Granny recipes against alzheimer.

My old friend insomnia is back! It is now half past five in the morning and I have been staring at this very uninteresting ceiling for the past seven hours. Silent sleep has deserted me and in its place, ideas and thoughts bouncing off the walls like pin balls and hitting me regularly with a loud clanging ping sound. How am I supposed to sleep with all that racket? I try counting enough sheep to muffle up the noise but some ideas just ram through (he he) and get me anyway. Most of them are useless (doing push ups until it tires me out -  I don’t think so) so I send them back on their merry way until the next time they fly by. Other ideas I keep and let roll about in my head for a while until I can make sense of them. One of those tonight has turned out to be a gem.

Because you see, I have got a charity place in the Great North Run. It is now official: on the 16th of September I will be running 13 miles wearing an Alzheimer’s Society T-shirt and that not only involves some training and running shoes, but also a fair amount of fundraising (a minimum of £375 to be exact). I was mulling this over when a series of notions zoomed my way:

ߛ The solution to most of life’s challenges is cake ===> ie: bake sale.

ߛ Fact: grannies make the best cakes. There always used to be a tart, clafoutis or cake on my Grandma’s kitchen table in the good old days when she could still tell the difference between lemon and washing liquid. It was systematically a little burnt around the edges but no one cared, it tasted delish.

 ߛ I have been meaning to meet little german grannies ever since I got here. One of the point of coming to Germany was to meet the locals, and grandmas have been around for a while, they should have a lot to tell. I also of course always intended to ask them about their favourite typical recipes ; food tends to be a good starting point for any conversation.

ߛ My very good friend Steph mentioned something about old people’s homes…

PING

I have already drawn up a list of old people’s homes to get in touch with to see if I could come in and chat with the residents about cake. The security levels surrounding grannies’ kitchen secrets are normally extremely high, but with a bit of luck I might be able to coax out one or two recipes, round up a couple of friends and organise a bake sale at university. I like the idea of getting grandmas involved. It’s such a shame I did not get to know mine better before Alzheimer’s disease caught up with her. Hopefully this whole thing might also encourage other people to get in touch with their grans and get them baking…(and send me the recipes?)

However before I call all these people it would probably be a good thing to get some sleep. Night-o.

French girl in a german sauna… the joys of FKK.

FKK stands for FreiKörperKultur (free body culture…) Any idea what this might entail? No?

So boys and girls, let’s talk about nudity. Because you see, comparative cultural studies are a very fine thing indeed, but quite often restrict themselves to a very narrow range of rather dull subjects (such as education, economics and politics) that often turn out to be of very little use when dealing with “real life”. And so it happened that after thirteen or fourteen lessons about franco-teutonic differences I found myself cluelessly entering a unisex sauna wearing a bathing costume.

Unaware of my crime, I was happily sitting on the top shelf, completely alone in this dark damp hot hole of a room, looking through the tinted window into the corridor and waiting for S. and L. to come in from the men’s changing room so we could discuss badminton. I saw them coming, let out a mental “ooooops”, rolled onto my back and spent the next 30 minutes staring at the ceiling. I was also vaguely very aware three minutes later of three portly, balding middle-aged men coming in to join the fun and sitting themselves around me, blocking all escape routes. It felt very hot in there – but maybe that was just the sauna.

I know that nudity in saunas has less to do with naturism and the FKK than with sanitation and hygiene but the truth remains: Germans are far more willing to get their kit off in public than either the French or certainly the British. I have been scouring the internet for facts to throw at this article and found out that Berlin for example, with its 24 open-air nudist areas listed on www.nacktbaden.de is internationally recognised as naturist heaven. Can you imagine Central Park in New York or London’s Hyde Park having a naturist corner? Any person attempting anything like this in another country would surely end up arrested, unless Spencer Tunick were involved. And the Germans don’t restrict themselves to designated areas either, even on “normal” beaches it isn’t really frowned upon to sunbathe in the nude. You might want to draw a line at that though and not try anyone’s patience by running around starkers.

It may seem strange perhaps that residents of Germany, a country stereotypically cast as very strict and severe should so easily strip down to their bare skin. For once I will have to give credit to and agree with my lecturers at Uni. Social barriers in Germany are not as fixed ad they are elsewhere, and if that is probably not the only cause for this exhibitionist streak, at least I think it is not completely irrelevant. There is a very different concept of privacy here, a different way of dealing with public and private matters.

However being myself French and British and therefore uptight and self-conscious (you’ll never catch me condoning stereotypes. Never!), I might give the sauna a miss next time and spend those thirty minutes wondering about highly important universal questions. One example: Why is it that whenever it comes down to nudity, portly balding middle-aged men always seem to be on the front lines?

