This study focuses on the spa town of Tsqaltubo in western Georgia. Since 2010, Tsqaltubo has been seeing a gradual rise in tourism. The town's history as a spa resort in the Soviet period has given it a repository of tourist experience to fall back on. An ongoing complication in this development arises from the occupation of the now-decaying Soviet-era former sanatoria by internally displaced Georgians. From its past as a site of state-driven collective educational practices aiming at the production of the 'new Soviet man', Tsqaltubo has evolved into the present-day location of conflict around the interpretation of that past between IDPs, tourists and tourism industry stakeholders. This article's principal focus in exploring these instances of conflict is educational processes in the context of life experience, within which subjects engage and interact with Tsqaltubo's materiality.