Hiking Likani, Sunday school Rustavi

17 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 21 seen

Another awesome weekend in Georgia 🇬🇪- with some elements of offroad riding, hiking, camping, horseback riding near Likani station, and a few skulls at Green monastery Saturday.

Back to Rustavi scout center for a lovely Sunday with fellow Latvians. 

Our last weekend trip with VW Touareg. 

Minimum Wages in European Union 2022

16 June, 2022 | Macroeconomics | 54 seen

In 2022 there were 21  out of 27 European Union member states with an official minimum wage set by the government.

Turns out this is already the eighth (#9) article about minimum wages in European Union featured on the blog. To keep it up, here is the raw data for minimum wages across European Union in 2022.

Please don't judge too hard, data are taken from this article on Wikipedia, and applied some basic calculations for yearly growth.

Buying a property in Georgia (Dedoplistskaro)

15 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 28 seen

Dedoplistskaro is a small town in Kakheti, Georgia with a population of about 6,000. Distance to Tbilisi about 130 km, about 2 hour drive. 

I first had an idea of buying a house in Dedoplitskaro a few years ago, back then I was researching the whole of Georgia and Dedoplitskaro stayed the top of the list because the buying price seemed one of the lowest in the country. When speaking with locals (not from Dedoplitskaro) - I was told that the place is not good, with snakes, earthquakes, and a lack of drinking water. 

Cannot either confirm or deny. Snakes? Probably, the city and nearby area are located on Shiraki plain, which is kind of like a desert. Earthquakes? They do happen, quite frequently in Georgia. Lack of drinking water? This might be a problem, but maybe a borehole is an option? These are the questions we should clarify, before moving on, I guess. And the simple ones - electricity, gas. 

As we had other priorities in life, we didn't buy anything here.

About a year ago, a German friend took me on a trip to Vashlovani, Eagle canyon, and even some abandoned Soviet airfield in Big Shiraki. I had a chance to…

Eagle canyon in Georgia

10 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 25 seen

The bear went over the mountain .. or last weekend we went hiking at the Eagle Canyon near Dedoplistskaro, Shopping at the Dezerteer market in Tbilisi, and exercising at Lisi Lake... another fabulous weekend has been put on our tapes and post-processed.

Enjoy the video and thumbs up!

Tbilisi Airbnb market overview - May 2022

8 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 81 seen

Recently I've been working on the Tbilisi Airbnb property management service and with the help of this article, I decided to take a quick look at the overall Tbilisi Airbnb market. The size, revenue, occupancy rate, and more.

According to AllTheRooms, the average daily rate for hosts earned in Tbilisi was $40, which is a +5.26% growth if compared to the previous month. while the occupancy rate was 27% (a -10% decrease compared to the previous month)

• There were 6,435 listings in Tbilisi during the month of May (-1.74%)
• The average earning per listing is $339 (+0.3% growth)

Taking all those data together, it seems that the Tbilisi Airbnb property market in the month of May was worth about $2,16M

As I'm looking to rent to sublet an apartment in Tbilisi, these numbers are good to know and might help get basic general.

To make it worth the effort I've decided to focus on popular and highly demanded areas in Tbilisi for letting entire apartments for short-term rent. Looking to rent a newly built apartment in Vake, Saburtalo for a budget of $500-600 per month. i couldn't find exact data…

Tbilisi Airbnb property managment

7 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 141 seen

Tbilisi ex-pats and locals - I'm launching a new service - Tbilisi Airbnb property management.

Whether you are an expat looking for someone that does Airbnb management in Tbilisi? Someone that can take care of your apartment and rent it out when you are out of town. Or local looking to get maximum return from short-term rentals. We are here to help.

I'm open to helping manage your property, listing it on Airbnb, Booking.com, and other travel booking websites. Helping with quality photography, copywriting, setting the right price to get the best results, and last but not least taking care of maintenance and cleaning. We will take 20% of the Gross income.

If you have an apartment you are ready to rent out for the long term (at least 1 year) - we are interested in renting it for a fixed price and subletting for short-term rentals. You will get a fixed monthly payment - no matter, will we make any booking or not. We are interested in newly finished projects in Vake, Saburtalo.

We are also open to buying your real estate in Tbilisi or any other part of Georgia. 

