Colourful World – Apricot and Peach

5th August 2015nn 4 Comments

Courtyard in Alhambra, Spain

This week Cee chose the colours apricot and peach for her Fun Foto Challenge Colourful World Series. A few weeks ago, I took a photo of summer’s bounty: the bowl of apricots and plums we’d picked on J’s family’s farm in Czech. So I went back to that photo to study the shades of apricot, wondering if I’d taken any other photos that included natural shades of apricot and peach during my stay in Germany. The answer was, not many, apart from some orange-yellow flowers! Apricot and peach are shades of summer, warm colours, and this is more a land of greens and blues. Looking back at my photos, I found that these colours were more common in warmer countries: in the orange sand and rock found in some parts of South Africa and other dry countries, which turns a yellow-orange apricot shade when the sun is setting, and the peach-coloured stone of the beautifully carved Alhambra in Spain. It has been dry this year in central Europe, and last weekend we did ride past some wheatfields which had turned an almost peach colour in the sun. Actually, a great trick to make a room appear warmer is to paint it in shades of peach or apricot, and I noticed that buildings painted in these colours still look warm in winter or on a rainy day. Here are some of the photos I found with shades of apricot and peach. Continue reading →

Middle Europe Weekly Small Pleasures #9 – Cake and kayaking

4th August 2015nn 3 Comments

This week’s small pleasures included a meal at a Moroccan restaurant, J’s birthday, and a lovely hot weekend in which we could do some outdoor sports.

1) Although the best Moroccan meal I’ve ever had is still the one in Lieges, Belgium, i always enjoy a tasty Moroccan tagine, the mint tea served in pretty glasses with a silver teapot, and the lush decor in maroons and burgundy. At this restaurant they also came around with a jug of rosewater to wash our hands before the meal, which smelt beautiful.

2) It was J’s birthday on Thursday so I made him this Sachertorte cake with a Mary Berry recipe. I always find her recipes really reliable, and this one turned out very nicely.

3) On Saturday we went for a cycle on part of the Oder-Neisse cycle tour, which runs along the Oder river on the border of Germany and Poland. It’s very scenic and we saw lots of animals and open fields of countryside – will write more about it some time when I have time!

4) On Sunday we went to Müggelsee for some kayaking, which was perfect on a hot day. More about that here.

Have a good week!

Watersports and beaches at Müggelsee

2nd August 2015nn 5 Comments

Berlin is in a region of many lakes, and is fortunate to have lakes both within the city as well as in the surrounding countryside of Brandenburg. Today we visited Müggelsee again, a big lake in the south-east of Berlin, in the Treptow-Köpenick district, surrounded by the suburbs of Freidrichshagen, Rahnsdorf, Köpenick and Muggelheim. It is so lovely there that I thought I would share some photographs. Continue reading →

Weekly Photo Challenge – Close up

29th July 2015nn Leave a comment

This Week’s photo challenge theme is Close up. We were in the Czech republic this weekend, and I enjoyed taking photos of the bees and butterflies busy at work in one of my favourite flowers, Echinacea purpurea. Even with cellphones these days you can take close-ups, although obviously it’d be better to have a proper camera with a nice macro lens to get a sharper focus and finer details. This photo was taken with a Nexus 5 cellphone. The hard part was getting the insects to sit still! Here are some more photos of the bugs’ world. Continue reading →

Middle Europe Weekly Small Pleasures #8 – Summer thunderstorms

27th July 2015nn 5 Comments

It was quite a nice week. This summer is much more like my first summer here than last year, with lots of “Gewitter” (thunderstorms) in the evening, bringing heavy downpours of rain. I like summer rain, when it’s been hot and humid, and suddenly with a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning, the clouds open and drench the earth with water. Since it’s not cold, it’s nice to open the windows and let the cool breeze waft through the apartment, inhale the smell of rain on earth, and listen to the rain pouring down.

I also enjoyed an impromptu dinner J prepared. I was tired and had come home from German class, and he put together some feta, olives and cherry tomatoes on a plate, which we ate with sesame and rye crackers and a bottle of cider. It’s such a simple meal but somehow so delicious. We ate the same once for breakfast after visiting one of the Turkish supermarkets here and buying a big can of mixed olives and a large pack of good white cheese. When I visited Turkey they served white cheese, olives, tomatoes and cucumber for breakfast, so we did the same.

On Thursday some friends came around for dinner, and J made one of my favourite Czech dishes, meat and knedlicky (bread dumplings) with a dill sauce. I’ll post the recipe for this some time (and a photo), as it’s a good one. This time he cooked the meat (beef) in the pressure cooker his mom gave him for Christmas, and it turned out lovely and tender. For dessert I made a lemon fridge tart, which required some experimentation with German jelly. In South Africa the jelly includes sugar but here it doesn’t, so I just premixed the packet contents with the amount of sugar suggested on the packet and then used the amount of one packet of the German one (plus sugar), hoping that it’d be a similar quantity to one packet of South African jelly powder. The dessert set nicely, so it worked out.