Quote… unquote.

There I was reading my book the other day when I saw this:

McLuhan, page 54 of Understanding media: “…as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.”

Did you see it? I saw it. Hurray!  I am an educated woman. The sort who can notice a reference to Shakespeare in a modern text without a literature teacher having to point a chalky finger over her shoulder and leaving a little white mark on the page. It felt so good! I basked for a little while in the glowing warmth of self-satisfaction before realising how pathetic I was. Not only was this a reference to the most famous speech in Shakespeare’s most famous work, but the only reason I knew it is because one day in school I just randomly decided to learn said speech off by heart. Did I do so in order to be a more refined, educated person? No. I wanted to show off. How unscholarly. What’s more, if McLuhan did just happily pepper his book with quotations, Shakespearian or otherwise, he surely hadn’t limited himself to one from Hamlet on page 54. I had spotted one; how many had I missed? It would seem after all I am not the sort of person capable of floating from one text to the next in what the French call transtextualité.

So I wonder: how do the other people do it? You know when you listen to the radio or watch politicians on TV. There they all are, debating away when all of a sudden it happens: one of them says something and pauses. Just a second. The rest nod with knowing glances and smile and you know. You just know you’ve missed out on something. You look around nervously. Did the other people in the room get it? Ears peeled you listen and hear a ripple flowing through the BBC radio 4 audience. Did they really get it? Or are they just trying to sound clever? It could just be some obscure reference but all of a sudden, doubt creeps in: could it have been obvious? Are you the only one who doesn’t know? Often a benevolent chairman will kindly clear things up as subtly as they can: “Mr. N., you were just quoting Voltaire I believe… would you say his opinions on Utopia are still…”. And they always get it right.

But HOW? I mean surely they can’t know ahead of time what their panel might come up with. How can they keep in mind everything every politician has said over the past eight years, and everything every second politician has said during the eight years before that? Not to mention every passage from every significant book and article ever written. Some even manage to fit in a couple of pop culture references in there too, before conjuring up musicians, artists, filmmakers and figures from greek and norse mythology. And this database grows daily; with the media capturing every minute of everything, everyone is given the chance to speak out and have their dose of nonsense filed into the global archive. How do chairmen and women keep up?

Do they have the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford Companion to literature digitalized and saved in their brains in zeroes and ones, and maybe a live connection to ever-growing wikipedia, wikiquote, wiktionary etc?

Or maybe I’m just stupid.

A rapidly evolving situation

Over the past few weeks I must have started writing half a dozen health-related blog entries. Typical subjects were:

Three days and a lot of medication later: massive improvement

• having the sniffles
• having the sniffles and a headadache
• surviving a first day at work on throat lozenges
• waking up buried under mounds of used up hankies
• comparing tonsils with aggressive difformed little jellyfish recently discovered by R. Attenborough
• unsympathetic doctors
• the uselessness of homeopathic medication
• oh, the homeopathic stuff does seem to be doing something…

And all of these just wove in and out of each other. Not enough time to finish one paragraph: whatever I had written five minutes earlier would no longer be relevant ages before I got that far. It was a rather busy week. And it all eventually culminated with me writhing on my bed at 5 in the morning covered in angry red blotches, trying not to scratch and just shaking incontrollably whilst waiting for the on-call doctor to get extra-medicine from his practice.

My very first allergy! How exciting! I would love to linger on and tell you all about it, about the inadequacy of of the the verb “to itch”, about tiredness and recurring eczema and nice mad doctors, fairytales, medical students, ointments creams tablets and drops… BUT I am now quite far behind in my revision “plan” and exams are looming ever nearer. So I’ll just leave you with this lovely picture from last week and a suggestion for low-budget horror film makers. You know, if you need a good zombie look.

Cold

Yes I will be talking about the weather.

We had the most amazing sunshine today, a proper crisp winter day that just felt lke a proper crisp winter morning, only played over three times in a row. The light held its slanty sharpness, the grass stayed white until evening come. It was sunny but I could not feel it, just see it ; the warmth of it was swept away by this tiny wind before it had time to settle on my cheeks. Nevertheless it was comforting standing there on a frozen puddle, loooking at the light through the branches, through my eyelashes, through my eyelids, and thinking how I could use all this in terms of blogging.

