LIVING EUROPEAN IN ASHEVILLE
Susie spent the night in Asheville last night to avoid the long drive to Madison County and back. We drove to their apartment house in Asheville and left our cars and walked to the Owl Bakery. Along the way I took some photographs of small American houses, most of them similar except for a few very modern newcomers. This area of Asheville had been slipping twenty years ago and is now gentrifying with people buying old houses and fixing them up. House prices are rocketing.
The Owl bakery has European bread with crisp crusts ($9 a loaf) and croissants every bit as good as in Haarlem or Paris. My ham and cheese croissant cost $6:50. I think they would have been $3 for the bread and $2 for the croissant in either Haarlem or Paris.
I remember when my German brother in law, Volker, visited us 20 years ago he wanted to have prosciutto and German bread for lunch because that is what he ate at home. We had great trouble finding prosciutto in Asheville and when we did it was very expensive, now it is inexpensive at Trader Joe which offers all kinds of foods from all over the world. We didn’t find any German bread.
The moral of this story is that is that when traveling, and I am traveling right now, stopping briefly in beautiful green Asheville, eat what the natives eat or pay through the nose. I avoided hamburgers and fries in Europe until I discovered that their fries were much better than ours. On Friday when I had an errand in South Asheville I stopped at Farm Burger for their signature burger and fried onion rings. It was worth the two and a half month wait. And tonight I am eating steak, on sale at Ingles, cooked myself, after trying steak several times on the trip and being disappointed every time.
Just as the houses in Haarlem, except for the modern ones, all looked alike, the same is true in Todd and Susie’s Montford section of Asheville.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 