Mexican Week at the Lidl

The only thing that can top my anticipation of American Week at our Lidl grocery store a few months ago is Mexican Week this week. You can find Mexican ingredients at the bigger supermarkets, but that was not the case 5 years ago. Our friend Dina told us how thrilled she was the first time grocery stores stocked Mexican items after several years in Germany of finding none.

At the Lidl, there were taco, burrito and fajita kits, salsa, tortillas and corn chips. There were, however, a few surprises.

Here we have Burrito -flavored tortilla chips and Apple-Lime-Cactus juice.

My personal favorite, though, are the hell-flavored chili chocolate chip cookies. Yikes! The packaging makes me almost afraid to sample them. Chili cookies sounds a bit odd, but do they really taste like hell?

Yes, yes, I know. Hell means light. There were also chocolate chocolate chip chili cookies labeled dunkel or dark. We had recently watched the film Chocolat where a mysterious woman tempts a small French village with her chocolate concoctions, many spiced with chili, so we were curious to try these cookies.

The dark cookies tasted pretty much like your run-of-the-mill chocolate chocolate chip cookies and the kids loved them, but the lighter ones had a definite kick to them. You could see red specks in the cookies themselves and after finishing one, my mouth experienced a subtle burn. Tasty, but I don't think I'll add chili to my chocolate chip cookie recipe anytime soon.

Meeting the Sopps in Würzburg

My cousin Eddie, his wife Heidi, their four kids and Heidi's father were driving through our area today. They have been touring Germany for the past week and for Heidi's dad, who was born and raised in Germany, it was his first trip back since he left at the age of 16. We agreed to meet in Würzburg, a one and a half hour's drive south.

We caught up on family news and enjoyed lunch at a café.

We took a stroll across the Old Main Bridge which was built in the 15th century and is adorned with statues of saints.

Four cuties in front of a fountain.

Eddie and me with Fortress Marienberg in the distance, built on the site of a Celtic fortification dating from 1000B.C.

Flying Standby

We were joined yesterday by a colleague of David's from Atlanta, plus his wife and two of their three children. They are also good friends of ours and we were happy to put them up for the night. They had been visiting friends and family in Germany and were going to try to catch the Atlanta flight out of Frankfurt yesterday morning.

Issam and Haike and their kids are flying standby, as did David's parents just a few day ago to visit us. Over dinner last night, we talked about the highs and lows of flying standby. Here's what we concluded: When it works and you get on that first or second flight you try, it's the greatest thing! Flying for almost nothing! And sometimes you even get bumped up to Business Class.

Issam suggested that Micaela and I should just fly to Rome one day for pizza. Or to Paris for a few hours of shopping. We could be back in time to read Rebecca a bedtime story. He said that many Lufthansa employees just show up in the airport early in the morning when they have a few days off, check and see what flights have seats and hop on a plane, destination unknown until just a few minutes before they board. Hmmm, should we go to Barcelona, Vienna or St. Petersburg today?

When it doesn't work, you just cannot even imagine at the time a more frustrating experience. It just isn't worth it. What a waste of a day! And then you need to ask yourself if it makes sense catching another flight to a different city and then trying to get from that place to your final destination.

We all commiserated, all of us having had the experience of spending an entire day (or two) at the airport, trying to get home. One time was when David, his parents and I were trying to fly out of Frankfurt after having attended a family reunion in Finland back in the 90s. The thing I remember most vividly was how you were not allowed to enter the gate and have a seat until just a little while before the flight and you had to have been assigned a seat. So we and scores of other standby passenger spent an entire day standing at the Frankfurt Airport. There were no other seats around except inside the gates. I think we may have take turns sitting on our suitcases. An understanding and generous friend of David's let us spend the night when we couldn't get on a single flight and then we managed to get seats the next day.

In fact, after two days, and I mean from 5:30 in the morning to 11:00 at night, of trying to fly out of Boston ten years ago, we never flew standby domestically again. David's priority was just too low compared to Delta and United employees and their families and wasn't worth the risk and frustration. We caved and bought Air Tran tickets every time.

So, off Issam and Haike went yesterday morning to attempt the only Lufthansa Atlanta flight of the day. And back they came. Not a problem. I didn't even change the sheets on their beds.

We discussed the whole standby issue again, this time at the Indian restaurant around the corner from our house (butter chicken, yum!). We have plans to fly to Atlanta for a visit next week, so all during dinner I kept saying to myself, "Thank God the tickets Lufthansa gives us to fly home a few times a year are confirmed seats. No more standby for us. That would drive me crazy." (Cue ominous-sounding music.)

Issam and family did finally make it out this morning, though not on the Atlanta flight. They had to fly into Washington DC and then catch another flight down to Atlanta.

Grandpa and Grandma also made it no problem onto their flight this morning to Finland to visit family for a few days. See? When standby works, it's awesome!

Aschaffenburg

One of our guide books to Germany suggested the city of Aschaffenburg as an easy drive from Frankfurt and well worth the visit. When I told the kids we were going on another day trip, they whined, "Not another castle! That's all we do is see castles!" I never thought we would see a day when my kids would lament having to tour a centuries-old castle. I told them to take heart. We were not to visit a castle, rather a palace (splitting hairs, I know).

