Sorry about the slowdown in posting. In England I suffered from the weather (raining, thundering and hailstoning all the time) and dentistry (one extraction and one filling with another booked). As a result I spent quite a bit of time hibernating and reading novels, which makes a change.
Although previously I was not too impressed with Georgian dentistry (the one filling I had left me with a swollen jaw for a week, from the anaesthetic) after British dentistry I had the same swelling and pain not to mention the pain of a bill 4 times as big. No wonder I put off going to the dentist for 4 years in England.
Otherwise I can report on new restaurants in Cowley Road. The Santorini, a Greek restaurant recycled from a previously "lebanese-turkish" restaurant, where we had reasonable Greek food at 5pm (when most restaurants aren't usually open in Britain) and sat for a long and comfortable time as if we were in a Greek cafe, instead of being hassled out into the rain.
Bee and I decided to have a girlie cocktail on Saturday night as she was bored doing revision for A levels and I was bored with work. So we went to the recycled Cafe Tarifa which used to be the rather expensive and pointless Organic Burger Cafe. Cafe Tarifa doesn't really know what sort of a place it is, but it has sort of Moroccan decor. No cafe is allowed to have seating on the pavement (which is a bit narrow anyway), so we sat in the window, as the next best thing, as the it was one of those sliding folding jobs. This was one of the few dry days, but even that was spoilt when at 10pm or some really early hour, the cafe management were forced to close the windows to prevent noise escaping onto the pavement. Hello, this is the Cowley Road, people make noise on the pavement all the time.
So we retired to the garden which was tiny, completely full and making just as much noise for the people living in houses overlooking the garden. Still it was warm and outdoors, we could just about pretend we were still in Morocco. Some more cocktails later, we ended up in fits of giggles as she told me about her current boyfriend (a new topic of conversation for us). This discussion caused much hilarity as he was revealed as having the opposite politics, ambitions and values from us, though he apparently had a single mum slogging away in the city, so we decided he might be OK.
As we staggered back along the Cowley Road, a voice called hello, as he rushed past. Though I missed the sight of "the boyfriend", it was enough to send us into another fit of giggles at the thought of the introduction that might have been.
While rushing round doing last minute shopping I spotted the distinctive Oxford pubstops map done in the style of the London underground. So I brought that back to Tbilisi to add a bit of culture to our office.
You can see the map here.
No prizes for guessing the "line" with the most pubs.
