this exactly

a month of letters

2012-02-01T13:49:00.001+01:00

As seen on the Hairpin a few days ago, Mary Robinette Kowal had the great idea to make February be A Month of Letters -- that is, a month in which you send one letter or postcard for every day that the post office is open.

Now, for those who know me outside of the internet, saying that I like to write letters will inspire peals of laughter because, um, that's a lot like saying I really enjoy oxygen. I'm an enormous dork when it comes to anything of the stationery and postcard persuasion, and already send mail on a regular basis anyway, because it's good fun.

But if you're not someone who already gets mail from me ordinarily and you have some interest in, say, a postcard from Malaysia (I fly to Asia tomorrow (!)), here's your chance! Shoot me an email with your address (thisexactly@gmail.com). I promise not to use your address for anything nefarious, unless you consider snail mail nefarious, in which case . . . our life philosophies are a little different.

If I already have your address, expect awesomeness in your mailbox.

mayrhofen V: après-ski

2012-01-25T16:35:00.001+01:00

The fact that I didn't go skiing didn't remotely mean that I was going to skip out on the grand tradition of après-ski. We spent parts of a couple different evenings at the Ice Bar, with its dancing polar bears whose masks looked decidedly more like white rats. (And I enjoyed the Ice Bar/Eisbär [polar bear] pun.) As Megan said after we left, "I could very much get into the idea of a yearly non-skiing ski vacation." Agreed! As long as it doesn't get in the way of my tropical/beach vacations, that is.

Eight days till the China/Malaysia adventure!

mayrhofen IV: schneeschuhwandern

2012-01-20T18:34:00.000+01:00

It turns out that snowshoeing near Tux, Austria is less like a pleasant stroll through the snowy hills and more like clawing your way up the side of the mountain. When you reach the top, you shiver on the porch of someone's cabin (your Austrian guide, who spent the morning snowshoeing in pants that unzipped to show his thighs and his tiny army green boxer-briefs, assures you that even though he doesn't know whose cabin this is, it's all good). You put on all the extra clothes you've got and chow down on the most delicious belegtes Brötchen of your life, plus tea, cookies, and Schnapps that tastes the way pine trees smell. You look at the mountains, which even in the fog are gorgeous, unreal, and you think about the village your guide told you about earlier, as you were passing a tiny chapel in the snow: a village big enough to have its own movie theater, entirely buried in an avalanche in the '70s. Twenty-odd people died; the chapel is in their honor. And you'll think how crazy it is that a whole village can disappear in an instant, like something out of a myth, like Atlantis, the lost city under the sea. There's very little danger of avalanches at the moment, your guide assures you. There's not enough snow on the mountains right now.

The way down from the cabin is more like what you were expecting out of this experience: for the majority of the return trip, you'll follow the road that winds gently back into the valley, cutting into the woods only once the snow cover gives way to icy slick. By the time you're back at the van, in spite of how you're sweaty and tired and a little bit freezing, longing for a change of clothes and a shower, you'll be thinking about how you understand it better now, the appeal of the mountains in winter, thinking maybe you'd love to do this again.

mayrhofen III: the most wonderful blues

2012-01-19T17:51:00.002+01:00

Even if you aren't skiing, you can walk to the end of the main street in Mayrhofen and ride the lift up to the top of Ahorn mountain and spend an afternoon people-watching, drinking Glühwein spiked with a copious amount of rum, and gaping at the towns in the Zillertal below. Highly recommended.

mayrhofen II: new year's horse race

2012-01-18T22:55:00.000+01:00

On New Year's Day we shuffled down the street from our hotel to check out the yearly horse races in the snow. The three actual races involved normal-sized horses pulling jockeys on sleds, but in between some of the actual races there were some local ski club members being pulled around the track. And the miniature ponies jockeyed by children were a slow-moving highlight.

mayrhofen I: welcome to winter

2012-01-16T17:09:00.002+01:00

[full set here]
About a hot minute after getting back from spending Christmas in Virginia, I hopped in the car and drove south to spend New Year's in Mayrhofen, Austria with four of my best friends. I have basically no grounds for complaining in my life. Where did you spend New Year's, Kelly? Oh, you know. Tirol.

Mayrhofen was really lovely, and I say that as a non-skier (I've given skiing and snowboarding a couple of halfhearted tries in the past and am not terribly committed to trying again). We watched plenty of movies and TV (<3 you, Alias), acquired and shot off fireworks (okay, Felix shot them off; the rest of us watched from a safe distance), went to an Erlebnisbad, watched a New Year's Day horse race in the snow, went snowshoeing, and ate all the Käsespätzle, Schnitzel, and fondue we could handle. Tip: go to Wirtshaus zum Griena. It's down a narrow street that is probably perfectly innocuous-looking in daylight and was fairly creepy at night, but inside it's rustic and wonderful. The Schnitzel was great, the spinach ravioli with Alpine cheese was marvelous, and the cheesy-potato-bacon masterpiece I ordered was a heart attack in a skillet, and so worth it. Be sure to reserve in advance! They nearly didn't have a table for us, and that would have been a sadness. I mean, to the extent that being forced to eat something else delicious at one of the other lovely establishments in Mayrhofen really counts as sad.

resolutions and plans

2012-01-12T18:20:00.000+01:00

[Full photo set here. Is it really possible that between last August and now I had forgotten how incredible the Côte d'Azur is? Guess so.]

Some resolutions for 2012:

+ Figure out job/country/life situation.

+ Write daily.

+ Run a 10K.

+ Write the first draft of a novel (= at least 50,000 words). It's all right for it to be terrible! That is what first drafts are for.

+ Take a cooking class.

+ Take a photography class.

+ Be open to randomness, such as the solo four-day trip to the South of France I planned at the last minute last year upon having a fit of feeling that I wasn't getting out of Frankfurt enough. (. . . This was approximately thirty seconds after returning from three weeks in the USA, mind.)

Last year at approximately this time: I was getting ready to go to London.

Three weeks from today: I will be on a plane to visit my brother Conor in China for a week, followed by a week in Malaysia with Megan. I think that's what we call starting 2012 off right.

brudders

2012-01-11T16:14:00.001+01:00

My brothers (Ryan, green buttondown, and Conor, black t-shirt) and Ryan's girlfriend Mariah are a bunch of goofballs.

colonial williamsburg

2012-01-10T17:16:00.001+01:00

This one's for Megan, who likes Colonial Williamsburg almost as much as she likes Mt. Everest. Duke of Gloucester Street is a lovely place to walk, especially on a marvelous sunny day just before Christmas when all the houses were decked out with wreaths and garlands.

a tale of two bakeries

2012-01-09T11:46:00.000+01:00

For Gran's 87th birthday, we drove over to Plaza Bakery (pictures 1-3) and bought half of the baked goods in the world, and then drove over to Sugar Plum Bakery (pictures 4-7) and bought the other half. We made Gran endure a particularly off-key rendition of "Happy Birthday" (not a single good singer in this bunch), and then we feasted.

conor and the dog

2012-01-09T11:17:00.002+01:00

Just Sunny and Conor goofing off, plus Sunny doing what she does best at her advanced age: looking sad and/or possibly dead. (My mom says she plays "dead or asleep?" with the dog every morning. Aww, old Sunses.)

welcome to virginia beach

2012-01-09T11:10:00.002+01:00

I spent two weeks in Virginia Beach leading up to Christmas, and have thoroughly remembered why you might want to live someplace with a mild winter. I wore my wool peacoat all of once while I was home. I wore shorts outside, repeatedly.

And on top of that I got to see my whole immediate family all at once, plus my brother's girlfriend, both grandmothers, all of the cousins from one side of the family and my uncle from the other side of the family, some dear friends I hadn't seen in years, and -- last but certainly not least -- Sunny the upwards-of-fifteen(!)-year-old Labrador. Plus I cooked up a storm, hosted a dinner party, biked into the state park twice, biked on the boardwalk twice, went out to breakfast at The Beach Pub and Doc Taylor's (the latter of which is in an old beach house down at 23rd Street -- there can be crazy wait times, but the place is super atmospheric and if you're into brunchtime drinking, there are $2 Bloody Marys to make the wait go faster), went out to lunch at Doumar's and Bite (twice), and bought out the inventory of two excellent local bakeries (more on that to come).

Two weeks is such a great amount of time to be home, I think -- long enough not to feel harried -- though I could happily stay much longer. Are you sure you don't want to take me up on the offer to become the family's personal chef, Dad? I assure you my rates are quite reasonable.

merry christmas from the dog

2011-12-26T03:20:00.002+01:00

Sunny doesn't much like being an elf.

weihnachtsmarkt

2011-12-17T15:13:00.002+01:00

I'm in Virginia Beach for the holidays, but first a couple of pictures from the Frankfurt Christmas market.

1. The star lights you see all over the place in Germany during the holidays.

2. What happens when you rubberband two full packages of 40 sparklers each and light them on fire. (I stood waaay back.)

Happy holidays!

thanksgiving

2011-11-30T12:45:00.001+01:00

My very favorite of holidays, without a doubt. This was my third Thanksgiving in Frankfurt, and . . . fifth? away from home overall, so I'm pretty used to missing my family on Thanksgiving. Still, Thanksgiving with good friends in Frankfurt (plus Mandie joining from Cologne!) was excellent. Everyone brought or made something to share (even my friends who had just gotten back from Australia), and I made:

+ mashed potatoes (with Greek yogurt, like Rachel says to do it)

+ cornbread stuffing (adapted from here -- no sausage, and subbing vegetable broth for chicken broth)

+ mushroom gravy (this one, which is a bit hard to follow as far as amounts go, but I used 500g of white button mushrooms and 800g of vegetable broth, added over time as needed, and it was amazingly good)

+ caramelized corn with fresh mint from the NY Times, which I made for the third year running! Its first appearance was at Thanksgiving 2009, where I was turned into a pumpkin.

+ pumpkin pie (from here, plus homemade whipped cream that I accidentally almost whipped all the way into butter)

+ raspberry pie (Katherine-style: Betty Crocker-esque double crust made with all butter, filling of frozen raspberries, some sugar, and some flour all tossed together, a few pats of butter here and there. Delicious.)

+ cranberry sauce (okay, I didn't so much make it as pop open the lid on the can, but the can of jellied cranberry sauce is one place where I don't mess with tradition. I was completely happy to leave turkey off the list (there would not have been turkey at all were it not for Kylie's last-minute decision to purchase and roast turkey legs!), but I don't mess around when it comes to my Ocean Spray.)

The stars of the show, though, were Mandie's green bean casserole (totally homemade, if only because you can't just go out and buy a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup here) and Rebecca's honey spice cheesecake with some kind of graham cracker-esque crust. Deadly.

