Water Bed
This is a furniture store in Germany, where the sign says “Do Not Get On the Bed” LLOOLLL!
She Cried
“I wanted to thank you,” I said to my son’s sixth grade teacher “I can’t imagine how hard it was to get 30 sixth graders to go through the paper-writing process, but I know my son learned from it and he will use the skills you taught him for many years to come. One day he will thank you in his heart, but I wanted to thank you now.”
It was one of those small expat military communities, where your child’s teacher also goes to the same church you go to and shops in the same commissary. We were at a church benefit, chatting before dinner.
She started crying.
She told me that every year, she teaches the sixth graders to write papers, and they hate it. She started with library research, making bibliography cards on little index cards, formal writing, footnotes and a formal bibliography at the end with a formal title page at the beginning.
I was the first one who had ever thanked her. She believed in what she was doing, but it was so hard, and she never got any positive feedback.
Imagine. Do you remember what sixth graders are like? This lady had courage, and persistence. She gave these students (in spite of themselves) a skill which would take them through the rest of high school and into college. They learned to do it right, so they never had to embarrass themselves by turning in an inferior, poorly-done paper. It was a great gift she gave these students – and no one thanked her.
Well, it would be a rare, very rare sixth grader who has the maturity to understand that while it was a difficult and demanding section in their school year, it was a tool in their tool box of life, a gift that just kept on giving.
Thank you. Thank you, all the teachers out there who knock themselves out to give our children (and grandchildren) the tools they need to be good students and good citizens.
Fredericksburg, TX; an Unexpected Pleasure
We are headed west, and our friends suggest we take a route which will take us through Fredericksburg, TX. From the time we get on the road, we are surprised – good fast roads, even the backroads, wildflowers along the highway, and, soon, a wonderful store where we found Mayhew Jelly:
Continuing on, we arrive in Fredericksburg just about noon, after driving past countless tempting wineries and farms, all with great old German names. We find a place to park and look for a place to eat, finding the Lindenbaum and oh – they have Zigeunerschnitzle, schnitzel Gypsy style, which we love. Actually, when we lived in Germany, we sort of stopped eating schnitzle because it is meat and then deep friend meat, with fattening sauces, but it’s been years, and we couldn’t resist.
Oh! It was so good!
We decided we need to stay the night in Fredericksburg; there is the Nimitz Museum which is calling my husband’s name, and there are little shops calling mine. As we are eating lunch, we find a place in a Fredericksburg Magazine, The Austin Street Retreat, but to book there, you have to go to a place called the Gastehaus where they have a bunch of B & B’s and you get the reservation through them and then go to the place, which is a really good thing because some of them are a little hard to find.
We book Annie’s cottage – and when we get there, we are delighted. It is very French, a cottage all to ourselves, quiet, private, a great retreat:
And then AdventureMan heads off is his direction, and I in mine, both of us finishing up about the same time and heading back to the cottage to rest and plan our next day’s travels.
Dinner was at Mamacita’s, a very popular place with both local people and tourists, and reminded me of Chevy’s Fresh Mex – they made their own chips, and our server was very polished and attentive; we really liked the way Jason took care of us:
This is the schnitzle from Lindenbaum, but I can’t figure out how to get it in the right place.
Monday Night Blues at Five Sisters Blues Cafe in Pensacola
We kept wanting to go to Five Sisters Blues Cafe – everyone tells us it is a really fun place with great food – but it takes us a while to find it. I’m printing the Google map for you; it is at the corner of Belmont and DeVilliers. Not that hard to find if you know Pensacola, but we are still learning Pensacola.
Five Sisters exterior:
“Where’ve you been?” our waitress, Lisa, asked as we were seated. We must have looked goofy, we’ve never been there before, so we said, “this is our first time” and she laughed and said “I know that! I haven’t seen you before! We’ve been open a year! Where’ve you been?”
We just laughed, she had really caught us off guard. The place was packed, on a Wednesday afternoon, people all around us eating giant salads, plates heaped with fried chicken, everything we saw coming out to the tables looked delicious. Lisa brought us iced-tea, and I lost my heart, look, REAL mint in the tea, just like home . . .
We were overwhelmed. There is a lot going on in the restaurant, people laughing, art works on the walls, a new menu to peruse and we don’t know what we want. We finally decide to share the sampler platter with two fried green tomatoes, 4 crab cakes and 4 shrimp, which came with three very tasty sauces – WOW. Wowed right off the top:
AdventureMan even said, in wonder “This crab cake really tastes like crab with a C!” and it was. You know, the other kind, that calls itself crab, but is really flavored Alaskan pollock, and not crab at all? This was real crab, and it tasted crabby. Yummm.
