O Brother, Where Art Thou

I'm working from home today, but taking a little break for some Minneolas and a blog post.

Eric and I are really looking forward to my brother's visit from South Africa next week. Harry arrives in Chicago on Monday afternoon, and will be with us for about a week. Then he's off to Hawaii for 10 days (seeing as how he's "in the area" - it's only about 8 hours worth of flights away!), and then back with us for 3 or 4 days.

He wants to play it by ear while in our beautiful city, but there will be some must-stops on the agenda: namely Coldstone Creamery (hey, I don't mind!) and Starbucks. Hehe. There's a Starbucks a 5 minute walk away from our place, not to mention it's on every 2nd street corner in the city, so I'm sure he'll get his fill.

We'll try and do some fun stuff in the city, and might take a day trip to Amish country. I've never seen Amish people outside of the movie Witness so that should be interesting. And now that we're part of a Mennonite church, with the Amish and the Mennonites both coming from the Anabaptist tradition, it's even more intriguing to me.

We can't wait to show him around some of our favorite neighborhoods in Chicago, check out some of our fave eating spots, and of course have him meet our friends and church family here.
Oh, and there will be multiple games of Settlers of Catan played. Yes indeed. Harry is a fan after we introduced him to the standard version during our trip to Port Elizabeth this past February. When he's here we'll introduce him to Cities & Knights, the expanded version. It will blow his mind.

While the main and best thing is obviously the family/human element :), I also have asked for some re-ups on South African goodies - namely, Rooibos Tea, Cadbury's Milk Chocolate and Biscuit Chocolate, Mrs Balls Chutney, and Tennis Biscuits. Ah, the taste of home...