Paris October 2007

We met up with Alice and Giuseppe for their last 3 days in Europe: after two years of Italy and Belgium they flew back to OZ on the Sunday. We watched the last game of World Cup Rugby, played in the park and cruised the town.


a bit of romance in front of Notre Dame cathedral













On Sunday we met up with crazy French girl (now Canadienne?) Cecile for a brief visit shortly before she escaped to Canada. She taught us the fine French arts of:
1) eating a full Sunday lunch at a sunny sidewalk cafe
2) flirting with Parisian waiters and reaping the rewards
3) locating a train station while drunk on red wine.

Prague

here are a few of my favourite photos - in no particular order whatsoever - what, you want order?! - of my choir trip to Prague this july. or, as the germans say, 'Prag'. or as the czechs say, 'Praha'.


my choir, Unichor Duesseldorf, in the university's Carolinum, or auditorium, where we held one of our concerts.


after 3 weeks in bc, i jumped directly into an intensive 6 days of german immersion in a czech speaking land. as you can imagine, i didn't learn much czech.

view of st. wenceslas boulevard.

the prague castle. it's actually a kind of enclosed city with a palace at one end, still in use by the government, and a few huge churches in the centre, plus the old streets and houses of citizens of old.

river view from our evening boat tour.

you just don't find this kind of architecture in vancouver!

'sgraffito' - precursor to today's graffiti. plastering and scraping to achieve two contrasting tones that will last a lot longer than paint.

a closeup of a building in the jewish quarter. there are quite a few synagogues in the area, some dating back to the 1200's, a jewish cemetary and cultural centres.

this was the funniest thing: a walkway so narrow there was actually a walk/do not walk ligth (you can see it in green) on either end of it to avoid one to one confrontations!

part of on open-air sculpture exhibit in the city while we were there.

a dripstone wall. there are frogs and snakes and faces hiding in it.

the small church in velka lhota where we had our killer concert!

our final meal: this was to serve 6. could have served 10.

the ambience. not for vegetarian eyes.

Biogarten

in eschewing all attempts to apologize for or explain my long absence from blogging, i'll start right into my current duesseldorf excitement:

i've finally started volunteering at the 'Biogarten' (organic garden) in the big city park near my house.

it's a beautiful, peaceful sanctuary set up as a practical grounds on which to run gardening courses for the 'volkshochschule' - the folks' high school, or college. so they offer courses on medicinal herbs and drying herbs and composting and all kinds of stuff. plus they take on volunteers who want to learn how to grow stuff by doing, get stuck in up to the elbows in dirt and physical labour, be a part of the community and share in the fruits of our communal labour.

above you can see some of the gorgeous 'fruits' i brought home last week!!

i've been loving it. the first saturday i helped them build up this massive compost configuration of branches, dirt and green stuff, which is strategially layered to collapse in on itself and rot evenly. they use that to feed the rest of the garden, and grow squash over the heaps still in process. yesterday i helped create a 'death zone' free of plants (klaus, my coworker's term for it: he compared it to the no-go zone between east and west germany before the wall fell) in order to maintain friendly relations with the small gardens society next door, which kept complaining of uninvited ivy and acorns and random other plants invading their pristine, golf-course-esque lawns and beds. hee hee! we had fun thrashing through the bush, though. he's a 70 year old retired pharmacist who loves gardens and seems to know quite a lot about the medicinal herbs.

after our 10-1 session of work, we all congregate around the big outdoor table and drink coffee and some treats someone has brought: fresh baked seed bread with butter and jams made from garden berries, or yesterday 2 different kinds of plum cake with garden plums and whipping cream. mmmm, mm. here is a close up of some great sunflower seed bread - you can't beat german bread - baked by hildegard.



i get to practice my german quite a bit and am getting to know the other folks. they seem like a really sprightly bunch of characters, full of humour, and quite relaxed. ie, i get to call them all, even the 'old farts' ;-), 'du' instead of the formal german 'Sie'. and THEN after the end of the Kaffee und Kuchen session, we all get to try some of the stuff that has been grown right there and picked that day. can you feel my excitement?! so far i have had the pleasure of: zucchini green and yellow, yellow beans, potoatos, mangold (chard?), chives, cucumber, apples. they produce all kinds of things in this garden: they also have bright red, fuzzy amaranth plants which i have never seen before, a fig tree, a peach tree, 2 types of plums (one is really small, yellow, called mirabellle or something), an asian apple/pear, raspberries, etc.

