July 2015 – robinchartier

Birthday princess

After a solemn day, we celebrated Camille properly with a fun evening. All day she had been wearing her princess crown from Nana. It didn’t quite fit the theme of persecuted people groups and death camps, but you’re only 5 once!

We walked back up the main shopping road to the square where Caleb talked me into buying him a bird whistle that he had been longing for all week. I thought he was going to need to learn a special technique to make the sound, but all they do is add water to the bowl and then it sounds like a very loud, shrill, warbling bird. Awesome.

So they showered their fellow man with terrible whistles while we watched the other street performers: man playing music on crystal glasses, a Giant skellator statue (he must have a box under his long robe to give him the extra height) who would time his movements to scare people walking by (that one was hilarious), a street-dancing troupe who was not up to the So You Think You Can Dance caliber, and various individuals or groups playing musical instruments.

We saw a woman surrounded by a flock of pigeons and realized she had brought a bag of food for them. Caleb had spent the last few days trying to catch a pigeon so he went to see if he could get his hands on one while it was busy eating. The birds stayed just out of his reach until the lady gave him a handful of food and then they were all over him. Perched in his hand, on his arms, and one landed on Camille’s head and she ducked and ran away screaming.

The bird whisperers

Who would have thought it would be so much fun to feed a flock of feathered rats? Sadly, I think this was the activity that the kids enjoyed most, since from then on it was “when can we go feed the birds again?!” I’m so glad that we went all the way to Poland for that. Kind of like the time we took 2 year old Calvin to Sea World and he was most excited about the ducks in one of the landscaping ponds. Woo. Hoo.

Although, in their defense, we don’t really have flocks of pigeons in Bahrain. At least I can’t remember seeing them. And not “friendly” ones like these. Maybe a solo bird here or there. I vaguely remember seeing a few crows. We have a lot of cats. And sand. That’s about it. If I get excited about grass and rain, I guess it makes sense for them to think pigeons are a novelty too.

When the birds had eaten their fill we headed back to the house to meet up with Nana and Poppa and get dinner. We returned to the restaurant from a few nights before with the amazing mulled wine. We wanted to try their specialty platter — basically a kitchen sink of polish food. Pickles, sausage, pierogi, fried cabbage, sauerkraut, and more. It was divine.

It’s not actually a curved dish, just the panoramic lens makes it look that way. Our dinner was too long to fit in a single shot!

From the right: kielbasa on top of fried cabbage, pickles, chicken kabob and pork, boiled potatoes, and the black lentil looking stuff was this mushroom I-don’t-even-know-what, but I wanted to eat all of it. Maybe mushroom and bulgar wheat? That doesn’t sound appealing, but it was a grainy textured, earthy comfort food. Good thing I’m not a food writer or no one would want to eat at the restaurants I reviewed.

Second half of platter from the right: the mushroom fabulousness, more boiled potatoes, the brownish thing at the top is a pork knuckle — pork cooked on the bone until it is falling apart, more pickles, 2 or 3 kinds of pierogi, and at the far end is another sausage on top of my other favorite thing, biggos. Also called Hunter’s Stew, it’s cabbage cooked with different cuts of pork (bacon, sausage, etc) and tomato sauce and again, that sounds boring, but it’s so good I ordered it at several different restaurants. It’s on every menu.

Writing about it makes me hungry for Polish food — I never thought I’d be saying those words!

All week Camille had been begging to ride in one of the horse drawn carriages that are parked on the square so we told her we would do it for her birthday.

We climbed aboard and set off around the square, down past the castle and back. It was a 20 – 25 minute ride for 8 people for $35. Another Polish bargain. Nana and Poppa taught Camille to “wave like a princess” and told people, “It’s her birthday!” as we rode past.

driving by Wawel Castle

Party in the carriage!

Calvin sat up front with the driver so the 7 of us could squeeze in the back. Good move, kid.

Petting her horses at the end of our ride.

To end the evening we went to birthday dessert. It was about 10:30 by then but all was still lively on the square. We found outdoor seating at Noworolski’s, famous for being a favorite hangout of Lenin’s (it’s been open since 1910).

Just as we were seated a light rain began to fall so we scootched our seats in closer to the center of the umbrellas, ordered up a bunch of desserts and enjoyed the pitter patter of the drops overhead as we tried a bite of everything.

She ordered the hot chocolate, which was thicker than any I’ve ever seen and had to be eaten with a spoon.

