Summer time and the living is easy

Well, if you aren't a procrastinating writer/blogger/opera lover like I am. Remember when I used to update everyday? I'm amazed I had the tenacity.

Let's see, what have I done to keep me away for the last few weeks?

*Gone to teach at English Summer Camp, in the wilds of Buckow (right outside Berlin). If that was not the most sophisticated summer camp that I have ever been to, I'll eat my hat. We had an actual house, with our own kitchen and bathrooms, and catered meals. It was less like work than it was play English language games with the kids all day and eat really good food. And run around in the forest.

*Been to two operas (The Pearl Fishers and Attila and Erwin Schrott's Berlin Rojotango concert. The first two I wrote about for BachTrack, so I didn't talk about them here, and the third I just didn't have time to review, given the hectic schedule I had in June.

*Watched Jonas Kaufmann be Awesome and Badass in Il Trovatore (which was also hilarious) in the weird-but-I-liked-it new Bayerische Staatsoper production by Oliver Py. We had a Twitter Block Party for it, so if you follow me on Twitter, you can read my thoughts there.

*Got into a huge fight with a PR person over the meaning and use of the word "butthead". Rather lost my taste for the internet for a few days after it devolved into character defamation.

*Spent a week curled up in my armchair tearing through Ben Aaronovitch's hilarious and wonderful Rivers of London series. This is me while I read it:

It's just that good.

Oh, and I changed the URL of this blog to more properly reflect my current internet name. So there's that.

I have something up my sleeve for August, but I'm not going to say what yet. You'll have to stick around and see. :-)

Let them eat cake

Something magical is happening in Brandenburg right now. The air is suddenly, for the first time in months, warm and sweet-smelling, the sky is marbled blue and white, the trees are beginning to show blossoms and buds. At work today I was able to sit alongside the river during my long break, reading Julia Child's memoir My Life in France and eating homemade sausage rolls. I fed the leftovers to the ducks and took a long, leisurely walk while the sun warmed my shoulders and the prettiness of it all warmed my heart. And then I tripped and fell over and bonked my head and strained my wrist. Which was embarrassing, to say the least.

Still, a sore arm cannot dampen the joy of springtime, and I was in the mood for something good to eat (reading anything by Julia Child will do that to you), so when I got home this evening, I embarked upon an orgy of cookery. I made cake.

Now, I cook a lot, but I am not always a successful baker. Cakes seem to dislike me, even thoughI love them. But this cake was special. I found it online, via Tumblr, where someone had posted a gorgeous photo of it. Pretty photo, pretty day, pretty cake. Lemon-Rosemary-Yogurt Cake.


The ridiculous thing is that I had all the makings for it right there in my kitchen, ready to go.

Here is the recipe, and the link to the website, Baked Bree, where I found this recipe. I've copied it into the big Moleskine notebook where I write all the recipes I really like (sort of a "mom's cookbook" for the single girl), but I have to share it, because it's so wonderful.

Lemon Rosemary Yogurt Cake
Ingredients

3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup Dixie Crystals sugar
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
Zest of one lemon
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup Mountain High Vanilla Yoghurt
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon fresh rosemary, finely chopped
Glaze:
1 cup Dixie Crystals powdered sugar
3 to 4 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Rosemary sprigs (optional)
Instructions

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add lemon juice, zest, and vanilla. Add yogurt, and add eggs one at a time. Add flour, baking powder, salt, and rosemary. Mix for an additional minute, scrapping the bowl, until everything is smooth and combined. Pour batter into a loaf pan that has been sprayed with cooking spray.
Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 45 to 50 minutes. Cool in pan for 10 minutes. Take the cake out of the pan, and cool completely on a rack.
Make the glaze by whisking powdered sugar and lemon juice. Add more sugar and lemon juice as needed. Drizzle over cake and add rosemary sprigs. Let glaze stand until completely set.

http://tinyurl.com/ctwrnaa

As Julia Child would say, Bon Appetit! :-)

I got an award!

And no, it's not that of "Queen of Lamest Blog Titles Ever". I only came in second for that.


