A Sunny Day, In Moscow Town

 Happy Birthday Dr. Brent, Miss Emily and belated by a day to Maria.

We didn’t get much sleep last night and we can’t figure out why. Perhaps it was in sympathy with Katy and Craig who had a 4:30 am pick-up for their flights back to Costa Rica, but whatever the reason, we are both very tired today.  At least I don’t have to pretend to be wide eyed and bushy tailed at work.

Dinner last night was fun and it was great to meet Craig. He has had a whirlwind trip with non-stop travel and work, but he seems to like it and it looks like they will be coming to Moscow next year. They will be most welcome additions to the expat community here. The Bavarian Beer joint was in top form with a new fall/winter menu with excellent soups and hearty wurst and meat dishes to go with their spectacular beers.  Cindy had the grilled veggie platter that she declared to be one of the best she has ever had, and she’s had lot of grilled veggies. It is nice that there is consistency in some of the restaurants here.

I woke up thinking about Dr. Brent’s birthday today.  There was a time in the late 80’s and early 90’s when our paths would cross on a regular basis on his birthday, usually somewhere in Asia where we were attending conferences.  We have had many a lovely celebration with great exotic food and drink from Baguio to Bangkok and Tokyo to Taipei.  I remember one memorable meal we had once while we were waiting for a plane in Baguio in the Philippines.  We had a very early flight at 0630 and we were at the airport - well what passed for an airport at the time - at about 0515. Nothing was open at the airport; in fact the airport wasn’t even open, but outside on the sidewalk was a little street vendor heating up his wok and starting to make garlic fried rice with egg.  We wandered over and got two plates of the fragrant, hot and delicious fried rice and washed it down with two almost cold Heinekens. My but that was a breakfast of champions and by the time we were done eating, things started to come to life at the airport and we were soon on our way.  The memory was so strong and pleasant that I made a plate of the fried rice for my breakfast today.  I skipped the beer but did toast Dr. Brent with some rather cold water.

After getting laundry cooking, I decided to take advantage of the marvelous weather and go for a walk. The theme today was, “ Tracking the Elusive 54 Bus.”  I started at the 54 Club Clubhouse and just started walking in the direction the bus was going. There are a lot of them so when I lost sight of one, another would pass me and I was on my way. The bus goes right past my lovely 1905 Park, but I had never noticed it since I stick to the middle of the park and not along the street side. The park looked lovely today in bright sun with all the leaves packed into bright blue plastic bags that looked like so many wayward oversized beach balls.  The trees are bare but beautifully shaped and the ground glistened from yesterday’s rain. 

The bus took me out of the park and headed towards a series of manmade ponds and paths that Cindy and I had walked before.  There it seems to turn around and head back to our apartment, but I couldn’t be sure and it will take another walk to figure out all the details. I have a feeling that it crosses the Moscow River before turning back to our neighborhood.  We hope to ride it some day, just for the fun of it. I must say that no other bus stops that I saw seem to host a clubhouse.

I doubled back and headed for the embassy, staying on back streets to see some of the non-touristic sites.  On most of them what I found were cars parked on the sidewalks so that it was impossible to walk without getting your shoes filled with mud or having to walk in the narrow streets where cars do not yield to pedestrians.  Not one car had a ticket! Must be the norm here and the hell with those of us who walk. As I’ve said before, the rule in Moscow is: If it is convenient, do it!

I finally reached the Children’s Park, which is across the street from the embassy.  The joint was jumping since the weather was so spectacular and the park was filled with little kids and their nannies, parents, and grandparents. The park workers were doing a wonderful job of boxing the delicate rhododendrons to protect them from the heavy snows, which can snap the branches. They made A-frames around them and then covered those with burlap.  Snow seemed a long way off today, with temperatures in the high fifties. Everyone is worried that this has been the warmest November on record so obviously we’ll pay dearly for this come January.

Crossing the street to the embassy I noticed that the church they call The Church of a Thousand Ears has begun to take down the scaffolding that was up for the renovations.  This church is right across the street from the embassy and the story is that the renovations included adding many more listening devices.  In this day and age it is good to know that we still participate in Spy vs. Spy just as we did in Mad Magazine days. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fifItoMPTw

Church of a Thousand Ears

I noticed that the ambassador’s car was at the front door, along with about six other convoy vehicles.  All of these were American made, the ambassador’s is a specially modified Cadillac with bullet proof everything, and the others were all SUV types from GM.  However, looking in the parking lot of the housing area, I didn’t see one American made vehicle, all Asian or European.  There ought to be a law!

