eating our way through londontown

  



  





A week ago Megan and I spent five days visiting Lucy in London and ate our way through the whole city, from Pakistani at Lahore Kebab House (beware of sound on the link) in Whitechapel to a three-hour Mediterranean fusion lunch at Moro on Saturday to Sunday lunch at The Jolly Gardeners in Putney to afternoon tea at The Wolseley on Monday. We also walked around Portobello Road, rode the London Eye, visited the nigh-overwhelming Oxford Circus Topshop, danced the night away in SoHo, and saw a production of Billy Elliot, but don't let that fool you -- all these things were really just to keep us from falling into a permanent food coma. After living in Frankfurt for a while, the sheer urban sprawl of a place like London seemed a little overwhelming, but good-overwhelming, a nice reminder that you can't walk from one end of downtown to the other in 20 minutes in every city. And if there are whole large neighborhoods of the city we didn't explore, well, darn, I guess I'll have to go back. What a hardship.

karneval

I met up with Mandie and Suz (and their respective grad school and couchsurfer buddies) in Cologne for Karneval this weekend. I didn't much know what to expect, though the fact that my company's Cologne office essentially closed at 11 a.m. last Thursday with no particular plans to be truly open for business again until the following Wednesday says something about the scale of mayhem. And indeed, much like Ann's and my Oktoberfest experience, it started out pretty calm, with a multi-hour Thai lunch, and ended with a parade, a cohort of Italian scuba divers, the pilot to my stewardess costume (though he seemed pretty enamored of German Princess Leia), mushroom pizza on the street, a circus director, Robin Hood missing the memo on it being Men in Tights, some Mexican-Americans on a train, and Marcus the giraffe photobombing every picture a group of ten blackfaced Germans attempted to take. (Because yes, Germany has not gotten the memo about how blackface is not okay.) Any holiday that involves shutting down a whole city to party for days on end is fine by me. So, Mardi Gras one of these years?

frühstück

For brunch today I made American breakfast: oven-roasted potatoes with Old Bay seasoning, fried eggs, Heinz ketchup, orange juice, and a Wawa hazelnut coffee latte. It kinda reminded me of American breakfast in Freiburg with Katherine -- minus the deeply confusing maracuja jam, that is.

plans

Absolutely brilliant blue skies in the middle of the day today, coupled with tofu and kimchi and coffee, made for an excellent Mittagspause.

One year ago: I was moving into a new apartment and planning a trip to Bangladesh and India.

Today: In honor of the just-under-one-year-anniversary of moving into that new apartment, I bought a washing machine on amazon.de and therefore joined the ranks of real adult people, where by "real adult people" I mean "people who can put their clothes in a washing machine any day of the week including Sundays, when the laundromat is not open."

In a little over two weeks: Megan and I are flying off to London to visit Lucy, gorge ourselves on delicious food and high tea, and wander all around the city. I've never spent more than 24 hours in London at a stretch, and I'm stoked to get to be there for five full days.

London is my only definite vacation plan for 2011 so far, though, which needs fixing. I've got my eye on Istanbul, Marrakech, Stockholm, and China in particular, along with a couple jaunts across the ocean to visit my family and my very favorite beach (and possibly road trip through the South? Oh, I hope so.). Now just to wrangle my 30 days of vacation into making this fit into a single calendar year . . . .

feuerzangenbowle

   
   
I headed up to Hannover to visit Mandie at the beginning of last weekend, and then both of us continued on to Essen to visit Suz for the remainder of the weekend. The day and a half we were in Essen were filled with cooking, eating, and getting to know a little bit of the Ruhrgebiet (which, while we were there, was gloriously sunny but cold cold cold), and also with making Feuerzangenbowle -- the first time I'd ever participated in making it (really it was Suz's show!), though I was already quite the fan. It can be a bit hazardous to make indoors; good thing Suz's roommate thought to move the table out from under the low-hanging IKEA paper lantern before we had to think fast and put out a fire. Watching a rum-soaked sugar cone whoosh with flames was immensely mesmerizing and felt much like like I imagine the cave people must have felt while staring into their fires, except for at the end of my fire there was warm alcohol. Delicious.

neighborhood

Walking around in the cold sunny weather yesterday, I got a nice reminder of how much I like my neighborhood.

the isle of sand and snow II

   

   





I spent just over a week, from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day, in my favorite beach town on Earth, Stone Harbor, New Jersey. The sand-on-snow reminded me a lot of Sylt, but thankfully there was a whole lot more sunlight to be had on the Mid-Atlantic coast than there was on the North Sea last winter -- in spite of 18 inches of snow the day after Christmas! Happily, after the blizzard the sky turned blue and stayed blue, so we got in plenty of walking on the beach, and even bike-riding toward the end of the week, once the streets were pretty clear. We also had the best (eco-friendliest!) Christmas tree yet, which was in fact our deck umbrella. Classy!

feuerzangbowle and fondue

This year's been more of a Feuerzangbowle kind of year than a Glühwein kind of year. The Feuerzangbowle stand is winning out over Glühwein through having the best mugs and being located right by the creche, which has become my friends' usual meeting place ("See you at the Baby Jesus at eight!"). I tramped around the Weihnachtsmarkt in the snow this evening in search of Christmas presents and cupped a steaming mug of Feuerzangbowle in my hands to warm up for a few minutes. Another new Weihnachtsmarkt favorite: the fondue place just past the fountain where you can order an individual-sized pot of cheese fondue with bread for dipping. My officemate Anna and I tried it recently, and it was excellent.

snow

I'm a summer person, no question, but I have to say, there's something immensely beautiful about fresh snow on trees against a blue morning sky.

the two german seasons

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I recently read and slightly misremembered this blog post as saying that there are two seasons in Germany: winter and dreading the winter. In the middle of the whopping four weeks of summer, I was already in "dreading the winter" mode -- and after a long and rather magnificent fall, we are decidedly in winter again.

But things aren't bad! I've remembered how much I like wearing tall boots, for one thing (shopping for tall boots is a different story, though I'm a big fan of DUO, who sell boots in many, many calf sizes). For another thing, the Christmas market is back, and there is no bad there. For a third, it's only a few weeks until I fly back to the U.S. for my family's first-ever Stone Harbor Christmas, and I'm hoping Sunny the 14-year-old Labrador is going to hang in there and be around for it.

In the meantime, I'm working lots and haven't seen a ton of anyone outside of my coworkers lately, so it's a good thing I work with a whole bunch of lovely people. And in a week or so things should calm down, just in time for me to squeeze in as much Glühwein and Weihnachtsmarkt food as possible before flying out on Christmas Eve.

***

I sounded pretty lukewarm about living in Frankfurt in my last post, I realize, which isn't an accurate depiction of how I feel about FFM at all. I really like living here now, actually. It's a surprisingly excellent place to be. It's a hard place to commit to, though, particularly when you hang out with mostly ex-pats, as I do, because most everyone I know in the ex-pat community is living here with an end date in the back of their heads, some idea that they are going to be leaving. And right now I don't have anything of the sort. I don't actually wish I were anywhere else at the moment -- which was a kind of startling thought to have, even more so when I voiced it to a couple of my friends recently and they pointed out that there are not a heck of a lot better reasons why people stay places than that.