The Good Life

As mentioned previously, I am duty officer for the week, which doesn’t mean too much other than that I need to be reachable by cell phone at all times. Therefore, no hash or hike this weekend. Of course, Stephanie and I made the most of our down time and had a great weekend.

I should start by mentioning that our new cleaning lady started on Thursday. She’ll come once a week and I think that will help tremendously. It’s a big house and with both of us working full time, cleaning is the last thing we want to do with time off.

On Saturday, we made our first foray to the Morning Star Café – which has a pretty good brunch menu. While enjoying my bacon and biscuits with gravy, we ran into the Ambassador as well as some of my friends from other embassies. From there we did some shopping around town. We looked all over for some potted plants for the house, but they are really hard to find. We had a tip that they could be found at the Green Bazaar, but that didn’t pan out. When we finally found some they were ridiculously expensive – around $30 for a small one – so we decided to wait. On the way home, I stopped by the local fast food joint – Southern Fried Chicken. Before you cringe, I would like to say that walking into that place was the closest I’ve felt to being ‘home’ since we left. Kind of sad, I know, but there’s something about the smell of hot greasy food that just takes me back to the good ole U.S. of A. The chicken was pretty good too, so it’s nice to know where to go when I need a fix.

Later that night we had an adventure trying to find a European classical music concert. We thought it was on the other end of town, so we drove down and then looked all over trying to find the Cultural Center, which is in the middle of a group of tiny side streets. When we found it, we parked nearby and had a quick dinner of sambusas (meat pastries) and cherry compote before heading back over only to find out the concert was at the opera house, back uptown. Fortunately, with the car we were able to make it just in time.

The opera house is beautiful inside. I didn’t know we were going there or I would have taken the camera. The concert was quite good – as the speaker put it in Russian – a journey of classical music through time and across Europe. It started with Handel, Bach, and Mozart and continued up through more modern composers who I wasn’t familiar with. No major incidents except at one point, what sounded like an extremely loud alarm went off and I thought the end of the world was nigh. And of course, the family in front of us managed to seat their hyperactive 6 year old son in the squeakiest chair in the entire auditorium, which he used to good effect. Despite these minor annoyances, we had a great time. I did think it was funny though, when at the end of the concert we got stuck trying to get out of our aisle because these three young men refused to step out into the crowd of exiting people. Considering the propensity of the people here to boldly and unflinchingly walk out into speeding, heavy traffic, it was almost comic that they didn’t seem to want to step in front of slowly moving old people.

Sunday was a nice lazy day for a chance. Washed the car, relaxed, etc. Brunch, fried chicken, classical music, and lazy Sundays… what can I say? Life is pretty good.