Here come the Weinachtsmarkts!

Here in Germany, we really have no Christmas 'brake' holidays-- no Halloween, no Thanksgiving (sigh), and All Saints' Day doesn't really do the job.

And so, they are starting to build the Christmas Markets in the public squares! I love the Christmas Markets- you hang around outside with piping hot spiced wine (glühwein) looking at the lights and shops while eating food that is hideously unhealthy.

Things have been a wee bit Christmas-y around here since the beginning of October, when the grocery stores began stocking the candy and stollen and chocolate Advent calendars and pine wreaths. Oh, and speaking of Advent calendars, I saw one the other day with 24 cans of BEER (Kölsch, naturally) tucked inside the tiny doors. Whoa.


Here's what the Gaffel Brewery has to say:

"Wir haben ein interessantes, innovatives Produkt produziert, das eine optimale Geschenk-Alternative zu konventionellen Kalendern darstellt", sagt Thomas Deloy, Marketingverantwortlicher der Privatbrauerei Gaffel.

Die stabile Kartonage mit einer Höhe von knapp einem halben Meter ist trotz des Gewichts von ca. neun Kilo durch einen Haltegriff unkompliziert transportierbar.

"Die Vorgespräche im Handel liefen allesamt sehr positiv. Nun können wir mit der Kombination aus Sonderdose und Adventskalender das Warten auf das Christkind allen besonderes schmackhaft machen", meint Andreas Lesche, Verkaufsleiter Handel. "Parallel werden wir auch die 0,33 Liter Sonderdose dauerhaft anbieten.

In English:

"We have produced an interesting, innovative product, that presents the optimal gift alternative to conventional Advent calendars," said Thomas Deloy, who is responsible for marketing at Gaffel Brewery.

The stable cardboard box, which is just under a meter high, is easy to transport with its special handle, despite its weight of 9 kilos (about 18 pounds).

"The preliminary reactions in the stores have been very positive. With the combination of our special cans and the calendar, we can now make waiting for the Christchild exceptionally delicious," believes Andreas Lesche, the chief of sales for Gaffel. In parallel, we will also continue to offer the .33 liter cans (this is the size of an American beer bottle. Normally kölsch is sold in .5 liter bottles-- about the size of a pint).

But I love Glühwein.

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).

Schnitzel Tonight!

Today is the last day for Chuckie and Elaina to soak up the deliciousness of German culture, so naturally we are taking them to the very fine restaurant Oma's ('Grandma's') for the best schnitzel in town.

Jeremy and I ran those poor kids ragged: riding bikes to the Palace near Cologne (a 1.5 hour ride instead of 45 minutes. Oops!), hiking the 'Philosopher's Path' in Heidelberg, gawking at the immensity of the English Garden in Munich (they cried Uncle and went back to the hotel, unfortately missing MORE NAKED GERMANS. One part of the park is clothing-optional. Now it seems like Jer and I can no longer avoid seeing naked Germans. Once you start, it seems hard to stop!!), and walking through all of the awesomeness that is Berlin while staying in a hostel barely within the town (and while we were there I saw about 10 hostels MUCH closer to the action. Waah!).

Quotes from the exhausted kids themselves:
Elaina-- "Germany is pretty, too bad the sky looks like Northeast Ohio. And what's up with having to pay for the bathroom and no water fountains and no free water with dinner?"
Chuckie-- "Ich bin ein Strudel."

My highlight of the trip was eating calves' hearts for the first time in Munich. Kinda gamey.

Naked Germans Galore; or, How to Spend your Sixth Wedding Anniversary

Deutsche Badekultur!

Jeremy and I celebrated last Sunday with our first trip to the German Sauna. It was unbelievably relaxing--- 5 different saunas and pools with different temperatures. There was one sauna that smelled citrusy, one that was menthey, and one where a worker put water on the coals and then flung a towel at us to make it even hotter. In this super-hot sauna, we also received a skewer of fruit in-between the towel-flinging. And eating a 'skewer' of fruit in a room that is 100 degrees with 30 other naked people is not only pretty funny, but also extremely delicious.
This brings me to the most famous aspect of the German Sauna System: Nakedness. The place is decidedly co-ed (even the changing rooms!), and one MUST be naked when sitting in the sauna (on a towel). You also go in the pools naked, after taking a shower to get rid of the sweat. When you are walking around between saunas or relaxing on a deck chair, the choice of nakedness is yours.













