Final Kastanien Update

I now have it from a German authority that the 'chestnuts' that we gathered in the park are, in fact, poison.

When it rains....

Is it just me, or are the Swiss now totally insane?

Is it only because I am now aware of the craziness of the Swiss that I am seeing evidence everywhere?

Sometimes it pays to poop around on the internet.

Another disappointment for me-- when I work in Switzerland next month, I won't be able to feast on human breast milk.

Kastanien Update

I know, it was heartily disappointing not to be able to scavenge food from the park, but Jeremy and I are both now agreed that the whole chestnut business is too much of a pain. When he came home last night, I had roasted the suckers for an additional half an hour to try to take away the bitter flavor. I gave my darling husband a crack at peeling the horrid nuts, but he also recoiled in disgust at the evil taste. Hmmmm. I think grilling may be the best way... with plenty of kölsch, naturally. These nuts were so bitter, that they made everything else taste horribly sweet-- like if you eat too much artichoke.

By the way, as we search for the best and cheapest flights home for Christmas, we are running into the dismaying problem of flights from Germany to America suddenly discontinuing after November. Of course, it must be the economy, stupid. We may have to take a boat.

Ich hasse diese verdammte Kastanien;

or, I hate these damned chestnuts.

Oh, how they mock me with their dark, shiny, wooden exteriors (who doesn't love shiny dark wooden things?) How they call to me with their siren song of chestnut chocolate cake!

Ok, so, it is indeed difficult to be Nature Girl when you have no idea what you are doing. After roasting the chestnuts in the oven, I struggled to peel one, and then I tasted it. NOOOOOO! It tasted really bitter. This led to a panic that we had collected horse chestnuts, but a Wikipedia search only confused me because the true chestnuts and the horse chestnuts looked REALLY similar, AND it said that the taste of raw chestnuts can be "astringent". I was somewhat buoyed by Jeremy's claim that he ate chestnuts from the park (without dying) two years ago by grilling them with his friends. But did he eat from that tree? Could they have mixed horse chestnut trees and true chestnut trees in the park (ooooh, that is evil)? I then tried another peeling method, but the horridly bitter taste in my mouth really took the zap out of the impending hour of manual labor, so I gave up. I just got over being a little sick, I don't feel like have food poisoning in the same week.

Kastanien!

Ok, so after all that excitement last weekend in which I didn't really participate because I didn't understand what all was happening until it was too late, I managed to become ill. I think it might be because the heat in our apartment is not yet on coupled with the fact that Jeremy and I stayed out really late on Saturday chatting it up in our own special German/English cocktail with the cool cats at the Indonesian restaurant near the movie theater where we saw "Tropic Thunder". Ahem. I have been in bed watching the Simpsons for hours, and perhaps my mind is a bit soft-- the perfect moment to compose a blog entry, no?

Which brings me to the curious title of this entry: Chestnuts! This weekend we plucked a few kilos off the grass at the Volksgarten park, and I am still trying to decide what to do with them. I wanted to make this kind of chestnut dessert puree, but now the temptations of chestnut soup, red cabbage with chestnuts, or chestnut chocolate cake are calling out to me. And, thanks to the wonder of the internet, I now know that these babies have to be used fast! They don't keep so long, especially if there is no room in your shoebox freezer because it is completely full of frost. Just moments ago I was tempted by a recipe from the middle ages for "Chicken Broth with Chestnuts" that calls for (besides the aforementioned ingredients) chicken livers, a hard boiled egg, ginger, nutmeg, cardamon, cinnamon, saffron, and cayenne pepper. Whoa.

So they don't like Nazis in Cologne...

I'll start with something light:

I WON at Ping Pong Thursday!!! It was 20-20, and then I made 2 points in a row. Oh, it is so on now! Of course, yesterday I lost 3 games in a row, but no one can take away my glorious victory.

I also had to buy a new bike yesterday. The blue goo problem was not fixed by changing the inner tube (I know how to do that now! Yay!)... Two completely flat tires (complete with hearing the air escape in a cartoon-like sound effect) in 2 weeks seems to point to a more systemic problem. My new used bike is green and says 'Hercules' on the side. You can call her Madam Hercules, the Incredible Bike.


Now for the serious news:

On Saturday in Köln was the "Anti-Islam Conference" in which people were supposed to be coming from France, Italy, Grest Britian, and other parts of Germany in order to protest the building of a mosque in Köln. Naturally, this is causing a wave of counter-protests, which were more popular than the "Conference" (Gott sei Dank). I'm hearing a lot of words like "Rassismus" and "Faschismus". On Friday I saw tons of police and even a few tanks on the street.