I'll make it home for Thanksgiving again one of these years, but this was a mighty fine expat Thanksgiving.

park

2011-11-13T20:41:00.001+01:00

Günthersburgpark was showing off more than a little earlier. I love blue-skied fall.

night of the near-death experience

2011-11-11T13:30:00.000+01:00

A short guide to Bonfire Night festivities at Wimbledon:

1. Consume gross hot chocolate from a Cadbury truck in the middle of a field.

2. Watch Guy Fawkes burn in effigy. Feel slightly uncomfortable at the realization that watching live people burn probably used to be a whole family kinda event, too.

3. Watch fireworks set off to the rhythm of Glee covers and Disney hits. Try to avoid being set on fire by burning bits of paper falling from the sky.

4. Decide it is a totally great idea to go on the spinny thing, you know, that one over there at the carnival. Realize only once you are strapped in to the twirling wheel of doom that the spinny thing is exactly as sketchy you would expect out of a ride called "Body Count" that is pumping dance music and oh my God it's flipping you upside down you did not know it would do this otherwise you never would have gotten on in the first place why is this ride lasting forever we are going to die.

5. Survive ride, and realize that the spinny thing you rode is not even the actual spinny thing you had intended to ride. This is okay, because the spinny thing you had intended to ride looks even worse.

6. Go on another ride anyway, in spite of your recent near-death experience, because obviously you never learn. Bruise the crap out of your friend's right side as you slam into her with your full body weight every time the car swings outwards. Also, whack her in the face with your hair repeatedly. By the end of the ride, your hair looks like this, which is to say, super hot.

7. Walk from Wimbledon to Wandsworth. Acquire glowing neon bracelets along the way from a guy who is selling them for 50 pence each, or £2 for six just for you (the "Recession special"). You'll need these to torment your cab driver with later.

8. Go to Chez Bruce and overeat like a champion to comfort yourself, post-carnival trauma.

9. Take a cab home, and be terrible to your cab driver. "That was your iPhone that just got a text message, wasn't it? I'm just saying, it wasn't one of ours. Did you get a good message? Was it from your girlfriend? Oooh, I bet it was. Do you want some glowing neon bracelets? That's all right. We're giving them to you anyway. Here, I am putting them on the gear shift. Oh, they fell on the floor. Here's a really big tip, byyye!"

Obviously, England loved us.

london eats

2011-11-09T17:42:00.001+01:00

Megan and I visited Lucy in London again last weekend, for Lucy's birthday. If there's any question as to whether we ate a whole bunch of delicious things, you don't know me (or this blog) at all.

1-7. Ottolenghi, Belgravia: I'd been seeing Yotam Ottolenghi's name on food blogs for a while, and figured on good things at one of his four restaurants, but oh boy. This food was AMAZING. I got a lunch plate of four salads (£13.70) and all were phenomenal, particularly the green beans (front and center on the dark blue plate). I was glad to see that that recipe is also in Ottolenghi's cookbook, Plenty, with which I am obsessed. The Belgravia location only has one large table in the restaurant, but there was also an adorable bit of outdoor seating out back -- perfect for a surprisingly mild November day.

8-9. Chez Bruce, Wandsworth: Megan, Lucy, and I are beginning to collect Michelin-starred restaurants as we travel now, which sounds like a bad idea for the wallet (though as Michelin-starred restaurants go, Chez Bruce is hardly a bank-breaker: £45 for a three-course meal) and maybe also a bad idea for the stomach. We were so full after this dinner that the cab ride home was torture. (In the sense that we tortured the cab driver. We were fine, ourselves.) Megan left some chocolate on the table, uneaten, for the first time in her life. Worth it. We get why it's Lucy's favorite restaurant now.

10-11. Byron Hamburgers, Putney: Fresh, delicious ingredients for burgers that they actually cook rare upon request without looking at you like you have two heads? Oh Byron, be mine. Frankfurt's burger scene may have worn me down a little, but even apart from that Byron has great food: jacket-on potato wedges, crunchy, peppery coleslaw, homemade milkshakes, and all kinds of excellent burger options.

12-13. Bluebird, Chelsea: After multiple days of overeating terribly, a latte, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and an order of eggs florentine were exactly what I needed in my life. I did not, however, need to know that the London Anthro is just down the street, nor that the shopping on the King's Road is all-over glorious.

kölner tag

2011-11-08T16:11:00.002+01:00

A week ago Sunday, Megan and I hopped over to Cologne to meet up with Mandie and go to the Bon Iver concert at the E-Werk (so good! so full of German hipsters!). It was a Verkaufsoffener Sonntag, so we got to make the unfortunate discovery that Cologne has a lot of nice stores Frankfurt doesn't have (including Muji, maker of my favorite pens). We also rode the little yellow and green Bimmelbahn train around the city (EUR 6, in both German and English, though the degree to which the German commentary was translated into English left a little something to be desired -- "a little something" to the tune of 5/6 of the commentary), drank Kölsch and ate dinner down by the Rhine, and ate leisurely brunch at Cafe Spitz, which, in addition to being in a gorgeous little area of the city and having an excellent summer terrace, introduced us to the glory that is sauerkraut lasagne, which will need to be recreated at home post-haste.

dinner

2011-11-02T16:27:00.004+01:00

A few shots from a potluck dinner with work friends a couple weeks back.

tomato jam

2011-10-28T12:12:00.000+02:00

A month or so after bookmarking Luisa's version of Mark Bittman's tomato jam I had some leftover tomatoes from making Yotam Ottolenghi's shakshuka and decided it was jam time.

I was a little wary of following Luisa's lazy-person canning tip (just boil the jars for a while to sterilize them, then dry them out, fill them with hot jam, close them up, and turn them upside down for a while, and you should hear the sound of the jars sealing themselves as they cool) but I gave it a try, figuring worst-case I would just refrigerate the jam once it was cool and eat it up quickly. But, sure enough, there was the unmistakable sound of jar lids popping as they sealed in the kitchen about a half an hour after I filled them. Wild! I will eventually get up the nerve to give hot water bath canning a try (it doesn't sound terribly hard or anything), but I was pretty pleased with my first canning experiment.

As for the jam itself, I was somehow expecting it to taste more savory than it did. Make no mistake, this is jam. It's sweet. But it's also got a more complex thing going on than blueberry or blackberry jam does. There are definitely some spicy, savory notes to it, and as long as you eat it as you would any other kind of jam it'll be a lovely little surprise. My favorite thing to do with jam is put it on bread with Frischkäse (Neuchatel cheese, in the U.S. -- lighter than regular cream cheese), and tomato jam + Frischkäse, pictured above, is one seriously delicious combination. I've promised my third and last jar of tomato jam to my friend Ann, and I had better get that package in the mail sooner rather than later. Otherwise, it's going to be a jam-free package.

fall light

2011-10-26T20:03:00.001+02:00

Pretty fall weather down by the Main Café on Sunday, and nice light on Oeder Weg.

two weekends of friends

2011-10-10T14:23:00.001+02:00

[full set here]
Two weeks ago: Lucy! Signs at the airport. Breakfast at Cafe Karin. Potters' balcony x 2. Dinner at Lobster. Park lounging. Mainufer lounging. Frankfurter Oktoberfest. The Tree House, Round One.

This past weekend: Suz! Gaststätte Mosebach: delicious Grüne Soße and the best Bratkartoffeln I've ever had. The Tree House, Round Two. This shakshuka. This pumpkin bread pudding (topped with Greek yogurt = yowza, though it could do with about half the butter, and be sure to soak the bread in the custard before baking). Family-style Vietnamese at Toan, plus homemade chocolate cake and berry-topped cheesecake (and emergency cupcakes). Apfelwein at O-Ton.

I think we're firmly entrenched in fall now, but after the glory that was the long weekend when Lucy was here, I'm all right with that. It's allowed to be fall in October.

the coolest bar in frankfurt

2011-10-10T12:34:00.001+02:00

My friends and I spend a lot of time talking about cities, specifically, about cities that have a wow-factor. New York has it; London has it; Istanbul most definitely has it; but we're of the opinion that no city in Germany really has it. Or rather, we were of that opinion before we went to Pret-A-Diner's pop-up bar/restaurant The Tree House on the roof of the Nextower and discovered that Frankfurt actually does have some world-class appeal after all. It's only open until October 22nd (though I have high hopes for the Nextower turning this space into a permanent bar, please oh please), so get in there while you can -- it requires a reservation (and its website requires registration), but during the week there's no cover charge and trust me, the view is worth it. Just don't be in a hurry to get your drinks. Watching the bartenders mix them is a slow slow slow art form.

heut ist so ein schöner tag

2011-09-29T16:34:00.002+02:00

[full photo set here]
Mandie and I hit up Oktoberfest in Munich last Saturday, joining up with a couple of people who were already her friends and many, many random people who became our friends by the end of the day! In addition to these tips, a few words to the wise:

1. If you go on a Saturday, holy crap, get in there early! We were in the Spaten tent, and even before ten a.m. finding a table was rough. Not only was the place jammed, but also people do not like sharing space at their table at ten a.m.

2. After a couple hours and a few rounds of beer, finding a seat if you want one is easy-peasy. But you won't want one, because you will be standing up, wearing the funny gray felt hat you borrowed from a Dutchman and doing all the hand motions to das Fliegerlied.

3. If you're in the Spaten tent, order the chicken and the Käsespätzle. I don't think it's the beer talking when I say that that chicken skin was the greatest thing I've ingested recently. (Speaking of chicken skin, a timely NY Times article that pretty much forms the list of places I want to eat next time I am in NYC. Along with this list.)

4. Oh, and when you finally do leave the beer tent after eight hours of not seeing daylight, be sure to ride the Ferris wheel! It's EUR 6 for the ride, which ain't cheap, but it's worth it.

afternoon phillies & crab fries

2011-09-25T21:42:00.002+02:00

I wrote about crab fries at Chickie's & Pete's last year, but didn't have any photos of the glory -- probably because I was too busy stuffing my face. This year we went for lunch before an afternoon game. Even at 12:30 on a Thursday the South Philly Chickie's & Pete's was packed.

The following Sunday I sought out the airport Chickie's & Pete's (conveniently for me, in the international terminal) and had a Yuengling draft and a basket of crab fries for lunch while waiting for my flight back to Frankfurt. "That's the lunch of champions," said my waitress. Darn right.

tour de shore

2011-09-25T17:14:00.003+02:00

Over the week I was back in New Jersey for Bethany and Andrew's wedding, my dad and I biked from Stone Harbor up to Strathmere (~25 miles round-trip) one day and down to Wildwood Crest (~22 miles round-trip) another day, along with shorter rides around Stone Harbor/Avalon. Love that part of the shore.

stone harbor september

2011-09-25T17:01:00.005+02:00

With a little bit of Wildwood/Strathmere bike rides thrown in for kicks.

boardwalk

2011-09-21T21:17:00.002+02:00

Some shots from the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey from a long bike ride last week.

fifteen

2011-09-13T20:50:00.001+02:00

Sunny the yellow Labrador turned fifteen on Saturday, September 10th. Lookin' good!

hurrah II

2011-09-05T09:17:00.005+02:00

In between the drizzly gray August weather, Frankfurt's been sneaking in a few hours of pretty summer weather here and there. All last week I spent my lunch breaks on a picnic blanket in the park near work, basking in the sunlight. And Saturday was glorious: breakfast at Familienbetrieb (new favorite Frankfurt café); full afternoon of poolside lounging with Megan (German pools, with their huge grassy lawns, have it all over American pools, with their concrete); courtyard Grillfest with some of my neighbors; and a fairy tale themed costume birthday party hosted by Snow White, for which we naturally went as the Seven Dwarfs. (Well, six of the seven; Sneezy was on vacation, that slacker.)

