whole new direction

I've just spent my first almost-full day in our new home in Norway. I arrived last night after a gloriously sunny and emotional Sunday in Reykjavík, accompanied by a colleague who happened to be traveling for meetings in Oslo. After we landed, we both took the train, and after the last station in Oslo, I was on my own, rocketing through the blackness to where I will now be living.

S met me at the train station and we walked through a brightly lit square lined with shops to the car, and a short drive later we were at the new place. He'd chosen it at a time when I couldn't be with him for the search so it was with some anxiety that I walked in to see what he'd committed us to having as our home. I should not have worried. It's bright, classically Norwegian looking with a huge deck, slate floors in the connected salon, and views of hills from every window.

Last night I couldn't sleep, looking at the twinkling lights of the hills from the massive bedroom window, pacing between the other windows in the other rooms to look at stars and sleeping Norwegian houses. After so many months being apart, it's amazing to be here finally, together with the same address.

all the right elements

Yesterday afternoon, the joyously blue weather coupled with the glimpses I'd seen of early asparagus gave me a craving for a bright, fresh salad. Since I'm working downtown in the center of everything German-city I decided to do the shopping from the street market near the church instead of going to a usual grocery store. Come 6pm, I packed my computer together and headed up to Lorenzkirche were a small band was playing some snappy 1930s jazz tunes to a captivated crowd. Ringed around the base of the church was a small cluster of stands selling fat olives, all varieties of cheeses, beautifully displayed vegetables, and tempting clusters of flowers.

I made my way through the different stands, finally going for the Spanish green asparagus since all the German stuff this early seems to be the white kind- not my thing. A few lemons and a massive bunch of flat parsley the size of a small shrubbery and I was ready for the cheese guy, where he sliced of a generous, creamy chunk of parmesan. One last stop to toss in a few coins for the musicians and I was on the way home with my spoils, the parsley springing out of the shopping bag festively. At home I sliced and simmered the asparagus lightly, and tossed with bulghur, minced garlic, garbanzo, and the other market ingredients, it was the perfect way to celebrate the springiness of the day.

These are the kinds of moments I dreamed of so much when I was a girl in Vermont, albeit quite vaguely. The ancient churches, the cobbled streets, the street markets with their gorgeous produce, and the soundtrack makes it feel even more like a dream fulfilled. I'm not sure what makes it feel so special though- I had cobblestones and street markets when I lived in Boston, and I did love them too, but maybe it's just that the Big Dig towering overhead isn't quite the same as a Medieval castle? Is it about the language and that thrill I feel when I can successfully order my 100 grams of cheese in German and actually get 100 grams of the cheese I wanted? It's definitely partly due to the knowledge that when I get home with the spoils, S will be there to tell me about his day, and as darkness fades on the view of the towers in the altstadt, we'll be there together, talking over our asparagus salads.

living the dream

That's how I feel this week, after spending a few days visiting my friend C, her husband, and their charming bebe E in Paris. I've known C since 2004 and since I moved soon after, our time spent visiting has generally been a few snatched hours amid other activities in both our lives. This time on my way to Germany, I decided to add a few days and take her up on the invitation to see the amazing apartment where they now live.

After so many visits to Paris in the recent years, I'm familiar with how to get efficiently into the city, so an hour and a half after touching down, I was knocking gently on the 7th floor door to her home in the 18th arrondissement. From all outward appearances she's living the Parisian fantasy life, with sweeping views of the city that cover the top of the Arc de Triomphe to the Tour Montparnasse and everything between- Invalides and Eiffel Tower included. The triple-balconied apartment has all the necessary fanciful ironwork and herringbone wood floors. It's a rental from some professors on sabbatical so it's ceiling high with dry art-history texts, and a collection of furniture that looks suspiciously rickety. The desk I worked on one day had a leaning front leg that seemed about to give up, and most of the chairs in the kitchen swayed like drunken sailors at the lightest touch. No matter, though, we're in Paris, at the base of one of the hippest neighborhoods, where Sacre Coeur appears like a ghost in the view on certain streets.

