EuroLIfe: Day 229

It's been a few days since I've written anything about desserts, so it seemed about time to do so. Late this afternoon, Michael and I went out to our favorite ice cream shop to sit in the sun and play Scrabble while eating delicious ice cream. (This is one of the finer, though rarely exercised privileges of being an adult--eating ice cream before dinner.)

I have posted about this ice cream shop before, but I had not yet the Mango Becher. This is the sundae to end all sundaes.

Start with four scoops of ice cream: mango, lemon, vanilla and strawberry. Add whipped cream, strawberry sauce, a drizzle of mango sauce, and 4 or 5 big slices of mango, plus a little cookie and (oddly, I think) a single grape. It's incredible. I have only had it once before, and actually it was quite different--no strawberry ice cream, no strawberry sauce, more real mango slices. I'm not sure which I prefer, but this is hands down the best ice cream sundae I have ever had. The funny thing is, I've never been a big fan of fruity ice cream. I like my ice cream in chocolaty or minty flavors, thank you very much. For whatever reason, though, these Italian ice cream shops don't do a great job with the flavors I like from back home. Their fruit ice creams, on the other hand, are unbelievable. Who knew that lemon ice cream--not ice, but creamy gelato--could be so delicious?

As further proof, I will show you Michael's selection for the evening: chocolate ice cream and chocolate chip ice cream drowned in coffee and topped with whipped cream, a cookie, and a chocolate covered coffee bean.

Michael looks pretty happy about his selection in this picture, don't you think? And, indeed, he took one bite and said "oh...this is very good." Then I made the mistake of giving him a bite of my sundae, and that was the end of that. Suddenly his was "bland" and "uninteresting" and Michael was unabashedly attacking my Mango Becher. (At times, he practically took the spoon from my hand as I finished a bite.) Now, you might have noticed that my sundae was a bit on the large side, so this was alright...but next time he's getting his own :)

So, for those of you who will be visiting this summer, you have this to look forward to! For those of you who were considering coming for a visit one of these days, consider this extra incentive :)

On the way home, however, I noticed one area in which German is not necessarily better: Pizza. I have had my concerns with German pizza before. (Why would you put tuna fish on a pizza, for example?) Here was a new idea, though:

Pizza Butterfly. As in, pizza with butterfly pasta as a topping. Again: why?

One more funny sighting that we should share. The city center is again full of carnival rides, food and drink stands, and in general a flurry of activity. There is a big stage set-up, and various musicians have been performing over the weekend. On our way home, Happy Feeling was the band of the hour. Click on this photo to zoom it...it really is worth it. We couldn't tell if she was trying to be goofy with this outfit (heart-shaped glasses and all) or earnest!

EuroLIfe: Day 227

Hello again! Boy we've been remiss about writing lately. I'm determined to get better about this. Michael swears that he is going to write a post on the Lycean Trail soon, as promised :) Still, the day we spent hiking the trail was long and eventful, so I thought that we could do TWO posts on it! After all, Michael will want to tell you all about the Lyceans and the trail, while I mostly want to show you pictures and tell you about the highlight of the day:

We met a mountain turtle. "But wait!", you say, "Turtles don't live in the mountains!" Well this turtle does. (And, as it turns out, so do lots of Turtles in Turkey. Who knew?)

We nearly walked right past him! In fact, Michael did walk right past him, but I saw him there, just meandering along the side of the path. He was awesome. Michael says he was the best part of the vacation, actually, and I have to tell you it was pretty funny watching Michael play with this turtle. Right about now you're probably wondering how a person plays with a turtle. Well, once this guy spotted us, he started to chase us. (Very, very slowly...but deliberately and with great determination!) So, Michael kept climbing onto tough-to-reach spots in order to watch the turtle (slowly, methodically) follow.

That might not look like such a tough climb, but remember--he's a turtle!

He was, as I said, very determined, but he had one weakness: He couldn't get enough of these yellow flowers that grew along the trail. He had no interest in the red flowers, he was willing to eat the white ones from time to time, but he simply could not pass-up the yellow flowers.

In the end, this was the turtle's downfall. He had almost reached Michael (after a particularly arduous climb) when he came upon a big cluster of yellow flowers. He went to work, chomping the heads off of each and every yellow flower, and eventually forgot all about us. We probably spent 15 minutes or so hanging out with this turtle...it's a shame we couldn't take him home from his mountain dwelling.

