On patrol.

For the last three weeks we’ve been under attack.

I first noticed it around two weeks ago, when I put A outside in the yard, only to hear him start barking furiously. As the doorbell hadn’t rung, and our neighbor children (who wake me each morning screaming bloody murder) were unusually silent, I couldn’t see any reason for all of the noise.  He kept barking, the sound echoing around our garden walls.

I looked out the window and saw A running around the yard, barking up into empty space. What is that idiot on about, I thought, and went back to whatever it was that I was doing (read: wasting time on the internet.) But he kept barking, his tone growing, to a loving ear, ever more frenzied, even panicked. So I went back downstairs.

When I came outside, I saw A being closely pursued by two medium-sized brown birds, both doing their best Red Baron impression. A was doing his best Tippi Hendren.

The ultimate culprit, as I quickly remembered from a childhood of seeing my father attacked rescuing countless of the same, was a baby bird. A fat little thing perched unsteadily above us while his parents defended him to the death below.

Fatty.

The birds, A and I developed an uneasy truce, where I would head out first to see if we had any unwelcome guests of the avian variety. Only then would I allow A to roam unfettered.

The cease-fire continued until yesterday, Mother’s Day. I woke up at A’s normal 5:45 of dear-God-why-don’t-dogs-understand-weekends, and I stumbled blearily out into the misty morning.

We were promptly attacked by a shrieking mother bird, and I discovered, to my horror, the fat little baby in the center of our lawn. A, happily ran in his direction, looking as if he would finally fulfill all of his wild-game fantasies with one snap of his jaws.

Luckily for the baby bird, A’s lupine genes are recessive and his scaredy-cat genes dominant, so he skidded to a stop about a foot from the baby bird, cocked his head, and proceeded to bark. I hurled myself at him, dragging him back in the house.

When I came back out, the baby bird was still in the center of the yard, eyes unblinking, tiny chest still.

I felt my own heart lurch, chest go tight. The mother bird hopped nervously on the garden wall above, making a sad, low keening. There is something about the fragility of baby creatures that makes their death or injury all the more terrible, and the tiny feathered body looked very small in the center of our garden, and very, very dead.

I did the worst thing I could have done. I went back in the house, closed the door, and I googled. To be specific, I googled: “How do you tell if a baby bird is dead” and “bird first aid” and “bird not moving” and “do birds play dead” (spoiler alert: they do).

I don’t know why I turn to the internet in any crisis. The internet in a crisis is the worst hive mentality of doomsday scenarios. Every headache is brain cancer, every stomachache, intestinal worms, and every rash, flesh-eating bacteria.

So the internet told me that the baby bird was dead, and that I had killed it. All this before 6:30 am.

When I came out, half an hour later, determined to save the bird or bury it, it was gone.

A few hours later, digging in the garden, A complaining from inside the house, I saw the mother bird fly down into the center of the lawn, and after her, slow and unsteady, the baby. She looked at me, covered in mud, spade paused above the dirt, and she turned back towards the baby – carefully watching over him in a world full of teeth and claws, slowly nudging him towards flight.

Thanks, to my mother, for doing the same.

More worms, Ma!

View of Kraków.

To conclude the limited summary of our trip to Poland, here are (in no particular order) some street views of people, places and things.

Someone had a birthday on our trip. Luckily, it was easy to find a Happy Birthday music box. Or Stairway to Heaven.

M's sister demonstrating the excitement that is snow.

Speaking of ridiculous. I really wore this. It was cold, ok?

City center, Kraków.

Kraków’s main square is world famous, and we spent a lot of time in that area, visiting museums and historic buildings, cafe-ing, and of course, eating.

Church near the main square.

I'm not sure? But it happened on the main square.

Bookstore off the square. Of course, I had to buy something.

Antique store near our rental apartment.

We visited Wawel, the large castle compound on the hill overlooking Kraków. Wawel is complete with a castle, a cathedral, and its very own dragon. The Wawel Dragon legend (as told to me by M, with editorial help from his sister) is that for years, a dragon lived under Wawel. Eventually however, his daily dragon activities – lighting fires, terrorizing villagers, eating lifestock – became troublesome, and the king, as happens in all legends and fairy tales, promised that whoever slew the dragon could marry his beautiful daughter. All the usual handsome knights tried to kill the dragon, but perished. Luckily for the kingdom (and the legend) a clever shepherd knew what to do.* He brought the dragon a dead sheep stuffed with hot spices. The dragon gobbled down the sheep, but the hot spices were too much for him, and he became very thirsty. The dragon drank from the local Vistula river, drinking and drinking and drinking until he exploded. Thus the humble shepherd slew the dragon, saved the kingdom, and won the hand of the fair maiden.

