timballo!

Guess what? I made THIS last week. Why? Possibly because I’m insane. No but really, most stunt-food freaks me out and I’m pretty sure there’s a Vast Conspiracy of Everyone to pretend that stuff is food when it clearly is not, just to get me to eat crazy shit so they can point and laugh at me. See for instance squid, snails, and tofu. Oh, and cuy, which is eaten in Ecuador and is apparently roasted guinea pig, and which – yo.

1. Pets are not for eating.
2. Rodents are not for eating.
3. That is all.

Also? Sushi. WTF, y’all.

BUT I DIGRESS. This… timballo… thing, had only ingredients that I consider to be actual food, plus it had the key advantage of being something you bake in a bowl and then flip upside down onto a plate and shout “Ta-DA!” I always like to shout when I present food to people (though usually it’s something more like “Look out!”). Also, even in the fancy recipe picture, it looks like a brain. I could only assume that my version would be even brainier. 

packing elicits awkward emotions

When did I start packing? (quick check of the blog) Oh look, I wrote an entry about it in late September. The password for that one is ‘boxes’, btw. So you’ll be very impressed to know that I have managed a total of 7 boxes. Well, maybe more like 10 if you choose to look at it a certain way, but really, my box-a-day resolution is looking more like a box a month.

More Marrakesh adventures!

On the third day we found a pharmacy for Fiona’s cold. I mean, we found lots of pharmacies on the day before, but they were all closed because it was a holiday. A holiday for pharmacists? We wondered, because everything else was open. Later people told us it was Muhammad’s birthday, which I would suppose is a big deal for more than just the pharmacists, but that’s just a guess.

Heidebert! Er, Heiderberp! No wait, Heidelberg!

So we drove south for a lot of hours (okay, 4) and checked into a hotel that used to be a brewery and had dinner with a colleague/friend of DrBob’s, and also the c/f’s adorable wife, and that was fun. We found a really cool coffee shop, with books! We watched half of the Super Bowl, but you know, kickoff is at midnight-thirty here in Central Europe, and we had to be chipper in the morning. And on Monday I met with the Dual Career Service lady for a sort of introductory interview and we talked about what sort of things I could do, what I’d like to do, and what I can reasonably expect, and then we rented bicycles from the hotel and pedaled around the city checking out neighborhoods in case we might want to move there! Though for some reason everyone seems to want us to move to Mannheim, which is weird. Anyway, dinner was Indian takeout from right down the street and then a sauna visit  (srsly, I loved that hotel!) and then a televised soccer game of Angst and Frustration. Then on Tuesday DrBob has his negotiations which I will not talk about, and then we met with another colleague/friend and drove home to a very anxious cat. All in all a good trip, and I should be tired now, but no. Drat it.

I didn’t take any pictures of Heidelberg because it’s February and the light sucks, but there are quite a few of them in the video for today’s song du jour of the day: Ich hab mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren, by Heino. Um, maybe hit the mute button before you click that link, unless you feel like marching around your room a bit. We saw an interview with him on TV, he is… um. Er. Well.

I went to Marrakesh with a crappy celephone camera

Fiona took better pictures and I told her that I planned to gank them all and she said okey-dokey, so, um, some of these shots may turn out to be hers. I suck at attributing, so if you’re curious, just ask.

So anyway! We flew to Marrakesh last week and a nice (but nefarious) taxi driver picked us up and drove us to the closest point you can get to Riad Slawi (link: beware of embedded music) with a car, which is not actually all that close (and then he tried to get us to pay for the ride when we knew the riad (what’s a riad?) had already paid him, hence the nefariousness), but a young man met us there and threw our bags is this wagon-y thing and led us through many windy walkways and tiled squares past a skillion decorative doorways and tiny shops to our place of rest. I got completely turned around. 

Post pending

I’m back! And it was pretty fun, and I took lots of notes and kept ticket stubs and took pictures and I’ll blog it all over the next few days but agh, it takes a long time to upload and crop and enhance all these pictures, even without my laptop and my mobile phone apparently not being on speaking terms. But I’m working on it! And there will be blogging, soon! Here’s a comfy place to sit while you wait.

 

Song du jour of the day: Africa, by Toto!