Interested? Send me a message and…

Sighnaghi & Vazisubani trip

3 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 12 seen

At the start of May, Oskars invited us to visit his new hut in Kakheti.

After a few stops at McDonald's, Sighanghi, and Bodbe monastery we finally reached Vazisubani, where we were greeted with traditional Georgian supra and a lot of chacha.

Now, there is one more cool place where they speak Latvian to visit in Georgia. Enjoy the video and Thumbs up!

Filmed with DJI Mavic Air 2 and Samsung Galaxy phone, Georgia May 13-14, 2022

Notes from Tbilisi: Abandoned Military sites in Latvia / Estonia; Sold VW Touareg car; #2 Bitcoin newsletter

2 June, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 12 seen

Good afternoon from sunny and hot Tbilisi. The weather was scorching today, reaching +32 Celsius.

The morning started with an interesting message to the blog's contact form - an Estonian person was asking some questions about military sites in Latvia, we exchanged a few e-mails and talked both about Latvian and Estonian abandoned military sites.

Information about former Latvian radar base Skrunda-1

Hello, Reinis

I read your post about Skrunda-1 and also did some internet ''research''. And I've come to a couple of questions.
When did You visit this place? And was it closed? Because I read that it is now closed for tourists and the Latvian army has closed the area. Could You please tell if this is true?
I am asking because I'm planning a trip in Latvia's abandoned military places/bases.

Any information that You could share would come in handy for me.

I was pretty much intrigued and shout out the best I knew both about Skrunda-1 and other interesting sites in Latvia

Good morning! At least morning is here in Tbilisi!

Are you from Estonia?

Skrunda - 1.. I visited it back in 2015 if I remember it…

International Scout Centre Rustavi

31 May, 2022 | Professional services | 98 seen

The industrial town of Rustavi, approximately 25 km southeast of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, offers a modern international scouting center.

The youth center offers space for a variety of indoor and outdoor activities. The facility is available for children and young people from Rustavi and offers comfortable and reasonably priced accommodation, seminar, and conference facilities for regional and international youth groups, schools, universities, and non-governmental organizations, as well as tourists and individual travelers.

I first visited this place at the end of May 2022, during an event organized by Latvian Sunday School in Tbilisi.

Should I say I was really impressed after seeing it? Now, I have seen such places all over the world, but was really surprised seeing such high level center in Georgia. Really cool!

Since its opening in 2013 the centre has hosted special events such as training courses, seminars, planning weekends, etc.; annually the centre is used by around 1200 people, with approximately 6500 overnight occupancies.

The International Scout Centre Rustavi (ISCR) is a project of the The Caucasus Cooperation Foundation…

How to Fix "Unable to install bootstrap, bootstrap.settings already exists in active configuration"

26 May, 2022 | Drupal Development | 110 seen

As this was already the second time i faced the "Unable to install bootstrap, bootstrap.settings already exists in active configuration." problem i decided to share a quick and simple solution.

Background: I have faced this error when performing the Drupal 7 upgrade to the Drupal 9 version and trying to enable the bootstrap theme. 

solution: in PHPMyAdmin open the database your Drupal site is running, in the Search tab enter "bootstrap"

Make sure you select all under tables and click the go button

You will get a result with rows showwin where bootstrap setting might belocated, in our case, table config

Simply click the delete on config.

that's it - now you should be able to install and activate the bootstrap theme for Drupal

Notes from Tbilisi: Caru.ge services our Car, new expats join language courses, PCR test

25 May, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 14 seen

The morning started with the kiddo having a little fever (temperature 37 C). Decided to leave her at home and observe, as this Friday we have our first school concert. It would be very sad to miss. Sent a message to Ms. Nino.

Yesterday - the car just stopped working, or won't crank. Already for the third time, this year ordered caru.ge to service the car. As the car was parked in Vake I went to the office in the morning to meet the service guy in the afternoon. Traded a bit of bitcoin futures. Packed out robot cleaner for cleaning our apt.

Met with the caru.ge guy, he said, the problem is with the starter, had to order evacuator. I left the spot and come home. 

We received a letter from the school that there have been positive covid cases among teachers and pupils, we ordered PCR test to see, does the kiddo has got Covid or not. We already had at the start of February after returning from Bakuriani.