My favorite part of Wawel, due to my penchant for old churches, was Wawel Cathedral, where many famous Poles are buried. The cathedral itself dates from the 16th century, but as time went on, many different individuals were interred in chapels that were built out from the central cathedral – each with a slightly different style.

Different strokes for different folks.

Wrocław, M’s birthplace, was not without its charms, and boasted the usual churches, cobblestone streets, and picturesque views.

Another view of the "padlock" bridge in Wrocław.

Post WWII Wrocław.

Restored.

Breathing water, not fire. Dragon downspout at Wrocław's Cathedral.

Indoor market in Wrocław.

Godzilla.

Ah, Poland, you were over too fast. Before I knew it, I had left the cobblestone for the traffic of Tegucigalpa. But I know that M and I will be back to Poland frequently in the future, and there is much castle-ing and cafe-ing and cobblestone-ing ahead of us!

*Upon reviewing my retelling of the Wawel Dragon legend, M has requested that I note that the legend is very typically Polish, in that it isn’t the most handsome or strongest knight that gets the girl. Instead, intelligence is what wins out. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on M’s profession (engineering) and his fondness for Polish legends.

]]> http://wearealivemom.com/2012/04/25/poland-street-views/feed/ 4 wearealivemom IMG_3450 IMG_3434 IMG_3422 IMG_3419 IMG_3387 IMG_3487 IMG_3359 IMG_3432 IMG_3505 IMG_3454 IMG_3517 IMG_3537 IMG_3538 IMG_3536 IMG_3515 photo http://wearealivemom.com/2012/04/23/green-thumb-update/ http://wearealivemom.com/2012/04/23/green-thumb-update/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:08:39 +0000 K http://wearealivemom.com/?p=1484 ]]> I interrupt my fond recollections of Poland, which I shall return to (I have at least another post planned), for a breaking news update on the garden front.

For my recent birthday, I received a gift card to Amazon from my parents. I used it to buy the rumored best of garden accessories, EarthBoxes!  I’m hoping for a box for tomatoes, a box for spinach and arugula, and a box for a variety of herbs.

Earthboxes have arrived!

Since I have your attention on the gardening topic – or at least, my mother’s attention, as I know my updates on gardening kindle the faint hope that the childhood hours I spent digging weeds did something to shape my character – here is an update on how our garden is progressing.

Our mangos have become tennis ball-sized.

Tennis ball sized mangoes.

Which has led to some confusion in our family.

He thinks we have a tree growing tennis balls just for him.

A really, really big tree full of tennis balls.

This is where I make a confession. Remember our previous confusion about the mango tree? Well, there were a couple of months when we didn’t think we had a mango tree. So we planted one. Oops. Now, we actually have two mango trees. Our second tree has managed to produce only one mango, the effort of which tipped over the poor little tree. Not to worry, M, our in-house engineer, was on the case.

Classy.

So far, our herb garden is doing well, and has managed to produce several batches of homemade pesto, and a lot of strawberries. I have successfully eaten one strawberry. The rest have been sneakily consumed by neighborhood birds.  But those birds better not touch my proudest garden product: our bananas.

Growing bananas. Big batch on top and smaller batch on the bottom.

So there you have it! More updates to come as  plant our EarthBoxes, battle the birds and A frolics with his mango-flavored tennis balls.

Or is it?

But if you look closer, you see something unusual along the railings of the bridge.

Padlocks - everywhere!

After their wedding, newly married couples walk across the bridge, and lock a padlock engraved with their initials and wedding date onto the railings. They then throw the key to the padlock into the river below. I’m not exactly sure if I find that to be an optimistic view of the institution of marriage, but it certainly makes for interesting urban art.

Not our names.

The epic Poland trek 2012. It was cold. And yes, I bought that hat there.

It has been a little over a week since I returned from Poland, and I think that I have almost recovered. Not from the  seventeen hours of flying time, or the culture shock of going from the tropical chaos of Honduras to the well-ordered winter of Eastern Europe, but from the excesses. In my eight days there, we did everything. More importantly, we ate everything.

