Chips in a Foreign Land

The first time I had salt and vinegar potato chips was in London, and I couldn’t wait to trade them away.  I was 20 and a student in a four-week study abroad program. The chips came in a sack dinner I picked up every afternoon, and my friends and I would eat them along with our sandwiches, sitting on the curb in Leicester Square. For the first two weeks, if I found the salt and vinegar chips in my sack, I tried to trade them away for regular chips. The vinegar was too strong, too sour and tangy. But Londoners seemed obsessed with them: I saw them all over the city.

I wanted to be like the sophisticated Londoners I saw every day, walking purposefully in the busy streets, standing confidently on the Tube, and going to the theater. I began venturing off by myself more, without friends to trade chips with. By the end of the four weeks, I could hardly believe that I had once disliked salt and vinegar chips. What a perfect combination of flavors! What a brilliant country!

8865057426_6be830e5a2_oWhen I came back to school in the U.S., I frequently kept a bag of salt and vinegar chips in my dorm room, a late afternoon snack in the midst of writing papers, reading, and dinner dates with friends.

After college, I found myself living overseas again, but on the other side of the world. Instead of one strange food to adapt to, it was all unfamiliar. For the first two months overseas, I had to have every meal (that I didn’t eat at McDonalds) ordered for me. My coworkers and I soon had our preferred dishes, bowls of noodle soup, spicy cabbage, steamed rolls with sugar. I grew to appreciate the unfamiliar flavors, the crowds we ate them in, and the the anticipation of wondering what I would receive. But I longed for home. I would have been willing to run a marathon for something familiar.

Even after I began ordering my own food, I had to point to someone else’s dish to let the server know what I wanted. Sometimes this was done with lots of smiling, the server happily relieved when I decided on something and we seemed to be in agreement. Other times I smiled and pointed to a stone-faced waiter who seemed to dismiss me out the door and out of the country with his eyes.

Then one day, while exploring the foreign city by myself, I went up a new staircase in a long city block and found myself in a shopping mall. There, in a small store, on a display in the center of the room, were three cans of salt and vinegar Pringles. It was as if a spotlight was shining down on the blue and yellow canisters.

I grabbed them immediately, looking around furtively to see if I had any competition. I couldn’t believe they were just sitting there, available. I hadn’t seen any other Pringles in the whole country, and they were even my favorite flavor.

I kept the chips in a hidden corner of my apartment and didn’t tell anyone about them. For several months, when I was too tired to go outside for another minute in a place with constant reminders that I didn’t belong, I knew it was time for the chips.

Eating those chips took me back to London, to the carefree days with college friends. As I slowly savored them, I found myself wondering if I would one day be as confident and assured as those Londoners.

Now, ten years later, I remember the confidence of the young woman who lived alone and braved crowded, unfamiliar streets, eating countless bowls of noodle soup and savoring three cans of salt and vinegar Pringles. Now, back at home, I await the next adventure.

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MiahOren portraitMiah is the author of The Reluctant Missionary, a memoir about the two years she spent overseas teaching English. She writes about learning to let go of perfectionism and embracing God’s plan for her life. She lives in Dallas where she dreams of someday having another cat. Connect with Miah online at www.miahoren.com.

Chip photo by RosieT on Creative Commons

Dublin Lamb Stew

Nine months after my college graduation, I find myself living with my parents, looking for work, trying to write more frequently, de-cluttering my room, and generally freaking out about life. It is a time of uncertainty, a time that requires more patience than I have.

The lamb stew I am cooking for St. Patrick’s Day takes patience, too. Lamb—trimmed of excess fat and cut into 2-inch cubes—simmers with beer, some spices, and broth for at least an hour before I can add the cubed potatoes and sliced carrots. I start early in the afternoon so that the stew will be ready for my family’s 6 o’clock dinner hour. As it cooks, the stew fills the kitchen with a meaty smell. Its taste, when we finally sit down to dinner, is rich, with a hint of thyme and a ghost of wheat from the beer. My family’s silence indicates their approval.

Deciding to make lamb stew was not so much a whim as a nostalgic gesture to the weekend I spent in Ireland three years ago. It was the end of my semester studying abroad. Four girlfriends and I had arranged our flights to stay over in Ireland for the weekend. After a jaunt to Galway, the Cliffs of Moher, and the shrine at Knock, we returned to Dublin for a farewell dinner to Europe. We chose what the hostel employee told us was the oldest pub in Ireland—The Brazen Head—partly for its history and partly because it was only a short walk away. A waitress seated us at a battered wood table in the pub’s squashed and dimly lit interior.

IMG_2325Four months abroad had felt like a lifetime; we were ready to return to American soil and our families. Yet, at the same time, we were overflowing with the exhilaration of seeing the world, of being young, of having friends, and of being more or less carefree. We ordered Guinness and raised a glass: to friendship, to Ireland, to life.

