Highlights from my Christmas holiday in Ohio

1. Waking up at 3am last Tuesday and standing in a cold, snowy field with my parents and husband to see the full eclipse of the moon. I believe that every single day we were in Ohio it was cloudy, but the skies happened to clear at that hour. I thought it was incredibly cool that my parents would wake from a dead sleep and look at the moon with me.

2. Decorating the table. My father and I designed this one together.

3. Discovering that my husband knows how to draw. We colored with my niece and nephew for an afternoon. We were there with paper and pencils and then he just produced recognizable scenes on the page. This is something I’ve never been able to do, so I’m rather in awe.

4. Reading. I love reading, and whenever I go on vacation I’m reminded that I want to do it more. I read to my niece and nephew, I read my own books, and now (thanks to Andrew) I’ve got a Kindle so I can read even more.

5. Cooking a four course English Christmas dinner: Welsh rabbit, standing rib roast roast with onion gravy, roast potatoes and vegetables, and a boiled pudding with custard sauce. I learned that Welsh rabbit is actually cheese sauce on toast and that boiled puddings (which are just cakes that are steamed rather than baked) are deliciously moist and just as easy to make as regular cakes.

6. Reveling in winter. I appreciate many aspects of Miami, but I really miss the changing seasons. I soaked in the winter feeling as much as possible, which meant taking a walk in the woods while the snow was falling and drinking Gluehwein.

A styling car!

Chicago: Days 3 and 4

Sorry about the long radio silence. Work has hit me hard, and it's not going to let up until I take my Christmas vacation. I thus present an abbreviated version of our last two days in 'my kind of town, Chicago'.

It turns out that Andrew didn't ever remember visiting a zoo during his childhood. His whole family loves animals, so I guess they were too busy visiting the animals at wildlife preserves, model farms, parks, and beaches to make it to a zoo. So we visited one of the last free zoos still around in America - Lincoln Park Zoo. It was a small-ish but excellent zoo. The unseasonably warm weather that we had enjoyed the previous days had disappeared (and since I had accidentally left my winter coat in storage) I waddled around wearing two shirts, two sweaters, and two jackets. I was not exactly an icon of style, but I mainly stayed warm.

That night we had dinner a restaurant which was exclusively vegetarian. When travelling, we're often lucky enough to find vegetarian restaurants that cater to the foodie crowd, or high-end restaurants that serve vegetarian prix fixe menus. It seems a bit cruel of fate to give me a decent job so that I can afford to go to restaurants like this but plunk me in a city like Miami that would never support such a restaurant. In any case, Green Zebra served a great meal. We had a panna cotta, which I've never had because I didn't know they could be made without gelatin. The waiter assured me that it was done with agar, so I may be trying that myself one of these days. We also had a lovely potato soup with smoked sunchokes and a pasta in brown butter. These dishes, of course, made me vow to buy a smoker and learn how to make brown butter sauce.

During our final day we squeezed in a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I love this art museum, and have visited many times. But this time we only had a few hours and Andrew had never seen anything there. So we availed ourselves of the "If you only have an hour, see these twelve paintings" insert in the guidebook. I felt like the epitome of a tourist, checking off the paintings: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks? Check. American Gothic? Check. Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte? Seen it, moving on. But sometimes it just turns out that way.

Then we were off to the airport and to our respective homes. And those were our four days in the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down.

Chicago: Day 2

The last little bit of my vacation disappeared when I ate the last kernel of the Garrett's popcorn on Friday. I had rationed it, to make the vacation last, but I guess it's time to admit it's over. Luckily, we've got Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations approaching.

On Day 2, we took a boat tour on the Chicago River, led by the Chicago Architectural Foundation. Andrew enjoyed it much more than I expected he would, as evidenced by the fifty plus photos we have of random skyscrapers. I learned lots of history, none of which I can remember right now, and I got thoroughly chilled, a sensation I can still remember distinctly.

Dinner was ethiopian (Thanks, Tim - Ras Dashen was terrific!) and I discovered that Ethiopian beer is orders of magnitude better than Ethiopian wine. They had several authentic beers, all of them a chocolate-y, port style, which goes perfectly with spicy veggie purees. We ended the evening with Billy Elliot, a musical based on the movie. It's set in northern England (county Durham) and their accents were spot-on (not that I could tell - I asked Andrew afterwards). It was a terrific show, but it reminded me once again of the perils of wearing eye makeup to the theater. Even happy shows have a tear-jerker song or two, and then I'm left looking like Tammy Faye Bakker.