We visited old churches, museums, festivals, and jazz clubs, rode on trains (twice!), visited H&M (thrice!), walked around cobblestone streets day and night (a luxury that does not exist for us in Honduras) drank our weight in mulled wine, and ate our weight in a variety of Polish delicacies.

Seriously discussing what we just ate, and what we were planning on eating later.

We spent most of our time in Kraków, with a few days at the beginning and the end of our trip in Wrocław visiting with M’s grandparents, where, embarrassingly enough, we ate even more.

In Kraków, there was a huge Easter market in the Rynek, which is the main square in the old city. From morning ’till night there were small wooden booths selling traditional foods. This went on for the whole week, and I won’t even tell you how many times we ate there. The deliciousness of the food was heightened by eating at outdoor picnic benches in weather that could best be described as “blustery” – the perfect fried mushroom and kielbasa weather.

View of the outdoor market.

Baskets of farmer's cheeses, eaten grilled and served with jam.

Jams!

Traditional dried flowers. We didn't eat these.

Kielbasa!

Gofry - waffles with whipped cream and fruit.

Vats of mushrooms, fried potatoes, and bigos - a hunter's stew of game, poultry, sausage and cabbage.

When we weren’t eating at the outdoor market – or traditional foods of similar types in restaurants around the Rynek, placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes), pierogi (polish dumplings), nalesniki (polish crepes), and grzaniec galicyjsk (hot mulled wine with spices), we were visiting coffee shops, cafes, and wine bars.

Wine bar near our apartment.

Detoxing at a vegetarian cafe after all that meat. Featured are M's little sister, brother, and brother's girlfriend.

M, people watching at our favorite cafe.

What about dessert, might you ask? I can assure you that I left no rose-filled pączeki behind. Even though my arteries are probably still gummy with the consequences, I’d absolutely go through another seventeen hours worth of flying for just one more. Oh pączki, why must you be so far away?

I've got my eye on you, pączki.

Even more.

We even went to Wedel’s, a famous “chocolate lounge.“  The capstone of our excesses? Most definitely.

Big chocolate decisions.

Move over, Swiss Miss.

]]> http://wearealivemom.com/2012/04/17/poland-the-things-that-we-ate/feed/ 3 wearealivemom IMG_3392 IMG_3405 IMG_3357 IMG_3386 IMG_3384 IMG_3382 IMG_3379 IMG_3381 IMG_3380 IMG_3425 IMG_3367 IMG_3471 IMG_3470 IMG_3361 IMG_3396 IMG_3416 http://wearealivemom.com/2012/03/24/things-that-have-happened-while-i-wasnt-blogging/ http://wearealivemom.com/2012/03/24/things-that-have-happened-while-i-wasnt-blogging/#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:18:40 +0000 K http://wearealivemom.com/?p=1430 ]]> Ooof. No sooner do I pledge to frequently blog then I break that pledge. As an apology, here are a few things that have happened in the last two months.

Yes, that's who you think it is.

1) The Vice President visited. He had a small get-together for all the employees here, and was incredibly gracious and funny, even inviting all the little kids up on the stage with him. This is one of the few pictures that I (or M, I’m not sure who took it) was able to get, because every other picture has everyone holding up their camera or smartphone.

Someone went swimming in Yojoa.

Street in Yuscarán.

2) We’ve been taking more short weekend trips to areas around Tegucigalpa, and spent a weekend at Lago de Yojoa, as well as day trips to Yuscarán, Santa Lucia, and Valle de Ángeles. Post on these locations coming soon!

Banana tree!

And mangoes!

3) Our garden has become a moderate success, with our lime tree, mango tree, herb garden and banana tree all coming to fruition (puns!).  We’re now heading in to the burning and dry season for the next two months, and mango season should come around June, so we’ll see how things turn out.

I let him drive me around town.

4) We (or I should say I- as I don’t think M found it that difficult) have become more comfortable driving around Teguc. Even though I’ve driven in quite a few U.S. cities, Honduran driving is an entirely different experience. Think less “rules-of-the-road” and more “Grand Theft Auto.”

Not Honduras.

5) M and I are shortly heading to Poland to visit his grandparents, and I hope to do one, if not several, posts about the trip. We’ll be staying mostly in Kraków and Wrocław, and gorging ourselves on cold weather, cobblestone streets, and Polish delicacies. My trip will be around 17 hours flying time from Tegucigalpa, and I can’t imagine a stranger transition. I only hope that don’t stagger off the airplane to greet his grandparents in Spanish…

Hungry.

