happy turkey day!

we're in roma! and this is our thanksgiving feast...

lots of prep....potatoes, chicken (no turkey in italy!), and squash soup...and that's squash that you can't find in the U.S. (turned out to be the best squash ever and one of my favorite dishes!)

yummers

lots of spices and such

that's keith taste testing the mashed potatoes

did we get a caterer? no.....those are just my fancy aluminum dishes that came in handy.

keith bought flowers



the best squash soup, hands down. I don't mean to toot my own horn but this could have been at a fancy restaurant and I would have been dumbfounded and left with a gimpy-hand!
the squash looked like a pumpkin at the market and after roasting in the oven (with apple) it shredded like butternut squash. I added the squash and apple mash to a pan with butter, sauteed leeks and added homemade chicken/porcini mushroom stock and then some nutmeg, salt, pepper... whipped with my fancy immersion blender (see previous post) and added a splash of milk. presto!

drumsticks stewed/sauteed in wine, rosemary, olive oil, olives...

squash puree for keith and chicken off the bone

homemade stuffing - good ol' mom's recipee with the best crust top!

yams! let me tell you that yams are very hard to find in italy. I think they import them from america because the sign at the market said "america yammys"....and two giant yams cost just under $8!! but oh, so worth it. oh, yeah....and no brown sugar in italy...or maple syrup or molasses. so, I still roasted them in oil and then once cool, cut them up and roasted with a bit of chicken stock, orange juice and sprinkled with a litle sugar.

keith's favorite....mashed potatoes!...with no cheese! ahahahhahah



mmmm

keith's first finished plate!

keith doing the dishes...never have to ask...what a gentleman!

keith passing out after dinner

and a brief sidenote: we bought this fun fabric at a strange fabric store in rome because our sofa smelled a little funky. now we love it and want to ship the fabric home afterwards!

hope you have a great thanksgiving - and *thanks* for reading!

keith likes taking pictures

yet another left-over boboli post, but we leave tomorrow for rome so I wanted to take a second to show how much keith likes taking pictures....

it's sort of an inside joke because you would think that the ex-blogger, artist would be all about taking pictures while traveling but in some ways I hate it. ok, maybe not hate, but it is a combination of going out to art opening in detroit and taking pics for the blog and feeling like I missed out on the actual art because I was busy taking pictures. in that way I want to experience the places we see and not take pics...ok and also, I have a complex about people looking at me while taking pics in a foreign land....but anyways...thank goodness keith likes to take pics or we wouldn't have a lot of these good shots.
this day I was making fun with keith about him taking pictures and took many pictures of him taking pictures!...hahahaha..all in good fun!







so this brings me to keith's future....a tourist traveling with a tri-pod! well, not really, but there were many asians setting up tri-pods in the garden....very professional! I think keith was jealous. the illegal-goods street vendors sell tri-pods too...what is so illegal about tri-pods? they set up blankets with fake Gucci purses and then next to them are tri-pods??

ok, and this keith showing the vertical slope of the hill.

oh, love!

operation kitten calendar @ boboli

so there's this show that used to be on comedy central called Acceptable tv. The show was ok as a whole but had a few really fun skits. when I found myself at boboli gardens obsessively taking pictures of the cute kitties like all the other visitors I thought that it would make for a good show!
here watch this to get the idea! hahahahh!

firenze pt. 1

We've been enjoying our week in Florence - it's a small city without a lot of "cool" stuff to seek out and do, so we've really been relaxing. It's pretty much "here are the tourist-y things, here are the main parts of town" - and that's that. there might be a "cool kids" quadrant, but it hardly seems worth seeking out in a place this tiny. So restful has this time been, extended our time in the apartment until monday morning, at which point we will head to Rome for a week.

Down the street from our apartment is the Mercato Centrale. Downstairs houses butchers and cheese counters, upstairs has produce:


Ann's been buying amazing olives by the truckload (I've been casually converted into liking them ... casually). I've discovered dehydrated fruit, like these cherries:


I tend to eat far too many at once and then swear them off, only to return again hours later. it's a vicious, sugary cycle.

a major bonus of living as we have been - staying in "self-catering apartments" (that is, apartments with kitchens) and shopping at markets - is that we get to feast like royalty for comparably little money. Ann's cooking (it's an interest of hers. this isn't me going in some weird '50s husband direction - ann *likes* cooking. I like eating. it works out) is rapidly developing in light of our European dining. We eat out once or twice per town/week, and try to learn things from where/what we eat at those meals. Ann has been able to take that knowledge and then immediately apply it to, say, lunch the next day - cooked in our apartment, at little expense.