We took full advantage of this location too, with an evening at a local bistro, plenty of bakery stops, a tour to one of her favorite decorative art museums, a massive family home on Parc Monceau. We also spent one lovely evening at home making our own food- she did a divine goat cheese tart and I made my favorite parsley-and-mint laden tabouleh. With a cheap table wine and a view on the glittering Eiffel Tower, it was all the things a short visit to the city of lights ought to be.

Next day we had a leisurely breakfast and then I took the direct bus to the Gare de L'Est for my train ride to Nürnberg. I confirmed my train on the Grand Lignes info board (love the way that sounds!) and spent my last minutes in Paris soaking up sun in the cobbled courtyard. I'd gotten a cheap first class ticket on the train which was of course punctual as Germans do best, so at precisely 13:10 we jolted away from the platform and off we went into the gently rollling farmland east of Paris.It was a delight to discover that first class international train service on Deutsche Bahn includes lunch, so a few minutes into the ride, a snappily dressed waiter delivered roasted vegetables, chicken and couscous to my seat, of course accompanied by a glass of wine and a miniature chocolate bar. The life indeed.

A mere 4 hours later we were delivered in Frankfurt (in comparison this same bus ride takes 9 hours) after winding through some lovely mountainous areas just past the German border. I had an hour to wander the station before my connecting train, so I stepped outside the station for the first time in all my stops in the Frankfurt main station. I was happy to see that the architecture is satisfyingly grand, with the standard massive clock framed by female allegorical figures, with both sprawling station wings thoroughly laden with columns.

The connecting train is a route I'm very familiar with, and with no meal service the difference between first and second class was a bit less noticeable, but I still always enjoy the ride. The bit near Würzburg is the best part, with the glimpse of the grand fortress on the hill surrounded by vineyards. All too soon, we were pulling into the Nürnberg Hauptbahnhof and I stepped off into S's arms. A long day of enjoyable traveling well over.

grocery joy

One of my favorite things to do pretty much anywhere in the world is go grocery shopping. Even if it's shopping in the same place I always go, there's always something new to be seen, a new kind of cheese I didn't notice, a shipment of strange vegetables, some crazy kind of pasta.

When it's the first solo trip in a new country, that's even more fun. Last time I was in Germany I sallied forth to provision for dinner at what I thought was a regular grocery store a few blocks from the apartment. When I entered I was dismayed to discover it was in fact some kind of bizarre discount shop. I wanted regular vegetables and meat and herbs and dairy products but found horse blankets, canned cheese soup, and obscure potato seasoning instead. The vegetables available were all in massive multi-kilo bags, and the dairy also covered a rather suspicious range of odd yogurt flavors. The dinner plan had to change drastically but after having had stranger shopping experiences I just took it as part of the learning experience that comes with new countries.

It wasn't an experience worth revisiting though, so this time I chose more wisely, armed with S's better information on where Germans really shop. Off to Marktkauf at the square nearby, where I found that strange combination of cheap housewares and good grocery variety that seems to come frequently here. I paid for my trolley in the trolley corral and found the descending trolley-conveyor to the subterranean grocery department. No trip to a German store would be complete without some clever engineering feat, which I found in the design of the trolley wheels- they'd been shaped in such a way that they rolled freely, but once on the conveyor, their grooved surface stopped the cart from shooting down the ramp and bowling over other shoppers. Cool!