I cooked some of the things you see above, all of which were delicious:

- these cheese grits (with English white cheddar rather than pepper jack, which improves them, I think, after having tried them both ways)

- this roasted eggplant salad with saffron-yogurt sauce (I added a bit of garlic to the sauce, and used fleur de sel instead of regular salt, but otherwise followed the recipe exactly; amazing)

- this coleslaw (you wouldn't think the texture mix would make that much of a difference but it really, really does; I leave out the bell pepper and halve the sugar and tend to add a bit of lemon juice to taste, especially if I'm using German mayonnaise)

I'm home in less than a week! Home in the sense of Stone Harbor, which counts. Bethany's getting married! And there's talk of going to see a Phillies game! And I'm hoping for plenty of glorious warm air/warmer water early fall beach days and daily bike rides. Riding bikes on that island in the early mornings never gets old.

alte oper

2011-08-31T18:15:00.002+02:00

Frankfut's old opera house, on a beautiful blue-skied day this week.

postcards from stockholm

2011-08-29T14:29:00.002+02:00

1. Östermalms Saluhall, Östermalm
2. & 3. Vasa Museum, Djurgården
4., 5., & 6. Coctail & Coctail Deluxe, Södermalm
7. & 8. one of the Fjäderholmarna islands
9. Djurgården
10. Gamla Stan, ferry to Fjäderholmarna islands
11. & 12. bridge between Kungsholmen and Södermalm
13. Swedish post hot air balloon as viewed from the city

stockholm eats and drinks

2011-08-26T09:43:00.011+02:00

I never have to worry about whether or not I'm going to eat well when I'm traveling with Megan and Lucy. Our priorities always skew toward deliciousness.

Where we ate:

- Lux, Lilla Essingen: a Michelin-starred restaurant that does an excellent and quite reasonable lunch special? Yes, please! The day we were there it was tiny lamb burgers served with fresh cooked vegetables and an amazing butter-filled potato puree. We also had amazing slightly sweet bread to start and raspberry ice cream to finish. Mmm.

- Taste of Vietnam, Södermalm: we ducked in here when it was pouring rain and we'd waited too long for dinner, with the thought that phở is never unwelcome. It was delicious! And, bonus: our waitress told us about the next day's zombie walk, which we ran out of Creperie Fyra Knop to watch.

- Creperie Fyra Knop, Södermalm: a filling but not too huge lunch (mmm, raclette crepe) just off Götgatan and its many lovely design shops. The atmosphere made us think of Sweden in winter, but in a cosy way.

- Fjäderholmarnas Krog, on one of the Fjäderholmarna islands: Lucy and I took Megan here for a birthday surprise. Lucy wasn't terribly impressed by the service, and it's definitely got special-occasion prices, but worth it. The reindeer carpaccio appetizer was Megan's favorite (and possibly also mine), but everything was wonderful, from the butter with pink salt to the other appetizers (smoked herring and local cheese on thin wafers and cauliflower gelatin topped with truffles and fried onion) to the mains (crispy rainbow trout with cauliflower puree, mushrooms, and poached egg; beef with crispy fried potatoes; and pierogi stuffed with vegetables and cheese) to dessert (salted caramel ice cream and a cappucino that I spilled all over the table).

- Brunkebergs Bageri, Vasastaden: I'm slightly obsessed with this little bakery. Everything we tried was A+ delicious. Also, there was a tiny half-Swedish half-American girl singing the Pippi Longstocking song in Swedish and dancing with her eyes closed while her American mother chatted with us and shook her head. If I lived in Stockholm, I would be here basically daily.

- Café Sirap, Vasastaden: brunch is huge and very delicious. There was more (tasty!) bacon than I could eat, and I can put away a lot of bacon. The blueberry pancakes looked better than they tasted, but the coffee and fresh orange juice were lovely. Also, the crowd was almost uniformly poorly dressed yet extremely attractive.

- Planet Food, Östermalms Saluhall, Östermalm: delicious wraps in the market hall! There is nothing not to like about this.

Where we drank:

- Kaffekoppen, Gamla Stan: we didn't much like the looks of the sandwiches, but for an afternoon coffee or tea while people-watching, it's unbeatable.

- A café of which I do not know the name, Södermalm: just around the corner from the Stockholm Stadsmuseum, cattycorner to the bank at the base of Götgatan, but strangely not showing up on Google. Cozy, with lovely hot chocolate, but if you order tea, make sure to get the milk on the side -- my tea, pictured just above (right), looked like a tall glass of hot milk that a teabag might have glanced at sideways but never actually touched.

- ICEBAR, City: described at length in my previous post (but keep in mind, it's a bar! made of ice! just go.).

- Lady Patricia, Södermalm: as mentioned before, it's a gay bar on a boat! It's also a rather popular restaurant, though we'd already eaten (at a non-descript but quite okay Thai/sushi place across the street from the ICEBAR). We snagged couches on the upstairs deck and people watched for a while before dancing.

Anddd I'm officially missing Sweden now.

ICEBAR

2011-08-25T11:28:00.004+02:00

Possibly the highlight of four days in Sweden with Megan and Lucy: the ICEBAR. We were initially a little less impressed than expected. We thought it would be a bar COMPLETELY OUT OF ICE, and well, it's mostly ice, with a metal floor; the drinks are tiny, though delicious; and if you go anytime other than on a Friday or Saturday after 9:45 p.m. you have a time limit for how long you're allowed to stay.

But in spite of the things that were not quite what we thought they were going to be, we were still in a bar made of ice wearing ridiculous hooded parkas with attached gloves and sipping tiny drinks out of glasses made of ice while David Guetta pumped through the sound system. We started dancing around like fools the moment we arrived and did not stop hamming it up until our time at the ICEBAR was up -- at which point we promptly relocated to Lady Patricia, because when there is a boat that is also a gay bar, you need to check these things out.

the blue coast

2011-08-17T14:27:00.009+02:00

(full photo set here)
I spent a four-day weekend on the Côte d'Azur (French Riviera) based out of Nice, the name of which city lends itself to so many good puns. But Nice really is nice. I went to four different beaches along this stretch of coast: Cap d'Ail, Juan les Pins, Villefranche-sur-Mer, and Nice (listed in order of awesomeness). Cap d'Ail's Plage Mala (with the red umbrellas and the sheer cliffs rising out of the Mediterannean Sea) was the best due to sheer stunningness of scenery, though Juans les Pins (where a Canadian girl I'd met at the hostel and I snuck onto a private hotel beach, until we were regretfully requested to vacate the premises) was also stellar. And this is not to say that the beaches at Villefranche-sur-Mer, with its adorable old town, or Nice were not lovely, too, though the "pebbles" at the beach at Nice are really more like fist-sized rocks. I recommend paying the EUR 14 or so for a padded beach recliner, in spite of not having done it myself.

Other highlights of the trip: the view from Èze Village, over terracotta roofs, gorgeous coastline, and yachts; a brief visit to Monaco, which looks like Disney and Louis Vuitton teamed up to design a country; and the market at Nice, where I showed a great deal of restraint and bought only 1.5 liters of Niçoise olive oil to cart home, in addition to a couple of olive wood utensils, herbs de Provence, etc. I think that sometime in the future an excellent vacation would be to rent an apartment somewhere with a beach and also a wonderful market, and spend the whole time cooking delicious things, lounging by the sea, and people-watching from the balcony, which would naturally have a great view. Noted for future vacations!

Though not for my next vacation -- four days in Stockholm with Megan and Lucy, starting, ahaha, tomorrow. Because returning from Nice on Monday night and flying to Stockholm on Thursday night is totally a thing that people do.

where i'm from

2011-08-10T14:11:00.004+02:00

When we were growing up, my brothers and I used to whine about wanting a pool in the lower part of our backyard. It was the perfect shape for a pool, and both of our next-door neighbors had pools. We didn't understand why we couldn't have one. "Because you've got the big pool down the street!" was our dad's reply. The big pool, aka the ocean: five minutes' walk down the street. It might not have been my favorite beach, but then I'm spoiled to have had two different beaches in my life from the start. And much as Stone Harbor might win the prize for my favorite beach (and beach town), Virginia Beach is home.

one summer day

2011-08-03T12:48:00.003+02:00

Yesterday we had one legitimately summery day. I scooted straight down to the Main after work and parked myself on a beach towel and did not head home till nearly ten p.m. I'm hoping for many more days like this in August. Come through for me here, Frankfurt, please say yes.

frankfurt lately: city

2011-07-31T21:22:00.006+02:00

To look at these pictures, you might think we'd been having a good bit of nice summer weather in Frankfurt lately. You'd think wrong. But about once or twice a week, over the three weeks since I've been back from the U.S., we've had a tiny moment -- sometimes only a few minutes, sometimes a whole hour or two -- where the sun came out and the air was warm and, even though tomorrow is August already, it felt like summer was just around the corner. Germany's doing its best to ruin my hopes of true summer weather, but I still haven't given up just yet. Happily, I'm off to the Côte d'Azur for a long weekend in less than two weeks, so even if Germany doesn't come through for me, I figure that Nice just might.

