra Goldstein's book "The Georgian Feast."

You'll need 2 cups of all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 12 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter -- about 1 1/2 sticks cut into pieces -- 2 eggs, 1/4 cup of plain yogurt, 1 1/4 pounds of mixed Muenster and Havarti or feta cheeses, grated coarsely -- this all depends, of course, on how salty you like your cheese -- 1 egg yolk, beaten.

Put the flour and salt into a medium bowl and cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal.

Beat one egg and stir into the yogurt.

Then add the flour mixture.

Form into a ball and chill the mixture for one hour.

Grate the cheese coarsely, beat the other egg, and stir into the cheese, then set aside.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and grease a large baking sheet.

On a floured board, roll the dough into a rectangle about 12x17 inches.

Trim the edges, then spread the cheese mixture on half the dough, then fold the other half over to enclose it, sealing and crimping the edges.

Transfer the bread to the baking sheet and brush with the beaten egg yolk.

Bake for 50 minutes or until browned.

The bread is served slightly warm.

Cut into small squares.

Eat.

♪ After lunch and a strong Georgian coffee, Mako and I take a minute to chill at Fabrika, a former Soviet sewing factory turned multiuse urban space where all the cool kids hang out.

♪ - We started tourism eight years ago.

And, like, before that, we don't have this experiences.

We were just enemies or guests.

- Okay.

One or the other.

- Yes.

- Enemies or guests.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- And guests is very holy for us.

Like, guests is the gift from the God.

- Okay, okay.

- And this is very, very holy.

And, plus, guests is our chance to have more friends.

Because friendship is power, and power is friendship.

- Wow.

- We are always in trouble, and we know that we will into trouble again, so the guest is like our hope to have more friends around the world.

- Okay.

- And, you know, when you are in the trouble, you have a hope that a friend will help you.

- Yes, yes.

- So this is our kind of hope, that we will collect more friends and we will build this more friendship and we will have such a peace time in here to have somebody to drink with our beautiful wine.

- Okay, your beautiful Georgian wine.

- Yeah, and to say toast and to build a friendship, because life is too short, and we really want to spend a good life without troubles and just spending a good time till we are alive.

And to have lots of friends, this is the big gift what you can get in your life.

- Absolutely.

Friendship.

It's what it's about.

- Yes.

- Alright.

Cool.

♪ So, how is Georgia seen in other places outside of Georgia?

- The image of Georgia is -- Like, for example, in Russia, it was, like, not so good.

Because during the Soviet Union, they were visiting Georgia as like a dacha, you know?

Dacha means like when you have a house in the village, so they were not even guests and even tourists.

They were coming like their own place.

- Okay.

- And after this situations, what happened in the close past, they got this information which was really, really wrong, that we are just running in the street with the horse and killing everybody in the streets, which is not true.

- Okay, so just really negative stereotypes.

- Yeah, and some accidental guests that we got in Georgia, they found that we are just hugging them and sitting and drinking, and we are offering our food and our wine to them, and we don't have this feeling to hate anybody, because we feel that life is so short... - Yes.

- ...that you don't have this feeling to hate anybody, even Russians, even Turks, even Persians, you know, the countries who were conquering us during the centuries.

- Right, right.

Well, you know, if you hold in that hate, you're only hurting yourself.

- Yes, that's right!

And what we can offer to other countries, like, other people, this is, like, our friendship and our open-minded.

- Yes.

- So, word of mouth was very popular.

Word of mouth helped us very much.

Like, these backpackers started to promote Georgia.

- Right, and then blog about it and talk about it in travel forums.

- Yeah, like, friends -- They were telling other friends about this place, so Georgia was promoted, like, very fast.

And every year, um, number of tourists increasing.

- Okay.

- So, like, last year, we got 6 million tourists.

- Wow.

That's a lot for a country this size.

- Yeah, and we made a big party with the 6 millionth tourist, and it was, like, a big... - A big event.

- ...event, like, for him and for us, as well, because, like, again and again, more tourists means more guests, and more guests means more friendship because... - Back to friendship, yeah.

- ...we really deeply believe that person who will come in Georgia, you are just -- you're just fall in love with Georgia.

- Hey.

I love it.

- Yeah.

[ Laughs ] ♪ - Though religion was repressed during Soviet rule, Georgia's history of religious tolerance remains evident in its abundance of churches, mosques, and synagogues, and I visit a few of these houses of worship with Gigi, who has a deep knowledge of holy places.

♪ - I am a tourist.

- I'm tourist, too.

- Yeah.

Oh, you're a tourist, too?

- Yeah.

- Ah, you're a tourist.

- Yeah.

- Ah.

- He's tourist, too.

- Yeah, we're all tourists.

- Yeah.

This planet, everybody tourist.

- Exactly.

I knew where you were going with it.

[ Laughs ] - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Okay, yes.

- Here.

Sit, women.

Men here.

Separate.

- Women are over here?

- Yeah, women here.

- So, we were just -- He was just saying that the women are never in the same space as the men.

So the women are on the balcony, and the men are here.

They're never in the same place at the same.

- Judaism has existed in Georgia for some 2,600 years, representing one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.

The ornate Great Synagogue, in Tbilisi's Historic District, was completed in 1903, while Georgia was firmly under the rule of Tsarist Russia.

- I think what's interesting about this, compared to a Christian church, is that there's no imagery of people.

There's no stories being told, like, on the wall.

In Christianity, people didn't read.

- Right.

- And so they used their paintings to tell people the story so that they would understand what was happening.

That's the main method of communication, while here, you see that -- the language -- More people could read.

And, also, there was more oral history, so people were telling the story orally, so they didn't have to use pictures and images of things.