What a store.. After years in Iceland I've forgotten that this kind of shopping experience is normal elsewhere, but for me now it's a total delight. What a vegetable department! Five kinds of carrots, beautiful firm mushrooms of all types, sprightly bright herbs, and everything so inexpensive compared to Iceland. I moved onto the spice aisle where I bought something in hopes it was bay leaf, then I rounded the corner into the baking aisle. Here I found a wall of flour, including spätzle flour, as well as more types of sugar and cookie sprinkle than I could use in a lifetime. I found nuts of all sorts prepared in all sorts of ways, special bakeable, edible cookie saucers, dozens of fruit sauce bases, pudding mixes of all sorts, and yet, the one thing I needed was not to be found. I trawled the aisles four times and didn't turn up a single can of baking powder. Perhaps it's classified somewhere else in the German mind? Whatever the reason, dinner was served without biscuits tonight.

I even found an American food shelf that was populated exclusively by Mexican dinner fixings and one lonely can of spray cheese. Glad the best of my native country has made it across the pond.

The meal came together without mishap, and the leaves I'd hoped were bay leaf were indeed bay leaf. Hopefully this is the beginning of many more culinary successes, and one of these days I intend to make use of that spätzle flour.

dreams of far-off lands

As long as I remember, I've been interested in Other Places. Some of my favorite books when I was younger involved foreign travel. My mom lived abroad as a child and young adult, and the house was full of the remnants of that life- books from Brazil and France, kitchen towels and trinkets from her family trips all over the world, and when I was sick and stuck in bed, she used to give me the postcard box to distract me from the long bedridden hours. It was a shoebox full of postcards that her parents and college roommate had sent from their stops all over Europe. I'd flip through them, lingering particularly over the ones of the little girls in national costumes, and try to insert myself into those turreted, cobblestone venues.

There was also that one time my father went on a trip to somewhere in Quebec and came back with all kinds of ordinary objects from there. Soda cans (in French! I was delighted), tickets, paper napkins, brochures. I wanted to be in one of those places where these other languages were really how people communicated, not just something I practiced in a classroom. Later I collected coins from anywhere I could- forgotten remnants from the dryer traps at my parents laundromat, gifts from friends and family who traveled.

The first time I went For Real abroad I was in college, on my way to an internship in London. I stopped over in Paris before my work began to visited my aunt who lived in the 16th, within walking distance of the Eiffel tower. I can still remember that sunny July day when I called my parents from a phone booth below the Palais de Chaillot. "I'm HERE I'm really HERE!!" The next two weeks I spent doing all the things one does in Paris- I ate loads of lemon tarts and meandered through the parks and went to Versailles and generally marveled at all the things I'd seen in all my dim art history classes, finally come to life in full three-dimensional beauty. What glee to know that the downspouts at the base of the central courtyard at the Louvre had dolphin-shaped openings, to know exactly how the summer light looked through the stained glass arcs of Ste Chappelle.

Six months later, I was back in Paris again, this time to study 19th century French literature. I was one of the hardcore kids in the class who wanted to only speak French all the time whenever wherever. After just four weeks I was almost able to walk into a shop and not plan out what I was going to say beforehand. I started thinking in French, and the French words for objects moved to the forefront of my mind, just in time for me to return to America.

I held onto that foreignness as long as I could, wearing the clothes I'd bought Over There, poring over my credit card bill when it arrived with all the names of the exotic places I'd used it while on my trip. I held onto the timezone as long as I could too, waking early to the fuchsia streaks of a New England winter dawn through the leaded glass windows of my dorm room. It was the early days of radio stations streaming online so I hunted for ones that would give me the flavour of being Continental, streaming them into my dorm room decorated with travel posters and any travel memorabilia I could scrape from my home. My miniscule dorm fridge was stocked with Pellegrino limonata from the Italian grocery store near school, and I thought it the height of cool to invite my friends for espresso. Yup, I was That Girl.

During those first years after college I didn't manage to travel so much, what with living in Boston on a meager entry-level salary, and having only two weeks vacation per year. I did finagle a trip to South Africa via England once, and I remember sitting on the wall at Windsor Castle in the light of Saturday morning, thinking how lucky I was to be sitting there while everyone back in Boston still slept. The rest of the trip was quite memorable for probably all the wrong reasons, but I came home still resolved to get out as often as possible.