And then I got home and settled down to write, full of cold thoughts and frosty ideas (and it had nothing to do with a t-shirt wearing tiger) when our neighbour came knocking; her heating did not seem to be working, was ours? After we do all share one boiler. We went down to the cellar and sure enough: no huff, puff or other heating-related noise was to be heard. Only thing that was working: the wireless connection to the outside thermometre, indicating -1ºC (now -4). Handy.

Extra blankets anyone?

Insomnibus

Sleep is such a fickle thing. Sometimes it feels a bit like having a lunatic boyfriend. On certain days it follows you around, clings on to you . It will entangle your arms and legs in sheets and blankets and will make it ever so difficult to get out of bed. As you struggle with the bed linen, it wraps its arms around you and whispers: “Why bother? Come on, stay – Just five more minutes!” I have heard people say each minute with the one you love can feel like an eternity. The problem is with Sleep, the extra minutes you spend in its company often turn out to have been hours after all.

On the other hand, when Sleep has gone out for the night and left you alone, it is amazing just how much of eternity manages to fit in sixty seconds. Oodles and coils of it unravelling in the darkness as you lay in your bed, inwardly listening for signs of Sleep’s return home. Which sometimes just does not happen. And the following day, there it is, waiting for you in a lecture theatre at Uni, wanting to make up for its inconstancy.

And some other times it just leaves.

It has other plans, I suspect it goes off on boys’ trips with its friends: Concentration, Motivation and Patience. They just all scurry off and leave you on your own to cope. In their absence you find yourself flirting with another set of friends. The bad boys of behaviour and health; certainly more exotic darkly entertaining and unusual, and definitely not the sort of blokes your mam would like to see you bringing home: Insomnia, Restlessness, Distraction – and also it would seem: a penchant for drawn out metaphores.

Half-marathons and musicals; singing my way to the Great North Run.

I am dreadfully exhausted, completely kaputt, one might even say bloody knackered. That is because, ladies and gentlemen, I have now gone officially bonkers and have embarked on a project bigger, greater than any other I have ever mentioned here: I have picked up running.

Now you may think this is a bit of an anticlimax, and the most attentive among you (or possibly those with the greatest amount of spare time) may already be aware of my recent acquisition of a pair of running shoes. Since that day I have been trying to go out running every now and again, but nothing especially awe-inspiring. However now I have decided to take part in the biggest, most amazing, mind-blowingly great half-marathon of them all: the Bupa Great North Run. Maybe you’ve heard of it? 54000 runners, millions raised for charity every year. I think it’s awesome.  And what’s more, the finish line is just next to where my auntie Hilary lives. I’ll only have to run a few hundred metres further to get a shower and collapse on a comfortable settee with a nice cuppa (and possibly with both feet in a bucket of cold water).

But in order to get any of this, the first thing I need to do is actually reach said finishing line! I signed up on this “Take to the Streets” website I’d heard of which generated a lovely, very reasonable looking training plan, bought a pair of reasonable track suit bottoms and got running. Except it appears that unlike my outfit I myself am not reasonable, and struggle to keep to the official training plan.

It tells me: You’ll be running about three times a week for the next year or so. We’ll be starting gently: first week, do 5 – 10 mins easy run/walk. So I went out running and came back quite a while later, calculated the distance; 5k, not mad. Second week, maybe de 10-15 min easy walk/run.  Ok, so I felt quite good doing 5k, why shouldn’t I try doing a bit more. I came back 1hour and 9k later. Third week, you want to get used to your new rhythm, so do something similar to last week, 10-15min easy run/walk. I did 10k, got lost and somehow got home an hour and a half later. I don’t think I’ll be going quite  this far every single time I put on my sneakers – I simply don’t have the time – , but I also can’t imagine the use of  sticking to “10-15min easy run/walk” either.  So my plan is: whenever I get an automated reminder saying  “run”, I might just go the extra mile (or two, literally). Does that sound good? Are there any expert opinions out there?

So now I have just added something else to my already busy timetable (lessons, aikido/kickboxing, writing, exploring, going out culinary experimentation – latest to date: savoury muffins filled with feta cheese spinach olives and parma ham-…). And I don’t even like running that much! When I was at school I couldn’t stand even the idea of any form of physical exertion. I am getting better, but still going out running when one could stay nice and warm in bed… You need something to keep you going. What does the trick for me is west end and broadway musicals. I have heaps of them stocked onto my mp3 player. Admittedly it can be a bit of a bummer when you reach a hill, it’s raining and suddenly “Lost in the darkness” comes on…You just have to skip.  But just imagine, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a bright sunny morning… just what you need to help you beat your personal best. The only really tough bit is not to burst into song and start tap dancing on the way.

