Remember White Rabbit

La Palma Days 5 & 6: Caldera

2012-01-25T21:24:00.000+01:00

Caldera, Caldera, Caldera...always this Caldera in view. The Caldera is a giant hole in the middle of La Palma, created by the collapse of one of the volcanoes that formed the island. Originally, this volcano was around 4000 meters high, then it just imploded, leaving a couple thousand meters of mountains.

The Caldera is such an ever-present feature of this island that it warranted visits 2 days in a row. Originally, we planned a hike from a high point down into a valley where you can walk through a riverbed and back to civilization. After the drive up the the starting point of the hike, which involved, oh, at least 15 kilometers of winding, narrow, pretty much one-lane mountain streets with hairpin curves and bus and taxi drivers driving like they're on the Autobahn, I pretty much said, and I quote: "(Insert expletive here) this. This trail is crap and I'm not walking down because my knees already hurt." Anyway, it was too late to start the hike. The signs at the top said specifically, DO NOT start the hike after noon because you will get lost, fall off the mountain and die. It was about 12:01 when we got to the top, so that was enough adventure for one day for me. We opted instead for a fun drive back down the 10 kilometers of hairpin curves where I knew my certain death was lurking around every corner and a hike in the riverbed which would have been the goal of the first, much longer and much more treacherous original hike. Unfortunately, at this point my camera's battery had opted to off itself rather than risk falling off the side of a mountain, so I couldn't take any pictures of the truly cool riverbed where we actually did take a little walk. It was full of giant boulders and actually quite scenic. It was also not without its challenges, a lot of the walk involved balancing on stones to cross the river, which also robbed the whole affair of fun for me. I am not so well-balanced and don't like water...so we turned around after a while and headed back. Enough fun for one day!

Look at those streets and look at those paths!

The next day a certain someone was full of gusto and decided to hike around the rim of the Caldera. I didn't join this hike, though eyewitnesses told me that even I could have handled it, even considering my fear of heights and occasionally questionable sense of balance. Instead of challenging myself even more, I relaxed on our rented balcony and read a book about Chernobyl. Two days of Caldera are enough for me, the next installment is the Cumbre!

La Palma day 4: Santa Cruz and Salt

2012-01-15T22:30:00.000+01:00

At first we thought this was just a creatively built parking spot in front of our apartment. I regularly threatened my friendly driver should he even consider parking there. Just being a passenger in a car maneuvering into that spot would be enough to give me a heart attack, big whimp that I am! Finally we discovered that this was not a parking spot. It took us three days to see what it really was:

It's where somebody changes their oil! Notice the bucket of oil and the pliers on the right side. I love the fact that rather than just crawling under the car or driving it up on ramps (or having the mechanic change the oil as a whimpy non-mechanical person like me would do), they went to all the trouble of pouring cement to build this crazy oil change apparatus.

On day 4 of our trip we decided to head out to the markets and look for some local produce and fresh fish. Our first stop was in the capital city of Santa Cruz. We strolled around town and enjoyed the traditional Canarian architecture and also found the small market hall. Unfortunately, we were a little disappointed: the market was not bustling, hectic, and packed full of sights, sounds, smells and people like markets we've experienced elsewhere, it was pretty laid back and there wasn't anything that really piqued our interest.

Here's a church in Santa Cruz, I particularly liked the gargoyles which you can see below:

After leaving Santa Cruz empty handed, we continued on to Mazo, where there was supposed to be another market. We found this one easily, because there are signs on the main streets of the bigger towns directing you to the mercado municipal. The farmers' market in Mazo was also small, but more to our liking, there was slightly more action and lots of fresh fruits. There were even some German expats there selling their wares: whole grain baked goods, tofu burgers and seitan patties. We stocked up on local avocadoes, squash, bananas, tomatoes and lettuce and feasted on delicious produce for lunch. Of course we saved the squash and tomato seeds to plant in our garden this year! Only later did we discover that fish is sold on La Palma from trucks, much like ice cream trucks in America with a loudspeaker on top. They drive around and announce they're selling fresh fish, I guess. That might explain the truck we heard driving around twice in the week that we were there announcing something like "Wap wap wap WAP, wap WAP wap..."

After pigging out on fresh fruits and vegetables,we went down to the southern tip of the island, as you can see above. You can see the Fuencaliente lighthouse in that photo.

In Fuencaliente they make sea salt using the basins you can see here. The salt from Fuencaliente is produced in a traditional way with no additives or chemicals. Above you can see the evaporation basins, big basins where the whole salt making process starts.

In the next step the water is moved to the crystallization basins, where more water evaporates and salt crystals form.

The salt crystals looked kind of like ice. But they tasted very salty.

That street is paved in salt!

Winter is the off season for salt making, so we didn't see any salt being harvested, but there was still loads of salt everywhere. If you're interested in some more information about this process, or some pictures of salt being harvested and the salt pyramids among the basins, then visit this site.

After our visit to the salt pans, we stopped a little to the west and went searching for a lonely beach. The only accessible lonely beach we could find was already occupied by a naked man and his girlfriend, so we continued on and settled down on the rocks.

We would have really liked to go down there, but that would have involved some pretty acrobatic climbing.

As always, we spotted some hungry crabs.

And to end the day, we watched the sunset.

La Palma, day three

2012-01-14T17:05:00.000+01:00


Here's a papaya tree in the garden across the street from				the place we were staying.

On our third day of vacation, we decided to be active after a couple of days of relaxing and not exerting ourselves too much. Since we are fans of the humid, green laurel forests on the Canary Islands, we decided to visit the region of La Palma with a laurel forest. The area near Los Tilos also happens to be a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, but we only found that out from our guidebook on the road to our hike. The landscape on the way to Los Tilos was truly breathtaking:

This guy was hanging out with some other sheep eating cacti on the steep side of the canyon below the street pictured above.

Above are a couple of views into the canyon in the laurel forest. Unfortunately, we weren't so impressed by this forest. We visited the neighboring island of La Gomera a few years ago, and preferred the spooky, foggy laurel forest there in Garajonay with its smaller, twisted, mossier trees. In the end, maybe it was just the same, and we are just jaded now because we've seen this type of forest a few times on La Gomera, Tenerife and now La Palma. All in all, we weren't so enthused by the hike, the trail and the scenery were much like that which we can see in the Saxon Switzerland just a 30-minute drive from home. Oh well, it was still great to be able to go outside and walk around without any snow gear!

Here's what the valley looked like as we were leaving, even though we didn't like the hike so much, the valley itself was really beautiful!

The same day we drove through a couple of these cool, creepy, unlit one-lane tunnels. That's not something you get to do all the time! German tunnels do not look like this!

After leaving Los Tilos, we drove all the way around the north of the island to get an idea of what the whole island looks like. This is one of the views of the coastline that we had. The drive itself was long, it took much longer than we expected: the streets were narrow and winding and we went through lots of pine forests and little villages--just the right thing if you are looking for a break from civilization!

We also spotted these guys grazing by the street. Always a funny sight!

La Palma vacation, part 1: days one and two

2012-01-13T23:05:00.001+01:00

Following an incredibly horrible spell of gray, dark weather and absolutely no sun that lead me to hole up in the apartment, do nothing but read books and knit and nearly lose my mind, we hopped on a plane and flew to La Palma, my 4th of the seven Canary Islands. Previous trips have taken me to Tenerife twice, Gran Canaria and La Gomera. The minute the plane landed and I saw the beautiful golden sunshine, I relaxed and came back to life. Aaaah. Too bad I nearly puke every time I get into a car on one of these islands because of the winding mountain streets. Oh well. That's just a sacrifice you have to make.

We went from skies this color:

To skies this color:

That makes a big difference in your mood, even if you do feel like you have to puke because your friendly driver is driving like a bat out of hell on winding mountain roads. And no, I'm not pregnant with all of these references to vomiting.

On our second day, we left our apartment in Los Quemados and drove just a short way to take a walk in the volcanic landscape in the south of the island. Here you can see a nice panorama of the area, with the Atlantic Ocean on the left, the brown rocks are a cliff that the natives of La Palma considered holy, to the right you can see the mountains and volcanic formations.

The holy cliff is famed for the petroglyphs that the natives carved into it, here's one example. These were kind of hard to spot, so several vandals have carved their own names into these rocks to make up for the small number of actual petroglyphs. Or supposed actual petroglyphs, as my kind companion would say.


The Lizard Whisperer

Way cooler than the petroglyphs, however, were the lizards! Those who know me know I love wildlife, and I was absolutely thrilled to hear these guys rustling around, and then see them racing around. I was wondering on the whole boring walk to the holy cliff where the lizards were, the weather was perfect for them, and as we got closer, I heard the sound of their darting around. At first I was busy searching for petroglyphs when I noticed my kind companion standing suspiciously still by the holy cliff. I wondered if he was peeing on the holy cliff because he was mad about the petroglyphs, but no, he was lizard whispering. At one point, there were at least 20 lizards gathered around his feet!

Later on the same day, we drove over to Los Llanos, one of the bigger towns on the island. I don't remember our exact motivation for the trip, maybe it was to look for a fish market, maybe it was to shop for sunglasses (my kind companion lost his while gathering mushrooms in the fall, but that's another story). Whatever the reason, we were wildly unsuccessful doing whatever it was we had originally planned. But we did luck out and happen upon an interesting cultural event. On the way to Los Llanos, we were stuck driving behind a number of cars, all of which were behind this truck and couldn't pass, due to the winding mountain streets. After 20 minutes or so, I noticed that there were three CAMELS in the back of this truck. That doesn't exactly look like the kind of truck you should be transporting camels in, but hey, why not?
After consulting one of our guide books, I realized that this day (January 5) was the day before Three Kings' Day. It just so turns out that on the evening before Three Kings' Day there's a parade in the bigger towns of La Palma with some floats and with the three kings riding in on camels.

The floats had a Disney theme, which reminded me of parades during my childhood. Here you can see Tinkerbell and Mickey Mouse.

Here are Beauty and the Beast. The characters from Toy Story were also marching, as were Aladdin and some other characters I don't know the names of.

There you have it, there's old St. Nick on a camel! While we didn't need jackets due to the approximately 70 degree temperatures, St. Nick was wearing his regular heavy cloaks. He must have been warm.

This one's pretty blurry, but if you look closely, you can see all three of the three kings and the three camels. So that's why they were hauling the three camels halfway across the island.

January 6 is the day when the kids in Spain get their Christmas presents, so this ritual is pretty important. It also explains the connection of the three kings to this whole event: they are the ones who bring the presents. Now I can see the sense in the decorations that we see every year hanging from lots of windows and balconies on each of the Canary Islands that we've visited, and that I've never really understood and therefore found really funny, but also slightly disquieting:

Here are the Three Kings, climbing up their handy rope ladder into someone's window. But it's okay! They're bringing presents!

On the next day, it was obvious that lots of presents had been given, because we spotted some grinning kids loading their new stuff into the car to head to their relatives' houses or outside playing. But the really impressive thing were the mountains and mountains of trash next to every dumpster we passed. Packaging for giant cars and trucks and slides and playhouses--every plastic toy you can imagine was given generously on this Epiphany! My poor kids, all they got were a couple of books and some CDs that I copied from the library. But we don't make a big deal out of Christmas. We prefer to get the hell out of Dodge for it!

More soon about the rest of our vacation!

Michigan (Crack) Rocks

2011-12-30T00:40:00.001+01:00

Not only did I get to meet with a friend (who's originally from Pennsylvania) this evening and visit the Schokoladenbar, where you can eat, drink or slurp something like warm pudding spiked with anything from milk rice to cherries, plums and spices from a giant cup, but I also got a little surprise package of Michigan Rocks, pictured above. At first, when presented with this shiny package of rocks, I nearly laughed at the name, because all I could think was: Michigan rocks? Like crack rocks? Ah yes, my mind is always functioning at a very high level. But then I learned that the contents of this little package were cookies. With what ingredients? The regular old cookie ingredients, dates, raisins and walnuts, that's what. But still, I'm hung up on the name. Why, oh why are these called Michigan Rocks? I am from Michigan and lived 23 years of my life there, and have never heard of these cookies. Is it a Pennsylvanian way of poking fun at one of Detroit's major goods? Or is it a reference to Michigan's mining industry in earlier times? Or are they (truthfully or ironically) exclaiming "Michigan Rocks!" every time they say the name of these cookies? I don't know, but what I can tell you is that these are some moist, delicious treats!

I also baked some cookies myself yesterday. This was a little experiment. The recipe came from a vegan cookbook, and so while I was happy to have everything required on hand, I was sceptical that baking cookies with no egg would supply me with a satisfying result. I was to be proven wrong! These little guys are chewy oatmeal raisin cookies, and while they are not as soft as the Michigan Rocks, they are pleasantly chewy and excellently seasoned with a generous portion of cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg.

Not only did I bake cookies yesterday, but I also baked some stuffing and made some soup. These short, dark, work-free days are inspiring me to do things that I otherwise don't have time for. Actually, I've been craving stuffing for a few days. Probably because it was Christmas and I think my family always has stuffing at Christmas. However, I think the stuffing wasn't really stuffed (into a bird, for example a turkey or goose), I believe it was prepared much like I prepared my vegetarian stuffing: mix some roasted bread cubes with some sauted onions, peppers and celery, add some vegetable broth, seasonings and an egg, stir it up, put it in a covered baking dish and bake the heck out of it. While this stuff tasted a bit like stuffing, some liquid was lacking and the consistency wasn't quite right. I think the key is more seasoning, more broth, more baking! We'll see if I can perfect this recipe.

My other kitchen masterpiece yesterday was celery soup. I only used 3 stalks of celery in the stuffing, and had the rest of a bunch of celery, so I had to do something with it so that it didn't just go all limp in my fridge. So I whipped out my cooking notebook and consulted the celery page: celery soup sounded appealing. It's really quite simple: saute the celery and an onion, throw in one cubed potato, cover with broth and boil, boil, boil. When everything is soft puree it, put in 2 tablespoons of cream and maybe some salt and pepper and voila! You've got some warm, delicious celery soup.

Scenes from Christmas

2011-12-30T00:02:00.002+01:00

Better late than never, here are some pictures of Christmas in Dresden-Neustadt. I was so thrilled when I found that the above mural survived the holiday, this particular location is often painted and repainted at regular intervals. It's between Katy's Garage and the Scheune on Alaunstrasse. The message is "Gift's instead love" and while the English isn't perfect, I find the painting absolutely perfect.

Here are two views of the giant ferris wheel at the end of Hauptstrasse near the Golden Rider. A part of me would love to ride that ferris wheel, and another part of me gets terrified even being near the thing. I'm always a little scared of these rides that are assembled and disassembled and operated by carnies. Need I say more?
The other thing I really like at this spot are the humongous and slightly creepy figures: the nutcracker and the chimney sweep. As pleased as I am that there's no snow yet, these guys look just a little out of place surrounded by dry leaves blowing around.

