The Everywhereist

One of the better things I’ve ever had in my mouth. #thatiswhatshesaid

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I’m having a brief moment of wakefulness right now. I haven’t had too many of those as of late. I’ve gone through the last few days in the fog of jetlag, waking up at 4 in the morning and crashing (heavily) around 7 or 8pm. My body and my brain are making it painfully clear that I can’t travel like I used to.

And so I’d like to take this brief moment of lucidity to tell you a bit about Africa. I hate to say that it was a life-changing experience, because that expression is so melodramatic and overused. But the thing is, it was precisely that. There was more than one occasion where I would pause, take in my surroundings, and realize that it was in the middle of one of the more incredible moments of my life.

Between the immensity of that, and my lack of sleep, I’m having trouble knowing where to start. How do you even begin talking about your first visit to a new country, and a new continent? How do you sit down and write about your visit to a place that is (almost exactly) on the other end of the world?

For me, I do it by talking about fudge.

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(Note: I just got back from South Africa yesterday. My brain has absolutely ZERO idea what time it is. I contemplated blogging last night, but I was deliriously tired, and acting slightly more crazy than normal. At one point, I may have fallen over my husband in the kitchen because I wanted to bite his arm. When he didn’t acquiesce, I started whining like a four-year-old.

So he let me bite his arm. 

I’m still kind of out of it, but I’m pleased to say that the attempts at spousal cannibalism have become far more infrequent since that episode. I’m going to try and get my bearings over the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll be posting about a few trips that we had prior to South Africa, that I haven’t gotten around to telling you about. Enjoy.)

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Like any good alchemist, I spend a lot of time at home trying to turn lead into gold. Or, more precisely, flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and a bit of vanilla into cake.

Same thing, basically.

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My family members do not always understand me. I feel like a foreign exchange student in their homes – I’m most definitely welcome, but damn it, I’m strange. My accent is funny. I don’t eat pasta daily. I don’t have several gallons of sauce sitting in my freezer, in the event that we might have unexpected company. I purchase pre-made gnocchi, and I don’t drink wine out of a box.

And most significantly, I like sweets. This is perhaps one of the biggest things that separates me from 80% of my blood relations. They are perfectly content to go days, if not weeks or lifetimes, without anything that even remotely resembles sugar. I’ll never forget the time my aunt once told me not to frost a cake that I had made.

“You know,” she said, gently, “because some people don’t like frosting.”

“Bwa-whaaaaa?” was all I was able to sputter out before promptly fainting. She might as well have asked me not to bake the cake, too, so ridiculous was her request. (When I came to, I frosted it anyway.)

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