Monday January 30, 2006 – Eating Tweety Bird

My daily routine of painting myself silver and standing extremely still on a box for tourist handouts was altered significantly today. From 10 – 1, I joined a walking tour of the “Historical Center” of Limassol. Although I had been along a majority of the streets and seen most of the notable landmarks, the tidbits of history (Richard the Lionheart married to Berengaria in Limassol) were added to my bank of exciting conversation pieces.

Last week, I stumbled across this mosaic studio along one of my Limassol strolls and figured mosacing would be a nice addition to my repertoire. So for three hours Monday afternoon, I focused intently on advancing along my chances of getting carpel tunnel by cutting tiles in a mosaic class. Ideally, I was supposed to be cutting (more like cracking) 50 1” square tiles into four smaller square pieces with these funky sharp pliers (“wheeled nippers”). I ended up averaging two smaller squares and shards, but refrained from injuring myself – so I deemed it a small victory. With design and gluing advice from raspy oversmoked instructor, I’ve got the makings of a pretty good mosaic chachke on the way.

Dinner tonight was with the entire crew plus additions from 5 big-wigs from all over (Netherlands, U.S., Canada, Luxembourg, and Italy). We all went to this restaurant which has been dubbed by Steph as the “the little bird” restaurant. A Cypriot delicacy are these little birds (about the size of Tweety of “I thought I saw a puddy cat”) BBQ’d whole and served. They are an appetizer because you’d probably have to eat 50 of those at one point cute little guys to fill up. Hardcore tweety-bird eaters eat everything but the stomach (bones, head, wings…), but I being anything but ate the itty breasts and chomped down on one little leg as "C" looked on from across the table in mild disgust. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have partook in the carnage, but I’ll stick with “everyone was doing it” and “when in Rome…” The remainder of the meal was “normal” food – kebabs, salad, etc, but before continuing I had to cover up the remains with a piece of bread because I could no longer handle Tweety’s glances of indignation and judgment.