coffee morning highlights

Happy weekend! Doing anything interesting? I’ve been having a lovely, lazy Saturday, following a busy week. After spending all of Thursday in the kitchen, baking (cinnamon rolls, bagels, mini quiche, coffee cake, acorn cakelets, brownies), I hosted a coffee morning on Friday. It was a lot of fun, and there were a couple of highlights I found to be particular to the Foreign Service and/or life as an expat:

• Bagels. Yes, I made bagels. As anyone who has been out of the US for an extended period of time knows, bagels are only available in the States. I have no idea why, but it is true. I’ve seen them advertised elsewhere — here in Belgrade, in Budapest, for example — but whatever those things were, they weren’t bagels as we know them. Needless to say, the bagels were a big hit.
• Slip covers. After a lot of thinking and weeks of research, we got slip covers to out on our State Department-issued Drexel Heritage couch and loveseat. For those of you who know what I’m talking about, we had the green and gold ones. The fabric options for the Drexel Heritage furniture are notoriously bad and most certainly not neutral. While I didn’t find these to be particularly offensive, they made our already light-deprived downstairs look even darker. But now we have light beige/oat colored furniture, thanks to Ikea’s Ektorp line, and what a difference they’ve made! Almost all of yesterday’s attendees commented on them, and most we’re very eager to find out where I had found them. The fit isn’t perfect, but it is good enough and I finally feel like we’re putting our own stamp on things
• One of our new rugs.This one is in our living area, and it is both gorgeous and unique. And we got it here. Not Uzbekistan; here, in Belgrade. I have a post-in-progress about buying it, so look for that soon.