Marneuli

Marneuli is the part of Georgia where the language, the food and the rhythm of the day all change. The town sits on the fertile Kvemo Kartli plain, fifty minutes from Tbilisi, and the majority of the municipality's population is ethnic Azerbaijani. Both languages are spoken on the street and signs are often in both.

This is the country's vegetable garden. The Marneuli plain supplies Georgian markets with tomatoes, herbs, potatoes and the first crops of spring. Greenhouse farming has expanded sharply over the past decade, and whole fields of plastic tunnels line the road in. Marneuli is also a road junction: from here the route divides towards Sadakhlo and the Armenian border and towards the Red Bridge and Azerbaijan, so much of the traffic through the town is freight moving between three countries.

The large market in the centre is the main reason to come. It is not a souvenir market but a working one: rows of vegetables, a meat hall, spices, fabric, hardware. The food is worth the trip on its own — bread from the clay oven, qutab, samsa, Azerbaijani-style kebab, and tea houses where tea is drunk by the pot rather than the cup.

Honestly: Marneuli has no architectural monument and no museum. It is a typical working South Caucasus town — dusty, noisy, practical. But if you have spent a few days in Tbilisi and want to see that Georgia is not one thing, this fifty-minute drive shows it better than most museums.