Sneaky

A few things have taken me by surprise recently (and not just the kilo per month I've gained while living on a diet of beer, salty bread and potatoes). Like, for instance, Mads and I are getting on a plane tomorrow night and flying to Melbourne. I really should pack.

I also knew, but have only just taken seriously the fact that I have five days of book week school visits ahead of me (including one session with a group of 120 high school students, which is making me feel a little queasy). And then there's this event (it's at 10 am by the way Sally). I need to work out what I'm going to do for that because surely I can't just read for an hour?

I think the reason I haven't really let myself dwell on any of these events until now is because it would require me to think about the thing I am fearing most of all: the long haul flight, on my own, with my not-great-traveller three year old. I have packed books and toys galore but I suspect I will spend most of the time pretending that my arm is a sea slug called Celina which is what I can be found doing most afternoons on the train home from kinder. Still, hopefully the pain (and the RSI) will be forgotten shortly after we disembark and I hand Mads to the grandparents.

The blog will be on holidays too until mid September when we return as hopefully I'll be catching up with the two of you who read this blog in person shortly.

Wish me luck.

Real or Not Real?

So let's just move along from my culinary attempts of the other weekend. I didn't give anyone food-poisoning (as far as I know), which surely counts for something. And let me present instead a gameshow concept I've been working on called 'Real or Not Real?' based on the characters Mads' tells me about and my attempts to work out which ones actually exist.

Emily Rude.
This is an easy one to start with. Not real, or at least, not in a breathing kind of way. Emily lives in our cutlery drawer. Also clearly not real is her associate, Emily Nice who lives on the kitchen shelf and looks like this.

Holly Honda.
Also almost definitely not real, although I have a strong mental image of her looking a little bit like this but with a manga-esque modernity to her. Her grandma is called Polly Peugeot.

Bim Bim.
Not real. Bim Bim has been with us for years now. Bim Bim swaps effortlessly between genders, ages and degrees of naughtiness and bravery, depending on the role he needs to fit.

The Girl Who Says No.
This is where things start to get tricky. She was supposedly a girl at Mads' kinder who would always say 'no' whenever Mads went near her. But then surely she'd be the girl who says 'nein'? One day when I was dropping Mads off she pointed excitedly to a girl and said 'that's the girl who says no!' She has left the kinder for school but she still looms large in Mads' stories of her day - apparently coming for visits or even staring through the kindergarten fence just so she can say 'no' to Mads occasionally.

Naughtius.
Last week Mads started telling me about a boy who liked to pinch the other kids at kinder. I asked what he was called and Mads said 'I call him Naughtius.' I hope Nautius is not real, because otherwise his parents have a lot to answer for giving their child a name like that. It was asking for trouble. All the same, I have grown rather fond of Naughtius, especially as his bad behaviour escalates. It's become one of the first things I ask Mads when I pick her up: what did Naughtius do today? Sometimes he's been piffing food around at the teachers, sometimes it's pooing on people's heads. And according to Mads the teachers are powerless to stop him. I picture Naughtius as a miniature Roman emperor, despotic, horrific, feared by all. Unfortunately I fear that Naughtius may be ficticious, or at least exaggerated. Her kinder teacher does not strike me as someone who is likely to put up with such antics.

Guess who's coming for Abend Essen?

We have a German family coming over for dinner tonight and I'm nervous. Not being the best cook even when cooking for my Best Beloveds, when I'm cooking for others - particularly new acquaintances - I get a little rattled. It's just a BBQ, which in theory should be straight-forward but it's the first time we've used the BBQ in question and all the knob-labels are in German. When we first moved into the flat Thieu sat in front of the washing machine for an hour with a dictionary, working out which was the gentle cycle and which was for the coloured clothes. I hope the BBQ will be a little less complicated.

No supermarkets are open on Sunday and, naturally, I woke up this morning and realised all the things I don't have which may be required by our German guests. These include:

Bottled water, with gas and without. Whenever we've visited the locals they always seem to have a huge range of bottled waters to offer us. Not just with still or sparkling, but with varying grades of bubbles - from very fizzy through to just a couple of bubbles. I still baulk at the idea of paying for water at all, and Thieu, well, he thinks it's all a worldwide conspiracy and next they'll be charging for air etc etc. But serving tap water here would be the equivalent of scooping water straight out of the toilet. Just not done.

