summer goal: complete

I only had one official goal for summer 2010 in Germany: find an outdoor place in the Frankfurt area in which one may swim and that is reachable by public transportation, and swim in it. It might seem like I was setting my standards low, but this is not the case -- fulfilling all of those requirements was a surprisingly difficult task, requiring many rounds of questioning locals. As far as I can tell, the entire idea of "it is summertime, so let us go somewhere outside where there is cool, refreshing water, and submerse ourselves in it!" is a foreign notion for the immediate Frankfurt area.

But I persevered in my quest, and so on Saturday Megan, Lucy, and I went to Langener Waldsee, just to the south of Frankfurt, which is a former gravel quarry turned lake, and is fantastic and beautiful and bizarre. Where else in the world can you see, all at once, a beach, a nude beach, a yacht club, gravel quarry equipment, and planes taking off and landing at an international airport? Re: the nude beach, we'd been aware that Langener Waldsee had an FKK area (FKK = free body culture = clothing decidedly optional) but we hadn't realized that said FKK area would be separated from the regular beach by nothing but a flimsy little fence. See the sandy area in the picture above? That's the normal beach. See the grassy area just around the curve of the lake? That's the nude beach. Constant entertainment! Every time we looked across the way, we'd find something new to stare at: nudists sunning themselves on the wooden bathing platforms in the middle of the lake, for instance, or wearing nothing but hats and flip-flops to walk to the bathroom. Thanks, greater Frankfurt area. Stay weird.

summertime and german pie

Tonight is cool and rainy and fairly miserable, but these are some of the things that have been good about Frankfurt lately:

Balcony brunch that ended with raspberry brown sugar gratin (Greek yogurt, half the brown sugar, mixed with blackberries -- perfection). Writing while sipping Eiskaffee on the Freßgass, on days that sent me running for the shade. (Re-)breaking in Katherine's pie plate (best part of today, and sure to be an excellent part of tomorrow, too). Sipping a mojito on the roof at Deck 8, with my feet in a wading pool and the skyline all around. Lounging by the Main on a lazy Sunday, with the hopes of more such summer days to come.

the trip down south

Last summer was a little bit magical in that I had a stretch of ten weekends in a row in Stone Harbor, starting the weekend after the Fourth of July and continuing well into September. Somehow, every one of those weekends, Friday would roll around and there wouldn't be a single thing that I needed to stay (too) late for or that required weekend work. And so I'd ride the A train up to Port Authority and then catch the late-evening NJ Transit bus number 319 down the Garden State Parkway, first to Toms River and then to Atlantic City (a city that's best from a distance, a horizon mirage from Stone Harbor or bright lights over marshlands, curving in on the expressway). South of Atlantic City, the bus winds along island roads, stopping in Ocean City and Sea Isle City before crossing the rusted, impossibly narrow bridge over Townsends Inlet and onto Seven Mile Island, where I'd get off at the corner of my street in the middle of the night and walk toward the wet-salt smell of the ocean.

I spent every Friday night for ten straight weeks on a bus last year, but here's a secret: I love that ride. Both going and coming, I love the looping entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, how it circles the Weehawken football stadium like a snake and rises up to reveal the Manhattan skyline from afar. I love the flat wide expanse of the Garden State, the views of suburbia down the roads that intersect with it, and the moments when the constant trees give way to water and bloody orange sunsets. I love cutting between the Garden State and the islands on causeways, water and marshland and houses on stilts, roadside diners and seafood stores. And at the end of the ride, the payoff: Stone Harbor, a weekend or longer on the shore. It can't be beat.

en why see

Oh, New York. This was the first time I'd been back since moving to Frankfurt, and I was a little bit worried that it would have changed, or (more likely) that I would have changed, that the fact that I like Frankfurt now would have lessened my love for New York in some way, as if there were only a certain amount of city love to be doled out from the pot. Ridiculous. On its own merits, NYC is still pretty much uncontested for my favorite city, and there are some other undeniable advantages to living there, proximity to Stone Harbor and therefore my family being chief among them. I'm immensely, ridiculously lucky to be living in Europe right now, but I'm certainly keeping New York in the back of my mind.