Happy birthday sweetie!

A small notFit update

After three weeks of working out with CrossFit (4 times per week) I begrudgingly admit that I might be seeing some changes in my body. I say begrudgingly because I’ve been riding along on the assumption/hope that I would look the same whether I exercise or not. That’s every couch potato’s dream, but I guess my 40s have caught up with me.

I noticed when I went to reach for something that I actually had a visible bicep muscle. I poked it and it didn’t mush into my arm like it usually does. Interesting. And today I had to give Camille a piggyback ride because her new flips were giving her blisters, but I easily stood up under her extra weight because it was much less than the squats I had been doing this morning. I actually felt stronger.

Another sign was when I got dressed for church on Friday morning I tried on a skirt that frustrated me the last time I wore it because my stomach was lipping over the waistband in a way that it didn’t use to, but this past weekend it looked as it did when I bought it. As many different times as I adjusted the waistband up and down, I couldn’t get it to pooch out in the same way as it did a few weeks ago. Coincidence? Maybe.

I thought I must be imagining things until we went to the pool and the hole in my thigh that started this all had turned into a dimple. I sat every which way on the lounge chair to make sure it wasn’t wishful thinking. It’s still there (actually 3 of them on the right and 2 on the left), but instead of reaching to China, they are just shallow dents. Carter didn’t seem that impressed when I tried to point out to him that my hole was gone. He brushed me off and went back to swimming.

I’m still dreading working out every day, but by doing it as soon as I wake up, it gives me less time to think about it and come up with excuses as to why I shouldn’t/can’t. I pretty much roll out of bed (after the 3rd alarm), throw on my clothes, make a coffee to drink in the car and am out the door in under 10 minutes. And today wasn’t as terrible as usual, so I actually had enough energy to make dinner. Or maybe that’s just what getting in shape feels like . . .

In the ghetto

Happy 5th Birthday Camille! Let’s spend it walking around the Jewish ghetto and feeling sad for all the horrible things that were done to people as part of WWII/the Holocaust. We were trying to schedule this part of our trip around the weather and it turned out that her birthday was going to be good day for walking around outside, so that’s what we did. She already thinks of the trip to Poland and Germany as her “birthday trip” and has put in her request for next year’s birthday trip to be to “Atlantis and Crete.” She has no concept that a normal birthday stateside might just be a trip to Chuck E Cheese and a few extra tokens. She’s in for a rude awakening someday . . .

Krakow is a perfect walking city so we set out in the morning to walk through the old town square and headed south over the river to the Jewish Ghetto. Before the German invasion there was a Jewish area of Krakow, but the Germans moved everyone out of the city to the other side of the river and packed them all in a several block area that they walled off.

A remaining portion of the wall. Before our trip I made the kids read several books about the Jewish experience during WWII. I read The Hiding Place aloud to them, which covered Jews in hiding, the underground resistance, and concentration camps. They also read The Boy on the Wooden Box, a book written by a survivor who worked in Shindler’s Factory when he was only 12. He lived in the ghetto in Krakow with his family and would walk to the factory each morning (as we would do on this day). The final book that I read is I Have Lived A Thousand Years by a girl who was 13 years old when the Germans took over her village in Hungary and she was eventually transferred to Aushwitz, the Plaszgow labor camp (located 2 tram stops away from the ghetto), and Dachau, before finally being liberated by the Americans. (I recommend all 3 books.)

Reading memoirs of individual experiences made everything we saw more personal. I felt like we knew the people we read about so seeing the places where they lived and worked and survived became, “This is where Leon would have gone through the gates,” or “this is where Corrie and her sister slept.”

A study in contrasts.

We found Leon’s house — 1/2 a block down the street from the wall. (The author of The Boy on the Wooden Box.)

Leon and his family lived on the 2nd floor — I wonder who lives here now and if they know the history of these apartments?

Caleb didn’t want to read the book because he kept hearing the title as “The Boy IN the Wooden Box.” Our reading of The Hiding Place traumatized him a bit. Carter really absorbed all the details of the book and kept telling me things like, “Leon’s mom and sister were sent to Auschwitz, but then Schindler went and rescued them.” My non-reader actually got something out of a book!

Heroes Square. Empty chairs representing lives lost. This is the square where they would round Jews up to be deported to various concentration/extermination/labor camps. I warned the kids that they better not sit down in any of the chairs!

