In the usual fashion of moving to a new apartment, we had a housewarming party on Sunday. And of course we cooked many different dishes for our guests.

The menu:

- Eggplant Parmesan
- Moussaka
- Greek Salad
- Râpé
- Hummus and pita bread
- Watercheastnuts wrapped in bacon
- Sushi
- Challah (not really Challah but a braided bread with shallots, poppy seeds and cheese in each braid)
- Canapes with olive tapenade mozzarella and roasted peppers
- Stuffed mushroom caps
- Fruit plate for the
- Chocolate fondue and
- Vanilla custard

It was a lot of work, but definitely worth it. We started the night before preparing what we could without filling up our tiny fridge, and got up early to cook everything. It all went pretty well. Calin and Susanne came earlier to help. We also bought 80 liters of beer and 6 bottles of wine.





We stayed up until around five in the morning and made it through 5/8 of the beer and ended up with more wine than when we started. The food all went which is impressive. Usually there are lots of leftovers. Well done, gang. Thanks to everyone for coming and all the wonderful gifts you brought, you warmed up our home beautifully.

Our apartment so far

Here's a clip of our apartment as it is right now. There's still some organizing and replacing of cardboard boxes with furniture to do but it's coming along nicely. The video is pretty choppy (I don't know why our camera does that) and you can't always hear what I'm saying (because of the choppiness of course) but it'll give you a good idea.

I'm on Wolke 7

Some will be glad to know that, just for using English idioms, you get two more full levels of bliss than Germans do (or Italians for that matter). That's right, in German once you reached cloud seven (Wolke sieben) there is nowhere else to go. As you can see from this bed and mattress store, the little sleeping angel is totally blissed out. So next time you're way up on cloud nine, think of all the poor Germans that are stuck down on cloud 7 and maybe it will bring you back down to their ultimate cloud level. But wait, does that mean that Germans only have to climb 7 cloud levels to attain nirvana whereas the English-speaking world must work harder to reach a higher plane? Is cloud ascension measured on a logarithmic scale? What authority certifies these levels? Is there a reviewing committee? What are the political ramifications of...

Mt. Jenzig

Ok, so it's not a mountain, it's just a little hill. And like most of the little hills here that have hiking trails running all over them, it has a pub/restaurant at it's peak. Pretty awesome! Just hiked for a couple of hours? Feel like having a cold Pilsner? No cooler-dragging required.



Check out Jena from Jenzig (with very little annoying commentary).

So... Germany

For all you poor crying babies that want a Germany post, well here it is. Julia came to Frankfurt to get Aeris and me. She rented a bigger car than we normally would so we could go buy some used furniture. Of course since we're in Germany, Avis had Mercedes to rent out.


The Cat did great on the way over. She probably didn't like it but she didn't lose her voice meowing like she did from Halifax to Victoria. Now she is right at home here...

and loves the chair that Julia dragged home, but misses Iams (her ex-food).

Lovely rapeseed (Canola, but not Canola cause that's a specifically Canadian engineered rapeseed plant) fields lined the Autobahn where Julia drove as fast as she has ever driven in her life. She was also quickly passed by motorists going much faster (probably 210-220 km/h).

So now I'm home again. Hooray!!

Bye Bye Bar

Fairwell Bar, we knew ye well. Take care of what's left of it Mike and Megan, and by that I mean have fun drinking the hell out of it.

Good bye Vic/Mike and Megan's house warming party

Thanks to Mike and Megan, I was able to piggyback my going away on their newly purchased condo warming hootenanny. We had two kegs, one of which was graciously donated by Megan's aunt and uncle, thank you, and the Bar (see next post). It was lots of fun and thanks to everyone how came and made it a very memorable and awesome last Vic bash.

Tomiko, Jordan, Sharon and Patricia drunk and smiling.

Me (I swear to god, I got out of bed and my hair was like this) and Katsy.

