SMASHING PUMPKINS

I have numerous favorite foods that you can only buy at certain times of year. Like now I love those processed date roll things with an almond jammed on it and then rolled in coconut. I have to be careful about buying them because I will eat a half a box in about 5 minutes. At Easter I LOVE Cadbury eggs. It's hard for me to eat them now because I don't eat much sugar and chocolate give me insomnia so one egg is like hooking me up to a jolt-o-meter and I start talking real fast and my eyes glaze over. But it's the real incredible edible egg.

CITY OF ANGELS

We went to Europe this summer and most everybody has seen the email reports from the road. So I went through my notebook to find new stories but some of the raw entries were so funny I decided to just give you those instead.

On Meals:

"Easy trip, ontime. PDX --> Minn. For breakfast vegans get: bagel, peanut butter and jelly, soy milk, cereal, banana." [Since I don't like to eat and fly, I stuff all this food into my backpack and believe me, it came in handy later.]

On Airports:

"In Minneapolis I went into a store called ESSENTIALS to look for earplugs. You can't imagine a store more filled with useless junk that no one is going to buy in an airport: make-up, random candy like pineapple dipped in chocolate, plastic toy airplanes too cheap to give as a free prize in a box of cereal, wall of Swatches."

On Acclimation:

"This is my first major trip where I didn't start the trip with either a tour group or in the home of a family member. It's nice to have someone to take care of you when you first arrive because, jetlag aside, it takes a while to get used to the idea that you are in a foreign country and don't know where things are or how they work or customs and ways. And, if you're anything like us, you're a little timid, at first, about asking questions because you don't want to look like a total dork (or in my case, I don't want to look like an American tourist dork.) The first 24 hours in Berlin were somewhat stressful because of this. Then I guess our psyches adjusted to the new less-than comfort zone and pretty soon we were helping other tourists operate the UBahn ticket machine and I stopped worrying what people think because like I always say, 'We're never going to see these people again.'"

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PHOTOGRAPH: Family Reunion in Orleans. Look at Josa's bathing suit. Photographer: Auntie Aileen.

This page was made on December 13, 2000. Featured artist: Def Leppard. Featured beverage: Merlot. My computer is a much loved lime iMac named Yoda. My software is BBEdit 5.0 which I am barely competent at using and Dreamweaver at which I am even worse.

Posted: 12.13.00
http://www.pamrentz.com/pampage/xmas/v10/p2.html