Batumi is a city you’ve probably never heard of. It’s in Georgia, as in the country not the state, and it’s on the Black Sea.

Visually, it wants to be like Dubai.

The bit of the city that people might reasonably call downtown is a festival of skyscrapers that are generally smaller than they would be if this really were Dubai, and uglier.

Some of them aren’t pretty. Some of them aren’t pretty but they’re so imposing and striking that they make sense. You end up liking what you see, especially at night.

It’s a fruit salad of concrete, lights, glass and thick grey sky. It kinda works, in a way.

I’m here because I’ve been wanting to come here for the best part of ten years. I don’t remember exactly how or when, but I do remember learning about this city about a decade ago. And I remember thinking, “that looks like discount Vegas in the Caucasus. I want to go."

So I did. It took ten+ years, an ultra-expensive and delayed Turkish flight, and a broken jawbone later, I’m here.

I’m still not great. My face still shows scars from the accident. There’s one that wrap arounds my eyebrow. It’s pink, and thick, and deep. This one, I’m afraid, is the one that won’t go away.

There’s another one on my nose. This’ll be gone soon. It’s here because my nose was also broken. There’s another one, two stitches, right below my right eye. This one may get better sooner than later.

And then lastly, there’s another one, eight stitches, right below my left eye. This one… I don’t know. It may still be here 10 years from now. I wouldn’t surprised. But I don’t mind.

Doctors said I’m on a liquid diet for a month and a half. It’s a good job beer is liquid, then. The beer I’m currently having is a thick, dark, almost soap-like banana stout.

It’s a meal. It’s like drinking liquid chicken.

The one thing that always gets me about places that are sort of between the West and Russia, and I mean purely geographically, is they never know what they want to be when they grow up.

Georgia, like nearly all the -stans, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and a long list of others, emerged from the heavy, depressing group chat that was called USSR.

Like any other group chat, no one except the host wanted to be in it. So when Georgia left the group chat, it immediately began looking West.

However, whether they like it or not, Georgians are not Westerner. They’re not European. They’re not Asian. They’re somewhere in between.

There should be a new continent, because so many of these countries cannot be categorized as Asian, but they’re not European either.

I digress.

I was saying, ‘whether they like it or not’. And that’s the thing. It’s unclear whether they do. I honestly can’t tell.

The situation in Batumi, by the way, is even more complicated because technically they don’t call themselves Georgians. Technically, they’re part of an autonomous, semi-independent republic called Adjara.

Around 40 percent of population here is Muslim. And you can tell by the amount of mosques that are present. The call for the prayer resounds five times a day.

And there are heaps of Saudi citizens here, just visiting. Probably because they too aren’t sure whether they wanna go to Europe or not. So they go here, the middle of the road.

Batumi, even at the height of Summer, even though there’s a Mafia-style system whereby every single hotel and apartment on Booking . com is run by the same investment group, is relatively cheap.

A taxi ride costs $1 on average. Beer is $2 or $3, even the fancy one. Wine, which Georgia claims to have invented, is even cheaper.

Food is cheap as well. Then again I wouldn’t know as all I can eat for now are yogurts, ice cream and mashed potatoes.

There’s also an army of stray dogs. And stray cats. And there’s a beach. It’s long and wide, it runs for miles along the coastline and there are areas where it’s 1 kilometer across.

It’s not sandy, which is a pain in the butt, and the seabed is covered by rocks the size of The Rock. And they can be as sharp as knives. People wear Crocs to the beach.

The water is clean but dark. Especially in the afternoon. Mostly because, and in my book that’s a good thing, ‘Batumias’ use their waterways. Any day, every day, you’ve got jet skis, boats, yachts, speedboats, sea doos, you name it.

If you want to fracture some bones in your face, it seems, you can do that any which way you want in Georgia. But I digress again.

I don’t know what to make of my trip to Batumi.

It’s very unlikely I’ll ever go back, because I will associate my trip to Georgia with the accident I had two days into the trip, and because yes it’s cheap once you get there, but flight tickets are too expensive. Then again Batumi gave me some nice vibes.

Then again so does the city I'm currently visiting, London, and I don't wanna live here either.