I was stuck in Frankfurt for the weekend (and spent part of Saturday working), but I put the rest of my time to good use: tried out Café Wacker on Oeder Weg, Launsch, and Moksha (the latter of which I intend to make into my local), as well as poking my head into Familienbetrieb (adorable, must return for breakfast); used a birthday gift certificate toward a hot stone massage at Palace Frankfurt, where I enjoyed myself but discovered that I'd completely forgotten how to say 'ticklish' in German (problematic, when you are in the middle of getting a back massage and the masseuse thinks she's doing something wrong -- 'kitzlig', by the way); and, last but certainly not least, finally giving Sunday Cycling a go. While the route wasn't terribly scenic (long stretches of the back side of the airport) and my knees didn't like me much by the end, it was good times regardless -- I'm planning on going again next week.

stone harbor III

2011-07-22T14:19:00.003+02:00

Home front / bike ride to Wildwood Crest and back.

stone harbor II

2011-07-22T14:17:00.004+02:00

Bay side.

stone harbor I

2011-07-21T12:05:00.005+02:00

Beach side.

the open road

2011-07-20T16:15:00.003+02:00

We all know that the creation of the U.S. Interstate highway system took all the glory out of American travel and reduced it to something easy, straightforward, and soulless. But you know what, I think the Louisiana state roads still have plenty of soul. Even I-10 (top) and the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (second from top) got some points for being (at least in part) bridges over water. And I think the American idea of "set out in your car and see what you can find" is still plenty alive.

baby gator petting pool

2011-07-20T10:52:00.004+02:00

The homepage of Insta-Gator Ranch is perfectly clear from the start that the gators you can play with and hold for the requisite photo op are not all going to grow up and be released to the wild to become the scourge of Labradors. If the description of a visit to the ranch weren't clear enough ("Your guided tour gives you a first-hand account of the Louisiana Alligator Industry, from hatchling to handbag."), perhaps the fact that "Adopt A Gator" appears directly above "Gator Recipes" in their website's features might help. During the visit, they talk a whole lot about how farming gators protects the wild ones from being overharvested (and A+ to them for having some actual transparency, unlike the rest of the industrial meat industry) and it sounds like they're doing a lot of good in that way. It's still a little disturbing to stroke and photograph something that will ultimately be dinner . . . but I think that says more about how far we Americans have gone to free ourselves from knowledge of our food production than anything else. I'd much rather have the opportunity to be squeamish petting dinner than be kept from any knowledge about where dinner comes from at all.

world's best hushpuppies and perfectly adequate grits

2011-07-19T23:07:00.003+02:00

I realize that 'world's best hushpuppies' is a big claim to make, and I'm willing to go right ahead and make it. They're served at Big Al's Seafood, which is located on a perfectly forgettable strip mall-laden boulevard in Houma (say HO-ma), LA, about halfway in between the trucker-haven Ramada Inn and Creole Lanes, the bowling alley (which gives you brand new socks if you need them, yours to keep!). We were mainly at Big Al's in an effort to go three-for-three on crawfish in our meals that day, and because we still, three days in, had not managed to eat a crawfish boil; the hushpuppies were an afterthought. But oh goodness, not for long. They were crispy with cornmeal on the surface and perfectly deep-fried so that the crispiness gave way to soft, spicy, artery-ruining glory the whole way through. The crawfish were amazing, too, not to mention all kinds of fun to play with. I tormented Katie with dangling talking crawfish the whole meal long.

Houma as a town was suburban standard and pretty forgettable, in spite of AAA's claim that it is "often likened to Venice, Italy" (by whom, AAA? by whom?), but its uproad neighbor, Bayou Cane, was pretty danged memorable. Don't mess with Bayou Cane, particularly not the gas station on Route 24 that advertises Confederate memorabilia, Bud Light, knives, and dolls with an absolute lack of irony (unpictured because when we tried to obtain photographic evidence of this, the very scary owner chased us off her property). Much as we'd wanted to get a view of (one side of) the real Deep South, we were pretty relieved to flee Houma and Bayou Cane for über-suburban Mandeville and the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain, which was a whole 'nother pile of weird, but a pile of weird in which we felt very much less like we were going to get shot for gas station trespassing.

Mandeville is home to a whole lot of rich people who seem to live a year-round take-it-easy vacation existence -- more South Florida than Louisiana, it seemed to us. The North Shore has lots of antiquing and a cute 28-mile bike path and adorable breakfast places like the original Broken Egg Café (which I hadn't quite realized was a chain!). If you go to the Broken Egg (or to Mandeville in general), go for the ambiance, not because you're expecting something exceptional. Katie's guidebook made the blackberry grits sound like they were going to be something to rave about, much like my AAA guidebook made Houma sound like Venice, and we were similarly disappointed. Not because they weren't delicious -- they were! -- but because they were nothing more than grits with a side of blackberries. Not quite that little special something we were looking for. But we should note that Mandeville does know how to throw a party (at the same four bars, visited in the same order, quite likely every night of the week) and that Katie was a real prodigy at the ubiquitous throw-the-metal-ring-on-the-bottle game. I'm sure she'd get a warm welcome back to Mandeville anytime. Me, eh -- maybe if I practice up.

plantationing

2011-07-19T11:25:00.004+02:00

The top two pictures are from Shadows-on-the-Teche, New Iberia, LA. All others are from Oak Alley Plantation, Vacherie, LA. I like the landscape and the grounds of both the houses better than the houses themselves, and feel less historically troubled appreciating a beautiful landscape than a house built on slave labor . . . though of course the grounds would have been maintained by slave labor as well. More than Shadows, Oak Alley didn't shy away from discussing its slave history (Katie and I were glad that there was the rather unsettling plaque detailing the prices for each of the slaves who worked the plantation), though it should be noted that we learned a whole lot more about the standards of rich white girl courtship than we learned about the people who kept the household clean, clothed, and fed. In spite of this, I was glad to have seen these places -- and there's no denying that those 300-year-old oaks are incredible.

swamp tour!

2011-07-18T11:37:00.006+02:00

I'm incapable of thinking about our swamp tour! without an exclamation point. Swamp tour! (I blame this book, which I keep intending to read.) Our swamp tour! was with Champagne's Cajun Swamp Tours on Lake Martin, just south of Breaux Bridge. In addition to the hoped-for gator sightings (we saw three of them, including one that our guide provoked a little with a kayak paddle to improve the photo opps), we also got all kinds of information on why there are no mosquitoes in that kind of swamp (a particular kind of plant that grows in the area keeps them away), why you don't take your dog duck hunting during early duck season (the gators haven't gotten sluggish from the cold yet and are still hungry enough to devour a Labrador), and why kicking your husband out of the house is not a particularly effective punishment when the man owns a houseboat [pictured above] (he'll come out there with a bunch of beer and his buddies and have a good old time).

Something about the word 'swamp' makes it sound like the place is going to be nasty, but Lake Martin was surprisingly beautiful. Perhaps the lack of mosquitoes contributed to our general enjoyment. Unfortunately, you really, really don't want to go swimming there, no matter how inviting the water might look on a hot day. It's got a shockingly high number of gators per acre (something like 3,500 gators for 300ish acres?!) and while most of them probably aren't large enough to try to eat a human, I'm personally not taking any chances.

honeymooners

2011-07-15T16:14:00.002+02:00

I hadn't exactly planned on going to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana on my honeymoon, but when you call up a place like Bayou Cabins (individual cabins! on the bayou! with free boudin and cracklins upon arrival [pictured above]! and a massive crawfish decorating the front yard [also pictured above]!) and they tell you that the only cabins they have available are the Honeymoon Cabin or some inexplicably more expensive Other Cabin, well, you change your plans right quick. And we had to admit: it's hard to think of much of anything more romantic than sitting on the back porch overlooking Bayou Teche and listening to the cicadas chirp while enjoying some chilled Abita beers out of Evangeline the $2.99 styrofoam cooler (a fine purchase made at the Breaux Bridge Wal-Mart that same afternoon). I'm just not sure that my actual honeymoon will ever be able to top that level of class -- particularly when you consider the glory of the embroidered pillow we found on the Honeymoon Cabin's bed.

We spent an afternoon driving around Breaux Bridge and Henderson in search of Cajun music, ultimately finding it at Mulate's (which we rapidly dubbed "the real Merlotte's"), home of the swingin' octogenarians. Boy, could those old people dance. Before we landed at Mulate's, we had a heart-in-mouth introduction to driving on the top of the levee in Henderson, of which I have no pictures because I was too busy driving and trying not to die. (It looked a lot like this levee in Vacherie except the sides were much, much steeper.) You have to drive up and over the levee to get to any number of waterfront bars/restaurants/boat launches, you see, and we'd had a great recommendation for Cajun music at one such establishment, only to find out after we'd given up the hunt that the place was closed -- it had been flooded and wouldn't reopen until long after we'd left Louisiana. By the time we learned this we were done with driving on the levee, and I was thankful for it -- it was an experience, all right, but not one I'm much looking to repeat anytime soon.

Downtown Breaux Bridge is pretty big (it includes the aforementioned Wal-Mart), but the cute old part of downtown can be walked in right around one minute, or two if you linger and take a picture of the giant crawfish overlooking the main street -- which you should. But about fifteen minutes south of Breaux Bridge is Lake Martin, home of a shockingly high number of alligators, and also our swamp tour.

chinatown food tour

2011-07-14T12:29:00.004+02:00

I don't have many pictures to show of the three-stop, five-dish tour of NYC's Chinatown that Amanda took me on on a rainy Thursday in June, mostly because I was too busy stuffing my face. But I'll tell you all about it. We met at the corner of Canal and Mott and stuck to Mott Street for our restaurants (food gold!). We were somewhat hampered by my too-early start time of 10:00 in the morning -- lots of places weren't open yet, so we were forced to do dessert as one of our first two dishes. Pictured above, spam and egg sandwich on Hong Kong-style white bread and French toast stuffed with house-made peanut butter served with maltose for dipping, both at Cha Chan Tang. We followed this up with shrimp dumplings and pork ribs at Mandarin Court, and then, just when we thought there was barely room for anything else, we went to a cart just up Mott from Hester and got delicious and cheap-as-hell portions of doughy pork noodles with a peanutty sauce and a bit of kick. We ate as much as we could of the noodles while standing under a storefront awning to protect us from the drizzle and then were forced to throw away the rest -- but at $1.25 a pop, we figured we were in the clear.

prune

2011-07-14T12:14:00.003+02:00

So I meant to blog all of the Deep South Road Trip before I got into NYC, but now that I've jumped around anyway I'll finish up New York before heading back south to your regularly scheduled Louisiana adventure.

I'd been wanting to eat at Prune for a good long time after having seen this post about the very avocado sandwich pictured above. We tried to reserve for dinner with a group of ten people, which, once you know it's a thirty-seat restaurant, understandably didn't work out so well. Happily, Amanda, Heather, and I were able to go for lunch the following day! And oh, it was worth it. Pictured above, the food Amanda and I shared:

- deviled eggs
- salt-packed slow-cooked filet, served cold with breadcrumbs, capers, and tomatoes (amazing)
- avocado sandwich on pain francese with ricotta cheese, tomato, and preserved lemon
- trout roe, grated radish, and brown butter

A+, would eat again.

downtown vacation

2011-07-14T11:37:00.000+02:00

As part of my grand three-week U.S. vacation, I spent a couple of days hanging out with friends in NYC. Other than a quick hop over to Amanda's house in Brooklyn for a nap, I never made it further uptown than 34th Street. Mostly I hung out with Amanda and ate things, but we did make a little time for shopping in between all that food. On the second day I was there, my brother Ryan came to the city for the first time ever and joined us for some sneaky pictures from the roof of my old apartment building (amazing how they'll just let you waltz right in if you act like you belong there), walking on the newest section of The High Line, and scarfing down pizza before we took off to D.C. for Ryan to hang out with his girlfriend and me and Katie to fly to NOLA. Most of my moving-away angst has faded, so I can think a whole lot more rationally about how I feel about New York than I could when I'd first moved to Frankfurt and was missing it awfully (I can now remember the terrible life crises of "this work schedule will never be okay!" that took place approximately once a week, for instance), but I do still love that city. I'd just have to find a different job to make NYC be a good place for me to live -- so hey, good thing "find a different job" is already on the long-terms goals list regardless!

city of a million fleurs-de-lis

2011-07-13T10:26:00.008+02:00

Katie and I had been talking about going on a road trip since well before we were able to drive, and finally, at the end of June, we did it: six days in Louisiana. We rented a car, whom we christened Jean Claude, and went on a leisurely tour of southern Louisiana, from the city to the bayou to the "Venice of Louisiana" to the lake and back to the city at the end.