Having said that, New York is easiest to love when you have unlimited free time and unlimited money (the combination that is almost certain never to exist when you actually live there). For the days that I was there, I shopped and ate and hung out with some of my very favorite people. I went to Amanda's house for the Super Awesome Fun BBQ of Pan-Asian Delights, which was exactly as advertised! (I was the one who came up with the name, but Amanda and her family made it happen.) I spent a rainy afternoon at my favorite coffee shop in New York, 71 Irving Place. I gorged on guacamole and an it's-five-o'clock-right-freaking-here margarita at Dos Caminos SoHo, and inhaled three tacos at Pinche Taqueria as Frida Kahlo and her ever-elegant unibrow looked on. Most excellent of all, Amanda and I waited for Shakespeare in the Park tickets in Central Park on an unbelievably perfect morning, sipping iced coffee and gnawing on an H&H bagel and listening to a man play the Star Wars theme song on his flute as a parade of uptown dogs and their owners strolled past -- a uniquely New York morning in all possible ways.

We feared rain that evening -- if it rains, that night's show is canceled, and there are no rain dates -- but the weather held, and so we got to watch the bizarreness that is The Winter's Tale. Though long, it was a surprisingly entertaining show, and we were amused to note that the humor of mooning an audience is timeless.

baseball, ray.

When I was little, the rule was that once you arrived in Stone Harbor, you did your absolute best to stay on Seven Mile Island for as long as possible, uninterrupted. Trips to the ACME in Cape May Court House were allowed, but only because food was wildly overpriced at the grocery stores on the island; beyond that, leaving the island for any reason, even to go for lobster at Carmen's in Sea Isle City, was to be done only with great reluctance or, ideally, not at all. In recent years, starting around the time when my brothers and I could drive, and increasing dramatically once I started taking the bus to and from New York, we've begun to explore the area more, from going for high tea at the Carriage House in Cape May to visiting Lucy the Elephant in Margate, but before that we kept to Seven Mile Island, and the southern three miles of it only, at that.

But there's always been one exception to the park-your-car-in-Stone-Harbor-and-do-not-move-it rule: the yearly pilgrimage to Philadelphia for a Phillies game. In spite of spending all my summers an hour and fifteen minutes from Philadelphia, I've been to Center City on exactly two occasions; but I've been just over the Walt Whitman Bridge to Citizens Bank Park and, before it, Veterans Stadium most every summer for as long as I can remember. We'd leave the beach early and drive to Philly for an early dinner, first at Medora's and now, in recent years, at Chickie's & Pete's, a sports bar/restaurant chain whose crab fries (crinkle-cut, spiced with Old Bay, and served with molten cheese for dipping) are so good that, when an acquaintance and I discussed them at Frankfurt's Christmas market last year, we nearly cried for the fact that we couldn't have them right that moment.

And then there's the game itself. I'd long looked forward to the first time I'd be over 21 at a Phillies game (and had not been at a Phillies game since I was 20) but the night was too hot to drink anything but water. No matter: we shared lemon water ice and bottled water and, stuck to the plastic of our seats, watched the Phillies royally stink against the Atlanta Braves all the way into extra innings.

true vacation

I recently spent two weeks in two of my favorite places in the world: New York City and Stone Harbor, New Jersey. I was in Stone Harbor for the Fourth of July and for my 24th birthday, on the tenth, bookended by a few days in New York. Stone Harbor was excellent. There was the usual Fourth of July barbeque at McGucks', with bonus bay swimming; three days of hanging out with Amanda; a truly awesome 15-mile bike ride with Dad to the Wildwood boardwalk and back; beach days that continued until eight at night, because it was just that beautiful out, and the usual five p.m. Stone Harbor breeze switch didn't occur to chase us off the beach, shivering; Backbays crabcakes and Henny's chowder from the new take-out location and Springer's ice cream; all the classics and more. As Bethany said, being in Stone Harbor is like being at home and being on vacation all at once -- perfection.

auf geht's deutschland, schieß ein tor!

