A Longing That Lingers

Ther's no way to really put my finger on it, but there are moments in life where I am overcome by longing. I wouldn't call it dissatisfaction, or even sorrow, but more of a sudden urge for things that are utterly out of my grasp.

I remember once when a dear friend spent an evening crying in the bathroom. I let her have her space, but when she was ready, I asked what had led to her misery. Her answer, "I was crying about all the goodbyes I am going to have to make in life." We were not at a point in time where a goodbye was close, but she was suddenly struck by the magnitude of the losses she would experience throughout her life time.

The thing is, I have been wildly blessed. I've managed to circle the globe and make friends in so many places that the sun never sets on the ones I love. But such depth of experience comes with a cost. Regardless of all that modern technology has done to make the world a smaller place, distance still exists, and connections do change.

Yesterday, as I drove over the pass above Newberg, I was struck with a deep ache for the lush green peaks and towering concrete, glass, and steel giants of Hong Kong. The gift of Instagram has allowed me to almost taste the succulence of Hong Kong style French toast, and to keep up with the daily sights of life in the city of life, but I am not there. I can't walk up onto my favorite rooftop and watch the twinkling lights, or go downstairs and curl up with a precious infant. I have to drive for miles to get to work, and the Portland skyline just doesn't have a chance.

Today, on my drive through Dundee, the geraniums around a shop transported me to Cesky Krumlov. The new school year is starting, but I have no lessons to plan, nor can I walk to the grocery store for soft herbal cheese and rohliky.

How does one balance the longing with contentment? It's a challenge, and knowing that I have no option to just set down what I'm doing so I can write another chapter in my travel log is hard on a transient like myself.

At the heart of all this struggle is also a lack of personal connection in my current life. Sure, I interact with people on a daily basis, but it's mostly that surface stuff that I quickly tire of when there is nothing of more substance to be acquired. I guess I'm missing long girly talks with all my roomies of old...

Customer Service FAIL!

When you travel you have to be prepared to come across things you like, and things you don't. Whether it's in your own country or abroad, people have different ways of behaving that might not always be quite up to par with your own thoughts on how things should be. It's something you just have to accept, right? Go with the flow and all of that.

In some cases this is definitely true. When I was first training to teach English in the Czech Republic the leaders constantly harped at us about how important it was to be flexible. It got old, but it was true. It's good to embrace new traditions and ways of looking at the world. Doing so has helped me to improve who I am as a person.

The other day I went shopping and in front of the mall I experienced my first ever pig killing feast. While I obviously don't want to watch a pig being slaughtered every day, this is an age old custom in the Czech Republic, and I can appreciate it as that. The reason pigs are considered good luck is because if you had enough money for a pig, then you were doing very well for yourself. The whole village would come together to celebrate by killing a pig and using every part of it. This was not about cruelty to animals, or being unsanitary. (Note: the EU is trying to ban, or at the very least control, this practice due to "health concerns.") It was about providing food for the people. It is represented in cultural art, and is especially important in the smaller villages. I am flexible enough to handle this, even if it isn't something I want to make a part of my daily (or even yearly) life.

While we watched them clean out the pig, my Mom-in-law, who happens to be a nurse, was describing to me what all the internal organs were. Shockingly enough, I actually understood most of the terms. I do know some Czech! The second two pictures are of our anniversary cake.

So whether you agree with certain cultural practices or not, it is important to at least try to understand them. I'm sure by this point people are starting to wonder about the title to this post, and I promise I'm about to get to it. See, the thing is, there are some things that I have a really hard time accepting. Bad customer service is one of those things. I don't care what country you live in, when you are in a position where you were with customers, being polite should always be at the top of your list.

I could name plenty of instances where this has very much NOT been the case. I'll stick with two for now. Keep in mind, I have had plenty of good experiences with service people as well, and these are extreme cases, so please don't see this as a reason not to visit this incredible country.

The first example took place during the summer of 2010. I think I wrote about it back then, but it's long enough ago that people might not remember ;) It was a hot summer day and I was in desperate need of a drink. In the center of town, prices are always higher because there are a lot of tourists, so I decided to pop into a little potraviny (food store) thinking I could get a decent price. I found a bottle of water for less than a dollar US and I went to pay. The only bill I had was 200KC, which is roughly $10. Not a big deal, right? Wrong. The cashier refused to take the bill. Even when I showed her that I honestly did not have anything smaller, she refused and pulled the bottle of water off the counter. Ridiculous much? I was angry enough to tell her in English that she was terrible, and then walked out never to purchase anything else there again.

