Discovery

Living abroad definitely teaches you to embrace the unknown. New customs, new food, new laws, new surroundings. Soon you get used to. From time to time something pops up that makes you realize your not where you grew up but that is part of the fun. Or the frustration. Take your pick.

What's funny though is that you (or really I should say Kept Man and I) are contstantly on the look out for things that are familiar to us but not readily available in Prague. I would think that it is a common expat or immigrant experience. Familiar things are what you make you feel at home and for Kept Man and I this mostly relates to food. Family members and friends have already heard of our Mexican food obsession and have been nice to ship us hard to find items.

I thought I would document some of our (read Kept Man's) finds because 1. It's been an ongoing process and we are very excited every time we discover something and perhaps only our friends and family outside of Prague will understand and 2. A list of places to find hard to acquire itmes might be a nice resource for any other expat in Prague. If we had found something as useful as another expats list of places they shop and find speciality items we would have been extremely excited.

I asked Kept Man what his favorite discover was in Prague so far and it is no surprise that has to do with Mexican food. We had gone to dinner at our favorite Tex Mex restaurant, Cantina, which was a life saver for two Californians in desperate need of enchiladas and tacos until they could get their own kitchen. On the table was a bottle of Cholula which brought back fond memories of our old work cafeteria and how the staff went through liters of the stuff. As I was looking at the bottle I started to wonder where the restaurant had purchased it. You can get hot sauce readily in Prague but I hadn't noticed Cholula. On the back was a sticker with the ingredients listed in Czech and a website. Kept Man immediately grabbed the bottle and made me remember half of the website address.

Upon returning home he looked it up only to find that not only did this place sell Mexican food items but that they had a store front in Prague. I think it took him less than a week to head out to the store. He has since discovered that it's better to order what he needs online and then pick it up than to go to the store and try to explain what it is that he wants. But they have dried chillies so we are no longer hoarding the ancho chillies like they're the last ones on the planet and there is even Masa Harina to make corn tortillas so family members are no longer required to ship it to us and we don't have to use of valuable weight in our suitcase the next time we're in the States. We also now have a tortilla press which Kept Man is enamored with. Before he found the store he was getting to the point he was going to go to a hardware store to see if he could put together some sort of home made tortilla press.

So our Mexican obsession now continues in Prague with fewer restrictions than before and that makes for two very happy native Californians living in Prague.