Ugly Americans

We are now officially done with 1/4 of our total time at post. It has gone really fast because Sarajevo is in general a pretty nice post. It has been snowing for over a week now, but its not cold enough to keep the snow from melting, so the roads are clear for now. I slept in today, and avoided the morning crises with the children. The kids, for their part, have been fairly reasonable all day. I did not set up the tree today, mainly because the tree is a lot of work and today is not the day for that. The most labor intensive thing I have done today is make the pineapple upside-down cake that is currently baking in the oven. Today is a lazy birthday day,

 There are (as I have mentioned before) both good and bad things about the FSLife. When it comes to the bad stuff, the best thing you can do for yourself, and in our case, the kids and I, is to be prepared for anything. Anything in this case includes a GO Bag, or Bugout Bag. If you are also in the FSLife, you are familiar with this item. You probably learned all about it in seminars for developing your own personal preparedness plan , at post or FSI. If you were somehow horribly unlucky and never got one of those seminars, there are a few links you should probably check out, like the page of information  FLO has put together on how to put your own plan together.   I have been going over my own bag, and I decided to share its contents here, so you can get an idea for what (if you're like me) you might want to put in your own bag. When we started this lovely adventure, the portion of the preparedness plan that covered Go Bags frankly sucked . A lot.** So, we took the ba...

If you are like me, food is a big thing. It is one of those things every other expat I have come across talks about, to no end. I was going to write a more flowery, fancy-pants post on food but frankly my days as of late have been a bit busy with other stuff. So instead, I am going to daisy-chain a bunch of photos taken from the weekend and this week. They all loosely (like the one below this sentence) revolve around getting food here in Sarajevo.   Early morning market run! Sarajevo really has a good variety of fresh vegetables and fruit (and mushrooms!) in its markets. Does it make me sad that my chances of seeing plantains, malanga, or yucca while here are slim to none? A little. But we're not going to starve, and I can still get black beans by mail. Sadly, this is the only photo I took at the local market because I needed my hands free to pick out the fruits and veggies we were buying and storing in our handy-dandy cart. Maybe next visit for the photos. In addition to...

I do not know how Lush managed to distill the essence of every agua de colonia every splashed on a little Hispanic kid during their childhood (fond childhood memory, ha!), but that is pretty much what the Dragon Egg bath bomb is.

Sometimes, no matter how much you research information or ask questions of people at post, you will still miss things that would be nice to know. It can be that the information you missed is relatively minor. For example, here in Sarajevo sweetened condensed milk is hard to almost impossible to find on the local economy. So, you can either pick it up in a neighboring country (by driving or flying), OR you can try to order it via pouch mail  and hope that the people working when your order arrives don't decide that your 6 cans of milk are a liquid in excess of 16 ounces and reject the package. Is it an inconvenience if you didn't know this before arriving? Yes. Is it going to impact your life every day? Unless you make sweets every day, probably not.    Regular water outages, however, are a different story. Imagine that the valley we live in is a sink full of water. At night, the water shuts off, and slowly but surely, starting with the homes on the mountain/hi...

   Half the time when i'm writing these postings I feel like some explorer sending letters home via the post, like now. It is now a little over a month since our arrival in Sarajevo. The children have gotten used to their new normal, probably because we have all our stuff, and all their stuff is set up in their rooms.    Our social sponsors have been great, and I foresee a thank you meal in our future for them. The locals are friendly, and barring a few commodities, we can get most of our foodstuffs on the local economy. This is all a pat, simple answer or explanation for people who just want a quick answer to, "So how is life at your new post going?" This is the short answer for the people who don't really care to hear more than that.  So, if you are one of those people, you can stop reading now because the rest of this post is the LONG answer to, "So, how's it shaking in Sarajevo, and how are you settling in?" Space bear approves of this ...

The packers are gone. Our junk is out of the apartment. There's a Rewe shopping cart downstairs in our storage filled with garbage bags that are, in turn, filled with stuff that will be going into a donation bin down the street. The kids are extra clingy. The pantry, the fridge, and the freezer are populated with the odds and ends of our remaining food stores. Everything that's coming with us on home leave is either in a suitcase, or can easily be chucked into a suitcase. We are almost done with our time in Berlin. I have now reached the hurry up and wait stage of our departure.  When we left out of Ashgabat a little over 2 years ago, it was a giddy and desperate affair. We were giddy that the tour was over, and desperate to shed as much weight as possible so as to make our pack-out and departure that much faster. Our predawn exit from that country was as surreal as our arrival. I wish I could say that these past two weeks in Berlin have been the exact opposite of tha...

There are a lot of pastry-related disappointments to be found in Berlin (food-wise). Many of them are apple flavored. However, If you find yourself in Berlin (in the morning, people!) near a Der B äcker Feihl Yes, too lazy to rotate the image.  Do yourself a favor and go buy yourself a Kirsch Plunder (Cherry Plunder). It is probably one of the best pastries you can pick up at any of the local bakeries. I bought all the remaining kirsch plunder (7) from our local store.    If you are reading this from somewhere outside Germany, you can always make your own using this recipe .

It is almost the end of February now. I have been slowly but surely eliminating the crap we have built up around the apartment from two years of living in Berlin. Between purging junk and dealing with kiddos, I have had a lot of time to think about the "FS Life", and form what i've learned in the almost five years we have been doing it into a list I keep revising as I think of new things. I realize that almost five years is nothing compared to some people that have been doing this for ten, twenty or more years. But length of time spent doing something doesn't make a person's experiences or thoughts on the matter more or less valid. As this is my own personal blog, I would like to reiterate that what I am about to say will a) probably piss someone or many someones off, and b) is my own opinion, and is not representative of the US government, the State Department, or any other agency. Also, I tend to be pretty catty, mean and sarcastic. You have been warned. My li...