I’ll leave you with a picture of today’s sunset from my office window.  Notice how I captured the flying saucer in the middle left of the photo.  Best to all, Cindy and Wm

Sunset from the Office

Mozart and Mayhem

 We just returned from an afternoon concert, which enthralled me for the first half and disgusted me after that.  I’ll not even talk about how dissonant and contrived the piece was, I’ll simply say it was a piece of quasi-intellectual hubris and let it go at that. 

Click this before starting the next paragraph:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc0J-mGoKxI

The concert was in an older hall, small but intimate with a magnificent chandelier. The first two pieces were Mozart, featuring flute and harp. The chamber orchestra was from the Moscow Music Conservatory and they are the most magnificent group of young people I’ve ever heard. So intense, polished, accomplished and each one looked like they were having the time of their lives.  What you are listening to now, the Andante in C Major, was the first piece and as you can hear, not easy, but our soloist did a bang up job.

The second piece was Mozart Flute Concerto in C, click here to listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M20tPT4PVoA

The soloists for this piece must have been teachers at the conservatory. They were really polished performers and the flautist and harp player have obviously played together many times. At the end of the performance they were literally covered with bouquets of flowers from their adoring students. It was really fun and it should have ended right there.

Last night’s Turkish Dinner was a grand event.  Everyone brought something for the meal. I made Glafko’s famous Cypriot Eggplant (I didn’t tell anyone it was from the Greek side of Cyprus) and stuffed green peppers.  I baked the pepper shells until they started to get soft and then stuffed them with the leftover pasta from the night before. I carefully ensured that the crumb topping stayed on top. Once stuffed I baked the peppers again to get the pasta hot and the crust crisp.  I arranged everything on a nice wooden platter and up we went with our appetizers and a loaf of good bread and a bottle of wine.  Others brought great soup, salads and the hostess made a Turkish stew with chickpeas and beef flavored with lots and lots of Turkish spices, really wonderful.  Most everyone avoided talking about school and focused on the important things like travel, food, wine and more travel.  Lots of fun.

We are about to head out for dinner at the Bavarian Beer hall with Katy and her husband Craig. We are looking forward to meeting him and finding out what they have decided about moving to Moscow.  They take off for Costa Rica, via Madrid, tomorrow. I don’t envy them that long trip but I know they’ll be happy to get home to the warm.

From CC:  OK, that piece on the second half of the program was pretty modern (1975) and had some odd sounds and combinations, but the musicians did a fine job.  The crowd had thinned from the first half, but those who were left went wild with applause at the end so apparently others appreciated it more than we did.  Afterwards we noticed that the neighboring music store was still open – I’ve been dying to go there to buy a proper music stand, so in we went.  Turns out that even though 2 people were working, only one could possibly have anything to do with selling a stand and we had to wait for her since she was busy with another customer.  After 15 minutes I was ready to leave and she miraculously freed herself in the nick of time and sold me the stand.  Describing the search for the two halves of the stand (the display model was not for sale) and then packaging them and so forth could take another 3 paragraphs but I’ll spare you.  She finally had it ready and asked me whether I had a car (one Russian word I know) and I promptly said yes because I could only begin to imagine what she’d start to do with wrapping up the darn thing and creating carrying handles or whatever if I said I’d be walking nearly 2 miles with it.  Wm my favorite Sherpa schlepped it home for me.

Happy Sunday, Cindy and Wm

Vodka Martini, shaken, not stirred!

A perfectly lovely and lazy Saturday morning.  The rain had stopped by the time we got up and Cindy went running while I coached her and read signs in Cyrillic.  We stopped at the grocery store to get a few things for breakfast and some veggies for dishes I’m making for a Turkish party in our building this evening.  We had big plans for a long walk this afternoon to purchase a music stand for Cindy but the rains came and dashed those hopes, so Cindy went to play music with her piano-playing friend in the complex while I started working on the dishes for tonight.

