happy birthday Cia!

today is birthday of a person, whom i look alike most of all in the world - my grandmother Cia. she was one of the most amazing people i know and i want to share with you the memories of her and the way i remember her. she was an ideal of a woman - even in her 80s, she never forgot to have her hair done, her nails looking perfect, her wardrobe renewed all the time. and she had amazing dresses - one of which - a black one with colourful flowers all around it we adored. she knew it, and would wear it to meet us whenever we were coming from moscow for the holidays, she would also wear it on her birthday, but only after we were asking her for several weeks beforehand, she would never wear the same outfit, she was a real fashionista :)

and she was an amazing doctor. when i was visiting her clinic few months ago, just the mention of her name made everyone gather around me and tell me all great stories about her. she was fantastic, after work when she came home she would bring us sweets, candies, presents and then in the evening would bake pies and cakes. her peach pie is  something i still dream about.

she had a great heart and trusted and loved absolutely everyone. i would come home and see absolute strangers in our flat. when i would ask, who are these people - she would say, they came from village, sell jams and fruits in tbilisi and have nowhere to stay, so i let them in for a few days.

oh! and she was a great literature lover. she had a subscription to all literature magazines, her collection of books was amazingly big and her best friend and my fathers godmother was Anna Kalandadze, famous georgian poet. Cia would show me all the books, tell stories about them: some of them she bought herself, some were the presents from her admirers (with romantic notes 'to my fairy lady' written on them), the story of others she couldn't remember. her handwriting was something fantastic - it was so beautiful, my whole childhood i was trying to copy it but couldn't. she wrote with beautiful letters - which could be a great georgian font to computerize - each letter was beautiful like a painting.

i want to share with you a note she wrote from the name of her son, so that you can see her handwriting yourself and i will also post a picture of her once i scan it to the computer.

happy birthday Cia!

midnight in paris

i need to share my emotions with you on this movie, i have a need to talk about something that i liked so much. midnight in paris was a long wait for me. i saw its trailer in february and only now, end of the summer, i was finally able to enjoy it. the trailer is nothing compared to the whole story itself. the genius mix of great actors, scenes, melodies and paris. that is just what i expected a new woody allen movie to be.

i feel like gil, just as he i always dream of past, feel nostalgic about old things. paintings, books, melodies from the past - they make me happy, i look at monet and my whole day is lighten up, i listen to old jazz - and i feel great. just as great as watching this movie with all familiar heros, listening to all familiar melodies and seeing the views of the city which i probably love along with two or three others most of all in the whole world.

and how fantastic are the actors. just a small scene with adrien brody as dali leaves me without words, he is just as i imagined dali to be. and picasso, and hemingway and fitzgerald - they are all just as i imagined.

paris is truly most beautiful in the rain, and today i really wish i could have a walk around night paris without any umbrella.

missoni toy watch

i've been collecting toy watches for some time now and this new missoni watches are the ones i have to have now :) i'm in love with the watch in the middle, would you like to have one too?

boys-band-mania

sometimes i get the nostalgic mood. this was what happened to me yesterday: i sat around my 'box of memories', where i keep different important for me stuff since school. it includes valentine's cards, notes, tickets to different concerts, movies, photos, small gifts from my friends.. lots of different things which make my day when i'm not in the mood of anything. among them were the tickets to five's concert in moscow. i don't know if some of you still remember five, but i was quite a fan of them at school. so i decided to dedicate this post to the boys bands that i loved.

here is the first video i want to share with you. that's boys II men, who according to me started the boys band era. i'm talking about the era of 1990's, with soul, rap and pop in it. end of the road, water runs dry, i'll make love to you... you never get tired of these songs and they are always there to bring the right romantic mood.

and then there was also East 17, which we were in love with in grade 6 i think. you know the funny thing, on my visit to Kiyv two years ago we were invited to the Premier Palace Casino birthday party and there they were - east 17, looking very very old and singing absolutely different and unusual songs, none of which i could recognize. when i asked them about 'thunder', they were very very happy i recognized them, and told me they lost the rights to this song and could no longer perform it.

 

Backstreet boys - my next favourites - were divided by my classmates according to the boys - some of them were nick's fans, some kevins, aj's. i was in the category of brian's fans. this song 'as long as you love' stays among my favourites now as well, i would often listen to it in moscow with my friend, who was among the fans of this song as well. good memories.

 

and here comes my no.1 favourite band of schoolyears - five. seriously, i loved absolutely all the songs of five, i knew all of them by heart and after their concert in moscow i felt i knew them in person. me and my best friend elya were so upset they splitted up that would watch their dvd's over and over again and remember the good times when they were all still together. and i always, deep in my heart, believed that elia would some day marry Scott. if somebody told me she wouldn't i would be very surprised.

 

after five's split, we needed a new boys band to love and there came blue. this was the last boys band i was fond of, since then i turned to jazz and occasionally went back to listening old songs by the bands i'm talking right now. i liked blue, they were handsome, singing nice songs and having very beautiful video clips. i heard they took part in eurovision 2011, which made me upset, but i also heard they are coming to tbilisi this autumn, i will definately go to their concert, even if the auditorium of it will maximum be 16-years-old girls.

