Oh Georgia!

Back in Tbilisi for three days now and still no food in the fridge! No time to go shopping!

Day 1 was spent catching up on email, internet and sleep - went for a meal to In Vino Veritas which is supposed to have a beautiful outdoor eating place. It probably does, but it was prepared for a banquet - and the only free table was in a dark, murky corner. I think they must only ever do mass catering; last time I was there, and ate, I was also stuck in a dark, murky corner.

So landed in King Erekle street where I bumped into my friend Kendra. Had always thought that you would only get fancy foreign food there, but the busiest restaurant, with reasonable prices and good food, was a Georgian one at the beginning of the street (close to Leselidze).

Monday rushed straight off into a workshop on budgeting (on the delivering side) at the Shindisi Hotel, which is on the Kojori road out of Tblisi. It was a residential workshop, to last for two days. The Shindisi is quite nice; quite a big complex, with en suite bedrooms and very large helpings of quite good food (much the same food, it should be said, for dinner and lunch). It helps that there is a baker straight across the road, providing gorgeous bread. While the hotel is nice, and it's a good idea to have the restaurant with the live band at some distance to the bedrooms, it can still improve a little - like having lights on in the corridors at night, or providing coffee, rather than nescafe granules and hot water. It was a nice place to go for a run from - I'd been in the area some time ago with the hash, and so knew where to run. The landscape around the hotel is beautiful! Looking out of the window you get a feeling of Switzerland, though perhaps there houses don't have heart-shaped roofs...

However, much road building seems to be going on in the area; at 20 minutes to Tbilisi it's only a question of time before the place is covered in new houses, I suppose. I hope the farmers make some decent money out of the sales of their land!