After I got home yesterday I started planning dinner since I knew I had to have everything ready before cocktails. We were scheduled to have vodka martinis with a twist - shaken, not stirred. Since this was to be my first martini, I didn’t want to chance knife work and timing after a drink.  I tried to recreate a wonderful meal we had when we were visiting Bari, Italy. It involved orecchiette pasta, which is a little pasta shaped like an ear, thus orecchiette.  This dish included broccoli rabe, hot chili flakes, cheeses and herbs all in a casserole topped with herbed bread crumbs and more cheese and baked until the top was very crisp and crunchy.  It turned out very nicely but it wasn’t the same as we remembered, but then again, I didn’t have all the lovely fresh ingredients they have in Bari.

While the pasta dish was baking, I set the table and started to build the martinis.  We are using a nice bottle of Stoli, which I’m told is much better in Russia than it is in the USA. I had it in the freezer along with two martini glasses I purchased for the occasion.  I used a commuter coffee mug as the shaker since we don’t have a real one here.  I added some ice to the mug, not that it was needed, but tradition is tradition. In went the vodka, a wee dram of dry vermouth, a tiny bit of lemon and I shook the begeebers out of it and poured it into the two glasses and garnished it with a twist. I must say, it took me longer to drink that drink than any other I’ve ever had, and I really did enjoy it.  I couldn’t do one of those every day, but on the weekend or when we are in some place in Russia that doesn’t have anything we like, we know they’ll always have vodka.  In celebration of my first Vodka Martini, I leave you with this:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1607006/james_bond_vodka_martini_shaken_not_stirred/

From CC:  This is killing me … I have some rules about martinis, the first of which is, if it has an adjective it is NOT a martini, e.g., apple martini, chocolate martini, and all those other variations that have become so popular but when it comes down to it are served in a martini glass and are not martinis.  While by definition a martini is made with gin, a vodka martini can still count (the exception to my adjective rule – although watching the James Bond clips I had to think that he should have stayed true to gin martinis).   Personally I’ve always preferred them stirred not shaken – we all know you shouldn’t bruise the gin!  And here I go, agreeing with Wm that a shaken vodka martini with a twist (not an olive) is a very good drink. 

Cheers and Salute to all, Cindy and Wm 

Language and Lessons

Our Russian lessons last night were, to say the least, intense. I thought my head was going to explode with too much information.  We had been expecting three others to come to our apartment for the lesson, but at the last minute all three cancelled so it was just Cindy, me and our tutor.  Our tutor is a lovely older woman who we think finally understands that we just want to be able to get around in Russian.  If she came every day, I’m sure I’d be speaking passable Russian in three to five years, but we don’t have the time or money for that.  We drilled and drilled and Cindy and I had to have conversations with one another in Russian. There were times when I felt I should sit on Cindy’s knee since she was feeding me lines like a ventriloquist.

By the time the lesson was over we were both exhausted and as Cindy brought the tutor upstairs for the next group to have their lesson, I was pouring scotch and gin like there was no tomorrow.  We both agreed that we have to stick with these, and even though we’ll be gone next week, we’ll bring our lessons and practice.  What fun, practicing Russian in Nice when we should be speaking French.

I knew we wouldn’t be having dinner until late so I prepped the meal ahead of time.  I made a salad dressing of mayo, Dijon mustard, olive oil, herbs and some balsamic and lemon.  Once I mixed it all up, I added a diced tomato, a diced green pepper, two chopped eggs and a hunk of diced extra sharp white cheddar.  I mixed it all together and let is sit for about an hour so all the flavors would blend. (This is a trick that Cindy taught me long before we were married and it is a winner when you are short of time.)  Just before we sat down, I made some Poppenhagen Croutons (so named for Brent Poppenhagen who used to make them for his famous Caesar Salad) from a bunch of old bread that I had been saving for a few days.  I cut everything into cubes and then added them to a pan that already had hot oil and lots of browning garlic.  I threw in some herbs and quickly browned the croutons as I tossed the salad base with fresh spinach and arugula.  When everything was tossed nicely, I added the hot croutons; tossed a bit more and sprinkled it all with Parmesan and served it up with some bracingly cold Sav. Blanc.  Oh my, but it was a lovely way to end a very busy day.