I've always been a fan of the Christmas pyramid, and this one with its life-size figures is my absolute favorite one. The kids like it, too.

Santa Claus even came to my house! This Claus is actually a vending machine for parking tickets. It seems that our neighbors decorate this machine each year with the Claus costume. That's the spirit!

Knitting

2011-12-25T23:40:00.003+01:00

Finally! These blasted socks are finished! I really like this yarn, I got it years ago as a birthday present. It's hand spun and the colors are just fantastic. I saved it and saved it until I thought of a worthy project: warm, cuddly house socks. I started them, a simple spiral sock pattern, and finished the first one rather quickly. But then, I started the second. About halfway in, it became depressingly clear that the yarn wouldn't be enough to finish the sock. So my search began. No shop seemed to have this yarn in stock this year, so I had to go with a simple deep red to complete the toe of the second sock. And now, finally, it's done.

As much as I like the idea of knitting (creating something warm and cozy all by myself) I find actual knitting to be incredibly frustrating. Starting a project is really tricky for me, as is finishing. The middle is rather easy, but it can be boring unless I have a good audiobook or some good radio programs to listen to. That's my other problem: I can't watch a film and knit. My multitasking just isn't that good. I'm too busy counting and making sure I get the needles in the right place.

On another note, knitting is all the rage. I've read about urban knitting projects now for a couple of years: knit sheaths for everything from lampposts to signposts and everything in between (see some neat pictures here). And now urban knitting has come to Dresden: somebody made this colorful cover for a trash can on Hauptstr.

We'll miss you guys

2011-12-12T06:38:00.001+01:00

Yesterday morning I was witness to great carnage as I took some bread to my bunnies: tufts of fur and what seemed to be a whole piece of skin, complete with fur. At first I couldn't believe my eyes, then a wave of shock washed over me. This had to mean that poor Knuddelhase had an awful night and an unexpected visit from a very unwelcome visitor: the marten.

This seemingly cuddly little guy is actually a brutal killer.

We seemed to have a foolproof bunny run built into a corner of our terrace, complete with emergency escapes for the bunnies into the three-storey bunny mansion, since there are a lot of cats in our neighborhood, and a net over the top. But nothing can keep out a marten, they are skinny, nimble little guys. We live quite close to the Dresden Heath, a large forest area home to a number of quirky wild animals who like to pay a visit to their city friends. Additionally, I'm sure they are regular visitors to our street because I've spotted them skipping along the street after dark when I'm out and I've heard from our neighbors that they've also eaten their guinea pigs. But I thought bunnies were too big and quick. After a little research, though, I've learned that bunnies are a much-loved source of nutrition for these feisty little thiefs. In hindsight, we're lucky a marten didn't come sooner.

Cream and Knuddelhase, I'm sorry to have left you so helpless against such a terrible enemy. We're glad to have known you and it's going to take me a long time to get rid of my reflex of tossing you our vegetable peels when I'm cooking. We'll miss seeing you guys hopping about when we come home, and the kids will miss looking out their window at you and bringing you in to pet. We hope you meet Wee Man (who died of tilt head) and Waboose (who died of a broken heart after Wee Man was gone) wherever you are!

Apple Crepes!

2011-12-03T08:39:00.001+01:00

Due to my seemingly endless supply of apples, I've had to get creative with my use of them. My kids eat two or three apples a day along with breakfast and dinner and as a snack, but that barely makes a dent in the boxes and boxes of apples that I have. I've made apple cake, apple muffins, apple cookies, apple sauce and I even throw an apple into some of my cream soups (curried pumpkin soup or zucchini soup), and still I have boxes and boxes left! A few weeks ago while perusing my cookbooks for new apple ideas, I found something intriguing: apple crepes. It was early in the morning, and I thought the apples went into the crepe batter and I started chopping. Then I had another look at the recipe and realized, no, the apples are part of a delicious creamy filling. I was sceptical at first that my food testers, accustomed to fresh rolls from the bakery with cheese or Nutella for breakfast, would like this culinary experiment so early on a Saturday morning, but I forged ahead on my way. Here's what I did:

Finely chop two apples, add 200 grams of cream cheese and mix well, then add sugar, vanilla and lemon juice to taste.
Put this mixture in the fridge.
Stir together 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of milk and 2 eggs.
Heat a large frying pan and butter it.
Pour in crepe batter and spread it around the whole pan. Basically, what you're aiming for is one giant, thin pancake.
Flip it when it starts getting golden brown on the bottom.
When it's finished, fill it with the apple-cream cheese mixture and roll it up like an enchilada.

This is a super delicious and pretty simple breakfast. I'm amazed that I can even remember all the ingredients and all the steps, I've made it a couple times now without even looking at the recipe. The really beautiful thing is that with this basic crepe recipe, you can even make lunch or dinner crepes, just change the filling. Fill them with grated cheese, herbs and sour cream, or maybe mushrooms and cheese, or really, whatever you like! My early morning food testers were also thrilled with this new twist on breakfast. The only problem is that even this new twist on apples has hardly made a dent in my apple supply!

Delectable treats

2011-10-26T22:54:00.001+02:00

As usual, I've been busy creating delicious treats. No parts of this one came from the garden, though. This cake was just for fun: for the little guy's second birthday! But he didn't eat any of it. He's only been eating noodles, bread and the occasional waffle or bowl of cereal lately, there's no room for delicious cake in that menu.

The main flavor of this cream cheese came from my garden though: habanero pepper! I took one big, fat habanero, one package of plain cream cheese and a generous amount of curry powder, chopped and mixed and voila! A very yummy, very spicy cream cheese was born.

This version of cream cheese is for the non-spicy gourmets: it features a selection of herbs from my garden and windowsill. I think I threw everything in here: chives, parsley, oregano, thyme maybe even tarragon and marjoram, a small onion and some salt and pepper. Despite its lack of spiciness, it was still delicious.

This weekend was fun-I sorted out the good chili peppers that survived the frost from the questionable ones, then had to find a way to preserve them so that we can enjoy them through the winter. We aren't such fans of dried chilis, we like sauce, so the search for a simple sauce ensued. Finally, I found a very simple recipe for sambal olek with just chilis and a little salt and sugar. So I roasted 300+ grams of red chilis, then pureed them to make a very spicy sauce. The deadly habanero sauce was a bit more complicated: I had to saute, carmelize, etc, etc. But the work was worth it! I made yet another very hot, very delicious sauce. Yesterday I even whipped up another sambal with about 400 grams of yellow chilis! It's excellent in squash soup.

These bad boys came from the garden. Yesterday I carved the spooky mad jack-o-lantern, and today I carved the happy one. Today I even used the cut out pieces to make some pumpkin-carrot-curry-sambal soup. Yum!

My Sweet Ride

2011-10-20T21:48:00.000+02:00

Oh, woe is me, I feel so lame. I hardly ever blog any more. It's not so much for a lack of things to write about, it's more due to a massive lack of time. I work too much, sleep too little, and when I'm not doing that or consuming some sustenance in the form of coffee or the rare meal, I'm hanging out with my kids. That leaves little time for blogging. But I must share this: my sweet ride! After being a righteous, non-gas consuming, non-CO2 emitting cyclist for nearly 9 years (well, not counting my 10-month experiment in Michigan), I've purchased a car. The thought of even committing such an act was initiated by events that I cannot yet publish here, they are still much too secret and much too unsure. Despite the unsureness of these acts of which I do not speak, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of speed, horsepower and six cylinders. Then came a new job where I have to start at 8 am, and before which I have to get my kids off to the Kinderhaus. With fall and winter creeping up on me and these early appointments, the only alternative to getting up at 5 am and leaving at the absolute latest at 7 was to get a car. After many a trip and many a test drive between Dresden, Hamburg and Hannover, I found this lovely red jacket of steel for myself in Döbeln. Not only is it a spacious, comfortable and powerful mama car, it's also an eyecatching fashion accessory in candy apple red. To put it simply: I love it.

And now I feel even lamer. This lovely red car has driven me to inner conflict. Here I am, I used to be a committed cyclist, and thoroughly enjoy that nice extra of keeping fit while travelling to work and all the other places I have to go. Why am I singing the praises of a gas guzzling six-cylinder that's probably going to make me fat? I'm not some technology obsessed man, I've never cared about horsepower or cylinders, and I sure as hell never dreamed I'd be thrilled to own a station wagon! They're right up there on my list near minivans. I think there are two very important factors in this new development. First, I'm an American, and I'm from Michigan. If you've heard of Michigan, then you've heard of Detroit, the Motor City. I'm not from Detroit (but my grandmother was!), and a good portion of car manufacturing is no longer done there, but still, I must have cars in my blood. It's in our nature to travel on 4 wheels, not just 2. I beat my nature for quite a while, and probably would have remained committed to my car-free lifestyle had I not grown up and turned my life upside down with a couple of kids. This leads me to the second undeniable fact: I'm getting older. As depressing as it is, I have a gray hair that shines in my face every morning in the mirror, and this one I'm not going to yank out of my head like the last 2 or 3. Maybe I'll dye it if any of its friends decide to join the party, but whatever. I'll cross that bridge-by car, haha!-when I get there. I don't feel like lugging my kids through ice and snow at 6 am this winter or biking 45 minutes in subzero temperatures and having my brakes freeze up on me. I want comfort, I want to stay warm, I want to travel faster and I want to listen to the radio. So, there you have it.

The reason for my long hiatus...the vegetables.

2011-09-13T23:26:00.001+02:00

One of our early harvests from the summer included crunchy kohlrabi,yellow peppers, juicy tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini. The kohlrabi is finished now, but we arestill getting a few tomatoes, cukes from the greenhouse, zucchini and pepperslike you wouldn’t believe. Yellow peppers,bell peppers and chilis, habaneros, jalapenos and more.

Here you can see our lovely, colorful potatoes. They are small, so they are a pain in the neck to peel, but they are pretty and delicious! These are truly a feast for the eyes.

Kale is another thing we have a whole lot of. When this delicious green started growinglike gangbusters, I became a little concerned because I had no idea what to dowith it. The only form in which I’d everseen it in was in the supermarket as “Kohl King”: a kind of TV dinner type product with pureedkale and slices of wiener or some other sausage that doesn’t interest me in theleast. I consulted my good friendGoogle, and found out that whatever you can do with spinach, you can do withkale. So I unleashed my powers ofblanching, pureeing and creaming, and voila! We had tons of delicious kale dishes, from lasagna to casserole to justplain old kale. It’s good stuff, andvery healthy.

Here you can see a fraction of our hot peppers, we have more hot peppers than we know what to do with. These are either adojemas or habaneros, I don't know which. They are supposedly among the hottest peppers out there, but this weekend, I devoured that big yellow one in the middle in some dipping sauce for grilled zucchini without any trouble. It was funny, it didn't burn my mouth, but for whatever reason, my nostrils felt like they were on fire--I felt like a dragon after eating that thing!

We don't just have edibles in the garden, but also nice flowers. These plants were given to us by our neighbors when they were just a wee few inches tall, now they are 2 or more feet tall.

Mmmmm, squash

2011-09-11T11:58:00.001+02:00

I'm turning one of our precious butternut squash into soup and pudding right now! The soup is basically the same recipe that I use for zucchini soup: squash, a pear, vegetable broth, curry, salt and pepper, garlic and cream. Here's the pudding recipe I'm trying:

Pumpkin pudding

Ingredients:

1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin puree
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 3/4 cups half-and-half or light cream

Preparation:

Butter a 11/2-quart casserole. Heat oven to 350°.

In a large mixing bowl,combine all ingredients and whisk or beat on low speed until blended. Pour intothe prepared casserole and bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until a knife insertedin the center comes out clean. If desired, serve with sweetened whipped creamand cinnamon sugar for sprinkling.
In a large mixing bowl,combine all ingredients and whisk or beat on low speed until blended. Pour intothe prepared casserole and bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until a knife insertedin the center comes out clean. If desired, serve with sweetened whipped creamand cinnamon sugar for sprinkling.

This recipe is from here: http://southernfood.about.com/od/pumpkins/r/pumpkin-pudding.htm

The Bike Rack’s Maiden Voyage

2011-09-09T16:03:00.002+02:00

After getting an old bike rack from our neighbors’ yard sale last year, we finally strapped it on the car’s roof rack, heaved the bike into position and took her for a spin. The test trip around the block seemed promising, so we took it for a longer ride. Racing along the Autobahn, performing the slalom maneuvers that my esteemed driver usually does, all seemed well. Until we neared Chemnitz. There was a VW that my esteemed driver was just burning to pass, and as he attempted the pass, there was a crash. The bike went down. Fortunately, it was hanging by a thread on our roof, and we had to work our way from the left across 3 lanes of traffic to the right shoulder. We were lucky there was a sort of a turnout leading to a field close by our incident, so we didn’t have to drive the next 5 kilometers to the next gas station with my precious bike teetering from the roof hanging only by its' lock. Everything was fine, I unlocked the bike, we lifted it down and checked all its parts, no damage but a little scrape had been done. The car got a new dent, but with all the other dents from its' various accidents, you won’t notice one more. The thing that suffered the most was the roof rack, or more precisely, the bike rack part of the roof rack. The track the bike stands on was bent all to heck, but fortunately for us, it is of such low quality that we could simply bend it back to a position vaguely similar to its original position. The only thing that hasn’t yet been repaired are my nerves, but that’ll go away soon enough.

More Prague Pictures

2011-09-08T09:51:00.002+02:00

Here are some more sights from Prague. First, the fantastic peeing men statue. Below you can see some details of my favorite architectural style: Art Nouveau!

Sunday Lunch in Prague

2011-09-07T21:21:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago we had visitors from North America, and I was lucky enough to accompany them to Prague. Because I had to work on Monday, I couldn’t stay overnight in Prague with them, but did go for the day on Sunday. Despite the poor weather, we still had a colourful time. Some pictures:

We didn’t have lunch at Hooters, though I would have felt at home there! We wanted to have some Czech food, not delicious fries. I’ve been to Hooters before in Michigan, and the food isn’t exactly gourmet, but at least the service is friendly. My son was enthused!

Admittedly, my lunch (tortellini with spinach filling) wasn’t that Czech after all, but the appetizer was: battered, deep fried cheese! A delectable treat, and quite filling. I didn’t even have Czech beer as you can see in the picture, I had water. But at least my guests had something traditional: goulash!

Those are not nachos

2011-06-24T12:40:00.004+02:00

It's almost a tradition of sorts that I get ice cream with the kids if we walk to the garden in the afternoon. Everyone is tired, needs a bit of sugar, and some delicious ice cream is just the right thing to get at the halfway point of the trip. This time I spotted a very special item at the store, and Kid 1 was also very enthused to try these delicious things. To me, these are tacos, but some confused soul at the Gut & Günstig company (Good-n-cheap is how I'd translate that, though a marketing manager may not like that translation because günstig isn't just cheap, it's a good deal...) named these tasty treats "Nacho". If I'm not mistaken, a nacho is actually a tortilla or taco chip served together with various fantastic toppings and sauces, often with melted cheese on top. This in no way resembles a nacho, not even a desert nacho. These scrumptious snacks are most definitely ice cream tacos, a taco being a tortilla shell folded around the filling. Nachos are not folded. Their origin is also from a tortilla, but a tortilla cut into triangles, making it too small to fold around anything.