Chicago: Day 1

I was lucky enough to have ended up in a hipster neighborhood (Wicker Park) filled with vintage shops. I didn't do this on purpose (a disclaimer I must make, as my husband may have thought that this was a carefully-laid plan to spend all our money). I spent most of the first day puttering around, ducking into shops. I emerged with a renewed resolution to wear more vintage clothes, and more hats.

After that, I headed downtown to meet Andrew for dinner, because he was still busy doing conference things during the day. On the way, I made sure to stop for one of the iconic tastes of Chicago- Garrett popcorn. In particular, the Chicago mix is my favorite - a blend of cheese and caramel popcorn. Trust me, it's better than it sounds.

I had some time to kill, so I spent an hour at the Bean (aka the Cloud Gate). Almost everyone who walks by it has the urge to walk right up to the sculpture and make faces or goof around, which makes for exceptional people watching.

Then, on our way to dinner, Andrew and I discovered a good reason to come back in a few weeks, to see some live theater:

Our dinner turned into more of an adventure than I expected. I had set my sights on Ethiopian food, because there is no Ethiopian in all of southern Florida. I had left my list of recommended restaurants back at my room, so we relied on the guidebook, which placed three different Ethiopian restaurants within a few blocks of each other. Unfortunately, the guidebook was seven years old, and not one of these three restaurants still existed. Despairing, we ended up at an Indian restaurant, the Standard India Restaurant. The food was uniformly great, but the best part was the host. He was extremely personable, wandering around and checking in on each table repeatedly. We learned that he was a law professor and a director at a director at a global company. His family runs the restaurant, and he's a helps out (in his spare time?).

Andrew and I have been eating Indian together since we met, and to me it's a romantic food because our favorite restaurant catered our wedding. I've been a bit melancholy because that restaurant (Udupi, for all you former UMders) has closed, and I felt like a little part of my life was gone. But I guess I can have hope that I'll still continue to have new Indian food experiences.

Sleeping in style

Chicago. I loved it. As a sort of belated trip journal, I'm going to post each of the remaining days this week.

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When I was a kid, we never stayed in motels. If we didn't have a relative who lived in the location of interest, we used something called Mennonite Your Way. This was a sort of organization where you submitted your name to a directory, indicating that you were willing to host people who needed to stay in your area. In return, when you were planning to visit somewhere, you'd call or write a letter and ask if the host if they could offer shelter. I think there was generally a bed or fold-out couch for my parents, but usually we kids ended up on the floor. You weren't supposed to pay anything, although you could bring a small gift. As the name suggests, this was intended for Mennonites, and since my parents had both been raised Mennonite, that seemed to be good enough. Throughout my childhood we had all kinds of interesting people stay at our house, and I thought it was perfectly normal to have complete strangers (but only Mennonite strangers!) drop by your house.

This option is no longer available to me, so I now use something called Airbnb. This isn't quite free, but it's along the same principle. When I was planning my trip to Chicago, I looked up who hosts there. The options vary - sometimes there's just a place on the floor, sometimes a couch or bed, or even multiple bedrooms - and prices vary accordingly. I used this in New York and plan to use it again at Thanksgiving. I couldn't have asked for a better experience in Chicago - my host was a young electrical engineer, who says he can often cover a good portion of his rent doing this. He made us breakfast one day, and offered good tourist advice. And I paid $35 a night for a room with no set check-out time and a genial host. It's the hipster's Mennonite Your Way.

My life has been a bit over-vegetabled lately. I've joined a vegetable buying club, where someone buys organic veggies in bulk, and distributes them each week. It's sort of like a CSA (community supported agriculture), but you can cancel at anytime and you're not limited to the produce of one farm, or even one region. The produce is much higher quality than what I can get at the grocery store, and they give you so much that I split the share with a colleague. This week, because I'm going away for four days, I've been trying to eat my week's veggies in just two days. It's turned into an experiment to test how much produce one can eat without upsetting the digestive system. Today I've managed to eat a pomegranate, a persimmon, collard greens, half a (small) watermelon, spinach, half an onion, two poblano peppers, and a half a pint of cherry tomatoes. Oof.

This hasn't hampered my Indian cooking too much, although I only managed one Indian dish this week: spinach pakoras. You mix fresh spinach into a batter and fry up patties. The most interesting part is that this recipe forced to buy chickpea flour (available at your local Indian grocery), which I would somehow like to start using more, because it's so much healthier than wheat flour.