12 Oct,2025 By Fake Travel News
Look, I know what you’re thinking. Another twenty-something American writes a self-indulgent travel blog about “finding herself” abroad. But here’s the thing: I got rear-ended at a Trader Joe’s in San Diego, went into a coma for a month, and woke up speaking fluent Georgian. Not the peach state. Georgia, the country wedged between Turkey and Russia that most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
So yeah, this is that kind of blog post. Except weirder.
Fair warning: I’m writing this in Georgian because trying to write it in English would take six months and sound like a malfunctioning GPS. My friend Sophie translated it from Georgian, then Tom—who’s British and pedantic about grammar—cleaned it up and made me sound more coherent than I actually am in English. Between them, they’ve spared you the reality.
It was a Tuesday. I’d just graduated from San Diego State with a marketing degree and landed my first real job at a tech startup. I was living my best basic life in an overpriced North Park studio. Then some guy in a BMW forgot what stop signs were for.
Thirty-two days later, I woke up with my parents crying at my bedside and zero ability to communicate in a language they understood. The neurologist had to Google what I was speaking.
Georgian. A language I had no memory of knowing.
Turns out my babushka—my grandmother from Georgia who died when I was twelve—raised me until I was four, speaking only Georgian. My parents figured I’d forgotten it all once I started preschool. And I did. Or so everyone thought.
Brain injuries don’t follow rules. Mine dug up a language buried so deep I had no conscious memories of it, made it my primary language, and turned English into this foggy, frustrating thing just out of reach. I could understand maybe sixty percent. Speaking it? I sounded like a drunk tourist.
The technical term is bilingual aphasia with language regression. The practical term: my life was completely fucked.
They tell you that you can be anything in America. Turns out that’s only true if you can communicate in English.
I tried going back to work. Have you ever tried to explain marketing strategies in a language you barely speak? I got laid off three months later. “Budget cuts,” they said.
My social life evaporated faster. Friends from college didn’t know what to do with someone who couldn’t participate in conversations or respond to memes. I went from packed weekends to Friday nights watching Georgia TV with subtitles, trying to understand a culture I apparently belonged to but knew nothing about.
Dating was its own nightmare. “Sorry, I can speak English but not good after brain accident” kills a conversation fast. One guy thought I was catfishing. Another wanted me to be his “exotic” fantasy. I deleted all the apps.
Six months in, my speech therapist suggested immersion. But English immersion wasn’t working—I was drowning in it daily and only getting worse.
That’s when I thought: what if I went the other way?
I knew nothing about Georgia. Couldn’t tell you the president, the currency, where it was beyond “somewhere near Russia.” My knowledge came from vague memories of my babushka’s cooking and whatever I recently picked up from Georgia reality shows.
But I could speak the language. Fluently. Perfectly.
So I bought a one-way ticket to Tbilisi, sublet my studio, and informed my parents I was moving to the Caucasus. My mother cried. My father asked if I was joining a cult.
I landed on a Tuesday. (Tuesdays, man.)
Here’s the thing about reverse culture shock: it’s worse than regular culture shock.
I could speak to everyone—full sentences, idioms, jokes. My mouth knew exactly what to do. But I had no idea what I was actually saying culturally.
First day in Georgia, I insulted my Airbnb host by not removing my shoes. She gave me a look that could curdle milk: “Were you raised by wolves?”
“No, Americans,” I said, which made it worse.
I didn’t know about bringing gifts to homes. About the elaborate toasting order at meals. That refusing food twice before accepting was mandatory. That showing up exactly on time was rude, but so was being more than an hour late—there was this magical 20-40 minute window.
I was fluent in words but illiterate in everything that mattered.
I’d stand at viewpoints around the city—the Mother of Georgia, Sameba—looking out at Tbilisi, able to name everything in Georgian but understanding nothing about how it actually worked.
The dating scene was brutal. Georgian men expected me to be traditional because I spoke the language, then got confused when I tried to split bills. One guy told me: “You speak like a Georgian but think like an American.”
“Yeah, well, you’re wearing a knockoff Gucci belt,” I replied. No second date.
I need to be honest about something. My babushka died when I was twelve, and I barely thought about her after.
When you’re a kid with immigrant grandparents, you get embarrassed. Your friends’ grandmas bake cookies and wear Costco fleece. Mine showed up wearing all black, smelling like unfamiliar spices, trying to feed me food I couldn’t pronounce without getting bullied.
I remember being seven and telling her to speak English. The look on her face—sad and resigned, like she’d expected it. I was a little asshole who corrected her grammar.
