red roofs and chocolate pantaloons

The first time I went to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, it was on my high school German exchange trip -- my first trip to Germany, my first trip out of the U.S. During our two days in Rothenburg, my friends and I discovered fruit-flavored ice cream, checked out medieval torture devices, got terribly lost (in a town the size of a button, never mind), and discussed the fact that the town was clearly the inspiration for the Playmobil castle we'd grown up with, and that the surrounding countryside, with its rolling green hills and forests, was just the sort of place we imagined the heroes of our eighth-grade novels riding through on their white stallions while wearing their chocolate leather pantaloons.

As for the actual town, I remembered it as being pretty touristy, but also just plain pretty: the most true-to-stereotype vision of (medieval) Germany there could be, thanks to the fact that the town became essentially a ghost town after being captured during the Thirty Years War and modernization couldn't take place for centuries, full of red tiled roofs and Fachwerkhäuser (half-timbered houses).

And on the return trip, Rothenburg certainly didn't disappoint. Except for the last morning we were there, our weather was yucky and gray, but the town itself looked just like I'd remembered it, in all its kitschy glory. A particular highlight, in spite of the fact that I'd done it before, was the Night Watchman tour, which was the very best kind of dramatic and hilarious historical kitsch. The dude's comedic timing and voice (the latter of which reminds me strongly of Brad Neely doing "Wizard People") absolutely made the performance.

up the river and through the woods

   


  
As the first part of my friend Ann's two-week visit from the U.S., she and Megan and I spent most of a weekend heading to Burg Eltz, a castle just off the Moselle River in Rhineland-Palatinate. We'd been drawn to Burg Eltz due to the fact that it's Rick Steves' self-proclaimed "favorite castle in all of Europe" (and you know what Megan's and my opinion is about Rick Steves' suggestions). It's especially hard to argue with Rick Steves when he gets all poetic. I mean, the man has serious feelings for this castle:

Lurking in a mysterious forest, it's been left intact for 700 years and is furnished throughout much as it was 500 years ago. Thanks to smart diplomacy and clever marriages, Burg Eltz was never destroyed. It's been in the Eltz family for 850 years.

So, understandably, our expectations were pretty high going in.

On a Friday we headed up to Koblenz, where we spent the (incredibly noisy and mostly sleepless) night before parking ourselves on a cruise boat with dozens of octogenarians and riding up the Moselle River in the glorious fall sunlight. We disembarked at Moselkern, where we paused for some fortifying Würste, fries, and beer before wandering through the town and into the forest, following the Elzach creek to Burg Eltz. I was a big fan of the walk, in spite of the mud and the fact that every guidebook and sign we ran across had a different estimate for how long the walk from Moselkern to the castle would take, ranging from 40-90 minutes (we came in right around the middle of the range: 70 going, 60 coming back). An important thing to know about getting to/from Burg Eltz is that you shouldn't let anyone fool you into thinking there's some kind of public transportation option if you get tired, because there is no such thing. You can get to Burg Eltz other ways (including within a kilometer of it by car), but I recommend the walk -- emerging from the trees and seeing the castle rise up in front of you is pretty excellent, even with cranes marring the view.

The castle itself was lovely but underwhelming. I was expecting some serious dazzle out of Rick Steves' favorite castle in all of Europe. And yet I kept thinking that there must be so many castles more excellent than this one -- maybe not so perfectly maintained, maybe not so immediately, obviously that American childhood vision of castle, but all the better for it. One of Rick Steves' other favorite castles, Burg Rheinfels, comes closer to this for me, but it's still not the absolute one for me. My favorite castle in all of Europe is still out there, lurking in the middle of some other mysterious forest. I'll keep on looking.

second summer in the unreal city

  
  

A couple months ago, my friend Cecilia visited me on her way to starting a months-long European adventure. Cecilia's one of my oldest Pomona friends -- we met on the first day of freshman year! -- and she was also my first independent travel buddy. For fall break our freshman year, we headed to Mexico, taking a Greyhound bus to San Diego, walking across the Mexican border, and standing in front of a Tijuana McDonald's, where a grizzled man told us in English, "If you're lookin' to have fun in Tijuana, this is not the place." (We were actually waiting for Cecilia's cousin Alejandro and then continuing on to Ensenada, but never mind.) Cecilia's relatives and family friends live in a pretty astonishing number of places, from California and Mexico to Italy and Spain and also, as it turns out, Zurich, Switzerland, where Cecilia's dad's cousin and her family kindly hosted us for the weekend and showed us around their beautiful city.

And oh lordy, is Zurich ever beautiful. Frankfurt's got a river; Zurich has a river and a lake, both of which you can swim in. (This is something I care about deeply, in case you hadn't noticed me harping on it all summer.) Not only can you swim in the lake -- we did, on Sunday! It was a little chilly, but a little hypothermia never hurt anybody. This nasty cough I've had all week is all Germany's fault. Swimming in a Swiss lake can only bring health!

Cecilia's relatives spent a whole day leading us all around the impossibly cute old city center, treating us to pizza, taking us on a boat ride* to the Chinese garden, and showing us the best museums in Zurich as part of Zurich's Night of the Museums, during which we went to two museums, ate curry, and watched a modern dance striptease so unfortunate that people left the room midway through. Art!

