SYW Holiday Edition: On Beating the Holiday Blues, Jolly Jolt, Jesus’ Birth, and Christmas Music

Melanie’s weekly Share Your World this week is about celebration of the winter holidays. Questions: What’s your remedy for the Holiday blues? Sing carols or if singing is not your thing, listen to cheerful holiday music. Go to a light show at your local botanic garden or zoo or wherever there is a holiday light […]

WPPC: Touring an Austrian Winery

The Weekly Prompts Photo Challenge this week has the topic of bottles. On July 5, our Viking Grand European Tour river cruise ship arrived in Austria. We spent the day exploring Melk and cruising; then in the evening, a few of us took an optional tour to visit the Mörwald Winery, and were shown around […]

CFFC: Smooth

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is smooth textures. Here’s my take on it: Fresh fallen blanket of snow My cat Hazel’s fur Soda bottles on a shelf

Tuesday Photo Challenge: Winding & Windy

Frank Jansen at Dutch Goes the Photo has a Tuesday Photo Challenge. This week the topic is wind. Depending on how it’s pronounced it’s either a noun or a verb. Here are a few of each. Glacier winding down a mountain at Glacier Bay National Park, AlaskaAt Glacier Bay National Park, a steward came around […]

CFFC: Making Chocolate in Tuxtla Chico

Cookie Monster sings, “C is for Cookie, that’s good enough for me!” I agree, but in my opinion, the best cookies have my favorite thing in the world in them: CHOCOLATE! For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, the letter C at the beginning of a word with 4 or more letters is the theme this week. […]

Curitiba’s “third best” steak house

November 15, 2016 Carlos and Eliane had quite a discussion in the car about which churrascaria (Brazilian steak house) was best. They had given us an option of different kinds of restaurants, but Dale was interested in trying out a typical Brazilian churrascaria in Curitiba. They settled on the “third best” one in town – […]

Curitiba’s Municipal Market

November 12, 2016 We planned to go to the large Mercado Municipal, an enclosed market of mostly food stalls. My points of reference were those in Peru and Mexico. On our way there, we stopped for a late lunch at a popular churrascaria which catered to a lunch crowd, Pepino Azedo, which was about to […]

Santa Felicidade: Italian restaurants and cachaça cocktails

Curitiba, November 11, 2016 Santa Felicidade is an Italian neighborhood in Curitiba famous for its Italian restaurants. Eliane’s mother wanted to treat us to lunch there. The restaurant we went to was called Madalosso and it was huge – in its various dining rooms, it could seat 5,000 people! As we entered, an empty dining […]

Peru 2008: Pottery and chicha

June 27, 2008 (Continuation of journal) We then walked to the Plaza de Armas (main square), where our bus was waiting, through the narrow cobblestone streets. Two plumbing supplies shops caught my attention, because outside these small dark establishments were pegboards attached to the wall. Hanging on the pegboards were various shapes and sizes of […]