We spent our first and last couple of days in NOLA, where we wandered around the French Quarter, Tremè, and the Warehouse District eating anything that wasn't nailed down: two rounds of Johnny's (fried oyster po boy + shrimp grits), dinner at Cochon, late-night Mexican in the back of a club on Frenchmen Street that I didn't catch the name of (kicking myself, because the food was awesome), and of course the requisite beignets and café au lait at Cafe du Monde.

While moseying through the city we came up with a fun game to play if you're ever in New Orleans: count the fleurs-de-lis (first to ten wins). It can be a little tricky outside of the French Quarter, but once you're in the FQ you're basically shooting ducks in a barrel, so after the first round was finished, we came up with the following rules:

1. The fleur-de-lis must be voiced and acknowledged by at least one other player for it to count.

2. No Saints symbols. (I mean, you could be done after a single store window if that were allowed.)

3. Once a player has found a fleur-de-lis of a certain category, she may no longer use that category for another fleur-de-lis during the same game. Example: once she has spotted a fleur-de-lis on a flag, she cannot call out any more flags. Same goes for signs, bumper stickers, Christmas tree ornaments, pottery urns, garbage cans, fencepost toppers, decorative belts, and beverage containers. (Note: we spotted all of the above.) As you become more advanced at the game, you can be more specific about just what constitutes a category. We decided that a pottery plate and a pottery urn were different categories, for instance, but you might not!

4. Bonus points for particularly excellent spottings may be awarded at the other player or players' discretion. Example: combination fleur-de-lis/American flag. Generally the number of bonus points would be two.

5. However, in spite of the fact that we never saw one, we decided that five points should be awarded for a fleur-de-lis tattoo. (We felt it was acceptable to make an exception to our no-Saints-symbols rule for tattoos.)

6. If the tattoo spotted as per #5 is on the person's face, automatic game over. You have spotted the most magical thing that could ever be.

Even if you are playing the advanced version of the game as delineated above, you can still point out fleurs-de-lis that fit into already taken categories, so that the players can let the glory of the fleur-de-lis wash over them. Don't worry if you lose to a particularly sharp-eyed player whom the fleur-de-lis has graced with its blessing. Everybody wins when you spot fleurs-de-lis!

the beach pub

2011-07-02T05:47:00.002+02:00

For the past two weeks I've been traveling all over the eastern half of the USA: Virginia Beach, VA; Stone Harbor, NJ; New York, NY; New Orleans and various other parts of Louisiana; and now back to Stone Harbor, where I've still got another four-ish days before heading to NYC for one final evening and then flying back to FFM. I haven't even remotely begun to go through my pictures, so for the time being, a preview: a couple shots from my favorite Virginia Beach breakfast place, The Beach Pub, which has something of a diner/dive feel and some incredibly tasty biscuits and wonderful spicy clam fritters (pictured above). I make it a point to go back there whenever I'm in Virginia Beach.

Many more pictures from the various places I've been will come soon! Watch this space.

storefronts & signs

2011-06-13T21:10:00.005+02:00

Save for one shot from my friends' balcony, these are all from a leisurely shopping/eating walk on Saturday from Alt-Sachenhausen to the Nordend in Frankfurt. This city keeps getting prettier the longer I live here.

recent deliciousness

2011-06-13T20:34:00.005+02:00

1. Chana masala with homemade paneer: I added a bit too much coconut milk to the version I served my friends, but the extra sauce I kept at home has all the right tongue-tingling goodness.
2. Aperol Spritz (the perfect summer cocktail) and mint & lemon water
3. Green pea soup with an Indian flavor profile: so good that I said, "Holy crap," upon taking a bite. I ate it with pan-fried haloumi cheese, not having yet made the homemade paneer from #1, and it was equally good hot and cold.

rheingau

2011-06-05T03:00:00.001+02:00

More shots from the Rhine Vally last weekend: flowers in St. Goarhausen, Burg Rheinfels in St. Goar, Dreiburgenblick above St. Goarshausen, and Rüdesheim.

three-castle view

2011-06-02T16:21:00.000+02:00

On Sunday, while my friends Heather and Fitz were here visiting, I rented a car and drove us all out to the Rhine Valley. I'd been a couple of times before but never by car, and it turns out that having your own wheels in that area is pretty awesome: it means that when you see a sign that promises a view of three castles, you can jump in the car and drive up a goat trail for ten minutes instead of hiking straight uphill for a couple hours. We had a little trouble locating the third castle, leading us to consider redubbing the scenic overlook "two-and-a-half-castle view", but it was there, slanting into the green countryside in the distance.

I love a good city and the beach will always be where my heart lives, the landscape where I am most at home, so it's easy to forget that the countryside can leave me breathless with longing. I forget that I ache at how beautiful Germany's countryside is: Rosskopf's golden checkerboard fields, villages tucked into the greenest of hills in the Bavarian Alps and the Schwarzwald, even riverside fields just the slightest bit to the east or west of Frankfurt, trees along the water on one side and fields full of crops on the other, no sign of a city anywhere close. I don't feel stifled by the city, but when I leave it I remember that feeling I had when I came to Germany for the very first time, as a sixteen-year-old: the feeling that I wanted to soak in every bit of this country's beauty until I was utterly satiated. And there's so much of the German countryside that I've never visited, that I haven't even begun to know. Better hop to it.

reunion tour

2011-06-01T11:52:00.005+02:00

Sunday a week ago, my study abroad friend Lauren rolled into FFM as part of her weeks-long European tour before heading off for her summer fellowship. Seeing as the last time we saw each other was in South Asia, it's less surprising than it would otherwise be that her summer fellowship is in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. We spent a couple of days wandering through town, enjoying the gorgeous weather (save for a freak hailstorm we got caught in in Sachsenhausen), and noshing on Flammkuchen, Grüne Soße, and Apfelwein at Dauth Schneider, Turkish appetizers at Manolya, ice cream at Eis Christina, and a big German send-off breakfast on my balcony. Not a bad way to say goodbye (though waving each other off in India was pretty solid too) -- and I'm sure the next time we see each other, it will be just as awesome.

riverbank

2011-05-31T10:54:00.003+02:00

I've had two sets of visitors over the past ten days, and have had a lovely time with them -- which I'll write about soon! But first I need to tell you about how yesterday evening down by the Main was perfect. A Radler, some homemade pimiento cheese and pretzels, and a good book = all kinds of wonderful.

break

2011-05-16T09:28:00.004+02:00

I bike past the adorable bar/cafe Darling every single day, and finally yesterday, after my second day in a row of weekend work (boo), I stopped in for a glass of Riesling and some marinated olives. My neighborhood is jam-packed with cute bars and restaurants that I have not even begun to take advantage of: Moksha, L'Apostrophe, m2o Bar, that tiny and adorable cafe on Burgstraße whose name I don't remember . . . Goal for summer 2011: try them all. (Along with spending more Friday evenings at Friedberger Markt, of course, because that place is fun.)

Upcoming:

+ May: a visit from Heather and Fitz? yes, please!
+ June: my cousin's wedding in Virginia Beach; a few days in NYC; and New Orleans, road tripping to gator farms, and eating our way through the Deep South with Katie
+ July: 4th of July in Stone Harbor
+ August: Sweden with Megan and Lucy
+ September: back to Stone Harbor for Bethany's wedding!

USA-heavy but excellent plans, I think!

sommerwind

2011-05-09T11:44:00.005+02:00

1. Sommerwind = summer wind = a delicious and dangerous twist on a mimosa with blood orange juice and sparkling Riesling wine (yum)
2. Tortilla-less huevos rancheros with this salsa
3. Goetheplatz has some surprisingly nice buildings if you look up (thanks for the tip, Tom!)

poolside lounging and wine fests

2011-05-08T21:57:00.003+02:00

We've hit the season of a fest or three every weekend, and I couldn't be more delighted. Friday night was my first return to Friedberger Markt of the year (I had forgotten just how packed that place gets!), Saturday night was Bornheimer Weinfest, and today Megan and I made out way across town to the pool in Hausen. Warm weather season is the best.

frohe ostern

2011-04-25T21:26:00.002+02:00

I spent my four-day weekend lounging at Freibad Hausen (a heated outdoor pool in Frankfurt! amazing!), basking in the sun in Grüneburgpark, eating all-day Easter brunch with friends, and finally trying yogurt ice cream Eis Christina (not as good as the hype I'd been hearing about it, but delicious nonetheless!). Such a nice lazy Easter weekend.

frühsommer

2011-04-17T23:15:00.004+02:00

According to the Main Café's website we're already in "Frühsommer", which I guess is like actual summer except for how it's not as sunny or as warm. But when the sun was out today, hanging on the Main, along with dinner on my balcony afterward, was pretty glorious.

gobble gobble

2011-04-14T23:06:00.004+02:00

2011 travel goal #1 from this post: complete. Megan and I spent a four-day weekend in İstanbul two weekends ago, and even though we did not see the sun a single time while we were there, we still loved the city -- which is saying a lot, because it was freezing and also I love me some sunlight.

