We had our first snow this weekend. It didn’t stay on the ground of course and though yesterday was quite cold and not very pleasant, today is beautiful and a lot warmer. That is what the weather is like in DC. Though there has been some socializing for me, I have of course mainly studied this weekend as I have an assignment that is due in about a week. I was invited to a Halloween party but I decided not to go. Even though it is an American tradition and I know that as an immigrant here I should really try to get into the local culture, costume parties have never really been my thing. I did decorate my apartment with pumpkins and black crows though, and bought peanut butter chocolates, so I am at least following some of the the local customes.

If you look carefully, you can see the snowflakes outside my window….

No real tradition without a fitting book to go with it. For Halloween, it is “Poems Bewitched and Haunted”. The mini-pumpkins are from the Farmers’ Market at Dupont Circle today. 

And back to my food policy studies….

Related articles: DN, SvD, New York Times

It is pumpkin season here on the East Coast and by this weekend, there will be carved pumpkins in every corner and on every doorstep in the residential areas around Washington. The trees have also shifted colors and makes the city look like it is on fire. It’s truly stunning and makes my 20 minute walks to work every morning all the more enjoyable.

Pumpkin delivery outside the East Village neighborhood store last weekend in NY

In the street in DC last Sunday (unfortunately, I only had my phone so the photo isn’t that great)

On my way to lunch today, I passed a screen where they played this video. Short and to the point! It is just depressing that this is still our world in the year 2011!

No, life was not an adventure in DC this weekend, but I did get somewhat more enlightened on the topic of food culture and expanded my Romanian vocabulary somewhat. Why I am learning Romanian? Well, I am beginning to ask myself the same. It was useful at one point and who knows – there might be another adventure out there in the future in which my Romanian language skills will come in handy. By now, I am supposed to have reached the level where I can get through a novel, and so there might also be a new favorite author for me out there that I am now able to read in the original language! I only have to read two books this semester so I better choose them wisely if I am to find a new favorite author because I am quite sure they will be the first and last novels that I ever read in Romanian.

Speaking of favorite authors though… I did come across this blog this weekend. The Bennet Sisters – a blog entirely devoted to anything related to Jane Austin! Perfect for me!!

Fortunately for my studies, I am living right next door to Java House, which serves some of the best coffee in Washington DC. 

So I am back in the US since two days and I am on the good jetlag. That is, the type of jetlag that we get when we travel back in time so to say. It means that I for a few days wake up super early in the mornings and “get more things done before nine than the army”, and get comfortably tired at a decent hour in the evening. And I try to enjoy it for I know that in a few days, it will be gone and I will go back to having to drag myself out of bed in the mornings!

Another stop-over in Vienna and I am not complaining! We arrived from Skopje this afternoon and the weather is wonderful! We walked around the entire city center before we by chance ended up at a small market with food stands in front of the City Hall. We had traditional sausages, Austrian gnocchi, and apfelstrudel. On our way back to the hotel, we passed by historic Cafe Central and decided to go in for an evening tea. With an amazing environment, a pianist playing the grand piano, and lots and lots of chocolate pastries, it was the perfect end of a wonderful day!

(For some reason, I can’t upload any pictures right now, but photos to come.)

So I am back in DC since little over a week. It is nice to be back. Not just because it is still summer here (no words can describe how happy I am to see the sun and have temperatures above 25 again after six weeks of unstable weather in Europe), but also to be back in my apartment and to see people here. I have lived here for almost three years now and coming back made me realize that it is finally starting to feel like home. Home sweet home!