Johannisburg Palace (or Castle, depending on the translation) is a relatively young one, having been constructed in the early 1600s. It served for years as the second residence of the Archbishop of Mainz.

This model in the palace's museum shows the condition of the palace immediately after WWII. Since first visiting Europe in the 80s, I have always been on the lookout for towns and buildings being classified as restored or reconstructed. I felt less duped if I knew that what I was viewing was not the original and authentic.

Well, it's not helpful to have that attitude when touring Germany or many other parts of Europe for that matter. So much of the country was badly damaged during the war and needed to be rebuilt. You'll drive yourself crazy if you stress about what is original and what is reconstructed. The city of Munich was almost completely rebuilt after the war, but it shouldn't stop you from enjoying the city, which looks just like it did before the war.

Most of Johannisburg Palace is an art museum with hundreds of paintings and many artifacts from centuries past.
























This fellow seemed to be the mascot of the palace. He was on brochures, t-shirts and postcards.

An ornate sleigh with a seat for the driver at the rear

These porcelain figurines reminded me of my brothers.

Emilie's face is reflected in the dollhouse's mirror.

Schloss Johannisburg has another unusual attraction to offer: the world's largest collection of historical cork models. Who knew? These replicas of antique Rome were made between 1792 and 1854 by the court pastry cook Carl May and his son Georg. This is the biggest cork model anywhere, the Colosseum with a diameter of over nine feet.

In the courtyard preparations were underway for an outdoor movie showing. The yellow tower on the right is the castle keep (strong central tower and my new word for the day) and is the only remaining part of the original castle built in the 1400s.

We marveled at the details of the building, such as this doorway carving, especially knowing how much of it needed to be restored.



View from the herb garden

The highlight of the day for the kids was being accosted by this family of swans who made a beeline for us when they heard us at the river's edge, no doubt hoping for some tasty morsels.

Back up to the palace

Emilie's sweet face contrasts nicely with the naughty one above

Königstein im Taunus

Grandma and Grandpa Nylund arrived yesterday for their second visit. We have a 4-day long trip planned for later in their stay, but for the next few days will content ourselves with day trips.

Only 15 minutes away from home is the town of Königstein im Taunus. My friend Kathy told us that the ruins of the castle are fun to visit, with its dark spooky passageways and impressive view of the town.


Königstein castle, built on a high hillside, dates back to the 12th century.


We amused ourselves speculating on what the underground caverns could have been used for. I opted for storage, the kids for imprisonment and torture.

We were glad that we took Kathy's advice and brought a few flashlights. One minute you were walking in the sunny courtyard, the next you'd enter a passageway, turn a corner and literally could not see your hand in front of your face.

Rapunzel gazing out from her tower

Surveying their kingdom

The castle met its end in the French Revolutionary Wars when the French blew it up in 1796, although this may have been unintentional. (Local legend has it that that gunpowder was hid in the castle's well, and a spark from a careless French soldier's pipe started the explosion).

We ended our excursion with the obligatory stop at a playground and....

...yummy ice cream.

Ein Regenbogen

This stunning double rainbow was so huge and being a complete arc, it was impossible, for me at least, to capture the entire bow in a single shot.

We've been surprised by the cool weather we have been having recently. For a few days, temperatures didn't get out of the low 60s. It will not doubt get warmer soon.

The Fourth of July

When I reminded the kids that today was July 4th, a holiday in the States, Micaela responded, "Oh, yeah. July 4th. That's the day you told us that we were moving to Germany." Really? She remembered the date we told them? "Of course! You told us and that night I was crying in my room, thinking, "I can't believe they told us that we're moving to Germany on July 4th -- America's birthday!" Oops. Didn't think about that at the time.

So, we are now beginning to commemorate our having survived the first year here. We informed the kids that we were moving only a few days after we found out for sure. Over the space of a week, the chances of us moving went from 0% to 10% to 25% to 80% and then to 99%. It all happened very quickly and David reminds me that right at about 80%, he looked to me for a definitive answer that I was on board. My response was no. Why move? We were living a charmed life in an Atlanta suburb -- our kids were happy, the schools were good, we had great friends, the convenience factor of where we lived was very high...etc. Why disrupt all of this? David's response was, "Well, I wish you had told me this when we were at 10%."

By the next evening, I had changed my mind, albeit reluctantly. This opportunity was something David had been hoping for for years and he had always talked about wishing the kids could have the experience of living in Germany. He would often visit his good friend Dina and her kids in Frankfurt and came home with lots of details of their great life in Germany. I realized that if I said no now, we would probably never get another chance and would always wonder what might have been. And this wasn't a permanent move, right? We would at some point move back to the U.S., right?

We needed to tell the kids right away. After all, we would only have six weeks before we were to fly to Germany and there was a lot to do. The kids were understandably upset, but by the end of the evening of July 4th, we could see them pulling themselves up by their boot straps and vowing that they would do their best to see this move as a big adventure. It didn't hurt that we promised them that we would be able to make trips back to visit their friends at least once a year and they would have their own e-mail addresses to keep in touch.

But my mind is still reeling with the thought that we have been here almost an entire year.