The Charm of the Unpredictable

Instead of being attentive to the list of ‘top things to do in location X’, I often make a conscious effort to observe how that place makes me feel. In that regard, Tbilisi surprisingly has not ranked high on my list. Given that it is my 3rd visit to this capital city, I am well aware of the impressive conditions that make the city easily a top destination for tourism: a historic old town, rich gastronomy, stunning viewpoints, modern digital infrastructure, and general affordability, to name a few. I haven’t given it serious thought yet, but I suspect that my unimpressive subjective experience has something to do with the nature of my interactions with the locals, and I do not rule out the possibility of a cultural incompatibility with my own background.

Despite that, I could not help but notice the ‘romance’ of the city during the past two weeks there, especially while walking the streets. Being a hilly city with many narrow streets means that your views change constantly with every step you take. The untrimmed and old trees constantly hide your views with their dense green leaves, making you wonder what will appear next after you pass that forested section or turn the corner. The plant-decorated balconies and the drying clothes outside remind you that there are people living there with their unique stories and tastes. Even finding a path beside tightly parked cars makes it feel like a game while making snap negotiations with oncoming walkers.

I think a lot of this romantic vibe stems from its unpredictability – just as unpredictability is often regarded as an enabler for human romance, at least in the initial stage. From the perspective of urban planners, this unpredictability would come from a lack of standardized infrastructure, whether it was a product of their planning or not. I briefly thought about my own country, South Korea — one of my gripes there is that the city landscapes are becoming more and more standardized. Walking or driving there is a highly predictable and repetitive action. I acknowledge that standardization is crucial to run a complex system, e.g., a populous modern city, especially to keep accidents to a minimum. In that regard, I certainly do not mean to romanticize this blindly — for example, the fact that parking rules seem too flexible, and the damaged roads or streets are left unfixed in multiple parts of this city.

I am just intrigued to look further into what we have lost or compromised during the process of standardizing our surroundings. A well-working digital platform guarantees that I can hail an Uber-like taxi anywhere at a competitive rate, but it makes us treat each other as ‘just another’, so we have become invisible to each other’s context. I feel that there is something fundamentally unhuman about standardization, and the streets in Tbilisi were a refreshing reminder of the charm of the lack of it.

May 18, 2026, Tbilisi, Georgia