A great porcini mushroom and fresh parmigiano reggiano pasta, courtesy of Ann:


That said, she did spend a little extra this week ... on a hilariously ironic immersion blender (long story short: I once gave Ann an immersion blender as a present - she said she really wanted one! - and was *laughed at* for *months*. then she came to love it, eventually. and now, here we are in florence, italy and what does ann buy? an immersion blender! hahahahahahahaha!)


with said blender, Ann made this delicious cauliflower soup:



After which we, naturally, went out for gelato. since it was our third night in town, and the previous two nights we had gotten gelato at a place around the corner, we (via my desire) sought out a highly regarded (on the internet, anyway) gelato place 15 minutes walk from our apartment. it was a small place, praised for its relative lack of tourists and experimental flavors. lack tourists it did. serve amazing gelato it did not. oh well.


we've since returned to the corner place. ann favors chocolate and chocolate/vanilla combos. I've gone for chocolate, chocolate/after eight mint, and most recently something called "contessa" which involved chunks of wafer cookies, their chocolate filling and a fair deal of peanuts. *that* was amazing.

at some point early in the week, we headed to the other side of the Arno River and to the Boboli Gardens (home, Ann hoped, to the famed ready-made pizza dough manufacturers). the gardens are basically the fancy backyard to Florence's old ruling family's palace, dating back to the 1500s.








Ann made friends with some cats there.


I plan to use this shot in my portfolio when I apply to edit "Cat Fancy" magazine. Hot!


Ann has also taken to making/constantly talking about the focaccia-based sandwiches for which she gave the recipe in the prior post. Their excellence has caused Ann's focaccia-based ego to expand wildly, and any time we pass a focaccia sandwich-serving establishment, she quietly mock-shouts "Focaccia off!" I was at first perplexed by the meaning of this. Then Ann explained that it was her way of challenging the proprietors of these "inferior" focaccia sandwich makers to a culinary duel. Yep. Exactly.

Here's one of the better contenders:


Firenze pt. 2 tomorrow.

yummy easy recipe

if you miss us, here's a couple of things you can do:

rent Ratatouille the movie (the rat is me and the boy is keith...heheheheh)


and...


here's an easy pizza/sandwich recipe that I love right now:

handful of kalmata olives
handful of sicilian green olives (these are the olives that you find at good markets like whole foods...or the like)
roma tomatoes
small onion
ricotta cheese (sheeps milk is the best)
red pepper flakes
(salami slices optional)
focaccia loaf

slice focaccia loaf in half...not like slicing bread but like making a top and bottom
cut up olives/de-pit
add olives and a small amount of olive oil if olives are not coated in oil on bottom layer
cut up onion small and sprinkle on top
slice tomato (roma is best b/c not so watery) then top
add chili pepper flakes to taste
add salami slices if you want
spread ricotta on inside of top slice of bread and put on top of sandwich (ricotta side in of course!)

grill in panini pan or flip in grill pan

eat! yummers...it is like a fast pizza sandwich! the better the ingredients, the better the product - italy's food lesson. italian cuisine might seem simple but the ingredients are very planned. the wrong cheese or spice might make for a luke-warm dish. simplicity is easy and fast but takes smarts!

our place in florence

here's a quick post on our place in florence:

kitchen set-up

upstairs



downstairs

venice

ann had the idea to stop in venice ... and I was immediately suspicious. my dad rasied me to be forever weary of tourist traps and heavily-travelled paths, so the idea of going to what is essentially the Mackinac Island of Italy didn't immediately appeal to me. but it offered promise of being warmer than vienna "colder and windier than chicago in december", austria - so we headed for the city of canals and gondolas.

it looked, I kid you not, exactly like this:



and it looked like that *everywhere*.

the whole place felt like a slightly more authentic Disney backlot. you didn't even have to try to find romantic viewpoints, they were ubiquitous. as were the tourists. but they were easily overlooked, as the fantasy land-ness of venice repeatedly forced you to think, "wait, this place exists organically? this isn't some weird planned community mall facade thing in rochester hills? weird ..."



the train ride in to venice was interesting in that it was our first couchette (2nd class sleeper car) night train excursion. I've done those before, but ann hadn't and it was quite something. we had booked two beds in a four-bed compartment, and right up until 5 minutes before the train pulled away from the platform, it looked like we were going to have it all to ourselves.

