Spring arrived in Jena!

Last Sunday it was so warm. The air temperature peaked at 19 C, but with the sunshine it felt positively summer-like. Here I am, sporting a summer dress, in front of a temperature gauge where you can see the proof:
See? It was so sunny I could barely keep my eyes open.

The night before was our friend Raul's birthday party, where a bunch of people went out for supper, and then later to the Rosenkeller, this club in an old stone cellar, for dancing into the wee hours. I don't have any pictures from the Rosenkeller itself, but I found this on the University website, to give you some idea of what it looks like.The next morning we went out for brunch, all a bit tired and hungover, and afterward Jeremi and I took a walk through the park on our way back home. The weather was too nice to go home right away, so we hung out on the grass for a while...There are also some new little yellow flowers growing in the Paradiespark, smaller than Winterlinge, as seen here:

(In that second picture they're growing all through the grass.) I remember seeing these last year when I went to Weimar with Anna, but I don't recall ever looking up the names.

And finally, a few more flower pictures. Here are the daffodils growing on the island at the corner of our street, which have been trying so hard for the last month to open...
...and finally on Sunday, with 19 C, one of them made it!
Now of course they've almost all opened, as it's stayed fairly mild and sunny throughout the week. And finally, one last flower picture, showing these lovely mini-irises, which came up around the same time as the crocuses (or croci?).
Hooray for spring!!! (I'm sorry to all of you who are still being snowed on and aren't enjoying it any more. You should know that we heard the weather reports and saw the pictures from Canada this winter with not a small amount of envy. Short days are made so much brighter when there's snow on the ground...)

a bike ride to Bürgel

This last Saturday the weather was lovely and we decided to go on a bike ride east, to Bürgel. This town is famous for its pottery, particularly that which is glazed dark blue with hand-painted white dots, like this stuff:But that isn't all they have. The town has at least a dozen individual potters, probably more like 20. And this is in a town of only 3400 people, counting all the surrounding villages as well. The last weekend of June there's a huge pottery festival here, with 98 artists booked to show their wares. Next time you come to visit, mom, we're definitely going to bring you here. And it's only 13 km away (by car that is, if you take our more pleasant cycling route you end up with a round trip of 36 km).

Along the way we also took pictures of some of the lovely spring flowers, like these mini-daffodils in our courtyard,and this collection of spring bulbs in a garden in Bürgel,
and this tree on our street, which has been flowering since December (and smells so sweet!),
and these twisted pussy-willow-like plants, which were in this parking lot where we stopped to check our map, and then were asked to leave by a security guard,and finally this forsythia hedge, which was just blossoming. (It's fully opened now, five days later.)

Aside from the flowers, we only took a few pictures in Bürgel, such as the interesting decorations around the church's door:And a close-up of the guy right above the door (I'm sure there's adequate clues with his orb and the water to figure out who he is, but I don't have the energy at the moment):Here was the nicely-decorated door of one of the many pottery studios:While there, after riding up and down many hills to get there, we went in search of a beer and bratwurst, not usually a hard thing to come by in small towns in Thüringen. The one pub that looked like they'd have such a thing was closed on Saturdays (but open on Sundays), following the general trend regarding German business hours and convenience. There was a restaurant where we could have gotten a beer, but there was no bratwurst, and the food was expensive. In fact, despite the sun, we didn't smell a grill in the whole town. Partly I think this is because Germans tend to dress and behave more according to the calendar than the weather (or common sense). For example, the German thought might be: "it's February so I must wear a toque", not "it's 20 degrees outside in February so I should BBQ in a T-shirt", which is what most Canadians would think. (Okay, so the Germans might not actually use the word "toque" in their thoughts, but they also don't think in English, generally.)

In fact the whole town of Bürgel was pretty dead, so we decided that our mini-picnic of taboulleh and fruit would have to be enough, when, on the edge of town, we noticed a lot of parked cars and pedestrian traffic. What were they all there for? Ice cream, of course. Don't be fooled into thinking they were only eating ice cream because it was sunny - Germans love ice cream. Of course everyone likes ice cream, but the quantities that they eat and the frequency with which they eat it is really remarkable. And so Jeremi and I had our first full-size German sundaes.
Yes, they were delicious, but I'd trade them for two pints and two bratwurst any day.

catching up on some French cooking posts

Back in January we had our second meeting of the French-speaking-and-cooking group, following our successful croissant-making kick-off brunch in December. This time we had a lovely meal of prunes wrapped in bacon, salad with a warm dressing with fried onions and garlic and warm goat cheese with honey, coq au vin with fresh pasta, and crème brûlée for dessert. The food was fabulous, better than good, and we had a great time cooking as well.

The pictures didn't get put up earlier, because we were too busy cooking to get around to taking any. Luckily my colleague Julia was there, and I just got the pictures that she took from her.

