The coat check near the front desk had been a gun check not so long ago, where businessmen deposited their machine guns and pistols before heading back to their rooms. The metal detector nearby had been disabled, but still stood upright and ready for duty. The hotel, newish but built in the Soviet style, was - simply by default - a little office centre of sorts for foreigners, since there were scant resources available in the city, including working fax machines.
The world outside had not yet filtered into Georgia, and there was little way to access it once inside the country. But in a small room down the corridor from the hotel reception, international newspapers could be printed out off the Communist-era teletext machines. And that's why I was there - for those precious newspapers.
It was still dark outside when I arrived breathless at the Sheraton, having left my apartment at 4.30 in the morning to flag down a tumbledown taxi with a broken windscreen, a partially broken steering column and questionable brakes.
I had flown into Tbilisi two days earlier for a two-month stay, and my luggage was somewhere else, as were all the materials for the journalism workshop I was set to run, come daylight. The Sheraton and its teletext newspapers were my only shot - there were no international papers sold anywhere in the city, and I was about to face a room full of journalists who wanted to see them.
This was six years ago and the Republic of Georgia was a derelict affair. No running water in the evenings, sporadic electricity, and no gas to provide heat in winter for sometimes weeks at a time. No public services, such as mail delivery, telephone directories, or emergency call centres. No traffic lights, no road repairs. Crumbling facades and decrepit infrastructures. No cops except for the corrupt ones, no jobs except for the connected ones, no medical care except for the elite ones, no end in sight for the two embittered conflict zones, Abkhazia and Ossetia, and no hope for change.
One afternoon I joined my Georgian journalism students to listen to a guest lecturer from the United States. He had been a civil servant, now retired, and stood before them to speak of the great changes he saw in store for their country - proof being the new Marriott under construction downtown.
Nino shot up out of her chair to defy him. Nino was shy, but inestimably strong-minded, and she demanded to know from him just what, exactly, was going so well in her country. She spewed a laundry list of ills, including a 40% unemployment rate, rampant corruption, poverty, and unresolved warring factions in the breakaway republics, of which she was a victim.
Nino, a refugee from Abkhazia, had lived for years with her family in one room of a condemned high-rise tenement. She was furious. His lecture was patronising in its optimism. Her outrage was echoed by her classmates.
But a leg up from the west finally did offer a chance for Georgia to become a junior member of the team. The US government started the ball rolling by sending 150 military experts to whip Georgia's ragtag squad of would-be soldiers - none of whom had uniforms or were paid - into an army. And western investment, in the form of a pipeline pumping oil from Azerbaijan, started to flow into the country. But corruption kept most investors at bay. Everything stagnated.
The Orange revolution in Ukraine taught the people of Georgia that change was possible in the former Soviet republics. ‘Enough is enough,’ cried Georgians in 2002, who took to the streets 100,000-strong to topple crusty, corrupt Eduard Shevardnadze and his posse of politicians. The Rose revolution was born.
Georgia has a history of larger-than-life leaders - Stalin among them - and it reveres tough guys in the top office. So the election of the
US-educated, Russia-hating former lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili as president appeared to give Georgian voters everything they had ever dreamed of.
"I think traditionally, largely because of our Soviet past. Georgians tend to see a president not like Americans or European nations, do, but as a leader who should be worshipped," says Christy, one of my former students who is now a high-level journalist in Tbilisi.
I was back in Georgia after the Rose Revolution, and clearly progress had been made. Electricity was uninterrupted in Tbilisi, roads were paved, traffic lights installed, newer cars were gradually replacing the aged, ramshackle Ladas, facades were being repaired, and businesses were multiplying. And there seemed to be hope.
I had watched the transformation of eastern Europe during the late 1990s, and was relieved to see it finally take hold in neglected, worn-out Georgia, which had generally fared worse than its western neighbours under Soviet rule and had an even steeper climb out of the rubble.
But just four years after the Rose revolution, Georgia has staged an about-face on Saakashvili. The man they elected as a firebrand has slowly morphed into an autocrat and the people have unexpectedly, noisily, risen up once again to give voice to their anger about shady goings-on in high office.
The list of grievances is long, but at the top is the suspicious exit from the country of the former foreign defence minister, allegations of high-level cronyism and corruption and the absence of news about future elections – a poll is supposed to take place in Autumn 2008 but Saakashvili has refused to name a date
So Georgians have taken to the streets again, with over 50,000 protesting against the government on Nov. 3. On Tuesday, the rallies started to turn ugly, with police firing water cannons and tear gas on overnight protesters – over 500 of who were hospitalised.
Meanwhile, Saakashvili remains resolute. He will not concede on any issue and will not step down. On Wednesday night he issued a 15-day state of emergency that includes a clampdown on the independent media and a ban on rallies.
"It's scary," says Christy. "I really could not have imagined things would turn out like this just a couple of years after the revolution."
The plans, such as they are, for what's next are grandiose, unmapped and impractical. Some opposition leaders are rumoured to be scheming to storm parliament, while others are speculating that an entirely new form of government should be inaugurated, although no one can agree on what kind.
If Saakashvili is ousted - and let's hope whatever happens next is as peaceful as possible - who will replace him is a big unknown. If Georgia sticks to its penchant for larger-than-life leaders, then controversial billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, the country's richest man, is said to be preparing to jump into the hot seat.
Whoever emerges victorious from the power struggle is in for a rough ride. Bullied by a Russia it has spurned but with little chance of joining the EU or NATO, Georgia is set to remain in Europe’s limbo land for the foreseeable future.