Today Jasper, I and the girls went out to visit some friends who had rented a house in the Choriner Schorfheide. The Choriner Schorfheide is an rural area in the former East German state of Brandenburg. When you drive through the area you come across village after village, some of them picturesque, most of them depressing, the locals (if you even see them because they seem to stay in doors) often making neanderthals look overly civilized. Still, the nature there is truly beautiful and the area is well worth a visit, especially from city slickers like ourselves. We met our friends at this lake. It was a beautiful late summer day with just a dash of Herbst in the air, so all was well. When we later drove to the woods, Miss Mia got a little spooked out. We've experienced this before when we rented a place in the same area a few months ago. Ten minutes into our hike she said she was scared and wanted to go back to the nice apartment. What can I say? I'm raising city kids. She was ok at the lake, though I suppose that's probably because it at least had a parking lot. At some point I took her to this little shed up on the hill to take some photographs. She's used to this since both Jasper and I are hobby photographers. A little to the right. No, a little to the left. Now hold still. She knows better than to give us an overly posed smile. Part of me thinks this is great. We have so many beautiful photographs of the girls and it's always the perfect opportunity to practice a little portrait photography. Still, the other part of me has to wonder, Jesus, are we warping them? From the very beginning we've both been constantly shoving these lenses in their faces, the plague of the paparazzi parents. A while ago, I saw a documentary about the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. He takes photographs of everything, including the death of his wife, including his many adventures with prostitutes. Although he has sometimes been criticized for this, he said his impulse has always been to document everything. I think I can understand him. For example, shortly after I took this photograph I confiscated Little Li's pacifier because I wanted to take better photographs. But the photographs I ended up taking were mainly of her protesting, her arms outstretched, screaming for her pacifier. Sometimes I've taken photographs of the girls crying instead of comforting them. But then, I think such photos are important. These are the times we spend together and I want to capture them. But, getting away from my thoughts and back to the day, Little Li and I took a nice walk in the woods, me in only my bikini, she in only her diaper. We climbed together for a while on these fallen logs and, of course, I took more photographs. Someday, in her early teenage years, Little Li is probably going to want to have a killer tan but look at how white this arm is. A pale complexion and red hair. Sorry Little Li, god or whoever might be up there will say, it ain't gonna happen! Here is a little self-portrait of my foot. I'm sure it's not hard to imagine that I have never ever in my life had a pedicure.... Later our friends went into the forest and collected some Steinpilze (I don't know what the English translation is, but big-ass mushrooms would suffice I think.) We all went back to the house they had rented where they started slicing up the mushrooms for a pasta sauce or a soup or to lay out on a loaf of bread. Who knows? But we had to be heading back as the babies were getting mighty grumpy (and grumpy babies forced to stay up often means grumpy babies for a couple of days=not worth the risk!!) On the way back we passed by this eerie swamp. The water was completely covered in duck weed and all the trees were dead (drowned I suppose, though it seems strange that a tree could drown.) Every once in a while you could see a ripple under the duck weed or an occasional abrupt leap from a frog. Creepy to say the least.... Good night, freaky swamp in the Choriner Schorfheide. Good night friends who have now most likely fallen into a gorged-with-Steinpilze-slumber. Good night babies, your paparazzi parents will greet you in the morning. Good night, anyone who reads this blog, oh yeah, and thanks for reading. :)
So we wanted to have a little birthday bash for Miss Mia, one more heavy on adults with only a couple of the kids of close friends invited (we will have plenty of future birthdays full of a dozen kids hyped up on sugar or, as Jasper calls it, Baby Cocaine...) Since her actual birthday was on Wednesday we could have had the party on either the Saturday before or after....that is, if we lived in the U.S. If you want to really spook out a German, wish them a Happy Birthday anytime before the actual date. This will be like cursing them forever with very bad luck. A couple of years ago, when my birthday was on a Monday, I decided to celebrate on the Sunday before. "No one can really that rule all that seriously," I thought. "Besides I'm an American, so it doesn't count for me." Needless to say, most of the German guests flipped out. One woman ran over to me, wide-eyed, and apologized profusely for having wished me Happy Birthday because she didn't know my birthday was actually tomorrow. Another friend gave me my birthday present but flat out refused to give me any birthday well wishes "I just can't do it," he said. And as for the other Germans, several of them called me the next year to say Happy Birthday on the 15th instead of the 16th. To them, that I had actually celebrated a day earlier just didn't seem possible....