A wide range of condiments. At least two varieties of mustard and two types of ketchup are required, preferably with one of the mustards coming from a farmers' market. We have only one of each. I also realised we are missing another important condiment, especially as we're having potatoes:

Herb butter. Not just an interesting addition to a meal, but an essential part of one. I have only normal butter. Social disaster is imminent.

Actually, while I'm on the topic, there's a whole lot of dairy things that flummox me whenever I'm in the local Rewe supermarket. Staring at them fills me with both anxiety and desire. Quark, for instance, which sounds like something a posh duck might say. What does one do with Quark? Then there's creme fraiche. ANd buttermilch. I know, of course, that these things are readily available in Australia, but there aren't usually entire cabinets in the dairy cabinet devoted to varieties of buttermilk. So I sense that these things are important and every good hostess should have some of each on offer. In desperation the other day I bought a small tub of creme fraiche. But I have no idea what to do with it. Offer it with the potatoes? With the summer pudding? With both? Neither?

Buying wine is also intimidating because I don't recognise the bottles. I often don't even recognise the grape varietals. There are a few Aussie wines in the supermarket, but they are ones I'd never buy in Aus and wouldn't inflict on anyone else. And anyway, serving supermarket wine to anyone other than your immediate family is frowned upon.

Oh dear. I think I may have to have a large glass of (supermarket)wine before they arrive.

The Strangest Hotel in the World

A couple of weeks ago Thieu had to go to a training thing in a nearby city called Karlruhe. There's an air traffic control centre there, an operational one rather than a training one, so Thieu and his collegues were sent to have a look. Mads and I joined him for the second half of the week. When Thieu rang after he arrived he kept saying 'You're going to love this hotel. It's the weirdest place. I think it's been designed by an insane person.'

When we arrived I saw what he meant. If a building could ever be described as a 'stream of consciousness' than this hotel was such a thing. And the stream of consciousness would sound something like this: 'We'll make a big clown face and each section of the face could be a separate room. The eye room. The nose room. The mouth room. And there will be other rooms, equally as weird, with weird decorations and strange, out of place objects in them, just to keep people guessing. And there will be a labyrinth of underground tunnels, so that the guests will continually doubt the strutural integrity of the rooms they're sleeping in.'

Here is a shot of inside our room:


Yes. The artwork is hanging upside down. I felt like I was back at art school viewing someone's end of year installation. Here's another shot:



So strange. But our room was positively conservative compared to the one given to one of Thieu's collegues and his family. This one had a waterbed (which is weird in itself as far as I'm concerned) and a coffin-like sauna in the children's room:



Here is a shot of one of the children's beds:



That's a sunlamp. What a lovely, homely touch. Give the children cancer while they sleep.

Despite the weirdness (because of it?) we had a great time. It was the kind of place children love as it had all kinds of weird (and possibly dangerous) objects everywhere and great places to hide. And it had a full German barf-ay breakfast, which, as I've previously mentioned, Mads is hugely in favour of. She wept when we left, but I suspect this was largely due to being separated from the other children.

Then we went to Munich. Munich was rainy. Torrentially so. We headed for the Deutches Museum on Saturday morning, along with everyone else, just to be somewhere dry. The queue was 45 minutes long. Happily, this provided me with an excellent eaves-dropping opportunity, as the American couple behind us had fallen into that travellers' trap of assuming that no one around you understands what you're saying, so you can speak with impunity. Hooray! Here's what I heard:

She: I'm not going to do it any more, Peter. I'm not going to starve myself.
He: Robin, please. Listen to me.
She: I'm not going to starve myself or gorge myself. I'm sick of it.
He: Robin. You're a beautiful woman. Beautiful! Why won't you listen to me?