MS Run

Way back on May 15 a bunch of us Ran/Walked for Multiple Sclerosis. This was a fund raising event in which you could run or walk 3, 6 or 9 km. I ran the 9 km circuit and Sharon kicked my ass.

Here is Isabella (Bryonee's dauther) playing with some helium balloons.


Sharon, Katsy, Bruce and Bruce's parents warming
up.

Daphnee's Dashers (Our team's name). Top row: Me, Erin, Bruce, Bryonee, Sharon, Daphnee (Bruce's mom) and the person hiding behind Daphnee is ... uh... Bruce's dad (I forgot his name, sorry Bruce's dad). Bottom row: Natalie and her dog (also forgot his/her name), Katsy, Isabella and Brandy our fearless captain.

Blossoms

I wasn't able to get any good pictures of the cherry blossoms this year because I had to borrow several friends cameras for my photographic needs while Julia had already left for Germany. But I did get some pictures of later blooming pear and plum trees that were in our backyard in Victoria.

Big pear tree and;

pretty plum blossoms.

Finally some new posts from Jeremi

My last days in Victoria were pretty hectic so I was unable to post much. The next post might be a bit late but will hopefully tie you over until the "I'm in Germany post".

Jeremi comes today!!!

I'm writing this from Frankfurt, and in a few mere HOURS I'll be heading to the airport to pick him up. Yesterday morning I picked up the rental car in Jena, and, as is often the case in Canada, they didn't have the exact car that I ordered, so I got one size bigger. So instead of a medium-sized Opel, I have a huge Mercedes, I think some sort of B class maybe? I should probably check the model name, but anyhow it's a huge 7-speed Mercedes and I was driving at something like 160 km/h on the Autobahn and getting passed like I was standing still. I'm certainly not in Canada any more. Despite the breakneck speeds, I did manage to snap a picture of the lovely fields of rapeseed/canola. I wish I hadn't gotten the sign in there, but this way you know that I was near Magdala at the time. The car also let me make a last-minute trip to IKEA to pick up a couple last things, and I even stopped at another furniture store to get a cheap table and chairs for the balcony. I didn't have time to assemble anything as I was stuck in traffic on the way back for over an hour, but we can do it together now.

And now just a couple more random notes as my last without-Jeremi posting. For one thing, today I'm wearing my first hand-spun hand-knit top, which I finally got around to finishing and blocking so I could wear it to pick him up. Here it is being blocked on my mattress. I'm really usually lazy with blocking, even though I know it makes a world of difference, but it was definitely the only way that I was getting those little lace corners to lie down. The fibre is beautiful, a merino and tencel blend. (Tencel is a rayon-like cellulose-based fibre, which has a nice sheen and drape a bit like silk, but much cheaper.) It's the same sort of fibre as the scarf I made for my mom, but with a darker colour.

And now I'm enjoying the day with Jenny and Janka. They're both sleeping on the couch while I write this, actually. Last night I arrived to a lovely asparagus-themed meal, with a cream of asparagus soup with vanilla, pork shish kebabs, asparagus with a sabayon sauce, and new potatoes. Very spring-like. And for dessert there was a lovely semolina mousse-like thing with strawberries. Delicious. (And Jenny and I had the leftover dessert as breakfast dessert today, which was also lovely.) They're waking up now, so I should be off, but here's a picture in closing.

Sperrmüll

As I mentioned in the last post, I discovered the wonders of Sperrmüll, which means something like bulky trash, I think. It's a special garbage collection for things like old furniture and the like, which wouldn't be picked up on a weekly basis. One neighbourhood at a time has these Sperrmüll collections, and they seem to happen every month or so somewhere in the city. A couple of my colleagues mentioned that they were sometimes good places to pick up furniture, but I wasn't expecting much. After all, this stuff is garbage, right?