Right across the street from the square is the Pharmacy Under the Eagle. At the time that the area was turned into the Jewish Ghetto the families that lived in the area were forced to move out. The owner of the pharmacy was the only Christian to remain. His pharmacy became the headquarters of the resistance where people would go for news, forged papers, and lifesaving treatments (including hair dye so the elderly could appear younger and escape being culled/executed).

Today the building is a museum that honors the work that they did and depicts what life was like for those who lived in the ghetto through photographs, first person narrative audio recordings, and video.

It has a great selection of hands-on materials. The drawers all open to reveal photographs, diary entries, and other replicas of prescriptions, issues of the underground newspaper, or logbooks of confiscated possessions or lists of people.

Inside the pharmacist’s office. They had a short movie clip of him standing in front of his pharmacy, being interviewed after one of the deportations, upset by what he saw.

The various old fashioned telephones offer recordings from different survivors and witnesses. One that I listened to talked about a young man who came into the pharmacy, shook up because the soldiers forced him and some of the other Jews to hang poles. It was only later that I realized what he meant was they were hanging Poles, or Polish people. That put a different spin on things!

Interactive photographs. Slide, spin, enlarge and click on them and information would be revealed about each person. Some were Jews, some were Nazis, some were heroes and some were villains. Caleb kept asking, “Is this one a good guy or a bad guy (or woman)?” Sometimes it was hard to say. There are a lot of shades of gray as people are struggling to survive. One might share the last of his food, but then turn around and rat someone else out to the SS.

It looks peaceful, but they spent much of the time fighting over who was going to control the screen since it would respond to only one touch at a time. I had to explain that it was disgusting to be fighting over who got to pick the person to read about when most of these innocent individuals had died horrible deaths.

After about an hour or so, we had covered most of the information on display. It’s a small place, with a fascinating history and I love how the information was presented in bits and pieces throughout the place. All the individual stories were more memorable to me than a big picture historical summary would have been.

After lunch we walked over to Schindler’s Factory. I didn’t take any photos here, aside from this one, because it was a bit heavy. A majority of the museum is focused on Krakow in World War II, with a small portion focused on Schindler. The photo above was taken in Schindler’s office, where there’s a replica of “his list” on a wall. Carter set out to find Leon’s name (The Boy on the Wooden Box) and found his entire family.

My other favorite part of this museum was a 30 minute movie that they showed of interviews with those who worked in the factory and survived the Holocaust as a result. In one portion they talked to one of the secretaries that told a story about the day that he took a group of employees out to the salt mines. (The mines that we had been to the day before!) It was a good day and a nice time and then he gave them each an envelope and asked them not to open it yet, but that he hoped that someday they would understand. It turned out that each of them had been fired. They were angry and upset and the secretary couldn’t understand why this had happened.

The following day, the Secret Police showed up at the factory with a list of names and as the secretary read down the list, she realized it was the exact same list as those who had been let go the day before. She was able to tell the SS that unfortunately those individuals had all been terminated and she had no knowledge of their whereabouts.

It was a heavy afternoon, but an important experience. I’m glad that my kids got to see these things and talk about them and hear the stories.

A bunny catching the breeze.

After we left Schindler’s Factory, we walked back over the river and to the old Jewish Quarter, where there was a thriving Jewish community before the Germans invaded. Currently there are only about 200 Jews left living there.

We visited a few synagogues

And saw some of the old posters encouraging Jews to come to Palestine after the war was over.

My favorite photo of the day: Josh and his mini-Me trying to decipher the Arabic script in the graffiti in the Jewish Quarter.

A unique birthday for sure!

Cross notFit

I should have learned by now that saying, “I will never” practically guarantees that I will end up doing that exact thing. So let me use this phenomenon to my advantage: “I will never be a published author,” “I will never have a million dollars,” and “I will never have a house with a yard and vegetable garden and free-roaming chickens.” I think that should cover it.

Many, many moons ago I said I would never do CrossFit, that cult-like exercise thing where people run around lifting and throwing tires and doing burpees until they proudly throw up. So guess what I signed up for this month?

I don’t like doing what everyone else does and everyone who does CrossFit becomes an instant missionary and says things like, “I PRed my squat weight yesterday. It was awesome. You have to do it.” That kind of talk immediately guarantees that I won’t. First of all, because terms like “squat weight” scare me and second because I don’t like to do what other people tell me I “have to” do. I even bristle when someone on Facebook says: “Need ideas for a trip to Crete. Go!” Um, no. Don’t tell me to go. Try going to Google, you lazy . . . (so I might have a small problem here).

