International Children’s Day

As I was walking home from the bus stop (trying to get some shopping in before the weather turns foul), I practically collided with a group of children and their teacher. The kids were probably 10 or 11. One of the girls smiled brightly at me and said something in German I didn’t understand. I [...]

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Convenience Food?

In my former life, I worked for a personal chef company, and still chat with their chefs somewhat regularly. A topic came up about convenience food, and what foods they occasionally “cheat” with.
Here in Switzerland, there aren’t all that many pre-packaged convenient foods (at least not the incredible variety that you can find back in [...]

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Coming Home…

We are coming back to our home state for Thanksgiving. We’ll only be here for a week, unfortunately. We’d love to see as many of our friends as possible. Since our travelogue is public, I won’t post the details here. Please send me a note via email if you want to join us for Lunch [...]

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Veteran’s Day

The English-language channels that we receive all come from the UK. So even CNN has a British flourish. For over a month now, newscasters and talk show hosts have been wearing red poppies. I only today found out why.
For today, Remembrance Day, the news was covering a ceremony (I didn’t catch where) that showed [...]

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Halloween Review

Halloween isn’t really celebrated in Switzerland, unfortunately. We carved our pumpkin, roasted the seeds and ate our own candy. Yeah, I got candy instead of the plentiful chocolate! I actually had to go to a special candy shop to find things like caramels and gummy pears, etc. You usually don’t find much candy at the [...]

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Holiday cooking

For all of my life, I’ve spent the holidays at my parents’ house, or in the past few years, my husband’s family’s house. I’ve occasionally contributed a dish, but usually all the cooking is left to someone else. This year we’re going back to Texas for Thanksgiving, but this Christmas is the first big holiday [...]

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Annoyed

So, we live in an apartment building, basically. It is probably about 30 years old or so. The walls are solid concrete, so we never hear the neighbors next to us, and the ones above us. There is one exception – the neighbors below us. It is a famly of four with one child probably [...]

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