The ever fabulous Raisa nominated me for a Blogger Award, which is very cool of her. There's a rule attached: tell my readers 7 non-operatic things they may not know about me. So here goes:

1. I'm fascinated by psychology. I adore it. Learning why humans react the way they do to situations is one of my favorite things, and I devour novels that deal with such topics. I also write them.

2. I had a deep and abiding yearning to be a Scholar of Some Importance as a teenager. Unfortunately, I'm really not made of scholarly stuff: I love to learn and research and write, but mostly in the realm of fiction. Dealing solely in fact irritates me, whereas the "what is" of writing is oh so enticing.

3. At one point in time I wanted to be a costume designer. I made loads of costumes, particularly for my home town's Renaissance Faire, and particularly outfits based on The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. I even spent a semester as an intern at the Utah Opera Company. Alas, that was when I realized that I'm really just not very good at things that aren't, you know, fiction, so I eventually gave it up. And I don't miss it.

4. I am incurable Romantic who has a hard time believing in the concept of True Love. And when I say "Incurable Romantic", I mean the head-in-the-clouds poet/writer/artist type who spends their days wandering in the woods and falling down holes, starving genteelly in Paris or Florence, and eventually dying horribly of TB. The ones who churned out poems and novels and music on such things as Death and Life and Life and Death. You know, that kind of Romantic.

5. I have always had a Thing for stories of Unjustly Imprisoned Men. I fully blame The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask for this. What did they do? How do they deal with it? What if they escaped? What if they were broken out? When I discovered Fidelio, it wasn't so much a surprise as a long time in coming.

6. I grew up with a deep and abiding hatred of Germany. Between my Jewish grandmother and her stories of the Holocaust and my immigrant father with his stories of escaping Cold War East Berlin, my judgement of the country in which I now live was one of deep disgust and shame for my ancestry and heritage. It took me years to get over it.

7. I love to cook and have been doing so for as long as I can remember. However, I have a hard time getting excited about actually eating. It's the joy of the act of creation that I like. I've been known to make food and then not eat a bite of it, but give it to other people with an "Oh, no, I don't eat X; I just wanted to try the recipe" attitude. This drove my mother bonkers growing up.

Now I'm supposed to tag a bunch of other people, but I'm not really comfortable doing that, so I'm gonna only pick one. And that is Lucy, from the fabulous, educational and informative Opera Obsession. Have at it, Lucy!

Belated resolutions

One of the hard things about blogging is knowing what interests people. When I started this blog, it was as a joke really, poking fun at my family members who had suddenly "discovered" blogging after years of mocking me for having one of my own. I posted simple every day things-stories about school, quotes I liked, whatever-and didn't expect to get more than a couple of views per week.

Then, I moved to Europe. At the same time, I was researching how to market books, thinking that it will come in handy if (when?) "Fidelio" gets published, and decided to use this blog as more of a diary of this adventure. I decided, too, to try to focus its content on music and opera. There's one problem there, however: I don't get out to the opera very much. I'm currently in the just-starting-my-career-and-so-quite-poor stage of life, so I don't get to go to concerts and stuff the way I'd like. So there's a problem.

The other thing is that I am interested in so much besides opera. And so, for the last couple of months, I've been procrastinating with updates, trying new forms of update, and wondering if anyone actually bothers with this blog at all. Do I, I wondered, write only about music, or do I post my own writing here, and do people want to read what I think about traveling and life and literature and fandom things, in addition to the mere pittance I can add to the wealth of opera blogs out there?

This year, my one of my goals is to post more regularly on this blog. I'm going to experiment with posting a variety of things, and hopefully, any regular readers I do have will enjoy it. Here's to 2013!

It's the most wonderful time of the year

I actually can't stand that song, but the sentiment is apt for how I feel about Christmas. Especially Christmas in Germany. Seriously, Christmas here just can't be beat. The Weinachtmarkts! The sweets! The candles! The snow! Okay, so we don't have snow yet. Whatever, it's coming.