Sadly, it all came to an end when Mads blew my cover by breaking into the chorus of 'Emily Rude'. Then there was an awkward moment where we all exchanged tight smiles and said 'how about the rain?' Then Peter said 'your daughter is so sweet. We have a daughter just like her,' and Robin said, 'well, not quite like her, Peter,' and I thought 'should I tell them she was just singing a song about her favourite kitchen implement?' I decided against it and recommended they go to the high voltage electricity display which we saw last time we were there. They seemed like the kind of couple who would enjoy it.

Schadenfreude

We were in the park yesterday, between bouts of rain and I noticed this little boy straight away. He was the one stomping on other kids' sandcastles and throwing rocks at the toddlers. Nice kid. His grandfather sat on a bench in the sun, reading the newspaper and paying no attention to his vile progeny's doings.

Then Mads whacked her head on a piece of equipment and the delightful lad rushed over, climbed up the tower she was standing on, and stood in front of her laughing. I can't tell you how close I came to pushing him over the edge.

As we left the park a little later I saw the boy near the basketball ring, bawling his eyes out. 'Look Mads, I said, 'that mean boy is crying. He looks like he hurt himself.' Mads looked at me sternly. 'Mummy,' she said. 'He's not a mean boy. What he did was mean.'

I rolled my eyes. 'Yeah, whatever,' I said. 'Now, run over there and laugh in his face.'

My inner German

There are many ways in which I feel that I am already quite German. A love of sensible footwear? I've been wearing Birkenstocks for years. A reluctance to drop in on people unannounced? Makes perfect sense to me. A passion for carbohydrates that borders on the evangelical? Yes, oh yes. A hatred of plastic bags? We'd been here for a month before I even realised that our local supermarket was bag-free because I had always brought my own bag anyway. In my opinion, the concept of the beer garden borders on genius, especially those with a well-equipped playground (nothing like setting a good example to those future drinkers). So there are lots of things about being in Frankfurt that make me feel like I belong.

Yet there are some things that confuse me. I don't understand the German love of smoking - everyone here is so sensible that the local fixation with smoking puzzles me deeply. I've seen people smoking while eating, smoking holding their babies, kissing someone else's babies, while jogging. Well, maybe not quite. But almost. The same goes for the lack of bike helmets. I don't understand it. And after having heard C's story of being knocked off her bike, sans helmet and ending up in a coma for three days, plus losing her sense of smell for an entire year, I'm a committed wearer of the helmet. And if there was anywhere in the world I expected to see others who felt the same way it was here. But no. So Thieu and I are the only big old dorky mushroom-heads riding around. Well, we will be, once we locate our helmets.

Then there's this, which I simply refuse to understand:


It is called 'spaghetti eis' and every ice-cream shop offers it. Why anyone would want to eat something that looks like spaghetti bolognese for dessert is beyond me. I feel nauseous whenever I see one. So I say nein to spaghetti eis. NEIN NEIN NEIN!(The picture came from wikipedia by the way, so that's not my spaghetti eis or my boob either).

I am not sure about this either:

It is a pub on wheels. One person sits in the front and steers and the other twelve people sit along the sides, peddling and drinking beer. I don't get it. Why would you want to ride a bike and drink beer simultaneously? It sounds simply awful to me. Yet all weekend we see the bier bike trundling up and down outside our window. Not a single bike helmet to be seen, either. Maybe it's for tourists. That would make more sense to me. And maybe once they've finished cycling and drinking they seek out the nearest ice-cream parlour and down a couple of spaghetti eises.

We are going to Munich this weekend. And then it's less than a month before Mads and I return to Melbourne for a visit. Talk about time flying.

New Books

Whenever I receive the advanced copies of a book I'm always reminded of the period of time in which I wrote them. So these latest ones - 'Beach Break' and 'Keeping Secrets' instantly made me think of the time when we finally committed to moving to Germany, then the subsequent stress of packing up our house, the terrible insomnia I went through during this period, the sadness of saying goodbye to everyone and even just making myself believe that 'yes, we're really going.'

Still, it was quite wonderful receiving them in the mail the other day. And now they are sitting on my bookshelf, all shiny and pretty and utterly, unquestionably finished, that all the effort and pain feels worth it. Which is something I have to remind myself as I struggle through the writing of Tweenie Genie 2.