Highlights: the Harem at Topkapı Palace (I love Turkish tiles almost as much as I love sunlight); the Turkish bath experience at Çemberlitaş Hamamı; amazing homestyle lunch at Mücver in Cihangir (along with all the grocery stores/boutiques around it); taking the ferry to Asia (in spite being too sick to really enjoy the Asian side of the city); the top-floor bar at the Leb-i Derya Richmond with expensive delicious cocktails and an out-of-this-world view; and of course Megan's many Turkish boyfriends at the Grand Bazaar ("You already have a boyfriend? That's okay, you can have another!"). I'll definitely be returning to this city. Just hopefully when it's a little warmer.

berlin weekend

2011-04-12T23:01:00.007+02:00

Ahh, this past weekend in Berlin with Megan and Lucy was perfect. Some things we loved:

+ Antipodes: adorable café in Prenzlauer Berg run by a couple from New Zealand with delicious coffee and sandwiches and the best brownie I've ever bought at a store
+ A visit to Tacheles (though things were looking grimmer there than they were last summer; the backyard sculpture garden/studio area/bars were gone)
+ Hanging out at Mauerpark on Sunday afternoon and enjoying the pure magic of hipster central (though we had to leave to catch our train before karaoke got going)
+ Fantastic turkey and mushroom salad at Strandbad-Mitte
+ Amazing live band and fabulous crowd at Clärchens Ballhaus
+ Renting bikes and riding lazily along the Spree, with breaks for beer and Thai food and buying cheap DVDs and vintage postcards at the Saturday flea market by the Pergamon Museum

Seriously, it would be difficult to imagine a more lovely weekend with friends.

springtime flowers + picnic blankets

2011-03-30T14:58:00.002+02:00

Yellow flowers and workweek picnicking on the Main: excellent start to the warm weather season.

outdoor tea + frankfurt spring

2011-03-19T18:21:00.004+01:00

Springtime in Frankfurt means SUNLIGHT. I spent most of the afternoon sitting outside at Harvey's, sipping Earl Grey and writing. So wonderful. Some shots from the past two weekends in Bornheim / Nordend, Frankfurt, my favorite part of town.

moro

2011-03-09T14:06:00.004+01:00

I'd already had a crush on Moro for a while because of their second cookbook -- I mean, this roasted squash salad is ridiculously good -- but I still didn't expect our Saturday lunch to be so insanely delicious. I was least enamored of the crab appetizer and most enamored of the vegetable mezze main, but truly it was all excellent, and a three-hour stay at our table in the corner on a rainy Saturday afternoon was the perfect way to enjoy it.

eating our way through londontown

2011-03-07T15:51:00.004+01:00

A week ago Megan and I spent five days visiting Lucy in London and ate our way through the whole city, from Pakistani at Lahore Kebab House (beware of sound on the link) in Whitechapel to a three-hour Mediterranean fusion lunch at Moro on Saturday to Sunday lunch at The Jolly Gardeners in Putney to afternoon tea at The Wolseley on Monday. We also walked around Portobello Road, rode the London Eye, visited the nigh-overwhelming Oxford Circus Topshop, danced the night away in SoHo, and saw a production of Billy Elliot, but don't let that fool you -- all these things were really just to keep us from falling into a permanent food coma. After living in Frankfurt for a while, the sheer urban sprawl of a place like London seemed a little overwhelming, but good-overwhelming, a nice reminder that you can't walk from one end of downtown to the other in 20 minutes in every city. And if there are whole large neighborhoods of the city we didn't explore, well, darn, I guess I'll have to go back. What a hardship.

karneval

2011-03-06T23:30:00.002+01:00

I met up with Mandie and Suz (and their respective grad school and couchsurfer buddies) in Cologne for Karneval this weekend. I didn't much know what to expect, though the fact that my company's Cologne office essentially closed at 11 a.m. last Thursday with no particular plans to be truly open for business again until the following Wednesday says something about the scale of mayhem. And indeed, much like Ann's and my Oktoberfest experience, it started out pretty calm, with a multi-hour Thai lunch, and ended with a parade, a cohort of Italian scuba divers, the pilot to my stewardess costume (though he seemed pretty enamored of German Princess Leia), mushroom pizza on the street, a circus director, Robin Hood missing the memo on it being Men in Tights, some Mexican-Americans on a train, and Marcus the giraffe photobombing every picture a group of ten blackfaced Germans attempted to take. (Because yes, Germany has not gotten the memo about how blackface is not okay.) Any holiday that involves shutting down a whole city to party for days on end is fine by me. So, Mardi Gras one of these years?

frühstück

2011-02-20T14:02:00.002+01:00

For brunch today I made American breakfast: oven-roasted potatoes with Old Bay seasoning, fried eggs, Heinz ketchup, orange juice, and a Wawa hazelnut coffee latte. It kinda reminded me of American breakfast in Freiburg with Katherine -- minus the deeply confusing maracuja jam, that is.

plans

2011-02-08T14:58:00.003+01:00

Absolutely brilliant blue skies in the middle of the day today, coupled with tofu and kimchi and coffee, made for an excellent Mittagspause.

One year ago: I was moving into a new apartment and planning a trip to Bangladesh and India.

Today: In honor of the just-under-one-year-anniversary of moving into that new apartment, I bought a washing machine on amazon.de and therefore joined the ranks of real adult people, where by "real adult people" I mean "people who can put their clothes in a washing machine any day of the week including Sundays, when the laundromat is not open."

In a little over two weeks: Megan and I are flying off to London to visit Lucy, gorge ourselves on delicious food and high tea, and wander all around the city. I've never spent more than 24 hours in London at a stretch, and I'm stoked to get to be there for five full days.

London is my only definite vacation plan for 2011 so far, though, which needs fixing. I've got my eye on Istanbul, Marrakech, Stockholm, and China in particular, along with a couple jaunts across the ocean to visit my family and my very favorite beach (and possibly road trip through the South? Oh, I hope so.). Now just to wrangle my 30 days of vacation into making this fit into a single calendar year . . . .

feuerzangenbowle

2011-02-06T02:06:00.001+01:00

I headed up to Hannover to visit Mandie at the beginning of last weekend, and then both of us continued on to Essen to visit Suz for the remainder of the weekend. The day and a half we were in Essen were filled with cooking, eating, and getting to know a little bit of the Ruhrgebiet (which, while we were there, was gloriously sunny but cold cold cold), and also with making Feuerzangenbowle -- the first time I'd ever participated in making it (really it was Suz's show!), though I was already quite the fan. It can be a bit hazardous to make indoors; good thing Suz's roommate thought to move the table out from under the low-hanging IKEA paper lantern before we had to think fast and put out a fire. Watching a rum-soaked sugar cone whoosh with flames was immensely mesmerizing and felt much like like I imagine the cave people must have felt while staring into their fires, except for at the end of my fire there was warm alcohol. Delicious.

neighborhood

2011-01-23T12:41:00.004+01:00

Walking around in the cold sunny weather yesterday, I got a nice reminder of how much I like my neighborhood.

the isle of sand and snow II

2011-01-03T22:57:00.005+01:00

I spent just over a week, from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day, in my favorite beach town on Earth, Stone Harbor, New Jersey. The sand-on-snow reminded me a lot of Sylt, but thankfully there was a whole lot more sunlight to be had on the Mid-Atlantic coast than there was on the North Sea last winter -- in spite of 18 inches of snow the day after Christmas! Happily, after the blizzard the sky turned blue and stayed blue, so we got in plenty of walking on the beach, and even bike-riding toward the end of the week, once the streets were pretty clear. We also had the best (eco-friendliest!) Christmas tree yet, which was in fact our deck umbrella. Classy!

feuerzangbowle and fondue

2010-12-16T21:04:00.004+01:00

This year's been more of a Feuerzangbowle kind of year than a Glühwein kind of year. The Feuerzangbowle stand is winning out over Glühwein through having the best mugs and being located right by the creche, which has become my friends' usual meeting place ("See you at the Baby Jesus at eight!"). I tramped around the Weihnachtsmarkt in the snow this evening in search of Christmas presents and cupped a steaming mug of Feuerzangbowle in my hands to warm up for a few minutes. Another new Weihnachtsmarkt favorite: the fondue place just past the fountain where you can order an individual-sized pot of cheese fondue with bread for dipping. My officemate Anna and I tried it recently, and it was excellent.

snow

2010-12-09T22:14:00.002+01:00

I'm a summer person, no question, but I have to say, there's something immensely beautiful about fresh snow on trees against a blue morning sky.

the two german seasons

2010-12-05T23:24:00.005+01:00

\

I recently read and slightly misremembered this blog post as saying that there are two seasons in Germany: winter and dreading the winter. In the middle of the whopping four weeks of summer, I was already in "dreading the winter" mode -- and after a long and rather magnificent fall, we are decidedly in winter again.

But things aren't bad! I've remembered how much I like wearing tall boots, for one thing (shopping for tall boots is a different story, though I'm a big fan of DUO, who sell boots in many, many calf sizes). For another thing, the Christmas market is back, and there is no bad there. For a third, it's only a few weeks until I fly back to the U.S. for my family's first-ever Stone Harbor Christmas, and I'm hoping Sunny the 14-year-old Labrador is going to hang in there and be around for it.

In the meantime, I'm working lots and haven't seen a ton of anyone outside of my coworkers lately, so it's a good thing I work with a whole bunch of lovely people. And in a week or so things should calm down, just in time for me to squeeze in as much Glühwein and Weihnachtsmarkt food as possible before flying out on Christmas Eve.

***

I sounded pretty lukewarm about living in Frankfurt in my last post, I realize, which isn't an accurate depiction of how I feel about FFM at all. I really like living here now, actually. It's a surprisingly excellent place to be. It's a hard place to commit to, though, particularly when you hang out with mostly ex-pats, as I do, because most everyone I know in the ex-pat community is living here with an end date in the back of their heads, some idea that they are going to be leaving. And right now I don't have anything of the sort. I don't actually wish I were anywhere else at the moment -- which was a kind of startling thought to have, even more so when I voiced it to a couple of my friends recently and they pointed out that there are not a heck of a lot better reasons why people stay places than that.

one year

2010-11-09T10:51:00.004+01:00

As of last Thursday, November 4th, I've been in Frankfurt for a full calendar year. In that time, I've been to Bangladesh, India, Paris (twice), Salzburg (twice), Spain, Sylt, Switzerland, and all over Germany; I've also gone home for one week, and to my other home for two. Moving to Frankfurt in November was not the most fun thing I've ever done, and leaving NYC was a little rough at first, but I've really ended up liking FFM. And wow, did that year go by quickly.

o suns and skies

2010-11-01T09:13:00.004+01:00

Frankfurt might have had a pitiful four-week summer, but it's made up for that a tiny bit by having a long and excellent fall.

an hour in the eighth

2010-10-24T21:56:00.006+02:00

Work ate me a little over the past week or so, and I've only just now gotten around to uploading the pictures from when I went on a one-day business trip to Paris two Wednesdays ago. My coworker Anna and I were lucky enough to sneak in an hour of wandering around the 8th arrondissment after we were done with meetings: down the Champs-Élysées and over to the Seine, with views of the Eiffel Tower. Not bad, not bad.

over the city

2010-10-08T09:34:00.003+02:00

In spite of having worked here for almost a year, I'd never been to the observation deck on the top of the Main Tower until this week, when I met my old roommate Sandra for lunch. It was a bright sunny day and very windy fifty-four stories up. Afterwards we had focaccia from Strahmann on Kaiserstraße, which we enjoyed in the (much less windy) sunlight of Goetheplatz.

park

2010-10-07T23:59:00.003+02:00

Sunday was exactly my idea of a perfect fall day: warm and sunny and shockingly blue-skied during the day and a bit cool at night -- sweater and jeans and scarf weather. There's a fall festival going on in town at Roßmarkt with amazing fresh-pressed apple juice and decorative gourds for sale and displays involving tractors and a mother and baby cow parked in a pen at Hauptwache. I'm a little in love with this kind of fall.

da liegt man nicht eng

2010-10-06T22:34:00.001+02:00

I somehow did not expect visiting Dachau to be as emotional an experience as it was. In spite of having lived in Germany for a couple of years in all, I'd never been to a concentration camp before. I was glad we went.

