Fall Break Part I: Dresden

Photos to accompany this blog post can be found by clicking HERE.

After the obligatory 6-day after-trip waiting period (and after procrastinating by cleaning out the fridge and making an apple pie) I think I am finally ready to tackle Part I of this most-likely four part blog saga.

This year's fall break started off, as usual, with us refusing to plan anything. At roughly 10pm on Thursday night I made a it a point to make sure Michael at least booked our hostel for the next night, forcing us to at least figure out where we were heading the next day.
Friday morning, we hopped on a 8:45 train out of Metz and made our way (via 4 different trains) to Frankfurt by lunch time and to Dresden by 7pm. We were a little freaked out when we arrived in Dresden and realized that no-where in the train station did they give out or sell maps, making it pretty impossible to find our hostel. We did eventually find an info desk with free maps but it wasn't very helpful with fairly poor graphics and no street listings. As we walked out of the train station, we were absolutely shocked at the immense area of neon-lit stores and restaurants as we walked towards town. When we were invisioning Dresden (without much knowledge of the city's horrifying history), we thought of a beautiful old germanic town with old buildings and narrow streets so you can imagine our shock when we were, instead, greeted by streets wide enough to play a regulation football game in and a huge TJMaxx (TKMaxx in Germany) store. We walked, in the dark, in the general direction of downtown and eventually found a mall with a newspaper stand that sold maps. There was a comical few minutes where Michael and I struggled to find the street on the new map (which still had not street index but was more detailed than the free one). We had no luck locating it so we asked the german-speaking cashier (essentially in mime since neither of us has the slightest clue how to speak German) how to get to the street...she had no clue, but we eventually found the street with another map she pulled out with the streets indexed. Ok, so with that first disaster averted, we headed off in the direction of our hostel. We got to walk by a few notable historic buildings on the way including the Roman Catholic Church (pictured above) which sits right on the edge of the river. We managed to get lost a few times...they really didn't portray the confusion of Dresden's streets onto the map very well, but eventually we found our way. The hostel turned out to be very nice. We had booked our room through www.hostelworld.com but apparently there was a computer malfunction and too many rooms had been booked, so instead of staying in the 8-bed dorm we had booked, we ended up getting a free upgrade to a private triple room (two twin beds and a sleeper couch). After getting settled and slightly warmed up, we asked the girl at the desk to direct us to a good Italian place for pizza. Toscano's was the name of the place and the pizza was absolutly awesome; we shared one with ham, mushrooms, salami and red peppers. After dinner we walked back to the hostel and pretty much passed out from exhaustion from that long day of traveling.

Friday morning we woke up to a damp and foggy day (pretty much the entire trip was like this) which was nice for not having to wear sunglasses, but not so nice for taking pretty pictures. We packed up our bags (we only brought one backpack each which fellow travelers found amazing) and headed into the city. Breakfast was found at a café/market type place; Michael had a strudel and coffee while I had my customary apple turnover and tea. They were good but not great, by we were starved by this point and didn't want to take the time to find a quaint little place to eat at.

On our walk into town, we were able to get more of a feel for what communism must have looked like when Dresden was under the command of the USSR. After almost every building in Dresden was destroyed by the British and American bombs during WWII, the communists rebuilt much of the city in their typical architectural style of square cement buildings.
We continued our walk through Dresden, passing over the same bridge and walking by the same Roman Catholic Church as we had the night before. We weren't quite sure what to do at this point. At this point, it was about 11am and we were planning to catch a 1:30 train into Prague which didn't leave us much time for a tour. So we spent the next couple of hours just wandering around the city and figuring out what we could of the city.
The church shown above is the rebuilt Dresdner Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). The church withstood the bombings of Feb 13, 1945 for 2 full days before catching on fire and collapsing, leaving the rubble blackened. The church was later rebuilt (completed in 2004) and the black stones in the exterior were recovered from the rubble and re-used in the new building.Anyone who has read this blog knows how much we love all of the interesting and delicious sausages that can be found in abundance in France, so it was only right that we have our first German sausages on this trip. We bought these babies after working up an appetite on our romp around the city at the market square in Dresden from the most crowded vendor there. I may not know much German but I can at least say "roastbrautwurst", hold up two fingers, then point to the mustard; it seemed to get the idea across well enough. While these sausages were the first of many enjoyed on our week-long journey, they were easily the best of the trip and quite possibly the best of our European lives.