I was hungry for some salty comfort food on this particular trip to the store, so instead of snacking on false nachos, I hit the chip aisle. I considered getting actual nacho chips, but much to my delight, I found something that not only looks, but also tastes like Sun Chips! Sun Chips are mouth watering whole grain chips. I've always been puzzled about the lack of Sun Chips here in Germany, because this seems to be such a whole grain loving place. But maybe the whole grain lovers are not so much the chip lovers...
Anyway, on my junk food shopping spree I almost lost my appetite, because I could just feel the other shoppers' eyes burning holes of disdain into my back. The English-speaking fat American is plying her kids with junk food one hour before dinner time! Little did they know, we'd already walked about a kilometer and a half with another kilometer and a half to go. Rather than feel too guilty, I paid and promptly tore open the false nachos gave each kid one right there in the entryway of the supermarket. Take that.

And yet, despite all the "fat American" jokes that course the streets, there's one sinful treat that you can get here that I've never seen in my home country: that would be sweetened condensed milk in a tube. For what reason do you need sweetened condensed milk in a tube? Let me tell you, gentle readers. Not for baking, not for your coffee, no, a can of sweetened condensed milk is good enough for that. This is for the kids huddled on street corners like crack addicts who suck the stuff straight from the tube. Yes, I've seen it with my own eyes. Children and grown ups alike, sucking sweetened condensed milk straight from the tube. At least I have the self-respect to eat the stuff from a spoon behind closed doors!

BRN!

2011-06-19T21:53:00.003+02:00

This weekend was the BRN, the Bunte Republik Neustadt festival, here in my neighborhood. I've been away from Dresden on the BRN weekend for the last 5 years due to other commitments, but this year I stayed on board and even took on a fun project: I organized a stand for the non-profit organization that sponsors our Kinderhaus, cocolores e.V. Now, all of you know how I love our Kinderhaus, so it was a pleasure for me to do this very big job.

Here's a picture from behind the scenes at our stand: you can see the table, the coffee, the delicious cake and the happy visitors!

Here's a view down the street where we had our stand, Talstrasse. Talstr. is known as being the children's street of the BRN, but I like it there the best because it has the neatest stands. It's not only stuff for kids, but also creative cooks who only take donations for their food, people with vegan sushi like the guys next to us, and the physicist Rocket Ulf who shoots empty pop bottles, rolls of toilet paper and other objects high into the air. We were lucky to have a roof over our heads, because Rocket Ulf's rockets kept coming down right on us. A friend of mine even set up a table on this street with an "Unprofessional Tailor Shop": an iron, a sewing machine, some fabric and buttons and sewed things on people's clothes like flowers, buttons, pockets, whatever they desired for free! That's the spirit!

Here are the guys at our stand building a giant marble run...or as one viewer of this picture said, "There's the engineer solving world hunger while the two managers drink coffee". The marble run was definitely a favorite for the crowd, the kids and adults loved it. One kid even showed up with a giant tin of marbles and just went nuts. My kid also lost it when he saw the giant marble run. I think somebody at my house might get a room-size marble run for their next birthday...

Like I said, it's been a while since I've been at a BRN. It's something I have mixed feelings about anyway. The first time I heard of it, it sounded great, almost like a giant, quirky, neighborhood flea market, with the people in the neighborhood coming out of their apartments, bringing tables and chairs out onto the street, eating and drinking and doing fun projects together. But when I saw it, it didn't look so much like this, except on Talstrasse and a few other little corners and alleys. To me the rest of the BRN looked like any other street festival: loud music, food stands, stands selling t-shirts, clothes, jewelry, and of course, beer. Oh, yeah, and aggressive neo-Nazis and anti-fascists and police in riot gear. Nothing too surprising, nothing horrifying, but certainly not at all like the warm, fuzzy, artsy event that had been described to me. This year was at least peaceful. There were still loads of police everywhere, but not in riot gear. You could talk to them like normal people, I had to ask about driving in on Saturday morning to haul the tables and stuff for the stand. They weren't weird like they had been in earlier years, and they had normal uniforms on. They also weren't so militant about searching every bag, pocket and crevice that entered the festival area for glass bottles as they had been in earlier years. I think this led to a more relaxed atmosphere. I didn't hear about any riots and there were no helicopters hovering overhead constantly, even on Saturday night. Late Saturday night the most annoying things were the mingling stench of urine and the aroma of the food stands along with all the staggering drunks on the streets.

Most of the live music on offer didn't really tickle my fancy, some of the DJs were playing tunes that I like, but dancing isn't so much my thing. My favorite spectacle from Saturday night was "Balkon Rap", some guys rapping from a balcony. These guys were obviously having a lot of fun, they had a giant crowd, and rapping from a balcony has this weird reference to political leaders giving propaganda speeches from their little balconies and yet, it's rap! That has a flair that I like. It was cool.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is that the BRN once again didn't change my life with its more or less nonexistant warm-and-fuzziness, it wasn't horrible, our stand was great, and I really liked Talstrasse as I always do. There were some very neat ideas and activities on offer, and masses and masses of lame, run-of-the-mill stuff. So I guess there was something for everyone. But I'll do it again next year, because it was fun to see the twinkle in older people's eyes when they saw our potato printing project, I loved watching the kids just go crazy for the marble run, giving people cake always makes my day (especially when repeat customers gobble up an entire batch of real American brownies still warm from the oven in 15 minutes!!!), and I'll take any chance I get to tell people how great the Kinderhaus is in a heartbeat.

Food, food and more food

2011-06-13T00:02:00.004+02:00

I'm up to my ears in herbs, strawberries and lettuce!

Not that I'm complaining about getting a heaping bowl of delicious strawberries every day I go to the garden. Certain kids in my household are also not too disturbed by this. One of them will only eat butter at present, the other could most likely fuel himself solely on strawberries. As quickly as I can pick them, the strawberry eater eats them! Plain, with cream and sugar, straight from the plant still sprinkled with dirt, it doesn't matter! They are delicious!

The cress was ready a couple weeks ago so I harvested it, this is only a fraction of the total amount. I made soup:

This was a nice cream soup with some crunchy homemade croutons. I also made cress pesto, very tasty on bread with cream cheese or pasta. The final product that we ate two days in a row and that was my favorite cress dish of all was salad, featuring cress, roquefort cheese, pear, white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper.
And then there was the spinach:

This is also just a mere fraction of the piles and piles of spinach that I had. The most delicious way of eating this was washing the daylights out of it to get the sand off and cooking it for a maximum of 3 minutes and just chowing down. Yum. I also made spinach lasagna with a significant portion of it, which is a tried and true favorite. There's another spinach recipe that I was too lazy to try, because it involved a few steps after the 3 minutes of cooking and I was hungry. It's a Turkish creamed spinach dish with dill, which would have been possible, because I am also practically swimming in dill. Dill quark, dill cream cheese, dill everything! One of these days, I will make the dill spinach, maybe even tomorrow. The fridge, freezer and windowsill are brimming with dill!

Today I had massive amounts of basil at my disposal, so I whipped up some pesto this evening. For that I threw some basil, olive oil, salt, pepper, almonds and a few garlic cloves into the blender, blended the heck out of it, and yummy green pesto came out. I can't wait for lunch tomorrow! I'll probably have it for breakfast, too :-)

Our lettuce is also getting ready to harvest, in fact, we harvested one head of butterhead lettuce today. It may be bibb lettuce, but I'm not up to speed on the specific types of lettuce. Anyway, my German chef simply tore it up, squeezed on some lemon and sprinkled in a bit of sugar, and voila! A tasty salad was made. The only thing that slightly freaked me out was that it was a bit crunchy, and I couldn't discern if the crunching was the sugar or sand. Unidentifiable crunching in my food really freaks me out, call it oversensitivity or a sensory processing disorder, it has seriously disturbed me since I was a kid.

But now, the real work comes in. I have to start learning some new tricks, because the above mentioned foods are all things I have some measure of experience with. What do I do with the other herbs like melissa? I know I can make tea out of it, is there anything else? How do I store it? What about lavender? Can I make soap? Should I make sachets? How in the world do I store oregano, thyme, rosemary, savory, marjoram...? Freeze or dry? In talks with more experienced gardeners, I was advised today to definitely dry the marjoram and thyme.

The herbs are harmless and take up little space. What in the hell are we going to do with all of the potatoes? We have a giant field of potatoes. Who's going to cook all of the tomatoes into tomato sauce? We'll need another freezer if we're going to make that much sauce. Not to mention the countless varieties of peppers, yellow, normal, hot...

In other news, our little tarpaper shack got a new roof this past week. It looks fancy! I was distressed last weekend when the boys went to town tearing off the old roof, and could walk through the door and look up and see nothing but sky. This week a certain someone worked from dawn to dusk, all alone except the last 2 days when we also had some most excellent helpers, and put on a beautiful new roof.

That's all from the garden front. This thing that was a hairbrained scheme in March has turned into an all-consuming epic. Maybe in the fall or winter I'll write about something else again :-) Or maybe next weekend, who knows.

"We'll put the toilet in the kitchen"

2011-05-08T16:22:00.004+02:00

What garden could be complete without a dwarf? I love dwarfs and trolls and the like, and am now the proud owner of 2. This one came with the garden. I purchased my first dwarf in 2004 at the flea market.

Last weekend we discovered this asparagus peeking out of the sand behind the cottage. Yes! Asparagus! Today while watering the plants I spotted 3 more little stalks sprouting.

Behold the blossoms on the blueberry bush! I can't wait to eat the blueberries!

Here are 2 sections of the vegetable garden with spinach, leeks, dill, radishes and probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting. In the background you can see the little shack. From the outside it looks okay, but the inside...we still have a lot of work to do.

The quince tree is just lovely right now.

All those blossoms on the cherry tree are now turning into little sweet cherries, yay!

The strawberries are blossoming like mad and are also producing some little berries already!

After I thought I'd transplanted all the flower bulbs from the lawn, these little guys pop up and contradict me. A garden is always full of surprises.

It seems like the previous owners of our garden really did gardening the last time in 2006. While reorganizing the cottage and getting the little room ready to set up a kitchen I started rifling through a box of GDR gardening books. At the bottom of the box was a folder with "Personal thoughts about the garden 2006". I thought this might make for some interesting reading, and did it ever! Not only was the work plan for the garden neatly typed out for 2005 and 2006, but there were also notes about other "Gartenfreunde" ("Garden friends", this is how people address each other in the garden colony. Maybe you're "Gartenfreund Smith" and I'm "Gartenfreund Leser".)
There weren't many scathing notes about others, but one of my favorites was about how "A Gartenfreund bitched at us for driving down path XY. He was stupid!"
The quote of the year for 2005 was neatly typed at the end of the personal thoughts for 2005: "We'll put the toilet in the kitchen."

My Victory Garden

2011-04-30T00:44:00.003+02:00

This is something I never knew about before, but something like the German "Schrebergarten" also existed in the United States during the World Wars. The US government asked citizens to plant gardens and grow at least some of their own food in order to have more available for troops overseas. The garden club where we now have our garden in Dresden was founded just after World War 2, the former airport of sorts and later illegal dump was parcelled off and leased to the hungry Dresdners so that they could grow some food. I read one account from one of the first gardeners in our club, they couldn't start planting things right away, first they had to clean up their parcel, remove things like tar paper, wire, building debris, bricks. Even worse, they had no water to water their plants once they were able to start gardening. They had to schlep it from Königsbrücker Straße, which is a bit of a hike.

This is our victory garden just after we got it about 4 weeks ago. The cottage was most likely built in the 60's, during the GDR, and upon closer inspection, you can see that it is cobbled together of the simplest materials. The roof is a hodge podge of different sized boards. Whoever built the place worked hard to even collect all the necessary building materials. In the before picture above, you can see almost how the place looked when we got it. The only things missing are all of the junk that filled up 2 dumpsters and the lawn furniture strewn about the front yard. I'd already transported the useable stuff behind the house.

Here's how the place looks now, 4 weeks later. We couldn't imagine all of the nice plants that would start popping out of the ground as spring sprung. There are a lot of flowers (roses, peonies, tulips, hyacinths, different kinds of lilies, and lots that I don't know the names of), herbs (lavender and chives), bushes (currants, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries) and fruits and vegetables (strawberries, rhubarbs and today we discovered asparagus!) already there, the beds and the plants just need to be cleaned up and transplanted to fit our vision for the garden. New beds also need to be dug and prepared, since we are required to (and want to) grow fruits and vegetables on a certain portion of the land.
The original plan was to simply plow the place and plant some seeds, but after it became clear what a great selection of existing plants there was, we started transplanting and carefully cleaning up.
So, what's the victory in my victory garden? Obviously I'm not farming for any war efforts. First, it's a victory for my kids. They can wallow in the dirt and get crud under their fingernails just like I did as a kid. They can simply be kids with no TV, no computer, no iPod, no CD player, no room full of toys... They just have lots of space, dirt, plants, snail shells, worms and other assorted creepy crawlies to indulge in. It's definitely a victory against boredom and getting stir crazy at home in our little tiny place. The trip to the garden is a nice 30 minute walk or a short bike ride, there's enough space for everybody to do their own thing if necessary, and oh, is there ever LOTS to do. There's something very satisfying and relaxing for me about pulling quack grass and dandelions. It's a victory for my nerves. I am so fried at the end of the week that it's nice to be able to absolutely switch gears, go someplace quiet, and do something very different. And of course the clearest victory of all: the delicious treats we will soon be harvesting!

What a difference a day makes

2011-04-17T21:00:00.001+02:00

Today I documented our walk to the garden. Someone has already put some graffiti on the wall in front of the new daycare where the teacher we had at our first wildly failed attempt at childcare now works.

Here's the Garnisonkirche, built between 1893 and 1900 with a Catholic and an Evangelical wing in Dresden-Albertstadt to serve the military, which was based in this part of the city. This building is so giant and just fascinates me, I adore it. My son thinks it's a castle and got mad when I told him it's a church.

It looks like someone got interrupted while working on this masterpiece.

Here's the addition that's going on to the Military History Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind. From this angle it looks tiny, later I'll post another picture from a different angle where it looks shockingly immense.

I thought this was a nice ensemble, near the entrance to the Military History Museum.

We like to call this "Freedom is not Free" , it's actually a Soviet war memorial that used to stand on Albertplatz a bit to the south during GDR times. In 1993 it was moved here, in front of the Military History Museum.

After a bit of a jaunt, we reached our little dump. It's starting to look a bit more cheerful, the cherry tree is in bloom and we decorated the quince tree with Easter eggs yesterday. My project for today was to clean up under the quince tree (on the right), transfer some flower bulbs to the new flower bed and transfer some strawberry plants from in front of the house to the strawberry patch I weeded yesterday. Other projects for today involved preparing a patch for sowing some more delicious vegetables like spinach and leeks and planting potatoes.