And finally, these two bands - boyzone and westlife, the fan of which i have never been, and i don't really know why, because they have nice songs in their discography. maybe it's just they didn't have handsome boys in there, and at that period we cared about the looks not less than about the songs these looks were singing.

romantic moments

a year ago on our honeymoon in Indonesia, we stayed at the most romantic hotel i have ever been so far. with our villa overlooking the ocean and frangipani flowers all over our garden, it was heaven on earth. we used to dine at a restaurant on the beach, which was very very quiet and romantic. we would sit among the palm trees, eat great food and listen to amazing songs.

when i came back, the first thing i did, i tried to look up the music that was playing there. famous songs in an amazing acoustic interpretation. these songs that i'm posting here were all part of our fantastic honeymoon, though i still didn't find the exact same performance.

putumayo world music

a short post about my favourite music brand. putumayo music collection started with my friends bringing me the very first cd from holland. it looked like this:

and had absolutely amazing music in it. my collection went further and further, being filled in with french, latin, italian music, jazz, salsa and many others. you have already noticed what a big music fan i am, and in the case of my putumayo collection, music not only gives you great feelings, it also makes you travel all around the world.

a romantic post

this is a short romantic post about my friend tamuna, who got one of the best proposals in the whole world. her now-fiancee hired a plane that flew around the beach of st.tropez several times with a banner 'tamuna, marry me'. tamuna was shocked and happy, people on the beach were smiling and clapping and we, girls, were listening to this story with a great feeling that there still is a romance in this world.

          

one of my friends proposal looked like this: he put arrows and hints all over moscow so that his girlfriend would go to the place they had their first date and get a hint to a second place, which all ended up in a park with him on his knees holding a ring.

my other friends future husband ordered thousands of roses, filled a terrace overlooking night tbilisi with them and appeared suddenly with a magician's hat holding an amazing diamond ring.

a recent proposal was made by my friends brother, who's friends were standing alongside the road  holding big banners asking questions and telling about the love he had for his future wife, with him on the end dressed in a t-shirt saying 'that's me'.

i love such stories, and i feel like collecting them. in the long run, it may lead to creating a book of such sweet memories.

huggin up the big monkey man

i have always thought Amy had a fantastic voice, it's just that i was not a very big fan of her music. i would listen to some of her songs but none of them did i want to put on the repeat mode.

yesterday, being a little bit down, my friend suggested i should listen to Amy's 'monkey man'. wow, that song made my day! her live performance made me want to dance to this song, which i actually did all around the office. looked weird, but felt great :)

best things in life are free

l o v e

s u m m e r

f r i e n d s

f u n

s m i l e

b e a u t y

le cordon bleu

my friend, who was visiting me in tbilisi last month has done lots of interesting things in her life. she is interested in all kind of stuff: design, architecture, fashion, cooking. speaking of the last one, she took a two-month course in Paris in famous Le Cordon Bleu, of which she told me the other day. Le Cordon Bleu is the school which julie&julia visited, and exactly the same school which makes greatest chiefs of the world.

i was looking through the courses it offers and have chosen a very nice mix of courses for me. most of all i like the Paris location with Patisserie Course which offers:

Artistic decorative skills
Ice cream & sorbet
Variations on restaurant desserts
Savoury petits fours
Introduction to bread-baking
Mastering bavarian creams & mousses
Caramel & nougatine
Introduction to chocolate : hand tempering & dipping

And this subject from Superior Patisserie Course is my no.1 choice:

The Art of Chocolate: Mousse cakes, tempering of chocolates, hand-dipped & moulded chocolates, mixing different chocolates and textures, chocolate boxes and flowers, sculpture & display

Oh, what a wonderful way it is to spend 2 months of my busy, crazy life.

marvin the greatest

marvin gaye is amazing. his music, lyrics, and the feelings it all gives you. i have long been a marvin gaye fan and this fanning will stay for long time. his songs are used in many movies, novels, plays, because they can create the most sensual scenes. in one of my favourite books by anna gavalda, 'ensemble, c'est tout', camille and franck are listening to 'sexual healing' on their first date, in the recent italian movie 'manuale d'am3re', robert de niro and monica belucci are dancing striptease to 'come get to this' - all the romantic scenes are becoming amazing mostly because of marvin's music played in them.

and how many artists have tributed to marvin gaye? out of million versions, i am sharing with you the one i love most: Maceo Parker playing 'let's get it on':

enjoy marvin gaye, and i'll go listen to mercy, mercy me for hundredth time

ps. on my last.fm profile marvin is number three in my top artists chart. about my #1 and #2 i'll talk in my next posts

summer thoughts

this summer season made me forget about my blog. its not that i'm somewhere at the seaside, having tan and having fun and not having time for the blog. no, im still in tbilisi, at work and with no holiday perspective. it's just that in tbilisi the degree outside is so high, that all the thermometers have crushed. and so did i for several days.

speaking of summer, what are you guys doing now? which countries are u visiting? i would personally fly to portugal now. i have no certain idea why is that i chose portugal over all the other countries, but i have never been there and it's time to check the flights to lisbon, maybe i'll have a chance to take few days off.

please do share with me your ways of spending this summer. maybe only reading about seasides and tans and funs will make me feel more summery?