Monschau

Saturday, we bundled up and headed to Monschau, Germany. It's south of here in the Eiffel region of the country, but colder since it's in the mountains. Maddie got to play in some snow. We enjoyed the half-timbered houses (got a picture of one that seems to have settled unevenly!). It's really cute village...maybe a little touristy, but quite nice. We're planning to go back in the spring, when more in open and we won't freeze off any body parts by being outside too long!

Cheese Making

Headed to the Netherlands today to learn to make cheese at Kaas and Kampeerboerderij "Hoekelum". Go ahead...try and pronounce that.

We began with bowl of milk that had come fresh from the cow this morning. I think that was my favorite part. I started to ask if we could get the name of the cow, but I decided against it.

Then we slowly stirred the milk with a special knife until we separated the curds from the whey. How Little Miss Muffet at that stuff is beyond me! We had to strain it and then add water and then strain some more. We learned all about enzymes and bacteria and what makes cheese cheese from the house cheese master. It was really cool.

After we drained the last time, the cheese master came around and picked up a handful of the curds. From the size of our curd, she could tell us how long our cheese would need to age before it came to its full flavor. Melanie, Susan and I had produced a three-month cheese. Which means we will have to care for our cheese for that period of time before we can eat it. For the next three weeks, I have to turn my cheese daily, until it gets dry. And after that, I have to turn it every three days or so and take care to wipe away any mold that begins to grow on it with a vinegar and water solution. Stay tuned for results on that one!

So we put our cheese into these little bowls. It looked all mottled like cottage cheese, but by the time all the water got pressed out, it looked like a little ball of white cheese. Ready to be cared for.

At the shop afterward, the cheese master (this is the title I bestowed upon her, I don't know what her official name is) let us try the the two different cheeses. Both were the same type of cheese, but one had been aged only six weeks and another six months. The difference in the flavors was amazing, and the only difference between the two was how long they had been sitting on the shelf. My nose is a little stopped up tonight after tasting all the cheese, but it was worth it!

It really was a lot of fun. We are able to buy some cheese that was ready to eat, and Maddie put away several slices of the Gouda that I brought home. Gouda is the cheese of choice in this area of the world and there are about 100 different varieties. Little tip I learned from another ex-pat today: gouda with cumin--really good with Mexican food. Don't even know if you can get cumin Gouda in the states, but it's plentiful here. Which is odd, since Mexican food isn't.

It is really cold here, but we're hoping to do some sightseeing this weekend in places where we can go indoors.

Legal and Living on the Edge

Only five-and-a-half months later, we are all official, legal residents of Duesseldorf. We had to take the train downtown this morning to present our faces and the proper paperwork in order to get our passports appropriately adjusted and become officially registered. No word yet on when we will get our check for having a child (the birth rate is really low here).

So now that we're proper and official, I decided life was getting to tame and took a walk on the wild side. Went with some girl friends to the Wednesday night Cinestar Sneak Preview. Every Wednesday, the movie theater in Oberkastle (a neighborhood of Duesseldorf--kind of like Back Bay in Boston) shows a movie in the original version (OV), meaning in English. The deal is, you don't know what the movie is until you've paid your money and sat down. Pretty risky, I know. Actually, it only costs 4.50 euro, so if it's something awful, like Saw 3, you can just leave.

We saw Dreamgirls, which I'd actually seen in the states over Christmas, but was fine with seeing again. It was a different experience altogether. In the states, everyone in the theater totally bought in to the whole musical thing--the big productions, people randomly breaking into song, fading spotlights, etc. People even clapped at the finish of one of the really show-stopper songs. Here, people kind of giggled whenever someone broke into song in a place where they would normally just be talking. In fact, the longer the movie went on, the more people laughed. Musical theater must not be big here.

Stuff

Skip went to cousin Detlef's birthday party last night, ate great food and enjoyed seeing Detlif and Torstein and their families. It would have been too late for Maddie on a school night, so we stayed at home. Tonight Skip is going to play indoor soccer at the International School. It's only the second time he's played since we've been in Germany, so beam some injury-free thoughts his way. He's ego is still bruised from the beating his favorite soccer team took in this tournament he went to this weekend with British buddy Steve.

