Final Germany post: Things that might not happen on everyone´s vacation

My bicycling buddies and I are all physicists, with some additional culinary and sartorial interests. I wanted to capture some of the things that make this special. For example, above, I´m enjoying four different pieces of cake. The intense focus on baked goods during my trips is not unique, of course, but I blame it on my year working in a French bakery when I was younger.

S is a solar physicist, who uses data from satellites to study the sun. When we found one of those solar system models with the planets proportionally spread across a few kilometers of park land, she cycled back to the beginning to get a selfie with the sun.

N appreciates the finer things in life. He found this incredible German hatmaker at the top of a mountain, and convinced me to drop a ridiculous amount on this hat. I love it. I do actually wear sunhats every day in Madrid, so it will be used, and you can really see a different between this and my 5€ convenience store hat. 

The guys really, really loved the extensive hotel breakfasts and occasionally sneaked out a "road sandwich", aka one for the road. 

Emergency coding after a long ride. 

Taken at the airport, before the trip began, discussing physics. N actually travelled with several physics textbooks. I didn´t ask, but I really hope they weren´t actually in his pannier the whole time.

Germany: All the best things

There is a lot I miss about Germany, and I tried to soak it all in while I was there. Of course, many of those things are food. Spain has excellent produce and nuts, and is rightfully proud of its Mediterannean diet. But it´s also a little lacking in food for vegetarians, and of course every country has products you just can´t get anywhere else.

May is prime asparagus season in Germany. That really is an official thing - it´s called Spargelzeit. Especially beloved is white asparagus, and many restaurants offer special menus featuring asparagus. I didn´t find anthing as unique as the aspargaus burger (six huge white stalks piled on a hambruger) compared to our last bike trip to Germany, but we ate lots of asparagus soup, asparagus and hollandaise sauce, even asparagus pasta dishes and flatbreads. 

As is tyrpical in the US and the UK, almost every restaurant has a vegetarian option on the menu, something that I can´t rely on in Spain. This was my favorite - "napkin dumplings" that are wrapped in cloth before being boiled. They were topped with a creamy mushroom gravy. It never occurs to me to make dumplings in my own kitchen, but I need to do so more often.

I am a fan of cake, and on all our bike trips I try to convince a group to make a cake stop daily. Usually we share so we can try many different flavors. I remember this particular cake shop had about a dozen options and I insisted my friend N come view them all before choosing. 

Cool, rainy weather! I don´t actually want to live in continuous rain, but I´d definitely take it over baking heat.

We were able to check a bag back to Spain, and had extra luggage space, so I quickly bought German products I miss. The incredible strawberries didn´t make it more than 15 minutes past this photo. The  rest I have been slowly enjoying over the past few weeks: soft pretzels topped with baked cheese (Käsebrezel), cherry yogurt, plum butter, hazlenut yogurt.

Since it was spring, and there was rain, flowers bloomed everywhere, helped by the German love of gardening. I am now back in Spain, where the temperatures are topping 32C / 90F. When this happens, all the grass dies and the city comes and mows it down to the ground and rakes it all away, leaving bare, dry earth (and presumably reducing fire hazards). So I am especially missing spectacles like this. 

Cycling down the Rhine

Last May, I took a smashing cycle trip through eastern France with friends R, N, and S. We had so much fun that we decided to do it again, this time in Germany. As always, the criteria for our trips are: Schengen zone (so I can travel easily), low chance of Putin invading, good bakeries and beer or wine, and not too many mountains. 

This time, I knew I´d be head translator, so I brushed up on my German the month before. I was pretty sucessful, I think, based on the fact that people did not switch back to English when we were talking, and I´ve definitely heard that Germans will do that if they think their English is better than your German. 

Even though we had a relaxed trip, somehow the days were packed and I didn´t manage to post anything during the trip. If you allow 1-2 hours for every meal, plus castle tours and cake stops, the days fill up very quickly. So stay tuned while I get caught up this month. 

