Snowbird City

27 01 2012

The Canadians have landed.

The annual exodus from winter to warmer climes began about Thanksgiving (American Thanksgiving, that is…) and usually lasts until Easter. That means, we here in Hollywood, Florida, are currently in the thick of it.

A caravan of vehicles bearing the license plate “Je me souviens” begins moving south down I-95 just as Florida’s hurricane season is ending, and Quebec’s deep freeze is beginning. The colony grows by the day until South Florida is saturated.

Bienvenue! And spend some money here, you Lexus driver, you!

And they really are ALL French Canadians. In all my years of coming to Hollywood between November and April, I have never seen a Canadian license plate from west of Laval. I have no idea why.

One telltale indication that the snowbirds are back in town are the signs in the stores that say “On parle français” and…I walk by this one every day….

Yuck.

For those of you unfamiliar with this culinary delight from north of the border, it is truly disgusting. A heart attack on a plate if there ever was one. Fries drowned in cheese and gravy, basically. I had the honor of making its acquaintance once while at university in Canada, many, many years ago. My cholesterol level has not yet recovered.

R. and I have started playing a drinking game when we are out in one of the bars downtown or at the beach. It’s called “Identify the French Canadian”. I can’t say what it is about them, but we are generally 98% right (and therefore drink a lot). French Canadians just have this look, and they all seem to look the same.

But despite the invasion of les Français, we are thankful for their cash, which they toss around liberally, as every vacationer should.

To keep our French Canadian friends and neighbo(u)rs happy and entertained during their annual sojourn to Florida, Hollywood offers Claude, the two-step king.

Monsieur "MC et DJ prof." in action at "Disco-Karaoké".

He is out a few times a week in the bandshell on the beach, crooning old favorites from the 60’s and 70’s. Hundreds of retired Canucks spend their afternoons in the sunshine, tapping their feet to Claude’s rendition of “Mustang Sally” and other favorites I never new had French subtitles or translations. His finale today was what seemed to be some kind of folk song that had everyone joining in in a sing-a-long.

It’s fun for the whole family, as Claude’s elderly line-dancing groupies – also out for every afternoon performance – will attest.

The ladies doing their thing for Claude.

We Floridians just sit there and gape at the crazy tourists.


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Categories : Americana, Cruisin', Uncategorized

The almost-United States

2 01 2012

In the last couple of days I have been having fitful bouts of insomnia again. Nothing like last summer, but still. Lying in bed, looking at the ceiling is no fun, no matter if its for 30 minutes or 3 hours.

So to make the time pass quicker, I devised a couple of concentration games for myself, one of which is a challenge to name all the 50 states in alphabetical order in less than 2 minutes. It’s not as easy as you think.

For the first twenty or so times I tried this, I always came up with 47 or 48, once I even made it up to 49. But that darn 50th state eluded me. Over and over and over again, I always seemed to be one or two short.

This is so true. (From the website: http://www.funnyordie.com)

In the meantime I have a system and I know exactly how many states there are per letter. The last couple of times I played this game with myself, I have got to 50 pretty regularly. Let me demonstrate.

First the four A’s. Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas and Arizona. Followed by 3 C’s: Connecticut, Colorado and Chicago. No, hang on. California.

Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii.

The four I’s come next: Iowa, Idaho, Illinois and Indiana.

Kansas & Kentucky.

Louisiana.

This is where it gets interesting. There are SO MANY states that begin with M and N! I’m so sure that this is where I always lose one.

Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri.

New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada.

Whew. Think that’s it.

Then there’s Oklahoma and Oregon, followed by my home state of Pennsylvania.

Rhode Island, and the Souths… Carolina and Dakota.

Texas and Tennessee followed by Utah.

Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Yay!

Uh oh. That’s 49.  Lost one again. Do let me know if you find it.

(And no – Washington DC is not a state!!! It’s a District!)


