Renewal

O.K., just got back the other day from a mini-vacation, a weekend getaway, just me and the wife because the kids are too cool to go with us and have stuff of their own. It was a great trip, for the most part. We spent the first day at Muskauer Park, or Park Muzakowski, but the castle and most of the formal gardens stuff, and the outdoor restaurant where we had lunch, is all on the German side, and the Polish side, where we had ice cream, is mostly a walk in the wild woods.
In the evening we stayed at her cousin’s flat in Zgorzelec, he doesn’t live there, he lives in the Czech Republic, but the flat is there for any family traveling there. Just a few blocks away there is a Greek restaurant, Naoussa, and that was the highlight of the trip for me. We were debating whether to sit at the tables out front, which had a crappy view of two streets and a lot of drab buildings, or inside, which was really hot, but they shepherded us through to the back garden, which was a magic spot away from all the cares of the world, as restaurant gardens can be.
I was a bit bummed that they didn’t have Moussaka, because that was my craving, but you had to order it in advance and at least for eight people, so I just order the Gyros special, with a bit of a surly attitude, I might add. The menu said “with french fries, Greek salad and tzatziki” what that usually mean is served in a pita bread sandwich with the meat, salad and fries all stuffed in with a drizzling of tzatziki sauce, and I was resigned to that. We sat and enjoyed the atmosphere in the garden as the sky slowly turned to night. I was impressed with the waitresses, dealing with the crazy person who was there by himself, changed tables three times, and was talking to everybody about how he’d been to Greece and knew all about it, and doing the stuff that waitresses always do, like taking shots with one table.
When the food arrived, it was one plate with a decent sized Greek salad, a respectable portion , and a tzatziki which had a bit more garlic than I like, but it wasn’t bad. The Gyros was a square bowl with a massive pile of meat and cheese, on a metal frame with a candle burning underneath. Very classy.
The next day we went back to Germany, to swim at a lake. The canoe rental was ‘pay what you like’ which I thought was pretty awesome, and we had currywurst and fries for lunch.
We stopped at my in-laws cottage for an hour or so on the way home and the rain hit shortly before we got home. Fierce, epic rain, there was an ad hoc river on the shoulder of the road.
Anyway, I’ve decided to try and revive this blog, maybe not every day like before, but at least a couple times a week, because I’m retired and have the time to do so.
Also, I’ve got a new book out to plug. It’s called “This Book Contains Bad Language” and some of the poems in it are pretty darned good if I say so myself, and I do. You can find it on this blog if you just look up the top and click on “Poetry”.