Little Lenka Loving Life

What a pleasure it is to see Little Lenka thriving! These are pictures of her and her husband Steve and their two children. She has grown into a wonderful Mom and wife (I knew that would happen) and an accomplished third grade teacher. Lenka is pursuing her MA in education.

The greatest joy is to just experience her happiness. Lenka says "we are blessed, truly blessed." She's right. Look at these cute kids!

Since I've seen her she has visited over 39 states and been on eight safaris in Africa (her husband Steve grew up in Zambia). Lenka says she thought life was rough under communism in Czecho but after seeing the poverty in Africa she has changed her version of "rough".

The first thing we did when I got there was call up Lenka's mom in Czecho to say hi and tell her I'm moving to the Czech Republic. That was fun! Her mom could hardly believe it was me and could hardly believe the news. It will be immense fun to reconnect with Hana in person! Ahoj Hana!

In the "it's a small world" department, the lady in the house behind us in this picture has a sister who leads bike tours out of Prague for Trek.

How do expats cook their favorites from home?

I have a lot of cookbooks. I still have my Betty Crocker's Boy's and Girls Cookbook that my mother gave me in 1969 when I was ten years old. It is falling apart but there are so many memories in that book:

- my first recipe that I became a known for within my family as a young cook, Apple Crisp (my sister and I used to make the topping and skip the crisp sometimes to just park ourselves with a bowl and a spoon of butter, sugar, flour, and cinnamon in front of 'Gilligan's Island' TV show when we were kids - true heaven when you're ten),



- the Enchanted Castle Cake that I made daughter #2 for her eighth birthday party complete with frosted ice cream cones for the turrets and Hershey's chocolate squares for the drawbridge and moat,

-the incredibly silly Raggedy Ann salad I made out of peach halves, raisins for eyes and celery stick legs for daughter #1 when she came home from college for the first time to remind her she may be an adult now but can still come home and be a kid occasionally.

What I served to whom, at what dinner party or special occasion, in what community are noted in the pages of my cookbooks. I love paging through them and remembering special times. All of my notes about how I would customize the recipe to fit my family's feedback are on those pages. What do expats do when they go abroad? Do they haul all of their cookbooks with them?

Daughter #1 solves this problem by not buying cookbooks. She like to read EVERY cook's feedback on a given recipe so she uses www.allrecipes.com. She even takes pictures of her cooking for the site! Her cooking memories will build up over time on her profile. That's a new generation's solution though. I adore my cookbooks. Do I have to type up or scan my favorite recipes and have digital versions of all my favorites? Do tell.

'Little Lenka' Lives!

And she lives one hour away from me here in America! And she's going to the Czech Republic for the summer!

I wrote about the young Czecho woman who came to live with my family on May 2nd and May 4th (I'll create links when Blogger gets that feature fixed). At the time Lenka came to live with my family, she was a teenager and Communism had been gone from the country just three years. We lost touch and haven't spoke in SEVEN years.

I am going to visit her on Sunday and meet her husband and two kids. Lenka has two kids! She is now actually the age I was when she came to live with me. Half of her life has now been spent in America. She says "how did you have me come live with you? We have family come live with us every summer because everyone is overseas and it's hard. I don't do well with that. I am more selfish than that." I chuckled. The greatest joy is when you hear former teenagers acknowledge your parental thinking occasionally. I can't wait to hear it in my own kids.

Lenka and I are going to try and surprise her mom with a visual Skype call or at the very least a regular old phone call. That will completely freak Hana, her mom, out.

This is going to be fun!

The Last Day of High School

Yesterday was my youngest daughter's last day of high school. I'm so proud of her. All tasks are done and the Constitution test is passed. She is graduating.

She created and hand wrote thank you notes to 27 different staff members. I'm proud that my child knows the name of her high school custodians and security people and went out of her way to thank them. She understands how each and everyone of them contribute to her experience. Most importantly, she tells them!

Last night our high school had Senior Awards night. This event actually means more to me than graduation because it's more dignified. It is such a pleasure to hear everything that the kids have done and to learn more about young adults in her school individually. I was so pleased that her boyfriend's mother and grandmother were able to join us.

