berlin weekend

  


  





  




Ahh, this past weekend in Berlin with Megan and Lucy was perfect. Some things we loved:

+ Antipodes: adorable café in Prenzlauer Berg run by a couple from New Zealand with delicious coffee and sandwiches and the best brownie I've ever bought at a store
+ A visit to Tacheles (though things were looking grimmer there than they were last summer; the backyard sculpture garden/studio area/bars were gone)
+ Hanging out at Mauerpark on Sunday afternoon and enjoying the pure magic of hipster central (though we had to leave to catch our train before karaoke got going)
+ Fantastic turkey and mushroom salad at Strandbad-Mitte
+ Amazing live band and fabulous crowd at Clärchens Ballhaus
+ Renting bikes and riding lazily along the Spree, with breaks for beer and Thai food and buying cheap DVDs and vintage postcards at the Saturday flea market by the Pergamon Museum

Seriously, it would be difficult to imagine a more lovely weekend with friends.

springtime flowers + picnic blankets

Yellow flowers and workweek picnicking on the Main: excellent start to the warm weather season.

outdoor tea + frankfurt spring

  
  
  

  
  

Springtime in Frankfurt means SUNLIGHT. I spent most of the afternoon sitting outside at Harvey's, sipping Earl Grey and writing. So wonderful. Some shots from the past two weekends in Bornheim / Nordend, Frankfurt, my favorite part of town.

moro

I'd already had a crush on Moro for a while because of their second cookbook -- I mean, this roasted squash salad is ridiculously good -- but I still didn't expect our Saturday lunch to be so insanely delicious. I was least enamored of the crab appetizer and most enamored of the vegetable mezze main, but truly it was all excellent, and a three-hour stay at our table in the corner on a rainy Saturday afternoon was the perfect way to enjoy it.

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.