We had lots of meals in little courtyards like this. 

Last year in Lyon, the them was "chateaus". This year the theme was "castles", which are almost excessively abundant on the Rhine. Sometimes you can stand on one location and see three at once, so it seems like all those dukes and barons would be rubbing elbows with their neighbors.

A river, car-free bicycle paths, and easy-going friends. What else could I want on a trip? Well, cake and castles, but I got those too. 

Our free day took place in Koblenz, where we saw the huge statue of William I, the first German emperor, at meeting of the Rhine and the Mosel rivers. That day, we managed to take a river cruise, drink a few spiked coffees, ride a cable car, and tour a fortress. We did not rest much on our rest day.

Three-quarters the way through our longest day, 65 km. I may have taken a nap on one of those benches, but I admit nothing. 

Let´s hear it for modern medicine

I´ve been dealing with some tooth problems again. Right after my trip to France, I got a pretty bad toothache, and the dentist found an infecion deep in my jaw. I´ve already had a root canal there in 2021, but the solution seemed to be to more or less do another one. There have been a couple of days with really unpleasant levels of pain, but mainly I´m on a steady trajectory upward. I´m three appointments into the treatments and only have one more left.

I have been pretty regularly reflecting on how great modern medicine is. I´ve received antibiotics, novacaine, and pain killers that will probably allow me to save (part) of the remaining tooth. Two weeks later, I can eat solid food again and almost all of the pain is gone. Two centuries ago, at age fifty, I probably would be toothless because of all my dental problems, and the treatments would have been agony before anesthesia. I feel really lucky to be alive in this era. (And after a few weeks of laying around and doing nothing more than taking legal drugs, I´m really enjoying walking, eating solid food, and bicycling again!)

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Lo siento, hoy no hay ninguna entrada en español.

Toulouse

As I've talked about in the past, I am exploring other possibilities where I might make a home. One option is France, and that's why I visited it last week. As I did last year in Hamburg, I used a housesitting service, which lets me take care of people's pets while staying in their homes for free. I applied for two positions in France during April, and received one, in Toulouse.

I was in Toulouse a year ago, but that was a touristy kind of trip, and this time I really wanted to learn more about day to day life, not what museums I could see. So I did my usual scouting trip process, which includes talking to other immigrants and using the buses to go to the very edges of the city. In addition, of course, I ate lots of French cakes.

I love the size of Toulouse and that it has a couple of big universities. This, for me, is really a sign of the academic and cultural vibe I'm going for. They also have a great public transportation system and the weather, at least in spring, was lovely. Now I just need to learn more about the disadvantages, like the legal processes I´d need to undertake.

The cats at my last petsitting gig did not like me at all (but I don´t think they liked anyone). These cats, named Paulette and Pacha, were very friendly. I miss pets a lot, and it was a delight to spend time with them. //

Los gatos de mi última función como “cuidadora de hogares” no me gustaban nada (creo que a ellos no les gustaba nadie). Pero estos gatos, que se llaman Paulette y Pacha, me gustaron mucho. Echo muchísimo de menos a las mascotas, y fue un placer pasar tiempo con ellos.

Gariguettes, the best strawberries that I have ever eaten. Sweet and soft, they turn into mush 

within a day, so you have to eat them immediately. They are a specialty of the region. //

Las mejores fresas que he probado... dulces y suaves, se ablandan en un día, así que necesité comerlas inmediatamente. Son una especialidad de esta región.

Market day // El mercado

Really fancy apple cake // 

Pastel de manzana y nata realmente elegante

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Como expliqué anteriormente, estoy explorando otros lugares potenciales donde podría vivir. Una posibilidad es Francia, y por esta razón la visité la semana pasada. Tal y como hice el año pasado en Hamburgo, en Francia, mi intención era cuidar una vivienda mientras vivía gratis. Solicité dos puestos en Francia durante el mes de abril, y recibí uno, en Toulouse.