Today I visited my first Christmas market of the season, the one in my own district of Berlin, ye old unglamorous Spandau. Here follow some of my favorite pics.

It's not a proper Weinachtsmarkt without half a million stands selling headache-inducing amounts of sugar.

Deeeeeeein ist mein ganzes Heeeeeeeerz!I'm not really sure what the point is of buying/selling a giant gingerbread heart that proclaims "I love you!" and "Kisses!" but I'm down with it. If I get home for Christmas, I'll be bringing one for each of my nieces and nephews.

Germany, that land of medieval castles, monasteries, abbeys, the Reformation, and silly young men who reforge their father/uncle's magic sword and slay dragons, is not above putting up a medieval market for their people's shopping pleasure. I may sound like I'm mocking, but as someone who spent ten years as a die-hard Tolkien fan and a medieval re-enactor, I kind of love it.

That, and they're selling this fantastic dragon puppet, which WILL be mine.

The smithy.

Booze. Or rather, enormous copper vats of Gluhwein. (Remind me to tell you my Gluhwein story someday.)

These gents were more than happy to pose for me. They probably thought I was a tourist. Ah, well.

And as they say on Loony Toons, that's all folks!

Wednesday night, pasta and opera

Have you ever just needed to have a night in? One where you do nothing but listen to good music, watch a good film, read a good book, and eat good food? That's me tonight. It's been a long and productive day (not in the writing department, alas). I'm working on a longer blog post about the research I did over in Potsdam on Monday; look for that tomorrow. But right now, I'm content to sit here with a bowl of pasta with butter-garlic sauce and a glass of sparkly water, watching L'age de raison (which I highly recommend; it made me cry like a little girl) and listening to opera.

How do you spend nights in?

(Photo from Pear Tree)

Sieglinde Potatoes

Hey guys, did you know that in Germany you can get a type of potato named for Wagner's Sieglinde? You totally can.

How to Not Go Crazy in German

Hey all, long time, no see. I have a valid reason: I've been stuck all week in a remedial How to Write a Resume and Cover Letter class that my sponsor at the Job Center seemed to think I needed. It's...not helpful. This class is for people who've never worked before in their lives, and are looking for jobs as taxi drivers, hotel housekeepers, etc. The teachers both boggled at me when I showed up, but the JC is forcing me to attend both weeks.

Today was the end of Week 1. Here's how I weathered it:
Day 1: Teacher: "You're, um, rather overqualified for this. And you already have a resume."

Day 2: I didn't go because I was supposed to have a job interview, which was postponed because the head of the school got sick.

Day 3: Teacher: "Well, replace 'z.Zt' with just 'z.z' and put 'Berlin' and the date at the bottom. There, that's all we need to change."

Day 4: I queried 11 agents about "Fidelio". Teacher: "You hanging in there, Frau Franke? No, you cannot go home early."

Day 5: I queried 11 language schools in Berlin, bringing my total of language school applications up to about 45. Teacher: "HOW many applications have you sent out??! TWENTY FIVE?! Well, then. Do whatever."

"Do whatever" in my case is read/query more agents/spam Twitter/plot my escape. Next week I will try to spend it blogging more.

Only one more week of this.

Wagner in the Ubahn

If you get off of the U7 line at Richard Wagner Platz, you will find yourself in a shockingly bright yellow and black shrine to a certain megalomaniacal German composer. Large murals line the walls on both sides of the station, depicting scenes from the operas. You can spend a lot of time walking from one side to the other, looking at the pictures. Whoever came up with this u-bahn stop was clearly a huge Wagner fanboy.

I assume that the original sketches and the other art in the upstairs part of the station date from the original Richard Wagner Platz, which unfortunately went through renovations sometime in the 1960s. (If you haven't been to Berlin, believe me when I tell you that we have some swanky U-bahn stops.) I had some time today and was in the area, so while I waited for my train, I snapped the following pics. Warning: this post is image heavy.