and then ...

in comes a 40-something couple from who-knows-where (thankfully, not america/britain) speaking Italian and Spanish(?) or some weird hybrid they had developed. they had a lot of luggage, but were largely palatable as couchette-mates. here's ann looking really happy to see them as they climb up to their bunks ...



here's me looking out the window/cool:



coming into venice is a torturous game of delayed gratification. there's a train station labeled "venice" that isn't actually venice. then you go through this area of boring suburbia, then it changes to outskirts-of-Florida-type near-swamp, then a minute of forest ... and then ... what's this? ... we're on a bridge. and there's water below. is this a causeway? are we finally getting there? wait, there's an island! nope ... not venice. ok ... there's an island ...



nope, not venice. (at this point, I suppose due to the bridge's structural engineering - or lack thereof - the train is going about 5 miles an hour and it feels like you could crawl - backwards - at a faster pace.) then ... finally ... there it is. it must be venice. and it is beautiful.

the train station lets you out right at the grand canal. the vaporetto (aka water bus) ride looks like this:





and took us near our hotel room, which looked like this inside:



but looked like this out of our window:



yep, canal view.

thanks to the internet and ann's well-placed prodding, we ponied up the extra $15 and went with the fancy view. it was well worth it.





again, this was *out of our window*:



we walked around and saw some tourist sites:









also, the italians are not shy about their laundry:



we walked more:



took "those photos" without trying:



and saw a great sunset:





the next morning (yesterday), we headed to the train station to go to florence. instead of friendly ticket agents ready to book our short train ride, we found this:



yet another strike! in paris, it was the metro and then the airlines, in germany it was the airlines again, and now in italy it was the railroads. luckily, there was a eurostar train (sort of unaffiliated with the italian national line) heading to rome with a stop off in florence, so we booked that and got off in Firenze (the, much to ann's continued upset, Italian name for Florence).

on the train, we had panini:



In florence, we found our apartment for the week, kinda near this street:



and then made our way to the grocery store, after which ann cooked a very tasty pasta meal for us:





last night, we walked around. here's ann at the david replica placed in the statue's original location:





here's the duomo:





and here's the ponte vecchio:





to cap off the night, we got chocolate gelato from a nearby corner place. it was sehr gut. (we're still speaking german in our heads, but trying to adjust to the new language.)



we're here in Florence for a week (or hopefully a little more) now. That catches us up. More soon.

wien (aka vienna)

we left germany and headed to Vienna, Austria (actually called Wien, but the english name is Vienna. Ann just found out about this English renaming practice and is quite upset about it). When planning the trip, we had not first included Wien, but once we decided to go with the five country railpass, we needed to - per the pass requirements - choose a connecting country that connected germany and italy. we picked austria.

Vienna turned out to be pretty cool. It definitely had the most consistently good youth fashion of any city so far. Tons of hipsters in nice jeans and boots combinations. And, weirdly, the most fashion "risks" so far. Beating everywhere else by far too much (and paris by more than one might expect).

Vienna looks mostly like this - they love huge buildings. and the baroque and neo-baroque stylings really suit the town's overall feel.





but before we get into vienna, on the train ride there (also, ann has discovered her love of trains. I quite enjoy them too. way better than airplanes. I love the just get on and go aspect. no security checks, no terrible cow herd boarding procedure) we ate in the dining car. it was a splurge that we really had fun with. ann got the sour cream potato and I got the goulash (a new interest of mine).



the dining car had skylights. it was, in the truest sense, rather grand.

back to vienna proper. we saw the danube and made a big splurge: we went to the musikverein to see a concert by the venice baroque orchestra and two rising star singers. we tried to get tickets at the box office in the afternoon, but it was "long sold out." so, we went back 45 minutes before showtime and I hustled an old hustler scalper into a pair for a great price. we dressed up like this:



the concert, even for two modest fans of classical music, was stunningly good. the hall is considered among the top three in the world. it looks like this:



an amazing night.

europe has been teaching me to like coffee (well, espresso anyway), and vienna sealed the deal. we went to cafe sperl based on a gridskipper recommendation (a handy website for travel tips) and it was an ideal vienna coffee house. I spent a while pondering what set the Viennese coffee house atmosphere apart from all other and I think it's down to lighting and high ceilings. the lighting is brighter than I would normally like, but really facilitates reading and is diffuse owing to the old school chandeliers. and the ceilings are high, but covered in intricate woodwork that has the essential feature of dampening what would otherwise be a cacophonous space. somehow, it's sort of *quiet* in these places, even when they're full of people. and they *don't play music*. no starbucks overhead jazz/norah jones. just wonderful silence and the din of hushed conversation mixed with the sound of white ceramic coffee cups clinking up against white ceramic saucers.





