frühstück

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

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

   
   
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.