Richard Wagner Platz


Helpful informational guidelines


Senta and the Dutchman


Lohengrin


Tristan and Isolde


Siegfried and Fafnir


Götterdämmerung


Tannhauser

How to Have a Pillow Fight in German

Pillow fight auf Deutsch is Kissenschlacht. If you're me, though, and trying to explain how you spent Saturday afternoon, you inevitably end up saying Kussenschlacht, which means something entirely different. (I can only say that the logic behind that is kissen=kissing and kussen=cushion auf Denglish. Moving on.)

Bright and early on Saturday morning, my brother called to tell me that he'd learned something "relevant to [my] interests": namely, that there would be a flash mob pillow fight at the Brandenburg Gate that afternoon. Being dignified and refined only half the time (if that), I called a few friends, grabbed an expendable pillow, and ran out the door.

The closer I got to Mitte, the more people I saw with pillows. By the time I hit the Friedrichstrasse bahnhof, plenty of people were walking around with enormous cushions and diabolical grins.

This is what I saw when I got to the Brandeburger Tor:

Not too many, I thought, but a respectable number. I was forty minutes early, so I guessed more people would show. The police certainly thought so, for they'd heard about the thing and were out in force:



At five minutes to three, some of my friends arrived:

And then, at 3:00 on the nose, this happened:

It very quickly morphed into this:

It was in fact snowing that day, but you couldn't tell for all the feathers flying through the air. People ripped their pillows open so that there were feathers everywhere: ankle-deep on the ground, blowing like a hurricane through the air, in your hair, in your mouth, in your shoes...everywhere. It was brilliant.

When it was all over, about 3:30, my friends and I left. Our hands were frozen solid, Britta had lost her pillow (someone snatched it right out of her hands) and we were so befeathered we looked like Papageno's hipster off-spring.


And that, my friends, is how you have a pillow fight in German. :)

Berlin makes me laugh so hard sometimes.

Truly, this city has some of the most awesome signage. I've taken to carrying my camera around lately, because beauties like the following just seem to appear out of nowhere.

Basic Translation: "Mozart...or Beethoven? Which composer wrote only one opera but nine symphonies? This, and two hundred other questions are in your daily copy of Die Zeit [a local newspaper]."


Note: this is the sign for the Wotan Apotheke. Apparently, their products are fit for the Norse gods. I wonder if they play Wagner inside? I would.

How To Get Your Hair Cut in German

Let me tell you about the Wizard of Charlottenburg.

First of all, he's not a wizard, but a hairstylist. A really, really good hairstylist. He owns a tiny salon in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, called Vor Hair-Nach Hair, and was probably trained at the Hair Stylists' School of Ballet, because he just swoops and swirls and flicks and snaps: it is absolutely hilarious to watch him at work. Also, he's really sweet and really knows his stuff: I've never felt so safe in the hands of a stylist.

This is how you get your hair cut in Germany:

1. Make an appointment. If you're like me, you're not comfortable calling people auf Deutsch just yet, so you go in person. Stylist will ask what you want, will ruffle your hair and tut to himself, and ask you when you want to come. Then he'll ask what time. No "I have a spot on Wednesday at 3". Name your day and hour, and if that works, he'll pencil you in. If not, keep naming times until he nods. Eventually you'll get it sorted.

2. Be on time. Hang up your coat and sit where he tells you. He will toss a sheet over you and swirl about, eyeing your hair, occasionally tousling it, and tutting to himself. At last he will inform you that you clearly haven't had a haircut in ages and what is wrong with you, woman? Then he will twirl off to get the hair coloring stuff needed to begin the transformation.

3. Your stylist will then proceed to swish and flick and dab your hair with two separate white creams that smell disconcertingly like the Fruity Pebbles cereal your mom never approved of when you were a child. Brushes and aluminum foil sheets will fly through the air as your stylist bops along to the indie electronic music coming from his stereo.

4. You will then be handed a stack of magazines and ensconced under a portable hair heater (I have no other words to describe it). There's no sound involved like in the States, just waves of dry heat.

5. Your stylist will occasionally come and jab at your foil-wrapped head to see how things are progressing. He may mutter "Scheisse!" a few times, but tell you things are okay. Trust him. He is a Wizard.

