Week 37: Dortmund

Last Friday I had a work trip that took me near Dortmund. Since the train ride wasn't very far, Jason took it up and met me on Friday evening. Since Jason didn't arrive until about 9pm, we only went out for a drink and a Salzkuchen. A Salzkuchen is like a very salty bagel, with a cured pork filling (so, like a cold sausage filling). We each got one, but neither of us were able to make it through ours. My, it was so salty. I would haven needed much more beer to make any further than I did. It was worth a try, but I am not sure if I would seek it out again.

On Saturday, we spent some time walk around the shopping district, which was rather full of people. We came across a small open air market, where Jason found some Syrian bread, something we would often get back in the States, but is not quite as easy to find here in Germany. We munched on that as we continued our walk around.

We spent some time looking through a used CD/DVD store. I've been looking for some more German language stuff to listen to and watch and made two purchases. The first was the movie Goodbye Lenin, which we had seen many years ago. It is about the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989 and how it impacted the life of one family. It is a comedy, in a sense, and very much worth seeing. The other was a kid's cartoon movie about Till Eulenspiegel, a German folk hero. Sort of like a Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. Neither of these have English subtitles, so we'll see how we do.

While we were looking through the store, we ran across the section shown in the picture below of "Black" music. If you take a close look at the album covers, you'll notice that it includes everything from hard-core rap to the Temptations and Ella Fitzgerald. Oh, and the Village People are in there too.

Way to illogically group musical stylings

It had been a while since we had walked around a shopping district while the stores were actually open and when so many people were out in the street, so we just spent a lot of time walking and checking out the various sights on the street. We saw a number of rhinos with wings, as shown in the picture below, which reminded me of the Mr Potatoheads you can find throughout Rhode Island. These rhinos (link in German) were painted by local artists and youth groups and are scattered about the city. They make for good photo ops.

Hier bleib ich! == Here I stay!

Another great find was the kid in the video below, who had wheeled a piano out into the street. He was pretty great, able to play so well in the cold with gloved hands. Don't worry, I gave him a good tip. He must have been asked to move along, though, as when we came back about an hour later, he was no where to be found. I hope he was able to keep his tip hat.

Week 36: Trip to Liege

Last Sunday we took a trip to Liege, Belgium, which is one of the largest cities and Belgium and was a industrial center for the country. Belgium is particularly interesting, as it has two distinct regions--Wallonia and Flanders--whose people are separated quite strongly by language and culture. Wallonia, the region closest to  us, is primarily French speaking (with a smaller German speaking area) and Flanders is primarily Dutch speaking. This difference was part of the reason that Belgium, up until early December of last year, had not had more than a caretaker government since June, 2010.

One of the big draws for Liege on the weekend is a very large market along the river. We arrived just as they were starting to pack up, but were able to walk through much of it while they were still set up. You could get just about anything you were looking for, especially if it was any of a wide selections of foods or that particular knock-off purse.

Liege's Riverside Market

In walking around the city, we stopped by the Cathedral, dedicated to St. Paul, for a wander around. There were some fantastic stained glass windows, which, unfortunately, do not photograph well on my phone. One of the nice parts of having all of these churches available to visit throughout Europe is they tend to be warmer than the outside in the winter and cooler than the outside in the summer.

Liege Cathedral

On a brief side note, we were reminded about how different Europe is from the US when we first parked our car at a garage in Liege. As I was zipping up my coat, I heard a familiar tune by Cee Lo Green, that was all over the place about a year ago in the US. There are two versions of this song. The first is the one you hear on the radio in the US: "Forget You"; the other is the album version, whose name in the listing is "F**k You". The one that was playing on the Belgian station was the second. It is funny how little things like this can still stop us in our tracks.

On our drive back from Liege to Germany, we made a stop in the old hilltop portion of Limbourg, Belgium. Our guidebook stated that it is a spectacularly well preserved example of a hilltop fortress, which it certainly is. It also noted that the main square had rather undulating cobblestones. We experienced those directly with the car. Jason though we should let Honda know about this, so they could use the area for a suspension test track.

Limbourg's Main Square

Once we bounced through the main square a bit and found a spot to park, we walked through the village. There were a number of side streets with fantastic stone houses, which looked over the side of the hill onto the main part of the town below. Since it was cold and wet (we are close enough to have the same weather as the Eifel), our walk was brief, but we did check out the exterior of the church, which was perched on the side of the hill. As the sun started to set somewhere behind the cloud covered sky, we made our way back to Germany in the soon to be complete darkness.

Limbourg--I swear I've seen this as a jig-saw puzzle...

Weeks 34 & 35: Christmas, Skiing and New Years

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and an excellent start to 2012. Our Christmas was low key, but we did get to celebrate Christmas Eve with some of Jason's co-workers. For that event, Jason made the ever popular Wacky Cake, which, with the help of the internet to find a template, I decorated with some confectioner's sugar. Despite there being far too much food at the festivities, we only came home with about half a cake, so it was, at least, a modest hit.

Frosty frosts the wacky cake

Christmas day was spent doing a little cleaning and then packing for our ski trip to Austria. We departed on the 26th and drove about nine hours to St. Veit am Pongau, The trip requires a little introduction: it was a package tour, organized by a group from Ramstein, the other larger American base in our area of Germany. I heard about it through my personal trainer. We figured it would be a good chance to do get away, do some skiing and meet some people.

We arrived after dark, went to the tour office, found out where we were staying and drove our car up a rather steep and frightening road to our guest house. We decided we were going to move the car as little as possible after that drive and mostly walked to dinner and town (about 20 minutes along the steep grade) for the week we were there, only using the car to drive to the ski area. We ended up having to leave the car in town for the last few days, as the foot or so of snow that fell completely impeded our ability to get up the hill. If we had only brought chains...

The view from our guest house--the town is over Jason's shoulders

Though the location of our accommodations left something to be desired, the skiing was great. We drove about 10 minutes from St. Veit to get to the Ski Amade area, where we took a gondola up to the ski slopes. The Ski Amade area is a semi-linked alliance of ski areas. You can see the full map here (we took the gondola up from Alpendorf). Some of the areas can be easily skied between, others require the use of buses.

Alpendorf gondola station (top)

Our package included five days of skiing with group lessons. We had two days of fantastic sun, which reminded me of spring skiing (you could almost go without your jacket) followed by three days of skiing between snowflakes. As I told Jason after the trip was over, I think skiing with an instructor helped me spend far more time on the slopes than I would have otherwise. Just having someone else there who is going to keep doing runs no matter what the weather (he's getting paid to do it), was enough to keep me skiing despite the snow building up on my hat.

It was the first time in 20 years that I had taken any sort of ski lesson. Jason had never taken one. We both, though, found it to be quite beneficial--I have to say, Jason looked much better on the slopes; I hope I had an equal amount of improvement. We ended up in separate groups for the duration, but since my group was dwindling to only two of us by the afternoon of the last day, Jason came and skied along with us. Between that afternoon and our pre and post-lesson runs, we did a fare amount of skiing together.

The view from one of the runs

Overall, we had a good time, though next time I think we will forgo the package deal and book on our own so we can ensure being a bit closer to the slopes and avoid driving as much as possible. Additionally, the package aspect left little opportunity for us to relax--after skiing we would take a quick shower before hiking down to dinner and the evening activities. Additionally, we were skiing while all of Europe had a vacation. While we were fortunate to have short lines on most of the days (primarily due to the weather), since we only have our own schedules to work around, we could certainly pick a less congested week.

Lift-line during good weather

Once again, we wish everyone a great start to 2012!