One of the reasons I had to come back to Nebraska this summer was a party.
It was actually a pretty big party, but we didn't end up getting a good group shot of everyone.
I just have this:

We needed to celebrate the birthday of my Grandad!

It was a great time and a wonderful opportunity to catch up with family that I haven't seen for ages.
Good times!

As a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, I figure that my only real hope of giving my readers any idea of what we're doing here in the USA lies in posting some photos.

First of all, no visit to the USA is complete without an enormous fiberglass animal statue, such as the World's Largest Holstein Cow up in North Dakota....or the slightly smaller, but no less beloved Giant Chicken of Lincoln, Nebraska.
This big guy roosts in the parking lot of a very popular local restaurant. Lee's has been around forever and some of my earliest memories involve eating there with my whole family. Grandpa Augie would invariably tell me to go over to ask the organist to play 'Love Letters in the Sand' and he'd give me a quarter for her big glass tip jar.
I must have done it dozens of times over the years, but I was always SO embarrassed...

It's not much to look at, but it was fun to take my kids to visit...and eat some of that amazing chicken!
Here's my mom and Tya at the bar:

(If you blow up the photo and look to the right of Tya, you can see that the organ is still there and the tip jar still sitting right on top of it)

But my home state of Nebraska is about so much more than Lee's fried chicken and old Pat Boone songs.
It's also about college football.
And, more specifically, college football merchandise:
Yes, the Huskers reign here and their insignia is to be found everywhere, on everyone, at all times. If you want to blend in here, all you have to do is wear a University of Nebraska t-shirt. It's a kind of uniform. As you can see, though, we haven't quite got that mastered yet and Tya's Goth wear kind of stands out like a sad, dark and mournful sore thumb...

We end up spending a lot of time in stores. When we're not looking at books and clothes, we're mostly to be found shopping for food. And when we do so, usually Tya grabs my camera, recruits her brother and heads off to document the fascinating world of the American supermarket. She seems particularly fascinated by the huge quantities and has quite a number of photos of Sev holding jumbo-sized containers of just about everything a person could want to eat.
For example:
They seem to have a good time, though the other shoppers aren't quite sure of what to make of them...

I have lots more photos and lots more to say about our trip. I just hope I can find the time to post them and do some more writing. I miss my blog!

The house is tidy, the garden weeded, laundry done, fridge cleaned, and suitcases packed.

In short, we are ready to leave for the U S of A!

We'll go to the Geneva airport early tomorrow morning and catch the 9am flight to Newark...then another to Chicago....then, finally, a plane to my home town of Lincoln, Nebraska.

I just hope the housesitters turn up! They're supposed to be driving in tonight, but it's already 9:30.....

Which American accent do you have? Neutral You're not Northern, Southern, or Western, you`re just plain -American-. Your national identity is more important than your local identity, because you don`t really have a local identity. You might be from the region in that map, which is defined by this kind of accent, but you could easily not be. Or maybe you just moved around a lot growing up.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Or maybe you lived in Switzerland, then France, and then Burkina Faso and then France again.

I left my home state of Nebraska right after university. Then when I was in my mid-twenties, I left the US altogether. I apparently also left behind my Nebraska accent.

Not that I ever sounded like Larry the Cable Guy. But it's been years since I called a soft drink a pop ...

I became a French citizen in 1996. Luckily, I was able to keep my US citizenship because, although I try to fit in around here, all of my laboriously acquired «French-ness» is grafted onto a whole lot of «American-ness».
And so it was that, as I drove up and down the D610 highway vainly searching for «Les Cabanes» as night fell, that a lightning bolt of a thought flashed through my tired brain: Ask a policeman for help!　

I’d heard this phrase probably thousands of times from my mom when I was a child growing up in Nebraska. (No cracks along the lines of «How could anyone get lost in Nebraska?», please. I assure you that a Football Saturday or an afternoon at the State Fair involves population density above 8.9 per km2).

If you get lost, you’re supposed to look for a uniformed officer of the law and ask to be returned safely to the bosom of your loving family - that’s the rule back in Nebraska and I didn’t see why it couldn’t work in the South of France.

I did a u-turn and headed back towards Castries -the village with the very distracting 17th century aqueduct. I’d already driven through the place several times by this point and on the last trip through had noticed a low, oddly-shaped building marked «Police Municipal».

I pulled up to the closed gate blocking the entrance and Valentine looked over at me with eyes that said «This sure doesn‘t seem like Vacation Paradise to me».

«We’re going to go into the station and talk to the nice police officers. They’ll help us find Papa and the other kids! » I said brightly. Or they’ll think I’m completely mad and send me on my way to wander the side roads of Provence for the rest of my life, I silently added.

While I felt that US police were probably aware of their part of the informal agreement outlined previously, I wasn’t so sure about their French counterparts. Maybe no one had ever told them that they were supposed to be the saviors of lost and confused travelers…

It didn’t seem very promising at first, that's for sure. The whole place was enclosed by a high fence and the gate firmly closed. Not very welcoming. Through the intercom box, I had to use my best and politest French to convince them to let me in. I was careful not to slip into the familiar «tu» form and even made the «liaisons» - something lots of French people don’t do, even though they’re supposed to. In short, I did my best to demonstrate, in just a few short sentences, that I was the «nice» kind of foreigner- the kind who has painstakingly studied the (rather pain-in-the-rear) French language and not done too badly at it.

