mainz

Went to the Weihnachtsmarkt in Mainz with my friend Anne on Sunday.







I had never seen a Weihnachtspyramide before. I wish I'd gotten a better picture of it. But basically it's a rotating tower (usually table-decoration size; this one is about twenty feet tall) that has Christian and traditional figures on it, along with candles.

Speaking of candles, I had not realized that anyone still put candles on Christmas trees, but Anne tells me they do. I'm sure it must be beautiful . . . just keep that bucket of water close at hand.

return to fantasyland

I went back to Freiburg last weekend for Thanksgiving, which Katherine summed up pretty awesomely (trust me when I say that you really want to click that link). Freiburg is really magical in wintertime, all lit up, in a way that Frankfurt doesn't quite manage -- I think it's something to do with Freiburg's tiny winding streets, the narrowness of the Dreisam path, and of course the Bächle.




I love going on trips that start with a train ride. Frankfurt's central train station used to be all that I knew of the city -- I still think it's gorgeous.




I love and miss Freiburg's Münsterplatz market.

happy thanksgiving eve!

The Weihnachtsmarkt is officially open for business. I think I know where my dinner is coming from . . .

christmas market season approaches

The Christmas market doesn't officially open until Wednesday, but the Römer area is completely packed with people setting up stalls and people watching them set up stalls. (This made it difficult to take a picture of any of the stalls; all of my pictures ended up with randoms wandering into the frame.) The Weihnachtsbaum is looking more and more decorated -- not sure if it is going to get more decorated than it currently is. I'll just have to keep wandering by to check.

Meanwhile, the path along the banks of the Main continues to be one of my very favorite things about Frankfurt. I'm taking advantage of the weather being pleasant(ish) enough to ride my bike to work. I mark the distance to work by bridges: my street becomes a bridge right at the point where I get on the river path, then I pass two more before I approach Untermainbrücke, the bridge that turns into the street my office building is on. Until a couple of days ago, I hadn't really thought about how good it was to be in another place with a river; but there's something really beautiful and awesome about bridges, in New York in particular, being able to count the bridges from downtown going up (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg) . . . and though the names of the bridges here don't come naturally to me yet it's comforting that they're here, in some gut-level way.

weekend

I am so happy to have a bike again. Frankfurt has really excellent public transportation, but it's a little like NYC in that everything goes through the city center, so a lot of the time it's easier to get from point a to point b with a bike.

I have also acquired: a bank card, an iPhone, and an apartment as of December 1. I am doing pretty darned okay.

wir feiern die ganze Nacht

I don't know quite what it is about living in Europe that makes my life turn epically more bizarre than it ever seems to be in the US, but since Wednesday I've been dancing twice, been reintroduced to cheap Riesling, watched two guys in a club who were dressed as policemen (in suspenders and tight turtlenecks) whip the butt of their buddy (who was dressed as a cowboy), spent two days with my friend Katherine (who I had not seen in nearly two years, but it didn't feel that way at all), done some neighborhood research for my future apartment search, and fulfilled a years-old dream through buying a milk frother and a Bialetti.



My mom had no idea what a milk frother was! One of my roommates in Freiburg, a massive and hairy German/Iraqi guy who liked to walk around in tiny black boxer-briefs, owned a milk frother and would frequently offer the rest of us lattes, which made up for a whole lot in terms of mental scarring. I have wanted a milk frother for my own ever since.

For the next few weeks I'm living in a sort of long-term hotel which some of my coworkers who've stayed here called a dump. It is admittedly very . . . primary colored, as you can tell from the fact that my new red frying pan matches the kitchen wall. It has a minimally stocked kitchenette which necessitated me buying myself a frying pan. I am, however, not paying a thing for rent for the month of November, so the place would have to be pretty darned atrocious for me not to be pleased with the arrangement.

I have also, since I arrived, managed to work two full days. As has been said to me, I don't waste any time! I'm sharing an office, which new and different but I think will work out fine. And the view from my office window is pretty all right.



Also the fact that I have a window is excellent. I was advertised to the entire Frankfurt office as being here for two years, which was something of a shock since that wasn't exactly what I agreed to (I agreed to a year with the possibility of extending to two) but after the initial moment of "um what?" I've started to warm to the idea. We shall see!

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Frankfurt itself yet -- the part of town I'm staying in right now is not exactly the cutest -- but I did a little bit of neighborhood shopping this afternoon and was deeply relieved to find that my area is sub-par. Other places are better!

The sun has been out for about ten minutes total since I've been here, but it's also been very reassuring to see that Frankfurt in general is better looking in sunlight.



As far as the local specialties go, I'm a huge fan of Frankfurter grüne Soße (the green sauce pictured below):



It might help that it's made with approximately a liter of sour cream. Do not care. It's delicious. And it's got lots of herbs in it! That's healthy, right? I thought so.

Work again in the morning! A couple of my coworkers accosted me on Friday evening and invited me along for something or other after work tomorrow night. It will either be this meet-up run by a French woman that basically sounds like speed dating for friendship, or something called ABBA EXPLOSION that is part of Swedish Week. I saw the beginning of Swedish Week (sponsored, of course, by IKEA) the other day in the center of town:



Because you totally cannot have any kind of Swedish Week without a) a pirate ship and b) IKEA's involvement.

Oh, Germany. It's good to be back.

willkommen in mainhattan

Yesterday I got on a plane, and today I officially moved to Frankfurt. I'm glad there are a whole lot of awesome things Frankfurt has going for it (Christmas markets; easy access to the entirety of Europe and beyond; hanging out with Katherine this weekend). Otherwise leaving New York would be pretty much awful.