Maddie is learning all about houses and homes at school. She told us yesterday that it doesn't matter what stuff you have in a house, it's the love inside that makes it a home. I like this school more and more every day.

I Hate to Have to do This

It wasn't ostrich. It was beef filets...from Austria...or Österreich in German. You know, some German words sound like the same word in English. Others not so much.

Also, for those who might be interested the Boot Expo that is in town is not a tradeshow for shoes, it's for big boats.

By the way, Austrian beef is far superior to German beef, so I'm really glad we tried the ostrich. Can't beat the Germans when it comes to schwein (oink, oink), but beef is not their thing.

Really got to get that intensive German class scheduled.

Wacky Weather

Had to pick Maddie up from school on Thursday at 11 a.m. due to high winds. My parents said they saw footage from England on the damage the wind had done. Since houses here are built like bunkers, it wasn't very scary, and it was kind of cool to watch from inside your solidly built home. Lots of work being done this weekend cutting up fallen trees and branches around town.

The German train system was actually shut down on Friday so that they could clear away all the debris, and a friend of mine had to go pick up her husband at the border of Holland because he had taken the train in for business earlier in the week and couldn't get back home.

Today all is calm and damp and gray--business as usual. Skip is headed into Duesseldorf to see some kind of soccer match where four area professional teams play a kind of mini-tournament. It's stadium with an optional roof and I'll wager they'll need it today.

Went to the grocery store today looking for something beef-like to cook on the grill. Couldn't get a t-bone, but I could get ostrich filets. Let you know how that turns out.

Pictures

Someone commented to me that there hadn't been many pictures on the Blog recently, so I came up with some. The truth is that while our location enables us to take some pretty cool day trips and easily access amazing places for vacations, most days, we're just living life--in a foreign country.

So to that end, here are some pictures from my yesterday: the cupcakes I made for the American Women's Club new member Welcome Coffee, the grocery store where I like to shop, my gym, Maddie waiting for the train with her friend Madison and her brother Jake.

Soon we should have something a little more exotic to offer up!

More things realized and/or learned

We have our grill up and running. Skip and I had to haul it up the steps to our house (we'll let you know how our backs are in the morning), roll it through the living room and out into our "garden". I had no idea how little I used the oven for anything other than baking until I got here and didn't have a crock pot or a grill. Now that I have those again, I can make anything...well, except for some of the cuts of meat here that I can't readily identify. I really need cousin Peter (former butcher/current homeopathic doctor) to come up and give a lesson on meat buying.

Skip and I went by the travel agency in Kaiserwerth today to finish up our booking our Paris vacation. we couldn't book online with Disney because we have a credit card with an American billing address but a German mailing address. That kind of glitched the system.

Anyway, while we were there we asked about the South of France (or the "beach" as we tell Maddie). We're planning to go there right after school is out in mid-June. The agent told us most people rent houses becauses hotels in France are not children friendly. When we asked more about that he told us that in Spain or Italy, they have resorts with programs where you can drop off your kids in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon, but the French expect you to keep your children with you at all times. Those wacky French!

Although, I have to admit that after Maddie's behavior the last few days, I'm thinking of booking a Spainish or Italian vacation right away!

Am continuing to smile at people on the street--particularly on days like today when the sun was shining! I walked home from dropping off Maddie at school and walked back to pick her up. It takes about 30 minutes, and when the sun is out, you want to soak it up! I think I've mentioned that Germans don't acknowledge people they don't know out on the street. Even if it goes against the cultural grain, I just don't understand in a place where it's usually so rainy and gray how you can HELP from smiling when the sun is out.

So I spent at least an hour walking around Kaiserswerth and smiling all along the way. Got a mixture of reponses--some looked down, others kept a perfectly blank expression, at least one eyed me with suspicion and no fewer than three looked at me as if I might be a little touched in the head. It's a fun game for me.

Progress

We had a remarkable experience today. Before we went into Kroeger (large furniture store), we had breakfast at a SMOKE-FREE McDonalds! It smelled so good. We're hoping that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here in Germany, decisions about smoke-free areas are made at the province level, so different areas have different rules.

