Our Sabbatical Life

When I grow up, I want to become the Postmistress of Castrojeriz, Spain. Imagine a job where you come in Monday-Friday from 9:30-10am.  You get to enjoy a bit of "office" camaraderie, interact with a few local residents, help out struggling tourists who want to send a postcard from their Camino route , and then go home in time to have a proper breakfast and really start the day. Of course, if you are a tourist--or, for that matter, a resident--who needs the post office to be open beyond 30 minutes in the morning, these hours could be a bit frustrating.  And--gasp!--what if I needed something on the weekend?  Then, I might be missing the Chicago-area suburbs with their 24-hour grocery stores, Saturday hours for the post office, etc. We have had enough adventures with European ideas of public services to know that all will not be smooth sailing if and when we finally do move there.  In fact, in just about every country we are contemplating living in, we've had...

In our second two-month stay in Montreal last fall, my French teacher Nicolas--who came from the beautiful 7th arrondissement of Paris--was talking about the relative merits of different coffee shops right around our school.  Someone in class then asked him whether one would ask for a cappuccino if someone wanted coffee with cream in France.  Nicolas responded that, in fact, either Italian  cappuccino or cafe latte would be understood, along with the more French  cafe au lait , but that there is another French name we could use, for a better coffee drink.  He asked if anyone in class knew what that might be.  I did. As a side note: Although our French classes were quite international, because so many of the students in class were still quite young (Will and I were both the oldest students in our respective classes, sometimes by 10+ years), they had not traveled as much as old fogies like us.  That being the case, I always tried to temper my ent...

Lest we seem ungrateful, let me just say at the outset that I often cherish our home.  When the afternoon sun hits our west-facing windows during summer dinner parties, or when Will and I sit out on our balcony to watch the sun set, or when I see our dog Katie sprawled out on the granite in front of our living room fireplace, I'm filled with a sense of contentment and--especially if we have actually cleaned the living room--even a certain amount of home-pride.  But... The fact is, it's not because we love our home that we opted to stay in Chicago when there were offers a couple of years ago for Will to move out west for his career.  Sure, I have a tenured teaching position here, but that wasn't the only reason either.  In addition to whatever other reasons, the truth is that our home is something of an obstacle to an ideal "sabbatical life." *   *   *   *   *  In May 2006, we sold our Chicago bungalow and went to...

In our " About Us" page , we promised that we wouldn't write too much about things like cooking dinner together.  This particular entry is going to make a liar out of that promise, but hopefully the occasional such posts will be forgiven... *    *    *    *    * The subtitle for this blog identifies "Biking, Hiking, Eating, Traveling and Other Adventures" as the focus of Our Sabbatical Life.  While the rest are more outdoorsy activities, we find the sole indoor -oriented activity of EATING at least as important as any one of the rest.  (In fact, for me at least, food might be more critical than the ALL the rest combined!) One of the ways we get the most out of our eating pleasure?: Hosting dinner parties.  We also like brunches and lunches and cocktail hours and weekend house parties too, but perhaps our preferred form of entertaining might be to have 2-4 extra people over for a long dinner that involves plenty of ...