Another Wonderful Gift of Music, This Time in Tbilisi!

tbilisi symphony orcehstra
Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra conductor David Mukeria takes the stage for Friday’s performance.

“Without music, life would be a mistake,” said German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

I surely agree. A life-long love of music has played an important part in my post-retirement travel life, providing many new, wonderful opportunities to hear and see live musical performances throughout the world that I would never have had without it.

Many of my most memorable travel experiences have involved music.

From the mad rock sounds of the French band The Inspector Cluzo in Peru; Gregorian chant in an 11th century cathedral in Berlin; impromptu jams by indigenous musicians in Iquitos on the Amazon River; the Amazon Symphony Orchestra itself playing Hayden and Strauss in Manaus, Brazil; to most recently discovering the incredible polyphonic voices at Tbilisi, Georgia’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, and many more, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a grand variety of world music along my journey.

This week I was looking online for more live music in Tbilisi and discovered to my delight that the internationally renowned Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra was performing this week at the Kakhidze theater, just a six-minute walk from where I live!

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Gone From Istanbul, Been to Barcelona, Now I’m in Georgia

One of my favorite activities in Istanbul, Turkey, was riding the ferries across the Bosphorus and Golden Horn to visit the many different parts of this large and captivating city.

It’s been too long since I last posted. I was in Turkey at the time, which was two countries ago on my continuing journey.

For the past 11 days I’ve been in Georgia — the country, not the state — and before that I spent a week in Barcelona, Spain, where I visited a friend who I first met in 2017 in Medellin, Colombia.

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