Home is Where the Stomach Is

One of the drawbacks of living overseas is missing all the food from back home. We are lucky and blessed to have a commissary at our post, so if you just can't live another day without your favorite junk food or beer, you can probably get it here, as long as money is no object. Somedays, only a Pop-Tart (c) will do, you know what I'm saying? 

But what you really begin to miss are the ethnic and local foods available at restaurants back home that just aren't available, or even more frustrating, they have something with the same name here but it just isn't the same. But lately, good things have been happening.

We have managed to find, not too far away even, a taqueria. It is a little hole in the wall joint that seats about 17 close friends, it's cheap, of amazing taste but dubious healthiness. Almost like what we enjoyed in Laredo!

Then, last night we had dinner at some Foreign Service friends' house where we got to enjoy for the first time since we left the DC area:

Oh, yeah, all the favorites. Injera, doro wat, that spinach dish :-), and small cups of atomic-strength Ethiopian coffee for dessert. Our friends bring t'eff from America when they go home and make injera for their family every week. They have said come over any time. If we went as often as we liked, they wouldn't be saying that any more.

It was a lovely evening with colleagues who had been posted to Addis Ababa, talking East African politics, eating until we burst, and listening to Teddy Afro.

So, in the last two weeks we have had two homecomings for our stomachs, and things are good, really good. As long as we meet Mexican and Ethiopian friends at all of our Foreign Service posts, we may just be able to make it in this life.

-S