6. When your hair is deemed ready, you will be given a very hearty shampoo that will make you want to screech, "Be gentle with me!" Delicate the Wizard is not. He will put some sweet-smelling product in your hair and react with horror when you tell him you don't normally use any. "This is YOUR HAIR; you must wear it with pride and dignity!"

7. You will then receive your haircut, during which hair will fly as he parodies Edward Scissorhands and lectures you on the necessity of both regular haircuts and regular haircuts from good stylists, geeze! Just let him do his thing; he's a professional and is going to make you "look damn good".

8. Haircut completed, he will then put brush and dryer into your hands and watch you try to style your own hair. Then he will take them away and show you how you're doing it wrong, and how to do it correctly. Then he'll make you try it again. And again. At last, he will be satisfied that you look good and know how to take care of yourself, and will let you leave. Three hours after you arrived, you will go out into the world looking like a princess.

I have never gone to get my hair done and come out with a book plot and its main character before, you guys.

Weihnachtsmarkt, Gendarmmarkt

How much do I love the Christmas Markets here in Berlin? Oh, so very, very much. The Romantic in me just dances in delight every time I go to one-but only if it's a very traditional, elegant market, not one of those made over into a carnival with rides and games and the obnoxious merchandise you see at county fairs. No, I love the good and proper old-time markets.

The Christmas Market at Gendarmmarkt is easily my favorite. Guards dressed in traditional livery guard the entrance, which is all lights and tinsel. It's the swankiest of them all, all crystal chandeliers, sparkling lights, handmade ornaments and lots of yummy food that is roasted right there in front of you.



There's also this fabulous open-air bakery that makes fresh Bavarian bread right there in a huge outdoor oven. You stand there and watch the bakers form round loaves out of huge, floury tureens of dough, thumping and rolling the dough until it's perfect enough to pop on a tray and stick into the wood-burning oven.




Besides food, you can wander the stalls, looking at a large variety of handcrafted objects, from traditional German Christmas ornaments to delicate glass balls to hand-knitted caps to Moravian stars:



Through it all comes the gentle sound of traditional carols, piped in over an invisible sound system. There's a stage in front of the Konzerthaus, too, set up for the evening festivities. The acts vary from children's choirs to quartets to silly people dressed as snowflakes. After dark, the whole place is a swarming hive of activity, but the daytime is a lot calmer. I actually prefer it then, despite the lights not being as bright. You can see more.

I had lots more pics, but the gods of technology intervened and I've lost most of the photos on my memory stick: these ones were taken only yesterday, when I realized that recovery was not going to happen. But there should be more coming: I still have to go to the markets and Schloss Charlottenburg and Sanssouci.

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree...!

Before:


After:


That's all I've got up so far: I'm not sure I like the candle-lights, so I'm going to sleep on it, and then decide if I want to go buy proper fairy lights tomorrow. This year, all of my decorations come from my cousin, who is going with her family up to the mountains for Christmas (they have another house there, and another set of ornaments. Sheesh!) I'm just glad I have a tree now: it's not Christmas without one! In Germany, trees don't go up until Christmas Eve (occasionally a day or two earlier), but I'm staying American for this one. I like to keep my tree up until January.

Happy December! I'm stoked. :)

Christmas songs that pass as lullabies

Sometimes I have the surreal experience of learning that my dad's German lullabies are, in fact, beloved cultural institutions. This is the case for this traditional German lied, "Kling, Glöckchen, klingelingeling". I heard this lullaby probably ever single night for the vast majority of my childhood. It was one of my favorites. I can still sing most of it by myself. Of course, as a kid I had no idea what the words meant, but my dad told me they were about bells and snow and coming in from the cold, so I was happy about that.

Imagine my surprise then, when a few days before Christmas 2006, I find myself sitting in one of the big churches in Salzburg, listening to a girl's choir sing that very song. The look on my face was something like this: o_0. Afterwards I yelped, "That's a CHRISTMAS CAROL?!" To which my parents just laughed and nodded. Technically, it's a winter song-there's nothing particularly Christmasy about it. I, however, say that it's appropriate all year round, and that it does in fact make an excellent lullaby.