In the weekend we went to Czech to visit J’s family on the farm. The weather was great and the plums, apricots and peaches were in season, so we were picking them and eating them directly off the trees. We went swimming at the lake, walked the dogs, spent time outside in the garden and just enjoyed a relaxing weekend, as it’s always nice to see everyone again. For breakfast on Sunday his mom made an amazing savoury “cake”, which consisted of layers of bread, cheese, peppers, ham and salami, sandwiched together and covered with cream cheese. You serve it by cutting a slice and eating it with a knife and fork. I’ll definitely have to try making one of these one day!

To share the good moments in your week, join the Small Weekly pleasures blog event over at A New Life Wandering. Have a good week!

Colourful World: Turquoise and Teal

27th July 2015nn 7 Comments

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge focuses on Turquoise and Teal this time around. The shades formed by the colours blue and green combined are probably my favourite of the colour spectrum. Here are just a couple of photos from a brightly painted bridge near Eberswalder in Germany, a dragonfly at Liepnitzsee (in Brandenburg, north of Berlin), the beautiful green-blue waters of Liepnitzsee itself, and the crystal clear aquamarine waters of the Julian Alps in Slovenia (the colour is apparently caused by glacial powder). Till next time!

The IKEA experience

23rd July 2015nn Leave a comment

There is no IKEA in South Africa. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of IKEA before coming to Europe, which most people here find unbelievable, considering it’s the largest furniture store chain in the world.

So for us South Africans coming to Europe, a trip to IKEA is an outing in itself.

Basically the central concept of IKEA (a Swedish chain) is build-it-yourself furniture and a shop that is laid out like a sightseeing tour of rooms, followed by an area selling household items and then a warehouse selling the boxes of furniture. Here is the general IKEA experience: Continue reading →

Weekly photo challenge: Half and Half – in Ireland

19th July 2015nn Leave a comment

The theme of this week’s photo challenge is Half and Half. The idea is to share a photo that has two halves, either literally or figuratively.

“This week, share an image that has two clear halves, literally or figuratively. You could focus on composition, like me, and take a photo with an explicit dividing line (either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal). Or take the theme in other directions: zoom in on a pair of objects that together form a whole. Show two people whose demeanor or personality complement each other. Or bring into balance two opposing visual elements — light and dark, color and its absence, sharp focus juxtaposed with blurriness.” – Ben Huberman

i wanted to (and might still) search through my photos for some other interesting takes on half and half, but the first thing that sprung to mind was some photos I took in Ireland. Ireland is, indeed, the emerald isle. How could it not be with all that rain? I found it a beautiful and dramatic landscape, with many rolling green hills and open expanses of sky filled with dramatic clouds, as well as cliffs overlooking the deep blue Atlantic ocean. The division between land and sky became a recurrent theme in the photos I took there, and turned out to be my favourite from the trip. So for my half and half I choose Earth and Sky.

By the way – there is no photoshopping at all here – Ireland really is that green!

Traditional Irish blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

the rains fall soft upon your fields,

and till we meet again,

may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Middle Europe Weekly Small Pleasures #7 – Summer flowers

19th July 2015nn 2 Comments

Two weekends ago we took a trip to the Baltic coast, and last week we were in Spain for four days. Apart from these great weekend trips, it has been all work work work. But in the weekend, although I also had to go to work for a bit, we had the opportunity to go for a walk in the park near where I used to live, where we enjoyed the summer flowers. This afternoon we also got to relax and BBQ in the garden of a friend-of-a-friend in the outskirts of Berlin. When you live in an apartment in Berlin, like many, it’s always a luxury to relax outside in a garden. Here are some pictures of the summer flowers that are out at the moment in Berlin. To see what others have been up to this week, check out the Weekly Small Pleasures blog event.

Tinto de verano – a Spanish summer drink!

16th July 2015nn 1 Comment

J and I recently went to southern Spain for four days, a glorious four days of hot sun, blue skies and beautiful buildings with Moorish architecture such as the Royal Alcázar in Sevilla and the Alhambra in Granada. We still need to sort out our photos, so more about that later. For now, I want to share a new drink I tried for the first time on this trip, very popular in Spain. It is called tinto de verano, red wine of summer, and is perfect for a hot day. Here is how you make it:

Add 1 part of red wine to 1 part of lemonade (e.g. Sprite or lemon Fanta), add a few slices of lemon and some ice blocks, and voila! Tinto de verano. So simple and yet so delicious and refreshing for summer. Drink it and picture that you are sitting at a cafe in a cobblestone street in Spain, enjoying the warm summer evening 🙂

Middle Europe

Daily life and travels in the central region of Europe and beyond

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