Who have you had enough of ??

[Kat817 19]

No green popcorn for me, I am one who would have promptly presented it to the manager!

BUT....I have sat through many a boring movie that DH wanted to see, consoled only by the endless bag of beautiful, fluffy, slick with butter, popcorn. Still love the stuff. Still eat the stuff. I am able to eat more of it than you would think, but still nowhere near my pre band capacity!

I too have tried every microwave brand known to mankind, and every type of popper...nothing compares. I buy the butter salts, and oils---no deal. Many years ago (back when you could go to a drive in in any town!!) my family had a little metal popcorn popper. It had the heating element in the base, and a small metal bowl that sat down in it, to pop the kernal corn. I was about 10 and drying dishes and dropped the glass lid, and broke it, I was crushed even then......my beloved popcorn! Alas, Mom to the rescue, another lid was found and popcorn was back!

We are going to the Bruce Willis movie either tonight or tomorrow, I will without a doubt think of you all!!!

Kat

[BJean 16]

OMG!!! Kat I had a popcorn popper just like that my first year living in a dorm at college! You could smell popcorn all over the whole floor when I would pop it and here came all the neighbors and it would wind up in a great bull session - usually about boys and sex!! What great memories! Btw, we didn't have co-ed dorms yet - that started the following year.

You can't imagine what all you can heat in one of those things. Soup, chili, etc. Quite the popular item for a dorm room. Wonder what ever happened to that. I probably burned out the bottom at some point. Between that and my roomie's stereo, we had the true crash pad that year. :notagree

[green 6]

There is no popcorn like movie popcorn. It really is zee best. I used to like it best with the slimey butter product on it. I also had fabulous popcorn in Mexico once. I think that it may have been popped over an open wood fire. It tasted smokey. This was served to us in a lodge in the interior of Mexico. We were the only guests there and we were treated like gold.

It was an altogether fine time apart from the fact that they served us fish for our supper. Green loathes fish. Fish is something I can do without! As it happened we had a number of people hovering discreetly around us. When they spied that I wasn't eating my fish they were mortified and scurried off to cook different.

[BJean 16]

What a lovely, fond memory! I've only grown to like fish since the band. Before that, it was an occasional thing that I felt that I MUST do. Now I have actually learned to enjoy it. But I've never been pampered like Green, in any case.

[green 6]

Yep, we were awfully lucky. We spent some considerable amount of time that evening talking with the manager about Mexico and Canada. His English was pretty good and I had an English-Spanish dictionary which helped. Canadians don't usually get any exposure to Spanish in high school, you know. (Up here we tend to get fed French.) This took place in a village somewhere in the Copper Canyon.

[BJean 16]

I don't know Mexico that well. Don't know of the Copper Canyon. I know of the Copper Mine in Bisbee, AZ, but that's extent of my copper knoweldge.

We were treated well once when we were in Alcapulco. We decided to take an "Ecology Tour". It was organized and conducted by a former professor from Berkley, CA. He had retired, moved to Mexico and married a young, lovely native Mexican lass. He bought a small, quaint, very rustic hotel and restaurant in Alcapulco.

We went on his ecology tour (although we were staying at a different hotel) and learned all about the native cattle ranches and farms way out from town. One stop we made was very hospitable. We drove up in our open air safari type vehicle and noticed a Mexican woman flipping a white fabric up and down over something which was covered in something black. The closer we got, the more the realization of what she was doing sank in. She had baked some kind of pastries to demonstrate how she used an outdoor oven (her only stove). We were expected to buy a pastry while we were there watching her son scale a 40 ft. palm tree, with no tools and in his bare feet. Amazing!

Back to the pastries. She had placed the cooked pastries on a large wooden plank and had her cloth over them, lifting it up and down TO MOVE A BLACK CLOUD OF FLIES off of them. The DH and I, both weak stomached, moved quickly back to the safari jeep and pretended like we had something to check on there. Other tourists in the group, very politely, bought pastries and ate them. Aaarrgh. Just couldn't do it.