Silent Night

When I was a child, my parents used to show me a movie about how a mouse named Nonny helped save the song that would become the Christmas carol "Silent Night". To this day, I have not been able to find it, but the story made a huge impact on me (not least because it contained a musician singing, "Christmas Eve brings Christmas Cheer/Kiss me quick and pass the beer", which I thought was hilarious). The above clip is the closest I've come to finding anything to do with the story.

The origins of "Silent Night" lie in Austria, where in 1818 a small-town priest, Joseph Mohr, wrote the lyrics and asked his friend, Franz Xaver Gruber, to write music for a guitar. Apparently the original tune was quite danceable, and only later slowed down into the lullaby version that we all know today. In any case, I grew up hearing it sung in German, and that was the only language I knew it in for a couple of years as a small child. (I will say this for my German abilities: due to singing German and listening to Kinderlieder 24/7* as a child, I have a damn good accent.)

"Silent Night" was not one of my favorite carols until fairly recently, when I finally woke up to how lush and sweet the melody actually is. Perhaps it was hearing all of those awful pop versions that the radio plays that made me hate the carol so much. And then my brother played the following video for me, and I was sold.





*Remind me someday to tell the story of the Horror of the German Lieder Cassette. It's a scream.

Snowflakes, stories and ballerinas

Every little girl goes through a phase where she wants to be a ballerina. The tutus, the floaty tulle skirts, the satin ballet slippers...as children we are born into a world of imagination and High Romance. I was one of those little girls who had twice weekly ballet classes, the highlight of whose week was donning leotard, tights, and ballet shoes to go swoosh around the studio, pretending I was a snowflake, or Cinderella, or Clara. And I absolutely lived for The Nutcracker. Even after class, even in the middle of summer, I could put on the music and dance around, and I was a part of that story. That was a special talent I had, to read myself into a story and exist there for hours at a time. It made it hard for me to be bored. "Go play in a story," my mom would say, and I'd go to my room, put on the music, and off I would go.

Given that classical music was involved, my parents aided and abetted my obsession with ballet in general and The Nutcracker in particular. I remember that we had Baryshnikov's amazing version, and later George Balanchine's. And believe me when I say that I knew both of those performances backwards and forwards, inside and out.

I eventually moved away from ballet (an extremely strict teacher killed the joy in dancing for me). I found out early on that if the music didn't have words, it didn't interest me as much. I still love The Nutcracker, though, and watch it every year. And I am telling you all this because the Weinachtsmarks, or German Christmas Markets, opened today, onto a bright, snowless Berlin (I adore snow), and I am listening to "The Waltz of the Snowflakes" in my own version of a snow dance.

How to do You Laundry in German

My friends, doing the laundry has never been so harrowing.

Imagine, if you will, that you live in a fairly tiny apartment, which is possessed of a giant main room, a fairly tiny kitchen, and a decent bathroom. Now imagine that you are gifted with a thirty-year-old Siemens washer, which the friend of a cousin did not quite have the heart to get rid of. Now imagine this good-sized washer in your decently-sized bathroom, and you see the problem.

Yes. My washer is almost the same size as my bathroom.

Here are the steps to doing the laundry with this machine.

1. Disactivate the wheel lock and push the washing machine into the center of the bathroom (during off times, it can act as a clothes horse and general catch-all).
2. Take the two pipes and the electric cord and bring them to the sink. Unscrew one of the bolts on the sink and put the first pipe onto it. Please make sure that you put it on securely. Next, screw the second pipe onto the valve beneath the incongruous-looking water handle. Pray that it actually takes to the valve and won't slip off when you turn the water on.
3. Turn the water on. If you've put the pipes on right, neither will burst off and spray the bathroom with a deluge of cold water. If you're not lucky, it will take a lot of screaming before you can turn the water off and get hold of the flailing pipes. Also, you will be soaked.
4. Plug in the electric cord. Try not to electrocute yourself.
Congratulations! You are now ready to actually put the laundry into the machine!
5. Load the washer. Shut the little metal doors that close the barrel and pray that they open again (if not, a spatula may be used to pop them open).
6. Put the soap in the indicated spots and close the main lid. Turn on the machine.
7. You have about nine different types of washing to choose from, all with different lengths of time. If you are doing your whites and simply have to wash them hot, your laundry will be ready in three hours. If you choose to wash them cold, you have a further three options: 90 minutes, 85 minutes, and 66 minutes. Select your cycle and pray your laundry turns out well.
8. Press "Start". Walk away contemplating that when your laundry is done, you have to dismantle the whole apparatus and put it back how it was before.