The title of this post is from the Paul Celan poem Todesfugue (in English here), which has a refrain that was in my head the whole time we were at Dachau:

dein goldenes Haar Margarethe
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

ein prosit

2010-10-05T00:34:00.002+02:00

One of the most remarkable things about Oktoberfest is how quickly it changes. One moment it's ten in the morning and the tent is almost completely empty, and you're eating your Weißwürste and Brezel and drinking your Frühstücksmaß and thinking that Oktoberfest is really much more low-key than it was four years ago; the next moment it's the middle of the afternoon and you're on your third Maß and your fourth beer tent and you can't find a table because it's a huge roiling party and your friend is being whisked away by a herd of Italians who want to take pictures with girls in Dirndls and you're befriending Australians and stealing their hats; and then suddenly it's three in the morning and you're waking up in the tent where you're spending the night and you're digging in your purse, where you discover a Burger King bacon cheeseburger you have no memory of purchasing for yourself. Which you then eat, delighted. Such is the way of Oktoberfest.

welcome to hostival hilton

2010-10-04T18:45:00.003+02:00

This is where we spent two nights in Munich. I know what you're thinking: There is no way Kelly and Ann paid 44,- euro a night each to stay in a tent in a gravel parking lot out back of a clubbing area, particularly not with the added information that this was an establishment run by a bunch of drunken 25-year-old boys dressed in scrubs who would, without prompting, tell you that they'd drunk at least seven Maß (one-liter beers) at Oktoberfest during the day, and point to the seven hash marks on their wrist to prove it. "There were more," I was solemnly informed, "but the ink absorbed into my skin. That's what ink does." (Generally I thought that was only what ink did when a needle was also involved, but hey, who am I to argue with a drunken murse?)

I would never want to stay at Hostival again, but at the same time, after the initial first hour of "what in the world are we doing here?" and subsequent extreme lowering of expectations, we actually had a fabulous experience. Maybe I'm not getting too old for hostel culture after all?

the day of the historically troubling encounter

2010-10-03T23:47:00.006+02:00

Katherine and I have had a joke for a long time:

Q: What do you find at the top of every German mountain?
A: A restaurant serving cake.

This has proved disturbingly accurate -- extra disturbing because it even holds true for the Kehlsteinhaus, a.k.a. the Eagle's Nest, a mountaintop residence gifted to Hitler by the Nazi party in honor of his fiftieth birthday. Hitler never actually lived in the Kehlsteinhaus, though his main residence, the Berghof, was also in the area (Obersalzberg, in the mountains above Berchtesgaden, at the absolute southeastern corner of Germany). The Berghof was destroyed, but the Kehlsteinhaus still stands, and has been converted into a restaurant. On the one hand, I'm glad that you can still visit the Kehlsteinhaus, because the view from the top looking out over the lush green valleys of the Bavarian Alps is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen; on the other hand, I'm not terribly okay with the fact that you can eat cake in a house where Hitler once used to impress diplomats, or the fact that you can buy Kehlsteinhaus fleeces. (Although, as one of my friends pointed out, at least they are not brown . . .) Our guidebook told us that if we were looking for a "less historically troubling encounter", we could take a cable car up to an also-beautiful overlook point, which might be the way I go next time*; I'm just not sure what exactly I was supporting with my 15,- euro bus + entry fee. The upkeep of Hitler's gilded elevator?

*I'm almost certainly going to head back to that area of the Alps -- I cannot say enough about how beautiful it was. I'd also like to check out the Königsee.

salzburg: details from a city

2010-10-01T14:31:00.001+02:00

I've been to Salzburg twice before (1, 2), but seem to keep on going back -- this time because when I asked Ann what her hopes and dreams for the Grand European Adventure were, Salzburg was at the top of the list. We didn't get our acts together sufficiently to go on the Sound of Music tour (sorry, Ann!) but we did visit Mirabell Gardens and see the steps with the unicorns that the von Trapp children dance around in the movie at the end of "Do Re Mi", and went on an ultimately successful but roundabout search for the Sound of Music house that led us past the pond of the rare Austrian flamingos. We also acquired Dirndls -- Ann's first, my second. I sincerely hope to get to wear it in a Bavarian wedding sometime; as it is, I'm going to be alternating between my two Dirndls for every Halloween for the rest of my life . . .

island hopping on the ancient sea

2010-10-01T12:10:00.000+02:00

After our visit to Herreninsel and Fake Versailles, Ann's and my boat ride on the Chiemsee continued on to Fraueninsel, a tiny and adorable island 1.5 kilometers in diameter that's home to a bunch of little hotels, waterfront restaurants, and small fisheries, along with the oldest convent in Germany, Frauenwörth, which was founded in 782. The step leading into the convent's chapel has a groove at least six inches deep from all those hundreds of years of feet wearing on it; I wish I'd gotten a picture of it. The chapel itself is small and dim and mysterious-feeling, and the wall of letters and embroidered notes giving thanks to the patron saint, Irmengard, who'd been an abbess there, is really something. Walking around the back of the convent by the lake, we saw a Bavarian wedding where everyone was in full Trachtenkleider (Dirndls & Lederhosen) and were utterly charmed.

One thing about Fraueninsel: as much as I loved it and wanted to claim one of the tiny houses for a summer vacation home of my own, it was overrun with tourists even on a rainy mid-September Friday. I think I'm going to have to go looking elsewhere for my waterside cottage retreat. Probably Sweden. I'm pretty sure the summer house of my dreams is around there somewhere. (Maybe I can just move into Hilda Grahnat's?)

bats don't eat bacon

2010-09-30T10:20:00.000+02:00

Ann and I spent about five seconds in the actual town of Prien am Chiemsee. I'm sure it was a lovely town, but we weren't interested in the "Prien" part so much as the "am Chiemsee" part: a lake so big that it's nicknamed the Bavarian Sea. (And everyone knows by now how I feel about lakes). So for the day and some change that we were there, we stuck to the lakeside area of town called Prien-Stock, using it as our jumping-off point for a boat trip to the islands of Herreninsel and Fraueninsel.

The main (only?) draw of Herreninsel is the palace Herrenchiemsee, which was commissioned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, "the fairy tale king" -- the dude who also brought us Neuschwanstein Castle. Ludwig II was big on castles as homage: Neuschwanstein was his homage to Richard Wagner; Schloss Herreninsel was his homage to Louis XIV. We suspect Ludwig II had a little dude crush on Louis XIV. Maybe more than a little dude crush. You don't commission a replica of Versailles in honor of somebody you like just a little.

The castle remains incomplete, but the parts of it that are finished are pretty stellar. Having been to Real Versailles in May, I can say that Fake Versailles compares rather favorably, though the grounds are less extensive and there are no wings off the main castle area, seeing as how Ludwig II ran Bavaria bankrupt before he could get around to adding them on. Also, Fake Versailles sadly incorporates none of the magical weirdness of The Hamlet -- but then again, Ludwig II wasn't building a castle in honor of Marie Antoinette.

Unfortunately they don't allow pictures of the inside of Fake Versailles, so you'll have to go for yourself if you want to see things like the swimming-pool-sized bathtub, the dumb-waiter-table, and the many, many paintings of Louis XIV in Ludwig II's private bedroom.

Finally, in a particularly delightful case of "Germans can be really, really weird," we ended the tour of Fake Versailles and saw a sign (still inside the castle!) for an exhibition on bats. Bats! Why not? It turns out that there are bats living in the roof of Fake Versailles, which makes the whole thing slightly less random, but we've still got no explanation for this sign. I never would have guessed that "bats eat bacon" was one of the seven most common bat myths in Germany.

time of your life

2010-09-28T15:52:00.007+02:00

Though I actually love train travel (and even, in certain instances, bus travel) and in fact once spent 24 hours on trains going from Freiburg, Germany to Sibiu, Romania, I tried to ensure that my friend Ann and I never spent too much time in transit each day while we were traveling around Germany and Austria. I decided we'd stop in Augsburg for an afternoon to break up the otherwise five-hour journey from Rothenburg ob der Tauber to Prien am Chiemsee, because it was more-or-less at the halfway point, but also because our guidebook made Augsburg sound awesome. I believe there was a sentence about how Augsburg was "definitely worth a stop on the Romantic Road." We're talking high praise here.

And, well. Augsburg was fine. The sun was shining and the sky was mostly brilliant blue, and we sat outside and enjoyed a lovely pasta with Pfifferlinge (delicious orangey-tan long-stemmed mushrooms) and wandered around town (this takes maybe twenty minutes total) and went into both of the town's massive and beautiful Catholic churches and enjoyed some Kaffee und Kuchen outdoors, and it was good, nothing to complain about, except that we weren't quite sure what we were doing there in the first place. I mean, the guidebook talked about this place like it was something really special, and as far as we could tell it was just okay, but certainly not anyplace we would have thought twice about passing right on by had we known what it was like beforehand. It wasn't particularly cute or particularly large or particularly much of anything other than a generic mid-sized German city (although, according to Wikipedia, Augsburg does have "more legal holidays than any other region or city in Germany." -- I suppose that's something!).

We decided that the guidebook author must have had the best evening of his life in Augsburg, culminating in meeting his future wife. And if his wife's from there, hey! He certainly couldn't diss his wife's hometown in his Germany guidebook. But from the rest of us, who did not meet our German future significant others in Augsburg, let's go ahead and be clear: it's a perfectly okay place, but forgettable. I might even go so far as to say that a straight-through train ride to the Chiemsee would have been just fine.

red roofs and chocolate pantaloons

2010-09-25T12:31:00.003+02:00

The first time I went to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, it was on my high school German exchange trip -- my first trip to Germany, my first trip out of the U.S. During our two days in Rothenburg, my friends and I discovered fruit-flavored ice cream, checked out medieval torture devices, got terribly lost (in a town the size of a button, never mind), and discussed the fact that the town was clearly the inspiration for the Playmobil castle we'd grown up with, and that the surrounding countryside, with its rolling green hills and forests, was just the sort of place we imagined the heroes of our eighth-grade novels riding through on their white stallions while wearing their chocolate leather pantaloons.

As for the actual town, I remembered it as being pretty touristy, but also just plain pretty: the most true-to-stereotype vision of (medieval) Germany there could be, thanks to the fact that the town became essentially a ghost town after being captured during the Thirty Years War and modernization couldn't take place for centuries, full of red tiled roofs and Fachwerkhäuser (half-timbered houses).

