springtime flowers + picnic blankets

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

outdoor tea + frankfurt spring

  
  
  

  
  

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

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

  



  





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

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?