Odessa, Ukraine, August 1992.In the late afternoon, I should take the train to Lviv. But it turned out that there are no free seats on the night express.So me and five girls spent the night in a hotel built during socialist era. There was a bar on the tenth floor. A few locals and the…
Month: April 2023
Meat Grinder
Let’s talk about mincing meat today.I have an old meat grinder in my small collection. Standardwerk #10, Americ. System. Made in Austria, sometime in the twenties of the twentieth century. It has always been in our family. My mother got it from her mother, and now I own it. Immediately after WWII, when there was…
When Your Passport is Stolen in India
While studying architecture, we also learned a lot about the history of architecture. Also about the Taj Mahal.And so, on a fine Sunday afternoon on February 26, 1989, I studied whether everything we were taught was true. Taj Mahal in all its beauty. I was so carried away by all this beauty that I forgot…
Hotel San Diego and its Residents
Late in the evening of Wednesday, February 10, 1982, I arrived in San Diego. After a long drive from Phoenix, AZ to Yuma, to the town of El Centro, where things got complicated. Nadine, a young Swiss girl, and I went to eat, and when we returned, our bus had already left. With our luggage….
Sneak Peak into the French Cuisine
So that it won’t just be my grandmother’s Austro-Hungarian cuisine, let’s try French cuisine this time.Do you know why the French eat snails? – Because they don’t like fast food.The French, and some others, swear that French cuisine is the best in the world. Maybe yes or maybe not. To the average non-French person, for…
Kaiserschmarren or Emperor’s Mess
OK, promises, promises.A little more about the Kaiserschmarren.The name Kaiserschmarren is a compound of the words Kaiser (emperor) and Schmarren (a scrambled or shredded dish). Schmarren is also a colloquialism used in Austrian and Bavarian to mean trifle, mishmash, mess, rubbish, or nonsense. The word “Schmarren” is related to scharren (to scrape) and schmieren (to…