Country music and homemade food

I flew first class from Washington DC to Nashville. I have no idea how that happened, but it happened sometime during the exhausting five hours I spent talking on the phone with three travel agents and trying to resolve the issue of the cancellation of a Miami conference that I was supposed to attend.

Anyway, after a short flight I arrived in Nashville,  where my dear friend Myra was waiting for me. We first met  ten years ago when both of us participated in the State Department's School Connectivity Project.  Myra's warmth and her amazing hospitality made my stay in her beautiful house in Nashville a wonderful experience.


Nashville, also known as Music City, is famous for country music and for its Grand Ole Opry House. Myra was so kind to take me to a concert at the Grand Ole Opry, where we listened to Loretta Lynn, Claire Bowen and other famous singers and singer songwriters.



We also visited The Hermitage, the birth place of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States and learned more about his impressive, but also controversial life.  I just found out that his face is on 20 dollar bill.

We explored places, old and new, those where we found memorabilia from the times past, those where we tasted delicious chocolate or those that are among the top 20 must visit coffee shops in the US.






It was a pleasure to visit the office of the Humphrey Fellows program at Vanderbilt University and speak to some of the fellows and their coordinators Shannon and Nancy.

At the end of each day we would come home and enjoy Myra's homemade delicacies. Myra is an excellent cook and everything she made was so tasty and delicious that my mouth is still watering when I look at these photos: