blue skies help

When the sun is out and the sky is blue and bright, everything seems way better -- as though maybe spring truly is just around the corner. Bright yellow bowls from Butler's and a Bangladesh travel guide (for my trip to visit Lauren in, holy moly, two weeks) do not hurt one bit, either.

threw our shoes into the ocean

I'm more than a little in love with "Daylight" by Matt & Kim right now. It's basically how I feel about NYC, in music form. (Along with "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z, of course, which crossed over to Germany about four months after it got big in NYC, and used to make me really sad every time I heard it until I realized that, oh yeah, I could always move back.)

IKEA + Frankfurt's nightlife redemption

Katherine came to visit me in Frankfurt for the third (maybe fourth??) time this weekend. Because she is a dear, dear friend and also because she feels much the same way about houseware as I do, she accompanied me to IKEA yesterday. My new apartment was in need of outfitting. It has now been pretty thoroughly outfitted.


The people behind IKEA know what they're doing. Just when we'd gotten through the showroom and were bracing ourselves for the circle of hell that is the marketplace/warehouse, the gleaming lights of the IKEA cafeteria beckoned, along with the delicate wafting smell of Swedish meatballs. As further proof of IKEA's genius, just as we got to the front of the meatball line, there was a refrigerated glass case holding beer. It was determined that we needed that beer. And a plate of the meatballs, size large, to share.



Those meatballs didn't stand a chance.

This weekend we also:

+ went dancing twice (Living XXL is a winner, and has single-handedly restored my faith in the potential of Frankfurt's clubbing scene)
+ made the veggie burgers and homemade mayo I wrote about before (burgers: decent, could use some tweaking; homemade mayo: disaster, should try again with a different kind of oil than olive oil, and maybe more eggs; unidentified vegetable pickles: nasty, chucked immediately -- overall an interesting and mostly but not totally failed experiment)
+ cooked these pancakes (weirdly, they were way tastier as a mid-afternoon snack, eaten cold)
+ hung out with our friend Alex, who Katherine and I studied with in Freiburg
+ listened to way too much Uffie and Ke$ha
+ witnessed the return of Frankfurt's dozens of late-night bunnies

Solid showing all around, I think.

food & coffee & the city i love

I'm a huge fan of taking pictures of the table in front of me while at cafés and restaurants.










It seems like most everyone I know is working on repatriating rather than expatriating. Like Cheryl (moving my very favorite city!), and Katherine, and my ex-coworker Róisín, who just left Frankfurt after thirteen years of living here to move back to Ireland and become a teacher. And here I am, 3.5 months into ex-pat land, moving to a new apartment quite soon (for which I am only moderately equipped, but an IKEA run will happen soon, and in the meantime I am quite delighted with my impulse purchase of these spoons the other day -- I may not have forks or knives or, in fact, plates, but I have got spoons!).

I don't feel totally new here anymore -- I don't get lost walking around the Innenstadt; I have a working grasp of the public transportation system and how to bike to work; the German keyboard seems more natural than the American one on my laptop now (though this latter is just sad, since it means that I have been working too much!) -- but I don't feel totally settled yet, either. Summertime, everyone keeps telling me. Just wait for summer.

I don't think Frankfurt stands much of a chance of knocking NYC out of my number one favorite-city-ever spot, but I guess it doesn't have to. One of my college friends was born and raised in L.A. and had no intentions of ever living anywhere else. "It's the best city in the world," she said. "Why would I want to be elsewhere?" I didn't get it, where L.A. was concerned, but oh, I feel that way about New York. And as much as I miss it right now, it's strangely comforting, too, to know that I feel that way about a place -- and to know that I'm going to go back, that that is where I want to be. It's nice to have that to look forward to, nebulous though my date of return might be.

yo quiero taco bell

Yesterday I discovered another amazing and terrible thing: the imported goods section of Galeria Kaufhof's grocery store. I now have in my possession hot sauce and Old El Paso fajitas! There is not one single authentic Mexican thing about Old El Paso brand, but it is the food of my childhood. Be still, my heart.