AdventureMan had a vegetable platter. Now this is Southern cooking at it’s best, so don’t expect ‘vegetable’ to be Vegan. Even Mac and Cheese qualifies as a vegetable, and beans usually have some pork to flavor them, etc. He said the entire plate was delicious.
I tried something I had never had before, catish over grits. I never thought I liked grits until our daughter-in-laws stepmother (I know, I know, it sounds complicated, and it is another thing we have in common with people all over the world; we all have complicated relationships) made Smoked Gouda Grits one night with her Barbecued Shrimp and a whole new world opened up to me. Wooo HOOO. Anyway, I didn’t eat all the grits; the catfish was filling, but this dish knocked my socks off and I don’t think I could duplicate it, so I’m just going to have to go back to Five Sisters every time I get a craving for it:
If we are what we eat, we are becoming very Southern. 🙂
Lisa, the waitress, was a lot of fun, helpful in making recommendations, quick when we asked for anything, and she told us about an upcoming special jazz night that we really needed to attend. OK. That sounded like fun.
Lisa was right. It was really fun. We walked in, early, and every table was taken. There was a Jazz Society of Pensacola membership table at the entrance, and the lady just laughed and said “Look! There are lots of chairs empty, just go to a table and ask if you can join them.”
Hmm. We’re actually used to that, living in Germany all those years, but I didn’t know you could do that here. 🙂 We ended up at a table with another couple, and as we chatted, we had a really good time with them. They were so gracious and welcoming to people they had never met and who aren’t even members (yet) of the Jazz Society. We laughed a lot. He told us that they didn’t have a lot of rules, but that when things got lively, no oxygen machines were allowed on the dance floor because they might explode, LLOOLLL!
This place was ROCKIN’. People were dancing between the tables, people from young to old, just having a great time listening to some very very good music. Within an hour, there were no empty seats at all, some people were standing, and others were eating out on the covered patio. It was raining (rain in Pensacola during a drought is a good thing) and the evening was called Monday Night Blues. How cool is that? The atmosphere was perfect.
Of course we had dinner. AdventureMan had BBQ on Red Beans and Rice and I had the Shrimp Basket. No Mom, I did not eat the French Fries.
I did eat ONE of the hushpuppies. I could not resist. 😉
Five Sisters Blues Cafe is just a really fun place, immaculately clean, great food and great service. We can’t wait to go back again.
Ash Wednesday in Pensacola 2011
Luke 18:9-14
9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” 13But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” 14I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’
(From the Lectionary readings for today)
“I forgot to set my alarm” AdventureMan said, coming down the stairs, “we missed the first service.”
Today is Ash Wednesday, the day Lent begins for Christians. We go to church, the priest puts a cross on our forehead in ash, to remind us “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, that our life here on earth is only temporary, and that our true home is heaven.
It’s easier to believe that in your gut when you are an expat.
My cousin wrote to me, and in his email, he wrote that I write about my own culture the same way I wrote about Germany, about Qatar, about Kuwait – as an expat, as an outside observer. Pensacola is like my foreign assignments; I could live here for twenty years (God willing) and I will never be a native, I will always be from somewhere else, the kind of person about whom others will say “she must not be from around here.” I am guessing I will get more comfortable, more confident, but I will always be not-quite-right among the natives.
And that is how we are supposed to be living here on earth – as people not-quite-right, as people eager to return to our true heavenly home.
Lent in my own country is odd to me, now. In a foreign country, you are accustomed to thinking of yourself as a minority; your differentness makes you more aware or who you are, and what you value. There is a part of me that thinks Lent would be a lot easier if, like Qatar, and like Kuwait, and like Saudi Arabia, religious practices were state enforced, like everyone in the USA fasted at the same time, maybe nobody would sell meat or chocolate or alcohol. And then, I think “but what is the point?” The point is our own sacrifice. Is it a sacrifice if it is enforced from the outside?
I can’t sacrifice cussing in traffic this year. Pensacola traffic, by the grace of God, is nearly non-existent, and it is mellow. I’m not even tempted. I’m trying to figure out what I will sacrifice.
Father Neal Goldsborough at Christ Church Episcopal told us on Sunday how all the children come in from the Episcopal Day School to have the ashes imposed, and how poignant it is for him, and I can’t help but think of all the soldiers he has been with at their death, mere children, children of God, and how he must see the faces of these soldiers in the faces of these tiny children. My heart would weep, even knowing they are on their way home.