I think I can pretty well guarantee that I will never be able to repay Cecilia's relatives' hospitality, so I'll have to pay it forward instead -- once I live in a lovely house in a Swiss village just over the mountain from a beautiful city on a lake, that is.

*The boats that run on the river Limmat and on the lake are part of Zurich's public transportation network, and are included in the price of a day transportation ticket -- as are Zurich's two funiculars. How cool is that?!

Feierabend

One of the very best German words there is: Feierabend. It's the evening, specifically the evening after a day of work, but there's something really wonderful about it in that it has that bit of feiern in there, which means "to celebrate" -- celebrating the fact that now you can sit, guilt-free, by the side of the river and drink a small beer and write, because you've made it through another day, because the business part of the day is done.

fall food in summertime

It's always disconcerting to go grocery shopping in late August and see that the entire front of the store is filled with ripened pumpkins and butternut squash. Surely those things shouldn't be ready until after Labor Day, at the earliest. We're talking about common decency here, and keeping fall things in their proper season, which is fall, which has no business starting in August. (Though last night's horrible weather at the Museumsufer Fest felt like a jump straight back into mid-winter; clearly Frankfurt has no sense of weather decency.)

And yet here I am contributing to this late August indecency, because I bought myself a butternut squash at the end of last week. For shame. I spent a while wondering Friday what I was going to do with it until finally stumbling on a recipe I'd seen before, on both Smitten Kitchen and Orangette, no less, which is pretty much the closest thing a recipe gets to an official stamp of "this is going to be delicious."

Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Orangette, who adapted it from Casa Moro

Yield: four servings (more like two servings as a main dish, four as a side)

For salad:
1 medium butternut squash (about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds), peeled, seeded, and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt
One 15-ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed (1 1/2 cups)
1/4 of a medium red onion, finely chopped (I don't love red onion and so used white onion instead)
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro or parsley (I went with parsley)

For tahini dressing:
1 medium garlic clove
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons well-stirred tahini
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more to taste
sea salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F.

In a large bowl, combine the butternut squash, garlic, olive oil, and a few pinches of salt. Toss the squash pieces until evenly coated. Roast them on a baking sheet for 25 minutes, or until soft (25 minutes was just right for me and my mini-oven). Remove from the oven and let cool a little.

Meanwhile, make the tahini dressing: In a small bowl, whisk together the garlic and lemon juice. Add the tahini, and whisk to blend. Add the water and olive oil, whisk well, and taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if you want. The sauce should have plenty of nutty tahini flavor, but also a little kick of lemon. I added a little bit of extra olive oil and water to balance things out, and a few cracks of pepper and sea salt.

To assemble the salad, combine the squash, chickpeas, onion, and cilantro or parsley in a mixing bowl. Add about a third of the tahini dressing to taste, and toss carefully, and serve with remaining dressing on the side.

I stored the leftover dressing separately from the salad and added it to taste just before eating. You can warm the leftovers back up in the microwave before dressing and eating, or so I hear; having no microwave, I can only vouch for the fact that the leftovers are also quite tasty left cold.

hurrah

I'm hoping this wasn't the last hot beautiful weekend, but if it was, it was a good one. Aperol spritzes and a rooftop BBQ, a long bike ride along the Main, two lakes*, one pool**, train rides, homemade Pfifferlinge salad, the most dangerous brownies (with sea salt on top), and a full afternoon spent reading my guidebook in preparation for Ann's visit (two weeks from Friday!) and plotting all of the things I still want to do in Germany. It's a good thing I don't have anything in the way of a departure date from Frankfurt yet, because I am in no way ready to be done with this country.

*Lake 1: Grüner See in Dietesheim, which a lot of Germans rate quite highly, but Megan and I found the algae a little off-putting, and I was cowed by the signs proclaiming swimming to be illegal (though apparently no one enforces this. Lake 2: Strandbad Spessartblick on See Freigericht-West in Großkrotzenburg, which was a seven-minute train ride from Hanau and was my favorite FFM-area lake yet. There's not much a view of the Spessart hills from the lake itself, but you can see the Spessart in the background a little bit as you approach, and the lake itself is lovely.
**Freibad Eschersheim was a delightful relief on Saturday after Megan and I gave up on trying to reach Strandbad Spessartblick by bicycle and decided we were not really interested in swimming in Grüner See.

sweet, soft & lazy

I spent this past weekend visiting Mandie, who just moved to Hannover to do an eleven-month business school program. We spent Saturday eating large German breakfast, visiting Maschseefest (a city festival on the lake, featuring a mini regatta and introducing us to the possibility of renting a paddleboat in the shape of a VW Bug), and walking all over the entire city. Our feet hurt intensely on Sunday, so it's a good thing it was cold and pouring rain and we could spend the day huddling indoors and watching a movie that turned out to have been partially set on Sylt ("I recognize this place!!" I hollered at the screen at one point). We finally emerged in the late afternoon to eat at Mister Q's, which claims to be "a culinary trip around the world", and is something of a trip, all right: think a German version of Applebee's with vaguely Asian decor and the added bonus that what you think you're ordering will not necessarily be what shows up on your plate. Empanadas and fried calamari strips are totally the same thing. Mister Q's: where ordering is always an adventure! Just not necessarily a good one.