When the chance to move to Iceland arose, I grabbed at it, not only due to the relationship but because I saw it as a way towards this life I'd been dreaming of for so long. This might not have been my dream country but it was different, foreign, with a crazy language and totally new customs and culture. In the years since then, I've never regretted the move, and the chances I've had to visit places I imagined so fiercely haven't disappointed. Even after almost seven years of life abroad I still get those moments of wild euphoria when I realize that I'm actually sitting in that fabled city, understanding an ordinary daily transaction in a new language, being part of some ritual that I'd read about once upon a time, or I'm there in front of some long-adored building or work of art.

I promised myself when I graduated from college that I wanted to be sure to never stop learning, and this life trajectory has certainly made learning a nearly daily necessity. There's always a new word to learn, a new obscure era in history to experience first-hand in a tiny village, and now an entirely new language to soak up. It's a bit daunting to think of how much there is to learn lying ahead, but I know that along the way there will always be those thrills that come when dreams become concrete.

time travel

Back from Germany and finding the re-entry to be rather bumpy. The visit to Germany was golden and sunny and autumn-leaf filled, but one of the high points was a visit to S's bachelor uncle H in a miniscule village in the rolling fields of Thuringia. This time S promised me I'd be able to explore the wonder of a house more than our last brief visit- it's a huge pile of stones, a home from another century, and has been lived in by the same family for most of its time.

We pulled through the always-open heavy wooden doors into the cobbled courtyard mid-day and passed through one of the barn gateways into the back garden, where the blood from a recent sheep slaughter still pooled in the earth. Off to one side, S's cousin was playing with her young son, a pink-cheeked, solemn young fellow. She told us that H was awaiting our visit eagerly and had even put on new trousers just for the occasion. So, back through the courtyard we went and through the wide farmhouse door to the flagstoned entry hall. This room alone is fascinating, with the massive staircase leading up and the myriad of doors going everywhichwhere, ornate of hinge and door handle. H came out, followed by his enthusiastic and massive Ridgeback, Nelson. We'd brought treats for Nelson and he found them immediately despite my attempts to hide behind my back. No matter.

We then all piled into H's farm scented land rover, and off to lunch we went. He'd chosen a place that was surrounded by a sort of petting zoo, occupied by deer from India, potbellied pigs, shetland ponies, and all manner of curious piebald geese. Inside the decor of the restaurant was equally inspired, with a Tiki bar hung about with cowboy boots and crowned by a stuffed peacock. The food was the best Germany can offer though, plentiful, delicious, and comforting. Afterwards, H took us on a tour of this slice of the land, showing us his winter wheat fields, sown and ready for the frosts to come. He showed us the wide view over the water that provided the area with the power that fueled the once-booming leather manufacturing. It's crumbled now, and as we went through the main town, it was quite evident- rambling, massive villas from the turn of the century are now crumbling into the ground in fascinating disarray. Some have been preserved and rise in fanciful shapes against the woody hills, but the place definitely had the feel of having passed its era of grandeur.

We visited the elementary school where both H and S went, a yellow confectionary from 1911, all wide windows and delicious turrets, set atop a hill and surround by lovely sloping lawns. After a final stop to view the glory of the 19th century train viaduct, we went back to the farmhouse for the moment I'd been anticipating since I first saw the farmhouse back in 2008- the attic visit. I knew that such a house must have an amazing attic, and S had told me stories of playing up there as a child, so I'd asked him if this visit could possibly include a trip up there. H happily agreed and soon we were up there among the massive beams and many layers of dust.