In the end, I think they opened the gate because they were bored and thought «This is really odd. Could be a fun story to tell around the espresso machine at break-time.»

So, they let in the crazy, but well-spoken, American woman and her 9 year old daughter.

To their credit, they were a nice bunch -a bit mystified as to what they could really do for me, but willing to give it a shot. Of course, not one of the nice officers had ever heard of «Les Cabanes» and they had no clue how to help me find it...

I know that I complained in a recent blog entry about soumbala and gumbo. But there’s foods far more exotic than that in West Africa.
By "exotic" foods, I mean foods that back home in Nebraska we'd describe as 'different'.
'Different' is a way to say 'really, really bad' in Midwestern Understated Dialect. If you invite a Nebraskan to see a politically-inspired modern dance piece featuring nude performers, scrap metal and chunks of raw meat, chances are he or she would say afterwards : "Thanks. That was different." We are a polite, cautious people.


So, being Nebraska born and raised, I'd have to say that caterpillars are different.


Now, I like caterpillars when they are A) humorous sidekick caterpillars, as featured in popular animated films, such as Bug’s Life. Or B) colourful creatures that stay outdoors, not making personal contact with me and eventually turning into butterflies.

I do NOT like caterpillars when they are C) dried, toasted and presented to me as my lunch.


Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city in Burkina, is famous for its edible caterpillars. It’s not a culinary oddity that the thrill-seeker has to laboriously ferret out. People present the things proudly at the town’s main market: bag after bag of the chubby brown bodies.
They are commonly eaten in sauces, but also in salads. And instead of a boring old mushroom omelette, in Burkina you can have yours with caterpillars.

I’ve posted a picture above from a cookbook called “Culinary Arts of Burkina Faso” (It’s published by the national tourisme office here). The book features several typical Burkinabé foods: tô, degue, zoom-koom, dolo, etc. and right in there among them are recipes for salad and omelettes featuring sitmus caterpillars.


Roasted grasshoppers are another somewhat alarming specialty. My friend Delphine loves them and nothing makes her happier than when a friend from Niger sends her a bag full of the crunchy treats. When she urged me to try some, I gingerly picked past the whole insects and found a small leg. It was not horrible, but I couldn’t get past the idea.
Eldest daughter (then age 6) is far more adventurous than her mom. She carefully chose a whole insect and popped it in her mouth. She thought it was great and settled down beside Delphine to eat a few more. She reported that the heads were a bit icky, but the bodies were pretty good.
Just like potato chips, but with more protein, I guess.


Folks in Burkina also eat bats. This was a source of a minor misunderstanding when I first arrived in Ouaga. I haven’t tried it – and probably won’t. But you can order stewed bat in some local restaurants.
Agouti (or grasscutter) is also frequently found in restaurants here, even though they live more to the south in places like Ghana.
Monkey meat is sometimes found. It's euphemistically called "bush meat".

Of course, the average person here doesn't eat much meat at all. And when they do, it tends to be either goat or mutton. Neither of these dishes are ever served at our house, though -especially the former.
Aslan the Wonder Goat is our friend, not our food!

When I go to the gym over at the Rec Center, I watch TV. In fact, the TV is what has kept me going there over the past few years. While my rear has not gotten discernably slimmer, I have gained a low resting heart rate and a great appreciation for Dr. Phil. He's on at 9am (local time) on channel 2 of the AFN. That's the Armed Forces Network and it's a trip. For those of you not familiar with it (and I bet that's most of you) it's the satelite network that supplies TV shows from the US of A to all of our soldiers all over the world. Lost, American Idol, House, and other delights are all on offer 24/7. We get it at the Rec, because the club is affiliated with the US Embassy here.
Actually, what's really striking about the programming is the commercials aimed at the military audience. They are not actually ads, per se, but public service announcements. Apparently, the members of the US military need to hear A LOT about the evils of: gambling addiction, suicide, domestic violence, credit card debt, dehydration, shaken babies, crash diets, rape and depression. (and who wouldn't be depressed after all that. Sheesh). What you get during the breaks between shows is a couple of these cheery PSAs, along with one exhorting you to become a demolitions expert or a Navy SEAL. Very strange.

Today 's Dr.Phil was about the pros and cons of the "baggy pants" worn by many" fashionable ghetto-rific persons and ghetto-rific-wanabes in the USA. By "baggy", they don't mean "large", they mean: hanging down so low your underpants are on prominent display. This strikes me as very silly, but not worthy of concern, but I guess several US cities have banned the style and impose fines. It was all very goofy and easily got me through a one hour aerobic work-out. Adding to my entertainment was the short "Guess this state capital" featurette that was on right afterwards. "My state capital features a replica of the Greek Parthenon!" the nice lady informed me, as they showed a tape of a big building that looked just like, well, the Parthenon that is in Greece. But this one looked lots newer. Now even a cursory glance at Wikipedia informs me that the Parthenon in still "one of the world's greatest cultural monuments". I had kind of been wondering if that had changed. Like maybe it had been decided that the Parthenon just wasn't "all that" and people were no longer being told that it's the most important surviving building of Classical Greece? Like maybe if they didn't specify that it was a copy of the Greek Parthenon, we might all think it was a replica of the Chicago Parthenon (which is a nice little restaurant on South Halsted, but pretty unprepossessing, architecturally speaking. Why the heck would somebody copy it?)
BTW- AFN is showing American Idol on Thursday night and the ad said they would be showing the auditions from Omaha, Nebraska!! Go Big Red!