As every year, my mother-in-law cooked a Sunday lunch for us this Easter. Only difference this year was, I wasn’t her only American guest this year. Gordon and Pat were on their best behavior, Helene was totally charmed and Karl spent nearly an hour telling Pat stories about his childhood in WWII and fishing with salvaged hand grenades despite the fact that Pat speaks very little German and kept trying to answer in Dutch, much to everyone’s amusement.

Helene cooked a noodle soup and schnitzels with some sort of green salad made with early greens her friend had grown in her garden, and a potato salad. Karl served the men beer.

Except for Gamma announcing during lunch that she had stuck a tiny (doll-sized) pink Barbie comb up her butt, and showing us the comb (which I then washed, just to be safe, although I think she had merely put it down her pants) things were fairly civilized the entire time. We listened to the Pope try to give his annual “Urbis et orbi” blessing on television, and Gordon explained what “urbis et orbi” meant, which the Austrians already knew, but they didn’t tell him that, although they did discuss it among themselves in German. The Pope wasn’t looking too good.

We had coffee and cake – Helene had baked Alpha a birthday cake 3 days early – her birthday is on 3 April. She baked a Sachertorte. I kept trying to think of a Sacher-Masochtorte joke, but with the Pope giving his blessings in the background I finally abandoned the idea.

After that I sort of lost sight of everyone for a while, because although it was a beautiful sunny day, Gamma wanted to watch a video of “The Frog King” she had recently received (maybe even for Easter) so I went upstairs with her to set it up for her. It was a Czech production – there were for some reason tons of fairy tales filmed in Czechoslovakia and for all I know they’re still being filmed in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. This one was, oddly, in German with German and Austrian actors, which I guess is perhaps not that odd considering the size of the German market…

Now it’s 9 at night and I’m still full from lunch.