When the husband is away...

Ha, just kidding. And I promise that in this post there will be no mention of supposed "dangerous" activities because I didn't participate in any, ok?

Anyway, Jeremy is in Ghent, Belgium, right now at another science conference. This time he is giving a new talk and with fancy animated powerpoint slides. I'm quite sad to report that he has not yet found where the Belgians are keeping the good french fries. Come on, people!! When I was working in Liège last year, I was so heartily disappointed by the wan, tasteless fries that I thought the delicious ones were surely hiding in the north of the country (Liège is in the French-speaking south and Ghent is in the Flemish north). But if we cannot find those mythical Belgian frites, then we will be forced to conclude that they are an American delicacy dressed in foreign clothes, like Chinese food. So far, the best "frites" are to be had on 7th St and 2nd Ave in NYC.

I'll join him tomorrow evening for the frite hunt! Putting aside ruminations of tasty potatoes for a moment, the city is supposed to be very beautiful. We are staying in a converted 13th century monastery! Here is a little taste of the Gothic craziness from Google Images:












The past week has brought pretty gorgeous, warm weather to Cologne, and I have been taking a few afternoons a week to go on long bike rides. It is amazing how fast you leave the city here and wind up either in industrial wasteland (à la Queens) or suburbia. I did find an interesting café or two and the Belgian supermarket (Belgium again! My goodness, that tiny country is everywhere) on my jaunts.

Has everyone seen the movie Juno? And The Namesake? Both are completely brilliant.

And finally-- Karen!! I forgot to go to the crypt in Paris! I will have to remember next time.

Die seltsame Welt der Mitfahrgelegenheit

Or, the strange world of the German Ride-Share.

You can pay lots of money and sit in the civilized, non-awkward environment of the train where you can go to the bathroom whenever you want (even if it is a mite stinky now and then), or you can save your money and be crammed into a car with college-age strangers and alternately hurdle and crawl on the Autobahn. The choice is yours. Lately, I have been trying to save by taking the crammed car method-- this Friday, I made a quick trip to Frankfurt (2 hours away, 100€ with the train, 25€ with the ride-share) in order to see a show of my friend Brian Novatny's paintings in Galerie Schuster (their website is a little wonky right now).
On the way from Cologne to Frankfurt, I arranged a ride with a guy named "Jens" in a silver Saab. Because I stink at reognizing cars (although I now know that the Saab hood ornament conveniently says "Saab"), I was asking every guy with a Silver car if he was Jens. This is especially embarrassing if you do it 5 times. Anyway, the real Jens finally showed up and I was stuffed into the car with 4 other people. The first 5 minutes pass and nobody speaks to anyone else. The silence is oppressive, so I turn to the girl next to me and ask her name. We strike up a little conversation (in German-- yay! I still can't get over being able to speak) because she used to study ballet at lot, etc, etc. We chat off and on during the 2 hour ride, but we are the only people talking in the car. There was also a girl sitting on my other side in the car, but I never spoke to her because after about a half an hour it seemed too weird to strike up a conversation.

Frankfurt is beautiful-- although I only saw the area around the river:


On the way back, I was in a car with only two other people (a different car, you book each way separately) who apparently took quite a shine to each other. I have really never felt more invisible in my life. But that was ok-- I sat in the back and worked on my knitting, and they dropped me off right outside my house.



It is finally kind of hot here in Cologne-- oooh! 80 degrees! So, inspired by my beloved Thalys meal, I made a Salade Niçoise:

I make it in the simplest way possible-- boil the potatoes and then use the same water to cook the beans, buy hardboiled eggs from the grocery store (I have gotten over my aversion to purchasing already boiled eggs), chop up the other veggies, dump the tuna out of a can, and make a quick vinagrette. OK, so it does require a lot of steps, but just look how pretty!







And Jeremy ate it all up.











Our bountiful harvest has begun-- just look at those precious little 'maters.

The coolest cities in Europe

I have to admit that I am rather partial to Berlin and Paris, so I was so happy to go to both of those cities last week to work on some baroque dancing!