When the time came to order our food, I knew I had to try a truly Irish dish. I chose the lamb stew. Ladled into a wide-rimmed, white bowl, it came with a scoop of mashed potatoes floating on top. Crusty brown bread was served on the side, slathered in butter, which of course I dipped in the stew, soaking up all of its delicious gravy. My friend, Allison, also ordered the lamb stew and together we reveled in its heartiness, while the other girls enjoyed beef and Guinness stew, another Irish favorite.

Stew, in all its forms, although hearty and flavorful, is a rather unremarkable dish. What was it about the Dublin lamb stew that captured my attention so that it stands forth in my mind as a dish worth recreating?

I felt whole during that weekend in Ireland. Now that I had seen places that before I had only read about, the world seemed smaller. Anything was possible. I could go anywhere. I could meet anyone. I could do anything.

Perhaps, subconsciously, it is that feeling of potentiality I am seeking to recapture as I cook lamb stew for my family this St. Patrick’s Day. A bubble of hope rises in my heart like those that rise to the top of my stew as it breaks into a gentle, rolling boil. Anything is possible.

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IMG_6527 vig“Dublin Lamb Stew” is by Stasia Phillips, a writer and amateur cook who loves a delicious bowl of stew once in a while. Studying abroad in Austria for a semester opened her eyes to a whole world of flavors that she is slowly incorporating into her cooking repertoire. Stasia draws inspiration for her writing from nature, good books, her faith, and hazelnut coffee. You can find her blogging at “Cold Hands, Warm Heart.”

Choose Your Own Isolation

It was January in London. The damp hung in the air, seeping into my lungs and up the legs of my flared jeans, as I walked the streets each day for hours, along with the rest of my contingent, students on a month-long study abroad.

I’d always loved the idea of studying abroad, and I’d always wanted to return to England after living there for a few short months as a four-year-old. My memories were hazy, but they were present. I wanted to return to a place I’d been happy, feeding cows in the afternoons at a nearby dairy, watching them slowly envelop my small handfuls of grass, looking at me with large, soulful eyes.

Our professor was very tall, and I found my five-foot-two self falling further and further behind as he gestured to the objects and sites of interest as we passed. I couldn’t hear a word. Frequently, I would break into a run, so that I didn’t start to panic about losing sight of the last member of the group and truly being as alone as I felt.

At the end of each long day, we would return to our hotel, a few blocks from Queen’s Way. My roommate was often ready to go out to a show on the West End, but I was usually spent, my feet aching from all of the walking, feeling so far away from everyone I loved. I had signed up for the trip without knowing anyone well, and I found it difficult to break into the groups which had formed long before the trip had started.

Choose Your Own IsolationAlthough I didn’t venture out on my own at first, soon I grew a bit more brave (or perhaps just desperate). Although I worried about getting lost, I walked the blocks to Queen’s Way, slipping into a Spar I’d visited earlier in the trip with fellow students. I purchased a samosa, some decaf PG Tips (the tea my mother drank at home on special occasions) and a single piece of baklava.

I walked back to the hotel with my simple meal, and waited until the kettle had come to a boil. Slowly, I poured the hot water over the tea bag in my cup, watching the deep brown fingers curl into the water. I added some powdered soy milk, brought from home, and a swizzle of honey, before taking my first sip. To this day, when I drink PG tips in the evening, I am back in that spare hotel room, and I start to crave baklava.

This ritual became my sanity. My feet learned the way to the Spar, and I slowly stopped shaking on the way. Sometimes I even ventured away from my usual samosa, and tried one of the other interesting Indian delicacies in the hot case.

But I always got baklava. It was soggy, and left my fingers sticky, but it comforted me still, a sweet spot in a winter evening, the perfect companion to a cup of tea. It was the last thing I ate, and I waited as long as I could before consuming it, not wanting the experience to end, to be left alone in the hotel.

I’ve always been frugal, and this trip was no exception. I tried to avoid eating out, buying cress sandwiches at Tesco as I passed by, and storing packaged pasta salad on my hotel windowsill to keep it cool, hoping that housekeeping wouldn’t see it and throw it away.

I’m sure that this was a large part of the isolation I felt. Instead of bonding with my traveling companions over hot bowls of soup, I snuck into tiny grocery stores and ate on the run. During one such transaction, I must have betrayed something of my loneliness. “Are you happy?” the cashier asked me. She looked concerned, and genuine. I was surprised by the directness of the question, and by being seen in that anonymous place, so far from home. I can’t remember what I said, but I couldn’t forget it.

I started looking over my finances, gradually loosening my grip on my money. One day I found an Indian buffet with two other girls. I ate hot chicken soup at Stonehenge. I purchased greasy fish and chips in Canterbury and mushroom risotto at the Eagle and Child, while toasting C.S. Lewis and all that his words had meant to me.

The knot in my chest finally started to untangle. My phone calls home became less desperate. I started to reach out, just a little. I stood closer to the group, and chatted with some of them. I joined them for shopping trips to H&M (which seemed so exotic in those days). I’d written off these people in the early days of the trip, but as I made slow steps in their direction, they responded. I didn’t meet a lifelong best friend on that trip, but I did learn that I wasn’t as alone as I felt. I was the instigator of my own isolation. I had the power to connect all along.