There was also a tiny bit of blue sky yesterday, and though it snowed grossly overnight, the sun is making a weak effort to come out today. So, in spite of the fact that I am working all the time, life is not so bad.

danger danger

After much taste-testing, I've found the chocolate croissant that closest resembles the one I loved from Heitzmann in Freiburg, at Cafetiero on the Fressgass. Simultaneously a cause for rejoicing and a renewed call to exercise.

pickled vegetables and sriracha mayo

I'm completely with Molly from Orangette: I love the grocery store. I've never been much good at grocery shopping quickly; I spend way too much time wandering through and just looking, thinking about what I could make with that. Before I hit college and my palate expanded dramatically, I would have been scared of a packet of difficult-to-identify pickled vegetables at the hole-in-the-wall generic Asian grocery store in the underground mall part of Hauptwache. Today I looked at this packet and just started imagining the possibilities.



Katherine's coming to visit three weekends from now, and we have plans: spicy pickled vegetables, homemade veggie burgers, and Sriracha mayo. (One of these days I am going to make the Korean BBQ burgers from that last link, too.) I loving having food plans multiple weeks in advance.

Oh yeah! Today I got myself a new apartment, too! It's mine as of March 1st. Pictures to follow as soon as I have any.

what i do for fun

I spend way too much time reading food blogs these days. And trying recipes. So far my greatest success, I think, was a variation on this basic lentil soup (the one in the body text -- I added bratwurst and a bunch of curry), but I also liked these biscuits, this cabbage soup (lots of parmesan is key!) and this pasta (I should have used more water, oops).

Smitten Kitchen continues to be my favorite day-to-day food blog, just for how freaking pretty it is, but currently my heart belongs to Orangette. I started at the beginning and have been reading my way through toward the present. It feels like sitting at Molly Wizenberg's kitchen table, eating amazing food (with dessert!) and hearing all about her lovely life. Especially at the beginning, also, it made me REALLY want to go live in Paris, at least for a little while.

Heimweh

The weather's been a little better the past few days, like Frankfurt's sort of vaguely starting to remember that there's this thing called spring. The snow that had been on the ground for weeks finally melted, and I decided it was time to start riding my bike to work again, now that I wasn't so scared of hitting an ice patch and dying.

And it's been really great, except for the part where I learned about a rule of the German road through a guy on a bike yelling "Rechts vor links!" at me as he cut me off the other day. Or so I thought -- turns out according to the rules of the German road, I was actually cutting him off, because unless there is signage to the contrary, the person on the right has the right of way, even if the person on the left is CLEARLY on the main street and the person on the right is flinging himself bodily into the middle of traffic.

When I learned what the deal was, from my coworkers, I was all, "This is a stupid rule! Who the hell would ever think of that?" But it's not a stupid rule -- it's just not a rule that makes sense to me. This is not my culture. And yet I've lived here before, and I speak good (though far from perfect) German. I find it too easy to forget that this is not my culture. It's not that I feel equally comfortable here and in the U.S.; it's that I feel comfortable enough. A lot of the time, where living in Germany is concerned, I know just enough to be dangerous, to think I have it all figured out, even though I should know better. I don't know why I feel like I should have it all figured out. I have at least one moment of "how do you do ___ here?" or "how do you say ___?" every single day. I've lived in Germany for a little over a year, versus a little over twenty-two years in the U.S. The U.S. -- the middle of the East Coast, specifically -- is where I'm from. I don't know why it should surprise me that my reaction to traffic laws that are not the ones I grew up watching my parents apply, that I learned myself, is, "Well, that's stupid." What I'm working on is getting past the initial moment of "that's stupid" and accepting that's it's not stupid but rather DIFFERENT, and that that's how it is here.

But oh, getting yelled at in the morning for something I had no idea I was doing wrong really makes me miss being in the U.S. sometimes, where my twenty-two years of being steeped in the culture help me a lot more than my one year and change do here. Not that I never have moments of not knowing what the heck is going on in the U.S., particularly in NYC, but I felt like I had it together a whole lot better in New York than I do here, and that, among other things, makes me miss that city acutely.

Indulge me for a minute.

lazy saturday

Instead of cleaning my apartment (my big goal for the weekend), I went on a run, ate leftover lentil soup (more delicious with added curry), and made myself hot chocolate with one of my Nikolausmänner and lots of cinnamon. It's nice to have a no-travel weekend.