This morning Cindy was up and out by 6:45 in order to catch a ride with the neighbors since I needed the car to bring Katy to AAS.  Somehow wires were crossed and the neighbors left without Cindy.  Luckily there was still an AAS bus in the parking lot getting ready to leave and Cindy jumped aboard.  At about 10 AM I met Katy about halfway from her hotel to the apartment and we walked back and hopped into the car.  One hour later we had traveled exactly one kilometer!!  Traffic has just been paralyzed by all the construction and sheer volume of cars on the road.  Once we finally got on the main drag we were at the school in twelve minutes flat.

Katy got a chance to meet with the Director, the head of HR, the Deputy Director, the principal of the elementary school and various and sundry others involved in elementary education and the elementary library.  She loved the school and the people she met loved her so if she comes to Moscow and wants a job, she has one. She went off with her realtor at 1:15 and I headed home, which took another hour and fifteen minutes. I swear Muscovites leave work at 1 pm on Fridays and they all head to Beloruskaya for cocktails.

When I got back, since I was all dressed up anyway, I went to the local wine shop to try and negotiate some decent prices for Chardonnays for the upcoming wine event that I’m giving at AAS.  Goodness, they get a lot of money for wine in these stores.  He started by showing me some ‘mid-priced’ wines.  Mid-priced to him was 500-600 rubles ($17-20), which is high end for me. I looked around and found a few in the 300-350 range that I would consider but I was only able to get him to give me a 10% discount and he wasn’t willing to give any freebies in exchanged for my promoting his store.  Since I have no idea what the business culture is here, I was hard pressed to do any heavy negotiating, but I’ll try again next week.

Well what do they think the Russians do when they are setting records for the most smokers in the world?

Per capita alcohol consumption in Russia is twice the critical limit set by the World Health Organisation (WHO), an official said Friday. The present consumption is currently about 18 litres a year, which has prompted the government to declare an anti-alcohol campaign which aims to halve consumption by 2020. About 40 percent of Russians - or 57 million people - drink to excess, health ministry official Yevgeny Bryun said Friday. 'Economic, social and family troubles, come mainly from those who just drink to excess. They constitute about 30-40 percent of our population,' Bryun said.

From CC:  remember me?  I want to share a heart-warming little story about finances.  Last week at the big grocery store our bill came to 2,799.93 or something similar so I handed the clerk 3000 and she wanted the 9. 93 in coins!  I fully understand that if the bill is a little over a round amount they need the change – for instance, if it comes to 2,801.25 I should give them $3001.25.  We learned that in Germany and it makes perfect sense. (Warning:  Do not try this in the U.S.; they can’t understand it even if the cash register does the arithmetic for them.)  Any-hoo, wanting to be cooperative, I opened my change purse for the 9.93 and promptly dropped a 5-ruble coin that fell through a grate in the counter and into oblivion.  Now, 5 rubles is about 15 cents so we’re not talking real money here, but I was irritated at her request for change in the first place and then irritated at having lost the coin.  Well, 3 days later I was running on a sidewalk near here and there on the ground in front of me was a 5-ruble coin!  I felt so satisfied.  Ha.

Have a lovely weekend one and all, Cindy and Wm

Veteran's Day

Happy Veteran’s Day to my veteran brother of both the Army and Marines, Kevin and to my retired Coast Guard Officer son, Colin.  Here in Moscow, only the Embassy is observing this date so Cindy is at school. Bummer.

As I was planning dinner last night I remembered an old Julia Child show. She was getting on in years and she would have guest chefs come and cook and she would talk with them and stick her fingers in whatever they were making.  This show had an Indian woman who was making spicy shrimp in coconut milk to be served with basmati rice.  She talked very lovingly about the rice and said that ‘basmati rice should be like brothers, very close but not touching’.  By that she meant that the rice shouldn’t be sticky, which is always a problem with some rice.  Her trick was to rinse the uncooked rice six times in clean water to get rid of most of the outer starch, so that is what I did.  It takes a little time but it is fun to do and you can see that the first rinse almost turns the water white from the starch.  I set the rice aside to dry and then proceeded to make the dinner.  I had macerated two fish fillets in teriyaki sauce that was spiked with lots of fresh lemon juice and pepper. I steamed a big bunch of fresh broccoli, a real treat for us since it isn’t always available.  I then cooked the rice as usual.  When the rice was almost finished I pan fried the fish and reduced the juices to place over the fillets on the plate, which now had the hot rice and hot broccoli.  I thought the rice was sticky but Cindy commented on how different and tasty it was so perhaps there is something to the whole rising thing.