Shopping Styles: Predatory, Social or Desperation?
As AdventureMan once said, I am not entirely sure I agree with what I am about to say. Feel free to jump in.
Today I was mopping the floors, washing the floors and vacuuming the carpets. This is not – way not – something I like to do, but something I do because long ago somewhere in my tiny little brain, a seed was planted that a dirty floor was a shameful thing. I remember once thinking “people could eat off my floor; there must be a whole meal here!” when I left it unwashed for a few days. In my last three incarnations, in Kuwait and in Qatar, I was blessed with wonderful women who came in and took care of my floors for me, also the dusting, and the laundry, and the windows, and all the things I now do. It takes a surprising chunk of time out of my day. 😦
Oh! Yes. The shopping.
I just wanted you to know that I am not cleaning my house willingly or joyfully, but dutifully. I have discovered, however, that mindless physical activity frees the mind, and you never know where a free mind will go.
I have a friend coming to visit, and this friend and I have had so much fun together, through the years, exchanging books, going out on double dates with our husbands to wonderful places in France and Germany, and . . . shopping.
Finding a person who shops the way you do is a real blessing. I say I am not much of a shopper, but we all have to shop sometimes. Mostly, I shop alone, I am a predator. I am looking for specific game, and I want the juiciest prey at the best price. Most of my friends are like me – we don’t hunt in packs, because when you shop in packs a group mentality surfaces, and you get home with things you never would have bought.
I do shop with other solitary predators from time to time; this is how you know them. You don’t shop together. You shop the same stores, sometimes just the same mall, meeting up to compare items and to go on to the next stop. Most of my predatory shoppers friends know their own style, know their own preferences, and few ask me what I think, nor do I ask them. We do exclaim gleefully over our purchases.
In the military, in Germay, there would be shopping tours to take you to places. Sometimes I took them, most times I didn’t. It depended on whether or not you had to stay together. I saw people buy some truly appalling things because it had a particular name or a particularly low price. The fact that it was obviously inferior did not even seem to strike their consciousness, once the herd shopping mentality kicked in. If the tour were going to a village, and people were on their own and then met up, I would do that. I went to Paris on such a trip; leaving
Germany at midnight, leaving the tour at six in the morning for croissants and coffee at La Duree at its original location on Rue Royale arranging to meet up with them later.
The Musee D’Orsay had just opened, and I was dying to see the exhibit. I spent the morning there, leaving as the hoardes started arriving, had a little lunch of Vietnamese salad rolls on the Left Bank, and strolled over the bridge to the shopping areas around Rue Royale. I found three great outfits at Galleries Lafayette, grabbed a salad from their gorgeous food court, and met up with my group at six to depart. I was home by midnight. 🙂 I would have liked a friend, but I didn’t know anyone, once again I was new, and Paris is so easy that just 12 hours there was a piece of cake.
Social shoppers find us solitary predators very strange. They live in a different world than we do. They consult. Their shopping goals are not so much the goods as the experience. They enjoy the company, and they like having someone to help them make their purchasing decisions. They often meet up for shopping and lunch, and some even shop to kill time. (What luxury! In my whole life, I have never had time to kill; I always have projects, and lists of things that need doing!)
I have been one other kind of shopper, though, and that is a desperation shopper. It was when I was a young mother. Shopping was for survival. I never knew when the baby would start to cry, need to be nursed, or need a change. When I had a babysitter, I was always aware of how little time I had and how much I had to get done. Once a month, I would go to the commissary, about twenty miles away, to buy a month’s worth of diapers, meat (we ate more meat then), canned goods and paper goods.
I see the same desperation in the elderly here in Florida; shopping takes energy and you never know when your energy will desert you. As you can see, I am still thinking about my experience at the Navy Commissary, and I now I can empathize. I might be grumpy and aggressive, too, when I reach a stage where I remember having energy, and now I don’t know where it has gone. I may even scowl at cheerful, energetic people because I wish I still were . . .
We’re all wired so differently. There may be some shopping styles to which I am oblivious. Can you think of any?
I Miss St. Martin of Tours
Today is Veteran’s Day in America, and in Europe, it is the patron saint day of St. Martin of Tours (patron saint of France) who, on a cold winter’s night, saw a beggar freezing and took his own warm red cape and split it in half with his sword and gave the begger half.
(I’ve always wondered why he didn’t give the beggar the whole cloak?)
All over Germany, a rider portrays St. Martin in towns and villages, and little children with lanterns on sticks greet him with songs.