As you can see, we were successful. The flowers have been transplanted, and next to the flowers are where the spinach and leek seeds went in!

These guys were transplanted last weekend.

Here are my strawbs next to the rhubarb that our neighbor gave us. It looks like I'll need to learn how to make quince jelly and rhubarb cake, because I sure don't know what the heck else to do with the stuff!

Ooooh, I can't wait until these pretty little guys turn into delicious sweet cherries! I know just what I'll do with them, camp out under the tree and eat them straight from the tree!

It seems that this year, my luck is taking a different shape. A couple years ago, I found over 30 four leaf clovers starting April 1, this year it seems that we'll be finding lucky mushrooms (Glückspilze, in Germany mushrooms are a symbol of good luck). My friendly gardener called me excitedly shortly before we left this afternoon to show me this lovely morel, a fine delicacy where I come from. We plucked it, carefully transported it home, sliced it up, fried it in butter and ate it with dinner. Mmmm. Let's see what kind of luck this brings.

Future Slumlords

2011-04-15T22:21:00.003+02:00

One person called it integration, lots of friends find it very cool, I don't quite know what to think of the fact that we are now owners of a little dump of a cottage and a 560 square meter parcel of garden space in a garden club not too far from where we live.

This is a view back toward the Military Museum from on top of the dump.
Good thing we can walk to the garden from where we live, because our car's been in the shop for nearly 4 weeks. So much for importing a stupid American girly-car! Good luck getting parts. It's actually a very pleasant and scenic walk, even though it doesn't seem too enticing at first glance. You leave our house, cut through the IKEA ghetto that is the Obere Neustadt, go past the imposing Garnissonskirche, cut through the park in front of the Military Museum and gape at the currently under construction Daniel Libeskind addition, cross the big loud busy street, pass the supermarket where you can pick up whatever provisions you could possibly need, from grilling items to fresh sauerkraut to delicious crunchy garlic pickles, pass some more military buildings on the left where there are signs that say "Do not enter, guns are used here" and can peer in and see all kinds of cool tools of destruction, from helicopters to tanks to rockets (the kids are always impressed), cross the bridge over the train tracks (also exciting for the kids if a train comes), and then, here's the really cool part, cut through the dump. The dump is no longer in use, leave it up to Dresden to turn a dump into a park. It's actually pretty nice and quiet, you don't even realize you are smack dab in the middle of the city (and on top of a dump) up there because you are elevated and the noise of the city is very far away. There are paths, meadows, often people are up there flying kites or having picnics, not to mention enjoying the great view. After exiting the dump, we go through a little gate and we are immersed in the joy that is our Kleingartenverein (Small Garden Club). Actually, there are two. On the left are the old Stasi workers' gardens, they are bigger and better equipped. On the right is the garden for everybody else. There are nearly 1000 parcels in our club, it's like a giant parallel universe. When you go for a walk in there you can't see the end of the place or anything else for that matter. You don't feel like you're in the city any more, you feel like you are in some quaint little village with nicely cut little plots of land and tiny little pink houses everywhere. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's a view out over our garden club from on top of the dump.

Here's a view back toward downtown, again from the dump.

And there it is, our own little slum. This place is in disrepair, the previous owner inherited it from his aunt who just got too old to really keep up the garden. Well, the nephew had no desire to. You can see the remnants of what was once a very chic garden that was tended with great pride, remainders of curving walkways among rose- and lavender bushes, carefully arranged trees, berry bushes and chives coming up that suggest a well-tended herb patch of summers past. This is all just talk of the garden. The house, oh the house. To put it simply: all the junk and stuff that was strewn about the garden and piled high in the house (and is not shown in the picture because it's already been hauled off or moved to the back part--like the tipped over yard swings, the grills, the bricks, the stones, a giant pile of sandstone...) filled a dumpster to the brim. We didn't pitch everything, we kept the useable items and the neighbors took some stuff. Somebody took the sandstones the guy had been using to build a terrace without a permit, somebody else took the mouse-poo-ridden sofa for their dog to sleep on. Oh, yeah, and the previous owner staked the place out, waited until we were gone and the neighbors were gone to slip in and take a bunch of stuff after his grace period had ended. You see, he'd been kicked out and owed the club money.

That's just the junk. Did I mention the roof? It's sagging. It looks sort of like a horse's back, if you want to picture that. After clearing the house out, my trusty handyman started to tear out the plastic lining that acted as a ceiling and stinky yellow water just poured down like a smelly rainshower. The good thing is that there's a stove that we could fire up to start drying the place out. It's got wet walls, but we've torn out the wallpaper and are airing the place out as much as we can. We're also having a visit from a roofing expert in the family this weekend to hatch a repair plan.

Then there's the water. Last weekend we tried our luck, Handy Man ventured into the 2 meter deep hole where the water can be turned on and off, and we established that when on, water sprays all around the line on the outside of the house.

We were prepared for this, I would say. We consciously didn't purchase some expensive chic-y garden because we didn't want to just take on somebody else's ideas. The plan was to make this our own, and oh, will we ever. This place also certainly has its advantages. It's on the edge of the club, giving us fewer neighbors and a view of something else other than the other gardens. Plus we've got a quince tree, a cherry tree and an apple tree, not to mention tons of annual flowers, plants and herbs and berry bushes. It just all needs to be moved around a bit so that we can also fulfill the requirement of actual fruit and vegetable cultivation on a certain portion of the garden. I've already been busy transferring flower bulbs. The little house is also bigger than you may build them now.

A little about the history of this place: in earlier times the area where the gardens are now was used as a type of airport. After World War 2, it was cleared and converted into garden parcels so that the starving population could have a plot of land and grow their food.

I like to see this as my start on a long career of being a slum lord. You see, I have a penchant for old houses, especially ones in disrepair. Plus, my parents actually thought that a garden club was a place for poor people to live, something like the trailer parks in the United States. This is my starter house. Next comes my first villa, then my second...

Oh no.

2011-04-15T22:15:00.003+02:00

What can we do to run this pest out of town?

Being the immature imbecile that I am, I cracked up loudly after spotting this one, most likely to the pure disgust of lots of other mothers who were out with their kids enjoying the sun last weekend :-)

The latest from here

2011-03-22T21:04:00.003+01:00

Whoever painted these, I adore them! So simple, yet so unique!
Anyway, that's just about how I feel right now, drunk on this lovely weather we're having.
I am not a fan of winter, and this winter was definitely not my style.

In our tiny little itty bitty postage stamp of a garden behind our apartment we have flowers, hooray! Crocusses and snowdrops, to be exact. Tulips and hyacinths are coming up as well, but are not yet in bloom.

These little guys are fantastic, and they came with the place. The tulips and the hyacinths we planted ourselves last year, and more crocusses, daffodils and another hyacinth are going out this year. I want a carpet of spring bloomers! As if that were not enough, we will officially become gardeners this weekend. Not only will I have my little flower beds at home, but also a remote garden where I can work to my heart's content. Oh and is there ever work to do...the cottage needs a new roof, and it's full of the previous owner's junk. So full that you can't really even walk inside. There are locked doors that we have no idea what's behind. So this summer we won't be taking fancy excursions or CO2 producing flights to exotic destinations, we're going to be ecologically responsible and grow some vegetables just a couple tram stops or a healthy bike ride from home. Not that I have anything against CO2 producing flights to exotic destinations, I just prefer to save my CO2 for the winter when I need to get the heck out of here!

German food

2011-03-19T07:43:00.003+01:00

We've been cooking up a storm! My in-house German chef whipped up some "Verlorene Eier" (lost eggs) a couple weeks ago--a concoction of hard-boiled eggs in mustard sauce, also served with potatoes. You can also poach the eggs in the mustard sauce, which we tried, but was a bit creepy, so I'd recommend boiling the eggs first if you want to try this dish.
Another major hit was the "Falscher Hase" (fake rabbit), something that my dear readers who've experienced this particular chef's treatment of a real rabbit will truly cherish. Fake rabbit is a dish that's much like American meatloaf, only wrapped in bacon and stuffed with hard boiled eggs. Voila! Fake rabbit!

Who the shizz is Professor Diz?

2011-02-25T20:26:00.003+01:00

I found this during my daily wanderings about town and was intrigued. This is a neat idea, and especially impressive is the fact that the crowd has apparently gone wild and taken every little tab but one from the bottom with Professor Diz's contact information in a seeming tearing frenzy from the looks of the bottom of the sheet. The price is certainly VERY low, making me wonder just how fo` real this Diz is. I'm curious about Diz's success. If you are or know Diz, holla!

Blast from the past! February 2006

2011-02-08T22:28:00.004+01:00

I was looking at my pictures and noticed that I haven't got any pictures on my computer from February yet. So I decided to put up some old pictures from a February past. February 2006 was an exciting time, we hadn't had our first son yet, he came in May 2006 and we'd just moved into our giant apartment on Förstereistr. Aaaah, 100 square meters, how I miss thee.

I'd just left my 42 square meters of single freedom on Alaunstraße, dropping the notice letter in my landlord's mailbox was not easy. But we were movin' on up, we got a nice big place and had a kid on the way. Little did we expect that 2 years later we would be standing in that very apartment, puzzling about what to do next. Standing in front of the DDR map of the Americas, we decided California was where we wanted to go. That didn't quite work out the way we wanted, we got to Michigan for 10 months, and made a road trip to California, but the economic crisis got between us and our American dream. Fast forward another 3 years, and here we sit, back in the Neustadt, doing the same old things that we always did, just in an apartment that's 25% smaller and has 100% more kids in it than the old one!!! It's sort of like the story "Oh, wie schön ist Panama", but we didn't even get a big plushy sofa out of the deal. I think we got a heck of a lot more!

The old colorful kitchen. That ended up in somebody's garden house.

The old living room. We still have those plushy sofas, a British guy bought the flooring, the chairs were used as bottle openers at our going away party. Other unspeakable things occured in the bathroom at our going away party.

Wow, we had high ceilings. We don't any more, but we have a private garden now, which is pretty sweet. You wouldn't believe how many people wanted to buy those silly IKEA wardrobes, even if they were broken! We don't have IKEA wardrobes any more, and I don't mind a bit.

The thing that strikes me in all of these pictures is how tidy everything is. We were freshly moved in back then, and there were also no kids smearing their smeariness all over everything and hauling their playthings into every imaginable corner and crevice, that surely made a difference. Maybe we just had more space to shove everything we didn't want in the picture out of the way.

More Fun Things From Fantastic Dresden

2011-01-09T22:42:00.005+01:00

These guys that I spotted in the fall near the Elbe summed up how everyone was feeling with winter approaching pretty well.

The pleasant smily faces made me feel a bit better about things, though.

I thought the brain-drainer was pretty clever, too.

Of banana farms and fishing towns

2011-01-06T10:49:00.003+01:00

From our last hotel in Puerto Santiago, where we spent our last 5 days in Tenerife, we were able to cross the street, go across an empty lot, and - so we thought - cut through a banana farm to walk to the coast. We started off on our trek, successfully entered the banana farm through a side gate that was open, and started trying to find the exit closest to the coast, which unfortunately, didn't exist. The friendly workers kept pointing us in the direction of the exit, which was by the street, exactly the direction we didn't want to go. So we cobbled together a question in Spanish of how to ask for the exit by the beach, and were told we had to walk down the street and then cut through another lot to the coast. At least we tried, got a cool glimpse into a banana farm, and one worker even chased us down and gave us an armload of delicious ripe bananas!

We didn't walk between the trees, we always stayed on the paths between the walled-in areas where the bananas were growing. There were always doors open into the actual banana fields, so we could look in and check out the plants.

A lot of the giant bunches of bananas were bagged, apparently to protect them from pests that would harm the fruit.

We made it to the water! The coast is quite stony, composed of rock that was formed from the volcanic eruptions that also created the island. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera and didn't take photos of Punta Blanca, where we took a longer break. It was an area made up of not only black stone, but also layers of white stone, rounded by erosion and creating an almost space-like feel to the area.

Our walk along the coast took us from Puerto Santiago once again to the village Alcalá. The distance from our starting point to Alcalá was about 4-5 kilometers. In Alcalá we were able to observe the crabs at the harbor enjoying whatever they were picking off the rocks and eating!

A hike in the Canadas at the base of El Teide

2011-01-05T18:54:00.003+01:00

On our drive up to the national park surrounding El Teide, where you are in danger of park rangers roaring up in their SUVs and shaking their finger at you and hissing "No! Parque Nacional!" if you accidentally leave the path, we stopped off at a scenic turnout and enjoyed the view of La Gomera next door. I'd like to go back there and back into the spoooooky-oooky foggy forests, supposedly the biggest existing laurel forest in the world. Call me a weirdo, but I like foggy hiking places. My first trip into the Sächsische Schweiz was in the late winter in 2003, and my jaw literally dropped because it looked just like some of my favorite Romantic paintings.

Caution! It truly was a high mountainous area at 2250 meters elevation. The air up there only has 25% humidity making lots of drinking water an absolute must. Dry lips and skin were also a result of this 4 hour trek. My personal favorite tip is to not walk near ledges while taking photos, in the middle at the bottom of the sign.

Here's El Teide, Spain's highest mountain. Kid 1 was with us in 2007 when we were in Tenerife, and he was only 13 months old then. He had an impressive vocabulary even then, and shouted out "El Teide, El Teide!" every time we saw the mountain. Kid 2, who is 14 months now, does not have such an advanced vocabulary. I think "Teide" slipped out of his mouth maybe once on this trip. Other words? No. He's too busy climbing everything he comes near to talk. His main modes of communication are nodding, shaking his head, throwing things down, pointing and saying "This, this" or pointing and saying "AAAAAAAAH!" in his shrill little voice.

Here are some shots of the landscape, which was pretty impressive on this hike. Each of these formations probably has a name, but I didn't take the time (or didn't exactly have the time, considering my duties as mother of kid 1 and kid 2 and my resulting lack of concentration) to look them up. All in all this was a nice hike, made much more difficult than it actually is by lugging around a one year old in a baby backpack and adjusting our pace for a 4-year-old. It was doable for all, though rather exhausting for the distance (8-10 km? We aren't sure because the distances on the maps didn't prove to be very reliable...what appeared to be 2 km turned out to be nearly 4 on one stretch) because of the thin and dry air. I found the first part the most interesting, starting at the Parador and walking among all of the rock formations, after we went the first leg of the trip we were walking toward El Teide where it was relatively flat and aside from the view of Teide, not so scenic.

Feliz Navidad!

2010-12-25T23:34:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we visited Igueste de San André, a little town at the end of the street north of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. It is a fantastic place, you can reach the upper part of town by car, but you have to walk into the rest of the town which descends to the oceanfront in a little canyon. In the middle of the canyon are gardens, on the sides going up the mountains are the houses. Here you can see the church, we stopped there at a little playground to have our lunch. It was so peaceful with no cars, all you could hear were birds singing and dogs barking.

