We continue to stumble across minor and major reminders of the explosion which blew up part of our home last April. The acid vapor cloud penetrated into the far reaches of the house in an intriguingly random pattern, so elusive that we still find evidence of damage here and there after all these months. Two […]
Read more "Candied Curry Chicken"It was our gardener’s assistant who sounded the alarm. The undergardener had been clearing underbrush behind the laundry drying area in the far corner of our “plantel”. El plantel is the level area of a property on which people build their homes. In our mountainous Central Costa Rican neighborhoods, a pantel is usually carved out of the face […]
Read more "Snake Scare"Prompted by an article in my daily English-language newsletter called A.M. Costa Rica I was reminded of a potential problem which had been quietly lurking in a back corner of my mind ever since we visited Nicaragua in 2013. The object of my concern is an interoceanic shipping canal which José Daniel Ortega Saavedra, President for life […]
Read more "WATER – All important. Under Threat."It is the small stuff, the jolly you-must-be-kidding non-events in life that sometimes throw you for a loop. Earlier this week, we found out that our kids will come and visit us in Saintes, France over Christmas and New Years – now, that’s big! That’s a mega-event of delightful proportions, an occasion that puts a […]
Read more "Über die Lungensucht"[continued from “Walking About – Part Two] I never realized how much I click the shutter release until I started this third part of my little twenty-minute walk home from physical therapy and saw, how many pictures I had accumulated … Anyway, after our encounter with the deer late in the last walkabout post, we’re […]
Read more "Walking About – Part Three"[continued from previous post “Walking About”] This timeworn front door caught my fancy as I turned from Rue Saint-Saloine into Rue Saint-Vivien. It’s not ancient, maybe from the 1940th, and it hasn’t been well maintained, but I think it shows that the original owner gave some extra effort to beautify his or her home. I felt […]
Read more "Walking About – Part Two"My new Frenchy family doctor prescribed physiotherapy for me to try to get a handle on my persistent back and leg pain. A physical therapist is called a kinésithérapeute in French, quite the tongue twister! Mine is located in the quartier Saint-Vivien, the neighborhood around the church of Saint-Vivien. This is also the neighborhood which […]
Read more "Walking About"Saturday evening we dined al fresco on the veranda, watching life play out in front of us on Quai de la République, the river Charente and Place Bassompierre on the opposite bank. It wasn’t the brightest of summer evenings, but still comfortable and very pleasant in an overcasty way. That was no longer the case […]
Read more "Ode to the Indefatigable Tourist"In large part thanks to the aid of automated translators, I routinely write emails or post on Facebook in either English, German, French or Spanish, with a smidgen Italian thrown in now and then. I’m only fluent in two of those languages, happily guessing my way through the others, killing grammar right and left as […]
Read more "Electronic Lunacy"Our last week in Heidelberg simply flew by, thus our visit to this charming town sadly has come to an end. From our apartment in the “posh” (as a friend and long-time resident of Heidelberg called it) neighborhood of Neuenheim, north of the river Neckar, we explored the Altstadt, the Old Town on the left bank, […]
Read more "Heidelberg – adieu"
NOT IN A STRAIGHT LINE by Photolera Claudinha 