Today example number two took place. My husband and I went to buy some nice chocolate for his dad's birthday. We went to the little local store and picked out some expensive chocolate. Keep in mind, we are a married couple. I was dressed in high quality clothes. He was wearing a black coat. One of the nice things in Czech is that people always greet each other in stores. It's all very polite. This was a small store in our local community, but the cashier did not greet us. I paid for the chocolate and she looks at my husband and tells him to empty his pockets. Um, come again? That's right. She treated him like a thief for no reason at all. Goodness, it's a junky grocery store, and we paid for expensive chocolate. What is wrong with people sometimes? The worst bit was that she didn't even seem to feel the least bit sorry for asking him to do that, even though he quickly proved that he didn't steal anything, and pointed out how ridiculous it would be for him to steal a 50 cent candy bar when he was already paying for something much more expensive.

All this to say, there are things that you just have to expect when you travel, but that doesn't mean they will all be pleasant or necessary.

As February Flees...

Another month is whirring by. Soon to be nothing but another list of memories. Thoughts of moments spent and celebrated. So it's time to share a bit more of what has happened this month before the month is totally gone. I bring to you, once more, a visually aided recollection.
Now, I've never really been a fan of Valentine's Day. Not that I haven't enjoyed handing out little cards, or eating chocolates, but the theme or the day has generally been something I found more depressing than uplifting. I can also agree with all the skeptics who say things like, shouldn't we celebrate the ones we love every day, rather than having a particular day set aside for it. But there is something about being in a relationship that shifts my perception on the topic. I still think it's predominately a marketing scheme, but there is really nothing wrong with finding a reason to express love. True, we shouldn't need to be told to do so more on one day of the year than on another, but there's nothing wrong with using the day that has been set aside to remind us that it's important to hold tightly to the ones we love.
This year I really appreciated the opportunity to share the day with someone extra special. There were no chocolates or flowers, but instead acts of thoughtfulness. A conscious effort to remember why we do the things we do, and to express our thankfulness for time spent together. It's easy to get caught up in the day to day of life, and to forget to show deliberate time and care, and having a holiday around as a reminder is helpful. So while Mark and I spent a truly lovely day together, and enjoyed the beauties of God's creation by going for a walk in the snow.



It's really worth taking a closer look at the photo with the snowflakes because you can see the individual flakes and it was really impressive. Usually snow all just molds together quickly, but these flakes maintained their shape and were delightful to see.
As we walked up through the town we were blessedly under the rays of the sun, but were allowed a very impressive view of a black sky as a backdrop for the lovely buildings of Marianske Lazne.


It was all truly lovely. And Mark topped the day off by making me some yummy pasta for lunch as well. Super sweet ;)

I've been enjoying the opportunity to get to know Mark's family a bit better as well. It's challenging because they don't speak English, and my Czech skills are far below what I'd like them to be. But we find our ways to communicate, and one of the ways they've discovered works well is to feed me :) So on the 13th we went out to dinner in a town near where they live. We went to a very interesting restaurant that is situated beneath a hill. The Chodovar Brewery makes beer here, and in earlier days I'm pretty sure the caves were used for some sort of mining operation. As you can see by the sign over the doors the caves have been in existence for a LOOOONG time! We had a nice dinner and I had Svickova, a very popular and famous Czech dish, for the first time. I was only able to make it through about 1 1/2 dumplings because they're so heavy, but the food was quite good. It takes a little imagination to get beyond the fact that you're eating meat with whip cream on top, but it works with the sweetish sauce and the cranberries. In all a very interesting eating experience.

This past weekend Mark and I went with his sister to her house in Germany and once again I had a chance to hang out with his adorable nieces and nephews. The language stretch was a challenge, but I managed to have some little conversations with the girls, and his sister as well. They're quite patient with me, and when I don't understand they find new ways to say things until I can mostly understand and try to respond. By this point, the boys who turned three a couple weeks ago, are used to me coming with Mark, and have lost most of their shyness, so it's a lot of fun. Exhausting, but fun.
So that pretty much sums up my past couple of weekends. The days are really flying by, as I mentioned before, and soon and very soon Mom and Dad will be here. Hopefully I'll have some place to put them and some interesting things for them to see. It will most definitely be interesting :)