Here is a look from the direction of the ocean into the canyon, you can see the gardens in the middle and the houses on the left and right.

And here's a view of the Atlantic from Igueste.

Walking toward the ocean you could hear rustling in the brush by the cacti and other succulents in addition to the birds singing and dogs barking, that noise was caused by these fantastic scaly friends scurrying about.

I was completely enthused by the lizards, but then I met Jola the white rabbit! We were chased by her owner Esther, who took us into her house to sell us some mangos. Esther lives right on the coast in a fantastic little house. She got Jola from a family in Santa Cruz who got her for their daughter, but she just kept growing and growing and got too big for them. So she came to live with Esther, and Esther can't eat her. I got all of this out of a conversation with my broken Spanish. I think we got the grand tour including Jola because of our two little blonde boys, they always seem to score us some extra points in Spanish-speaking countries.

This is Esther.

And there's her house. I wouldn't mind living there and selling mangos.

Today we had a Christmas picnic on the beach and then hiked a bit in the forest. Later we continued on to another little town at the end of the road, Afur. It was also in a very picturesque location, lush green mountainsides with a little waterfall in the middle. As we were driving out of the village, a girl was running along the street and motioning to her mouth. We stopped, rolled down the windows, and as soon as she saw us, exclaimed "Oh, ellas blancas, no hablan castellano!" ("Oh, you're white, you don't speak Spanish!") This absolutely cracked me up. I speak enough to understand that!

Christmas in the Sun

2010-12-23T23:08:00.007+01:00

We are spending our winter holidays in Tenerife this year...thinking back, we've had some adventurous times at Christmas the last few years: La Gomera, a road trip to California from Michigan, Gran Canaria, and this year Tenerife.

A nice little town in the West is Alcalá, a former fishing village that hasn't yet succumbed to the jaws of mass tourism. It's still pretty normal there, though there are lots of Brits in town. Above is the coastline by Alcalá with a banana farm in the background.

There was a hole in the wall around the farm, so you could peer in and see the bananas growing.

This is just up the coast a bit from the banana farm by Alcalá, the resorts are creeping in there too. The banana farm will probably be the next to go to free up some prime real estate for another of these lovely bunkers....I guess not too surprising when you consider that 74% of the economy here is accounted for by the service industry and only about 4% agriculture.

On the road behind a banana truck...

We stayed the first few days in Puerto Santiago, where I spotted a whole bunch of these scaly friends sunning themselves.

The coastline of Puerto Santiago by the little harbor.

Also by Puerto Santiago. The Atlantic is rough, and the giant waves crashing in made mist, which created some nice rainbows.

We walked to the harbor in Los Gigantes to show the kids the boats, there were also lots of hungry fish and we even saw this fishing boat come in. Their hunger was the downfall of the fish in all those giant boxes on the boat. On the boat I spotted a 650 kilogram sack of fish food, all they have to do is put out the nets, sprinkle in some food, and there comes dinner!

Today we departed from Puerto Santiago on our way to our next hotel in Puerto de la Cruz, which is our starting point for day trips into the Anaga Mountains. On the way we drove through the national park, which included scenery such as the lava fields above. You almost feel like you're on another planet going through there!

Another neat effect of the eruptions that formed the island are these layers of different colored stone.

More of the landscape, with El Teide peeking above the clouds.

We made it to Puerto de La Cruz in the afternoon and after checking in at our new hotel (which is quieter due to a lack of loud British tourists), we stopped in at the botanical garden, which is just a hop, skip and a jump away. We got to see this Australian tree with its giant roots, lots of palm trees and some lovely flowers...

...like this Brazilian one on a tree...

...and of course, the bird of paradise.

Here are some of my favorite food things here. Since we are not all-inclusive travellers, we shop for ourselves and cook for ourselves. So we come across funny things like this milk package. It cracks me up, I love the udder.

And then there are neat local specialties, like palm syrup from Gomera. It kind of tastes like molasses, but thin like maple syrup.

And queso tetilla! Mmmm. It's firm on the outside and kind of soft and yummy on the inside.

I've mentioned the British a couple of times in here. Not that I dislike them, but in the mountains we stopped at a very delicious and very friendly restaurant where we had lunch one day. I got to use my broken Spanish, and we had a really good lunch. A local man came to talk to us, and asked if we were British, probably because I spoke English with the kids. When we said no, he gave us a big thumbs down, "Oh no, I don't like the British," he said. I guess the poor old Brits have a bad reputation in certain parts of the world just like Americans... Another funny occurance at this restaurant was that they had rabbit on the menu, but it wasn't available. I asked when it would be available (not for myself!) and the boss said "Tonight!" as another man was sharpening a big knife at the bar. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. That place was the real deal!

Some works in progress

2010-12-16T15:49:00.003+01:00

My latest blogs for English learners:

Beginners:
http://virtualinguabeginners.blogspot.com

Advanced:
http://www.virtualinguaadvanced.blogspot.com/

Business English:
http://www.virtualinguabusiness.blogspot.com/

There's no place like home, there's no place like home...

2010-12-02T21:38:00.003+01:00

Here's what we woke up to this morning. Yeah, we get up before it's even light outside...
But that's not the point. This mass of white greeting us this morning was strangely reminiscent of a Michigan winter. Even my students and employer were joking with me this morning, "I bet you feel like you're home!" Haha, everyone. Snow is one thing I can live without.

At the same time, I do find it really pretty. Maybe it's just relief that I don't even own a car, so I can't be tempted to drive anyplace in the snow (one of the things I hate most about winter: driving in it), maybe I'm just happy that the creepy gray, rainy fall is finished. But what's not to love about snow-covered Wilhelminian-style houses and our very fine Romanesque Martin Luther Church?

The Christmas Market on the Hauptstrasse is in full swing, complete with a giant Christmas tree, blaring bad Christmas music and the gigantic rotating pyramid!

And for whatever reason, a little part of me was thrilled when I saw the trucks putting up these Christmas lights on Louisenstr. last week. I'm not such a Christmas nut, but I do like the decorations.

On another note, I have sore toes after tramping through the snow the last couple of days to drop a certain someone off at preschool. It is a special kind of exercise pushing a stroller holding a one-year-old and dragging along a 4-year-old through that much snow.

Oh, and one final postscript: am I a horrible person for relishing the fact that someone else's kid threw themselves flat on the wet, slushy floor of the supermarket and pitched a huge tantrum? For once it wasn't one of my kids screaming and throwing themselves down. I think I'm allowed to be thrilled.

Duck Crossing

2010-12-01T23:46:00.003+01:00

Careful! Duck crossing - take your foot off the gas!
I love it. Frog crossings, duck crossings, special bridges that are not paved but planted with grass and little trees so that animals can cross the highway -- these are all things you might see on the road in Germany.
However, I do know drivers upon whom this would have the exact opposite result: certain people who shall remain nameless would put the pedal to the metal if they see so much as a feather, let alone an actual moving target, approaching the street...

In other news I saw a nice sign yesterday on an Indian shop window: it should say "Wir unterstützen keine Kinderarbeit." (We don't support child labor) But someone scratched off the "k", so it said "Wir unterstützen eine Kinderarbeit." (We support a child labor - a sweatshop maybe?) Petty childish imbecile that I am, I cracked up right there in the middle of the icy cold sidewalk. It was more because I expected it to say something like "We support an orphanage" or something along those lines because it was in small print along the bottom of the window, and I saw "support" and "child" and then I read the whole thing...

As seen in Dresden-Friedrichstadt

2010-11-09T23:20:00.003+01:00

Here are a few new gems from my daily jaunts about town. Above is not only the profile of a crazy cool balcony, but I also like these tired guy faces I see popping up everywhere. They look about how I feel lately.

Here's a neat wall that I don't really get, but it's neat all the same!

And you can't beat the potato dealer! I didn't know there was such a thing.

A more non-urban look at Dresden

2010-10-20T21:36:00.007+02:00

The Dresdner Heide! This is about 50 square kilometers of great forest and nice hiking, and lucky me, one way in is just around the corner from my house. We can go in by the Prießnitz, a little river that runs through the Heide and into the Elbe.

These sculptures are right by where we enter the Heide. Unfortunately, I don't know the story behind them, but I do like them!

The high water this fall washed a whole bunch of sand all over the place!

Here's the little sandy beach that stays amazingly cool on the hottest summer days. Instead of having air conditioning, I can just bring the kids out here to stay cool!

This past Sunday we had the crazy idea to use the beautiful weather to hoof it to the Prießnitz waterfall. We've always seen the hiking signs for this down by Bautzner Straße, and sort of wondered just what kind of a waterfall this is. Finally we didn't have any other plans, so we went in search of the water fall. It's about a 9 kilometer walk from our house, even doable by a four-year-old!

We started at Alaunplatz, and from here it was just one more kilometer. Good thing you can pretty much find a waterfall by following the water, because this was the first marker we saw on the whole trip. But what is a trip into nature without a little adventure? We didn't even think to look at a map before we left.

This little hut by the waterfall is pretty neat, too bad somebody decided to burn it down.

There it is, the Prießnitzwasserfall! Not to be a jaded, spoiled brat, but it was kind of anticlimactic finding it. I'd always had the idea of some great, mysterious hidden treasure in the Heide, but this is just a tiny little waterfall. Oh well, we made it and it was a nice walk!

Just some regular old every day stuff in Dresden

2010-10-17T07:20:00.003+02:00

A view of the Dreikönigskirche was what I got to enjoy out the living room window of the place we stayed in for the weeks after our return to Dresden in July 2009.

My way to work used to involve biking through Johannstadt past the super cool ruin of the Trinitatiskirche. And it's not just an old broken down place, there's also a lot on offer there like concerts and other shows! It's a very cool venue, I saw a concert there a number of years ago.

Here is Dresden's Altstadt, or old city center, illuminated in all its glory. Yet another sight from my bike ride on the way home from one of my evening courses.

A lovely place to go for a walk that's not too far from my house (and super close to the Kindergarten) is along the banks of the Elbe River!

Another view of the Elbe and old city center from last week.

Another nice attraction along the Elbe is the rose garden, also walking distance from us. Even this time of year you can spot some gorgeous flowers!

The rose garden in fall, not quite as lush as in the summer when everything is in full bloom, but still quite nice!

The Gasometer, another architectural highlight from my weekly bike rides to work. These round buildings used to be used to store gas, the one on the left has been fixed up and it now houses the Panometer: artist Adagar Asisi has put up a 360 degree panorama of historic Dresden inside. It's breathtaking!

One of the companies I teach at moved to a new building, which caused me some concern, because I thought the trip would be significantly longer. It still takes the same amount of time to get there, and my new route to work takes me through the Großer Garten, and I get to enjoy this view once a week!

And on the way home, I get to see this view of the palace.

Now I hope my far away family and friends have a little taste of why I am so enamored of this place where I live!

Happy First Birthday, Baby!

2010-10-16T11:29:00.002+02:00

This birthday I was inspired to cook up a hedgehog cake that turned out to be a bit more of a crooked porcupine, but oh well, the buttercream tasted great!

Die Russenlampe

2010-10-10T21:33:00.002+02:00

We borrowed this lamp from someone after moving into our new place last year. The lender called it a "Russian lamp". But I saw a picture today that blew this right out of the water: a Russian faucet.

Scenes From Home

2010-09-19T04:55:00.006+02:00

We visited Dow Gardens in Midland, and in the Children's Garden there are lots of
scarecrows that the kids have put together. I decided to have some fun with the panorama
function on my camera while we were there.

I caught this slippery little friend at my parents' house and let him swim in some
rainwater for the kids to look at one evening. I'm still a stealthy frog catcher!

Beans is a neat sign that I've often seen and liked from the highway passing Saginaw, I just never had the chance to take a picture of it. Now to just photograph it at night when it's even more fantastic...

This old sign has been hanging around since I was little. It's on Beaverton Clare Road, right smack between Beaverton and Clare, go figure. It's outside an abandoned gas station, but the store itself actually looks more like an old house. Someone has put in a trailer on the property and seems to live there now, the old store is just getting more and more dilapidated. I was always sort of mesmerized by that dinosaur. I used to wonder why there had been a store out there in the middle of nowhere, why it had closed, and imagine going in that store to find a sort of wonderland of neat old stuff.

The horse and buggy parking in Beaverton by the Chemical Bank. I like this, and I like the new sign even more. The horse parking is there for the Amish, they also have some spots at the grocery store where they can hitch their horses.

This lady and her child were travelling with that buggy. As I continued on my walk to the Beaverton Dairy Bar, they were just exiting as we were entering! Amish eat ice cream too!

A horse and buggy on the road near Clare.

Here's a panorama of Ross Lake in Beaverton. As I was looking at the lake, I noticed that little sign in the middle. Have a closer look:

I read it and just about started laughing out loud. What crackpot put that up? Well, for a closer look at the text and the people who put these up, go here or here. I'm certainly not making any value judgements on these people or their causes, but still I find the sign pretty funny.

Creature Comforts

2010-09-11T04:06:00.003+02:00

I just adore returning to Michigan to go out and find the same old creatures I used to find when I was a kid. For example the snakes that I don't see anywhere but at home always make me feel, well, at home. This little guy reminds me of the baby snake I caught one fall when I was in high school and kept inside through the winter, feeding worms that we dug up and heating him with a warm lamp. I released him in the spring to watch him slither off in the grass toward the pond.

Maybe I just never noticed the red dragonflies, but I was enthused to see this pretty one by the pond a couple days ago.

Here's a very hungry caterpillar, spotted on the milkweeds behind my parents' house. He's working hard to get very fat, then...

he'll hang himself somewhere, like on a plant outside, or at the top of a jar if you catch him and take him into your house in a jar with nice airholes in the lid and delicious leaves to eat...

...and then he will emerge like so! This picture is a bit shaky since this Monarch was spotted by my parents' garden on a windy, rainy day in a white pine tree.

This one, however, emerged in the house in a jar, and then flew out of the jar and made a beeline for those flowers. Shortly thereafter the butterfly was herded out of the house and into the great big world.

I'm glad I didn't notice that crocodile waiting to eat me in the background while I was photographing this little flower, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten such a nice picture! I'm always scared that we'll run into a bear when we go into the woods, but I guess we should be more worried about the crocodiles! Are those pesky retirees who go to Florida in the winter bringing back these large, deadly reptiles with them as stowaways?

Vacation Reading

2010-09-05T03:37:00.002+02:00

A father speaking to his son:

"...What would you do, Lukey, if I turned into a woman?"

He looked unsure. "I would...still love you?"

"Would you?" I said.

He thought it over. "Sure," he said. "You'd still be you, wouldn't you?"

"Uh-huh." We sat together on the couch for a while.

"Have you noticed that I've been looking more and more like a girl over the last year?" I said.

"Some of my friends think you are a girl," he said.

"That must be hard for you," I said.

