The Little Tart Bakeshop

For the past year I've been working as a baker at the Little Tart Bakeshop, just the best bakeshop in the city! Never did I imagine starting work at 5am and actually enjoying it! I worked with a wonderful team of fun, open-minded and committed people that made the 10 hour days easy to handle. When we weren't working hard at making all our pastries perfect and delicious, we licked the meringue whip in the corner of shame, ate baby croissants for breakfast, wrote inspirational notes to one another on the focaccia, created imaginary scenarios for a sexy tart calendar, got high on Octane's caffeine and had lots of fun! 

This past Wednesday was my last day. I'm going to miss this...

Tart dinner

I've been working for the past year at the Little Tart, the best bakeshop in Atlanta, with a team of wonderful (and beautiful) people who I really admire and consider friends. Even though it is lots of hard work, we laugh, joke, sing, dance and comment on all the sexy customers that walk into the shop. And sometimes we even bake things! So my way of saying thank you for this amazing year, for this learning experience, for believing in me and for making me feel part of the Tart family was to host everyone at our place and treat them to a Portuguese dinner: arroz de cabidela, moelas, broa, pão alentejano, alheira, chouriço, migas, marmelada, leite creme, mexidos, amendoa amarga, favaios e ginginha.      

Love you guys!

atlanta, as seen from an open top car

Last weekend we went for a ride in downtown Atlanta in our very cool convertible and all I did was look up!

pig ears, anyone?

Where does one buy pig ears in this grand city?
Here, at the Sweet Auburn Curb Market...

... where you can buy whole pigs!

 

... and smoked ham. Yummy!

on how to make a come back by admitting to the obvious beauty in golden fork-shaped cabinet door knobs

Lots has happened since my last post. I haven't been away, just distant and not much in the mood to blog or photograph. It was a phase and now it's dissipating and I'm starting to carry my camera around more often and trying to find beauty in things like the knobs in our new apartment's kitchen! Very kitsch. 
I haven't been on my most cheerful side lately. Nor have I been making things with my hands, just bread. I'm also tried of how this blog looks like. It needs a makeover. I'll have to schedule an appointment with Pedro for this. 
I need to make a come back cause today is going to be a great day! 

It's been 6 months since we landed in Atlanta and started a new life together. 

You are the absolute best part of it. And home will always be wherever I'm with you!

Halloween with Roy Lichtenstein

Even though I still have a few things to share about my grandma's last days here in Atlanta, I can't help but talk about Halloween. It's crazy over here: the whole month of October is all about carved pumpkins, cobwebs, haunted houses and the Little Five Points Halloween Parade. I really wanted to dress up as something interesting and after a bit of googling, thrifting and some DIY goodness, we came up with this:

It's polk-a-dot madness! We were characters from Roy Lichenstein's pop art paintings:

Sarah's the sobbing character.

Thomas is the betraying husband.

And I'm too pretty to work! 

We were stopped dozens of times to pose for pictures: some knew instantly who we were, some people thought we had the chickenpox. We looked great! Or as Americans like to say: AWESOME!

A week later Sarah and Thomas hosted a Halloween party and it was Pedro's turn to dress up:

grandma is in the house

After being awake for 24 hours and a 16 hour flight with everyone treating her like a princess, my 84 year old grandma is here in Atlanta. How cool is that!? I'll be posting our daily "adventures" to share with everyone back home. Here she's skyping with my sister and cousins in Canada. She sends out kisses with her hand when she sees them live on the monitor, it's so sweet. Little does she know that in a about a week my cousins will be surprising her! I really believe that when a person gets to a certain age should be pampered and surrounded by family and love. It's my way of saying thank you for all the amazing things she did for me when I was growing up. Think about it. And if your grandparents live far away, give them a call. I'm sure you'll make their day!

hurray!!!

A follow up post: after much wait and despair these past weeks I received in the mail 2 beautiful pieces of plastic: my Social Security Card and my Employment Authorization Card. This means I can have a driver's license and legally find a job. No more loafing as an Atlanta housewife... 

