The latest from here

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!