"Not really. I just tell them, 'That's my daddy.'"

"Lukey, I need to talk to you about something. I have a condition, it's like when a person's sick, that makes me feel like a girl on the inside, even though I'm a boy on the outside. Does that make any sense to you, that a person's insides and outsides wouldn't match?"

"Sure," he said. "I know what that's like."

"So I'm taking some medicine that is slowly making my outsides more and more like a girl. After a while, I'm going to totally be a girl. I know that might make you sad, but it's what I need to do."

Luke gave me a big hug. "I won't be sad. You said you'd still be you."

A passage from She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan. I hadn't planned on reading this book, but it sort of crashed into my reading list like a freight train. It is a moving account of one man's transition into womanhood and is giving me a look into what kind of identity struggles and difficulties one can have with gender issues. If you're interested in or somehow touched by this topic, I think this book is a good one to read. The above passage made me tear up, and I really, really hope it's true.

And now on to my original vacation reading list!

The Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne. I love the Talking Heads, so what's not to love about the frontman's accounts of travels with his bicycle and urban cycling? I can't wait to pick this up, or have it delivered by Amazon, I haven't decided which. Amazon is probably the more convenient and affordable choice, even though I love perusing the shelves of bookstores. But I have to say, that is not much fun with 2 kids.

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison. Autism is a topic that has fascinated me since I was art director at a summer camp for kids with special needs. This book is Augusten Burrough's brother's account of his experiences with Asperger's since childhood. The neat thing about Asperger’s is that the people who have it are high functioning, so they know they are processing the world in a way that is different from how most people do and can describe what’s going on in their minds.

Fixing my Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions by Sue Barry. This is a personal account from a scientist who had crossed eyes her whole life, and at 48 went through vision therapy and learned to see using both eyes in stereo, therefore learning to see in 3D, which you can’t when your eyes are crossed. This may not seem so fascinating, but when your kid has crossed eyes, believe me, it is thrilling.

More Adventures in Food

2010-08-17T21:59:00.003+02:00

After my foray into delicious tofu spread, I have ventured into the world of cream cheese spread. Basically only for the reason that I am too lazy to go to the organic supermarket and buy silken tofu, not only because it's farther from my house than the regular supermarket, but also because a certain four-year-old I know absolutely loses all control when we go into that place. I don't know if it's that organic earthy smell, or all the natural products, but something about that place makes him go crazy and touch everything and scare me that he's going to smash some Earth-friendly glass packaging. So I've taken to buying my raw materials at the supermarket: regular old cream cheese and delicious discs of goat's milk cream cheese. What I do then is smash and mix together about equal amounts of the two different kinds of cream cheese, then add all kinds of tasty nuts and bolts. So far I've come up with 3 variations:

Green Onion Cream Cheese
For this you start with your cream cheese mixture of equal parts of the two cream cheeses, then thinly slice two or three green onions, depending on how much cream cheese you want to make. You can also throw in a little finely chopped regular onion and some chives. Smash this all up and mix it (I find a fork works nicely) and add in just a bit of milk to make the mixture nice and spreadable. Throw in some salt and pepper to taste, and voila! Super yummy and easy spread #1!

Chipotle Cream Cheese
If you like things hot, then this is the one for you. Mix up your cream cheeses, then chop up about one chipotle pepper (a smoked jalapeno in spicy marinade) and some chili if you want it even hotter. Here I also tossed in some finely chopped onion, salt and pepper and stirred in a little milk. This one tastes great with the smoky chipotle flavor and has a nice slow burn from the hot peppers!

Tomato Basil Cream Cheese
This is a variation on one of my favorite themes: insalata caprese. For this I added two chopped sun dried tomatoes (from a jar, the kind in oil), a handful of fresh chopped basil from my window sill, a little milk for consistency, just a bit of finely chopped onion, salt and pepper and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Yum yum yum.

For some reason I've been on a whole grain bread kick for about the last week or so, and every one of these spreads tastes absolutely fabulous on a slice of toasted whole grain bread (right now I've got sunflower seed bread).

Shameless Self Promotion

2010-08-16T23:22:00.003+02:00

Here are the results of my latest foray into the art world: an exhibit of photos at a language school. I was approached about doing an exhibit there shortly before they moved to their new office, and quickly agreed with many an idea in my head...landscapes? cities? some of my crazy bird photographs from all over the place? We settled on American cityscapes, and I think it turned out all right. I didn't get all wild and use different colors for the mats around the photos this time around, I was lacking energy this time around. On Friday after 3 trips to the school to get everything organized and put together, everything was finally finished and some clients even came in and gave some positive feedback. And I used the photos as part of a conversation lesson this evening, putting sticky notes over the locations and trying to figure out where the photos were taken, talking about who's visited those places, etc, and by the end I think the students were ready to hop on a plane and head across the ocean!

If you want to make the trip across the river to Friedrichstadt, here's where the pictures are: Fremdspracheninstitut Dresden
Angelika Trautmann
Schäferstr. 42-44
01067 Dresden

Of if you have some naked walls you'd like me to dress up, just let me know. Give me frames and something to hang them on, I'll do the rest!

Obligatory Photos of the High Water in Dresden

2010-08-15T17:06:00.006+02:00

That photo was taken on Tuesday, I'm a bit late putting these up since there have been other things on my plate. As you can see, the water from the Prießnitz was right up to the bottom of the little pedestrian bridge by the hospital, and the water from the place where the Prießnitz flows into the Elbe was up on the bike and pedestrian path. People had stripped down their kids and were letting them play in the water on the path. While it's a fun idea (and W was begging to go in the water) it really creeped me out, because one other time when there was high water on the Prießnitz, there was some very unsavory stuff floating in there. For those of you who can't imagine what, it was anything and everything you might flush down the toilet or put in the trash in your bathroom. Not pretty.

The ferry between the Neustadt and Johannstadt sides was closed, because the docking area was under water. I think that's running again, though, since the water has receded.

You can't see the humongous and humongously ugly Waldschlößchen bridge on here so well, but maybe the planners were onto something when they made it so big. Maybe they knew something more about high water in the future than we know! But that's still no reason for it to be so ugly. Bridges do connect, it's true what the CDU says, but couldn't they have made this connection a bit nicer? Maybe they really wanted to stick it to the protesters with an extra ugly bridge at what is otherwise a very beautiful location.

Newsflash from my terrace! It too is flooded! Every time we have a torrential downpour like we did twice today, my stupid terrace gets flooded. I too am in on the adventure! Fortunately we don't have a basement as we did in our old place, there the basement was flooded every time we had rain, which was super annoying. We had some stuff ruined, and other stuff just stank to high heaven.

We love Love LOVE the new Kinderhaus!

2010-08-06T22:36:00.003+02:00

After probably one of the worst experiences of my life (sending my poor defenseless kid off to an awful throwback of a preschool where they were convinced that he was disabled and kept trying to convince me of the same, where they went so far as to try to organize a doctor's appointment --as if we don't take him to the doctor ourselves and didn't inform them of every last "?*"*)§/ appointment-- without our permission to "put pressure on the doctor" to put him in a special needs preschool), we have started him in a new preschool that just opened and he is a superstar there. The teachers there actually seem to like their job and like kids, which is completely different from the old place. At the new Kinderhaus the teachers have tons of ideas and already this week started building puppet theaters and houses out of giant cardboard boxes with the kids. They actually let the kids use paint! Real, wet, smeary finger paint! W's group at the old preschool never once used paint with a brush, let alone FINGER paint. Good God, someone could have gotten dirty! And then the teachers maybe would have had to work to help clean up! The most artistic thing I saw there were some colored pencil drawings, and one time one other group used Play Doh. The Kinderhaus has a huge supply of finger paint and real, messy, brown clay. I want to go back to being 3 years old so I can go there and play!

Anyway, our new Kinderhaus is a fantastic place. I say "our" because it's a parents' initiative, meaning that parental work there is required. This could be anything from helping wash hand towels to fixing curtains to bookkeeping, planning parties, organizing photo archives...In our case, I will be providing English lessons for the kids. I like this, because in a way it is a kind of self selection: who is willing to do 4 hours of work per month for their kid to go there? And I can also have a look on the inside and see just what goes on inside this place. At the old preschool I really had the feeling that parents were unwanted. Please just drop your kid off, pick them up as late as possible before closing time please so you don't disturb our day, and we will fix everything you have done wrong with this child in the meantime.

I haven't even touched on the pedagogical concept. They are picking and choosing different aspects (what they consider the best) from various pedagogical approaches, including Montessori, Waldorf and others. The Kinderhaus is also free of mass-produced plastic toys--they only have things like wooden building blocks, dress up clothes, paints, boxes, beads, glue, marbles, tubes, blankets, buttons, musical instruments, books, paper, pencils, scissors, cloths, beanbags...you get the picture. The first day W asked for a car, but soon after, forgot all about cars and was really free to start exploring. This Kinderhaus is also conceived as a place that is colorful, varied, open, international, welcoming and where everyone is equal.

As if that all isn't fantastic enough, the building itself is a low-energy building with solar cells on the roof and they collect rainwater for watering the garden. In the back they will have gardens where the kids can grow vegetables and herbs, and the food on offer is organic and fresh. When I first walked into the building, I wanted to move in. It has gorgeous wood floors, cool windows and colorful rooms.

How do I know that W likes it? On Wednesday when we rounded the corner and the Kinderhaus came into view, he took off running and called out "Woohoo! The Kinderhaus!!!". On the second day he already told me that he wanted to stay there alone. Today he was practically begging me to be able to stay all alone next week. On the first day he took off with his teacher as if I wasn't even there to get water to water the plants and take some banana peels and stuff downstairs to the compost. Today he was playing and singing one of the songs he composed himself. And he talks to people there. He never spoke in the old preschool. I would like to thank Frau G and the others at the old preschool for showing me how absolutely horrible and damaging a preschool can be so I can really appreciate what a wonderful one we have found now! Sorry, Frau G, that I almost always freeze up and start swearing like a sailor as if I had Tourette's syndrome when I see you on the street or at the store, it's sort of like an allergic reaction. Maybe if someone treated the kid you love more than anything else in the world like trash and spoke to you as if you are an idiot just because you are a foreigner (who speaks the local language at least okay and can understand everything), you just might see where I'm coming from.

Hold onto your hats!

2010-08-01T22:12:00.003+02:00

I didn't take that picture, but stole it from here.

I found 27 four leaf clovers in about 5 minutes today, and 2 five leafers. I don't know if this counts as real luck, though, because I asked the current inhabitant of the place where I found these, and he said his parents had planted a four leaf clover plant many, many years ago near the spot where I was finding these.

Anyway, if this is real luck, what in the world am I going to do with so much of it? Will we need it for the trip the United States? That will be a long flight with just me and the two little guys. Will we need it to deal with W's new preschool that starts tomorrow? I think we've already been very lucky to get a place there and it seems like he will have very nice teachers (2 people, a man and a woman) and a very small group (5 kids!!!) for the beginning. What in the world else could I/we use so much luck for? I can think of a few of my silly dreams, which I won't even write here because they are so mundane (and I don't want to jinx them), but c'mon, that's not all going to happen just because of a few silly leaves...But I have to say, everything last year worked out pretty darn well, and I started finding four leaf clovers just after we really decided that we were 100% sure about coming back to Dresden. That fateful day last year, I walked out of the door of the house at 1083 McKimmy Drive and saw that first clover staring up at me, waiting for me to milk all the luck out of it I could. Then I found ten more at various other locations in Michigan and Saxony, at very interesting times. And everything worked out better than I could have imagined! What's next?

New British-American Shop in the Neustadt

2010-07-29T09:24:00.004+02:00

http://beyondtheponddresden.de/

How about that? There is a new shop on Rothenburger Str. 26, run by an American married to a German who's been in Germany for almost twice as long as me! I saw the sign in the window of the still-empty shop a couple weeks ago, and thought, "Hmm, what's this all about?" and happened past yesterday only because the tram stop by my house is not in use right now, so I had to walk two stops. Good thing! It's a neat little shop, with a nice selection of foods and books. It's always funny to stand in front of shelves of American products here, it's like being transported to an American grocery store for a few minutes. She even has a wish list, so if you and a couple other people want something, she'll try to get it. Come on everybody, go sign up for Grape Nuts! I was the first person to ask. I didn't sign up on the list, though, because I will be buying my own in just a few short weeks... We wound up having a nice chat and W scored a new Dr. Seuss book out of the deal. A good stop for all.

Found

2010-07-22T19:26:00.003+02:00

I love finding stuff, and days where I find neat stuff seem to come in clusters. Either I'm finding four leaf clovers left and right, or I find kids' clothes by the donation container or at the free store a few days in a row, or I just find stuff on the street that people put out because they don't want it any more. That is the case with yesterday and today. Yesterday I found some dishes that will be useful because a certain four-year-old in my house helps to put away the dishes and sometimes drops them. And today I found a memory card from a camera, and voyeuristic me was pretty excited to see just what was on there. I had hoped for some documents full of spelling errors or some pornographic photos, but got some pretty normal stuff, like photos and vacation videos in the mountains from 2002. Entertaining nonetheless.

If you're a little bit creepy like me and like to get a glimpse into other people's heads by looking at their junk, then you might also enjoy Found Magazine.

I went sailing today!

2010-07-18T22:10:00.005+02:00

Well, no, I didn't, but "I went to Marga and took some pictures of Art Nouveau architecture!" doesn't sound nearly as exciting and glamorous as sailing. Sailing smacks of having a special striped sailing shirt, boat shoes and a cool anchor tattoo, none of which I have. SK and W were sailing with a friend on Senftenberg Lake, while I took F and walked along the lake about 4 kilometers to Marga, a little suburb built in a circular arrangement in the early 20th century to house the many miners that were needed in the area at the time.

Senftenberg Lake, like the other many lakes in Lower Lusatia, used to be a giant strip mine, but after the mining was all finished, it was decided to flood the mine and make a lake. I like that attitude: take a raped piece of nature and make something nice out of it! Not only is it a lake, but it is all public property surrounding the lake, meaning you can bike on good trails, camp at campgrounds, go for an ice cream, or play at one of the many playgrounds. Or you can sail or do whatever else it is that one does on water (as long as you don’t go to fast, there is a pretty low speed limit).

Back in the early 20^th century is when this all began. At that time, the strip mining was becoming big business, and there just weren’t enough people around to fill all of the jobs. People were brought in from the surrounding states as well as countries to the east of

Germany

. They all needed a place to live, and so Marga was built. This was built as a suburb of Senftenberg, today it is more or less a part of the town. It was designed by a Dresden architect in a circular formation. When you see it in an aerial view, the town looks like a circle, with a ring of trees surrounding it and the market square and church in the center. The residential houses surround this. Historically it is interesting, because a lot of American suburbs were built following the model of this workers’ neighborhood. It really does feel like a suburb, it has everything one needs for daily life in a central place, and the houses are all on quiet little streets, they all have yards and fences, and the streets are curved so that you lose your orientation pretty easily.