Wrong! And I understand now why the second hand stores in Jena are so crappy - people just throw out perfectly good furniture! And so a couple of weeks ago, on a Tuesday night after a friends' birthday party, I headed over the river to Jena-Ost to see what I could find. The main prize of the evening was this beauty. Okay, maybe not so beautiful, but it's comfortable, clean, doesn't smell funny, and has no holes or anything. Not only that, but it´s on castors, which is a bit odd for an armchair, but it made it easier to push this monster back the 1.4 kilometers over cobblestones and streetcar tracks to my house. And then, I actually managed to bring it up the stairs all by myself, without making too much noise, as it was already 1:00 in the morning. I paid for this the next day with sore muscles, but no serious damage. And I didn't just get this chair - I also brought home a wicker chair (which has since broken - I guess it was there for a reason), an ironing board, a little sleeve-sized ironing board insert, not one but two laundry racks (one of which looks like it came directly from the store it's so nice), a grass mat for at the beach, an umbrella, and a couple of big plastic containers that will either be gargage cans or tomato planters, likely the latter. I really wanted to go back for more, but at this point it was 2:00, and I was really tired. It'll definitely be easier next time with Jeremi along. I can't wait!



(Again, I'm sorry this picture is sideways. I figured out how to fix it on my computer, but I'm writing this from Jenny and Leo's, and their computer is all in German, and I can't be bothered to figure it out right now.)

And this was not my only economical addition to the household of late. I also managed to pick up a used sewing machine, based on an ad I found on the internet. It's a bit like my old one in Canada, an older model that has some plastic but still a frame of cast iron, so it weighs a tonne, and works like a mule. It's actually a lot fancier than my old one, as it does much more than just straight stitch and zigzag, and it came with a bunch of special feet for things like blindstitch etc. It came with a manual too, but of course it's all in German, so it'll be an adventure figuring it all out. Actually, even buying it was an adventure. I was able to do all the correspondence over email, and my German is good enough for this now, even though I'm sure I make lots of mistakes. And the seller was in Erfurt, which is about 50 km away from Jena. There's this cheap rail ticket you can get for one day that lets you take any local trains within a 50 km radius of your starting point for only 6 euros, so that wasn't too expensive, and I thought that picking up the sewing machine was a good excuse to get to Erfurt and have a look around.

Because the seller's house was about 5 km from the train station I brought my bike with me on the train, and I figured that this would make it easier to explore the city as well. This is really easy to do here, which is awesome, and on the weekend lots of people will go with their bikes for the day to another city and then either ride around there and take the train home, or ride home from the other city so they don't have to ride back along the same route.

I sort of wanted to explore the city first, but I started late, so I had to go to get the machine first thing. The couple selling it were really nice, but they didn't speak a word of English (which they apologized for, which is silly), and my basic German does not extend to sewing vocabulary. And so when I tried it out and something was funny with the tension knob, we had some trouble communicating. But in the end I think I got the gist of it, and it's an old enough machine that it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. It's also a super-retro East German sewing machine, with a brand name of Veritas, and it was built in this famous sewing machine factory in Wittenberg, which was shut down in the 90's after reunification. Here's a picture of the funky carrying case:



And here's a peek inside at the actual machine.



The thing weighed a tonne, and definitely didn't fit in my backpack, but if I looped the handles over one of my handlebars I could sort of ride. Enough to coast down the hill to the train station at least. The nice man who sold it to me (for 25 €) offered to help me carry it to the car, but I declined, as I was afraid he'd insist on driving me back to the train if he found out that I was going to try and bring it on my bicycle. But with the heavy machine I couldn't explore the city much, so I locked my bike and the bag together at the train station, afraid that someone would think it was a bomb, and I left to explore the city by foot.

It was a gorgeous sunny Sunday, and there was a huge pottery festival going on in the city centre, with at least 100 presenters. The pottery was lovely, though quite pricy, more than I'm used to seeing in Canada for sure. Mom, it would have been the perfect day for you. I took a couple pictures of the pottery, but they're on my computer in Jena, and not with me here in Frankfurt. I'll try to post them later.