My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
“Chocolate is the first luxury,” says actress Mariska Hargitay. “It has so many things wrapped up in it: deliciousness in the moment, childhood memories, and that grin-inducing feeling of getting a reward for being good.” And now you can add another: reducing your chances of getting diabetes. Yes, you read that right. A massive 30-year…
Commuting to an office five days a week; I still shudder when I remember how many hours of my youth were spent crammed into subway trains and buses, navigating crowded transit hubs, and hurtling along freeways, pedal to the metal in the 8:40 Grand Prix, trying to comb my hair and put on lipstick using…
“Grab your toothbrush,” said Rich. “We’re getting out of town.” Reeling from weeks of harrowing headlines, Rich and I realized we needed some serious attitude adjustment to pull together the tattered shreds of our mental equilibrium. It didn’t take us long to choose the geographic solution favored by so many great minds from Marco…
“You’re the first Americans I’ve ever met,” a Spanish friend confided one night at my dinner table. I was so gobsmacked almost dropped the bowl of cranberry sauce I was handing her. The occasion was a Thanksgiving meal Rich and I had prepared for the members of my Seville art class. I’d learned my new…
Do you ever have days when your tech devices gang up on you, taking fiendish delight in frustrating your efforts to perform the simplest task? I’ll take that as a yes. When that happened to me Friday, along with the teeth-grinding exasperation came the nagging feeling of familiarity. What did this convoluted, time-devouring, mind-numbing quagmire…
It’s not easy for anyone, let alone a foreigner, to cause a sensation at Seville’s Feria de Abril (April Fair). The whole event is already wildly over the top, with half a million women dressed in gaudy, ruffled gowns, beribboned horses and carriages weaving through the crowd, and everyone dancing day and night all…
“Nothing is permanent in this wicked world — not even our troubles.” — Charlie Chaplin “I always feel younger here in Seville,” Rich said at breakfast Friday morning. My husband looked remarkably chipper for a man who had been out till all hours watching live cabaret in an old warehouse on one of the city’s…
“What surprises people most when they first move here?” I asked my friend Gabrielle — Gaye, for short — as we lingered over late-morning coffee in one of Seville’s back street cafés this week. Having moved from the US to Spain in 1963, marrying a Sevillano, and raising a family here, Gaye has been my…
The first thing that struck me when I arrived back in Spain this week was how much less invisible I feel here. People pay attention to each other. It’s one of the things that makes Seville — a city of 700,000 souls — seem like a village. For instance, there was the time I discovered…
“The horrible thing,” Rich said, after finishing Charlotte’s Web , “is that I’m never going to be able to kill a spider again.” When I’d learned Rich had somehow managed to get through childhood without meeting the talking spider who saved an innocent pig, I gave him my copy, pulling it out of the huge…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
