on occasion

usually it's screaming and wrestling and spitting and shredding and flailing and chasing and breaking and crying and destroying...

but sometimes it's bliss.

some kind of thanksgiving

on saturday kelly and i cooked a wildly successful thanksgiving dinner for my aupair family. curried sweet potatoes, stuffing, corn with mint, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and raspberry pie. the kids helped with the pie (i've got them kind of obsessed, and it's sweet). then they went downstairs and dressed up like indians, completely unprompted, and somehow got kelly into a pumpkin costume. it's possible kelly will never visit freiburg again.

Seepark

there's a lake by my house.
it's surrounded by sports fields and apartment complexes and a boat house and a public swimming pool, just like every other "natural" space in germany (god i miss the rockies). but there are trees and turtles. and this little bit of nature is keeping me sane.

i am thankful for some things

of course there's no thanksgiving in germany. so today, while my family eats pie in minneapolis, i am having pickeld red cabbage for lunch and then heading to the immigration office to get my visa sorted out. i'm feeling sort of anti-thanksgiving, and that is unacceptable because i've often called it my favorite holiday. so i decided i better make a list:

i am thankful for
the market in freiburg
mail from far-away friends
peter fox
delicious coffee
my bikeable city
the running path around seepark
getting to travel
my attic room
the current streaming
kid art
rhubarb yogurt
my camera
a sweet summer job waiting in the US
mi familia


and on saturday, kelly is coming from frankfurt and we're cooking. i am scouring freiburg for some sweet potatoes and cranberries. thanksgiving will be redeemed!

number 11

finished number eleven off the list.
there is no word for pie in german, so we're calling it a cake.
or sometimes "das Pie," but that's a little awkward.

The Great Rang Teng Teng

drank some beers with emma at The Great Rang Teng Teng last week - my new favorite haunt in freiburg. it's grungy and dark like my favorite places in minneapolis. it's western-themed like my favorite places in montana. and the beers are large and delicious like my favorite places in germany. the best of all my worlds.

p.s. thanks cheryl, i owe you some great recommendation some day.

grownup food

i cook a lot of kidfood these days, so i took advantage of emma's visit, and we cooked and ate some delicious things. homemade flammkuchen, steffi's coffee cake and mohnschnecke nudeln, a four hour german brunch with lox and café au lait, pumpkin soup, elaborate pizzas for the kids, and a mock thanksgiving for our german friends' benefit.

a whole wonderful week without noodles or fried eggs.

far from the madding crowd

my friend emma came to visit last week, and we spent time with our mutual german friends (whom we met in ireland in college...life is strange). freiburg shuts down on sundays, and the freiburgers take to the forest, or to the hills, or drive to the mountains somewhere. last weekend the weather was not great for a hike in the black forest, as we had planned, so we drove to a valley town and walked up in the hills surrounding it, among the cows. how very pastoral.

zlatý klinec

'twas hard to go back to work after my wonderful vacation. austria/slovakia was the "zlatý klinec" of my autumn (my new favorite slovak phrase: the "golden nail," the special little something extra).

freiburg was soggy when i got back, so i spent a week in hibernation.
then my emma came from wisconsin and rescued me, just in time.



btw, i got my trip photos up on flickr this week.

a note on green sauce

i'm not usually that excited about german food. i don't like meat, and the germans love it. i think vegetables are better before you pickle them. i think wurstsalat is totally bizarre. and leberkäse too. so i had every intention of eating turkish food and sushi in frankfurt. i'm down with that, i'm used to it, and i love turkish food. and then i saw the Ebbelwei Expreß roll through town:



i didn't want to ride the "Apple Wine Express," but i did want to try some of this Ebbelwei stuff that seems so important to the frankfurt tourist experience. the internet told me to try Ebbelwei with the famous Frankfurter Grüne Söße, green sauce made with boiled eggs and vinegar and lots of herbs. so kelly and i headed to the Sachsenhausen neighborhood in search of "typisch frankfurt" and ended up in a lovely little restaurant with this delicious meal:

i'm not a convert to german cuisine, but that sauce was delicious.
and the leftovers were great at 4am when we finally stopped dancing.

Frankfurt

from bratislava i flew to frankfurt for one final romp before aupairing recommenced. hard to say goodbye to the slovaks (i just had to do it in montana, and now all over again so soon), but in frankfurt i got to see my friend kelly. she just started a new job in frankfurt, so together we explored the city and scoped out some typical frankfurt eats. and we danced, two nights in a row, which was absolutely vital. with four kids in my life, i've been feeling about a decade older than i should...nothing that a garish german disco can't solve.

Bratislava

after our hike, the slovaks took me back to bratislava, where we spent a few days walking around the city and sitting in wonderful, dark, smoky bars. bratislava has a beautiful medieval old town surrounded by a bunch of very modern buildings. i dig it. peter likes it because of the "mess." i have to agree.

for lunch on my last day in bratislava, peter made me the national dish of slovakia in his dorm kitchen. bryndzové halušky, which i've been hearing about since june, is potato dumpling with a sheep cheese called bryndza, with something like kefir to drink. he was convinced that an american wouldn't like bryndza, but it was delicious (though not vegetarian...peter used less bacon fat for my benefit).

then we went to Hrad Devín, a castle on a cliff over the Danube, which had an extensive history before it was destroyed by napoleon's troops. and then to Slavín, a memorial to soviet soldiers on a hill covered in huge fancy houses that overlook the whole city. it was dark, and we ate chocolate and drank grapefruit juice, and i said goodbye to bratislava, for now.

(the bottom picture is peter's)

Tatras

there was a moment in slovakia when i was absolutely content.


germany is fine, and i have some small adventures, and i learn some things.
but i am always missing mountains.


the tatras form the border between slovakia and poland - part of the carpathians. peter wanted to climb a mountain, but i came too late in the season, and there is already lots of snow and avalanche danger. so we hiked something else, 13ish kilometers down a road and up a snowy slope to an amazing alpine lake. the ground was covered in ice and frost crystals and crunchy frozen moss (andrej said it looked like finnland). peter packed pastries. i ate wild blueberries off the bush, and they were frozen. we filled out waterbottle from a mountain stream. there was no path, but peter knows these mountains...



exactly what i needed.

new on my hypothetical do-before-i-die-list: go back to slovakia and climb the Kriváň.