here's a weblink with a few other photos and an article on a plant exchange for those of you who want to practice your german! i'll endeavour to get some of my own photos up here soon.


http://www.wdr.de/tv/service/heim/inhalt/20030711/b_2.phtml

Kate's Description of Duesseldorf Karneval:

Imagine a cross between Halloween, Mardi Gras and Oktoberfest. It's a seasonal holiday as ubiquitous as Christmas and the Rheinland Germans celebrate it in a big way. It's the same Catholic holiday as Mardi Gras, which is basically the time to party like mad before you enter Lent, the 40 days of fasting and austerity (when Jesus was wandering round the desert) before Easter. It's 6 days of craziness which is the best German attempt I know of to dispell those myths that Germans are all seriousness.

It all begins on Thursday, Altweiberfastnacht. This means something like 'old woman's fasting night'. They're not fasting, though. This is the day the women in the city take power: they storm the city hall, take the keys from the mayor and govern the city for a day. What would happen if the mayor were a woman?? not sure... the mayor here's a man... the current Chancellor of the country is a woman, so I guess she just kept the keys to the Parliament for the day. When they're finished with their storming business, the women roam the streets and snip off the tie of any man so careless as to wear one. (Symbolism, anyone?) After 11:11am the vast majority of the city get into a costume and leave work to go to the Altstadt (old city) and drink beer. Skipping work seems to be generally accepted and expected in Duesseldorf.






The party generally continues until Saturday, when there is a race in the afternoon of men dressed up as virgins (blonde braids, drag, high heels) who race around Königs Alle, the chi-chi historic shopping boulevard. You can see a shot here of the Cartier store boarding up its windows on Saturday before the onslaught.

Sunday, there is costumed chaos and celebrations on Königs Allee, also known as the "Kö". I met up at noon with a friend from work, a big group of her friends and family, and brought Tony and our neighbour Mariza along. There were 14 of us all dressed up as polar bears. Here are a couple photos for your perusal! The streets are all blocked off and people just... be... there. They bring their whole family, there are food and drink stalls, and musicians - we danced our butts off to two Maracatu/ Samba bands!!








Rosenmontag, 'Rose Monday' is almost a regional holiday (Tony had it off; one of my two employers gave it to me off) and the big parade. A couple of shots below of the parade, too. There are marching bands, horses, more costumes, lots of candy and other random things like toys and sausages thrown, and cool papier mache floats with political commentary on them. Tony and I were exhausted by Monday and went to the parade for half an hour then fled!







Veilchendienstag, 'Violet Tuesday' things are almost back to normal. In Canada this is called Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. I remember churches on Salt Spring Island doing big pancake breakfasts on that morning, which is the only sign I've seen of this holiday in Canada. I wonder if the 'roses are red, violets are blue' phrase is connected to Karneval somehow?


Aschermittwoch, 'Ash Wednesday' is the first official day of LENT. And beans. :- ) (We've given up meat as an experiment during Lent this year. Hoping to explore new vegetarian recipes and challenge ourselves!) Does anyone have any other Lenten givings-up they’d like share with us?? Post a comment!

testing...

testing out the new bells and whistles blogger...

hungry for hungary

this was our first night in hungary visiting with three friends who are living there: ariel ann and adam (centre) in budapest, and angie in siofok.


big, beautiful church in the middle of pest. the city's divided by the danube river; pest is the east side and buda the west.


we arrived on saturday and went down to the parliament buildings (below) that night to join the protests against the hungarian prime minister. he had recently been caught on tape saying that he had lied to the public for two years about the state of the economy in order to get reelected in april. people demanded his resignation but he refused, even after admiting that it was him on the tapes.


about 30,000 people were at the protests on sat night and they had been going on all week. a major economic problem for hungary when we were there was price increases: heating and electricity had gone up by about 35% over a few months.


above and below: this was a cool pub we visited on sat night called szimpla. indoor, outdoor, plastic lanterns, movie screens, beer, plants, delapidated walls with peeling paint, a bike room, cozy nooks and tons of character. this is double a's great shot of a cozy nook




a jewelry stand for girls to play in.


graffiti on the walk to lunch the next day.


lunch! really yummy, fusiony food. i was impressed we found more than meat, dumplings, paprika and sour cream.


wicked facades on old buildings.


tone and double a in the sun near double a's hood.


music academy where liszt studied.


the courtyard of ariel ann and adam's flat in pest.

...and we haven't even got to lake balaton yet!!! more excitement to come.