Die Meerschweinschen

Neither I nor Simon can pronounce the name of the pets that we own. I think it's pretty amusing when they become a topic of conversation. The other day he told me very matter-of-fact that his mother had killed one accidentally back when they lived in Austria because she left it in the sun too long. I know that's not funny, but I laughed. I always laugh when I'm not supposed to.

The Meerschweinschen are like guinea pigs, but cuter. The mom (black and white at the top) recently had babies. She was fat, but now she's skinny again and drinks a lot of water. I first saw the babies when they were only a day or two old and they were already pretty big and covered with fur.


Look! They eat what I eat!

They have a cool cage with levels and stuff. [Remember that one episode of Seinfeld when Kramar did the levels in his appartment?] In the photo we've put them out on the grass so they could eat it and stuff.

EDA: Damn. If I weren't blogging I would've never known that today is the anniversary of that thing that happened seven years ago. Another reason I'm glad to not be in America.

I feel so vegan.

I made salad for lunch. In college (I say this like it was a long-term thing. ha!) I ate salad at least once a day. By the end of that wretched stay, I'd had my fill of salad. With my new host family, though, there's been a lot of salad-eating. My host mother and I usually make one for ourselves for dinner. It feels all healthy and other BS like that.


picassa didn't work, so this photo kind of looks like poo.

I've got this new salad dressing craze. Actually, allow me to be more precise and say that I've a general obsession with tahini (seasame seed paste). It's filled with good things like calcium and calories. I like to make a dressing with tahini, a little olive oil or pumpkin seed oil (mmm... omega-3s...), salt, herbs from the garden, fresh squeezed lemon and a teensy tiny bit of maple syrup. It's really good.


decimated pepper

I also roasted a pepper in order to make hummus or something else with later. Roasting a pepper is something easy that you can do. If you've a gas burner, you could have pepper roasting parties, if you've got an oven with a broiler, that'll do just as well. Basically either hold it over your gas burner or shove it in the oven (no baking paper! or it'll burn just like the outside of your pepper! let's pretend I didn't learn this the hard way.) and then... veganyumyum describes this process a lot better than I.

You could use roasted red pepper in a dish like this or this. okay. that last one is supposed to link y'all to a good basic hummus recipe. there's about 89thousand out there on the internets, but I won't be satisfied with just any one. and I refuse to give mine because I'm afraid it might be weird (and I don't measure). yeah, so there'll be a link there later.

ps. damn I'm wordy!

La Braderie de Lille!

Lille is located in northern france, in the region Nord de Calais, I think, but I'm too lazy to check out wiki right now. I learned that they have their own language in this region! Not too many folks speak it but old people and kids, apparently, but lots of folks use some common words in daily conversation. The word for "house," for instance, is often said in this regions' dialect. I can't help you out on what the word for "house" is either.



Lille seemed like kind of an older city. It looked as if it had once been elegant and decadant, but is now delapitated and in disrepair. All the same, I thought it was really beautiful.

About 150 CSers showed up at this meeting. During the day on Saturday, some of us partook in a scavenger hunt. We had to find things like a blue thread and 20 beer bottle caps. Each group was also given an item and were intructed to trade it for something interesting. We had this raggedy, but very soft scarf. I traded it for a snow globe. One of the participants in my scavenging group was positively thrilled over our success in the trade. She kept the snow globe.


Where we met to begin the scavenger hunt

There was allllll kinds of junk and really gorgeous crafts at the braderie. Over a million people (apparently) came into Lille, which already hosts a population of approximately 1mill. I was on a mission for a good eyebrow ring, but alas, nothing satisfactory was found. I did not end up purchasing anything except for food and beer, which were expensive because it was France. It made me realize that I do like Deutschland for some things. I did have this frickin' amazing tofu dish at a take out chinese place. I did not take a photograph of it, but it made me take a mental note to work with silken tofu more often in the future.


duck! Simon knows this word in English

I brought Simon to kindergarten about an hour and a half late today. Yesterday he was in an exceedingly crabby mood and I deduced that it could be because he gets really bored at Kindergarten. I don't believe that they provide very much in way of organized activities for the children. So I thought "screw it" and we played for a while this morning and talked and stuff because he's a really awesome kid.

ps- My grammar and diction are really bad in the entry, but I don't care to go through and make it better. Now we all know that I'm aware.

