November 18, 2010
I can’t believe that I was actually wishing for snow to fall today. It seems silly, right? I mean Summer just ended and Fall is upon us, and yet the thought of Thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays finds me yearning for a few crystals to float in the air, sparkling in the low sunlight. To get our Winter-time “fix” we took a little train ride to Swiss-German-speaking land in the Alps to get up and close with our favorite mountain range.
Fate led us to the end of the SBB line in the little resort town of Grindelwald, just south of Interlaken in the canton of Bern, a post-card perfect village nestled right up next to some of the most famous giants of the Alps – the Wetterhorn, Schrekhorn, and the Eiger. Much to our surprise, it’s not Winter in the Alps yet either! The sun was shining throughout the valley, cresting ever so slightly over the wall of the Eiger, releasing a soft yellow glow over the entire landscape for most of the day.
September 17, 2010
P.F. Changs may not have been the most authentic Asian restaurant we ever frequented in the States, but on our then extremely limited graduate student budgets we could go out to eat, be sure there was gluten free goodness, and get like 6 portions of food for $40 – a near steal for eating out. We would always order an appetizer, then my husband would get a fried rice and I’d get a rice noodle dish. Considering we were ordering as much for the leftovers as we were for the experience there, it was easier later if I also got a gluten free dish. One thing I can really commend them on, besides having a gluten free menu and system in place before most other restaurants knew what gluten free was, was their chicken lettuce wraps. I think they were our favorite dish out of the menu, and they certainly became a tradition of sorts whenever we went there.
