Manic Bookstore Cafe

Recently I spent the day in the kitchen, putting together a dinner for my husband's colleagues. We had just returned from Poland, and I was happy to be back in my big Ohio kitchen with its warm orange walls and smooth black concrete countertops. We love to entertain, and yet between the complications of daily life, unfamiliar ingredients, and minimal kitchen gear we had actually not had anyone over at all during our months in Warsaw. So there I was, and once I got started I went a little crazy. I remembered a fantastic, elegant dinner last summer at my friend Bruce's in Swarthmore when he served a Tuna-Lemon-Oregano mousse. I was also remembering Warsaw, and the wonderful evening our friend Gabrielle put together -- wine, warm conversation, and flatbreads with cheese and asparagus spears, among other dishes, including cucumber rounds with mackerel filling... As we wended our way back to the States we had shared a meal with friends in Copenhagen, who had put spring roll fixin...

One of the new experiences I had as a Fulbright scholar in Poland was to join a Facebook community. I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually join Facebook. My daughter is a teenager, and I had dragged her across the world, far from her friends and family. I am fortunate that she agrees to my monitoring her FB activity (also known as being her "friend"), and I enjoyed the terrific pictures and funny notes she posted about our life in Poland and our travels in Europe. But the first reason I made a Facebook page was to be able to join the "Polish Fulbrighters" Facebook group. I was able to use it to get help before I even arrived in Poland with my family, but the truly fascinating aspect of the group was sharing our experiences during our time abroad. One highlight was the Fulbrighter who posted an article about a Catholic school in southern Poland where the administration had been censured for their rite-of-passage ritual. (It involved licking whipped ...

As my Fulbright stint in Poland was coming to an end, I blogged more and more frequently -- seemed like I had a lot of experiences I wanted to process, thoughts worth recording, ideas I wanted to share. Then we left and went on a 6-day bike ride from Brussels to the North Sea. And I have to admit that 1) staying off the computer for that week, and most of the following week, was incredibly refreshing and 2) the green Belgian landscape, and the beer we quaffed not once but twice a day as we cycled through it, has erased much of what was on my mind as I left Warsaw. Photo from behind, taken by my fabulous daughter. Which I have to assume is a good thing. Fulbright will take some time to process -- I was in mourning the night we left Europe, and I still wish I didn't have to drive around the U.S. in an automobile -- but the benefits of landscape on memory may last a lifetime as well. Belgium at 17-22 kilometers an hour (these were bikes built for comfort, not for speed!) ...