Anyway, I didn't dare leave Mia to the mercy of the bad-luck birthday fairy, so her little birthday soiree was yesterday at 3 o'clock. Here are some behind the scenes photographs before the little party started:
Of course, we cleaned the apartment. Here's my desk looking waaaayyyy less messy than usual, believe you me.
The carrot cake I made for her. The recipe was from the U.S. so I used half the amount of sugar they said to use. Basically no German can handle "American sweet" and, frankly, after living her for ten years, neither can I.
Chopping tomatoes for a most delicious homemade salsa fresca.
But we didn't want to slave away for hours in the kitchen so we also offered delicious spreads from Knofi, a Turkish specialty shop in Berlin (the one on Bergmannstrasse).
...as well as some of their tasty dolmas and olives.
Thank goodness I got all that new silverware at Sage Patch and the Alameda Point Flea Market when I was in California. We're going to need them today.
As usual, there were some vintage finds floating around, waiting to be photographed and posted, like this Arzberg tea cup and cake plate set, hand-painted and signed in 1952, which I will soon be offering for sale in Schaufenster....
...and, hiding shyly behind the door, this truly amazing 80s prom dress which will soon make its grand debut in Curious Knopf
This necklace is also the first in a new series of jewelry I am making from vintage 1940s Bakelite which will soon also be for sale in Curious Knopf. But sorry folks, this first one is mine-all-mine. ;)
Since all of our guests were fashionably late, I caught Jasper pigging out on the salsa before they arrived. After I had given him a good scolding he said "Hey, I know what....
....why don't we take macro photographs of each others eyes."
Have I ever mentioned how much I love this man?
The cake's on the table, the salsa's half eaten, the balloons are all over the apartment. Let the party begin. That is, whenever the guests decide to arrive! (and of course they eventually did and boy did we ever have fun. :) )
Technically we have Valentine's Day in Germany, but no one seems to do anything for it. You won't hear any wives complaining about the cheap present they got or some girlfriend getting pissed off because her boyfriend forgot to make a reservation at Grill Royal. Since living in Berlin, I've had two husbands (German) and one boyfriend (Dutch Indonesian) all of whom I tried to convince it was mandatory to celebrate Valentine's Day with little old American me. Here's how it usually went:
"Hey, so today's Valentine's Day."
"Oh yeah. Happy Valentine's Day." "So? Where's my present?"
"Wait....I was supposed to get you a present??"
"Don't you remember? I already told you about that last year."
"Honey, I can't remember that kind of thing. I'm European."
Each year it was the same: No rare Amaryllis, no Belgian chocolate caramels, no dinner at Der Goldene Hahn, nothing.... After a while I gave up trying to teach these Europeans hounds new tricks because a) it was a lost cause and b) I hate Valentine's Day.
Seriously, the day is just plain stressful. If you are in a relationship there is a lot of pressure to have it be "the perfect day." Even if you and your significant other decide not to celebrate it, it will most likely be from an "anti" stand point and not because you really don't care. And, let's face it, nothing sucks more than being single on Valentine's Day. All those ads for diamonds for that special someone or romantic spa get-aways for two or the tables in any even half way decent restaurant taken, all of them just there to rub it in your face that, yes, you are alone. Grrr....I'm married and yet it makes me pissed off just thinking about it.
For all you disgruntled single ladies out there, here's a song for you, sung by Trude Henne in 1959:
Ich will keine Schokolade, I don't want any chocolate ich will lieber einen Mann, I'd rather have a man, ich will einer, der ich küssen I want one who I can kiss und um die Finger wickeln kann and wrap around my little finger
Valentine's Day, you can take these truffles and shove them! ;)
So I'm not dead positive since I'm no cemetery scientist, but I'm pretty sure once you're buried in the U.S. then that's it. No one is ever going to dig you up no how, that is, unless they are some creepy grave robber if such a thing still exists....Not so in Germany. Here you lease a grave for thirty years. When the time is up, if no one from your family pays for the next thirty years, then your remains are dug up to make way for the next "tenant". I'm not really sure what they do with the people whose families have defaulted on the payments. It's not like there is a hot line you can call (actually, hot lines don't even exist in Germany, at least not toll-free ones, but that is an entirely different topic...) to find out what happened to the bones of Fräulein Müller. 1-800-Call-a-Corpse, where are you when I need you?
