J’s brother-in-law found a little guest sleeping in the garage while he was tidying up. He brought it to show me as he knew that I’d never seen a hedgehog before! This little guy was quite smart as he pretended to be asleep until he thought we weren’t looking, then turned himself over and strolled off across the lawn. Hope to see him again sometime!
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
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!
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
Door on church in Prague, Czech Republic
This week’s photo challenge theme was Door.
I was looking for one photo of a door in particular, but it’s an old photo and my photos are on various hard drives both in Berlin and South Africa, so I couldn’t find it. But on browsing some very old photos (taken with a very old point and shoot camera) I realized that a) I really have a lot of photos of doors and b) there is a remarkable variety of styles of door. So here are some photos of some doors around the world (click on the photos to view them larger).
Doors in Greece
Colourful doors in Mexico
Doors of Asia (Japan, Malaysia, Thailand)
Doors that echo the structure of the building (Thailand, Italy)
Doors that blend in with nature (Japan)
Arabic doors (mosque in Malaysia)
Doors of Portugal (Lisbon)
Old and ancient doors (Vietnam, Ireland, Turkey, Greece)
Doors to the underworld (Turkey, Greece)
Market in Vilnius
This weekend we went to visit a friend and her family in Minsk, Belarus, and as we had left booking a bit late and prices were pretty high on the airline Belavia which flies directly from Berlin, we booked tickets with Lufthansa which flew via Frankfurt and Vilnius, then took a train from Vilnius to Minsk. The flight arrived late at night to Vilnius, but it was cheap and easy to book a taxi to take us from the airport to our B&B. The B&B was run by a lovely Lithuanian woman who stocks her kitchen with cookies and tea, so even though we arrived really late, we could at least have a little something to eat and drink before going to bed. Continue reading
Kunětická Hora castle
Recently I posted about the new kinds of over-the-counter medications I’d discovered in Germany compared to South Africa (mostly herbal). At the time I was busy optimistically trying them all out since I had a bad cough. Sadly, none of them seemed to help, although the good strong ginger, lemon and honey tea that J kept making me definitely soothed the cough. The terrible, choking cough was just going away when I caught another bad cold just before the Easter weekend. We’d already booked tickets to Vienna, from which we would drive to Slovenia, and nothing was refundable so we went anyway.
Easter market in Vienna
My family’s Easter tradition was fairly simple: on Easter morning my sister and I would wake up and hunt for the chocolate eggs hidden around our house by the Easter bunny (or our parents).