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Categories : Americana, Cruisin', Just another working stiff, This & that in the real world

Of paint, outlets and doorknobs

7 12 2011

So for the last two weeks or so I disappeared into renovation-land. As some of you may know I still own my father’s condo in South Florida. He died about four years ago, and we decided to keep it as a (very expensive) vacation place. Some would call it a “money pit”.

Two years ago, when R. was unemployed for a few months, we decided to start upgrading the place that seemed to have not been upgraded since it was built in 1973. The kitchen’s dome lighting was vintage, and the appliances were slowly taking leave of their functionality, one by one.

The pink bathroom was classic, too.

Gorgeous. Just Gorgeous.

So thanks to my unbelievably resourceful and flexibly unemployed husband, we managed to redo the kitchen and the two bathrooms within about four months. He flew from Europe to Miami five times within that span of time to supervise the construction.

For the past two years we have thoroughly enjoyed our half-new vacation place. But every visit we said to each other that the place kind of needed a new paint job. And every time we came, we also said – “Okay…. next time.”

This past September we attacked the project head on. R. is no longer unemployed, but he now has a job where he can literally take every fifth week off. (PS.: I want one like that too…) So he flew over to Miami and started the long and arduous task of covering every ceiling and vertical flat surface within the four walls of our condo with a fresh coat of white paint. It took him eight full days.

But once the walls and the ceilings were white again, we noticed that the closet doors, room doors and door frames were a kind of seedy beige-y color that depressed us. And the doorknobs, fashionable in the 1970’s, I’m sure, just had to go.

A second working vacation was planned.

We arrived a week and a half ago, and in those ten days the place has turned from dowdy to rowdy.  For the trim and every other surface that needed something fresh, we chose an airy, light turquoise that carries the name “ionic sky”. I kept calling it “iconic sky”. It looks unbelievably Florida-y, South-Beach-y even. Oh-so-cool.

But renovating comes with its pitfalls, too. For example, I never knew painting was so hard, that one can make so many mistakes, and that it is possible to get a cramp in one’s hand from holding a paintbrush for 8 hours every day. I thought that kind of thing only happened when you were writing exams at school.

During our renovation extravaganza, no day was complete without a visit to one of our two local Home Depots. We always seemed to need some tool / widget / screw / nail / cable / switch / outlet / paintbrush / cover / glue that we did not have at home at that particular moment.

On the bright side, I discovered a new, marketable skill I never knew I had: replacing doorknobs. My apparent expertise earned me the endearing title “Miss Doorknob”. My dear, sweet husband, whose native language is not English, was previously unaware of the colloquial connotation of calling someone a “Doorknob.”

Of course, he meant well, and I love him for it.

And hey, if I don’t get a job in my field by the end of January, maybe I can make replacing doorknobs my new career choice!

My handiwork. All mine.


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Categories : Americana, Blood relations, Cruisin', Just another working stiff, This & that in the real world

Thanksgiving on the wrong side of the pond

23 11 2011

It’s Thanksgiving week and I am, once again, for yet another Thanksgiving, stuck in Europe. I came here after finishing my Master’s degree expecting to be away from the U.S. for one or two Thanksgivings. I have been away for nineteen, and counting.

Here in Europe, there is no such thing as Thanksgiving, and I must say it is the one day of the year I am physically sick with longing and blind with homesickness. And my European friends, all lovely people for whom I am eternally thankful, just don’t understand.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of all time because there are no expectations attached to it. There is no gift-giving and therefore no disappointment and no fake joy. The joy is (usually) real, and it’s all about just having a great meal together. Food that reminds me of where I come from and who I am. Food that reminds me of my good fortune in this life, so far. Comfort food.

When my father was still alive, he would come visit me at the end of the year. Every September we would have the same phone conversation – should he come at Thanksgiving? Or four weeks later, for Christmas? We always decided on Christmas because then he could hang around for New Year’s Eve too. And he loved being part of a traditional European Christmas over here… it reminded him of his childhood in Germany, a long time ago.