M and I have only been in country (see how I’m picking up the lingo) since October, but we’ve already had the opportunity to get to know some about Honduran cuisine. In fact, my first day at work I ate what could be considered the national street food, the baleada. Baleada is a tortilla filled with beans and cheese and usually bits of scrambled egg (although different varieties are sold).   The name also translates to English as “shot,” with two competing folk stories as to the origin of the name. The first, that the little beans look like bullets that are shot into the tortilla, the second being that the street vendor who made the baleadas famous was shot in the leg while selling them. You can choose what folk tale you’d like to accompany your breakfast.

Anafre, another famous dish, is a mixture of cheese, beans and chorizo. The mixture is heated in a clay pot with a heating element underneath to ensure you have maximum melt-y cheese and hot beans at all times. You usually eat it with fried tortilla strips or fresh corn tortillas.

Anafre with beans, cheese and chorizo.

Typical plate with beans, cheese, salsa, chorizo, steak, rice and avocado.

Plato típico is a dish that you can order at most traditional Honduran restaurants. Roughly translating to “traditional” or “typical” plate, it is a dish that usually comes with a grilled meat, rice, beans, some type of fresh salad, and avocado.

Another typical food you can find at most restaurants, even the ones that don’t specialize in Honduran food, are juegos o bebidas naturales (natural fruit juices). Some of the most popular are piña (pineapple), fresa (strawberry), limonada o limón (lime or lemonade), and maracuyá (passionfruit – more on this particular delicacy later). Almost all restaurants make their juices with a blend of filtered water, fruit juice and sugar (sometimes), so they are safe to drink for gringo and gringa stomachs.

Sandía (watermelon) juice.

Soups are very central to Honduran cuisine. So far I’ve eaten chicken soup, beef soup, tortilla soup, a cheese and corn dumpling soup, seafood soup, and the crème de la crème of Honduran soups, sopa de caracol.  I have yet to try the legendary mondongo soup (intestine soup).

Cheese and corn dumpling soup.

But the best soup of them all is sopa de caracol, a conch soup made with yucca, cilantro, conch, coconut milk, green plantains and spices that taste a bit like a mild West Indian curry. Looks like I’ve found a favorite lunch for the next two years!

Conch soup!

The very large tree at issue.

Over a recent vacation to visit family, I showed my Mom a picture of our yard. She looked at the picture casually and said “Wow, you guys are going to have a lot of mangoes.” I responded with confusion and she gestured at the picture.

“That tree, the big one, is a mango tree.”

Because she is my mother, I refused to believe her.

Fast forward to this week, when I finally broke down and realized that our garden was too much for my limited time and even more limited gardening skills. So, I hired a gardener. He was a charming older man, who it turns out, worked as the gardener for a previous tenant, and was now happy to restore our garden to its former glory.  Walking around the yard, he commented on various plants, what to add, what to take out, how much sun, how much shade. He stopped and stood by the huge tree, considering it.

“Mucho mango,” he said, pointing up at the tree.

Good eye, Mom.

The infamous Swisher Sweets of my youth. Available in any and all gas stations in the U.S.

When I turned 18, I smoked my first cigar. (I’m sorry, Mom!) I vaguely remember going to a gas station somewhere, proudly showing my ID, and buying a cigar in a shiny red and white package. I remember much more clearly smoking that cigar. For lack of a better description, it was awful. The wrapper tasted oddly of sugar and the filler had not-too-subtle notes of tar, gasoline and black lung. I choked back the bile and sadly realized that yet another previously forbidden marker of adulthood was a disappointment.

As this was my first introduction to cigars, I understandably avoided them religiously for the next ten or so years. But after our first weeks in Tegucigalpa, we heard that a small group was going to visit a local cigar factory. We didn’t have our vehicle yet (it was somewhere in the purgatory of customs clearance), so any excursion was a welcome one. Honduras is known for fine cigars, and this would be an opportunity to learn more about them, and decide after all these years if cigars do have any redeeming value.

Much like a vineyard, both the Swisher Sweets grade cigars (awful) and the Rocky Patel Decade (apparently delicious) come from the same factory. The lower quality tobacco is simply used to make the Swisher Sweets, while the fine cigars are made with higher-quality tobacco, and a more refined manufacturing process.