CNN has done a story on the demonstrations:


To give you a little more information, at the beginning the demonstrators are saying "Nazis Raus" or "Nazis Out". It is, to my knowledge, illegal to build anything that is taller than the Cathedral now. I personally think that they should of course build the mosque, but that one should respect the cultural history of Germany and not make the minarets taller than the spires of the Cathedral.

Also, my friend Beate lives very close to Heumarkt, and could not get back home last night (she had to teach in another town during the day) because the police told her people were throwing stones.

The Odd and the End

Hello folks! I am finding it hard to be interesting every week...

We are basically just plugging away at our respective careers here in Cologne. Jeremy, as you know, is super fancy, and maybe if you ask him real nice, he will explain what he is doing himself. I am going to ballet class more or less everyday, working on the show for February (this entails a lot of jumping around in the apartment and talking to myself), riding my bike to the grocery store twice a week, etc., etc., etc. All of this routine seems so appropriate in the fall, no?

Anyway, here is a picture of some knitting that I finished in April from the yummy sock yarn Karen gave me:
Now it is cold enough to wear them again, and my calves are so happy to be coated in wool. As you can see, I tried to be a little fancy with my lacey-seam design.

Right now, I am learning fair isle knitting- it's fun!






I also feel it is my duty to tell everyone about the wondrous joy that is shopping at etsy.
It's a site where people sell their handmade and unbelievably cool items (silkscreen t-shirts, pottery, art prints, jewelry, etc). I've bought presents for people on the site three times, and every experience has been great. This last time, I requested that the price not be included in the box because it was a birthday gift, and the artist emailed me to ask if I wanted a hand-written note included! What service! Vive le reverse industrial revolution!

My German Dopplegänger better shape up

I had a meeting on Tuesday for Tanzhautnah (that class I am teaching in October) along with all the people dancing and teaching in the festival this year. Oy, my German was so bad that night-- all mispronounced words and forgetting what crazy verb I had to stick at the end of the sentence. NOOOOOOO! Plus, I had to explain in German what a contredanse class is and why it is so fun, and I can barely do that in English. The best I could come up with is 'folk dance', 'square dance', 'two lines', 'jumpy', and 'pas de bouree'. Some perople did seem pretty interested in baroque dance anyway, as much as they could understand from my mangled German.

It also seems that the German Sarah Edgar still does not know how to take the subway. I mastered the NYC subway in about 2 months, but since I ride my bike all the time, the trains here are still a bit of a mystery. I did manage to memorize the number of the line that passes by my apartment, but I still get confused about the direction. That means that since my bike is currently a little under the weather (blue stuff was gushing out of the tire when I tried to put more air in it... not a good sign, eh?), I took TWO wrong trains today, and got lost while walking. Luckily I walked in a big (half an hour) circle, and could start again from the beginning.

By the way, Jeremy is doing fantastic with all the science. He's such a fancy pants that he is giving a talk at Cambridge in a couple of weeks. Yay!

Ping

Pong!

Jeremy and I are now avid ping-pong players. Every day, I would ride past the tables in the park, and watch the kids chasing their tiny plastic ball as it rolls into the path of my oncoming bike. Now we are the ones dodging bikes! I have finally found a sport that I can kind of play-- it's exhilarating! Of course, I haven't won a game against Jeremy yet, but this is only a matter of time. Although he did say that as I improve, he also improves, so it may be an ever-retreating fantasy. I will just be content to bask in the joy of improving my hand/eye coordination, in that case.

Last weekend, Jeremy and I went to my friend Roman's studio (the guy I am still supposed to make a video with... apparently these things take forever) to provide audience support while they taped a youtube video. It was a glimpse inside how a band works... pretty fascinating. Here are the two videos they put up:



This one led to discussions of the "kitsch gland".

My German Döpplegänger...

is me!

I'm teaching a contredance class at a modern dance festival, TANZhautnah, in Cologne this October. It remains to be seen whether I will actually be paid for this endeavor, or if bringing baroque to all those modern kids will be its own reward. I just saw that they put up info about the classes, and thought ya'll might like to see me all German-ized.

Click here, then scroll down to "Kontratänze aus dem 18. Jahrhundert" and you can even click on "Infos zum Workshop" to see the description and bio that I wrote all by myself (and only needed 3 different people to correct).