Here Matthias is cutting up the smoked pork for the sauce for the coq au vin, while Barbara samples the wine.
And the lovely Constanze here preparing the salad (that's the cheese in the pan)...
...and here's the finished product.
Meanwhile, Jeremi was wowing them all with his pasta-making skills, calling for help only when the band of dough became unmanageably long.Julia and Barbara were in charge of the dessert, and they didn't disappoint. Here they're getting the custard ready to go into the oven in its hot water bath,
And here comes the ''brûlée'' part.You can even watch a video of it, if you like. Someone tried to borrow a little kitchen torch from a friend to make this, but wasn't able to, so Julia borrowed two torches from the workshop in our institute. (The price was some of the dessert the next day.) To ensure that we have the tools next time, Jeremi and I bought Matthias a torch for his birthday, which was just last weekend.
And since Julia was sending me pictures anyhow, she also shared the ones that she took at the croissant-making party in December, where I took careful photographic records until the moment they went into the oven, at which point I stopped. And so here are some more of her pictures, showing the shaped dough rising...
...and then baking...
...and being carefully watched as they puffed up......and finally, here they are, complete perfection. I'll have to find some excuse to make these guys again, but I'll have to invite guests.

Wedding invitation sweatshop

Last night we had Calin and Susanne over for supper to help put together our painfully homemade wedding invitations. A couple of weekends ago I spent much of one day cutting and gluing these strips of paper into log cabin quilt blocks, and found that I only managed to get 27 done. And so I brought home another glue stick from work, and decided to call on some friends for help. I didn't get any pictures of the labourers actively at it (perhaps I don't allow cameras to record the working conditions?), but here's the scene just after they left. As you can imagine, the cat was lots of help.
Don't think that this was unpaid labour though - they were treated to a thoroughly unhealthy meal of ribs with North American-style BBQ sauce, sweet potato fries, and a giant salad, all prepared by Jeremi. Here they are, sitting down to it.
By now you're probably wondering what the invitations themselves looked like. Here's an out-of-focus picture of one of the covers...and the inside has this in it:
Don't bother trying out the website listed yet - it's not up and running yet. But it will be by the time we mail them out! It may well be a while yet until they actually arrive at your door. We've got just over half finished now, and we still don't have a full address list put together. After that we have to address them and the RSVP cards, send the whole package to Canada, have the best maid of honour ever (aka Marie) stamp them, and mail them off. I can't see this taking less than a month, but that's still pretty reasonable.

PS If you find any spelling or grammar mistakes in the invite shown above, please don't tell me.

Winterlinge!

Among the many floral sites around Jena (including a variety of wild orchids), is the early spring appearance of the Winterlinge. From what I can tell online, these are known as winter aconites in English, though I don't recall ever hearing the word or seeing the plant in Canada. They can be grown in hardiness zones 4-8, so it's not that it's too cold anywhere that we've lived in Canada, but they're just not that common. Here, they're everywhere - in gardens, planted in the grass like crocuses, and, most notably, covering the forest floor in some areas around Jena.

Last February after I'd arrived in Jena I heard about these flowers, and decided that I wanted to go try to find them in the woods. I set out with Anna, a PhD student at my institute, and we rode up to Rautal, a forested hillside, where they were purported to be. Unfortunately we couldn't find any. Figuring that we were just too late in the season and had missed them, we vowed to try again the next year.

And so I found myself riding up this giant mountain with super-fit Anna, trying my best not to collapse at the side of the road. Unlike last year, I made it to the top without stopping for breath (woohoo!), and we headed into the forest. This forest, like most forests that I've seen in Germany, is far from wild. In addition to being basically a monoculture (beech, in this case), it's also criss-crossed with paths, and they maintain it by carting away any trees or branches that fall, so that the forest looks tidy. Still, it is a nice place, and has a lovely little stream (the Steinbach, literally the stone brook) running through and carving up the limestone.

At first we were beginning to worry that we'd missed them again, as the forest looked exactly the same as last year, with no little yellow flowers to be seen, but we just kept walking. The area isn't so big, maybe 2-3 square kilometers, so we figured that we had to find them eventually. And then, as we were coming around another bend, we were able to make them out in the distance... And suddenly there were little yellow flowers everywhere!

Complete with an interpretive sign!


Here you can see them up close. They look a bit like buttercups, to which they're related.
And it wasn't only Winterlinge either. Here you can see a few snowdrops poking out in between.
This is a terrible picture of Anna, but I thought I should put in at least one of her...And this isn't actually a picture of the Winterlinge, but I thought that the roots of this tree at the edge of the path warranted a picture as well. Just left of the centre (a bit hard to see) there's even a small tree growing up from the roots.
The only thing that took away from the flowers was the weather. Though not raining, it was quite cloudy, and as such the flowers weren't fully opened. I might have to bring Jeremi back there on the weekend with me if it's sunny. (I shouldn't have mentioned to him how bad the hill is!) At some point we'll put up some other pictures of flowers around town. The crocuses and snowdrops have already been out for a while, and the daffodils are ready to burst any day now. There are a few bushes blooming as well, including one with pink flowers that started in December. We really didn't realize that the winters in Europe were so warm. It seems that Canada may have the reputation as the land of ice and snow for a reason...