I'll end with two photos, one of each of us. I sometimes hear that we do not post enough pictures of ourselves up here, so here goes:

I don't know why I always have my hand on my belly. I know that most pregnant women do, and I have tried from time time to just stand like a normal person, but I inevitably find myself with my hand back on my belly. (This is especially true now that the little guy moves around so much. I guess it's the closest I can get to snuggling him!)

I love this picture. It really gives a sense of how incredible the view was along this trail. It was a fantastic day, and surely the last mountain trek that I will make before this little guy comes to join us!

EuroLIfe: Day 223

As you may have noticed, it's been a while since Michael has written. Word on the street says that he's going to write a post tomorrow on the Lycean Way (and the Lyceans themselves...sort of a buy one get one free post!) We've been rather negligent of late, though, so I thought I'd at least do a quick post today.

In addition to many outdoor adventures, cultural encounters, and other edifying experiences that comprised our Turkey vacation, we also did a lot of eating. Not just regular old eating, either...we ate like royalty. Every morning and evening, we would report to the beautiful dining room where we found an enormous variety of freshly made treats. Breakfast was good, but dinner was incredible. (We had no idea how amazing Turkish food is!) We started the evening with the cold appetizers--including delicious grilled vegetables, hummus, stuffed peppers, stuffed grape leaves, various spreads with fresh breads...and it goes on and on. There was a large spread of fresh cheeses as well, and more varieties of olives than I have ever seen. (Not my cup of tea, but still impressive!)

After that, we would go for the main courses...but again, there were usually too many to choose from! They were mostly cooked right in the dining room, too, so you could simply walk up to the man grilling the fish, for example, and wait for him to plop one on your plate! There was always a fish option, and a number of lamb dishes, and pasta dishes, some chicken or other, and about a dozen (honestly) side dishes. Once again, it wasn't just that there was a lot of food, but that the food was all of the quality that you would expect at a restaurant at which we couldn't ordinarily afford to eat :)

And finally--and I'm sure you all saw this coming--there was the dessert. Now this was really a problem. I had to take pictures. There were no fewer than 30 desserts every evening. Each one of them looked handmade and, quite frankly, irresistible. I tried to take a picture of the dessert table and couldn't fit it all in one photo...that should tell you something! So here are TWO photos of the dessert choices with which we were confronted every evening.















As you can imagine, the pictures don't do justice to the selection. The very first evening, I stood at the dessert table for a few minutes just paralyzed. I had absolutely no idea how to proceed. In the end, I resisted about 80% of what I really (really) wanted to try, and was rather proud of myself until I saw that I had 7 desserts on my plate. Now, they were little desserts--sized for sampling, so to speak--but 7 desserts is 7 desserts, and even I can admit that that's probably too many.

One thing I discovered in Turkey: I had never had a decent piece of baklava! I thought I had, but once I tried the real deal I saw what I had been missing. That was one of the real dessert highlights--that and the various fruit tarts on homemade butter crusts...and, of course, the chocolate desserts were not bad either :)


These last two pictures are our dessert plates one evening. I told Michael that we could only take the pictures if we didn't tell anyone whose plate was whose. He readily agreed and said with a smile "I'm sure nobody will ever guess." Humph.

EuroLIfe: Day 220

My First Mothers' Day (sort of)

Having not yet had the baby, last Sunday probably wasn't really my first Mothers' Day, but the lovely people at Montana Pines gave me a flower at breakfast anyway :) They got very excited, actually, given that I was obviously a soon-to-be mother. It was super fun!

After a delicious (read: pastry-rich) breakfast at the resort, I took the shuttle to the beach with a friend that Michael and I met while on vacation. Her name is Silvia, and we met her and her husband (Dieter) on a fantastic 12 Island Boat Tour. (Soon we will write about that as well.) Anyway, Silvia and I got on the shuttle and headed to the beach.

Why didn't Michael come? Why didn't Dieter come? Both excellent questions. They hung around for another 15 minutes or so and got on a truck which drove them up, and up, and up the mountain with a few other people. (Michael tells me this was the scariest part of the day, which I believe having been on those impossibly narrow, bumpy mountain roads.)

They stopped about 6,500 feet up the mountain, where they found the launching area. Then Michael was assigned a "pilot", sharply attired in a flight suit, strapped into a fancy flying hammock chair sort of thing with said pilot, and off they went! Fortunately (as I've explained to my less-than-amused father), parasailing is not like parachuting; there is no freefall. Instead, you run about 15 or 20 feet with an open chute, and the air just lifts you up and off you go! In fact, you go up for a while before you start going down--but down you go, in the end.