But I've made a short story long again... the professor included dinner at his restaurant in the price of the tour. He was a lovely little man and when we returned to his hotel, his wife was just as hospitable and sweet as he. We did tour his hotel and saw his al fresco dining tables, but again we weren't able to handle the idea of actually eating there. He sensed how uncomfortable we were and he cut us loose in a very considerate way without making us feel embarrassed. I've always wished we had spent the evening visiting with them in his restaurant.

I wound up getting Montezumas several years later at the race track in Juarez. It was such a beautiful, clean, relatively new facility that I figured there was no way I could get into trouble. Ah, how youth is wasted on the young.

[green 6]

The flies sure would have grossed my husband and I out but we probably would have bought pastries out of respect for the lady and then discreetly tossed them at a later point. I can't blame you and your husband for running for cover, though.

It is too bad that you missed out on dining al fresco in Mexico. This is something which we have done many, many times without any ill effects when travelling in foreign countries. I have been told by my brother the doc that the cleanliness of the local Water is the issue which is the most problematic and thus the rule is never to drink or eat anything which hasn't been boiled or which has been peeled by someone else. This means no drinks with ice, no salads, and no peeled fruit unless you know that the place which prepares these items uses boiled/purified water.

We have travelled to a lot of places where we have had to use bottled water in order to brush our teeth. When we were travelling in central USSR the only bottled water we could get was a very gassy mineral water. It was horrible salty stuff and went badly with the taste of toothpaste. It was while we were still in that general area that we ended up staying in a hotel where the latrines were immediately outside the restaurant. I call these toilets latrines because they were fly-infested and smelled like a collection of outhouses. In order to dine you had to walk through the stench and the wall of flies. Talk about culture shock!

[green 6]

Your tour sounds most interesting, by the way.

[BJean 16]

You're right of course, we should have bought the pastries and been discreet and just not eaten them. We were young and not very well traveled at that point.

I have dined al fresco in Mexico, but just not in such crude surroundings, as the prof''s little restaurant. It's interesting how different most genuine Mexican food is from the Tex-Mex I grew up on. There is much more emphasis on fresh vegetables and fish than all the ground beef and gloppy melted cheese in Tex-Mex food.< /p>

The tour was a once in a lifetime experience. We actually went into a couple of small villages where they were having a celebration with all the beautiful costumes and colorful decorations everywhere and the great local bands.

We were advised not to take photographs of naked children. They were everywhere, but the government passed a law against tourists photographing the poor naked children in the streets. That was in the 1970s.

The cattle ranches and farms we saw were pretty crude too. Much like you'd envision early Texas or Oklahoma ranches. Mexico is such a beautiful country.

[green 6]

Yah, real Mexican food is a surprise for us who have previously experienced Tex-Mex. We now have a local Mexican restaurant and my girlfriend ordered tacos. She later admitted that she was kind of surprised/disappointed because they weren't like those at Hernando's Hideaway, our first ever Tex-Mex joint and one where you can get the famous as big as your head burrito. This was a popular place for stoners during the 1970s. The food was cheap, tasty, and the servings were enormous.

The tour sounds very interesting. Whenever we go down to Mexico to one of those all-inclusive beach holidays we always sign up for a few tours. These are invariably worth it.

The Copper Canyon trip was in fact a tour which started off in Guadalajara. The Copper Canyon is actually a series of canyons and one of them is over a kilometre deep. They are deeper in places than the Grand Canyon but nowhere near as wide. There is a train which runs along the canyons but in order to really see them it is necessary to leave the train and stay at hotels in little villages along the route. From these a bus or jeep will drive you to various interesting spots.

Our experience was very strange for it was off-season and we were the only 2 people on the tour. The hotels where we stayed varied from luxe to one which was basic and quite battered. And some of our tour guides only spoke Spanish. The trip was fabulous all the same. And because we were fairly high up and in the interior the air was cooler and very dry and smelled wonderfully of pine.