I went to Berlin to work with Klaus Abromeit on the grotesque style of the 18th c. Grotesque dance can be described as "extreme exaggeration and contortion, acrobatic"-- like what ballet is today!

To get to Berlin, I took what they call here "mitfahrengelegenheit" or organized hitchhiking. There is an internet site where you can see who is driving from a certain city to another city, and then you call the person to pay for a spot in their car. It is soooo much cheaper than the train, especially to a popular place like Berlin. I was in a car with 3 college-age boys, one of whom was Belgian and just got back from a trip to China. He was there doing some work for an Agricultural Engineering degree, but the bureaucracy in China was so horrible that he didn't get anything done. The trip was fine, except it took us 6 hours to get there (compared with 4 hours on the train).

In Berlin, I was sleeping in Klaus's artist studio-- that was a blast. You had to wash the dishes in the bathroom sink, crouch in the bath tub to take a shower, and the kitchen had a fabulous red 50's refrigerator and a hot plate for making coffee. My baroque dance friends took me to the most adorable old bar near the studio (Chuckie and Elaina watch out!), and the whole night the bartender called me the "amerikanerin" and decorated our table with an American flag stuck in an old beer bottle. People of a certain age in Berlin really and truly love the Americans. We also went to a fish restaurant where you can eat tiny deep-fried sardines like french fries.

After all that, I came back to Cologne early on the train, watered the plants, and left the same evening for Paris. Now, to go to Paris, you take the Thalys train (not Die Bahn) which always makes me so happy. This time, the 1st class tickets were cheaper than the 2nd class, so I traveled in style. They served dinner, too-- Salade Niçoise!

I went to Paris to work on elements of the late 18th c. style... In Paris I was staying at a friend of a friend's house in Montematre. I ate dinner in the neighborhood a couple of nights-- the most fabulous Rabbit in Fig Sauce and Duck in Blackberry Sauce (fruit sauce season!) at this tiny local restaurant that was not expensive. I didn't see any monuments this time, except for the Sacre Cour, but mostly walked around getting lost and seeing neighborhoods far off the tourist track.

Horray for the Reasonable Germans

After my flitting about Europe last week (more in the next post!), I came home to a strange bill-- 102 euros for taking three ballet classes in Göttingen when I was working there this spring!! See, I had found a place to take ballet, but it was kind of like a gym that offered ballet classes, so this bill was to become a member of the gym. As you can imagine, I really do not want to be a member of some crappy gym in a town 3 hours away by train. I called the gym, expecting to argue and cry and switch to speaking English, but the secretary very simply said, "Oh, you only took 3 classes and live in Köln? I'll just erase the charges for you." Whoa.

I just flew in from Africa, and boy are my arms tired, or "I went all the way to Africa, and all I got was this stupid malaria

I'm pretty sure that the second part of the title is not true, but I am feeling a bit under the weather, so apologies if this entry is not as sparkling as you have come to expect.
Anyway, over the past week or so I was visiting South Africa in conjunction with attending the International Congress on Entomology in Durban. It was a bit of a strange experience, as I do not consider myself so much of an entomologist, but there were some interesting things. For example, there was a talk about polydnaviruses in parasitic wasps (I hate to keep harping on how cool these animals are, but I can't help it). The viruses are integrated into the wasp genome, and can't replicate on their own, but when a wasp stings its host, the virus particles made in the wasp reproductive tract go along with the venom and the egg. Once inside the host, the virus expresses genes that basically shut down the host immune system, allowing the egg to grow comfortably into a larva.
Another cool thing was there was a special session on the Mantophasmatodea (don't ask), which were "discovered" in 2002, and are the first new order of insects described in almos 100 years. Conveniently they are native to Southern Africa so at the end of the session, the chair invited people to come take a look at a live example. There was a lot of nerdy jostling to get a look at the creature, which in the end was pretty underwhelming.