Of course there was an old rocking horse, and a large old dollhouse that would have housed a massive doll-family once upon a time, along with ancient farm scales and plenty of heavy old bits of furniture. H pressed through to the end-room where a row of windows trimmed with stained glass looked over the eaves of the outbuildings beyond. There, he went to a dusty cupboard, saying "here's where the real good stuff is". Inside, the shelves were crammed with papers, albums, and cigar boxes. He pulled the top one out, full of stiffly posed 19th century portraits, the baby ones with that fuzzy blur they always had when the baby-wriggle was faster than the shutter speed of the era. Beneath it was another, a postcard album from a little girl who'd lived at the farm around 1900. There were postcards of the sights around Europe at the time, greetings on the first day of school, Christmas cards, birthday cards, new-years cards, all as crisply colored and bright as if they'd been sent yesterday. Page upon page of German history stretching through the first world war, and a second album chronicling the years after.

I dug into the lower shelves, full of dress pattern catalogs from the 50s, farm logbooks from the 40s that tallied the bushels of rye, wheat, potatoes for every month. I found illustrated newspapers from the 1920s, cigarboxes full of all kinds of odds and ends. One contained needles and lengths of hemp for sewing sacks, another contained some forgotten buttons, a third contained a large chunk of rock and a rolled newspaper clipping. None of us could determine what had been so important about that particular bit of rock but to someone it must have been significant.

By then the sun was starting to fade and the attic was growing cold, so we went downstairs to join the others for coffee and cakes. Such cakes! There was plum cake and crumble cake and so many types of cookies, all eaten around a massive table and surrounded by furniture that was at least a hundred years old and probably hadn't moved from its location during most of that time. In one corner a lovely Art Nouveau grandfather clock kept us company, as the view of the little church across the street faded in the dusk. After coffee, S and I went downstairs to H's cozy living room where he lit the fire and Nelson curled up in his huge basket right in front of it. I finally had a chance to marvel at the wonders in this room, including a fascinating 19th century men's smoking table, covered in stamped tin and including matching covered ash tray. I then noticed the row of leather volumes on the bookshelf, so H explained his love for old maps and atlases. I pulled the first one off the shelf and was immediately lost in the 16th century maps of Europe inside. So many of the towns I've visited were already there, albeit with a different idea of their locations relative to each other.

When the fascination of the map book was exhausted, I turned to the next volume on the shelf, an illustrated history of Germany, published in the 1890s. It was certainly a thrilling tome and liberally sprinkled with dramatic engravings of the high points of a thousand years of time, mostly considered to be battles. By then it was drawing onto dinnertime, so over a glasses of delicious German red wine, we finished off the evening with thick slices of sourdough spread with all manner of delicious toppings. We left soon after that for the two-hour drive south, back from 100 years ago and into 2011 again.

besser und besser

Two months gone and since then, many new German words have floated through my brain. The course I signed up for was a disappointment on a rather grand scale, although I suppose the stories I've been able to tell from it have been worth the price of admission.

The course was taught by a middle-aged German man who seems to have lived here for many years, and as a result spoke decent Icelandic which he used far more than I was interested in hearing. I'd signed up for a German course in the hopes of hearing lots of German, not long ghost stories in Icelandic, moments of yoga and relaxation in Icelandic, and a total lack of homework. At the end of the class when I asked the teacher why there had been so little homework, he said that it was because his experience with Icelanders showed that they didn't want to take classes that required homework. For the price I was paying, I'd expected something more rigorous though.

So, on to my own teaching methods. Thankfully my good friend A, provider of German films, is also provider of websites, so I'm now learning online with a nicely organized and entertaining course. I've got books too, bought during my last trip to Germany, and A's organized a Stammtisch for students of German. Also, unlike trying to learn Icelandic a few years ago, there are lots of online ways to practice and learn- I can watch soap operas on zdf, news online, streaming radio stations from German speaking countries, and of course, ongoing contact with all my favorite German speaking people out there in the world.

It's been a strange time of limbo while S works on reconstructing himself, so having the project to learn his language as much as possible in the meantime has been really useful. I don't know what my future holds but at least it will hopefully be approached with some new vocabulary in my toolbag.