A few observations about the factory. Yes, it did feel very strange to be in a room with hundreds of people rolling cigars. Also, all of the boss men and women, the overseers on the floor, were smoking cigars. This did make them look tougher, and gave everything a kind of colonial air. The workers did not each have their own cigars, but would sometimes share a cigar among a couple of rollers. There wasn’t any smoking in the drying, sorting or premium rolling rooms. The whole factory smelled very strongly of ammonia (and cigar smoke, obviously), and although it wasn’t unpleasant, you didn’t notice how oppressive it was until you got outside in the fresh air.

Sorting the leaves.

Also sorting, I think?

Rinsing the leaves? Also, this guy makes the cigar process look 100% more authentic with that hat.

Tobacco leaves.

Packaging the Swisher Sweets.

This machine tests the airflow through the cigars. After each cigar is rolled it is quality tested.

The premium room. Women were the rollers here because they are said to have a more delicate touch.

Another view of the premium room. I didn't capture it in this picture, sadly, but all of the women were wearing sky-high heels.

Butts!

Rolling room.

Side view of the rolling room.

An option of our tour was to have a set of custom-rolled cigars made for us. After coffee, our guide conferred briefly with the floor supervisors (all three smoking cigars, of course), and they laid out a variety of choices.

M ponders the selection. Our guide is the lady in pink.

We had to choose our filler, binder and wrapper.

I had no idea what I was doing, so I had one of the supervisors help me choose. Remembering my first experience, I just kept saying “suave, suave” (smooth), and although I have yet to smoke one, M reports that with some bourbon, they aren’t bad. (I know, he’s really taking up the expat lifestyle.)

Watching the custom-blend cigar rolling.

Home sweet home.

First, an apology. At some point in the late spring/early summer of last year, I stopped blogging. I had a lot of excuses for why I shouldn’t blog: I was in language classes, there were no new adventures, I had nothing to write about, I was tired of blogging, we had so much to do to get ready to go abroad, wah wah et al, ad nauseum.

The reality was, I didn’t want to sit down and think about why I was now uncomfortable with blogging. This blog was originally a travel journal, and although the inherently public nature of the internet made it viewable by anyone, my readers were friends, family, and the occasional traveler who was headed to some of the sites that M and I had just visited.

Then I got a new job. A job that involves, at its essence, representing the United States government abroad. My blog was linked to, and I got new readers, and these readers weren’t just friends and family, they were co-workers, and people who were now curious about my choice of profession and wanted to learn more about it.

So I got a little bit of stage fright, and I stopped blogging. I considered make the blog password protected, and giving the password out to family and close friends – taking the blog back to what it was before. But, you see, I’ve benefited immensely from internet crowd-sourcing in the past. I’ve used food blogs for recipes, travel blogs for itineraries, and even blogs from my colleagues when I was still waiting to hear if I would get the job or not. So locking up my blog seemed to go against the whole spirit of the blogging enterprise. I could delete it, but I knew that without the blog around, I wouldn’t be able to share M and I’s travels the same way – not with my friends, my family, nor even with my colleagues who I now consider friends.

I did the mature thing, and postponed the decision. Suddenly, it was half a year later, and I was talking to my mother on the phone. I was trying to describe for her the view from our house in Tegucigalpa, that right next to an aging Coca-Cola sign, there is a giant statue of Jesus with his arms outstretched, and how those two images together say a lot about Honduras, and Central America, and the whole tangled experience of commerce and conquest.

There was static on the line, and I could tell that I wasn’t describing it accurately, and I was suddenly very sad that I was living far away from friends and family and not sharing the experience with them because of my self-indulgent stage fright.

After that, it was an easy decision to restart the blog, with a few caveats:

• I’m not going to talk about my job in anything but the most general terms. I’m mainly doing that because, to be honest, I spend more time working, dealing with work, thinking about work, talking about work than anything else. When you are living abroad because of your job, and in government provided housing, you live your job all day, every day, even when you aren’t on the clock. Writing about this experience outside of the lens of work will make it more enjoyable (and less boring!) for me as a writer, and hopefully to you, my readers.

• Also, I don’t want my opinion to ever be confused with the “official” opinion of my government. While I have opinions (and do I!) I’d never presume to speak for anyone but myself (and M, when I’d like to irritate him). That’s a tricky line to walk, but I hope to do it by remaining true to the blog’s original intention: travel, adventures, and food.  That isn’t to say that I won’t mention local politics or events from time to time, because they do impact our daily life and how we experience the country. Just know that Uncle Sam didn’t clear my opinion, and I am not speaking on his behalf.

And that’s that! More adventures to come, and a regular updating schedule, so stay tuned!