river revelry

Spring is here! Say the trees. And the weather is fantastic. Yesterday I pulled my "Isarmat" out of the cabinet (a foam mat to cushion against the notorious pebbles of the isar riverbank), stuffed it into a giant blue Ikea bag along with a blanket, pillow and some reading material, and headed off. Since I live a ten minute walk away from the "Flaucher", the isar's sunbathing and grill paradise, it didnt take long until i was strolling past the tiny beer garden hut and strolling out onto the "Flauchersteg", taking in the view of the river and small scattered islands of trees. The first island was a no-go for me--naked island as i call it, home to the most devoted of FKK sunbathers. The next few sections were mixed, so i picked a spot near a group of teenagers dressed in black and playing jack black on their guitars and spread out my goods.

Not a bad life, having time after work to read and doze... I enjoyed the muffled guitar chords and slept fitfully in the sun, every now and then reading a few pages of my book before drifting back to sleep. The flaucher is one of my favorite spots in munich, such a mix of mega fit joggers, super suntanned nudists, crowds of teenage grillers slugging river-cooled beers, families with small kids splashing about in the puddles, fishers casting into the current, and the occasional kajaker, riding the waves on the isarkanal. A good neighbor, that river.

A trip to the Bakery

It smells like bread, and flour is floating through the air. It can’t be anything else but a bakery. And that it is: Bäckerei Ziegler, and Herr Ziegler is leading us through the labyrinth of bread and Brezel baking. Each child has a baker’s hat on, and we’re all ready to be taken on a journey of delicious discovery.

Our first stop is the giant mixer. Herr Ziegler types a few keys and the computer communicates with the main flour storage unit, delivering us five kilos of flour within a few seconds. All the children wow as the flour is poured through a transparent tube into an oversized mixing bowl. This bowl travels to the next station, where the fluid ingredients are added to the flour, salt and yeast. Everything is kneaded with a giant dough hook. Then the finished dough gets fed into a dough cutting machine, which divides it into equal portions and then feeds it into, as the kids call it, “a snake rolling machine.” These snakes are normally thrown into Bretzel shapes by professionals, but today we are on the job.

Every child gets a dough snake. Everyone thinks about the story that Herr Ziegler told us about the slave who bought his freedom by creating a baked good through which one could see three sun, a seemingly impossible task made easy by the Bretzel’s three “windows. And we begin to cross and twist. Finally, we’ve completed 18 beautiful Bretzen which go through a Lauge
waterfall before being shoved into a hot oven.

In the meantime we visit the Sußgebäck division, and watch as a giant roller transforms a lump of dough into a 20 meter long sheet. This sheet is then cut into triangles by another machine and fed into a “croissant roller” which twists the triangles into perfect uniform horns. The chocolate ones have to be made by hand, explains Ziegler, as he hands out thin pieces of chocolate intended for the croissants to the children.

We make our way downstairs to retrieve our Bretzen from the oven. They look golden brown and perfect, and steaming fresh from the oven. Bäcker Ziegler gives each child a handmade Brezn’ and a drink and sends him on his way, but I stop. I’ve just had another one of those intercultural moments, and I thank him for his kindness. Now I know just how another traditional Bavarian food is made!

going to paris tomorrow

that's right..the city of loooooooooove for valentines day. And who better to take with me than my boyfriend...and my boyfriend's parents...

artur and i are treating his mom to a paris trip for her birthday. And Artur's never been there. And i'm living my dream of going to paris for the weekend. On a whim. wahoo!

berlin oh berlin

So the trip to Berlin was great. The first day was "tour" day and after Artur and I arrived exhausted on the 5-11am ICE train, we went and ate an amazing buffet brunch with everything imaginable for only 7,90 euros. Ah berlin is so much cheaper than munich. And then Michael chauffuered us around in his car for a few hours and told us all about berlin, including stops at kreuzberg with its fantastic view and the siegessäule, for its also fantastic view. Unfortunately, the pedestrian tunnel under the racing traffic island was flooded on one side, so it took us a while to get up to the top, but when we did, the views were commanding. The second day was "flea market day" and we took off for the antique markets at kupfergraben. After browsing the array of old DDR paraphenalia, cds, gas masks, babuschkas and china, we sipped some glühwein to thaw out and headed to a cafe to warm up, and then to a chocolate shop to eat chocolate ice cream and cool down.

Monday was then "badeschiff" day and we set off to bathe on the river spree... no, not IN the river, ON the river, on a half sunken barge that has been converted into a retro swimming pool. In the summer, the thing is just open surrounded by wooden docking, but in the winter, it's turned into a white bubbly creation by way of a plastic roof and includes two saunas and a bar. We spent three hours enjoying the mix of warm, cold, naked, dressed, and just plain crazy. An ingenious design.

the eye

Well, it's been a while. And lots has happened--- hospital visits, a trip home to Pittsburgh, my first set of finals at a german university--and the beginnings of my first "container vegetable garden"

But now i'm back on my feet and ready to write again. I'll start with the story of my companion from Azerbaijan in the hospital. During my stay in the intensive care unit, I had a neighbor, a bed neighbor, that is. In between IV changes and doctors visits, I noticed that she was having trouble communicating with the doctors. Strained attempts at English were made by the surgeons, but the nuns who did much of the care work just kept on speaking in their native Bavarian dialect. One day, when sister Fransiska was doing her "get up out of bed and move around" motivation rounds, I decided to pitch in. I translated the enthisuastic sister's instructions, relaying commands to breath deeply, stand up, cmon, you can do it!! Zoora, I learned was her name, looked and my with grateful eyes.

During our time "upstairs" in Intensive care, I became her translator. I thought a lot about how scary it must be to not understand anything the doctors say to you.. the whole thing was scary enough, as it was! In turn, Zooras sister, who was almost always by her side, would often fetch me water and pick things up that I dropped--the kind of little favors I was more than thankful for at the time.

The day before I was set to leave the hospital, I took a walk down to Zooras room (both of us had been relocated to the "stationary" (and more humane) portion of the hospital and gave her a christmas card and said goodbye. A few hours later there was a knock on my door and there she stood... she very quickly slipped a silver armband off her wrist and onto mine this is the eye, for protection and good luck" she said, and disappeared back down the hallway.

The bracelet depicts a round, blue eye, surrounded by half moon engravings and a wavy silver band. Now, I wear it everyday.

i'm back

so... after a 20-day stay in the hospital i'm back online. More updates to come...

The Mountain Show

In America, there's the house show. You know, that show on sundays that just shows houses for sale: no video, just pictures of the houses and the asking price. Watching the show is soothing, it requires no brain power, it's so elementally boring that it's like automatic meditation: you aren't thinking anything.

In Germany, there's the mountain show. Intended to provide skiiers with a view of the current weather conditions in each ski area, this program flips from one mountaintop to another, broadcasting images recorded by some tiny camera mounted, in most cases it appears, high up in some snow covered tree. This show is even better than the house show, not only because the images sometimes rotate to show the full panorama and because the video is live, but also because more than often all there is to see is white because, well--it's snowing. Sometimes there are droplets on the camera, sometimes the blustering snow lets up for long enough to identify the tree a few meters away from the camera--the only way to identify these places is by the logo in the lower righthand corner.

As if this wasn't already enough to beat the house show, the whole thing is accompanied by a background of traditional bavarian and austrian "Blasmusik" Fantastic. Of course, on a beautiful day the mountaintops look gleaming white and I cuddle up under my blanket on the couch and think to myself "this is so much better than real estate."