I've been watching a lot of the WM (Weltmeisterschaft, World Cup) at the Public Viewing at Roßmarkt. It's always a good time, but the atmosphere is absolutely amazing when Germany's playing -- being in the middle of a sea of German colors, the arena full to capacity and everyone's eyes on the screen . . . . There's really nothing like it in the U.S., no Public Viewings in the middle of cities, no sport that captures the whole country's imagination, no Nationalelf whose first and last names everyone knows. The city was magical after the game, too: everyone yelling and blowing vuvuzelas and pouring into the streets and dancing. It's immensely fun to be in Germany for this.

kaffee & kuchen and german feather dusters

Cecilia visited me on her way to moving to Italy for the summer and fall. We ate, walked, talked about our big life uncertainties two years after graduating from Pomona, and watched the World Cup. Kaffee und Kuchen at Café Laumer was a highlight (their veranda seating is lovely), as was Germany's World Cup win over Australia on Sunday night. We sat outside of a hookah bar in Sachsenhausen and nursed beers, then walked back to my apartment, grinning at all the honking cars and excited people post-win.

Near my apartment, we were accosted by four guys running out a bar, trying to convince us to come in and celebrate Germany's win. When we tried to say we were tired, they became suspicious. Had we not supported Germany?! No, no, we had! We pointed to our leis in Germany's colors. They remained unconvinced; how could we not want to celebrate? Had we even WATCHED the game? One of them wielded a feather duster (in German flag colors) as a microphone. It turned out he wanted us to name the players who had scored each of Germany's four goals (which we knew, but we were flustered, and had not understood the question). At our confused, "Wie bitte?" the guy determined that we needed reminding. "Podolski!" he told us, delivering a whack to my back with the feather duster. "Klose!" WHACK. "Müller!" WHACK. "Cacau!" WHACK. We were then sent on our way, sufficiently shamed.

not imaginary

This weekend I visited Lexy in Berlin on a last-minute whim, which was a thoroughly excellent choice. We walked all over Tiergarten and Grunewald, spent a whole afternoon in a Biergarten, attempted (nearly successfully) to visit a recreated medieval village, and took advantage of Berlin's fantastic brunch culture. The highlight for me, though, was returning to Tacheles.

The last time I was there was October 2006, as part of my thirty-hour accidental sidetrip between Italy and Oktoberfest. Most everything about that trip felt like something I'd made up in a haze of too little sleep -- drinking brightly colored Berliner Weisse at the festival in front of the Brandenburg Gate that we eventually realized was in honor of German Unification Day; happening upon large numbers of nudists in Tiergarten; etc. But Tacheles really felt like something that existed only in my imagination, and not just because I went there on a night that ended in me kissing a German boy in a some grass that I thought, at the time, was a park, and the next morning turned out to be a ten-by-ten-foot scrubby patch outside a retirement home.

This is what I remembered about Tacheles: some kind of tall, abandoned-looking building with a bunch of graffiti and many flights of stairs, a bar up top, and some kind of park with playground equipment out back. It seemed deeply unlikely to be true, and yet, when Lexy, her friend Chris, and I went there on Saturday night, the only thing missing was the playground equipment. There were a bunch of massive sculptures around the Biergärten/bars in the yard -- I wonder if maybe the playground equipment I remember climbing on was actually someone's art installation? If so, belatedly: oops.

how i spent my thursday

Thursday was Corpus Christi, the third and final holiday of Germany's weird ring-in-the-summer holiday season. I went jogging in Günthersburgpark in the morning and then went back in the afternoon to lounge in a bikini and write. Then I saw Prince of Persia with my friend Pet (better than anticipated, actually, though it felt like kind of a mash-up of many other Disney movies with a little time-travel twist) and afterward we went to dinner at Rinks and split a Bembel (traditional stoneware pitcher) of Apfelwein. I hadn't liked Apfelwein much when Katherine and I first tried it, which horrified Pet until I assured her that I had since remedied the situation. As my friend Amanda and I learned, it turns out that the secret is to order yourself a Bembel, preferably one intended for far more people than are currently present, and keep drinking until you don't remember anything at all, let alone why you used to think you didn't like Apfelwein. Some places, like Rinks, have smaller sizes than the 1,5-liter ones you get at places like Dauth Schneider or Wagner, but my friend Amanda and I thoroughly recommend the 1,5-liter size for two people, lots of good times, and very few clear memories. Delicious.