We weren't at IKEA, but the pieces we bought have just as many screws and will take just as long to put together. You can pay someone to do it for you. It always sounds really expensive in the store and then becomes more and more reasonable with each 100 screws that you twist in.

We went to see a Night at the Museum tonight (original version--in English) and all of us really enjoyed it. We are just now able to venture outside cartoon territory with Maddie and the movies and it is really nice. They dub movies like that here in Germany, but I feel like the Germans are really missing something when they don't get Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson's real voice.

Stuff

Got a crockpot today. Pretty exciting! They're very hard to find here, and we had some really great spareribs tonight so tender they fell right off the bone. We bought a gas grill right before break from some Americans who were returning home, so between the grill and crockpot, I am back in the cooking game.

We're about to get back in the groove of being back in Germany, back to school, back to work, etc. Making plans to head to Paris over winter break in February. It takes longer to go from Little Rock to St. Louis than it does to get from Duesseldorf to Paris. You can get to Amsterdam in about the time it takes to get to Memphis. It's kind of weird.

We may be a little extra careful in planning our travel from here on out. One of the women in the American Women's Club was in Tanzania over the Christmas break and got a speck of bacteria of some kind under her contact that caused an infection in her cornea, and she's had to have a cornea transplant. It's been really sad and a little scary. People in the know are saying that it's a bacteria you can pick up anywhere, but I think it's made people in the ISD community a little more wary of taking advantage of those North Africa vacation deals.

On a totally different topic: a question for your cooks--is there a good substitution when a recipe for cookies or cakes calls for shortening? It doesn't always work to just sub oil or butter. Shortening almost impossible to find here and if you can, it's ridiculously expensive. Also, it would let me make "homemade" Bisquick. You can't find that here either. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Weird Things and Good Friends

Maddie and I couldn't get back to the house today after running an errand. We returned from the Real (pronounced Ree-Al) and a police car was blocking the turn onto the road that led to the road where our house is. So I went around the world to come at the road that leads to our road from what I think is the north (or is it the east) and cop car was blocking that entrance as well.

Maddie was really upset that we couldn't get to our house and even more so that I couldn't explain to her what was happening or when we might get to our house.

Unannounced, we landed at the doorstep of my friend Joy who fed us dinner and let Maddie play with Matthew and Madison until other friend Melanie let us know that the coast was clear. Apparently, there was a really bad wreck, so we could have parked the car and taken the train home, but there were workman digging up sidewalk near our home earlier and I was afraid there might have been a gas leak.

It's nice to be safe at home, but I imagine we will be making a late entrance to school in the A. M.

TV Stars

Our landlord came by to welcome us home and told us that on the day we left for the states, the local news was doing a story on holiday travel. Guess who the video was of? Yes, the Lentz Family--pushing a cart piled with six suitcases through the Duesseldorf airport.

Got Maddie up and to school this morning. We are still not on a good sleeping schedule. We got to walk to the train in the dark and in the rain. All the moms at school were really dragging--whether or not they had been home for the break. It's hard enough to get back to the school routine, but the icky weather made it doubly difficult. Wonder how many kids will nod off in German class today?

And We're Back

It only took us 21 hours door to door to arrive back in Duesseldorf, but we're back. Just a tip for those of traveling here...make sure if you use a different airline for domestic and international, the international has a baggage agreement with the domestic airline. Also, those from Little Rock should avoid JFK as you have to connect somewhere else to even get there. Go through Atlanta, or if you can travel on Monday, Orlando has a direct to Duesseldorf.

Well, Duesseldorf is the same as we left it...overcast and rainy. Although not quite as cold as it was when we departed, so that's a bonus.

We all slept until after noon today and are trying to get back on Germany time before Maddie starts back to school on Monday. I imagine at an international school, the first couple of days back after a long break are a little dicey when all of the students have returned from different time zones.

Now we try to unpack from our trip as well as put away the stuff from our shipment that arrived the day before we left.

Had a great Italian meal for dinner tonight at one of our favorite restaurants. Who knew that the best Italian food could be found in Germany?