Moving to Tbilisi: My Experience and Practical Advice
In 2023, I moved to Tbilisi. Although for quite a while, I avoided calling it a move. I was only supposed to be here for a while. That sounded much less serious.
When you think you’re only staying temporarily, everything feels easier. You don’t have to decide where home is now, what you’ll be doing five years from now, or whether you’re actually starting a new life. You can live, look around, leave half the suitcase unpacked, and tell yourself you’ll figure everything else out later.
As it turned out, Tbilisi had its own ideas about that.
Before Tbilisi, life looked very different
For more than twenty years, I worked as an attorney in Saint Petersburg. I had familiar streets, familiar routines, and the comfortable adult assumption that I more or less knew how everyday life worked.
I knew how long it would take to get home, whom to call if a pipe started leaking, where to buy what I needed, and which shop had not yet raised the price of butter.
All of these things seem insignificant until you suddenly find yourself in another city and realize that you have to learn almost everything again. Where do you buy a light bulb? How do you find a plumber? Why has the water suddenly disappeared? What exactly did the electricity company just text you in Georgian? And why does everyone else seem so much less bothered by all of this than you are?
Moving to Tbilisi turned out to be less about changing an address and more about becoming a beginner again in the most ordinary parts of life.
At first, I didn’t understand Tbilisi at all
The city seemed beautiful, noisy, kind, and slightly mad. Someone could spend fifteen minutes carefully explaining how to get somewhere, make absolutely certain that you understood every turn, and then send you in entirely the wrong direction. A taxi driver might begin with the weather, learn most of your family history five minutes later, move on to politics after another ten, and by the end of the ride have a very definite opinion about how you should live the rest of your life.
After Saint Petersburg, this took some getting used to. In Petersburg, people guard personal distance as if it were a national treasure. In Tbilisi, that distance tends to disappear somewhere around the first question. After a while, you stop finding this unusual. Then one day you realize that you’re happily participating in a conversation that began with “Where’s the nearest pharmacy?” and somehow ended with the other person’s family history over the past twenty years.
Learning how not to get lost
During my first weeks, I walked around with my phone in my hand and the expression of someone who suspected Google Maps was deliberately withholding information. Tbilisi streets went uphill, then downhill, and occasionally seemed to do both at once. The navigation app would confidently suggest a route that ended at a staircase, a fence, or somewhere where the idea of a road became rather theoretical.
It was often much more useful to hear a neighbor say:
“Turn right after the shop, then go past the green gate.”
The funny thing is that, eventually, I started giving directions exactly the same way. Not the street name and building number, but the pharmacy, the bakery, the green gate, and “you’ll see it.”
Perhaps that’s when you really begin to get used to a city. Not when you stop using the map, but when you become capable of replacing it yourself.
The dream apartment and the detail missing from the photos
One of the places we lived in looked almost perfect. High ceilings, plenty of light, a terrace. Even the cat sitting on the stairs looked as though an interior designer had placed it there to complete the composition. Then the damp appeared.
At first it was a small patch in the corner of the bedroom. Then there was the smell. Eventually it became clear that the apartment had another feature that had somehow failed to make it into the listing: mold. After that, phrases like “dry apartment,” “proper heating,” and “good ventilation” stopped sounding like boring technical details.
I learned something very simple: you shouldn’t choose the most photogenic apartment. You should choose the life that begins behind its front door. That matters particularly in Tbilisi. Even neighboring streets can create completely different daily routines. From one apartment, your destination really is ten minutes away. From another, it is also ten minutes away — on the map. In an actual Tbilisi traffic jam, those ten minutes can perform the remarkable trick of becoming forty-five.
At that point, choosing an area is no longer about prestige. It’s about how many hours of your life you’re willing to spend in a car.
What my legal career turned out to be useful for
More than twenty years of legal practice gave me one particularly useful reflex. Whenever someone says, “It’s a standard contract, everything’s fine,” I immediately want to read it. Very carefully.
With a rental agreement, the important questions are usually not the elegant legal phrases but the thoroughly ordinary ones. Who pays if an appliance breaks? When is the deposit returned? Can you leave early? Can the landlord enter without warning? Are pets allowed?