Stay tuned for the next episode: Fall Break Part II: Prague.

Sorry for the ridiculous discombobulation (wow, how did spell check not get that...I wasn't even sure it was a word let alone how to spell it!) of my last post; there were too many things to write and no good way of getting it all down (at least not that I could visualize at the time). In other news, I've updated the Metzing Around photo album on facebook. You can view the new and old photos by clicking HERE.

Keeping Up With Tradition

Although I've not really succumbed to homesickness yet, I have become nostalgic for my favorite time of the year back home. Mind you, Metz is going through fall at the moment, but it's more of the traditions of fall in the states that I miss. The football season has been difficult for us to come to terms with during this particular adventure. For those of you who haven't spent more than 3 minutes in a room with me, I am, and have been since I can remember, a die-hard Steelers fan, and have slowly but surely converted Michael over to the black and gold side (a process that was aided by his living in Pittsburgh and being there for their 5th Superbowl win). Before the season started, we had assumed that there would be some way to watch the games on the internet but were faced with a hard blow when we realized that the first 3 games of the year were all at 8:30pm...2:30am our time, meaning we weren't even able to attempt to watch those first few games. Even though I couldn't watch the games, I went to bed at night with my Parker jersey on and would jump on the computer upon waking to see how the game went. Thankfully, the past two weeks have been much more enjoyable; 1pm games mean we can watch it at 7pm our time. And we have been keeping the football season menu the past couple of weeks.On the left is a pumpin pie (tart) that we made from roasting and pureeing courge (the closest equivaent to a sugar pumpkin). As you can see, I have not mastered the communal kitchen ovens yet...it was a little "caramelized on the top".For the football game we made some of my family's traditional chicken wings. At this point though, we had no oven, and since we normally let them slow bake for 2 hours or so, the communal kitchen was really out of the question. This meant that we had to fry them, which is not my favorite method, but it worked and was yummy.
The picture on the right is of the chili we made last Saturday. It is pretty much your basic chili...you can't buy black beans here, so red beans were subsituted. And unlike America, it is very hard to find ground meat here (well, you can usually find it but it is pre-seasoned for sausage) and if you do find it, it is often times as much or more than just buying a chunk of meat, so instead of the ground turkey I usually use, we just used some braising meat and simmered it until it was nice and tender.This past Saturday, we took a chilly ride down to the thrift store again. I was running low on crochet thread for the project that I'm working on (pictured above), it is about 3/4 of the way done and will hopefully be a 3 foot wide table centerpiece when finished. I will make sure to get a better picture with more contrast when it is all finished. Anyway, we rode our bikes down amid sporadic autumn showers. The landscape was absolutely beautiful.

The photo above was taken from our balcony just minutes before getting on our bikes to leave. At the thrift store I managed to find 1 more spool of the cotton I had been using along with 3 new spools in a slightly different off-white color...let's hope these last me awhile. While we were there, Michael managed to snap this (slightly blurry) picture of the store from the top floor. I still can't get over the incredible antiques that they sell here for next to nothing. On this particular trip, I fell in love with an old desk for 150euros...actually, I think you can see it in the bottom left of the photo, it has the white cone-shaped thing on it, not that you can really get an idea of what it looked or felt like from this picture. An just in case you were wondering, the table top felt exactly like someone had written on it for several hours over hundreds of years, it had that smooth wood feeling that you feel when you run you hand along a railing in Disney Land...I love that feeling.