This thirty year rule, mixed together with good old fashioned German bureaucracy, has made the local Kreuzberg cemeteries even more interesting and macabre than they already would be: both the ones in my neighborhood have at least a dozen fancy crypts where the families lapsed on their payments. The bodies have been removed- you can tell this by the trees growing through the roofs:
By the gardening equipment stacked beyond rusted gates (in this one the crypt was even open, going down at least six feet. Um, can you say creepy?!?):
And by the boarded up doors:
Still, there is a problem: The bodies had to be removed because no payment had been made but you can't exactly lease the grave to anyone else since the crypt says Familie Hoffmann in large, Art Nouveau letters. Probably the buildings are also under Denkmalschutz which means they can't be torn down, making it all the more complicated.
Still, the old crypts have a beauty to them, albeit dilapidated and spooky. Just the thing for a stroll on a dark and cold Sunday afternoon in December...
So I wrote in an earlier post on this blog that Germans don't have stockings on Christmas Eve but what I failed to mention was they DO get presents in something they normally wear on their feet namely, their shoes. On the night of December 5th Niklaus comes and, if the children have properly cleaned their shoes, he delivers them small presents and chocolate to a shoe that has been placed in front of their bedroom door.
Since this is the first Christmas where Mia is old enough to know what's going on, she's been learning a lot about all the different holiday figures: She knows Santa, she knows Frosty, she's at least heard of Rudolph. But this Niklaus guy, how could I explain him to her without overwhelming her two and a half year old senses?
"Niklaus is Santa's brother," I told her, trying to connect them together. "No, they're not!" Jasper said, somewhat entsetzt.
I thought about it later and realized how do we know they aren't brothers? I mean, what do we even really know about this Santa Claus guy? That he's old and doesn't shave much and likes to eat? That he lives in a cold and dark place but apparently does not suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder because he laughs like a bowl full of jelly and, once a year, travels around the world in one night delivering presents to all the good little boys and girls? How do we know his brother Niklaus doesn't live in a cottage on an ice floe down the road? One is into shoes, one into stockings; hey, it's a family thing....
All I can say is, thank god for Wikipedia. I read this article on Santa Claus and learned a lot of interesting things. Some of them were predictable; namely, that Santa Claus, Niklaus and Sinterklaas (as my Dutch ex-boyfriend called him) are all the same guy, St. Nicholas, whose feast day is, yep you guessed it, on December 6th. Some of the information was more unusal, like there have been parellels drawn between St. Nick and Odin as well as a mention of the untrue legend that Coca Cola invented Santa Claus (something that I've heard many times from smug, arrogant German college students I've taught, who claimed it was just another example of how American pop culture has ruined the high culture of Europe. Granted, you can be critical of certain more obnoxious parts of American culture, but please at least get your facts straight. In my experience, snobbery is often largely based on ignorance....)
The good news is, even if you're more into Niklaus, there is still a slutty Santa outfit to be had for the ladies. Here's the example I found when I googled Niklaus images (under the heading, Niklaus Kostüme, Gr. S):
Happy (belated) Niklaus everyone and keep those shoes nice and polished!
So, I've never really been much of a "Christmas person", but I have to say it's a lot more fun when you have kids. Mia is so excited. She talks about Santa Claus constantly, has watched the Frosty the Snowman song at least a dozen times on YouTube and today got her first piece of chocolate from the Advents Calendar (this is going to be a hit for a sweet tooth like her!) We also made a (wonderfully crooked) advent's wreath together last night and then wrote Christmas cards while listening to Bing Crosby sing White Christmas. Seriously, the only thing that was missing was hot chocolate with marshmallows and a candy cane or two.... Still, there are of course differences between how Germans and Americans celebrate Christmas. Some of the differences I've known for a long time: Germans open their presents on Christmas Eve and don't have stockings. They have Christmas Eve (Heiligabend), Christmas Day and Christmas Day 2 (apparently to recover from the Christmas Goose and all the mulled wine they drank on Christmas Day number one...) But now that I'm actually celebrating Christmas here I've realized there are other even more subtle differences. I discovered these when I went out shopping with Mia for Christmas ornaments since I didn't have any (told you I'm not a Christmas person.) Here is more or less what I came back with:
When I showed them to Jasper he said: "Oh no, not those! Those are SO spiessig!" Spiessig is a hard word to translate, but I would say the closest definition would be by combining dorky, uptight and bourgeoise into one word.