But not all is peachy: on the down side, we found out we don't have health insurance. This means we'll get on the first plane out of here if anything happens! Don't you just love "first world" countries!? 

the computer says no....

here

Who´s familiar with this Little Britain sketch? You cross your fingers and hope this is only fiction and that in real life civil servants are nice and helpful people. Well not with the Social Security Administration (SSA) here in Atlanta. My adventures with them have been surreal! So for those who complain about Portuguese civil servants, trust me they are truly nice compared to the ones over here. 

I'm sorry this is such a long post but if you have the patience keep reading!

NOTE: Pedro received his SS card 2 weeks after our arrival. I'm still waiting for mine. 

SOCIAL SECURITY, THE PROCESS:  

1. The day after our arrival in Atlanta we went to a local SSA office to fill out the application for a Social Security Number. This was my first application. 

NOTE: the documents riquired are: passport with I-94 (Alien number) and because I have an L2 Visa, a copy of my marrigae certificate, which is written in portuguese (this will be interesting latter on!). 

2. In my first application they got my address wrong. So after waiting 2-3 weeks I went back, only to be told that they didn't know where the application was and how I applied so quickly for a SS number (because you have to wait at least 2 weeks before applying). To sum it up I had to fill out a second application.

3. I waited one month after which I returned to the SSA office. The nice man here told me that I had been attributed a SS number and wondered why I didn't receive a letter of notification. After a couple of minutes of searching his computer, he tells me he doesn't understand what was going on with my application and goes talk to his manager. He returns and tells me that something was wrong with the verification with Homeland Security (because I'm an "alien" the process goes through Homeland Security). Anyways, I would need to fill out my third application!

4. If you managed to read it up to this point, this is when it gets nasty. After one month I finally receive a letter saying that they weren't able to give me a number because Homeland Security was unable to verify my "legal alien status" but this did not mean I was ineligible for a SS card. The letter also stated that if I wanted someone at SSA could review my application. 

5. So I went to the SSA office once again to better understand what was going on. I had the most surreal treatment! The lady basically says: NO! No to all my questions. Refusing to review my application because she needed my marriage certificate (which I didn't have on me that day because they have 3 copies of it on file!) She says, and I quote "I am the one that works here!"; "I can't do nothing!"; "I can't search for your application!". I kept telling her that my application is on file, look for it! She says NO. Simply no. Come back tomorrow! 

6. I was furious! I exited the building, waited a couple of minutes, talked to Pedro on the phone and went back into the building, got another number and waited for my turn. This time I was attended by another "nice lady" that sat right beside the bitch that had served me just 15 minutes before. I asked her the same questions: can you review my application? can you tell me what was wrong? Not as bitchy as the first one, but without ever being nice, she gets up, goes to a file cabinet and gets out my application, reviews it and says: Homeland Security stamped your passport wrong with my first entry, instead of stamping L2 visa, they stamped L1 visa. Since I went to Toronto I got the proper L2 visa stamp but they still hadn't updated my status in the system. I would have to do a fourth application! 

7. The next day I go back to SSA office, with my passport and Portuguese marriage certificate (that had been accepted the other 3 times). I'm served by the same "nice" lady that had accepted my second application. She looks at my marriage certificate and hands it back to me saying she "can't read it"! I couldn't believe it! When I tried to explain, she interrupts me and says "DON'T TALK!"! Can you believe it! Don't talk! I laughed and ignored her and said that a couple of months ago I was sitting in the same chair and she accepted that same document, so she would have to accept! She literally snarls, gets up and goes check other applications with foreign documents. To her surprise and my pleasure, it's SSA responsibility to accept and translate foreign documents because there is no federal law that says English is the official language in the US! She snarls the whole way through the application and I sit there and smile in her face. 

