SIQ

So I could blog about how we spent Saturday (flea market with our friends Jeff and Jenn), or Sunday (flea market in Calw - beautiful little town on a river with SSgt Veronica Soto), or the dinner we had last week at a restaurant near work with a little pond while we sat on the patio eating salad and schnitzel, or I could blog about taking some time and going vegetable shopping with Brad at the Vaihingen market, but instead I'll blog about sickness...

Not swine flu, or the H1N1 variant as it's correctly called, thus not impacting pork sales - guess the pig farmers were protesting the title. But being sick. I have been so sick that I had to go to the clinic twice! The first time I went was last Wednesday - I had been coughing for four days and I had been told there were three people at work with whooping cough, a highly contagious disease, so I went to get checked out. The doctor, after making a big deal out of how it couldn't be "whooping cough" told me I had a respiratory virus and sent me home with some over the counter Muscinex and Motrin (why do they think everything can be solved with Motrin!!!????) After five days taking medicine and getting a sorer and sorer throat that couldn't be eased with all the Motrin, Tylenol, cough drops & cough syrup in the house, I went back. This time they gave me antibiotics, cough syrup with codeine, and a SIQ chit. SIQ = Sick In Quarters = and ordered me to not go into work Tuesday. So I spent one of the best Tuesday's ever, laying around the house doing NOTHING at all! With my wonderful husband! It was a great day :-) (and only the second time I've ever gotten a day off of work for being sick in 16 years).

Anyhow, I'm better now :-) I'll write about the spring festival we went to last weekend later...

My first sweater

I completed knitting my first sweater today! It came out pretty well also - I'll have to take a picture soon and post it here. The other cool thing that happened is Brad bought me for my birthday a spinning wheel so I can make my own yarn. He got it for a good deal at the thrift store here.

The other thing we've been doing is watching the Battlestar Galactica. Everyone has always said it's a good show, so when our upstairs neighbor loaned us season 1, we figured, what the heck, and started watching it. We're halfway through season one already!

Chili Champion

Brad's chili stood up to the competition again in it's second chili contest. His "Hot Ass Texas Soup" as we named it, won both the contest and the prize for best name! Brad made two different batches of his chili - one regular with a little spice and the other super hot. The super hot one won - it was funny watching people taste it. They'd go "that's good" and then a second later when the heat hit "oh, my!!". It was all gone way before any other chili. Both of Brad's chili pots were empty, I think only one of the other eight competitors were eaten until empty. It was great!

Easter Weekend

Brad and I went down to the flea market again on Saturday (do you sense a tradition here?). Even though both Friday and Monday were German holidays with everything closed, the same didn't apply to Saturday. Not only were all the shops open, but the flea market was going strong.


























Easter Sunday we took easy, having a good breakfast together in the morning, and then going for a nice long walk around a nearby lake. There were a lot of ducks out, though we didn't see the beautiful wood ducks that we had seen before - when we didn't have the camera, of course! We brought some bread and fed the ducks as we walked. Some of them were far too clever and started following us around the lake. It was kind of funny except ducks are pretty tempermental and would spend as much time chasing off other ducks as they would looking at us for food. A couple ducks were brave enough to come up and eat out of our hands. This intrepid fellow, pictured at the bottom here, even followed us walking down the path to get more.

Beautiful Crazy Day

I had a crazy day at work today - heck just telling Brad all the madness that happened took me an hour! The good thing is the day was BEAUTIFUL, so after I got off work at 6:30, and we ate a quick supper (eggs in a burrito - Brad's with cheese and salsa, mine with cheese and a chopped up habanero (my guts are still burning) - yum).

I then I drug Brad out to walk around a lake we live near, the ducks are all paired up, the fish are biting, and it was a gorgeous night. I think it was in the 70's today. The only thing we did wrong is we forgot the camera! I'll get some shots next time.

The daffodils and tulips are in bloom - it smells so good here, with all the buds coming out on the trees and the grass going green. The sun set before we left the lake so as we were walking back we could see bats flying around. Brad commented that bats are a sign of a healthy ecosystem, they're pretty fragile so they are one of the first species to die in a bad environment.

Today was the way I was hoping Oklahoma would have been when we were there in spring break - but everything was so dry, the lakes were so low, and though it was warm everything was still dead. I guess there are a bunch of fires in Oklahoma now, I'm not surprised after how bad it was when we were there. It's worse than it's ever been in anyone's memory.

Food is Different Here...

When we were in Luxembourg, Brad had pizza for lunch. Brad really enjoyed it, in fact we both enjoy eating pizza here. When we were back in the states we ordered pizza - but it was just not the same. Here the crust is almost as thin and crispy as a great big cracker. Sauce is a secondary effect - no where near as thick; if you order salami - it's pepperoni, if you order pepperoni - you better like hot peppers and bell peppers 'cause that's what you're going to get. Sometimes the cheese is different too!

Another thing I noticed was really different is the national food here, the pretzel (okay, I just call it that because they're everywhere, and in every bakery they are one of the key staples) is salty bread with some salt on the outside. In the states it's the same shape but it's soaked in so much butter and oil that instead of a bread substitute it's a huge calorie greasy treat (granted, I like both kinds!). And in both places they are also served warm.