I took a day off from the conference to go on a game drive in Hluhluwe park with some colleagues. We managed to see four of the "Big five", a kind of annoying term for the animals are hardest to spot, or are big or something. (Wikipedia tells me that the term comes from the 5 animals that are most difficult to hunt on foot. Fine.) We saw the cape buffalo, white rhino, elephants, and leopard, only missing lions. You can check out the pictures on the picture page link at the top left. My personal favorites were the warthogs. It was also cool to see cheetahs, I wonder why the are not hard enough to hunt to be included in the big 5? They're fast, right?
After the conference, I went to Johannesburg. For anyone wanting to go to South Africa, I will let you know that this is not a big tourist destination. However, we did manage to go to a cool place outside of the city (by "cab", the journey was an adventure in itself) called the sterkfontein caverns, where they have found several Australopithecine skeletons. Also went to the Apartheid museum, which was also pretty eye opening.

New Inspiration

I said I was going to infect pop with baroque, but it appears that the French have already done this-- and the infection is kind of oozing.

May I present to you, Le Roi Soleil!

totally professional

You may not know, but the past few months I have been really working like mad to get more dance work here in Cologne. This means wading through acres of German to try to figure out which dance festivals and residencies I can apply for and sizing up everyone I meet for performance possibilities. Some of it has paid off!

The first thing is that I am choreographing a pop music video! The shooting keeps getting delayed, but I really think this thing will happen end of July/early August. The artist is a local Cologne guy, and his name (and the name of the band) is Roman. I'm making 3 different dances about 30 seconds each-- one athletic modern sequence, one sexy Cabaret sequence, and one contredanse. That's right, baroque is going to infect pop!

Here is the fabulous Roman demo from youtube:



My friend Beate from ballet class-- who just happens to be a professional baroque flute player!-- and I met with two other musicians (viola de gamba and theorbo/baroque guitar) this morning to work out what kind of show we can put together. I was dancing around this couple's living room, and it was rockin'. We are going to try to get something off the ground this fall.

And I'm going to Berlin July 10-15 and Paris July 15-19 to work on more baroque stuff...

Yay!

There is a baby in the family!!

Jeremy's brother Kris and his wife Stephanie had a baby this afternoon! Mr. Benjamin Philip Lynch. Check out their blog on the side for up-to-the-minute pictures and a squealing video. I cannot believe they were blogging during this process (sooo much more dedicated than I am), but I am grateful.

We are totally ready to be Crazy Aunt Sarah and Wacky Uncle Jeremy.

Random Events, plus Gay-Pride

Hallo faithful readers!

Jeremy is in Durban, South Africa this very second. He's at an embryology conference as a fancy-pants special speaker.

He's been gone only 24 hours, but I think I have already used my time somewhat wisely. Last night, I went with my friend Beate to a harpsichord concert and met quite a few adorable young baroque kids. They were all flabbergasted by the idea of baroque dance, so it looks like I should really petition the Musikhochschule into letting me teach those impressionable minds the proper way to do the minuet.

This morning, I realized it was the Christopher Street Parade day (aka Gay Pride, named after the street in NYC), so I hopped on my bike to check it out. It was, I'll admit, mostly like gay Pride everywhere-- disco techno music, rainbows, plentiful sequins, wacky baroque costumes that make me totally jealous, feathers à la Rio, and chaps-- but with a few charming kölsch additions. I should just realize that every big event in Cologne will have Karneval songs and groups of people dressed in red and white (the colors of our fair city). Also, there were 2 fabulous drag queens dressed as Saint Gereon and Saint Ursula. Saint Ursula, as you may recall, along with her entourage of 10,000 virgins, saved the city of Cologne during a seige by the barbarians by sailing up the Rhein and getting slaughtered. The barbarians' blood lust was sated and they returned from whence they came.













My other favorite float was from Ikea-- "Leb mit wem du willst!" (Live with who you want!). They were throwing tablecloths and kazoos into the crowd.

There were a few dance teams, but I couldn't see them because I am a midget. Too bad.