Lille and Belgium fun

Hello! Was in Lille over the week-end for the world famous Bradierie (a huge flea market). It was pretty fun and really adored my host and some of the other people I saw there. Some were old, some were new, all were great. Then Sunday night I stopped with my driver in Belgium to visit some other CSers in their quaint little home that also hosted the Maastricht Summer CS meeting. It was really neat to get to have some one on one with these charasmatic fellas. This AM we went hiking in some cool areas around Belgium. Now I'm back and not a lot of time to include details, but more in days to come! Tschü!

Getting sick. Guacomole.

I think that when you're starting to feel a cold coming on, you should up the liquids and switch to raw foods. So bread wouldn't be a good choice, but I needed it for decoration. My neighbors have got to think I'm a little whack by now what with all these photo shoots I've been doing on the front porch.



What's in it? An avocado, two small tomatoes (don't bother me with species...), a very little bit of onion, some fresh basil leaves. Blended with the best kitchen utensil ever: the emersion mixer.

The Tandem

Me and Simon ride a tandem bike to school. Well, it's not really a tandem, it's more like a small bike attached to a larger one. He doesn't have to stear or pedal, but sometimes he does and most of the time it's entirely unhelpful. For instance, when I'm slowing down for traffic, he thinks to himself, "Why aren't we going faster?" and proceeds to pedal (something that he did not help with when climbing the hill just before this intersection) and I have to break harder while asking him to stop pedalling. He then very promptly obeys my command and we halt unexpectedly fast.



Simon also likes to stear the bike, even though his handle bars are there for support rather than to help the driver manuver. I think that he likes to pretend that he's in a race car video game when we're going down hills because we'll start swaying in one direction or the other once we get going pretty fast. Then I'll say, "Simon! Was machst du?" What are you doing? And he'll simply respond that he's helping me stear. Somtimes, however, he does admit that he's trying to throw me off the bike. The other day, when I was having a particularly rough time driving on accounta him, he gasped through fits of laughter that I had no idea what direction he would turn next. True, Simon. Very true.

Simon has recently learned how to ride a bike by himself. I think this may make our mornings a little easier.

Soup is people too!

Obviously I can solisit more of a reaction from y'all with bombardments of sweet treats than with my existential crisis of how to be a mountaineer.

So today I made potato leek soup, which came out being just okay, but when I have soup, especially something so comforting as I recall potato leek soup being, I expect it to be orgastic. Maybe it was the carrots. I've never been much of a carrot supporter.


the very ugly potato leek soup that was in need of its carrot garnish

And just to get y'alls attention back, I also made Lemon Gem Cupcakes from VwaV, but without soymilk because it's a total waste for me to purchase an entire liter. I never was much of a milk drinker (vegan or pre). The only thing it's good for is cupcakes and black tea. I put in some water mixted with cornstarch where the soymilk shoulda been. I've no idea how that changed the cupcake, but they look fine to me. there are one or two lemon cupcake that I'm not giving to the family. if anyone would like one delivered in the next 24hrs or so, please let me know.


I just wanted to make use of this cool-looking plate

It's come to my attention of late that I really don't care for speaking German. It was my intention in coming here, however, to learn the language thoroughly and to be able to speak it like a German. My skillz are adequate. Yesterday evening, for instance, I met with a friend in Neuss and we spoke German for the first hour and it was fine. I know my grammar isn't great, but I'm understandable. I guess I thought, back in early 2007, that I'd get all immersed and involved in the "culture" here; I do like parts of it, but a lot of it gets on my nerves (the Germans' closed mindedness and coldness being at the top of my list).

This is a stark contrast to my feelings about the French language. I bought a small book in French over the week-end to read for pleasure and I'm going to Lille for the week-end with the intention of practicing their language. By this I can tell that it's not foreign languages that I dislike, it's just... German.

Hopefully things will change when my Deutschkurs begins next week and my mind will be opened up to some new literature or grammatical nuances. I also won't have so much damn freetime to brood on these sorts of things. In the meantime, I'm going to keep enjoying switching to English.

I'd love to hear some of your sentiments on the foreign languages you might've learned (or wish you had).

Tomorrow will be a funnier blog post, I swear.