golden october

As rainy and cold as it seemed to turn once in a while, we've actually had a real nice "Golden October" with lots of colorful leaves, nice trips every weekend, more onion tart and wine and turning on the heating only occasionally in the evenings.

taipei and shanghai

I've just reserved my flight. I'm going to Taipei for a visit :-)) and to Shanghai :-)) I'll be gone for almost four weeks (quote H: "Of course you don't have to ask me how long you can stay."). I'll be staying with Reiner in Taipei and with Alex in Shanghai. I already have a shopping list for all those things I can't get here (Tuesday's favorite cat food, cds and movies, English books, cheap and beautiful christmas cards, Jimmy books, dried fish to snack on and share with Tuesday, maybe some Kimchi, dangly thingies from the jade market, Chinese dictionaries from Mainland...). And a To-Do list for a couple of things I wanted to do before I left and didn't manage in my leaving lethargy (visit Hans in his office opposite of Reiner's place, drag Reiner to as many movies as possible - all original versions :-)))))))))))), get a decent chop done for H and myself, meet the others for lunch or dinner or whatever - maybe I could get them to organize a ktv session???????...). And a list of restaurants I want to go to (Alleycat's, my favorite Vietnamese place in Kungkuan, Thai, Korean, the nightmarkets, maybe JB's...). And that's just Taipei, and there'll be more people to see, more favorite food to eat, more things to buy and more stuff to do in Shanghai :-))))))))))))))

I'm so excited, I woke up at 5 this morning and couldn't go back to sleep

the most beautiful car

Saturday afternoon, H grabbed a couple of scissors, disappeared into the bedroom and shooed me away whenever I tried to ask what he was doing there. Half an hour later, he sent me to the loo, and when I came back, I found this on the table:

It's the goddess's birthday :-)) so our daily paper had a special feature. And H's work is almost as beautiful as the 40 die-cast models of her I have waiting to be picked up at my dad's place :-))))

addendum

the perfect companion to Federweisser: Lamb's lettuce and Zwiebelkuchen (onion tart) - made by myself :-))


The Federweisser is all gone by now :-((

federweisser

One thing I definitely missed about being in Asia is Federweisser, grape juice that has just started fermenting, a sweet, tangy delicacy that's only available at this time of year and is traditionally savoured together with onion tart. Living close to Saale-Unstrut, the northernmost winegrowing area of Germany, Federweisser isn't that hard to get here. So we combined a sunday trip around the Saale valley with a detour to a wine grower H knows and bought a couple of bottles after some tasting on the spot. (H: "Are 3 bottles enough?" I: "Let's make that 5"). The girl didn't understand us when we asked for "Neuen Wein", new wine, the expression used down south where we come from. And it took us a second to realize our mistake. But the wine was goooood :-)

autumn

We're lucky. Except for some fog in the mornings, we're experiencing a beautiful "Golden October". It isn't too cold yet, too (thank goodness), and we've only had to heat up the old tiled oven a couple of times last week. The weather is great and Tuesday can't decide which sunny spot to prefer for her many naps. And I'm taking pics :-))), out of the windows at home:



of my autumn decoration:



one of these chestnuts is the one Sarah sent by mail from Munich - and paid a fortune for mailing it:

During a walk among the grapes on the weekend:






and a couple of weeks ago on a walk along the Saale:

auguste rodin

I dragged H to the Rodin exhibition in Jena. He asked: "So, what did he paint?" and then took a look at the bronze statues and said he'd prefer big canvases with some paint on them. Of course, there are loads of big canvases with paint on them that I like. But I love Rodin's female bronzes. I had to keep my hands behind my back to stop myself from touching them. Iris, Messenger of God was just one of them. I liked his drawings of women's bodies, too. Can't post a sample here, though, some of them were outright pornographic.

skype

My aunt called from Singapore. Through Skype. I had installed it in April after loads of people kept bugging me to download it. But so far, the only way I'd used it was for the STAR Greater China group chat (jeez, we should have started that years ago. It made things much easier to be able to ask a question to all Germans at STAR Beijing and STAR Shanghai at once and then get answers from different sides instead of having to bother Alex on the phone. And it would be great to use that between the European and overseas offices, too. Or with the software support).

Chatting was ok, basically the same as using MSN. But every time anyone suggested to use Skype for internet phone, I'd start panicking and find ways why it didn't seem to make sense to me: "the phone bill is paid by the company anyway."; "I have no microphone."; "I have no headset"... Today, my aunt asked if I had Skype while we were chatting on MSN and then immediately called me. I refused her first. But she called again. And I picked up, and it worked :-)))) Sound quality was even better than with phone calls once in a while. And it felt nice to be able to talk to her without having to worry about the phone bill (have I mentioned that I LOVE my DSL flatrate? ;-)).

10 minutes later, the phone rang again. My cousin from Singapore ;-) my aunt had told her about our successful talk and she wanted to try it out, too :-). Now I should get Reiner to install it (he had actually been the first one to tell me about it some time last year but lost interest when he didn't know anyone who used it).