I spent far too much time this morning studying Russian. We are going to have a sit down with the tutor tonight since she is not teaching us what we need. She thinks we all want to read Pushkin in Russian when all we really want to do is read a menu. I don’t think that I’ll have occasion to use the nominative case and I have no idea what a Voiced or Voiceless Consonant is and I really don’t care.  The tutor is a lovely older woman who I’m sure is used to teaching people who really want to learn academic Russian, but we just want to learn how to get around, order things, and understand numbers and directions and, of course, all the words I need to shop.  I do not want to learn cursive letters, which incidentally can be very, very different than the same printed letter.

It was a dark and stormy morning today, but then again it is always a dark morning at 5 am.  It was blowing and raining to beat the band and every fiber of our bodies wanted to just snuggle and stay right were we were. (We switched over to the flannel sheets and pillowcases and oh my goodness it is hard to get out of bed.) Reason prevailed and we were up at 0530 ready to face the day. Cindy was out of the house an hour later and I cleaned up a bit and started looking at my Russian text.  I’m really getting to hate Masha and Alexi, my cartoon guides to the exciting world of complex Russian grammar and syntax. 

The new Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, has introduced a new plan to fight Moscow’s traffic dilemma. It is a bold plan that will not work but it is certainly a great PR move on his part.  An hour after he announced the plan, traffic in downtown Moscow Ring Road was blocked for four hours, as a result of the police blocking all traffic for the cortege of the visiting Finnish President, which was three and a half hours late leaving the Kremlin, but no one told the police so they just keep all the cars off the road for four hours!  One of the suggestions is to enforce parking laws, which is causing everyone to laugh out loud.

For those of you who have had a lot of international travel experience I’m sure you wondered at some time or another as you were landing in a foreign country with a difficult language, “ How does our pilot communicate with Air Traffic Control?”  Well, if you are like me, you just assumed that the standard communication for international air travel was English.  It ain’t necessarily so! 

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/english-language-to-rule-skies/422197.html

If you have eight minutes, click on the link about two-thirds down the article for a thrilling and chilling interaction between pilot and ATC.  It makes me shudder.

Best to all, Cindy and Wm

Touring and Dining in Moscow

Well, our Georgian restaurant didn’t let us down last night.  I picked up Katy at her hotel and brought her back to the apartment for Kirs and pâté.  Her husband Craig is being recruited to work on gas turbine technology and they have him running all over Russia this week so Katy was on her own and we were only too happy to show her around.  We walked back to the apartment and it was spooky. She actually reads the blogs and seems to memorize them.  She knew all the landmarks, remembered all about the boys and girls of The 54 Club, and loved seeing their clubhouse. On the way home we saw a classic car accident, which created gridlock, and she remembered all the rules related to driving in Moscow. I’m going to have to be very careful what I write from now on.

Back to dinner. We had the really good waitress, which forced us into ordering in Russian. We, and by we I mean Cindy, are really getting better at this language and we ordered everything in Russian, much to the delight of our waitress.  We had three starters, the rolled eggplant with walnuts, which we always have, the spicy spinach soufflé and a new dish, which was, mashed red kidney beans with walnuts. All of them were delicious as was the hot and crusty bread.  We ordered three main courses, the fabulous grilled split quail, a new dish called lamb kebab which was really a wonderful lamb sausage wrapped in something resembling a tortilla, and stuffed with fresh tomatoes and some yogurt sauce and a plate of roasted veggies.  Man, it was all delicious and even the red wine seemed to taste much better.  Katy was most generous, in addition to the lovely orchids she brought for Cindy; she also picked up the tab at the restaurant.  Let that be a lesson to those of you who might come and visit!!

Katy and Craig have been living in Costa Rica for eleven years and are now considering a major move. She was working as an educator there and I’ll take her to Cindy’s school on Friday so she can have a look around incase she decides to work there if they come to Moscow. We were very firm in telling her that she had to live in the city and not in the sticks were her husband’s office would located. She would be miserable being stuck twenty kilometers from the nearest Metro.  A prison is a prison no matter how well appointed.