So many Stars of David, and, I mean, there <i> are</i> images, but they're kind of, like, blended in.

♪ ♪ - The Cathedral of Saint George, a few steps away from the Great Synagogue, is an Armenian church built in the 13th century, Armenia being Georgia's neighbor to the south, with a similarly complex and connected history.

Many of the churches in Georgia, particularly in rural stretches of the country, were built in the Middle Ages, often on promontories, hills, and other intimidating landforms as a way of offering protection and security for nearby villagers.

In Georgia, churches look like castles, highly fortified and often full of treasures from all along the Silk Road.

- And then, also, if you look at this church, it's very small.

So if we're standing here, we're actually quite close to where the spiritual leaders would be.

- Mm-hmm.

- And there's not as much space as like when you're in a Catholic church, there's so much space.

And also, like a traditional medieval church, there's no place to sit.

- Right, right.

Or kneel even.

- There's only a few benches on the side.

You would kneel right here on the ground.

- Okay, okay.

- You would kneel here.

You would also stand.

So you would actually be on your knees in here the whole time, and you would stand sometimes.

It definitely feels more immediate.

- Mm-hmm.

- And even the paintings, you don't feel far away from God in here.

You feel sort of like -- - Right, right.

It's intimate.

- Yeah, it's really intimate, even though it's a really tall, big building.

So, we have, like, traditional scenes of Jesus giving instructions, moments.

But these landscapes are very modern.

I mean, that's a landscapism kind of painting.

It's influenced by landscape painting.

- Okay, and you can just tell, then, the era, kind of, that it was inspired by, even if -- - 16th century.

So it was probably influenced by art that they were seeing from the West.

- Mm-hmm.

- Which, if you consider how closed-off Georgia is, it's kind of amazing that an artist came in here and painted that.

- Right, right.

- Yeah.

- It's beautiful.

- It is really beautiful.

[ Men singing in native language ] ♪ - Later, folklorist and entrepreneur Luarsab Togonidze serenades us with traditional Georgian song at his cozy and aptly named restaurant, Poliphonia.

[ Men singing in native language ] ♪ - It's a song -- I don't know -- Maybe '50s, 20th century.

It's about Georgia.

Georgia is still like, um, in Soviet jail.

So it's a song about Georgia.

It's a sad song because the words say, like, "You are so beautiful, nothing compares to your hills," and something like this.

♪ [ Singing in native language ] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [ Cheers and applause ] - Beautiful!

- Recognized by UNESCO as a masterpiece of intangible world culture, Georgian polyphonic music melds ancient and modern harmonies in a surreal, dreamy soundscape at once worshipful and cinematic.

Retaining its unique character throughout centuries of external control, Georgian music has staying power.

Coupled with a tradition of celebratory toast making, in which the host regales guests with humor, wit, melody, and poignancy, a proper Georgian celebration can make you laugh, cry, and laugh again at one sitting.

♪ Tbilisi excites visitors with its perfectly balanced historic and futuristic atmosphere, connecting the old world with the new, the East with the West, tradition with modernity.

And that interplay of energies can make for quite the party.

- [ Laughs ] You look like -- - [ Laughs ] Yeah, he's not a grandma.

♪ ♪ ♪ - They will dance circles around you in Georgia, and those circles will be elegant and exciting, pulling from centuries of cultural exchange and cultural pride to put on a lovely, lively show.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ After all that excitement, Gigi and I finish the day discussing our shared love of travel and of Tbilisi.

- ...more than 15 years, but I didn't call it travel writing.

I just called it writing.

I was always a traveler.

I was always journaling about what I did, but I didn't officially become a travel writer as a way to make a living until about 3 1/2 years ago.

- What about Tbilisi, then, stands out compared to other destinations that you've been to?

- I did not know what to expect when I was coming here.

- Yes.

- I heard there was great food.

I heard there was great wine.

What I didn't understand was the history that I was gonna be looking at, that it had been occupied by the Soviets for so long.

I had the impression that it still kind of was because that's how the history is told to us, what we hear in the media.

- Right.

- But what I'm looking at is this, like, fresh, vibrant, incredible city paired with this ancient culture, paired with stories and customs and saints from as far back as the 7th century.

I'm walking through a city, and it's like walking through jazz.

- Mm.

- That's what it's like.

- That's true.

- There are layers.

If you look at any aspect of the city, because Georgia was invaded so many times, there's not a big space between, say, one era when they were invaded and then 10 centuries later, because they were invaded every single century, so you have architecture from every single one.

So it's a blend.

- Yeah.

- But somehow, this is, to me, very harmonious.

- Right, right.

- And then, also, they've really embraced modernity.

They've embraced a modern sensibility.

There's modern architecture, there's modern music, there's modern food.

It's like fusion.

- Yeah, yeah, and it sounds good.

- Yeah, it sounds -- - It tastes good.

It feels good.

- It does.

It doesn't -- There's nothing that they're doing that doesn't feel like it fits.

- Yeah.

- It's just -- And there's a level of excitement and energy to this city.

- That's very true.

- This is definitely a place that I would come back to many, many times.

I actually don't think -- and I'm here for two weeks -- I don't think two weeks is even enough time to discover this place, but, in three days, I think you can really get a pretty good sense of it.

- Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Tbilisi.

Lovely, surprising... exciting, enticing.

I'll always remember the sweet songs that keep Georgia on my mind... and keep me wanting to go back.

♪ ♪ - Major funding for this program is provided by... Marie Roberts De La Parra -- personal coaching, executive leadership, and self-empowerment.

Courageous Conversation Global Foundation.

Promoting racial justice, interacial understanding, and human healing.

MetalShake by Sweden.

Additional funding provided by the following.

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