For the past 2 years I’ve been working out pretty regularly doing things like Pilates, yoga, and TRX, except during summer vacation because the keyword here is vacation. But my various teachers have all moved away so I’ve been out of the exercise habit since late spring and not missing it at all. But when I was on our recent trip to Germany and Poland, I saw a few things that reminded me that I need to get back to doing something active. First of all, the Germans are crazy in shape. I saw 70 year olds with calves that looked like they’d been carved out of marble. All that trekking and hiking and walking up mountains has turned them into unstoppable machines. Meanwhile I saw some Americans half their age who were huffing and puffing trying to walk up a hill. I’d rather be like a German at 70 than an American at 40 so I vowed to get back to doing something active when I got home. Use it or lose it, I guess.

The final straw was when I was sitting poolside, sipping my iced coffee (with ice cream) and Carter pointed to my leg and exclaimed, “Mom! You have a hole in your thigh!” Yes, sweetie. Thanks. That’s called cellulite. “But it’s a hole!” Yes, I know. That’s what happens when you grow up, have babies and don’t exercise. Let’s keep talking about this subject really loudly so everyone at the pool can hear us. So that cemented the fact that I’m not as fit or as put together as I’d like to imagine that I am and it reminded me that I’m only going to get more dimpled and horrifying to my children if I don’t do something about it.

So, enter CrossFit. In a moment of insanity, I signed up for the month. Three weeks in and I still haven’t gotten the hard body that I am owed after doing all this hard work. Every day I look around for my gold medal because I swear I’m working as hard as an olympic athlete with all the running, jumping, pushups, pull-ups and other ridiculousness. What does a workout look like? Here’s an example:

5rnd
Cindy x3 x2
C/J x 50,000
run 400 meters

I can’t even tell you what that means because I made it up, but that’s what all the workouts look like. A jibber-jabber of numbers and letters written on a whiteboard so I have to whisper to the person next to me, “What are we doing? Wait, how many times?!? And I’m supposed to be holding weights while I do that?! Am I being punked?“

I don’t like to sweat, I don’t like to push myself, and as we established previously, I don’t like when people tell me what to do, so CrossFit should be a non-starter. But so far I haven’t died, which is a plus and also shocking, considering that I did 50 squats this morning while holding one of those long bars that Olympic lifters use. And did more squats and overhead lifts with a bar with weights on the ends. And did some running. And some burpees. This morning. Before 9am. Who am I?!

I do like that it’s so hard that I feel like I’ve earned the right to complain about it for the rest of the day. After my workout I don’t have the energy to do more than lie on the couch and knit and binge watch Parks and Recreation, which seems a bit counterproductive, but supposedly it will get easier. I’m not sure how that’s possible when the coach tells me to add more weight every time I turn around. He seems to think I’m able to do more than I think I’m able to do. So far, he’s been right, but whatever.

Another plus is I’ve met some new people, both from the military community and Bahrainis. I can barely talk to them as I’m huffing and puffing between exercises, but it’s nice to have a change of scenery. It has also brought me closer to God, as each morning I wake up and whisper, “Oh Lord, what new torture will I have to face today?” I may not get to my ultimate goal of hole-free thighs, but hopefully when I’m hiking that mountain I’ll be moving so fast, my thighs will just be a blur.

a Magic Carpet Ride

A few times a year a children’s theater company comes to Bahrain and spends a week with the kids preparing and putting on a musical. This summer the show was Aladdin. Perfect for our Middle Eastern setting!

Caleb auditioned for the role of Cassim, a character who spends a lot of time hiding from the 40 thieves through the use of various costumes and props. The play is very loosely based on the original story/movie. He and his brother, Ali Baba are hiding in the large water jugs.

Camille, thrilled that she’s finally old enough to join the cast, was in the role of a lost penguin (remember how I said it was very loosely based on Aladdin?)

She was the happiest penguin I’ve ever seen.

In disguise as Harpo Marx

More grinning

I can’t tell you much about the storyline of the play. Something about not judging people based on appearances. I was too concerned with watching my little penguin and my Master of Disguise (and trying to delete photos off my phone since I ran out of space as soon as I started to video. So aggravating!)

Cast photo

It’s pretty amazing that they take this group of kids that shows up on Sunday morning, run them through auditions, assign parts and begin rehearsals and are ready to put on a live show on Thursday evening!