Hugo and I flew to Boston last week to visit my father and stepmother. Hugo got spoiled with limitless attention and eager playmates and I got to leave the house without him, driving around suburban Boston, seeing a few friends, getting to eat a delightful tuna sandwich undisturbed in the car in a drugstore parking lot for lunch, browsing said drugstore afterwards for as long as I wanted all by my blissful self, and feeling like I could hear myself think again. Oh, it was a good vacation, alright.
On the way back to Berlin, I stuffed the suitcase with board books for the baby, a few new shirts for me for spring (elusive spring) and, of course, precious treasures from the grocery store. This time around, I had enough baking powder, vanilla extract and brown sugar waiting back in Berlin, so I got to focus on some new acquisitions.
Namely, steel-cut oats, dried Blenheim apricots, Better Than Bouillon vegetable base (Max is so addicted he sometimes threatens to eat it straight from the jar with a spoon), dukkah, because it looked interesting and because I think Heidi once said it tasted delicious, and two kinds of chile powder (ancho and chipotle).
How about you, fellow ex-pats? What do you buy when you're home for a visit? I don't just mean Americans far away from home – but ex-pats in general. What foodstuffs do you miss the most, whether you're Italian or German or Indonesian? What's the weirdest thing you've ever toted home again? What is the one thing everyone in your life knows to bring you when they come to visit?
If I had had more room in the suitcase, I would have also crammed in a bag of pecans, one of those big jugs of Grade B maple syrup, a package or two of Zip-Loc bags (yes, really), a box of Triscuits and one huge super-sized carton of Cheerios. Sigh.
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