And on the return trip, Rothenburg certainly didn't disappoint. Except for the last morning we were there, our weather was yucky and gray, but the town itself looked just like I'd remembered it, in all its kitschy glory. A particular highlight, in spite of the fact that I'd done it before, was the Night Watchman tour, which was the very best kind of dramatic and hilarious historical kitsch. The dude's comedic timing and voice (the latter of which reminds me strongly of Brad Neely doing "Wizard People") absolutely made the performance.

up the river and through the woods

2010-09-24T21:12:00.008+02:00

As the first part of my friend Ann's two-week visit from the U.S., she and Megan and I spent most of a weekend heading to Burg Eltz, a castle just off the Moselle River in Rhineland-Palatinate. We'd been drawn to Burg Eltz due to the fact that it's Rick Steves' self-proclaimed "favorite castle in all of Europe" (and you know what Megan's and my opinion is about Rick Steves' suggestions). It's especially hard to argue with Rick Steves when he gets all poetic. I mean, the man has serious feelings for this castle:

Lurking in a mysterious forest, it's been left intact for 700 years and is furnished throughout much as it was 500 years ago. Thanks to smart diplomacy and clever marriages, Burg Eltz was never destroyed. It's been in the Eltz family for 850 years.

So, understandably, our expectations were pretty high going in.

On a Friday we headed up to Koblenz, where we spent the (incredibly noisy and mostly sleepless) night before parking ourselves on a cruise boat with dozens of octogenarians and riding up the Moselle River in the glorious fall sunlight. We disembarked at Moselkern, where we paused for some fortifying Würste, fries, and beer before wandering through the town and into the forest, following the Elzach creek to Burg Eltz. I was a big fan of the walk, in spite of the mud and the fact that every guidebook and sign we ran across had a different estimate for how long the walk from Moselkern to the castle would take, ranging from 40-90 minutes (we came in right around the middle of the range: 70 going, 60 coming back). An important thing to know about getting to/from Burg Eltz is that you shouldn't let anyone fool you into thinking there's some kind of public transportation option if you get tired, because there is no such thing. You can get to Burg Eltz other ways (including within a kilometer of it by car), but I recommend the walk -- emerging from the trees and seeing the castle rise up in front of you is pretty excellent, even with cranes marring the view.

The castle itself was lovely but underwhelming. I was expecting some serious dazzle out of Rick Steves' favorite castle in all of Europe. And yet I kept thinking that there must be so many castles more excellent than this one -- maybe not so perfectly maintained, maybe not so immediately, obviously that American childhood vision of castle, but all the better for it. One of Rick Steves' other favorite castles, Burg Rheinfels, comes closer to this for me, but it's still not the absolute one for me. My favorite castle in all of Europe is still out there, lurking in the middle of some other mysterious forest. I'll keep on looking.

second summer in the unreal city

2010-09-06T10:59:00.008+02:00

A couple months ago, my friend Cecilia visited me on her way to starting a months-long European adventure. Cecilia's one of my oldest Pomona friends -- we met on the first day of freshman year! -- and she was also my first independent travel buddy. For fall break our freshman year, we headed to Mexico, taking a Greyhound bus to San Diego, walking across the Mexican border, and standing in front of a Tijuana McDonald's, where a grizzled man told us in English, "If you're lookin' to have fun in Tijuana, this is not the place." (We were actually waiting for Cecilia's cousin Alejandro and then continuing on to Ensenada, but never mind.) Cecilia's relatives and family friends live in a pretty astonishing number of places, from California and Mexico to Italy and Spain and also, as it turns out, Zurich, Switzerland, where Cecilia's dad's cousin and her family kindly hosted us for the weekend and showed us around their beautiful city.

And oh lordy, is Zurich ever beautiful. Frankfurt's got a river; Zurich has a river and a lake, both of which you can swim in. (This is something I care about deeply, in case you hadn't noticed me harping on it all summer.) Not only can you swim in the lake -- we did, on Sunday! It was a little chilly, but a little hypothermia never hurt anybody. This nasty cough I've had all week is all Germany's fault. Swimming in a Swiss lake can only bring health!

Cecilia's relatives spent a whole day leading us all around the impossibly cute old city center, treating us to pizza, taking us on a boat ride* to the Chinese garden, and showing us the best museums in Zurich as part of Zurich's Night of the Museums, during which we went to two museums, ate curry, and watched a modern dance striptease so unfortunate that people left the room midway through. Art!

I think I can pretty well guarantee that I will never be able to repay Cecilia's relatives' hospitality, so I'll have to pay it forward instead -- once I live in a lovely house in a Swiss village just over the mountain from a beautiful city on a lake, that is.

*The boats that run on the river Limmat and on the lake are part of Zurich's public transportation network, and are included in the price of a day transportation ticket -- as are Zurich's two funiculars. How cool is that?!

Feierabend

2010-09-01T12:16:00.000+02:00

One of the very best German words there is: Feierabend. It's the evening, specifically the evening after a day of work, but there's something really wonderful about it in that it has that bit of feiern in there, which means "to celebrate" -- celebrating the fact that now you can sit, guilt-free, by the side of the river and drink a small beer and write, because you've made it through another day, because the business part of the day is done.

fall food in summertime

2010-08-30T11:39:00.000+02:00

It's always disconcerting to go grocery shopping in late August and see that the entire front of the store is filled with ripened pumpkins and butternut squash. Surely those things shouldn't be ready until after Labor Day, at the earliest. We're talking about common decency here, and keeping fall things in their proper season, which is fall, which has no business starting in August. (Though last night's horrible weather at the Museumsufer Fest felt like a jump straight back into mid-winter; clearly Frankfurt has no sense of weather decency.)

And yet here I am contributing to this late August indecency, because I bought myself a butternut squash at the end of last week. For shame. I spent a while wondering Friday what I was going to do with it until finally stumbling on a recipe I'd seen before, on both Smitten Kitchen and Orangette, no less, which is pretty much the closest thing a recipe gets to an official stamp of "this is going to be delicious."

Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Orangette, who adapted it from Casa Moro

Yield: four servings (more like two servings as a main dish, four as a side)

For salad:
1 medium butternut squash (about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds), peeled, seeded, and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt
One 15-ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed (1 1/2 cups)
1/4 of a medium red onion, finely chopped (I don't love red onion and so used white onion instead)
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro or parsley (I went with parsley)

For tahini dressing:
1 medium garlic clove
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons well-stirred tahini
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more to taste
sea salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F.

In a large bowl, combine the butternut squash, garlic, olive oil, and a few pinches of salt. Toss the squash pieces until evenly coated. Roast them on a baking sheet for 25 minutes, or until soft (25 minutes was just right for me and my mini-oven). Remove from the oven and let cool a little.

Meanwhile, make the tahini dressing: In a small bowl, whisk together the garlic and lemon juice. Add the tahini, and whisk to blend. Add the water and olive oil, whisk well, and taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if you want. The sauce should have plenty of nutty tahini flavor, but also a little kick of lemon. I added a little bit of extra olive oil and water to balance things out, and a few cracks of pepper and sea salt.

To assemble the salad, combine the squash, chickpeas, onion, and cilantro or parsley in a mixing bowl. Add about a third of the tahini dressing to taste, and toss carefully, and serve with remaining dressing on the side.

I stored the leftover dressing separately from the salad and added it to taste just before eating. You can warm the leftovers back up in the microwave before dressing and eating, or so I hear; having no microwave, I can only vouch for the fact that the leftovers are also quite tasty left cold.

hurrah

2010-08-25T00:01:00.000+02:00

I'm hoping this wasn't the last hot beautiful weekend, but if it was, it was a good one. Aperol spritzes and a rooftop BBQ, a long bike ride along the Main, two lakes*, one pool**, train rides, homemade Pfifferlinge salad, the most dangerous brownies (with sea salt on top), and a full afternoon spent reading my guidebook in preparation for Ann's visit (two weeks from Friday!) and plotting all of the things I still want to do in Germany. It's a good thing I don't have anything in the way of a departure date from Frankfurt yet, because I am in no way ready to be done with this country.

*Lake 1: Grüner See in Dietesheim, which a lot of Germans rate quite highly, but Megan and I found the algae a little off-putting, and I was cowed by the signs proclaiming swimming to be illegal (though apparently no one enforces this. Lake 2: Strandbad Spessartblick on See Freigericht-West in Großkrotzenburg, which was a seven-minute train ride from Hanau and was my favorite FFM-area lake yet. There's not much a view of the Spessart hills from the lake itself, but you can see the Spessart in the background a little bit as you approach, and the lake itself is lovely.
**Freibad Eschersheim was a delightful relief on Saturday after Megan and I gave up on trying to reach Strandbad Spessartblick by bicycle and decided we were not really interested in swimming in Grüner See.

sweet, soft & lazy

2010-08-17T11:54:00.000+02:00

I spent this past weekend visiting Mandie, who just moved to Hannover to do an eleven-month business school program. We spent Saturday eating large German breakfast, visiting Maschseefest (a city festival on the lake, featuring a mini regatta and introducing us to the possibility of renting a paddleboat in the shape of a VW Bug), and walking all over the entire city. Our feet hurt intensely on Sunday, so it's a good thing it was cold and pouring rain and we could spend the day huddling indoors and watching a movie that turned out to have been partially set on Sylt ("I recognize this place!!" I hollered at the screen at one point). We finally emerged in the late afternoon to eat at Mister Q's, which claims to be "a culinary trip around the world", and is something of a trip, all right: think a German version of Applebee's with vaguely Asian decor and the added bonus that what you think you're ordering will not necessarily be what shows up on your plate. Empanadas and fried calamari strips are totally the same thing. Mister Q's: where ordering is always an adventure! Just not necessarily a good one.

summer goal: complete

2010-08-02T12:38:00.000+02:00

I only had one official goal for summer 2010 in Germany: find an outdoor place in the Frankfurt area in which one may swim and that is reachable by public transportation, and swim in it. It might seem like I was setting my standards low, but this is not the case -- fulfilling all of those requirements was a surprisingly difficult task, requiring many rounds of questioning locals. As far as I can tell, the entire idea of "it is summertime, so let us go somewhere outside where there is cool, refreshing water, and submerse ourselves in it!" is a foreign notion for the immediate Frankfurt area.

But I persevered in my quest, and so on Saturday Megan, Lucy, and I went to Langener Waldsee, just to the south of Frankfurt, which is a former gravel quarry turned lake, and is fantastic and beautiful and bizarre. Where else in the world can you see, all at once, a beach, a nude beach, a yacht club, gravel quarry equipment, and planes taking off and landing at an international airport? Re: the nude beach, we'd been aware that Langener Waldsee had an FKK area (FKK = free body culture = clothing decidedly optional) but we hadn't realized that said FKK area would be separated from the regular beach by nothing but a flimsy little fence. See the sandy area in the picture above? That's the normal beach. See the grassy area just around the curve of the lake? That's the nude beach. Constant entertainment! Every time we looked across the way, we'd find something new to stare at: nudists sunning themselves on the wooden bathing platforms in the middle of the lake, for instance, or wearing nothing but hats and flip-flops to walk to the bathroom. Thanks, greater Frankfurt area. Stay weird.