Caru. ge informed that the problem is with fuel pumps (VW Touareg has 2 of them) the total cost for replacement and work GEL 1,400. Sh*t 

Our language courses for ex-pats in Georgia are gaining momentum, got another applicant.…

Top 8 Best Selling Intel Core i7 12th generation laptops

23 May, 2022 | Laptop Reviews | 191 seen

Laptops with the latest 12th generation Intel core i7 processor will be popular among gamers and graphic editors.

In this article, I've listed the top 8 best-selling laptops with Intel Core i7 12th generation processors. 

See: Top 9 Best Selling Intel Core i9 12th generation laptops

A quick note: This article contains affiliate links to Amazon.com, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on the Amazon site, I will earn an affiliate income at no cost to you. Prices for laptops listed on this page are retrieved using Amazon Product Advertising API and are updated daily. For actual prices please refer to the product page on Amazon.

• POWERFUL, FAST, AMAZING: Our new laptop is packed with the premium performance you’ve come to expect from Samsung — plus some; It’s powered by the latest 12th Gen Evo-certified Intel processor, our most powerful available CPU yet
• THIN, LIGHT, POWERFUL: With a PC this powerful,…

How To Upgrade Drupal 7 to 9 (With Multilingual Support)

19 May, 2022 | Drupal Development | 26 seen

In this article, I will keep notes on how I upgraded the multilingual Drupal 7 site to a multilingual Drupal 9 site.

Turns out I had originally built this website on Drupal 7 more than 10 years ago and it already felt that the exciting website's look and feel is a bit outdated and we wanted to get a fresh look.

I thought it wouldn't do any harm upgrading the database too. As I have already done a few successful upgrades in the past and as the website was not very complicated I didn't spend a lot of time on this.

As I'm using Linode VPS I decide to go the migrate path, and started with creating a new subdomain on the webserver giving it a prefix d9

As I already had configured the server I will walk through the most essential parts only in this article, for configuring a server from scratch, see this article: How to Install Drupal with Nginx, PHP-FPM 7.4, MySQL, phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04 - Linode Guide

We will install Drupal 9 in the directory "/srv/www/d9.caucasustranslations.com". Please replace my domain name in your installation with the domain name of the website that you want…

Dashbashi Canyon & Waterfall with 240 meter long Glass Bridge

17 May, 2022 | Tourism objects | 99 seen

If there is a reason to visit Dashbasi canyons near the Tsalka in Georgia - the canyons themselves, cascading waterfall and the glass bridge hanging over the gorge should raise some interest.

Dashbashi Canyon Natural Monument is part of Khrami (known as Ktsia at it source) gorge near Dashbashi village, 3 km from the town of Tsalka

I first heard about this place a couple of years ago from an ex-pat friend, back then the place was pretty much not developed and unknown to the broader masses.

We first visited Dashabshi Canyon in 2020, back then it was still a pretty much-underdeveloped area, but some touristic routes were built. Back then we didn't climb down to the cascading waterfalls, but instead, I made some nice drone videography from the nearby restaurant (Restaurant Pepo near Dashbashi Canyon).

See: My First Drone Video / DJI MAVIC MINI

Now, we returned here again at the end of April 2022 and huge improvements are made. There is a good asphalt road, a visitor center, and plenty of tourists. Entrance fee (Gel 19, as of 2021)

I didn't try to cross the glass bridge over the canyon, instead, I got my adrenaline rush from…

Top 9 Best Selling Intel Core i9 12th generation laptops

16 May, 2022 | Laptop Reviews | 106 seen

The 12th Gen Intel® Core™ HX processors utilize desktop-caliber silicon in a mobile package – to deliver high levels of performance for professional workflows like CAD, animation, and visual effects.

The HX processors are unlocked out of the box and available in Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 models.

In this article, I've listed the top 9 best-selling laptops with Intel Core i9 12th generation processors. 

A quick note: This article contains affiliate links to Amazon.com, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on the Amazon site, I will earn an affiliate income at no cost to you. Prices for laptops listed on this page are retrieved using Amazon Product Advertising API and are updated daily. For actual prices please refer to the product page on Amazon.

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU: Bringing the flagship 80 Ti class of GPUs to laptops for the first time, the RTX 3080 Ti features 16GB of the fastest GDDR6 memory ever shipped in a laptop and delivers higher performance than the desktop TITAN RTX
• 12th…