Chuckie and Elaina come to visit tomorrow! Jeremy and I are going to jet them around Germany-- we'll go to Heidelberg, München, and Berlin. Kind of ambitious (these places are not close together!), but it should be fun.

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.

Sun! Gorgeous Sun!

The last few days in Koeln have been fabulously sunny and even a little warm. It is amazing that you can feel the happiness in the air. People smile at each other (or I imagine them smiling-- I have an active imagination). It has been simply delightful to ride my bike around town.

To catch you up on the end of the Krazy Karneval, we went to the "Umzug" (Parade) last Monday, but the weather was AWFUL! It rained almost the whole time, so Jeremy and I kept ducking into the cafe nearby to warm up and stay out of the blasted rain. The floats are all pretty similar (and the whole thing lasted 5 HOURS)-- lots of giant paper-mache (too lazy to look up the proper spelling) giant people doing German things, marching bands, and some people riding horses. On most of the floats, they throw candy, and one is supposed to yell "Karmelle!!!" to get them to throw candy to you. Some enterprising people hang out of their windows with upside-down umbrellas on strings to catch the candy. They also throw flowers, but if you get one, you should give or blow the person a kiss. We actually didn't go to the burning of the scarecrows because it was at 11pm (I had German class the next day-- NERD!), and we were kind of over the whole Karneval thing by then.

I just found out that I will be dancing in a baroque ballet pantomime in Nürnberg next month! Yipee for work! It's with a choreographer I have never met, but I was recommended for the gig by the choreographer I worked with in Italy last year. Thank heavens the baroque world is so small.

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.

Schoko-Kirsch-Kuchen

I thought perhaps someone out of my faithful readers would like to make this cake because it was a huge success! and so easy! so moist! etc. So, here it is, faithfully translated from my German cooking book:

German Chocolate Cherry Cake
Umm, Not That Kind

Ingredients
2 2/3 c. flour
2 1/2 T. baking powder
pinch of salt
7 ounces bittersweet chocolate
16 ounce jar of cherries, drained well
(hmmm, is it possible in America to get cherries in a jar that are not the pie
filling kind? Frozen would be ok. Regular cherries would work, but I know that is completely impossible this time of year!)
2 eggs
8 ounces plain, full milk yogHurt
2/3 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla extract (if you have vanilla sugar, you can use a packet of that!)
1/3 c. butter, softened

Preheat the oven to 350, and either butter and flour a rectangular bread pan, or cover the inside of the pan with a piece of parchment paper (I recommend this! I just lifted the cake right out of the pan, and I DIDN'T HAVE TO WASH THE PAN!)

1. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl.
2. Roughly chop chocolate.
3. In a large bowl, beat eggs, then mix in joghurt, sugar, and vanilla. Mix in softened butter.
4. Gradually mix the four mixture into the egg mixture.
5. Fold in the cherries and chocolate.
6. Pour (more like glop) the dough into the pan.
7. Bake for one hour at 350 degrees!


The Vietnamese restaurant was absolutely fantastic last night. Jeremy had duck that he rolled in rice paper wrappers with fresh herbs, mung beans, and rice noodles. I was totally jealous because his dinner was yummy AND fun.

Echt Deutsch

Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby announce that as of January 7th, I will be submitting myself fully to the study of the German language. I found a class at the Volkshochschule (the school for continuing education) that meets 4 days a week for 4 hours per day for 3 months (with time off for Carneval, of course-- and then I will take a week off to visit my family, but other than that, no excuses!! Nothing but German learning!). Yes! Hopefully, I will be able to communicate in a less embarassing way after that kind of rigorous training.

Speaking of things German, after ballet today I popped into the grocery store where I was met by a girl who gave me a certificate for a free drink. Within the store. Of Jägermeister! It was 1pm! They had a crazy booth set up, and everyone was enjoying their free drink. I have to admit that Jägermeister in hot chocolate with whipped cream on top is a very enjoyable concoction.