Dairy Disaster

In the last two weeks I have had a couple of dairy disasters. Bizarre.
Last week, it was very windy, and I was going home on my bike with the groceries safely (I thought) tucked into the string bag I made. I stopped at the bank machine to get out some money, and of course, my bike fell over, spilling everything. The milk opened and a pool of white liquid collected on the sidewalk. I had to walk the bike home with the offending carton of milk in one hand.

Two days ago, I was once again going home from the supermarket with all my
stuff safely tucked away in my string bag (will I never learn?), and as I climbed the stairs to my apartment, I noticed strange white drips following me. I searched through the bag and drew out the offending container of cream (they put it in plastic cup with a foil lid)-- it had gotten punctured on my bike ride home. I continued a little less merrily up the stairs mumbling under my breath about stupid German packaging, but when I got to my apartment, I noticed there was ANOTHER trail of cream!! I had bought two containers (I was making a bad, bad cake) and they were BOTH punctured! So, now I took off my coat, grabbed the paper towels and Meister Proper (or Mr. Clean to you Americans), and set off to clean EVERY STAIR in the building. Naturally I was wearing a sweater that I had "re-designed" to have a plunging V in the back. Why not? After two floors of hands-and-knees stair cleaning, I remember that I had forgotten something. That's right, the keys to the apartment. So, after I finished cleaning all
the cream off the stairs, I had to walk to Jeremy's laboratory-- without a coat, without any money or identification-- to get his keys. Nice guy that he is, he walked back with me and let me wear his coat.
Of course, today I feel like I'm getting a fric-fracking cold.

Bits of Questionable Interest

First of all, I have to remind myself to point out to those folks at home the strange German things that may be interesting. However, now that we have lived here for a year and a half (!), things no longer seem so strange... But one thing you have surely never seen, unless you've been in an old German governmental building (like the Volkshochschule or the Auslanderamt) are the crazy elevators. In these buildings, there are usually two elevators-- one up and one down. They are constantly moving, have no doors, and when you want to use the elevator, you just jump on! These things are a little bit scary to me (are they insane? jumping on an elevator??), so I always take the stairs. Another thing is the German habit of staring. A fellow Auslander pointed this out to me, and now I notice everyone doing it. It's not rude, they just don't have that aversion to looking people full in the face for several seconds at a time. I have to admit that I did notice this when we first moved here, but I thought it was just because I dress funny.

Tomorrow we are taking part in another Robert Burns Night, the fabulous Scottish holiday where everyone reads poems out loud and eats haggis. Oh, man, my mouth is watering just thinking about it. (really! Haggis is delicious! You should try it!!). Jeremy was trying to discourage me from reading anything this year-- ha, just try and stop me-- because last year I read both To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell and Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara. I did manage to restrain myself from also reading T.S Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Hee hee. Maybe this year I will do Shakespeare's Sonnet #147 ("for I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright/ who art black as hell, and dark as night" It was a great inspiration in my "Armida") or something funny by Roald Dahl.

And Karneval starts next week! Slightly less literary, but I think it will be fun. Ummm, I hope it will be fun. If you haven't read Jeremy's excellent, all-encompassing entry last year for this event, I will inform you that (to an American) Karneval is lot like Halloween but with more drinking and less scary pretense (although I think plenty of scary things happen, just not with witches and goblins). The thing lasts FIVE DAYS, and the whole city closes down. No school (not even my German class or ballet!), no work, and I fear the grocery stores are also closed most of the time. We are going to have some fun stocking up on food with the rest of the city before the whole thing kicks off next Thursday.

German Class Home Renovation Extravaganza

We finally tried to sort-of in some way make this crazy German apartment more of a home. Right after New Year's I made it my mission to slap paint on the walls and cover up the weird spot in the wall (the hanging fabric is very clever, no?). That horrifying light is still there, but we have decided that we are too chicken to do anything electrical. With time...

We both love it, and when I am working at home, it is much more cheery.

On Jan. 7th I started my German class, and I am so sad that I haven't been able to do it earlier! It is bizarrely fun-- it feels a little like a very international 2nd grade. Today we were talking about food, the food pyramid, etc (along with sentence constructions that second graders would probably already know, but feel very important and difficult to me). I sit between a girl from Iraq and a woman from Turkey, and Mexico, Morocco, Afghanistan, Khazakstan, Pakistan, Latvia, Poland, and Nigeria are all represented. I think the class is especially funny because while teaching language, the book is also trying to integrate everyone into German society (family life, carnival and the Berlin Love Parade: girls with purple hair, hotel customs, etc.). In the meantime, I get to satisfy my voracious appetite for learning about other cultures because the teacher asks everyone how things are done in their home countries. All in German!

I'm already starting to see some results-- I have been blushing and stammering less when speaking to strangers! Even though I still make about a million grammer mistakes a second.

Jeremy's heading off to Bavaria tomorrow for a couple of days to give a talk. What a guy.

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Hi everyone!
Sorry, I have been so blog-lazy. I promise in the next few days to write a scintillating post about my German class, our apartment renovations, and any other new strange experiences that I think you might like. My excuse is that I've been writing an application to do a choreographic residency in nearby Essen (thankfully in English!).

Bis Später!

Paris noch mal

Happy New Year and Alles Gute!

Jeremy and I made a little trip to Paris last week to see Daria and Sue and revel in the fatty goodness of the City of Lights. I went a bit wild with the goose and duck pâtés.

We stayed in the dorm room of our friend from Cologne who is now doing a post-doc in Paris-- he was spending Christmas with his family in Holland. That left us with enough money to fund my burgeoning pâté habit.



The weather was pretty fabulous, cold enough to eat roasted chestnuts but warm enough to walk around. We only managed to cover about a third of the city-- the Louve (yay! baroque paintings and sculptures!), Montmartre, Montparnasse, the Hotel de Ville, Latin Quarter, etc. In between seeing the sights we played Playmobile and "Hide the Sock" (exactly as advertised) with Daria and, of course, ate disturbing amounts of pâté. Washed down with incredible hot chocolate.

Because it was almost New Year's Eve, (I think this is why) we saw oyster sellers on the streets! I was so tempted to get some to bring back to Germany, but I have no idea how to open them. Plus, they are not pâté, which is so very easy to bring back. So, we didn't sample the oysters, but instead ate some yummy bullots, a kind of snail that you pull out of the shell with a tiny long fork and dip in lemony mayonnaise.



If you look at the pictures, you may notice a preponderance of artistic behinds. All I have to say is, from Boucher to Falconet, nobody constructs a sumptious derrière like the French!

And Jeremy rode the pig on the carousel.