When one is in the know...

...in Georgia one no longer buys the wine in a boring glass bottle, corked and sealed....One goes to the little wine shop up a back alley, or sometimes even in a main street, and buys the wine loose. As you can see it comes in all sorts of bottles - you just ask for the number of litres you need. Here we have an unknown bottle with a Coke top, a 7-up bottle with a Borjomi top, and a Nabaghlevi bottle with a Sprite top. If you are fastidious, I suppose you could bring your own bottles .... So now we know what happens to all those bottles that the poor people collect out of everywhere. And no, so far I have not got sick from the wine. It costs about 2.40 Euros for a litre of red, and less than a Euro for a litre of white wine.

Bizarre moment No 57 in the wine shop; it's a very small shop and there are always some people sitting on chairs, looking vacantly at the door - not convinced whether they are employees. One of these asked me in German if I spoke German, and I confirmed this. When he asked where from, I said 'Vilnius', as is my wont. Whereupon he launched into Lithuanian! Geez. His parents were of two different European countries and he had spent some time in Chicago where it seems he learned Lithuanian. As one does, in Chicago - my Chicago readers might confirm? He also speaks English, I think, and Georgian. When I asked why he was here, he said because he is an orthodox ('ortodoksas' in Lithuanian, it seems). I wonder when he had last spoken Lithuanian - it was halting, but it was good!