Meanwhile, back at the beach, Silvia and I were settled onto our beach towels chatting away, and waiting until it was time to start watching the sky. (And, in my case at least, praying that this baby would get to meet his father, and that his father would be all in one piece when it happened.)

Silvia and Dieter are German, and it turns out that Silvia grew up in Jena! We were all very excited to hear this; most of the Germans we meet outside of the city have never been to Jena. So we had plenty to chat about. Because Silvia grew up in Jena while it was Eastern Germany, she had Russian in school instead of English, so all of our conversations were in German. This was great for two reasons: first, it's fun to see that I am now (almost?) conversant in German. I am far, far, far from fluent, but I can carry on conversations! We spent the better part of 2 days with Silvia and Dieter, all in German, so I got plenty of practice. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it is an excellent distraction to have to think so hard while chatting. So I worried about Michael a lot less once I was with Silvia :)

After about an hour and 15 minutes, Silvia and I walked up to the landing site and waited to be told which of the many, many parachutes we should be watching. Eventually, they said "well, one of the Montana Pines guys is in that red parachute" so we started watching and taking photos. As he got closer, we looked at the shoes (following their advice) and saw that it was Michael--white sneakers for Michael, black for Dieter :)

Michael came down looking like a 5 year old on Christmas morning (but in a flightsuit.) I don't know that I've ever seen him look so excited and delighted about anything before! And he landed safely, so it looks like this little guy will not be deprived of his father after all.

This last picture is cool, but only if you know what you're looking at. The pilot filmed a video during Michael's flight, which we were then shown with the hope that we would buy it. We did not buy it--most of it was a video of Michael's face, and not of the surroundings--but I snuck a quick picture of it :) So this is a photo of a video of Michael flying over the Blue Lagoon!

EuroLIfe: Day 217

We are back! Turkey was absolutely amazing. I kept thinking about how much everyone would love this place--our parents, siblings, friends--and then remembering just how long the flight would be from the U.S. It really is too bad, because this region of Turkey (Fethiye/Olu Deniz) is absolutely astonishing. The landscape is unlike any place I've ever been, though I haven't been to all that many places, and Michael tells me it's a bit like Greece :)

I'm super tired today, and there are enough photos and stories for a week's worth of posts, so I'll just share a bit for now. First, this was the view from our breakfast table on the first day! The mountains were incredible, and the dining area felt like a rather posh restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating. We ate outside nearly every day.

The nearby beach was one of the prettiest I've ever seen. The resort is up in the mountains, but there is a free shuttle that leaves at 10:30 and comes back for you at 4:30, and the drive only takes about 10 minutes. We went a few times, including the first full day that we were there.

The beach is called the Blue Lagoon, and it really is just nestled among the mountains--and it is extremely blue. The water is totally clear, but a very rich, purplish blue color; just beautiful. It was also extremely cold--as in, your chest seizes up upon entry cold. Still, we went swimming the first day, and even swam out to a little island across the way. Michael went once on his own, and then we went together. It was only a few days later, while snorkeling, that we saw the many hidden sea urchins that could have assaulted our poor bare feet. Fortunately, we managed to avoid them anyway! If you look closely in the third photo (or click on it to make it larger) you can see Michael climbing onto the little island.

There was a snack bar on the beach which sold all sorts of lunch food, beverages, and the like. Our first day there, we bought cheeseburgers and split and order or fries. When one of the men working there saw our order, he called me down the counter to where he was standing and gave me a big forkfull of spicy meat used for Doener Kebaps (a delicious Turkish sandwich.) He smiled and said "for the baby!" I assumed that he was disappointed that we were ordering hamburgers instead of trying to local food. The truth is, though, we eat Doeners in Jena all the time--they are a favorite of ours. Hamburgers, on the other hand, are very hard to come by! Still, I couldn't exactly explain this to him so I ate the meat and told him, truthfully, that it was delicious.

A few days later, we were there for lunch again. This time we did order Doeners. (The hamburgers had been very good, but tasted nothing like hamburgers.) I went back to get some ketchup and saw that same man, who again called me over. He asked how I was, I said very well, and he said "Please, one minute!" He disappeared, (well, not literally) and came back with a paper bowl which he filled with pickles and onions. I mean it, he filled this bowl with pickles and onions, stuck a fork in it and handed it to me with the kindest smile! I thanked him, and took it over to our table where I did manage to eat most of it with my sandwich.

So, I suppose he just really likes to feed pregnant women. Michael thinks his wife, mother, or somebody must have really craved pickles & onions while pregnant, and he thought "Ooh, she's pregnant--she must really need some pickles and onions!" In any case, it made my day. It's hard to explain why, but he was just very sweet. Not pushy, just generous!

