Cheese Grater Bottle Openers

Georgia is just the funkiest country. The cheese-grater bottle opener is one of its more interesting homegrown inventions and perfectly captures the mood of the place - good food and lots of alcohol are the twin heartbeats of the Georgian people, and the hospitality is legendary. Of course, everybody is shaped liked a barrel after the age of 30, unless they're very poor, and there is a lot of poverty to be seen here amongst all the abundance it must be said.

The country seems much more European than I had envisaged in terms of its look and feel, and it is markedly devout. Everywhere there are simple and very ancient churches which seem akin to romanesque in style. When you visit a church it is always a hive of activity, with little crowds largely made up of women gathered around bearded priests, and everywhere votive candles flickering. I lied about the medieval frescoes in my previous post by the way, they have them in spades here and I've checked out a fair few. The whole country is an early medieval architectural historian's wet dream.

After Batumi we travelled to a mountainous area in the south to stay in Bojomi, a fading spa town that is the source of the former Soviet Union's most famous mineral water. It's a touch salty but quite enjoyable. The homestay was a bit of a reality check in terms of facilities, but the cuisine was out of this world. I'm curently addicted to aubergines served in a walnut sauce, and I'm still just about managing to stay enthusiastic about the ubiquitous khachaeuri, a sort of cheesebread a bit like a pizza which turns up everywhere. They're pretty keen on cherries here too, and in fact the trips to the markets to buy fruit and veg are a whole lot of fun. Bojomi also witnessed my first major run-in with the local Georgian wine. The tradition is to drink it out of a ram's horn and to make a toast. Needless to say the wine must be downed in one and there is no set number of toasts. Our convivial host, egged on by us, soon had us introduced to the second local drinking tradition which involves downing horns while in a locked arm position with a fellow drinker, who you're supposed to kiss on either cheek afterwards (assuming you internal navigation system is still up to finding their cheek).

This message finds me in Tbilisi, which is a bit of a big grimy city, though with some hidden delights. En route we visited Stalin's birthplace museum at Gori. It was a bit unsettling to be honest, not least because they seemed to have left out all the bits about the gulags and mass purges. I had a sneaky lie down on his bed in his railway carriage and took some small satisfaction from that.

The nightclubbing tour of the Silk Route also continues apace. Tbilisi's offering was the Beatles Bar, a cheesy cellar place mocked up to be the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It had a particularly amusing food menu where you could order anything from a 'firm sandwich' though to 'frizzled chicken cooked in a clay pen'. We watched a blues band who's singer appeared to be wearing pyjamas, and who ended their set by playing the opening riff of 'Smoke on the Water' and then walking off without bothering to finish the song. It was priceless.