We saw the local indigenous people who live on the hips of the canyons. These are short, squat, shy folk with strong lungs who can walk and run over long distances. They live in clearings and caves and keep chickens. The women weave shawls and baskets and make small carvings which they bashfully sell to tourists.

One of the oddest experiences for us Canadians was being proudly shown the local lake by a tour guide who spoke no English. This lake was about the size of a Canadian pond but we knew that this was a big deal because it was a photo op. We had to get out of the jeep! An interesting note for folks who come from the land of water....and take it for granted.

[BJean 16]

Wow Green, your Mexico adventures sound really fabulous. I can imagine the Grand Canyon on a smaller scale. The thing that makes the Grand Canyon so hard to relate to when you're standing on the edge of it, is that it is so vast, so far to the other side and to the bottom, it just doesn't seem real. I don't know if you've been to Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona, but it is unbelievably breathtaking - sounds a little like Copper Canyon in Mexico. My SIL was recently in Guadalajara and said it was a really neat place to visit.

Have you been to Hawaii? My DH has been asking if I'd rather go to Hawaii or Italy. I have been to one island (Oahu), but he hasn't been to Hawaii at all. My choice would probaby be Italy. What about you?

P.S. I'm from Oklahoma which is a land of lakes. Little known fact, of course. Bob Kerr was a U.S. Senator for years who worked hard at getting dams built so that Oklahoma became a much more attractive and abundant (crop-wise) state. It's very beautiful. Our small mountains and lakes are no match for Canada's though. I currently live in Texas, but I miss Oklahoma very much. To the outside world I know it is stricly from hicksville, but Tulsa is beautiful and sophisticated and the people are salt of the earth.

[BJean 16]

Ha, ha, ha... big as your head burritos... funny! When I went to a spa (read Fat Farm/boot camp) near Rutland, VT, my newly acquired roommate and I used to walk to town to a little burrito stand that had big as your head burritos. In the spa dining room, no one could understand how we could eat such delicate portions :rolleyes

It's not surprising I didn't lose more than 9 lbs. in a month! :faint:

You heard any word from anyone about TOM? :confused:

[green 6]

Although I have never been to Hawaii I have been to a few places in Italy. I have been in florence a few times and in Rome once. If I were you I would be inclined to go to Italy. The countryside is beautiful and there is, of course, a great deal of culture to see and enjoy and marvel at, something which the old countries alone can provide us. I would love to go back and see more of Italy.

The Italians also have a very sensuous and respectful attitude towards food. I ate well while I was in Italy. In fact I prefer Italian food to French. I was living in France at the time.

We have a huge Italian community living in Toronto and its suburbs and it was surprising how many Italians I met while I was in Italy who wanted to know if I knew their Canadian relatives.

When I was travelling in Italy we stayed in pensiones and did a lot of walking, shopping, hanging out, and went to some of the museums. I suppose that if I were to go back I might end up taking some kind of tour due to my husband's time constraints. In some ways this might be a little sad as it would prevent me from mingling with the local folk. On the other hand I would see much more of those things which are of historical or cultural interest.

[green 6]

I've never been to Oklahoma which does sound like a beautiful state. In fact the only places in the States where I have been are Florida and New York City. I visited NYC when I was in my early teens and only saw Brooklyn which is where my relatives lived.

My parents once took a 6 week long road trip through the States and they absolutely loved it. They found America to be a fascinating country. The idea of a road trip like theirs has long been a fantasy of mine. I figure that the hubby and I will do this at some point in the future. We've chosen to see exotic third world countries while our health is up to it. We do plan to travel in those places which have all the mod cons when we are older and want/need them. This is when we will travel Canada, another country which I haven't seen much of even though I hold the passport.

Ironically, my husband got the worst case of food poisoning in Halifax, Canada and we didn't bother to bring our collection of travel meds with us. Go figure, eh....

[claramae 0]

Since this has turned political, how the current resident of the White House. Had enough of his bs.