Here's the neighborhood:



Here's me suspiciously trying a random dessert at a pastry shop and discovering it's terrible:





(it turned out to be a chocolate-dipped cone filled with marshmallow-type goo of the weirdest consistency.)

most of our breakfasts for the last three weeks have looked like some for of this bread-and-cheese combo:



and this is how we do our laundry:



a note on the laundry situation: I am a bit prissy about garment care. at home, I follow the instructions on the care label rather closely. if it says "wash warm, hang dry" - then I do that. this trip has spurred a laundry liberation within me. I wash everything in hot sink water now, wring it dry and hang it up to drip for a while. it's rewarding. and freeing. I see myself travelling like this forever. two outfits and a few extra pairs of under-things. (our Exofficio brand underwear and Smartwool socks have been really wonderful. they are quick-dry, comfortable and anti-odor. I plan to use them on trips from now on.)

we couldn't leave vienna without trying wiener schnitzel. but we were a little schnitzeled out, so we went with wiener chicken-schnitzel.



here's ann enjoying what was, basically, the best fast food chicken sandwich of her life:



our last day in vienna, we went to see the Danube River (actually called donau in german, much to ann's dismay).



up next - we finally find warmth - and ridiculously romantic backdrops - in Venice, Italy.

update .... finally

we've been without regular internet access for the last week, so sorry for the lack of posts. (we're at a nice place in florence now that has internet, so the posts should be more frequent again.)

here's what's been going on, part one:

we were in berlin, but it was cold and full of hippies, so we left. but not before having fun going to a rock n roll show at a punk squat and buying swiss army knives (our nails were getting long), among other things.

and I found this cool dill oil. like olive oil, but made of cold pressed ... dills?



it was delicious.

but again, berlin was cold, so after our week-long apartment rental ended (more on what it's like living in other people's homes for a week at a time in a future post), we rented this:



and headed to visit ann's friend steve who is studying at the bauhaus university in Weimar.

This involved me driving on the Autobahn. You know, the road with no speed limit ... Here's a picture of my foot on the accelerator, holding it completely to the floor.



Here's how much fun it was for me:



But I soon discovered the little rental Fiat was governed to a top speed of 170 kmh. (for the mothers reading along at home, don't worry - that's only 105.6 mph). Here's a picture of the speedometer feeling sad it couldn't go more:



We stopped for lunch at one of the Autobahn's famous "Rasthof"s (basically, truck stops). They look like this inside:



And yes, that's *a liquor-serving bar* right inside the door. Hello, drivers! Hmm ...

Anyway, we got food from the buffet. Its quality was comparable to, say, attending a modestly provisioned German middle class wedding. Ann's chicken leg was the best part. Here she is enjoying it:





I took this one for my brother: the Germans know how to make a heck of a white dinner roll.



Back in the car, we arrived, after a few hours of driving, in Weimar. That looked like this:



And featured wonderfully clear traffic control indicators, such as this:



Weimar is home to the Bauhaus, and also Goethe (I didn't know this going in, but having been a big fan of Faust, etc. in college, found it an added bonus) and a bunch of classical composers. It's a picturesque little town of sidestreets and small squares.



We stayed with Steve. His place looked like this:



That shot was taken at about, oh, 4:30 in the afternoon. Notice the world outside the windows? Yep, pitch black. It gets dark super early over here. We had thai for dinner. Steve recommended the duck. We got the duck. It was superb.



After dinner, we walked around and got some ice cream (which the Germans do remarkably well). I got After Eight mint flavor. Here's a slightly ominous photo of it:



Ann and Steve got some other stuff:



The next day, Ann ate another slapstick-sized sausage sandwich:



I ate another ice cream (this time, Toblerone flavor):



And we (very temporarily) sated our desire for Mexican food with this incredibly weird german salsa:



It had the consistency of sweet & sour sauce. yeah ...

But weimar is still in germany, and germany is still cold - and we were sleeping on a hard wood floor - so we left for what we hoped would be even slightly warmer locales ...



(that is ann's "I'm sooooo cold!" face)

Up next: Austria - surprise! - turns out to be freezing too!

scc

We didn't go into Germany knowing we would do this, but we spent Thursday afternoon at the former concentration camp, Sachsenhausen.