A view across the market square in Marga

The thing that really blew me away about this little suburb, however, is that it was completely unified in style, and that style was my absolute favorite architectural style right now, Art Nouveau. Just for kicks yesterday evening while we were planning our trip for today I was trying to think of what I could do in town while the guys were sailing, so I searched for “Art Nouveau Senftenberg” and my good friend Google pointed me in the direction of Marga. This was more than I could have possibly hoped for!

The bakery. I like the wooden elements, often seen on country style Art Nouveau buildings.

The post office, clearly marked by the post horn on the roof.

The restaurant Kaiserkrone, which doesn't look like it's in business.

There were lots of little mining details worked in to the buildings, like this on a doorframe on the Kaiserkrone: "Glück auf!" is the typical miner's greeting, meaning so much as "May luck be with you and bring you back up safely!"

Also on the Kaiserkrone: fantastic stained glass windows. These may even be original, the window frames themselves certainly looked to be original.

The parsonage. This was one of my favorite residential houses in Marga. It was next to the church. The outside of the church was pretty reserved, and unfortunately I didn't have a look inside since there was a service starting just as I was walking past.

Walking back into the center of Senftenberg I also happened past some pretty neat residential houses in the Art Nouveau style. Here in Dresden the Art Nouveau houses have a lot of rounded, smooth, sleek, incredibly graceful decorative elements, and in Senftenberg there were a lot of slightly more boxy elements with more grooves and almost Aztec-looking (at least to me) designs.

This house made my little Art Nouveau loving heart skip a beat. Look at those window frames!

The intertwined roses!

The details of and around the door!

And just one more, this was by the market square in Senftenberg. I almost missed this elephant up at the top of the facade of this house, but then I saw him and was just tickled pink. The guys had fun sailing, I had a great time on my little architectural safari, and at the end we all got together and grilled in our garden. All in all, a great day.

The Greenhouse

2010-07-12T22:36:00.004+02:00

It may sound like a hairbrained idea to put up a greenhouse in the middle of the city where most people don't even have their own yards, but give us a hairbrained idea and we'll do it! I've been writing so many words lately that I decided to put up some pictures again. These greenhouse pictures are kind of old, so the plants are much smaller than they are now, but since I'm too lazy to transfer my newer pictures from the camera right now because the heat is making my brain melt and ooze out of my pores, you'll just have to live with these ones.

There she is, the little greenhouse. To the left you can see the living room window next to which I am sitting right now. The plants were tiny when I took these pictures, the cucumbers are growing out of the window in the roof now.

Tiny cukes!

Here things were getting greener and taller.

Behold! The tomatoes! Some are getting red now.

Rest in peace, first cucumbers. Shortly after this picture was taken, that little red-headed bane of my existence who runs around like a wild animal now that it is summer vacation ripped our first two cucumbers off. Haha little jerk, they weren't quite ripe yet. After the tragic theft, the greenhouse was fortified with a gate. Following its construction, the red-headed beast was heard standing in front of said greenhouse, rattling the gate and saying, "Boah, krass eh, boah, ist das krass." This isn't the freaking soup kitchen, genius, we don't have any handouts here. As my grandfather may have said in this situation: "Who in the hell is that dirty little red-headed son of a bitch in my yard?" But instead, a certain member of my household tore open the window and yelled "What is your problem?" The little beast seemed shocked, but after the window was closed (and my secret window still open) we heard the little monster call us assholes. Regardless, he hasn't come back. Either he is on vacation, or was scared shitless. A Sauer Kraut* can be intimidating!

*see here for explanation

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

2010-07-12T22:21:00.002+02:00

by Dr. Seuss

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street.

And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.
Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.

You can get all hung up in a prickle-ly perch. And your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump, you’re not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.

No! That’s not for you!
Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing. With banner flip-flapping, once more you’ll ride high! Ready for anything under the sky. Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.

And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.

But on you will go though the weather be foul. On you will go though your enemies prowl. On you will go though the Hakken-Kraks howl. Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. On and on you will hike. And I know you’ll hike far and face up to your problems whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

Kid, you’ll move mountains!
So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea, you’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!

Good times and noodle salad

2010-07-08T18:29:00.007+02:00

Mmmm, oh I can't believe it, I just made a pasta salad that tastes like my favorite tomato
mozarella bagel by Thomas! I am thrilled. Today has been quite a day of cooking: for lunch I took the celery I had in the fridge from making a different salad on the weekend (which received massive boos from one member of my household because "the celery is too hard and the leaves get stuck on the roof of your mouth") and whipped up a delicious soup. Call me crazy for cooking soup in this weather, but my kitchen remains amazingly cool even now because it's north facing and shaded by several trees. This soup reminded me of the Chinese Beef Casserole my mom used to make (or maybe still makes, I don't know), which is also heavy on celery, just minus the beef!
Just now I made some italian style pasta salad and can't wait to chow down, because, as I mentioned, it tastes like my absolute favorite food ever made by the bagel man. The tomato mozarella bagel was my main form of sustenance during my first month in Dresden, when I was staying next to Bagel's at the Mondpalast hostel. Even now I live only about a ten minute walk from there, and am so pleased that he is open again during the day, because now if there's crappy weather and we need to get out, I can have a coffee there and W can drink a "mango": he prefers to shorten mango juice to just mango.

Here are the recipes, sorry North Americans for the metric units of measure, but there are lots of good conversion sites online and I am lazy:

Celery Soup

6 oz. finely chopped celery (sticks and leaves, not the root! You can make a good schnitzel out of the root)
1 small onion, finely chopped
6 oz. potato
1/2 oz. unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 1/2 pints vegetable broth
salt
2 tablespoons heavy cream
chopped parsley

Melt the butter in a large pan together with the olive oil and gently fry the onion and celery until soft, about 10 minutes.

Add the vegetable broth and diced potato.

Boil for about 20 minutes, then blend it with your mixer stick (or immersion blender or Purierstab, whatever you want to call it) leaving some chunks. Salt it, throw in the cream, stir it, chop a little parsley and sprinkle it on top to make it pretty.

I doubled this due to my overabundance of celery, so we will be eating celery soup tomorrow too.

Italian Pasta Salad

250 grams noodles (I used fusilli)
200 grams mozzarella (the fresh kind in ball form)
100 grams dried tomatoes
arugula
1 clove of garlic
70 mL olive oil
balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon each pesto, mustard, honey
parmesan
salt and pepper

Cook the noodles and rinse them with cold water.
Wash the arugula and chop it a bit.
Drain the oil from the dried tomatoes and the water from the mozzarella, chop those into about 1 cm cubes.
Mix all this in a large salad bowl, add salt and pepper to taste.
Mix oil, vinegar, garlic (chopped or pressed), pesto, mustard and honey and pour over salad shortly before eating.
Mix salad and garnish with parmesan.
Mmmmm!

For this salad you can also add some ham and pine nuts, I left off the ham since I don't eat the stuff, and forgot the roasted pine nuts after having gone on an expedition to find some! Another note: the arugula in this salad also got massive boos from that special member of my household who also stated that it was "too hard" and picked out every last bit.

BP

2010-07-06T23:19:00.000+02:00

Well, if we can't fix it, we might as well laugh about it.

Happy Birthday, Blog!

2010-06-29T22:25:00.001+02:00

You're five today! We've come a long way, baby.

Is my kid weird?

2010-06-28T16:50:00.002+02:00

On Saturday while we were out for a walk, W., who is four, kept pulling up his AC/DC t-shirt and flashing his belly. Sometimes he would say "Oh, there's a baby in there!" and sometimes he would just show his lovely, slightly rounded, pleasantly smooth, lily-white belly. Who wouldn't want to see a fine belly like that? But then, then he topped himself, doing something I will never forget. While walking past the Mondpalast, a hostel with a bar that has tables outside on the sidewalk as well, he saw a round table surrounded by several chic, made-up young ladies. What did he do? Oh yeah, he flashed that belly. But not only that. He stopped very close to them and their waiter who happened to be by the table at that moment, too, and started snorting like a little bull getting ready to charge. Then he took a couple of steps and repeated the process. All parties involved cracked up.

A little rant, because I love where I live

2010-06-27T17:18:00.003+02:00

I am so sick of people wrinkling their noses about Dresden-Neustadt, where I live, and telling me how awful the Neustadt is. It's loud, it's smelly, there are punks and dog shit everywhere. Yeah, yeah, tell me something I didn't know. Despite all that, I will let you know how I really feel. To exploit my good old American love of the superlative: it's the greatest place in the world.

It is loud here if you are on one of the main streets, sure there's traffic, and often there are people out, talking or grilling or getting together in their garden or living room or in the park. Or right now, they are screaming because of whatever is happening with the soccer game on TV. So if you like your peace and quiet, either go home and leave my neighborhood alone or find a quiet place here, of which there are TONS. But I won't tell you where because you don't care anyway.

It can be smelly, especially in the summer from the grilling (which is a matter of taste if you like that or not) the dog pee and poo all around (which annoys me too) and maybe because of some smelly people. But come on, where don't you have those three elements? Jesus, where I come from we have super smelly Amish people, especially on Fridays in the summer, because they only bathe on Saturdays. I'll tell you what, they smell worse than the punks or the squatters here who don't bathe at all.

And on to the punks. Sure, there are punks around. But if you are polite to them and don't treat them like a total jerk, they will leave you alone too. They used to ask me for change before I had any kids, and I always said that I didn't have any. I did this in a nice way, looked them in the eye, and smiled. Do you know what? They always wished me a nice day. Honestly, not sarcastically. Once I was noticeably pregnant with W., and still lived between two of major punk begging areas, they stopped asking me for money. Since I have had kids and am on the go with my kids most of the time now, they always leave me alone, clear the way if I'm pushing a stroller and are genuinely respectful. Sure, I don't like their dogs, since they are ratty and unpredictable, but have never been bothered or threatened by their dogs, either. It's probably more my own dislike of dogs that gets me riled up in that respect. Honestly, I find the punks to be nicer than a lot of the other people out there on the streets. Small town dork that I am, I find it super cool to live somewhere where there are punks on the street. And a rather affluent American former colleague of mine put it this way, "I like living somewhere where my son can see that there are lots of different people around, and that the punks are not dangerous or scary".

And there's the dog shit, and honestly, nobody likes that. But there are more and more responsible dog owners who take a baggie with them and remove their poo. But there are still lots of jerks who don't.

Then there are all the good things about this neighborhood: the beautiful architecture, the interesting and friendly people, all the kids (I've heard we have the highest birth rate in Dresden, if not in Germany, but can't back that up with any numbers), the openness, the proximity to everything you need or could possibly desire as well as the possibility to get out of the city pretty quickly if you want. I'm sick of hearing how "antisocial" it is around here. I know of lots of other places in Dresden where you can go and see a much worse crowd hanging around the supermarkets, and I'm not talking about Prohlis or Gorbitz. Anyway, I guess what it really comes down to is that I really like this place where I live, I like going out the door and just about every time seeing someone I know, not having to drive to go shopping or to get anywhere at all, it's a neat and dynamic place with so many playgrounds, petting zoos, and kid-friendly cafes that we really can never complain of boredom or running out of things to do. It's a place that breeds and attracts people who are square pegs who don't fit into round holes, and that's just fine here. So enough of my long-windedness. I hate to carry on debates about such matters of personal taste, and even though I may be too polite to say it to your face, the next time you insult my neighborhood, do want to know what I am thinking while you barrage me with insults about my choice of a place to live? Stick it where the sun don't shine, baby.

Delicious tofu bread dip/spread

2010-06-27T16:56:00.002+02:00

In my quest to not be such a lardass, I am trying to eat more delicious healthy foods. At the market by my house every Thursday and Saturday there is a tofu lady who makes and sells all kinds of delicious tofu products--from blocks of tofu, smoked and unsmoked, laced with delicious things like herbs, hazelnuts and chili to scrumptious tofu creams and patties. OK, so the patties are probably not that healthy, as they seem to be deep fried (but they sure do taste good, crammed full of onions and chili!), but I bet the creams are super nutritious and not too likely to continue me down my path of becoming massively fat. Then, I had a stroke of genius and thought, "Hey, those can't be so hard to make!" So I set off on my voyage into the world of creating fun food using tofu this weekend.

Yesterday I rushed off to the organic supermarket before it closed to pick up some silken tofu, since I couldn't find it at the new little organic shop around the corner. Then this morning I took 200 grams of silken tofu, whipped it up with my mixer stick (I guess the proper English name for this handy tool is "immersion blender", but I prefer mixer stick), and then started throwing in tasty chunks of stuff. I thinly sliced one green onion and blended that with my mixer stick, too, then threw in 3 more sliced green onions, as well as a few finely chopped queen olives stuffed with garlic. I added about two teaspoons of granulated vegetable broth to this as seasoning. At first glance, I was very disappointed with the runny consistency, and it didn't taste all that good either. So I put some plastic wrap over the bowl and shoved it in the fridge and hoped for the best. Just now, about six or seven hours later, it has thickened to a nice, dippable consistency and tastes great as a dip with my sunflower and sesame seed bread! Hooray! Now I can make this stuff myself! I don't have to wait until the tofu lady comes back on Thursday! But I do need the patience to wait until my dip is edible...

BRN

2010-06-21T23:55:00.002+02:00

These were just a few of my favorite sights from the Bunte Republik Neustadt street festival this weekend. I only went out to the flea market and the kids' parts of the festival on Saturday morning. Some of the things on offer at the flea market were great, but Talstraße was not what it used to be with all of the great play equipment. It was not so exciting for us, because there some clowns putting on a show. While I am sure they did a great job, W. was scared of them so a departure was necessary. He has seen those clowns before, and they did some slapstick fighting which really upset him. Oh well. I don't like clowns either. When I was a child a Christian clown came up to me at the county fair and told me I was going to go to hell. I think I was nine back then, and since then there are two things I really can't stand. Guess what they are.

The weekend

2010-06-21T23:39:00.004+02:00

This weekend we visited my parents'-in-law for their yearly summerfest. While the kids were off for a walk in the woods, I took the time to explore the functions of my slick new camera! I am not disappointed. Enjoy!

AC/DC!!!

2010-06-21T00:36:00.002+02:00

It's been a heck of a week or so of concerts for me...Last week I saw my old friends from Dude Dude Chick playing at Orange on Kamenzer Str. Even though my friend and I were super tired and almost didn't go to the show after sitting around my house forever on that evening because of the heat and it was Friday, we finally ventured out and didn't regret it. The guys put on a very good, fun show, and we felt like we were 25 again.

Then this past Thursday I attended the Neustadt Guitarreros show at the Scheune. This was the kickoff to the yearly BRN festival here in the Neustadt, more on that later. Back to the band--I've heard of these guys before, the singer is even the brother of a friend and a very good cook of delicious Asian food. Anyway, they pretty much knocked my socks right off. They played cover songs, with Benny singing and 6 guitars! 6! Plus a bass and drums. The sound was HUGE. I'd heard all the songs before, but never like that!