I still don't like leaving New York a whole lot, but I've got hopes for Frankfurt. First day of work tomorrow -- wish me luck!

the shoulder season

I spent last weekend in Stone Harbor with my whole family. Both my brothers were on fall break, and I took my last two vacation days before I head to Germany on November 3rd (three weeks from today -- wild). Stone Harbor helpfully provided us all with pretty fantastic weather, so warm on Sunday that Dad and I went swimming without need of wetsuits. "Hypothermia sure feels nice," we joked.

The town is dressed up for fall, with corn husks on the lampposts that shed dried kernels all over the streets. It's meant to be monarch butterfly migrating season but we only saw a few here and there; we're thinking maybe next weekend will be actual migrating time.

It's always time for horseshoes, though. Thanksgiving? Christmas? You bet.

We didn't quite make it to any of the local festivals over Columbus Day weekend: Avalon Seafood Festival (I remember bagpipes and chowder as a child, and I still own a carved cedar chest Gran gave me for Christmas that she bought there); Columbus Day/Italian festival in Sea Isle; and, my favorite, the Lima Bean Festival in West Cape May. I'm beyond sad to have missed the crowning of the Lima Bean King and Queen. Maybe next year.

i'm pretending it's not yet fall

Some things that have happened recently, in no particular order:

Suz visited me on her way back to Austria!



We went kayaking on the Hudson.



We were attacked by the wake from a large boat, which left our butts rather soaked.



Nonetheless good times were had by all.

My friend Amanda and I had long bonded over our mutual love of food, with an emphasis on the deliciousness of meat. Since we work about ten minutes' walk from my apartment, we'd been joking around about how we should come back to my apartment in the middle of the work day and cook. Ideally, something with meat. It would be called Meat Lunch. Recently, in an impressive feat of time management and all-around awesomeness, Amanda and I made Meat Lunch a reality.



Steak, mashed potatoes, broccoli, and bread, all prepared and consumed within (just barely more than) an hour. On a Wednesday.

I discovered that, when straightened, my hair is surprisingly long these days.



I remain far too lazy to straighten my hair on a regular basis, but it's pretty cool to see what it can look like!

Lastly, tonight I attempted Käsespätzle for the first time since two summers ago. I forgot one of the cardinal rules of cooking, however, i.e. when you are making a dish (Spätzle) that has all of four very simple ingredients (salt, water, eggs, all-purpose flour) you should not substitute for them. White all-wheat flour will not have the same results as all-purpose flour. The Spätzle was something of an unholy mess to work with, and tasted mediocre at the end. Sadness.



Lesson learned!

lucy the elephant, down by the seeeeeea

In the early 2000s there was a jingle on the radio advertising Lucy the Elephant in Margate by the Sea. It was on the radio all the time, and also it was kind of creepy -- the combination of which made me want to stay far, far away rather than going anywhere toward Lucy, or even find out what she was beyond "some kind of elephant thing." (You can hear a little bit of the jingle here; you'll see what I mean about the creepiness.)

Anyway, a few years back my mom actually saw Lucy, though she never went inside, and she wanted to go back for the Lucy tour. And over the past couple of years I've come to appreciate weird roadside attractions in a much greater way than I did as a teenager (I think that a road trip around the country to look at the World's Largest Cross/Rocking Chair/Ball of Twine would be excellent fun). And since Lucy is billed not only as the World's Largest Elephant but also as the Eighth Wonder of the World (who could argue with that??) I was very interested in going.

Luckily, there was a nasty gray day at the end of my Labor Day vacation last week, so my mom and I headed up to check Lucy out.



So Lucy is a six-story-tall wooden elephant originally built in the 1880s by a dude from Philly who thought it would be a good way to attract people to the area south of Atlantic City and buy real estate. The large wooden elephant didn't inspire a whole lot of people to buy real estate, but it sure worked well as a tourist trap. It was also an advertisement for a hotel; a family spent the summer one year living inside Lucy; and briefly the elephant's belly served as a bar, until some idiot nearly burned the elephant down. I think this last is the best use of the elephant -- I feel very strongly that there would still be a whole lot of interest in an elephant bar. Sadly, she is now only open for tours; no beer involved.

   

The views from the top of the elephant, front and back respectively. Left, Lucy is oceanfront property! Right, from the top of Lucy the Elephant, you can see . . . Lucy the Elephant Water Tower!

   

Left, a very blurry picture of my mom inside the elephant (to give you a sense of the size of the interior if nothing else). See? Lucy is big enough to make a great bar. Right, there were water stains all on the inside of the elephant that they are eventually going to paint over -- including some, very creepily, in the shape of an elephant.

   

My mom (left) and I (right) in front of the elephant herself. Lucy is freaking big!

I'm down in Stone Harbor for weekend #10 in a row, which is pretty excellent in my opinion. There have been entire summers where I wasn't working in NYC and didn't get that many weeks in a row in Stone Harbor. (Granted, at that point I was spending the whole weeks here rather than just the weekends . . . but still not a bad deal this year.) Unfortunately the NJ Transit bus down the shore switched over to the winter schedule the day after Labor Day, so there's no real way for me to come down for the weekend without someone picking me up in Atlantic City (forty-five minutes away). My mom told me that I should find a jitney to drive me the rest of the way.

"What the heck is a jitney?" I said. I'd never heard the word in my life. She told me it was like a little vehicle, some kind of public transportation, but I still didn't have a good visual.

And then, in one of those moments of total bizarre coincidence, we were driving down Atlantic Avenue toward Lucy the Elephant and damned if there weren't a half dozen blue vehicles with JITNEY on them in big letters on the street coming toward us.



Apparently they've been running in Atlantic City since 1915. I laughed until I cried.

Also, if you're ever in Atlantic City and looking not for a casino or an outlet but in fact for a bakery, I highly recommend Formica Brothers Bakery. In spite of the name, it's actually quite cute.