Birthday

Larisa's sister had a birthday yesterday, and I managed to get invited to her party at Puris Sakhli, a swanky Georgian restaurant in Old Town. I've been to enough of these traditional-style dinners now to know the sequence of courses (first salads, and then: khatchapuri, fish, mushrooms, meat, french fries (?!?), more meat, fruit, coffee, sweets) and enough to know that I need to hijack the salads because there won't be anything else substantial for a vegetarian.

The salads pictured above may not look appetizing but they all contain a tantalizing mixture of garlic and ground walnuts that makes them incredibly tasty. (Except the gooey mystery balls. Nobody but me ever eats those. You should have seen the look on Anri's face when I tried to put some on his plate.)Of course there was cake, along with a multi-lingual (and unintentionally polyphonic) rendition of the Happy Birthday song.
And I earned my keep by instigating a card game that drew a reprimand from a snotty waiter but postponed, by at least an hour, the inevitable war- and zombie-themed shenanigans of two bored and oversugared little boys. (Thanks again for the cards, HRH!)