Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Das Heimatland: First Reactions

Notes on the first 36 hours of my 2-plus-week holiday:

  • If you only have 20 minutes to make a connecting flight, there's a good chance your bags won't make it to your destination at the same time you do.
  • One notices an awful lot of hot men when traveling by air... one might call it Larry Craig Syndrome. However, in any given aircraft/airport, there are probably a greater number of unappealing specimens.
  • If you sleep through your train station, it's a plus if the end of the line is only a hundred yards further down the tracks.
  • The upper 20s is pretty damn cold, but at least I have nothing that needs doing but napping.
  • The Philadelphia accent sounds pretty trashy and uneducated; good thing I'm not judgmental.
  • My mother's conure has a motherfucking sharp beak and has grown into one nasty bitch.
  • I'm tempted to try the Delaware Valley specialty of "Scrapple", which occupies some prominent real estate in the supermarket breakfast-meat section here, along with "Pork Roll" (with which I have a long and fond history).
  • I just received a sort-of open invitation to go with a friend to a Christmas party on Saturday in... the Bronx. As a complete outerborough virgin, I'm a little scared. In my mind, Grand Concourse is more or less the same as Normandie & Vermont. I'm such a white boy.
  • I manage to get pretty unmotivated and lethargic pretty quickly when I do this annual return to the womb, of sorts. Good times. I think.

6 comments:

LadrĂ³n de Basura (a.k.a. Junk Thief) said...

I can't believe it took you seven bullet points to get to pork products. Have you no sense of priorities!

I urge you to make the jaunt to the Bronx. It ain't what it used to be. It's hard to believe that even in the 1990s people feared coming to see me in Brooklyn, even though I was in squeaky clean Park Slope.

Anonymous said...

I would want to go Grand Concourse just for the name. The world needs more Grand Concourses.

Stash said...

*waves*

Anonymous said...

I love scrapple and always indulge when hanging out in Baltimore with my ex and his cranky, racist husband...

The Bum said...

You should absolutely try the scrapple. I love it. Just don't ask too many questions about where it comes from. Just a general idea is plenty. Yumm!!

BigAssBelle said...

it all sounds wonderful, but honey, the scrapple. indulge. it is DIVINE. that was one of the most marvelous things about hog butchering every spring. grandmother would sit down with the hog's head, scrape it out, scrape up all of the little bits and pieces of hog from the kettle and make that divine substance. i see CHOWHOUND on your blogroll. you must. report back.

the rest sounds lovely and especially the napping. something about napping at home. the home.

by the way, i had to look up "conure" ~ birds in the house freak my melon.