Drive-Up, Drive-Thru, Drive-In

One very big difference between the US and all of Europe is the abundance of fast food restaurants from which we can buy and consume food without ever getting out of our cars. The variety of food from these places isn't all that great: it is usually food which most people think of as typically American: burgers, fries, hotdogs, and milkshakes, fried chicken (KFC). There is also Mexican convenience food (tacos, burritos,etc), which is not now thought of as typical American, but which I suspect certainly will be soon, and a few such establishments that serve fish. Now that so many Americans are morbidly obese from consuming large amounts of typical American fare, all of these fast food establishments also offer salads and diet drinks as part of some show of being attuned to the health conscious.


Nearly all of these restaurants (I can see my French teacher shudder every time I use this word to describe these places) have what is called a "drive thru." There is a driveway alongside of the building which leads up to a large menu board. You stop at the menu board, decide what you want, speak your order at the speaker in the menu board, drive around to the drive-up window, pay, and pick up your food. You don't get out of your car; you don't unbuckle your seatbelt; you don't give the cashier a tip. Then you drive happily away, more than likely, consuming your meal in the car as you drive.
A drive-in differs in several ways from a drive thru. One, even if you wanted to, you could not choose to have your meal inside the restaurant, though you might choose to sit at a table outside. There are many many menu boards, each of which is located next to a parking space. The method of ordering your food is the same: you look at the menu, decide what you want, then tell it to the speaker. In a few minutes, a server will come walking or skating out to your car with your food. You pay either with a card and use the menu board, or you pay your server. Either way, you eat your food in the car.
There are a few places which serve food with just the drive-up window where you place your order, pay and get your food, but not many. These days, drive up windows, without fancy menu boards are more common at banks and pharmacies, and even package (liquor) stores than restaurants.

Bags Packed for a Guilt Trip

Children have a way of rewarding a parent in the most heart breaking way sometimes. The tea olive and gardenias that I planted and have nurtured for the last five years and have been ignoring all summer are now overwhelming me with their glorious demands for attention.The blossoms on the tea olive are so dense and their scent so strong that it is nearly suffocating on the porch and you can smell them all through the house. The gardenias, not to be outdone, are blooming again, too. I certainly don't deserve such sweetness from my yard these days, after neglecting it for the last 12 weeks. But here they are, my little children, presenting their negligent mother with flowers and sweet perfumes.

Gardenia Tea Olive

Augusta Arts Festival

Festivals are pretty much the same sort of thing whether you are in Austria or Czechia or here. Most have tents with or without stages, food, and music and dancing, and maybe some art and arts and crafts. The Arts in the Heart of Augusta Festival that we went to this past weekend to read our stories had it all. As with many festivals the purpose is to celebrate and to showcase local culture, and because of the fairly large immigrant populations in Augusta, it has the flavor of both an arts and crafts fair and international food and music festival. The cost for admission is just $5 for the entire weekend, and this entitles you to peruse the artists' tents, enjoy the music and dancing at four or five stages, and to buy food from the 30 booths offering food from 35 different nations. This availability of such a great variety of cuisines is one of my favorite things about my own country as is the fact that we all exist peacefully together. It is also, dare I say it, heartwarming that many of us also take great pleasure in learning about those who aren't at all like us. So, we watched a lot of Irish performers and some Indian dancers, ate a whole lot of good food, and Bram and I got henna tattoos.

Mmmmm, Power Tools

Here are the before and after photos of the closet for which I made and installed shelves yesterday. It took about two hours, including the trip to Lowe's,which is exactly like OBI or Bauhaus, except there is no cafe in the store where you can have a drink or a meal. I live an easy walking distance from the Lowe's and a Home Depot, but I never walk or ride a bike to them because there are no sidewalks, and people drive more like they're at the Lowe's Motor Speedway than on a trip to the Lowe's store. In this area, there are people who call in to the newspaper to express their heartfelt convictions about the fitness of NASCAR drivers to be President of the US (and I thought we couldn't sink any lower than the current one). I have noticed that both Lowe's and Home Depot have all of their signs in both Spanish and English now, as do a few of the other stores, and I am quite happy about it because now a trip to these stores is a free language lesson.

BEFORE no shelves AFTER shelves and drawers

It doesn't look like much, and really, compared to building (from scratch, all by myself) the doors for the garden shed a couple of years ago, the work was both less demanding and less satisfying. Learning and writing the code necessary to present these photos as they are here, side-by-side, with text, was actually more time consuming and in its way, more difficult than both. You know, I think those ready-made drawers should be replaced with something, better, don't you? Maybe next week...