8. Now I'm waiting for my SS card to come. If it'll ever come. And when it does, I will write a personal letter to the general manager of SSA in Georgia and to the office manager in Atlanta complaining about unprofessional behavior and explaining why courtesy and kindness should be universal principles in civil servants. They often forget that their paycheck comes from the people they serve. 

This post will serve as a draft. 

Thanks for reading.

ATL ART

I spent the last couple of days at the Gathering Atlanta, an event that brings together the creative masses of the city for a 3 day networking event. It was very eye opening to discover major cultural institutions here in Atlanta.

From the pile of cards and info I brought home, here's just a few things I learned:

- one could actually rent out an apartment at the Goat Farm, an amazing place for photos and events.

- there are graffiti in Atlanta after all! And Living Walls makes it happen;

- after much googling and phoning I finally discovered that I can use a darkroom at the Wooder Root has open access labs for  members at the amazing price of 10$ a month.

- Mass Collective is bringing together art and science in one space after they finish renovating a 100 year old building.

- There should be a website like this one for Portugal.

sweet auburn

As part of my training to be a volunteer tour guide with the Atlanta Preservation Center, we went on a tour of Sweet Auburn, one of the most interesting historic neighborhoods of Atlanta. After Emancipation it became a strong black community district and during the Jim Crow segregation laws, its was a city within the city, self sufficient and exclusively black. Also, it's the birth place of Martin Luther King Jr. and where he started preaching his nonviolent civil rights activism.

 

Place of birth of Martin Luther King Jr. 

An old ghost sign for Gold Dust Washing Powder discovered after the neighboring building was demolished.

The Odd Fellows Building

Going back into the past is fundamental to understand how life is lived today.

On this note, while I'm writing this, I'm listening to chapter 6 of the audio book Outliers (by Malcolm Gladwell) on the culture of honor, social and behavioral pattern specific to, among other places, the American South. Interesting. Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lines. They persist...

traffic signs

In Portugal, as in the rest of Europe, traffic signs are intuitive: a series of color codes and pictorial symbols that are very easily interpreted. So, imagine after a 24h flight to Atlanta, having to learn to drive an automatic car at 2am and then encountering a 14 lane highway with this type of traffic signs:

Fun, right?! East, West, North, South, miles, etc, etc. 

Aside from my still very complicated understanding of the imperial metric system, most signs are in writing: sentences that must be read in a split second while driving down a highway. You can imagine my first experience behind the wheel: I either paid attention to traffic or I read the traffic signs. Pick one!

When people ask me what the biggest difference between Portugal and Atlanta, first I say that everything over here comes in extra-large sizes and then I say traffic signs. 

After being here for a couple of months, I still don't understand another thing: traffic sign duplication. Traffic authorities need to make sure that a driver thoroughly understands the signs. A simple pictorial symbol is very often supported by a written reinforcement of it's equivalent meaning: 

It's not enough that a red circle with a white horizontal rectangle universally means "do not enter", they have "do not enter" written right over the sign. I suppose it's to aid the color blind? They do this all the time: imagine a turn right sign and under it the words "turn right".

I'm now collecting traffic sign photos! (Sorry, not the best quality photos, they were taken from inside the car.)

american civil war

This past weekend we went to an american Civil War period (1861-1865) re-enactment of the front-lines. Atlanta commemorated the 148 years of the Battle of Atlanta, a battle that sealed the fate of the Confederates (11 southern slave states) against the Unionists (25 northern states that supported the federal government). The Unionists won the war and slavery was abolished in all of the United States in 1865.

The re-enactment was centered around the CSA's (Confederate States of America) position in the Civil War, the states that had seceded from the United States to uphold the Old South ways, namely slavery. But no one seems to mention this during the event. Immediately I recalled one of the opening scenes from Gone with the Wind when the men are smoking and drinking and debating the upcoming war. One of the main characters, Ashley Wilkes, says "most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. and when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about". So true. 

And now for some real photos. The Civil War was actually the first major conflict to be extensively photographed in a photo-journalistic manner, being widely displayed viewed and sold all around the country. 

all 3 b&w photos from here