An American Breakfast

Few people who know me well would do more than laugh at the thought of me being a cook type person. I'm just not. It's not in my nature. Partly because of perfectionist tendencies. If I've never made something before the probability of a massive FAIL is just to high. We're talking astronomical. There are people who like to say if you can read you can cook. Perhaps there is something to be said for that, but there is also much to be said on the side of, say, natural talent. Not to mention interest.
There was a brief phase in 7th grade when Mom thought it could be...interesting...maybe beneficial, for me to join her on forays in the kitchen. I think it lasted 2 or 3 Friday nights. I mostly remember the time we made pizza from scratch. Did I mention my mom's a wizard in the kitchen? Um, cause she is. And that partly led to the end of these little ventures. You see, it was a whole lot easier for her to make the masterpiece without the meddling little apprentice there to screw the whole thing up. Do you all recall what happened to Mickey when the wizard left him untended for a moment? Yeah. So.
I had to enter the world of domesticity when in Hong Kong. In fact, my first attempt at feeding 15 people involved that same homemade pizza. I told myself over and over that it was true, if you can read, you can cook. I followed Mom's recipe to the best of my abilities. Now, I suppose I should give myself a few honest excuses. Hong Kong and Horse Creek exist in totally alternate realities. There is little comparison between one of the largest, most densely populated cities in the world and Horse Creek, CA population 115 on a good day when all the livestock has had a good breeding season. Hong Kong is located in a tropical climate and is rather ridiculously high on the humidity chart in the middle of summer when this little disaster took place. Horse Creek is located in a mountainous region of Northern California. Through the winter months the sun never shines on the little nook where our house and church nestled up against the mountains. They just aren't the same, and, believe it or not, that causes differences in the ways that cooking happens. There's a reason that there are elevation charts in cook books. All this to say, the crust that was supposed to spread out enough to feed 15 people scarcely covered one and a half pans...
It is true that, in the nearly three years that I lived in Hong Kong my skills got better. I learned how to chop veggies and fruit which led to some truly delightful salads ;) I also mastered the art of vegetarian spaghetti, tacos, French toast, and my mother's biscuits. All rather awe inspiring when you consider the half hour it took me to make 15 minute rice in my Redding apartment because I had to read the instructions so many times. Add rice to bottom of pot. Add twice as much water. Add a little salt. Boil. Keep boiling. Boil some more. When water is gone you're done. Tough people. Seriously tough. (And I'm pretty sure Jessie is still laughing at me 8 years later! Ha!)
Since leaving Hong Kong I've not done much to develop my culinary skills. I became the master of cheese, crackers, and those famous chopped veggies. Not to mention my mean Asian noodle boiling skills. Wild. Simply wild.
Those who've been following my blog for some time know that this summer my family took it upon themselves to improve my domestic qualities. There was a blackberry pie, orange and cinnamon rolls, and numerous dinner helping occasions. Funny how a man comes into your life and suddenly you're expected to be a woman of all things. I mean, I'd always managed to skip out of the womanly duties at family events. Granted, I can clean with the best of them. See, cleaning you can't really screw up. Water, soap, and elbow grease. These are things I can understand. I mean, I was a maid for several summers. (Two to be exact, with an extra month thrown in for bad measure just to remind me that it's a job I'll not likely do again unless the recession means that it's a choice between that, cleaning grease vats, or cleaning out the sewer.) But enough of the asides. I was thrown into the oven, and came out lightly browned on top...well, not exactly.
Basically, after the summer of preparations I came back and haven't done a whole lot with these recently brushed up skills. Sure, I've cooked for Mark a few times, but not enough to really make it look like I've at long last become the cook type person that my mother may of dreamed that I could be. Instead, we've eaten out a lot, or had my now famous open-faced sandwiches (shades of Great Harvest).
This week, however, I've had a little extra time. You see, last week my colleague decided that it was perfectly all right for him to ditch out on a week of school. Yes, that's right. Just two weeks after our Christmas holiday he took off for a week to ski in the Alps with a couple of students. Now, perhaps this would be all right at a normal school. You know, one in which there are a full staff of teachers who can wiggle their schedules around and fill in a class or two here and there. But at are school there are 3 full time teachers. That's right, 3! So when one of those is missing that means the other two of us have a LOT of slack to pick up. We even had to call in some extra help, which is scarcely heard of in a country where they don't have substitute teacher hot lines. (One more side note: I have to confess that it's nearly impossible to help students figured out compound nouns. The truth of the matter is, were it not for spell check I'd constantly make errors. Sure, I know that fire engine has to be two separate words, but fire man and fireman both look perfectly all right to me. The only way I know that it really is just one word absolutely for certain is the fact that when I type in fireman there is no squiggly line underneath it, unlike when I just typed in hotline as one word and there was one. End Side note.)