Na Naše Boty

We don't wear shoes inside our house now. At the door inside the garage we have a place for us to remove our street shoes and to change into our house shoes. If you are Czech, this habit is no great thing. Because the inside of a garage which does not face the street is a bit more private than a garage that faces the street, our original place for the shoes was simply a chair and a small bench on and under which we put our shoes. Then last Thursday morning, a neighbor's dog stole one of Thomas's good walking shoes, so Thomas agreed that it was time to buy a proper cabinet na naše boty. We were very lucky to find not only a little cabinet with doors for our street shoes, but a small thing with drawers for the house shoes, too. And three (3) bookcases for a great price at Goodwill. Goodwill is a non-governmental organization which helps people by offering them job training. The benefit for those of us lucky enough not to need this training is that we get to buy what Goodwill sells. Such a store is called a thrift store, and while most of the items sold there are used, many are still new, like the cabinets and bookcases we got this weekend. Think of it as a really well-organized yard sale, with these exceptions: the prices are higher, though still low, it is open 6 or 7 days a week, it is all indoors, and the profits go to benefit the needy. Ever wonder what happens to the stuff that Americans don't sell in their yard sales? Much of it ends up at Goodwill,the Salvation Army, or a similar place. So, we got all of this furniture which was unassembled and in boxes, and I have been very happily engaged in assembling the drawers and two of the bookcases. Honestly, if I could make a living at working with my hands, I think that I would choose it over other jobs I have had. At the end of the day, there would be tangible evidence of my labors.

Weights and Measures

In the South, when we share the products of our garden with someone,unless we are talking about huge gardens and sharing huge amounts, the term of measurement that we use is "mess". A mess of anything is about as much as one might cook for a family of four people for one meal, though it means more if you're talking about a bigger family. A mess of beans for us, for example, looks like what is in the colander on the floor in the picture here. Those beans on the floor around it are also called a mess, such as that which is made when the bag of frozen beans falls out of the freezer and breaks open on the floor. To include both of these uses of the word mess in one sentence, you could say, "Janet made a mess on the floor with a mess of beans." Mess used with "a whole mess of..." means a lot of something and applies both to things you can count and things you can't. As in, "Janet's mom put a whole mess of beans into a whole mess of bags, and one of those bags fell out onto the floor."

Labor Day Weekend

This past weekend was a long weekend because Monday was Labor Day. We had to find something else to do with ourselves because our elaborate plans for a nice long camping trip fell through because it was supposed to rain. We have only gone camping once, and we didn't actually go camping; we just slept in the tent in our backyard. It stormed and rained all night, and that is how we knew that our tent leaks and that we were not going to risk three such nights. So instead, we stayed home, watched movies and read, and I worked on the blog and the site I am webmastering for George Singleton. I got word that I won second prize in a literary competition, and was almost too excited to sleep because I now have enough money for a ticket to Prague. We went to White County to the McConnell farm in the mountains of northeast Georgia on Sunday and hiked around and played in the creek all day Monday. The McConnell boys are extremely fond of building rock dams on the creek, and they will spends hours at it. In fact, this interest in moving rocks has been going on for four generations now, and messing around with the rocks isn't limited to building dams in the water. Bram's grandfather once spent a summer hauling creek rock up the hill to build a nice long wall. I confess, I enjoy it, too. It is a soothing activity which gives me time to think about things.

On the way home it seemed an approriate celebration of Labor Day to stop by Babyland General Hospital, "one of the Travel Channel's top ten toylands" and to witness the birth of a baby doll. As you might imagine, Bram wasn't particularly enthusiastic about it, and he made a point of saying to the adults who spoke to him that he was only there under duress. You can't blame him; it is a doll factory, after all. These toys, called Cabbage Patch dolls, were originally created and hand sewn in Cleveland, Georgia, by Xavier Roberts, who called them "Little People" dolls. They were never cheap, and these days if you want one, you don't buy it, you adopt it for a fee. The adoption fee for a handmade Cabbage Patch Kid ranges from $170 to $350 (from 3570 to 7350 Czech crowns). And you have to sign papers and swear an oath to promise to be the best parent you can be to it. Mass produced versions with plastic heads go for $50 to $80 (1000 and 1600 crowns). A few very special ones have been known to demand a $25,000 adoption fee. That's five hundred thousand Czech crowns! Amazing, isn't it? And all I can figure is how many of these dolls equals one trip to Prague. Babyland General really is a cute little museum which offers as part of the free tour the chance to watch the birth of a real Cabbage Patch baby. Each of these dolls is given its own unique name, usually by a child who is present, and a birth certificate. The baby we saw being born was named Aiden Zeke, and there were lots of jokes about the "A to Z" baby who will have everything. You can see the most exciting moment of the birth in the video here. Let me know if you would like to see the entire ordeal.