Ice-coffee, cranberry muffin, and writing at my favorite neighborhood cafe

My last day in France! After little over a week in the wonderful house in Saint Jean d’Angely and with small day trips to La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Saintes, I said goodbye to Jessica, Malte, and Linnea yesterday afternoon and took the TGV up to Paris to visit my Moldovan friend Valeriu. I haven’t been to Paris for four years, which is probably the longest gap ever for me since I was a teenager, so one day here was of course too short. But I made the most of it, and walked around half the city today, through at least eight of Paris’ twenty arrondissements! Tomorrow morning, I will carry my suitcase up and down the many stairs in Paris’ old metro system and take the RER out to Charles de Gaulle from where I will fly back to Stockholm. I am not really ready to leave, but I know that I still have a lot to look forward to this summer, including seeing many of my closest, whom I haven’t seen for over a year. Still, if. I stay up a little longer, perhaps I can prolong my stay here…

Here is the view from Valeriu’s balcony. (Hope you can see le Tour Eiffel behind the roof of the big building!) More photos to come as soon as I get back home to my MacBook Pro!

Yes, technically it is true. I flew out from NY on Saturday evening, landed in Stockholm on Sunday morning, and left for France on Monday morning. The reason why I flew through Stockholm is because I will spend about a month there after my stay in France and it was about half the price to do a round trip to Stockholm rather than France (not sure how to interpret that in terms of Sweden as a tourist destination…) Though there wasn’t much more time than for repacking, I had time to see my mom whom I haven’t seen since she was in DC last year, and Jonas, with whom I went to an old neighborhood restaurant and had Swedish meatballs and lingobberries for dinner. (And yes, they are a lot better than the IKEA version!) I also was a able to spend a night in my beautiful little apartment. Home sweet home!

As always, I really thought I would blog more during my stay in NY but, as always, there is too much to do thst is a lot more interesting than spending time in front of a screen, and so I ended up writing very little. But I did sense NY all the more instead! Tesse and I didn’t do too much sightseeing but we walked around a lot, especially in Brooklyn.

One of the more interesting places that we visited was the Hasadic Jewish quarter. From what I ubderstand, the Hasadic jews came over from Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th century and have since more or less tried to isolate themselves in order to live according to their values. This includes dressing in a quite unmodern manner, the men (and boys) having the kippa and the ortodox jewish hairstyle, and women preferably not showing their natural hair at all, but instead wearing wigs. Apparently, the largest group is the Satmar Hasidic court, which coincidentally has its origins in the Romanian town Satu Mare that I visited three years ago. We had hoped to come across amazing bagels and other traditionally Jewish bakery and food, but there were few stores and from little I could see, the offer reminded me mostly of Kyrgyz department stores from the time of the Soviet Union. There were however signs of the 21st century, such as new cars, cell phones, plastic toys, and the Bugaboo stroller. For a Stockholmer, this might not seem so odd since not using a Bugaboo stroller for an infant there is almost like not using paper dipers for them. In the US however, this stroller is more rare and is mostly seen on paprazzi pictures of famos people out with their kids. The thing that pussles me is who decides this? Who decides that a cell phone is OK but not jeans? That you can have a trendy and expensive stroller for your kids, but you can’t have modern kitchenwear in your kitchen, or consume modern media? It is all a great mystery to me!

Another interesting place that we went to was Park Slope and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Or perhaps mostly interesting because the park and the area around it is like a secret twin to Central Park and yet it is all very quiet and sleepy. Quite surreal!

Similarily surreal was Coney Island where we went for the 4th of July. We missed the final of the annual National Hot Dog Eating Contest (!) but there was still a lot to see, both in terms of the old fun fairs (apparently, there is a freak show there and I don’t think I even have to comment on the fact that they still call it freak show!), the boardwalk, and the people. We ended up walking over to Brighton Beach (a traditionally Russian neighborhood) and had lunch at a Russian restaurant. In the evening, I tried to honor my new home country and thus we had hamburgers for dinner and watched Macy’s fireworks on the Hudson River.

So the whole week was great! In addition to everything we saw, we met a lot of cool New Yorkers (including Jenny!) who took us around to cool restaurants and bars, and so we had a fantastic time! I just wish we could have stayed longer!

Photos to come – have yet to figure out how to upload them from my i-pad….