"Wie bitte? Christmas balls are spiessig?" Garish maybe, especially since Mia picked them out and so they were purple and gold paired together with red tin foil. But spiessig? I tried to get him to explain to me why, because in my mind they are pretty much standard, but the best he could come up with was "They just are." I had also bought some of these straw ornaments which are typical in Germany.
"What about these?" I asked him. "Are they also spiessig?" "No, those are ok," he told me.
We talked about it again today and how funny it is that when you're from a different culture you sometimes don't make the same assumptions. Jasper is even less of a Christmas person than I am, yet he has certain opinions about things that I found surpring, for example, that ornaments should always be wooden.
"The worst and most spiessig of all is when people have electric candles on their tree."
Wie bitte? "Do you seriously mean that people should have real lit candles on their tree? Isn't that a pretty hardcore fire hazard?" "Oh sure," my non-Christmas loving husband answered. "There are lots of fires every year."
So I've learned a few things so far this jolly holiday season:
Number one: there is little chance of talking my husband into getting these electric candles with a convenient remote control.
Number two: we are still not putting real lit candles on our tree because I think I'd rather not burn the house down, thank you very much.
Number three: we are most definitely hanging stockings with care in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon will be there.
What can I say? Christmas traditions are truly diehard, even for two Scrooges like us!
Today Jasper, I and the girls went out to visit some friends who had rented a house in the Choriner Schorfheide. The Choriner Schorfheide is an rural area in the former East German state of Brandenburg. When you drive through the area you come across village after village, some of them picturesque, most of them depressing, the locals (if you even see them because they seem to stay in doors) often making neanderthals look overly civilized. Still, the nature there is truly beautiful and the area is well worth a visit, especially from city slickers like ourselves. We met our friends at this lake. It was a beautiful late summer day with just a dash of Herbst in the air, so all was well.
When we later drove to the woods, Miss Mia got a little spooked out. We've experienced this before when we rented a place in the same area a few months ago. Ten minutes into our hike she said she was scared and wanted to go back to the nice apartment. What can I say? I'm raising city kids. She was ok at the lake, though I suppose that's probably because it at least had a parking lot. 
At some point I took her to this little shed up on the hill to take some photographs. She's used to this since both Jasper and I are hobby photographers. A little to the right. No, a little to the left. Now hold still. She knows better than to give us an overly posed smile.
Part of me thinks this is great. We have so many beautiful photographs of the girls and it's always the perfect opportunity to practice a little portrait photography. Still, the other part of me has to wonder, Jesus, are we warping them? From the very beginning we've both been constantly shoving these lenses in their faces, the plague of the paparazzi parents.
A while ago, I saw a documentary about the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. 
For example, shortly after I took this photograph I confiscated Little Li's pacifier because I wanted to take better photographs. But the photographs I ended up taking were mainly of her protesting, her arms outstretched, screaming for her pacifier. Sometimes I've taken photographs of the girls crying instead of comforting them. But then, I think such photos are important. These are the times we spend together and I want to capture them.
But, getting away from my thoughts and back to the day, Little Li and I took a nice walk in the woods, me in only my bikini, she in only her diaper. We climbed together for a while on these fallen logs and, of course, I took more photographs.
Someday, in her early teenage years, Little Li is probably going to want to have a killer tan but look at how white this arm is. A pale complexion and red hair. Sorry Little Li, god or whoever might be up there will say, it ain't gonna happen!
Here is a little self-portrait of my foot. I'm sure it's not hard to imagine that I have never ever in my life had a pedicure....
Later our friends went into the forest and collected some Steinpilze (I don't know what the English translation is, but big-ass mushrooms would suffice I think.)
We all went back to the house they had rented where they started slicing up the mushrooms for a pasta sauce or a soup or to lay out on a loaf of bread. Who knows? But we had to be heading back as the babies were getting mighty grumpy (and grumpy babies forced to stay up often means grumpy babies for a couple of days=not worth the risk!!)
On the way back we passed by this eerie swamp. The water was completely covered in duck weed and all the trees were dead (drowned I suppose, though it seems strange that a tree could drown.) Every once in a while you could see a ripple under the duck weed or an occasional abrupt leap from a frog. Creepy to say the least....
Good night, freaky swamp in the Choriner Schorfheide. Good night friends who have now most likely fallen into a gorged-with-Steinpilze-slumber. Good night babies, your paparazzi parents will greet you in the morning. Good night, anyone who reads this blog, oh yeah, and thanks for reading. :)