I have included one more photo, which is sort of a preview for a later post. The Blue Lagoon is also the landing site for many, many paragliders. You will learn more about paragliding--and wives who let their husbands jump off of the sides of mountains--in a subsequent post. For now, suffice it to say that it's very cool to sit on the beach and watch a sky full of people drifting along the mountains and down onto the sand. At one point, I counted as many as 30 up there!

EuroLife: Day 208

Hello again!
Today's post should, if I am at all successful, be a quick one. We just got back from a fantastic conference in a little town in Hessen, about 4 hours from here, and we leave tomorrow for a week in Turkey! After that, there will be no more traveling for me until well after this baby arrives.

I did want to post about this conference, though. We were invited by our really wonderful friends Reinhard and Ulrika--we posted about them earlier, when they had us over for dinner after church one Sunday. They may very well be the nicest people that I have ever met. Reinhard is a retired professor of business and economics, and he's involved with a group called "Wort & Wissen" (or "the word and knowledge"). It is a group of Christian academics in a variety of fields--geology, chemistry, biology, economics, theology, archeology, etc. The conference went from Thursday evening through this morning, and there were probably 150 people in attendance.

Now, here's the impressive part: It was a holiday weekend, and many (maybe most) of the attendees were not themselves in academic fields. In fact, people brought their children and, while the younger ones had a kids program, the youth-aged kids just went to the talks. At this point, it probably sounds more like a church retreat than a conference--and that was what I began to wonder when we first arrived. Then we went to the first talk, which was given by a Geologist, and I realized what we were in for. It went from 8-10:30 the first night, and they had to eventually cut-off the questions to keep the discussion from going all night. The talk itself was extremely impressive--really an academic paper of high caliber. (I only partially understood it, but Michael was very impressed.)

This was to be the case with all of the talks; the weekend was essentially a rigorous academic conference attended by intellectually interested Christians from all walks of life. I thought I was getting off easy by choosing a "botanical excursion" for one of my seminars.I expected to walk through the woods with someone who could show me the pretty flowers. We did a little bit of walking, but mostly we stood around gathering specimens which we dissected while listening to some pretty hard-core botany lessons. This went on for 2 and a half hours, and we barely left the periphery of the building!

I've never been to anything like this conference, and it made me want to either find or eventually found something like it back in the States. I have been, on the whole, really impressed by the intellectual curiosity here in Germany. There is a far greater overlap between what academics are working on and what people want to talk about over the dinner table than I am used to.

Here's one pretty amusing example: Michael and I were walking home one evening a few months ago and we noticed that we were walking against a tide of people. It seemed the whole city was walking downtown, while we were walking home. We thought about following to see what was going on, but we had groceries with us and were tired so we just went home. The next day, I asked around--expecting to hear about a free concert, or something of that sort. It was an exhibition on light, hosted by Jena Optics. Now, it culminated in a laser light show which is surely why some people came out with their families, but still: an exhibition on light. That was enough to get the whole city out on a cool evening. We were impressed.

I've included some photo from the grounds of the conference center. It really was a beautiful location, and Michael and I were able to go for some short walks in the area. I will say this: I have never in my life experienced mental fatigue like I did this weekend. Even after my comprehensive exams in grad school, which came after my first year of course work and an intense summer of studying--I can still say that this was a new level of exhaustion. We would wake up (earlier than we prefer :), go to a morning service at 8, then breakfast at 8:30, then a talk at 9:30 (some went until 12, others only until 11 or so.) Lunch was at 12, then another talk at 3:30. Dinner at 6, then a talk at 8:30. The thing is, even the meals were work! We were the only Americans at the conference, and (as is to be expected) everything was conducted in German. Breakfast in German is particularly difficult for me, as it turns out. In any case, I ended up needing a nap on Friday and on Saturday--and anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely do not take naps. I think my brain just needed to power-down for an hour or so...it was simply fed up with translating and trying to construct German sentences.

OK that's it for now. Sorry if this is totally rambly but, as I said, my brain is pretty tired! We leave for a week in Turkey tomorrow afternoon, so the blog will be down until next Tuesday or so. (Unless I decide to do a post from there, but that seems unlikely.) When we return, though, we should have lovely pictures!
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PS--(In response to some comments) Aleisha, if you could find a way to send El Serrano's Pollo Fondito to us here in Germany, I would be forever grateful! (And very impressed, and probably a little afraid.) And Katie, I will email you once we get back from Turkey. I'm really looking forward to getting together!