Here, you can spend six minutes in a German village, experiencing the St. Martin’s Day parade and the arrival of St. Martin on his horse:
Today is also the beginning of the St. Martin’s goose season, one I used to wait for avidly while living in Germany. Oh Yummmmm.
Happy Veteran’s Day, to all those who have proudly served or are proudly serving our country.
Onion Soup of the Pfalz region of Germany
I am printing this just as I found it. The thrill to me is that I can read it and follow it! It is from a blog called ‘Grandmother’s Best Recipes in the Pfalz’ and today I am making Pfalzerzuppe! (It is a onion soup made with creme and a little caraway seed; I often used to eat it at Neuleiningen Castle, in the Bergschanke restaurant.Zwiebelsuppe
“Zwiwwelsupp”
Zwiebelsuppe ist nicht gleich Zwiebelsuppe. Oder auf pfälzisch: Zwiwwelsupp is net wie Zwiwwelsupp. Die nach diesem Rezept ist jedenfalls sehr delikat und würzig.
Zutaten:
- 10 mittlere Zwiebeln (onions, middle sized)
- 500 ml Sahne (cream)
- 1 l Hühnerbrühe (chicken stock)
- Pfeffer, Salz, Kümmel (pepper, salt, caraway seed)
- Butter
- 2-3 EL Mehl (flour)
- 1/5 l Weißwein (aber bitte Pfälzer Wein!) (white wine, Pfalzer white wine, PLEASE!)
Zubereitung:
Geschälte Zwiebeln kleinschneiden und in Butter nur ganz leicht anbräunen. Mit dem Weißwein ablöschen und zur Hälfte einkochen lassen. Das Mehl darüber streuen. Die Brühe und die Sahne hinzugeben und ca. 20 Minuten köcheln lassen, dann abschmecken.
Tipp:
Am Ende des Kochens noch drei Eigelbe mit etwas Sahne verrühren und unter die Suppe ziehen, dann aber nicht mehr aufkochen, sondern gleich servieren.
News and Roosters
“How’d you sleep?” I cheerily greeted my sister, Sparkle, newly arrived from Paris to our small farming village in Germany.
“That #*%@ing ROOSTER!” she exclaimed. “He started crowing around 3:00 a.m. and never stopped! You must have heard him! He was right under our window!”
No. No, there was no rooster under our windows. The nearest rooster was up in the next farm, maybe 100 yards away. But I kind of remembered when we first moved in, I think I remember we heard him. We no longer heard him. You just get used to it, I guess.
What brings this to mind is that KUOW in Seattle has a program today on the Seattle City Council vote – they are about to vote to increase the number of chickens allowed by ‘urban farmers’ but to prohibit the roosters.
You can hear the discussion for yourself by going to KUOW. There are some hilarious comments, one by a man who said “Sure, ban roosters, right after you ban boom boxes, and teenagers, and heavy trucks, and garbage pickups. There are a lot worse sounds in the city than roosters!” (I may have paraphrased that quote, I was laughing too hard to write it all down.)
AdventureMan and I love National Public Radio. We support our local NPR station, WUWF in Pensacola, which I listen to while I am driving, but when I am working on a project, I still stream KUOW, which I started doing while I was living in the Gulf. I love the huge variety of opinions and subjects, and I appreciate that there is more news in the world than what they show on TV, after all, on TV they can only show what they have film footage of. There are books to be discussed, and movies, and music, and social situations in Khandahar and Botswana and Sri Lanka and boy soldiers in Liberia . . . things I haven’t a clue about unless I listen to my national public radio station. I read the paper daily. I watch the news once a day – but it doesn’t meet the depth of coverage of NPR.
I think chickens are pretty cool. They are also pretty stupid, but I am all for a chicken or two, fresh eggs, etc. When I needed fresh eggs in Germany, I just walked up the hill and bought them from the chicken lady. When I asked my landlady about recycling, she just laughed, and we walked our food leftovers, peelings, coffee grounds, etc up the hill and threw them over the fence for the chickens. I don’t even mind roosters. Sorry, Sparkle!
Butler’s Pantry
This room is kind of an LOL; it is called the Butler’s Pantry, but we don’t have a butler. It has a dual wine refrigerator, one held at 47°F for white wine and one at 61°F for red wine. We do have wine in them, but we are not great collectors of wine. The cupboards have come in handy for all the beer and wine glasses we collected during our years of living in Germany. The white wine refrigerator also holds beer, which is tasty in hot hot weather and with Mexican food.
This is a room we are in and out of all the time – on our way to the garden, on our way to the laundry, and on our way out the door to the garage. The photographs are by AdventureMan:
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