Sorry Mrs. L

Sometimes language difficulties are funny.  Sometimes, not so much.  Recently, I had one of those not-so-much events.

First off, a bit of language explanation.  The words for hot and cold in Croatian are:  toplo (hot), hladno (cold).  I don't have trouble remembering toplo because they have these toplo springs here (hot springs) and the word toplo just naturally sticks in my brain as hot/warm.

But hladno is another story.  In my brain, I associate hladno with hot.  No matter what, there it is.  I think it is because in English, we don't have too many words starting with the letter 'h' and hot is one of those words.  Also, whenever you see a water tap in English, they'll have an 'h' for hot, and a 'c' for cold.  So again the 'h' means hot for me.

So, a few weeks ago, my kindly, nicest, friendliest neighbour, Mrs. L, came by for a quick visit and I made us some coffee.  I personally like to drink my espresso with a little extra hot water and I always ask people if they want extra water in their coffee.  Mrs. L said she'd love some, please...but some hladno water.  So, I went off and poured extra boiling water in her coffee.  And she, thinking I had added extra cold water to cool the coffee,  took a huge slurp.  And just about had a heart attack.

I was mortified to my soul.  Poor Mrs. L was very gracious about it, but it was just one of those moments that drives home how very important it is to learn, understand, and be aware of this language in a more fluent way.  I'm getting there (not as fast as I'd like, but I'm going in the right direction). 

I just gotta figure out how to remember that hladno is cold.  Somehow.

Shiny things

So it is December 1st, 2012.  There's a nip in the air.  There's snow in parts of Croatia (and we might get a few flurries tonight in our neck of the woods.)  Christmas is coming.  There's about a million things to do.  And all I can think of is this:  what the heck do I do with all my illy coffee cans?

I switched over to illy brand coffee about a year ago.  Before that, I was a Lavazza lover.  I exclusively drank Lavazza coffee for almost 12 years.  Here in Croatia the Lavazza was a bit stronger, but I adjusted my tastebuds and continued loving it.  But then it got harder and harder to find.  I ended up going directly to the distributor in Zagreb at one point and bought an entire carton (48 boxes) so I wouldn't have to go without my precious coffee.  But it kept getting harder to find.  The shelves at Konzum and Plodine and Mercator started filling up with lots of instant cappuccino mixes, and there was less and less space left for old-fashioned espresso coffee.  I actually started rationing my Lavazza!

Jump ahead to last year when I admitted defeat, and decided to try the illy coffee.  It was love at first taste.  I couldn't believe that I'd been denying myself the pleasure of such a beautiful tasting coffee.  So I switched and never looked back.

The illy I like comes vacuum packed in these nifty shiny cans.  With screw top lids.  So they are reusable.  At first I used them for things like pencils and pens.  Then for dried beans.  Then thumb-tacks and elastic bands.  But now I've got about 25 of these sitting in my kitchen pantry and I don't know what to do with them.  They are just too gorgeous to throw away.

For now, I'm just stashing them in my cupboards and hoping that I come up with some useful idea.  Maybe there's a secret illy-coffee-canister-horder-society out there.  If they contact me, I'll let you know.