On 11 October, at the restaurant “Gujari” located in Mtskheta, the ancient capital of Georgia, the reception was held to host the Kazakh bloggers, who decided to meet their Georgian counterparts and learn more about Georgia. There are some other countries on their list too, but as the luck has it, our homeland topped the list. Mr. Adil Tursunov, Vice Ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan to Georgia commented: “This is the meeting for bloggers and we decided to organize a big reception and lay the table at this wonderful place, ancient capital city of Georgia Mtskheta, at this wonderful restaurant. Kazakh bloggers had a lot of online contact with their Georgian counterparts, as well as with others. But it seems that relations with representatives of these two countries were especially close because for them the first foreign country to visit is Georgia.”
The bloggers were in abundance. “The aim of our visit is not very specific. We just want to be closer on state-to-state, people-to-people and business-to-business levels. The initiator of the event is a group of people who organizes tours in Kazakhstan – journalists, bloggers, etc., who organize events attended by over thousand people. We are going to visit Ukraine, Russia and China as well,” Roman Shovkoplias told us. “The idea is to tell the people more about Kazakhstan and learn more about your country and culture. We are going to meet people, talk to them; we will be seeing Tbilisi, Mtskheta, Kakheti region. And, no politics. We just want to write about why Kazakh people should visit Georgia,” a blogger from Kazakhstan aged 29-32 told us.
Kazakh bloggers met with the Georgian ones. “I hope one day I will also visit Kazakhstan and write about it,” one of the Georgian bloggers commented. The reader of Georgian Journal has an idea about Kazakhstan, the 9th largest country of the world, as we offered them “Kazakh Diaries” during our three-day-trip to Astana and Almaty, organized by the Kazakh Embassy in Georgia.
The evening turned into a real celebration. We, two nations, discovered that we do have a lot of things in common. It was discovered by the anchors of the evening that a Georgian female name “Tinatin” that translates into “ray of light”, has a synonymous male name in Kazakhstan that means the same. Then a lot of Georgian songs were performed by ordinary Kazakh ladies and gentlemen from the public. There were also a lot of games, staged dances and entertainment to the very end of the event. Kazakh people are rich and generous at heart. They did not let us go without nice gifts and sweets.