Kilometer 7277: on eggplants and ladas in a ditch

Remember how I warned you not to get on a car which a drunk driver? Well, odds are that you get on a car when he’s sober, but get off when he’s not.

We were picked up and invited to a grill party. Gocha turned right from the main road into a steep dirt lane, climbed up for a while cutting the throat of his rather mature Lada and stopped by a fire place where his friend, Armen, had already been waiting along with half of a butchery, half of a grocery and half of a liquor store.

Not to get into too much detail, here’s a recipe for grilled eggplant:

Skewer a whole eggplant.
Place it in fire and keep it there until it looks like an eggplant-shaped lump of coal.
Put the eggplant into cold water and scrape it clean.

Admittedly, an eggplant cooked according to this recipe looks like raw octopus, but it’s tasty.

1/3 of butcher’s, ¼ of grocery’s and a half of liquor shop later it was time to go back. For a short moment I thought one of the more sober individuals (like us) would be asked to bring the Lada together with the passengers safely back home. This did not happen.

We fell into a ditch right after Gocha said: Don’t be afraid, you have a good driver! Lada crunched and growled with discontent. Gocha also, only quiter. But what are friends for! Armen attached the ditch Lada to the tow Lada and started to pull. Sparks flying, engine howling, mud splattering. One more time: sparks, engine, mud. More power! Sparks, engine, there it is! The ditch Lada left the ditch at full speed. The tow Lada, however… fell into another ditch.