Internet, Dinner, and Party

I think I may have my internet problem solved. I bought an "Edge" technology modem from Vodafone, and although I've had to go back twice for adjustments, its working now. YES!

Friday evening I met MJ, who works for Radio Free Europe, for dinner. She's lived here since August and knows more places than I do. She recommended a vegetarian club, Rodosk, near Namesti Miru and I liked it a lot. Many rooms. Comfortable chairs and loveseats with coffee tables. Many menu choices. Quite fun. (Russ, Arnold and Ismini...a bit like the cafe with the 'mush-room' where we ate in Santa Fe.)

Saturday I spent the day preparing for my Fulbright get-together. Sixteen came and I really enjoyed having people in.

It was quite different getting ready for a party without having a car to shop and without having all my own kitchen stuff. My shopping list grew in the morning when it became clear to me that I had purchased ingredients for only about half as much food as I would need. Having only six plates and six flatware settings, I needed to supplement those too, or having enough spaghetti wouldn’t quite win me hostess of the year award, since people would have to take turns eating  As I suspected, there were no plastic silverware or paper plates to be found, so I bought six of the least expensive plates and 10 of the least expensive forks I could find at Kotva.

Kotva is an interesting department store that is about ¾ of a kilometer from my flat. It has five floors and sells a wide variety of items: clothes, ice skates, treadmills, other spots equipment, jewelry, wigs, toys, household goods, porcelain and crystal, travel services, linens, hair cuts… It has a couple of restaurants and a small internet café. It is not a single vendor, but rather many, many small vendors that rent space within the department store. There are several shops that compete, so you must go to each to see if they have what you want. It is not like a mall, with different stores, but more like the antique shops in High Springs that have ‘booths’ of different vendors side by side and it is possible to not notice initially that it is many shops instead of one. The Kotva building dates from the Communist era and has no attractive features as a building…architecturally, somewhat like our big box stores in terms of its overall appeal to the eye, inside and out.

Albert’s grocery chain has a store on the same block and I got some of the food stuffs I needed there, then stopped at a small Vietnamese grocery on the way back. It is the only place where I have found tomato paste and sauce and I wanted more of them. My arms are getting stronger from carrying the things I buy.

Having only one relatively large pot made preparing and storing my no-meat and meat versions of my sauce a challenge. I ended up with a medium size stock-pot of meatless sauce, two small sauce pans of sauce with meat, and my large stock pot ready to cook spaghetti...one pound at a time. It took longer than I thought it would to prepare, since things had to be cooked sequentially, instead of simultaneously, but it worked fine.

People brought lots of wine, salads, desserts, water, and one big pasta dish. No one went hungry. At about midnight, the under 40 crowd left to go to the clubs and the over 40 crowd headed home.

Speaking of the club scene after midnight…More tourists have appeared in the past few days. The clubs on my block have a lot of customers well into the early morning hours. This may be a noisy place when it is really tourist season, but that is the price to pay for being in the middle of things…which, so far, is worth it.