When you really like an apartment, there is a perfectly understandable urge to end the search immediately: sign everything, transfer the money, collect the keys, and never open another property website again. That is precisely the moment when it helps to stop admiring the kitchen for a few minutes and read the lease.
To me, a contract is not evidence that I distrust the landlord. It’s simply a way of making sure that two people who currently understand each other perfectly actually understand the same thing. Discovering three months later that each of you had a different definition of the word deposit is considerably less charming.
Then I started helping other people
Over time, people who were also planning a move to Tbilisi began asking me about housing, neighborhoods, and the practical side of settling in. I noticed something quite quickly. Behind the practical questions, there is often another question entirely.
Someone asks which neighborhood is best, but what they’re really wondering is whether their family will be happy there. They ask about the lease because they’re afraid of losing money. They show me several apartments and can’t choose, not because they’re bad at reading floor plans, but because their entire life is changing and they would very much like at least the housing part to feel understandable.
After going through the move myself, I don’t understand those concerns only in theory. I remember them. That is why I’m much less interested in telling someone, “This is a good neighborhood” or “This is a great apartment.” What matters is whether that particular place works for that particular person’s life.
Tbilisi isn’t perfect. Thankfully.
Tbilisi isn’t always convenient. It can be noisy. In summer, the sun sometimes seems personally offended by Tbilisi. The roads operate according to their own logic, and some drivers seem to have a fairly flexible relationship with traffic rules. In older buildings, it’s worth finding out exactly how the heating works, because discovering in winter that your main source of warmth is a positive attitude is not especially pleasant.
The water may disappear just after you’ve shampooed your hair. The electricity may go off five minutes before an important call. And an agreement that seemed completely clear to you may, with equal confidence, have been understood very differently by the other person. And yet Tbilisi is alive.
It doesn’t let you remain a tourist for very long. The city pulls you into ordinary life fairly quickly: neighbors who know slightly more about you than you expected, the owner of a small shop who notices that you haven’t been in for a few days, conversations that begin accidentally and end much later than planned. And, of course, hot bread that once again fails to make it home intact. Although by now I’ve stopped blaming the city for that one.
When I realized it was home
I don’t remember the day I decided to stay. Perhaps these things rarely happen on one particular morning. First, you stop counting the weeks. Then you buy something for the house that you would definitely never buy for somewhere you were staying “for a couple of months.” Then you start making plans for autumn, even though in spring you were completely certain you’d be gone by then.
And one day you hear yourself say:
“Here in Tbilisi, we…”
At that point, the situation is fairly clear. The move changed more than my address. It changed my work and brought me back to writing. I began recording people, conversations, and small scenes from city life: someone saying “I’ll be quick” and disappearing; balconies that seem to contain entire lives; salt being lowered from a third-floor window in a basket.
That’s how Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi began.
What I would tell someone planning a move
Don’t try to organize your entire future life before you’ve even bought the plane ticket. Prepare the documents. Work out your budget. Absolutely. But leave yourself permission to arrive and change your mind.
The neighborhood you’ve loved for three months in photographs may do nothing for you in person. The first apartment may be completely wrong. And the fifth one, which you opened without much enthusiasm, may unexpectedly be exactly what you need. Don’t choose a home from photographs alone. Look at the building and the entrance. Walk around the street in the evening. Ask how the heating works and what the utilities cost. If something isn’t clear, ask.
Ask a lot. It’s much better to be slightly annoying before signing a lease than deeply miserable in your own living room afterward. And don’t be alarmed if ordinary tasks take a ridiculous amount of energy during the first few weeks. Finding a pharmacy, calling a plumber, understanding a bill, buying something basic, or explaining an address to a driver can all feel like separate projects. Then, one by one, they stop being projects.
And eventually a stranger asks you for directions, and you answer without hesitation:
“Right after the shop. Then you’ll see the green gate.”
At that point, I think it’s fair to say that moving to Tbilisi is complete.
If you need help with housing in Tbilisi
If you’re planning a move and would like some independent help making sense of housing in Tbilisi, I can help with long-term rentals and property purchases. If you’ve already found an apartment to rent, I can help you assess the option, understand the real costs and practical lease terms, and work out what should be clarified before you sign or transfer money.
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