After she died, I moved on. Didn’t think about her language, her stories, anything she’d tried to give me. I threw away a whole part of myself without realizing it was valuable.
It hit me three months into Tbilisi. An old woman on the street was humming something, and suddenly my mouth formed words before my brain caught up. A lullaby. My grandmother’s lullaby.
I sat on the curb and cried because this woman I’d barely thought about in a decade had given me something so profound it literally rewired my brain, and I’d been too stupid to appreciate it. She’d taught me a language—the music of speech itself—then watched me reject it, reject Georgia, and reject her.
And now it was the only thing keeping me functional. She’d saved me twice. Once raising me, once after she was gone.
I met the expat crowd at a pub quiz at Fabrika—this converted Soviet sewing factory turned hipster complex that’s basically where every expat in Tbilisi ends up eventually. Exposed brick, street art murals, cafés with names like “Stamba” and “Rooms Hotel,” the kind of place that looks the same in Berlin or Brooklyn or Bangkok.
Sophie from France spoke Georgian, so we could communicate. She was sitting outside at one of those tiny tables, smoking and working on her laptop, and I must have looked lost enough that she waved me over.
“You look like you need coffee and directions,” she said in Georgian. “Possibly also friends.”
“Yes to all,” I managed.
She introduced me to Tom from London (teaching English, clearly running from something), Maria from Spain (vague NGO work), and Luka—from Georgia but raised in Germany, back for “the culture.”
“You’re American but only speak Georgian?” Tom asked. “That’s properly mental.”
“Brain injury,” I explained.
“Fucking hell.”
They adopted me immediately. Sophie explained cultural things and translated my Georgian writing into rough English. Maria taught me which marshrutkas actually went where they claimed. Tom helped me find freelance social media work for Georgian businesses targeting American markets—and appointed himself my English editor, red-penning everything I wrote like a disappointed teacher. “You’re murdering English,” he’d say. “I’m trying to save it.”
But Luka got it. He was too German for Georgia, too Georgian for Germany. We were inverses—I had the language without the culture; he had the culture but felt displaced.
My first month in Georgia, I got lost at least three times a week. Tbilisi’s streets don’t follow logic—they curve and climb, change names halfway through, dead-end into staircases.
But I started to learn the rhythm. Morning coffee at the corner place where the owner—Nino—started saving me a seat by the window.
The vegetable market on Aghmashenebeli where I still pointed at things like a toddler but the vendors were patient. The little Armenian bakery that made bread my babushka used to buy in Glendale, and I never knew it was Armenian, never knew she was maintaining connection to a whole network of Caucasus memory.
I’d walk from Vera down toward Rustaveli, watching the city wake up. Soviet modernist blocks next to Art Nouveau mansions next to something that looked medieval. Nothing matched, everything worked.
Sophie told me: “Tbilisi is beautiful because it never had money to replace things. It just kept adding.”
Sundays, I’d sometimes wander through the Dry Bridge flea market. Vendors selling Soviet medals, old cameras, someone’s grandmother’s jewelry, vinyl records in languages I couldn’t identify. All of Georgia, spread out on tables and blankets.
One Sunday, I found a photo—black and white, 1970s maybe. A young woman in front of a building that looked like Vera district. Something about her face, the way she stood…
“How much?” I asked in Georgian.
The old man looked at the photo, then at me. “You look like her.”
I bought it for five lari. I never figured out who she was, but I kept it on my desk—this anonymous Georgian woman who might have been my grandmother’s neighbor, my great-aunt, no one. A stranger who looked like family.
One Saturday, Luka took me to Old Town. Yeah, the tourist circuit. But when your guide actually lived it, the clichés turn real.
We climbed up from the sulfur baths to Narikala Fortress. The city spread below—old houses with wooden balconies barely holding on, the Mtkvari River cutting through, church domes and Soviet blocks crammed together in beautiful chaos.
“My bebia—my grandmother—grew up here,” Luka said, pointing to narrow streets. “One room for her whole family.”
Walking down into the maze, I felt something in my bones. Every turn felt familiar in a way I couldn’t explain. The cobblestones, the light on old brick, even the smell—like remembering a dream.
“She brought me here,” I said suddenly. “My babushka. I don’t remember, but she did. Before we moved to California.”
Luka waited.
“I forgot everything,” I said, voice cracking. “Not just the language. This place, her, where I came from. I was so busy being American that I erased something important.”
We stopped at a tiny church between two buildings. Georgia became Christian in the fourth century—older than most of Europe’s cathedrals. Inside: incense, candle wax, an old woman lighting candles in silent prayer.
“My babushka did that,” I said quietly. “Every Sunday. I thought it was weird. Now I think she was trying to hold on to something, and I didn’t care enough to ask what.”