My daughter definitely felt the love; I'm grateful for that. She was honored six times. I kinda sorta wished though that someone had mentioned everything she did for the school over the last year to sorta help explain why she was honored so much. So in case she reads this, here is my thank-you:

Thank you for spending every day at school during your junior-senior summer organizing 100 of your peers to put on a freshman orientation so that incoming freshman feel empowered and comfortable on their first day of school. You selected an inspiring speaker to help freshman set their goals. Each new student was shown where their classes are. You and your peers taught them the school song. You passed on pride.

Thank you for raising $2,000 to create and publish an eight-page full-color magazine all by yourself during that same summer. Your magazine showed incoming freshman how to be successful as freshmen. You can be proud that you helped them think of opportunities and challenges they may face before they come up. It was a fun, beautiful piece of magazine publishing. Your first of what I believe will be many.

Last night, you felt the appreciation of your school. All this week, I hope you feel the appreciation of your family. You have made us all so very happy.

Love,

Mom xxxoooxxx

American attitudes about taxes

Reading about European taxes makes me think a lot more about my own. People complain that my community in Illinois is a high-tax environment but I wish more people would do a cost/benefit analysis of what they get for their money. I find it’s always an INCREDIBLE value.

For example, the airport here charges me approximately $130 a year for tax support. Every-time the three of us fly to Denver directly from my airport, I save $30 each bus fare to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Our 3-4 hours involved riding the bus is also time that could have been used a different way. That’s worth money. Using my own airport, I can leave my home and be on the plane sitting in my seat in 20 minutes. Extraordinary!

The airport manager’s goal is to have the airport so busy, we don’t even pay taxes to support it. It becomes self-sustaining. My airport tax cost-benefit calculations do not even count the benefit to me of all the jobs that are created by having a terrific airport in my community. There are a lot of those jobs. So I easily get my money worth on that investment.

I pay approximately $130 for my local public library. I try to get at least quadruple the investment back every year. That’s just with my use, not even counting my children’s use of the facility. That is so easy! It allows me to avoid the cost of cable TV (currently running $70 at a minimum in my community) or a membership to Blockbuster or Netflix. I see books I want to buy in the bookstore and then go to the library and borrow them. I read and check out magazines and newspapers that I enjoy but don’t want to subscribe to yearly. Does it really matter if I read Architectural Digest in the month it’s issued? I think not.

Again, those calculations don’t include my children’s use of the library (I especially appreciate the local scholarship database) or all of the other people in my community who are uplifted to a higher, better place by the use of the facility. Surely less taxes are consumed overall when more people become self-sufficient.

Today I was thinking about what an incredible value the school system is. My children’s school system gets horrible press. What urban system doesn’t? One has to proactively choose a school system and a program within a school system just the way one would choose a melon at the market.

I choose to move to my community specifically for these schools. Within the larger system, there was a tiny gifted program getting by on funding scraps because it’s not particularly valued by the community. My children have received incredible individual mentoring from these teachers. Mostly, because they were open to it.

If I had sent my children to a gifted program in a university town, everyone would want in and everyone would be eligible. But in an industrial town, rigorous academics aren’t as highly valued because that’s not where the money has been made in the past. Money, for both the owners and the workers, has been made in manufacturing. All of that manufacturing has now moved to China. That’s another topic.

The high school my children attended had the schizophrenic distinction of being named one of 1700 “drop-out factories” by John Hopkins University (for the last twenty years only half of the freshman class went on to be sophomores) and “one of America’s 500 best high schools” by U.S. News and World Report all within the same quarter.

The little tiny gifted program my children are in turns out ACT scores in the top 1% of the nation. My oldest daughter left there with enough Advanced Placement credit to save $16,000 in tuition (one university semester). One boy I know of was able to start his college career with so much advanced placement credit he was classified as a second semester sophomore when he started college!

If I add up all of the money saved through advanced placement credit, scholarships obtained etc. and hold it up what I’ve paid in property taxes over the last five years for all services (school, airport, city, library, etc.), I’m still money ahead.

Of course, no one is out “selling” parents on this gem of a curriculum. Most people just see how rough the neighborhoods are. It can be a very rough place. I’ll never forget one young man’s joy when he saw his passing Constitution test grade. Passing that test was his last to-do item before graduating. He could not stop shouting with joy “I’m out of the ‘hood! I’m out of the ‘hood! I’m going to graduate!” I still tear up when I think of him. That too is an education for my children.

Armchair Traveling with Rick

Who is this Rick Steves guy? The guy who gets an entire bay at Barnes & Noble for his guidebooks? Doesn’t he know when he retires, if he’s ‘the brand’ he’ll get less money for his travel company when he sells it because there won’t be a Rick Steves there anymore?

