Yes

the wine sector is big

Georgia purports to be the birthplace of wine

there's a wine store chain called "8,000 Vintages"

for the 8,000 different varieties of Georgian wine

Tourists from Russia or Europe or both?

overwhelmingly Russia

there's a few Europeans and Americans but not very many

walking down the tourist areas you're more likely to hear Russian, Farsi, or Turkish being spoken than English or any mainland European language

enough so that when I come across people speaking English I always do a double take

georgian wine is top tier

we drink it here in the PMR too

That’s got to be tough to rely essentially on the economies of other countries to be stable enough to keep yours afloat

georgian wine is the best in the world imo

yeah I'm not a wine guy but Georgian wine is pretty good

the best wine/chacha is generally homebrew tho

@Right_Honourable that's pretty much every country in Europe outside of the big powers

Georgia's problem is that it wants to orient to Europe and the West but Russians basically fuel their economy for reasons of geography

it'd be like if Canada wanted to stop trading with the U.S. and orient to Britain

No country should orient to the west

G@y pride marches every month

well

in the issue of Ukraine, Russia is a far less white place and has infinite reason to dump genetic waste on it

a lot of Eastern Europeans associate the U.S. with freedom and prosperity, that's their attraction to it

they still remember the Soviet Union

Georgians are pretty impressed with Americans

if your choices are gay pride parades and having to live in a neighborhood full of chechens

the sane choice is the former

when I flew in for the first time the clerk at the airport cafe saw my passport and was super excited

@blue falafel yeah I'm more ambivalent about this issue but most Eastern Europeans associate Russia with backwardness and savagery for a reason

yes

I’d imagine if you were under the umbrella of a brutal communist regime for decades you wouldn’t like their remnants either

goes back further than that

it isn't just that, it is that Russia today is kind of a dump

the Russian Empire wasn't a good option either

gigantic multiethnic empire

full of violent criminals

you can even see this today

My take is that Putin is the only good thing about Russia

Putin is the worst thing about Russia

he literally imprisons actual Russian nationalists