French fries here are ALWAYS awesome! We've yet to get a bad french fry. And instead of ketchup, they're served with mayo. And they give you little wood fork things to eat them with (don't want to get the fingers dirty).

Breakfast, American style, with eggs, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, waffles, french toast, etc. etc. isn't even served here. Few restaurants open for breakfast unless you want coffee or tea at a cafe accompanied by a croissant - or ----- a pretzel! (Yum - cappuccino and a croissant!!)

Weinershnitzle is not a hot dog - it's a breaded meat patty.

Salad can be served with yogurt dressing -- nothing like those yogurt things sold in the little plastic containers in the states.

Deserts, and yogurt, are no where near as sweet.

Chocolate truffles need to be scoped out carefully when you're buying them - at least half of them are liquor filled (yuck!)

Luxembourg

Saturday, April 4, Brad and I heard about a large flea market/antique sale in Metz, France from some of the people I work with. Never one to turn down a shopping venture of this sort, yet reluctant to put the dogs in the kennel again, we decided to drive up early (it's a little less than 3 hours away from Stuttgart). We woke at 4:30 and we were on the road by 5:00. Everything was going well, we made good time, didn't run into much traffic, had plenty of gas and a beautiful day, but when we got to the location the GPS had led us to (the Parc des Expositions in Metz, France is what we'd entered), there was no antique sale to be found - just a live reptile exhibit. Add to that some motorcyclists running a course that asked us to move our car out of the parking lot we were in (we were in their way) and we were both completely baffled. So I messed with the GPS some more and found out the stupid thing had brought us to Nancy, France instead of Metz, France and we were 40 minutes south of our destination! Dang it!! Since they were both the same distance from Stuttgart, we were clueless until we arrived! We ended up getting to the antique sale at 9:00 instead of 8:00! At the market, we we looking for two things - some cast iron pans and a wooden box - and we found both and for good deals. We looked at lots of other things, but everything was more expensive than we were willing to pay for something that was not quite right for our tastes. I imagine now, you're all wondering - what the heck does this have to do with Luxembourg?? Well..... after we left the sale (at about 11:30), I looked over the map for something cool to see, and noticed we were only about 45 minutes south of Luxembourg - the country as well as the capitol city, so I twisted Brad's arm and we headed there for lunch and some sightseeing. It was a beautiful day for it, in the 60's and sunny. The top picture is a self-portrait with the aqueduct in the background. Behind Brad in the second picture you can see some of the ruins of the walls We walked around and looked at the old buildings, looked over the old ruins of the city walls (down below in these pictures), checked out some old roman aqueducts, and ate a wonderful lunch of pizza and pasta. I was enjoying it because everyone was speaking french so I could understand things again, plus another gorgeous day walking around is never to be missed!

Walking around downtown Stuttgart

Friday, April 3, was a beautiful day for two reasons, first it was a day off work - they call them "Training Holidays" and they are days off that the command decides to take - one each month! While I think they're kind of excessive, 12 days off a year on top of all the Federal Holiday - the number of hours I work coupled with my enjoyment of a good day off give me no qualms about enjoying them!

So Brad and I went to downtown Stuttgart and had lunch at our favorite restaurant - Arche. I had a wonderful parmesan, ruccola, cherry tomato salad with some potato soup. Brad had pork kabobs, with french fries and salad. We sat outside in the sun and enjoyed the weather and people watching.

After we finished lunch we decided to go for a long walk. We went past the state square, where we've gone many times in the past, and headed down - thinking we'd walk down to the zoo. The zoo is a couple miles down, but it's all parks - these are some pictures we took while walking.

When we reached a train station we hopped the train back to central downtown and had an ice cream, in addition to going into Brad's favorite hat shop and my favorite yarn store. Just a beautiful day!

Mainz and the Gutenberg Museum

Thur, April 2, one of my co-workers needed a ride to the hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany for a follow up appointment. He had been there for a while, including surgery a couple months ago. We'd visited and driven him a couple times, so during this trip I was determined to take advantage of it! We dropped Adrian at the hospital, then headed to the next town over (11 km away) Mainz, Germany. Mainz is the place where Gutenberg is from and the home of the Gutengerg press. Brad and I had lunch there and checked out the museum. It was not as much fun as I thought since all the books were in German - duh!, but it seemed to be one of those places we should see, especially since were were so close. The museum had a few copies of Gutenberg bibles we looked at also. In a way it was simply amazing, we were standing in a room with about 30-40 books, all hand copied, all from 1500 or earlier thinking - wow - all of these books predated our country's existence! Another thing I thought was neat/interesting is the Gutenberg bibles were printed without the big letters that started the sections/chapters. Those letter were either stamped in or drawn in with a bunch of additional art included later, depending on what you purchased. So every Gutenberg bible is unique!

Mainz is a pretty town, and it was a beautiful spring day for walking around. While we were just there for 2-3 hours, it was a great time. Our only hiccup was when we parked, under a big parking sign (P) with a parking meter nearby - some guy stopped his car and told us we needed to move since we didn't have a parking pass. Of course - we argued we had just bought our ticket - but he told us the sign meant residents only. We ended up moving our car since we couldn't read the sign, but it sure was suspicious since his only interest was in getting our spot! We did take a picture of the sign and he was right... I guess the parking pass machine was just for some specific spaces, spaces that didn't include the one we were parked in! It'll teach us to always bring the dictionary!!!