And tonight, well, tonight was the topper. We saw AC/DC in the Ostragehege in Dresden on the stage they had been putting up all week. That was one heck of a giant spectacle. They pulled all the stops, there was a giant flaming train on stage, a giant inflatable Rosie, canons going off, assorted other pyrotechnics and even Hell's Bell, lowered from overhead so the singer could swing on it. To put it mildly, I was impressed with their energy. After being a bit annoyed with the two opening bands who we didn't find so great, AC/DC came on stage and made everything right again. For me, the singer's voice left a little to be desired, but the guitarist was crazy! That guy has so much energy, even with his age he still did all the old tricks and was running around playing like a madman. They don't look so young anymore, but they still can put on one heck of a show. The guitarist stripped down to his AC/DC knickers, and during one song one of the women in the audience even flashed her breasts while she was up on the monitors. The band requested "more titties", but didn't seem to get them. I even got more for my money when a fight nearly broke out by me and a giant security guy came to break the guys up. All the drama and entertainment of a good rock concert was complete!

Holy Birthday Madness!

2010-06-14T00:23:00.005+02:00

Oh boy oh boy oh boy, there are so many birthdays this time of year that I have neglected several so far this month! Like my dad, my niece, a kid we know...

This is Cream and Knuddelhase's mom, Flo!

Above are Cream and Knuddel busy turning one today!

There's one birthday that I wasn't able to forget, since I didn't even know about it. Well, I knew somewhere in my head that the guys would turn one soon, but didn't know exactly when until my friendly bunny caretaker and bunny provider told me on Friday that the bunny birthday party would be today! So there's a lot to celebrate around here! 4 years of W, one year of bunnies (not quite the whole year with us, but close) and...almost one year back in Germany!?! What? Where did the time go? In two weeks is exactly the time one year ago when we packed up whatever belongings we wanted to keep in and on the car, drove across a good portion of North America with a three-year-old, a pregnant woman and a German driver to put the car on a boat and us on a plane in New York. How did we do it? There are a lot of things that I am looking back on that I have done and ask myself, how did I manage that?

Holy cow, and my mom's birthday! It's today, at least it's already today here...not quite there yet. And how did I manage to remember that one?

The Zoo

2010-06-10T21:12:00.003+02:00

With our annual tickets to the Dresden Zoo, we can go there as often as we like and see the animals. Among my favorites are these lovely red birds.

Then there's the stork. When we see him, I am usually required to sing

Auf unsrer Wiese gehet was
Watet durch die Sümpfe
Es hat ein weißes Jäcklein an
Trägt auch rote Strümpfe
Fängt die Frösche schnap wap wap
Klappert lustig klappertiklapp
Wer kann das erraten?

It's a children's song about something standing on my meadow that has a white jacket and red tights on. He catches frogs and says schnap wap wap and makes other funny noises, too. Who knows what it is? A stork!

Here's a guy that really says schnap wap wap and klappertiklapp every darn time I see him. He doesn't seem to have all the cups in the cupboard, as the Germans would say, or I tend to think that he has a screw loose.

The Kattas are among my personal favorites as well, they spring around and are just precious with their long, fluffy tails. One day in the winter one was by the glass, and Wilhelm cuddled him through the glass! That was also quite precious.

Then there's this little guy, the baby orangutan! He is just adorable. The orangutans are super interesting, and I feel kind of bad for them in their tiny cubicles. Hopefully they will have a better place to live when the new monkey habitat is finished. Unfortunately I couldn't get a better picture of him because other friendly zoo visitors kept pushing in front of me to take their own photos with their little cell phone cameras. Oh well. Another day.

The Birthday Party

2010-05-30T22:39:00.007+02:00

Today W turned 4, so we had a party. As always on his birthday, the weather was weird, one minute sun, the next minute rain. Just like last year, we were outside enjoying the sun and our cake, then next thing we knew it was pouring and we were running to rescue the cake and the chairs.

I really like this wrapping paper, but am pretty sure that it can't be politically correct, much like this gift that I considered buying, but finally resisted.

I baked a couple of neat cakes. They were a lot of work, but were fantastically sweet and delicious! The bunny cake is an old and pretty easy classic, but the train cake was new to me and rather time consuming. W wished for a blue bunny cake this year. Last year he had 2 brown bunny cakes, and this year I topped myself, replacing the normal construction paper ears with dyed white chocolate ears!

W's cousin G is 5, and he was very impressed with my big new camera. He really wanted to take some pictures, and fortunately my old camera was lying around, so I hung it around his neck and turned him loose. The above three pictures are a few of his shots. I like his work. This young man may just have a career in photography ahead of him!

A blast from the past: Fabulous San Francisco

2010-05-29T12:05:00.004+02:00

While going through my photographs to put together an exhibition in June, I started looking through our road trip photos from Christmas 2008. I had the best intentions to document our road trip on this blog, but only got up to the scary hotel story we had, and didn't put up too many pictures at all. Since there isn't much exciting stuff going on around here lately, and taking nice pictures has taken a backseat to dealing with two kids, I thought I would put up some old pictures that I haven't shared yet! The one above is a fantastic view of San Francisco from the top of a hill, you can see the adventurous serpentine we had to drive the Jeep up to get there!

While were in San Francisco that Christmas, it was deep winter in Michigan, but pleasantly sunny and mild on the Pacific. We enjoyed a walk on the beach, and even saw tons of these funny little washed up jelly fish! I bet they aren't so funny, though, if you step on one.

Oh, those San Francisco streets!

And of course we also visited China Town. This is a neat, bustling neighborhood, where you feel transported out of the United States. We had a nice lunch, then were chased and cursed at by the waitress, because she thought our tip was too little. She was unfriendly anyway, and despite that, she got an ample tip.

Our day off

2010-05-13T23:02:00.003+02:00

Yesterday we didn't do anything manly for Männertag, the other use of Ascension Day here in Germany. Instead, we did something very unmanly, and visited the kids' great grandmother in Leipzig. In addition to having some very delicious coffee and cake, before the visit we stopped off at the Völkerschlacht Denkmal, a giant monument to the Battle of Nations in 1813 when the Germans beat Napoleon.
Above you can see a picture of it being built back at the beginning of the last century.

One of the many details on the facade near the entrance.

Inside there is a circular crypt with these giant figures.

There is now also a museum, where you can view Napoleon's death mask.
My first fateful trip to Saxony back in 2001 also included a day trip to Leipzig and a visit to the Völkerschlacht Denkmal. A lot has changed there since then. They started charging admission, but the monument is also being renovated, there is now an elevator to go to the first outdoor platform, chain link fence to keep you from jumping, as well as new informational exhibits and a museum.

Later on, we also visited the Wildpark in Leipzig-Connewitz with Great Grandmother. This is a very nice, large park with free admission! It was originally opened in 1906 with some deer, later expanded, and now is a huge place with many animals which live in Europe, as well as some playgrounds and restaurants. There we saw this lovely lynx.

Of course there were some obligatory deer, as well as tons of wild garlic! Grandmother asked us if we liked wild garlic, and said we could collect some even though it is forbidden. When we got to a place on the trail where there were no other visitors, she said "Now you can collect some!"
This may sound far-fetched, but whole areas of the park smelled like garlic from this wild herb!

We have a hedgehog in our garden!!!

2010-05-11T06:42:00.003+02:00

We have a little spiky friend living in our garden! I spotted him (or probably her) at about 6:00 this morning, rushing between the plants and the corner where our lawn furniture is stacked. It seems the little guy is building a nest using leaves from our plants. We also contributed some bunny hay to the effort, and the hedgehog seemed to be in seventh heaven. I suspect (and hope!) our little friend may be building a nest in this sheltered corner of our garden to have babies.

Upon further reading about hedgehogs, it seems that this little guy will be quite a useful friend in our garden. Apparently, hedgehogs love to chow down on insects, meaning that they can be an effective form of pest control. According to Wikipedia, the British even try to lure hedgehogs into their gardens for this purpose. And we didn't even have to try! We must have a superiorly hedgehog-friendly garden.

The only problem that comes with the little guy are the cats. The cats have returned to watch the hedgehog. They had finally learned, after many a bucket of water over the head, that they are not welcome at our house and not welcome to use our sandbox as a toilet. But now they are mesmerized by the new guy toddling back and forth between nest and plants. Perhaps Wilhelm will chase them away, yesterday he kicked a cat on the street (without any encouragement) for no apparent reason.

In other animal news, we spotted a precious squirrel in the Großer Garten behind the zoo last week. I adore the sleek red European squirrels.

A little trip to Polenztal

2010-04-25T19:54:00.003+02:00

Yesterday we visited Polenztal in the Saxon Switzerland, a place we seem to go every year in the spring. I visited this place one time with English Club, later on we discovered that there is tons of wild garlic and watercress there, so we started to come each year. We've never eaten the wild garlic, since its leaves look just like those of lilies of the valley, which are poisonous, so we are always a bit scared. And though some people are scared of getting tapeworms from watercress, we eat it and have never gotten any tapeworms (that we know of). One year we even took some watercress and planted it on our balcony. Yesterday we had hoped to take some watercress and some wild garlic, but were scared for two reasons: too many hikers, since taking plants is forbidden, and dying from accidentally eating lilies of the valley.

Instead of stealing plants, I entertained myself by taking pictures with my fun new camera. I have so much zoom that I can just stand anywhere and zoom into what I want to take a picture of! What a great contribution to my increasing laziness!

I also had fun testing out the panorama function on the camera. I particularly like this picture. The treetops are a bit overexposed, but I am quite happy with the results anyway.

Instead of eating wild garlic and watercress, we stopped for a snack at the Waltersdorf Mill. This is a funny old place that serves snacks in an open-air picnic atmosphere. The snacks are very reasonably priced, even if there isn't much of a selection. The boys had wieners, I had some cake and coffee, but it didn't look so photogenic.

New Camera!

2010-04-25T07:05:00.003+02:00

Hooray! My new camera was in stock at the store yesterday, so I hopped on my bike, rode up to the store and bought it! I have not moved on to the hallowed ranks of SLR photography yet, so purchased myself yet another bridge camera. It has 12.1 megapixels and a whopping 26x zoom! It is a major move up from my 6-year-old Kodak with 4 megapixels and 10x zoom. Plus it has all the manual functions, so I can pretend to be a real, skilled photographer.
Anyway, I was playing with my new toy yesterday and reading the user's manual to figure out how everything works, and it seriously blew me away with all of its neat functions. I can zoom into the cobblestones of my street from my window and see the lip marks on the cigarette butts in the cracks between the stones!
This is a fun distraction after the stress of the last weeks. Did I mention how mean and evil the Kindergarten was? Wilhelm doesn't go there any more, and neither of my kids will ever go to a state-run Kindergarten ever again. Oh, yeah, and there's other stuff. But in the end, all of this stuff is not so bad. We are learning from it, and the way I see it, life is just a big game of Monopoly. I just landed on the wrong square and have to pay some money, but I'll pass Go and collect my 200 EUR soon enough. Later I will buy Park Place!

The Xenophobic Foreigner Office

2010-04-23T20:16:00.002+02:00

Today I had to pay a visit to my local Foreigner Office or Immigration Office or whatever you want to call the Ausländerbehörde in English to clarify some things regarding my residency permit. When my number was called, a small Chinese woman rushed in before me, and the official called me in as well. The Chinese lady had a quick question, and when she walked out, the friendly official sighed and asked me to please close the door, because "The Chinese never close doors! They leave all the doors open! I have drafts in here all day! You'd think they don't have any doors in China!" Then when I explained my problem, the official was surprised, because German children living outside Germany do not receive Kindergeld, the money paid by the government to each child living in Germany. She looked at my kids and said, "Those are German children! Why don't they receive Kindergeld when they live outside Germany? We pay it to Turkish children! That is outrageous!" That was my most amusing visit to the Immigration Office ever! I was a little sad because I didn't get to see the Frau I usually see, but this one was ten times better.

Hidden Places

2010-04-17T23:32:00.003+02:00

All right, these places aren't hidden, they are right out there where you can see them, but they are tucked into places where you don't always notice them.

The first one is the sad one:

The stumbling block at Bautzner Str. 20. The first time I saw this I was on my way somewhere and just thought, "huh, why is there a golden block in the sidewalk?" Then I saw an article in the paper about these Stolpersteine planted throughout Dresden. So I went back for another look. This is a project by an artist and has been done in a number of cities throughout Germany. These small, shiny stones are engraved with the name or names of people who were deported and died in concentration camps during the Second World War. They are installed in the sidewalk in front of the address where these people lived. This little stone makes me sadder and sadder every time I walk over it. Each time the history of what went on where I live now as a foreigner in a cosmopolitan city comes more to life.

This is one of those neat tucked away surprises that I always forget about. It's the back side of the house on the corner of Böhmische Str. and Rothenburger Str. where Hebeda's is located. You can go through a passage here to the Nordbad pool or to the Neustädter Diechl to get some delicious German food. I don't know how long it has been painted like this, but I think it has been for a while. It's just one of those things that can brighten your day when you see it, because it's like a little secret that's just waiting for a pedestrian to come appreciate it.

Lola

2010-04-13T17:00:00.002+02:00

There is a little girl at Wilhelm's kindergarten and her name is Lola. She is a very nice little girl, also has a little brother, and likes to help Wilhelm with his jacket and things like that. She was one of the first ones right at the beginning to always come and help him get his jacket off when he was new. Anyway, I only found out her name last week when Wilhelm was telling me something about her. And now, somehow or other, the song Lola has found its way into our constant playlist. Her mom even looks like someone who might know this song, but I can't imagine she knows what it says. Anyway, let's see what the Kinks have to say about Lola...

I met her in a club down in old Soho
where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Cherry Cola
C-O-L-A Cola.
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance.
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said, "Lola"
L-O-L-A Lola, lo lo lo Lola
Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy,
but when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
Oh my Lola, lo lo lo Lola, lo lo lo Lola
Well, I'm not dumb but I can't understand
why she walks like a woman and talks like a man
Oh my Lola, lo lo lo Lola, lo lo lo Lola
Well, we drank champagne and danced all night,
under electric candlelight,
she picked me up and sat me on her knee,
She said, "Little boy won't you come home with me?"
Well, I'm not the world's most passionate guy,
but when I looked in her eyes,
I almost fell for my Lola,
Lo lo lo Lola, lo lo lo Lola
I pushed her away. I walked to the door.
I fell to the floor. I got down on my knees.
I looked at her, and she at me.
Well that's the way that I want it to stay.
I always want it to be that way for my Lola.
Lo lo lo Lola.
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls.
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world,
except for Lola. Lo lo lo Lola. Lo lo lo Lola.
Well I left home just a week ago,
and I never ever kissed a woman before,
Lola smiled and took me by the hand,
she said, "Little boy, gonna make you a man."
Well I'm not the world's most masculine man,
but I know what I am and that I'm a man,
so is Lola.
Lo lo lo Lola. Lo lo lo Lola.