International Favorites

So what do you do when no one has volunteered for a day's cake time slot? Well previously we were stuck with whatever was available in the on site candy machine. Fortunately the situation has improved with the opening of a store called Gourmet Heaven not too far away. Prior to that downtown Providence was a desolate place to try to find any vittles - though a Starbuck's did open nearing Johnson and Wales.  Gourmet Heaven has some great food but more importantly has some great coffee time treats from several countries.  We picked five different products from five different countries with many of them classics.  You can rarely go wrong with Bahlsen from Germany and the Waffeletten with milk or dark chocolate are addictive. True also of Scotland's Walker Shortbread. Despite butter being a prime ingredient, we were happy to read that they are not as caloric as one would expected.

Le Petit Ecolier cookies from France with the chocolate coating are always worth it and the Japanese treat Pocky tastes great and is fun to eat. Lastly we had some cappuccino Quadrattini from the northern German area of Italy known as Südtirol or Alto Adige.  Loacker makes these wafer cookies in many flavors and they are all good. The package also reminds us that they contain "no ingredients produced using biotechnology". We're not sure if that is good or bad or if it should at all matter. We don't take it as a selling point.

With many folks at the DDW in New Orleans, conversation focused on various things including how Providence is not prominent enough to attract any terrorist's attention. We also learned from our resident food expert that airport concessions supposedly dole out bad food if they know you are taking it on a plane. They purportedly only give the fresh stuff to customers that are remaining local so that if the food makes a person sick they are no longer near enough to cause any trouble.  We can't help but be skeptical about this and if anyone has any experience or proof of this we'd be glad to hear it.

From New Orleans and the DDW we learned that the Peeps are still stalking Vicki and they showed up on her hotel pillow in the midst of a thunderstorm. This is getting interesting, folks!