german november/december

Writing from Virginia Beach, where I haven't yet taken a single photo with my big camera. Here are a few shots from Frankfurt and Nuremberg from late November/early December. Happy holidays! And yes, that is Santa playing an accordion with a dog who is also dressed as Santa. Nuremberg has not one but two sets of Accordion Santa and Dog Santa. They sit about a block apart from each other and we assume that they are bitter rivals.

brussels

Stephen and I went to Brussels last weekend to see Arcade Fire in concert*, selecting Brussels out of the European options (Brussels, Paris, Berlin) because neither of us had ever been there. In the five years I've lived in Germany, I'd still never even been to Belgium! Through Belgium, sure, but I hadn't ever stopped there.

The weather wasn't terribly inviting and we were both pretty badly in need of a chill weekend, so we took it pretty slow. We didn't even see the most famous sight of Brussels, in spite of being only ten minutes' walk away. However, we did eat a couple of waffles (the street waffle was far superior to the indoor waffle) and drink a bunch of Belgian beer, if only to prove to ourselves that we like German beer a heck of a lot better. A La Mort Subite was our favorite place to hang out (other than our hotel room -- it was a good weekend for napping). Despite having seen only a tiny bit of the city we both really liked it. I'd go again! Brussels. Who knew.

*The Arcade Fire concert was very, very fun. It was a fancy dress or costume concert, so we busted back out our crocodile and roach costumes from Karneval -- you know you're in for a good time when you go somewhere in a full-body costume. I haven't historically been an Arcade Fire fan with the exception of a couple of songs, but I've really been digging the album Reflektor, and have slowly been tiptoeing into the prior three albums (off The Suburbs, the title track and "Ready to Start" are both excellent).

freiburg

In the middle of October, the weekend before the Frankfurt Marathon, I went to Freiburg with Mandie and a couple of her grad school friends. The first day was warm fall perfection: no jacket, sunshine, blue-skied beautiful. The second day rained with a fury so powerful it was not worth trying to ruin my camera taking a picture of it. So all of my photos are from Saturday, which was a marvelous day full of outdoor brunch, many Feierling beers in the Biergarten, wandering along the river, and surprisingly non-awful Mexican food in Germany. I'll take it.

frankfurt marathon

  
Just over a week ago, on Sunday, October 27th, I ran the Frankfurt Marathon, which was actually awesome! I had a pretty solid plan in place (run a mile, walk a minute) which I'd used in training and which meant that my knees felt good the whole way through unlike in some early training runs where they started to be seriously hurty after the six-to-seven-mile mark. The weather was kind of messy -- warm, rainy, incredibly windy -- but I turned out to have dressed perfectly for it, so I had no particular complaints.

I'd worried that running a home-city marathon would be kinda boring, especially since I knew that the route looped out toward the middle of nowhere right around the toughest part of the race. That no man's land section between miles 14 and 20 where the end is still incredibly far from sight took place way out toward Schwanheim and Höchst and it's true, there was just not a lot going on out there. But overall running my first marathon in the city where I live turned out to be stellar, since it meant that a bunch of my friends could come out and cheer! A couple of them even ran some of the way with me (including Stephen, who got a bunch of funny looks from the Germans for running while wearing jeans and carrying a messenger bag). Also, Frankfurt felt different, more fun, during the marathon than it normally does. Even areas I see basically daily, like Hauptwache, were transformed during the race. Plus, since I'm planning on moving to Nuremberg soon, it felt like a fitting sort of goodbye lap through a huge part of the city I've lived in for the past few years.

Speaking of which, today, November 4th, 2013, is actually the four-year anniversary of the day I moved to Frankfurt. When I moved here in 2009, I never in a million years would have guessed that I would still be here four years later. As much as I angst about living in Germany, clearly it's not all bad. After all, if I hadn't come here, I wouldn't have gotten to travel all over the place all the time, get a heck of a lot better at speaking German, or date that guy in the photo above. I still miss my family like crazy and despise the weather the majority of the time, but it probably comes out close enough to even.

new jersey signs

From a morning bike ride when I was in the US for my brother's wedding: The Wildwood, New Jersey boardwalk has the best signs (with a sneaky guest appearance from a Stone Harbor hotel).

sardinia IX: blue

Amazing blue sea and looking down on a tiny deserted beach that we drove down dirt roads to find. And with that we conclude our coverage of Sardinia (for this year's trip, anyway).

sardinia VIII: spiaggia della pelosa

More of my favorite aesthetic ever, brought to you by Spiaggia della Pelosa just north of Stintino, Sardinia in mid-July. Finding parking was crazy and those colorful umbrellas on the tiny strip of sand look pretty packed together, so we admired the colors from afar and chose two loungers and a blue umbrella at the less crowded beach up the way, which was across a narrow straight from an abandoned Spanish watchtower. We swam out into the straight and I explored the island while Stephen chased fish all through the underwater plants. We drank cans of Ichnusa beer that didn't stay cold for long (gotta love the Italian summer sun!) and ate a picnic lunch of cheese and bread and olive oil and were delighted about our lives.

sardinia VII: birthday beach II

Floating. Santa Teresa di Gallura.

sardinia VI: birthday beach I

This is where I spent (part of) my birthday: Santa Teresa di Gallura, on Sardinia's northwestern coast. We weren't really sure whether it would be nice or not, and in terms of the beach experience it wasn't necessarily the greatest -- crowded! as you can tell -- but in terms of my favorite aesthetic that ever was, a.k.a. tons of colorful beach chairs and brilliant blue water, it was the jackpot.