I got a note from my sister regarding the blog where I mentioned Cake Boss. It seems that my niece, her daughter Mieke, is the assistant producer of that show! She has been working with them for two years. What an incredibly small world we live in.  Speaking of readers writing in, our resident microwave/grammar expert, Bob Van Epps, wrote to tell me that the Turkish menu that mentions ‘hot searches’, most likely means hot sandwiches.  What an eye/ear for language he has.

Speaking of language, why does Moscow wish to condemn itself to be a third world city, expensive, but third world. There was an article yesterday that said that three stores were being investigated for using English words in banners outside their establishments. It turns out you can be fined up to 500,000 Rubles for such subversion.  Here is a city, striving for modernity, attempting to lure multi-national corporations to do business here and they come up with some silly thing like this.  I would bet you dollars to donuts that all of the politicians send their children to English language schools since they know that English is the lingua franca of the business world.  It’s nuts but then again, where are we. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/stores-probed-for-using-english/422012.html

Perhaps the reason for such silliness is that for most Russians it really doesn’t matter since they won’t live long enough to learn English. 

More adults smoke in Russia than in any other heavy-smoking country, and their average life expectancy is one of the shortest among former Soviet countries, according to two separate but thematically linked reports released Tuesday.

You can read the whole article here: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/who-russians-smoke-the-most/422117.html

I’ve been struggling for the past two hours with the Russian alphabet and cardinal numbers.  I found a site on the web that has the Russian alphabet song and I’m trying like crazy to memorize it.  My brain is like most other muscles in my body, it is loosing tone and elasticity.

A few of the folks from AAS who when to Istanbul for the holiday came home with more than carpets and spices.  Seems that the ‘Stanbul Belly has hit many so I made a big batch of garlic soup this afternoon that I’ll bring around to those in need this evening. If this doesn’t fix them they’ll need professional care. Of course, I’ve saved a little for us as well.

And finally, it looks like the best and cheapest way to not suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in Moscow, is to go to jail!

Sunbeds for Moscow's notorious prison

November 10, 2010 - 8:19PM

Inmates at a notorious Moscow prison where a lawyer died last year in a case

that sparked global concern, are to receive sunbeds as part of a new drive

to improve comfort, reports said on Wednesday.

The chief spokesman for Moscow prisons told ITAR-TASS that the improvements at Butyrka prison also included Internet telephony, Skype, spas services and access to better medical services and drugs.

SADly yours,  Cindy and Wm

Rainy Tuesday, Again

If it is Tuesday and this is Moscow, it must be raining!  I don’t get it, every Tuesday for the past month it rains. Tuesday is the day we have a cleaner and I need to get out of the apartment since I’m always underfoot so I usually walk and end up at the Embassy to do some American food/cleaning products/milk shopping.  So I can remember very well walking home each Tuesday in the rain. Today was no exception, but at least it was a very gentle, intermittent rain and the temperature is darn near balmy.

My meeting with the FAA representative in the Embassy was rather interesting.  It is a job that I think I might like (if I were looking).  Lots of travel throughout Russia and the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), which are all the former Soviet Republics. We talked a lot about planes and pilots, always fun, and eventually about wine, another favorite pilot topic.  I’ve invited him to my tasting/history program later in the month. It looks like I’ll be doing some volunteer work for the FAA here in Moscow, which I think I’ll enjoy very much.

Last night we had some friends down for Kirs and snacks. Earlier in the afternoon I made a pork liver pâté that had lots of caramelized onions and garlic as well as raisins that were plumped with brandy.  I used tons of tarragon and some curry, cumin, turmeric and cinnamon.  I let it all sit for three hours and then decorated it with small dollops of mayo to which I added a tiny drop of Dijon mustard to make them look like half hard boiled quail eggs. Turned out to look as good as it tasted.  I toasted lots of French bread slices and some dark bread with pumpkin seeds.  All this was served with some black currant jam and cornichons so that you could opt for sweet or sour.  It was lots of fun.

Tonight we are meeting a friend of a friend who is in town while her husband interviews for a job.  She has been reading the blogs for about six weeks now and wants to go to our Georgian Restaurant. It will be grand fun to have someone to show around our favorite places.