Guest House Slavyanka

We three British middle-aged guys are a third of our way through our third trip to Georgia since 2010. We had escaped the heat in K into the mountains and Mestia. We returned as there was an opera on at the opera and ballet house on the day of my friend's birthday. We arrived at 13.55 at the Marshutka station and (unusually for us) dived into the adjacent MacD's for free wifi, A/C, shakes and a coffee! The wifi enabled us to research somewhere to stay and my friends found GHS on Bg.c so I checked it out on TA to find no pics and only one (but good) review! The Bg.c reviews were good though. We booked the triple room! We grabbed a taxi outside (6, pushing it!) direct to the opera house to book the tickets. It turned out not to be La Traviata but a Georgian Opera premiere, free but booked out completely! Luckily a group of Austrians with their interpreter got us some tickets! Free!! We then walked to the guest house in the heat following the map location. We found the spot (near huge melons and the flower market!) but no guest house!! Somehow we got separated and I waited on a corner for fifteen minutes until my friend returned. 300m away was the actual GHS along the kinked road north east! They had screenshotted the address, I had not! I had no local data SIM. Apparently tea was being made by our hosts and we went to the calmer end of the street, opposite a church set back off the street. At 15:28 I arrived at a gate (no 32) labelled 'Guest House', through a garden, another gate and the labelled (GHS) house (32b). Inside revealed a beautiful family house with tea and figs on the large reception/lobby table. The bedroom was big, ornate and furnished with four single beds. A table had three glasses and a corkscrew! They saw us coming!!! Various cabinets with books and trinkets as well as proper cut crystal vases adorned the magnificent room. There seemed to be an adjacent room with a double bed but on asking the man he implied it was rarely used for guests. It may have been the couples' bedroom and only used if bookings required as they may be happy to sleep on the kitchen floor (that's happened before to us in Gdansk many many years ago with an old girl sleeping on her kitchen chairs!!). The couple speak very very little English which is the only drawback. Wifi was quickly acquired and catching up with potential restaurants for after the 6-7pm opera. Palate seemed the best choice as local, ornate and operatic in theme for my opera loving friend's birthday! Plenty of sockets for charging devices. Parquet floor with a big rug on it. The blue tiled bathroom/utility room had an efficient thermostatically controlled gas shower in the (oddly oversized for the room) bath. The very stiff knob directly under the gas heater controls the flow. It's a bit noisy but it does work. The light switch is outside and the big mirror over the sink is ok for shaving, the water pressure high enough to flush out the razor. All fresh, I had time to catch up on the net, start this review and charge my iPhone before heading off for a pre-opera coffee and wine. We returned that evening at 23:50 and had no problem getting in with our key. A local dog barked (nothing unusual!) in the night a bit but overall I slept very well on the usual saggy beds (rare to get firm ones). The fan helped keep the room cool but my friends had problems sleeping with the general heat. We decided to definitely travel further east where it would be less humid. Mestia before was a much easier climate in the mountains. We're hoping the tourist information will be open (it looked shut) to see if we can go by the slow but less scary marshutkas! In the morning at 09:45 I asked the couple for coffees and a tea, no problem although no English and working out milk for me was fun! I enquired about breakfast and they offered bread (schleeb/lavash), yoghurt and scrambled egg but the man would have to go out to get the ingredients returning in 20minutes. The price would have been 10 (not 5 as others had indicated) so I decided they ought not worry and we would just have the (Turkish) coffee and tea. Very quickly the beverages appeared on the table and some home made cheese too. The smell of frying eggs got me wondering about more appearing and 10 each being charged. It is cheap at £3.30 but we are on a budget!) the lack of English might become a problem and I'm holding off posting this until we actually leave! In the end no fried eggs arrived so I am posting now whilst I have net access! The bedroom catches the morning sun so is quite stuffy after a night of three in it. The lobby/dining/TV area is much cooler. We did not try the TV! The couple own a cute miniature short haired dachshund (we had one as a family pet) which I was quite enamoured with. Well behaved and not yappy! See pics. I had not realised there was a dog in the house before as it was all very clean! We shall also see if we can book here for our last two nights before we fly back to Blighty from Kutaisi airport as this quest house is central, quaint and comfortable and in two weeks the weather is predicted to be cooler!