Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Doo doo doo lookin' out my back door


Spring is finally here. I'm reminded of that every morning when I look out our balcony.  The sunsets are even better.  Of course I can't be allowed to enjoy the scenery like just about everyone else.  Yes, with all beauty came some of the worst allergies I've ever had in my life.  I've always had fairly rotten allergies, but I've become accustomed to them.  Until now.  The past couple of weeks have been pretty rough, but I think I'm finally getting over it.  I've read that this was going to be a particularly bad one here due to the long cold winter.  Instead of certain types of plants slowly waking up one by one, they've all gone and done it at the exact same time.  Lucky me.  Fortunately I've found a few sites which show how bad the day should be.  I prefer this one if only for its use of cute little bumblebees, or as they are called in German, Bienen (pronounced "bean-in"). Now when it looks bad, I can say "uh oh, it looks like another three Bienen day."

Other than the allergies, life here has been pretty good lately.  How good?  Well, for starters we survived that whole volcano ash monster situation entirely.  Without going into too much detail, She works in transportation and would have been swamped at work dealing with all the canceled flights and crowded trains.  Instead, She was a bit under the weather and was off work during all of Volcano-lypse 2010.  She returned to work the day everything went back to running smoothly.

We also found something I was ready to give up on long ago.  Italian sausage.  Despite living in a country that prides itself on its wondrous array of encased meats,  I could not for the life of me track down any Italian sausage.  This is hardly a staple of my diet, but it is definitely something I want on a pizza from time to time.  We asked everywhere.  Everyone just looked at us like idiots.  If you order "Italian style" pizza here, maybe you'll get something with salami on it.  If you're lucky, pepperoni.  But still, no Italian sausage.  I've eaten pizza with tuna fish only because the baked tuna fish has the appearance of sausage.  I was once so desperate I even ate this:


I began to think that maybe "Italian sausage" is just something that comes from the US.  Maybe it was made by Italian immigrants in the US?  I asked an Italian colleague in school however and he confirmed that it is very much an Italian product.  He also confessed that he was shocked that he couldn't locate it anywhere either. I made one last search online and found this place not too far from us.  Tucked away in a rather industrial neighborhood, they probably exist mostly for restaurant owners.  It took several tries and descriptions but we finally got it.  If you're jonesing for Italian sausage and think you might know a place to find it, don't ask for "Italian wurst," instead ask for "Italian bratwurst."  Who knew?


And yet, things continued to get even better.  Last Saturday we stopped at the local bakery to get a quick bite to eat before running some errands.  We found 20 euros on the floor on our way out.  We figured that was a good sign, seeing as later that day we would be announcing to our families that we will be getting married.  Whoa.  Did I mention that?  More on that later...

1 comment:

  1. Wow!!! Congratulations! That is so exciting.

    And I know what you mean about Italian sausages in Germany. Sigh. I've missed them, too. I finally found them in Frankfurt, in a big industrial Italian food supply store.

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