Vake is an interesting part of Tbilisi, I can’t quite figure out when it was developed. Everything there seems like a mixture of European, Soviet, and modern. A highly developed area with a lot of changes taking place, and it’s an area I think I could really appreciate and live in sometime. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time there so far, but from what I’ve seen, it’s genuinely beautiful for its diverse offerings. New parks, lots of trees, very wide pathways and roads with plenty of public transport. It almost feels completely different to the rest of the city, even down to having old cobblestone roads that bump you around like crazy when you’re on the bus. To walk through the area takes a lot of time, especially with the intensity of the sun at the moment. But the brief walks I’ve had through had led to a lot of discoveries. One of which is an incredibly old building that looks utterly beautiful, though I couldn’t figure out what its purpose was. There were no signs, and the area looked as if it had been ignored despite walled-off. I assume at some point there is intent to fix it up and preserve the beautiful history of the building. I wanted to revisit and explore the interior a bit, but it seems there is a police station next to it and it isn’t really worth the risk of potentially being considered as a tresspasser.
In some areas there are walls of Soviet era apartment buildings. These massive buildings just block out the surroundings and seemingly go on forever. It’s such an odd thing to see in an area that has so much new devlopment. I had seen something similar previously in Armenia near the old theatre which is now turned into a soulless cheap shoe mall. But that wall of apartments was something that really hits. It really gives you this strange feeling of something massive, towering above and beyond the horizon. Such scale for something as simple as housing is something I had never seen before, and I think in this instance it’s actually bigger than the one in Armenia I saw. I quite enjoy this though. The emotions given by finding and looking at something like this is so different to the ones you get from looking at a high rise or something more new. It is like stumbling across another world, especiall when from certain perspectives it just pops out of nowhere within the trees. I took the first image in the park of vake, which is a bit more new, still yet to be finished; my first visit to that park led to the viewing of a rat running through by the side of the pond, as well as mounds of mud. Odd cafes, and some seating areas for outdoor events and music performances. Definitely something more new.
I took these shots with my phone on just regular walks, not really intending to stumble across anything in particular. Sometimes the ways in which the light interacts with Vake seems different than other areas, almost a bit more of a magical appearance. I guess it’s to do with the trees and the angle it has with the sun’s movements across the sky. The light interacts with this space in such a unique manner, to look through the streets and witness that; I can see why so many live in this area of all. Despite how rustic and old it can look sometimes. But that’s the fun of it, the varying signs of the ages.