best of 2013

In no particular order, some of my favorite photos from the last year from a bunch of places: Germany, Sardinia, Prague, Paris x 2, Stone Harbor, NYC, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Gran Canaria.

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.

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.

kölner wochenende

I visited Mandie in Cologne a couple of weeks ago, and in between running 13.1 miles (training for the Frankfurt Marathon less than two months out!), splitting fifteen little dishes of fabulous Persian food with Mandie and Kedar, watching Clueless, and getting Flammlachs sandwiches and a Nutella crêpe at a wine fest by the Rhein, we went to the lake. Specifically, Blackfoot Beach, which was excellent. We eased our way into the not-terribly-warm water and spent a while lounging on the big floating rubber barriers you can see in the lake before coming ashore for a light snack, which in my case translated to basically a whole meal involving potato salad, Greek salad, and, in response to some serious post-run protein cravings, the rare consumption of a German sausage. (I hit my lifetime bratwurst limit sometime in 2007, after a couple dozen visits to the Freiburg market for cheap bratwurst and mustard on a Brötchen, but do occasionally make exceptions.) The French fries in the picture tasted not a little bit like chicken and I didn't quite manage the entire sausage, but they (and the entire lake visit!) totally hit the spot.

frankfurt summer

     
We've had a relatively excellent summer in Europe this year. Here: a really gorgeous evening around Alte Oper, a superb grilling party in a garden, and swimming at Brentanobad.