Later, we ended up at a wine bar Luka knew—literally a cellar with clay pots buried in the ground and an old guy who looked ancient. Dusty bottles of wine lined the walls.
Guram, the owner, poured us amber-colored wine from a qvevri pot. “Traditional method,” Luka explained. “Buried underground, fermented with skins and stems. From his grandfather’s vineyard.”
I sipped. Nothing like wine I’d had before—earthy, tannic, wild. It tasted old, like something that predated borders and empires.
“Georgians have been making wine for eight thousand years,” Guram said in Georgian. “Wine is in our blood. It’s who we are.”
“My grandmother made wine,” I said, the memory appearing from nowhere. “In California. In the garage. My dad made her stop because he was embarrassed.”
“That’s a crime,” Guram said seriously. “Wine should never be hidden.”
Guram opened a new bottle and we drank more.
He told stories about his grandfather, about making wine secretly during Soviet times. I understood—not just the words, but something deeper.
“To your grandmother,” Guram raised his bowl. “Who gave you more than you knew.”
Walking back through old streets, wine-drunk and stumbling on cobblestones, I told Luka: “I wish I could tell her I’m sorry. For rejecting everything she tried to give me.”
“Maybe you’re telling her now,” he said. “By being here.”
“You think she’d be happy?”
“I think she’d be proud. You came home. Took a weird route, but you got here.”
Home. The word settled in my chest.
Seven months in, Luka asked: “Are you going to go back?”
Going back to America made sense. My visa situation was complicated, my parents worried, my bank account was concerning. I could keep working with therapists, rebuild English, restart my derailed life.
But I thought about my grandmother leaving this place for America and never making it back. Spending her whole life in California missing khachapuri, never hearing Georgian spoken on street corners, giving up real qvevri wine. Dying in a country that wasn’t really hers, surrounded by people who couldn’t understand her.
She gave up Georgia so her family could have better opportunities. And here I was, going in reverse—giving up America to reclaim Georgia.
“I think she left so I could come back,” I said slowly. “Does that make sense?”
Luka nodded. “Yeah. It does.”
We were at his bebia’s apartment when he kissed me. It’s complicated in that millennial way where we’re clearly more than friends but haven’t defined it because we’re both damaged and scared of ruining what we have. But it’s the good kind of complicated.
I’ve been in Tbilisi almost a year now. My English has improved slightly—basic conversations, reading comprehension, only occasional embarrassing word mix-ups. But Georgian is still what I think in, what feels natural.
I’m not going to tell you Georgia is magical or that I’ve “found myself.” Tbilisi is chaotic and frustrating. The bureaucracy is nightmare fuel, the air pollution terrible, the traffic don’t-even-get-me-started.
But it’s also beautiful. How the old city comes alive at night. The food, the wine culture, strangers inviting you home and feeding you until you can’t move. Mountains visible from the city on clear days. Post-Soviet architecture mixed with ancient churches mixed with glass buildings that shouldn’t work together but do.
And the people. My weird expat family. Luka’s bebia who still tries to make me a proper Georgian girl. The corner store woman who saves good bread for me. The bartender who knows my drink order and always has a joke ready.
I’ve found clients who value that I bridge Georgian and American marketing. My brain injury became an asset instead of a disability. I’m thinking about starting a consultancy.
My parents visited last month. My mom cried seeing me speaking Georgian fluently, living a real life, seeming happy. Dad tried khachapuri and admitted maybe I’d made the right choice, even if the path was weird as hell.
“Are you going to stay?” my mom asked in English.
I answered in Georgian—fluently, easily, the words exactly right. My mom waited, patient, for the translation. Then I gave her the English version: “I am… already home. My brain just don’t know yet.”
She understood. She hugged me.
Sometimes life breaks you in weird ways. Sometimes a Trader Joe’s parking lot accident leads to a coma leads to speaking a forgotten language leads to moving somewhere you knew nothing about leads to finding a home you didn’t know you were looking for.
Would I recommend brain damage as self-discovery? Absolutely not. Zero stars.
But would I trade this weird, complicated, beautiful life? Not for anything.
I came to Georgia because I had to. I’m staying because I want to.
I still mess up cultural stuff regularly. I’m still explaining my origin story to confused Georgians. But I can speak, work, live, love. Turns out, that’s enough.
My grandmother gave up this place so I could have opportunities. I’m taking those opportunities and bringing them back here, to the home she never got to return to.
Maybe that’s what she wanted all along.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Tbilisi, Georgia, you can visit the following link: Finding Love and Home in Tbilisi, Georgia