We would turn our Christmas dinner into an “end-of-year” dinner, so that we could celebrate all the holidays we had missed and the ones that were to come in the first part of the new year as well. The centerpiece of our culinary extravaganza was his Thanksgiving turkey. He had been the Master Of The Bird at home since as far back as I can remember, and was always eager to commandeer my mini-kitchen for a whole day, along with all of its tools and appliances.

I would pre-order the turkey from a local supermarket and he would directly import the stuffing and the cranberries in his suitcase.

The Bird, 2002 edition.

Since the amount of food on the table was usually far greater than the two of us could possibly consume in any useful period of time, and the standard European freezer is the size of a shoebox, I invited friends and colleagues over to partake in the gluttonous, succulent feast. Our rallying cry was always: “EAT MORE!” One year we had guests from six different countries, including Palestine, the U.K. and Germany, to name just a few. It was a real United Nations around the table in my little Berlin apartment.

Those were good times with my father, and old and new friends. Those evenings are past and long gone, now, but no one can take the memories away from us.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  Be thankful, and eat well.


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Categories : Americana, Blood relations, EuroTrash, This & that in the real world

Welcome to… a different world.

11 09 2011

The second Tuesday in September started innocuous enough. I was in the British countryside, west of London, along with about 20 colleagues, attending a course on working in hostile environments and battlefield first aid. Too many newspeople had perished while covering wars past, and the company I worked for thought it a wise investment to train its journalists in basic survival so that in the future more would come home from those environments unscathed.

Just in case.

Because the next war was bound to break out, sometime, somewhere.

An excerpt from the list of topics to be covered.

We learned things like: What kind of damage automatic weapons can do to cars, oil drums and humans; How to spot a sniper, and a tripwire; How to make a water filter using only materials found in nature; What an armed ambush feels like, and how to survive a kidnapping; Why a camera lens can sometimes look like a shoulder-held rocket-propelled-grenade at distance.

The course was a week long and I had decided to tack on a vacation to New York City and points north immediately thereafter. So I booked my flight from Heathrow to JFK on United Airlines for the following Saturday.

On that week’s Tuesday afternoon we were out in the woods, standing in mud up to our ankles. The assigned task was to practice negotiation skills. Our teachers had dressed up as hostile natives hell-bent on hindering our work at least, or murdering us for our expensive equipment. The overcast sky broke to a fine English drizzle and during a pause in the action a few of us took shelter in one of the vehicles. That was when the first SMS came from New York.

It was so absurd that we thought it was some kind of joke.

“What a brilliant idea,” one of my colleagues said. “But impossible.”

Four filthy, cynical journalists sitting in a Land Rover in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere, 3,000 miles from New York City, could not believe the audacity of flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

While calmly picking clumps of mud out of the treads of my hiking boots with a twig, I scoffed that no aviation routes even go anywhere near Manhattan… so that must have been some dumb pilot. Or just a tragic accident.

We turned on the car’s radio to see if the BBC had the story, and heard that a second airliner had just slammed into the second building.

Ah. No accident. No dumb pilot.

And suddenly our hostile environment training did not seem so theoretical anymore.

Four days later, I sat in one of the first aircraft permitted to re-enter U.S. airspace from abroad. Upon landing at JFK, a flight attendant announced our arrival over the intercom. Ten years later, I still get a lump in throat and my eyes tear up when I think of it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to….. The United States of America.”

The entire cabin erupted in cheers and tears. We were on home soil, and we were safe.

As the plane taxied off the runway to its parking position, a white plume of smoke continued to rise from Ground Zero into the cobalt blue sky. Lower Manhattan was still burning.

It was September 15th, 2001 –  and the world as we knew it was history.

**********

A cloud of smoke where the towers used to be.

A piece of a steel skeleton.

The destruction through the window of a city bus.

Guard duty at Ground Zero.

The impromptu memorial at Union Square.

NOTE: All photos are my own, taken on September 16th and 17th, 2001.


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Categories : Americana, Cruisin', The Savvy Aviatrix, This & that in the real world

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