Visité Toulouse hace un año, pero esa fue una visita turística, y esta vez quería pasar más tiempo explorando el día a día, y no los museos o las atracciones turísticas. Es por eso que tuve algunas citas con otros extranjeros y viajé en autobuses por toda la ciudad. Además, claro está, comí muchos pasteles franceses.

Me gusta el tamaño de Toulouse y que haya algunas universidades grandes, porque define muy bien su interés por lo académico y el gusto por lo cultural. También tiene un buen sistema de transporte público y el clima (al menos en primavera) es agradable. Ahora tengo que aprender más sobre las desventajas, como por ejemplo, los procesos legales.

Olives

t is no secret that I really miss gardening. I make do with my little terrace window boxes, but they certainly don´t scratch the itch of growing and storing your own food. However, I have managed a bit of this by collecting olives. My first winter here, I noticed that a nearby park had been built around an older, existing olive grove. I watched carefully, and noticed that in the late winter, the birds were feasting on the olives, so clearly the city did not pick them. I had seen people who did not look like locals (as evidenced by their headscarves) picking them, so the following year I did too.

I picked 5 kg of olives this fall. That is a LOT.

Processing olives to make them edible is time consuming work, as I knew from the one time I ordered a delivery of raw olives in the US. After picking, you sort by size and variety, prick or cut the skin of every fruit, then soak them in water. This water must be changed daily for 2-4 weeks, until the bitter compounds have been leached out sufficiently to make them edible. If you try to eat an olive off the tree, you will spit it out immediately - it is that astringent. After the many soaking, you marinate the olives in salt, vinegar, and flavourings, and in just a few more months, you have tasty olives to share. This is not for the faint of heart, or for those who can´t abide a bucket of olives in the kitchen for a month, but it definitely feels close to gardening.

Oviedo

The countryside is very near to the city of Oviedo. // El campo está muy cerca.

Oviedo is a small city in the north of Spain. When I made a list of the places I might like to live besides Madrid, it was one of the top choices. It´s quite close to the sea, which give it a maritime climate with lots more rain than Madrid. It is extremely picturesque, surrounded by mountains, and is filled with fountains and sculptures. Apropos of nothing, it was awarded the title, "Cleanest City in Spain", a fact that almost every person I talked to here told me about.

I went up there last week to explore. I followed my standard scouting mission methodology, which I use when visiting places I might like to live. I schedule coffee meetings with as many immigrants and expats as I can, to learn about their experiences and I take the bus to the end of the line to see what the countryside and outskirts of the city look like. Since culinary ingredients and bicycling are important to me, I always check out the local Asian grocery store and monitor how many bicycles I see as well.

I´m not sure this will be the location of my forever home - it´s simply too small. But it was a fun trip and it feels good to be exploring options.

Woody Allen is apparently a fan. // Woody Allen es un fanático de la ciudad. 

It´s a beautiful city, with lots of sculptures and fountains. // 

Es una ciudad muy chula, con muchas esculturas y fuentes.

Oviedo es una ciudad pequeña en el norte de España. Cuando hice una lista de lugares donde pudiera vivir además de Madrid, fue una de las primeras. Es cerca del mar, que da lugar a un clima suave con más lluvia que Madrid. Es pintoresco, con montañas, fuentes y escultura pública. Además, ha ganado el título a “La ciudad más limpia de España”, aspecto que casi todo ovetense me dijo.

Estuve allí la semana pasada para explorarla. Tengo un horario y metodología cuando visito lugares que podrían ser un posible hogar. Planeo citas con café con inmigrantes, para aprender sobre sus experiencias. También, voy en autobús al final de la línea del autobús, para ver los campos y los barrios de las afueras de la ciudad. Dado que cocinar es importante para mí, siempre voy a las tiendas de alimentación asiática. Al final, presto atención al uso de bicicletas.

No estoy segura de que Oviedo sea el un hogar para vivir siempre; es demasiado pequeño. Sin embargo, fue un viaje divertido y me alegra explorar mis posibilidades.