Ann and I had reservations about going. It seemed improper. It seemed like morbid voyeurism tourism. It seemed cliche, and debasing to the victims. It seemed wrong.

But it also seemed unavoidable. It was so close to us. A 45 minute train ride from Berlin (which only added to the horror and disbelief. It's suburban. There are houses next door. Lots of houses. Lots of next doors. A whole town literally just down the road - a road lined full with houses.)

But we went. It seemed like we were damned if we did and damned if we didn't, but "did" ultimately prevailed and we got on the light rail and headed north.

An hour later, we were sick to our stomachs. Being in the place and seeing the all-too-well preserved buildings of torture, terror and murder for so many people was even more shocking and disturbing than one might imagine or predict.

The thing that hit me most were how recent it all seemed. These are no Roman ruins or decaying, long-dormant ancient sites a contemporary viewer can choose to never engage with or decide to quickly detach from because they don't look anything like the places they encounter in their everyday lives. Take, for instance, the Tower of London. It feels old. The people who were tortured or killed there seem long ago and far away. That sort of deadens one's reaction to the place. You don't immediately think, "Man, those old Brits sure were monsters." You think, "Ye olde days were sorta barbaric, eh? Hey, look, fuzzy-hatted funny guardsmen!"

But the concentration camp - it looks like the buildings could be in use today. I've been to plenty of apartments and art galleries in far worse condition housed in buildings that are *far, far* older. The concentration camp's medical torture and experimentation rooms, with all their creepy white tile and ominous floor drains, seemed no more disused than the locker room at most American high schools currently in use. The bunk rooms and prison buildings, they could have been the outbuildings for any averagely-maintained summer camp in any Up North (Michigan) resort town - present day.

It was startlingly new. Devastatingly recent.

During the "should we go? is it wrong? or is it wrong *not* to go?" pre-trip debate, we both expressed dread at the thought of seeing tourists posing next to camp fixtures and taking digital snapshots like they were at a normal tourist destination. Thankfully, we didn't see any of that at Sachsenhausen. That we arrived an hour before closing on a grey, cold afternoon augmented by frequent periods of abrasively cold mist/rain likely helped temper the crowd size and mood. There was hardly a crowd to speak of. We were nearly alone in the camp, which felt, eventually, in some ways, even more wrong.

By the end, we started to wonder if maybe everyone shouldn't see the place - though I am still not certain of this. I'm not sure carefully preserving and protecting buildings and instruments of total evil are, even when used as "memorials" to the deceased, necessary to the mission. Educate about the events, to be sure. Remember the victims, absolutely. Meticulously preserve and guard the places where they were tortured and killed? That's a grey area to me, still. I might propose destroying all that evil and making the areas nature preserves with monuments to the deceased. Or something like that.

I was trying to think about what I would have wanted done with the place had I been tortured, kept or killed there, and I would - from this theoretical vantage point - want the whole thing burned to the ground and then rebuilt as a park or public space or some such thing.

We left Berlin on Saturday and headed to see Ann's friend at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Buchenwald concentration camp is a few miles away from this idyllic little town. Few people seem to notice or care. It's the giant metaphorical elephant in the woods that no one really mentions.

But the history lives on - and in a small way, it seems, repeats itself.
-k

berlin food

apparently the most popular street food outside the currywurst (which we did try today) is the doner kebab. I was excited and fearless. but in the end I don't ever want to see a big hunk of rotating mystery meat again. it left a bad taste in my mouth all day. I think I just got a bad one cuz man, they were popular everywhere we went!

pizza...

a lonely brockwurst and mustard....served up in a strange department store/grocery store above a train station. the sausage was good, but not as good as the one on the street the first day.

this is some strudel-y thing keith got. it smelled good, but with most desserts I have to be careful with nuts...don't want to stop breathing! hahah...
more food to come...a

berlin is...

this.

and this.

PS: my mom had the same Reebok high-tops (white) in the 80's. I debated buying them for oldtime sake. all the hipster kids have high-tops here. fashion here is much more inventive and experimental; similar to detroit style though. but there is also a big sect of hippies and goths, especially where we live. oh, and piercing and red/hot pink hair like Run Lola Run is popular. I didn't know if it was just youngsters who liked the movie who dyed their hair, but even old ladies have bad dye jobs of bright red, burgundy and orange. maybe the bright color lifts the spirit a little here.
-a