I shouldn’t have worried on his behalf. I get the feeling Rick Steves is doing just fine. And having watched four or five of his travel videos I can see why. One should never underestimate the power of enthusiasm. Rick Steves is so ENTHUSIASTIC, it’s infectious.

Rick Steves looks like a guy right out of my childhood: a good, Scandinavian Lutheran small businessman who could be carrying his wife’s dish to the church basement potluck. He instantly inspires trust. His celebration of European small business people and his constant reminders that if you ‘corporatize’ your travel (with hotels, food, travel companies, etc.) you are missing out on the real Europe. It’s very rare to hear someone in America media urging viewers to spend less money!

Occasionally he’s likely to show something that is so culturally shocking to me, it makes my jaw drop. I haven’t been to Europe in thirty years so I soak up every bit of it. What I really appreciate about his videos is that 1) you can tell there are tons of political opinions that he’s trying hard to hold back while he focuses on teaching us about Europe, 2) you can see the educator and life-long learner in him. It’s not only with the content he shares in his shows, but in his appreciation of the retired educators leading small tours all around their own European neighborhoods.

Rick is forever pointing out the “fantastic new European infrastructure” that makes mass transit so easy. It’s true too! One of the most surprising things to me is that no matter what country I investigated for a possible move to teach English, a car appeared to be completely unnecessary. It’s incredibly easy to travel the length and breadth of these countries without one! I wish we had that. I am currently estimating my transportation costs in Prague to be 1/10 of what they are in America.

When he shows naked sculptures of humans in European museums, he makes it understood that it’s risky to show these things on American TV because so many people will object. Unbelievable.

He constantly urges his viewers to not have a “dumbed-down” travel experience. He alludes to, but doesn’t explain, about the forces dumbing down our culture. What forces??? Name them! I want to hear every single political thought gained from the constant comparison and contrast between both these two continents!!!!

Luckily, I can. Off camera, it turns out, Rick Steves is not shy in the slightest about sharing what he thinks when he compares American and European culture. To be honest, his politics are so thoroughly documented on his web site and blog, that I’m surprised he’s given access to Public Broadcasting for his shows during the current administration. We need more people like Rick Steves in American media challenging us to do better.

Armchair Traveling with Tony

I avoided travel videos like the plague during my parenting years. What would be the point? As Barbara Walters has pointed out, “a woman can have it all, she just can’t have it all at the same time.” Besides, moving five times to advance my career counts as travel. Now that my parenting years are coming to a close, I’ve become obsessed with borrowing travel videos from the library.

I don’t have cable (cable television will be for my years 80-95 when I have nothing else to do and have presumably used my years of mobility to the utmost) so I had never seen Anthony Bourdain on the Travel channel. Looking at the cover of his books “Kitchen Confidential” or “The Nasty Bits” I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I’d always heard that his books were heavy on testosterone. Women gush over this guy and I never could see the attraction. Must be some sort of bad-boy fixation.



I get it now. I’ve borrowed every copy of his show “No Reservations” from the library that they own. These shows are a blast. Each show is literally so much fun to watch I would practically get giddy when I got a new one. I was immediately struck at how beautifully Tony uses language but it’s the self-deprecating charm that is the funniest. Sometimes it does feel like we’re listening in on a locker room conversation (Tony in Iceland) but when he went home and showed his native New Jersey (complete with endearingly-bad hair pictures from high school – anyone gets extra points for sharing those) it’s funny.

My very favorite show was one he did on Malaysia that featured two memorable locals: a tattoo artist who teased Tony unmercifully and this ancient, tough-as-nails old man who Tony showcased in a way that made you see the old guy’s magnificence. The old man was from an ethnic group I’m unfamiliar with that used tattoos to illustrate their life’s journey. I have never, ever understood the point of tattoos but when Tony Bourdain received a tattoo in the spirit of this ethnic group to commemorate his journey, it actually made sense. And given that his viewers were present at the creation of the tattoo, every time we see it on a subsequent show, it’s a reminder of all those shared travels (even if our travels were merely vicarious).

A guy I work with tells me that the Travel Channel has Anthony Bourdain marathons on the weekend. That would be like eating the entire box of chocolates in one sitting! It’s far better to dole each show out in dribs and drabs and just giggle for a couple days afterwards at all the fun in each one.