On Saturday night we were invited to a couple of parties, and since we are normally hermits at night, we decided to shake things up and get out of the dorm. The first party we went to was in the GTL undergraduate dorm, Lafayette. The party turned out to be exactly what you would expect from a college party; we played beer pong and foosball. The only difference was that I wasn't in constant fear of being caught "supplying" minors since everyone can drink at 18. At about midnight we all headed into town to a bar near the train station that was hosting a party that night (essentially meaning they cleared the floor for some dancing and brought in 2 DJ's). We had a great time with everyone and I was especially excited that Vanessa, the first Metzer I met, came later in the evening. We had a good time but still ended up leaving earlier than everyone (2am *Gasp*) and made the nice, brisk, 45 minute walk home.

For the football game yesterday, we made a Cincinnati Style chili...not that I was cheering for Cincinnati. In fact, the Steelers played Cleveland yesterday, so the food choice didn't make much sense but at least it was a good, hearty, football-type food. For those of you who are unaware, don't be ashamed, I didn't learn about Cincinnati chili until Michael and I started dating. Here is wikipedia's definition of Cincinnati chili:

Cincinnati chili (or "Cincinnati-style chili") is a regional style of chili characterized by the use of unusual ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, or chocolate. It is frequently served over spaghetti or as a hot dog sauce.

Michael has had quite a bit of Cincinnati chili in his time while I've only had it twice (and loved it both times), but when searching for chili recipes last week on www.epicurious.com, I came across a recipe for Cincinnati chili. It had never occurred to me that I could just make it at home rather than having to wait for our next trip to Ohio, so we decided that it would be a good meal to remind us of home. Here is a picture of my plate of 5-way Cincinnati chili, a mountainous tower of spaghetti, onions, beans, chili, and shredded cheese (it should be cheddar, but since cheddar is hard to come by but gouda isn't ,we used a yellow, gouda-type cheese); Michael eats his chili 4-way, without the onions. I'm no Cincinnati chili critic, but I thought the spices were pretty accurate. It was delicious, and, as you can imagine, quite filling.

In other news, we've decided to stay in Metz longer than we had initially intended, which is both a good thing and a bad thing for all of you. If you had put any thought to visiting us here in Europe, this gives you a whole 7 extra months to make it work (until December 2010). If you just wanted us to come home, I'm sorry to disappoint you. There were many factors that went into the decision but essentially, we didn't think that 9 months would be enough time to do everything we want to do (learn the language fairly well, travel, learn about the culture, find me an internship) and adding to that argument was the fact that Michael had overloaded his schedule with a particularly difficult course, thinking that he wanted to graduate by May. So instead of cramming everything into 9 months, Michael has changed course and will now be spreading his 1o classes out over 3 semesters. The really exciting part about this is that we made a couple of purchases after deciding. The first thing we bought was a fitted sheet for the bed (well, I made Michael get this, sheets are NOT cheap here, even poor quality sheets). You can see the pretty green color on the right. Before this, we had been fighting with making two twin-sized flat sheets work; it was OK but I curl up in a ball at night and would always get my feet all tangled up in the sheet on top. We also bought a mattress pad a few weeks ago (and a rope to tie the beds together) so our beds no longer slide apart through the night. And last week we bought a comforter so we weren't fighting over 2 doubled up twin sized blankets (one wasn't warm enough on it's own), so now we finally have a nice comfy bed to sleep in :-)
After our bedding purchase, we went from store to store for hours before we finally decided on a good, middle-ground mini-oven which means now I can make my chicken wings the way I like to make them.














And to prove that our new oven works well, I've included a picture of last week's pizza night pizzas. We still did one on the stove since we don't have a pan big enough for a 2-person pizza. We even managed to find pepperoni for this weeks pizzas...there's something we hadn't had since moving from the states, now all we need to find is some good/crappy Chinese take-out and we will have all of our cravings met!

Until next time, bonne semaine!