31 Days of Halloween: Day 25

They may not celebrate Halloween, but guys, I am here to tell you that German Octobers are fierce. Cold, blustery, smelling of woodsmoke and bonfires...it's the perfect weather to curl up in front of the fire with a spooky book. I like The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, by Helen Grant, for this purpose. The story is set in Germany and focuses around the mysterious vanishings of multiple people, set against a backdrop of folklore, history, and local legend. Five stars, and I couldn't put it down when I read it.

Are you all reading anything interesting?

31 Days of Halloween: Day 19

Today: the German Grocery Store



Being from America, I am used to having all of my foodstuffs in one place, neatly wrapped and presented for the happy and healthy wholefoods eating hippy that my university colleagues assumed me to be. Shopping in my local grocery store, I could find everything I wanted, plus a multitude of ingredients for cuisines from other cultures, namely pan-Asian, Mexican, and Indian. I knew that European supermarkets were different. My French teacher used to tell us of holidays in France where she would go from butcher to baker to fromagerie. I used to sit and listen to these stories, dreaming about the romance of it all. I would be one of those chic European girls with her cute market basket, tripping merrily from store to store to make my purchases: a roasting chicken here, a sprig of herbs there, bread from the bakery. And then, I imagined, I would go home and cook it all up into a delightful meal fit for the sophisticated and intelligent woman my fifteen-year-old self dreamed I would be.

Well, fifteen-year-old self would be proud in every way of twenty-five-year-old self, but she would, admittedly, grimace in chagrin at the non-romance of navigating the markets.

This is a typical day at the shops:
1. I set out with my cute market basket (yes, I bought one of those. I have an Inner Romantic to answer to, after all) for the market. I have my list in one hand. I'm getting ingredients for chicken soup and minestrone soup, because it is Soup Season.
2. I enter the first supermarket. It is crowded with moms and dads and babies, and elderly people happily stink-eyeing the younger generations out of the way. First, none of the vegetables I need for soup are in stock. Celery? What's that? says the bewildered clerk. Bravely, I make my way to the meat section, only to find that the only available chicken breasts look like they came from a one-hundred-year-old chicken, and the ground beef from a mad cow. Sighing, I get the basics-milk, butter, cream, pasta, etc-and make my way to the casse. A palatial exhibit of gluhwein stands next to the counter, supposedly to ease the trauma of being nearly killed by strollers multiple times.
3. Drop purchases off at home and head to the next, slightly more expensive supermarket. There I find chicken, beef and the vegetables, but they do not carry cheese. Also, their bread section is pitiful and unworthy of the name. Better to go to the proper bakery. My basket is very heavy by the time I am done.
4. Third stop: bakery. Service is prompt and they slice the bread for you.
5. Fourth stop: cheese shop. Or rather, cheese stand, because this lovely little place is located in the local mall, of all places (as are two doctors, a lawyer, and a fitness center). They only take cash, so I heft my basket and march to the ATM. Then the woman on duty asks how old I'd like my Gruyere: one year or two. I opt for the one year; she wraps it up and tells me I have a pretty accent. "From Holland?" I always get Northern Europe, for some reason.
6. I realize I'm out of face wash and duck into the drogerie to buy some. There is only one clerk on duty and the line is a mile long. But I wait, because if I don't I'll regret it.
7. And home, where I collapse in my chair and reflect that multiple-market shopping isn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds.

Wish me luck, I'm about to go out and do exactly this.