So this week Jonathan has to fill in some extra morning hours for me. That meant time for my mind to think again on the culinary arts. The result? I made mint chocolate chip cookies for Mark on Monday. Well, I mixed up the dough Monday afternoon and then cooked them up Tuesday morning so they'd be ready in the afternoon when I went to see him in his town. They turned out fabulous this time. Quite a relief after the disaster cookies I tried to make my students last year. Those ones ended up puddles. Seriously, it was not a pretty picture. I ended up shoving the rest of that dough into a pie pan and trying to convince them that it was now a bar cookie and they really should give it a try. Ugh! But this time they came out beautifully. Sadly I didn't get a picture, but I saved some of the dough and plan to cook up some more so we can have fresh hot ones with our team time tonight so maybe I'll snap a picture of those.
After this baking high note, I felt prepared for the next step. You see, unbeknownst to me my colleagues decided that today, Wednesday the 27th of January, would make a lovely day for a ski trip. I. Don't. Ski. Period. Yeah, I tried it. Once. Last year. And it's going to stay at once thank you very much. So they decided, again this was ALL done without me, that I could do something with the students who weren't interested in skiing. They'd offered up swimming. Um. It's January people! And I don't really swim either. Allergic to chlorine, remember? But at least it sounded a bit better than skiing.
I, on the other hand, thought up an alternate activity. So on Friday, when trying to sell the idea of watching a movie with me and being nice and warm, rather than freezing cold (consequently today is the coldest day of the year so far. Jarmila informed me it was -20 C on her farm this morning. That's cold. We're talking snot freezing cold.) I added that I would also take them to my house for the movie, and would serve an American breakfast. (So I accidentally just wrote sever instead of serve. Good thing I caught it since spell check would have been okie dokie with that little slip up.)
Now I didn't win over the whole crowd, but once the words had come out of my mouth, those who didn't want to ski sunk their claws into them and I was stuck in the promise. And so, today, I pulled out my mom's award winning biscuit recipe. Okay, so she never actually entered her biscuits into a county fair, but she could have. These biscuits are the reason I didn't starve as a child at potlucks. To say that I was picky as a child would be the understatement of the new millennium. Many apologies to all the people whose homes I entered only to turn my nose up at their gracious edible offerings. I think sometimes I was the bane of my parents existence at social calls. Here people invited the pastor and his family over to dinner only to have their adorable little girl turn into a demon at the table. At least I never threw up at other peoples' houses...
Anywho...I was an olive on every finger, deviled egg, and jello eater at potlucks. Good for the figure I suppose, but when you're 5 no one really thinks about that. They're more concerned that you aren't getting your four food groups. Thankfully Mom's biscuits always came to the rescue. She'd usually slip out of church just as we were all singing "Bless be the tie that binds..." and hurry to the house to throw the biscuits in the oven. She'd bring them down, piping hot, and be rushed by the frenzy. There were never any left over. Truth be told, they seldom even made it to the food table. People rushed to get at them and devour every last golden morsel. They were rather like the manna that rained down from Heaven. At least the first few days when the Israelites were still being thankful. Truly a blessing.
So I pulled out the recipe this morning, as I said before, and set about making these show stopping favorites. I mixed up the dough and then had to go to school to pick up my students. I didn't want to cook them in advance, since fresh is DEFINITELY the way to go. I rushed through the cold, watching my breath turn my hair gray as it froze immediately, after leaving my biscuit dough in the closet which is substantially colder than the rest of our flat.
I collected a grand total of three students. Honestly, that was the sort of number I was hoping for. My house isn't exactly designed for crowds. We headed back to my house with a disappointing stop at the not yet open video store. I had three L1s in tow, that means three people who really don't speak English. They're getting a lot better, but for the most part I had to scrape together what I know of Czech to follow what they were saying as we walked. Not that it was all that hard. I'm sure most people who speak English and not Czech would be able to figure out that "autobus" and "taxi" relate to modes of transport other than feet. Clearly the ten minute walk was not to their liking in this Antarctic climate. But we did make it, and I made them fruit tea to warm them up while the biscuits were cooking. The closet did it's work and kept it from turning into a fluffy monster whilst I was away. Twenty or so minutes later I had them seated at my table with a glorious spread.




Delightful!
Mom's biscuits did it yet again. They all sang the praises, and I knew it was the excellent recipe and not any ability of mine that could have pulled it off. We then watched Twilight which one of my other students had brought to me a couple months ago, because it was the only DVD I had with Czech subtitles. They seemed to enjoy that as well, so it all worked out.
American Breakfast.
Success!