There are auditions these days at the Uni for some sort of musical… maybe I should sign up. I really have too much free time

Very late breakfast: unexpected comfort food for expats in Berlin

Should I really  apologize again for my unpredictable, more than patchy writing habits? I think not, time is scant enough as it is and my bed is beckoning dangerously so let’s get to the point! I spent the weekend in Berlin, and it was pretty good.

You might be aware -or not- that I have been in Deutschland this past month and a half and the fact is: since my arrival, I hadn’t once stepped outside Regensburg (lovely little university town – I’ll come back to it some other time). So when Sven and Paul suggested a trip up to the capital, I jumped out of reason’s range, into the back of the car and we sped along northwards on the motorway, leaving all homework, academic and administrative bothers behind. This weekend was NOT going to be museum orientated: we set out to be unreasonable and  enjoy youth while we still have it; party much, drink a reasonable amount (my mam might read this blog so I’l leave it to everyone’s imagination) and sleep very little.

So at some point around 2pm on Saturday as we were walking along in the parks around Kreuzberg drinking takeaway coffee and gently emerging from our stupor, we realised we were going to need breakfast. And we went to THIS place:

We had walked past that shop the night before on the way to a party and it looked cool, a nice sort of whacky modern vintage look with big chunky furniture and many lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, and of course classic display racks and glass shelves covered in carrot cakes and scones and muffins. As an official half-expat it was pretty obvious I would have to go there at some point.

I was a little anxious at first, and with good reason: my experiences of british food abroad have been very mixed. Soggy chips, half-defrosted fish and wobbly set gravy. Some people do seem determined to confirm everyone’s deep-seated prejudice that british food is crap. Well this time I was pleasantly surprised. Particularly as far as the tea was concerned.

Tea preparation and serving policy varies much from one establishment to the next I have noticed, and this cuppa was very much in keeping with the contrasted stylish/funky atmosphere of  “East London- God Save Brit Food”. It came in one massive thick mug, and with all the elaborate paraphernalia one might expect from a specialist coffee/tea shop. Now I’m not normally one for over-complicated pedantic tea ceremonial. Like anyone else I just shake a teabag around in a mug of boiling water until the desired colouring has been achieved and then add milk. However for once I decided to obey the 5min indication on the timer and it was worth the wait. I drink about 1,5Liters of tea every day, and since I have come to Germany all I’ve had to quench my thirst was, well… german tea (ie: not English). But this time was something else. Possibly the best cuppa I have ever had. EVER. I was heaving a sigh of pleasure with each sip. Does anyone out there know what brand of tea they serve in that place, I didn’t even think to ask.

Anyway, that was for the tea. The food was good. I know this is a bit of a contrast with the lyrical description of a humble cup of tea but it was scrambled eggs on toast, so how much can I say? I could I suppose write an ode to comfort food but it’s getting late. Scrambled eggs is not exactly a good choice if one wants to write a restaurant review, but that wasn’t the point. It was comfort food, it was obviously freshly made, tasted good and was just what I needed. It went perfectly well with the cup of tea and I felt at home for a while, except I was speaking German all the way through.

What else can I say about the place… The staff are very friendly and all native English-speakers! If I remember rightly the cooks were English, and the waiters Australian and Irish. We were waited on by ozzy Annabelle, who smiles a lot and fits in perfectly with the surroundings: friendly bubbly and just a little bit odd (and I mean that as a compliment). She even posed with a scone for me, how much more helpful can you get?

So my verdict: I will definitely go again next time I’m in Berlin, if only a cup of tea and a scone and to enjoy the atmosphere.

And I know it’s a veeery long shot, but if the young man who was sitting at the table opposite us should ever happen on this blog, I really feel I should have come over and said hello that day (Saturday 5th of November) ; please get in touch?

End of an era and Neubeginn in Regensburg

Did I ever actually mention I am now officially a postgraduate student? Yes, I have a degree: I have finally been able to academically achieve something higher than the baccalaureate. It took me some time, twice the “normal” number of years (ie: a grand total of 6), it seemed like an eternity, I sometimes wondered whether I would ever graduate, but  I made  it!  And now I am moving on, specialising in “Intercultural european studies”: lots of language, lots of translation, lots of comparative cultural whatnots.  Sounds like something totally up, down and spread all over the walls of my street. And the first year of that course takes place in Regensburg! Now I mean no offence to Clermon, which is after all a very lovely town, but I needed out and now here I am, with my 43 kgs of luggage, unpacked and sprawled across my room. It would seem my untidiness followed me here…

And so: Regensburg. New town, new flat, new uni (hopefully, if I can manage to climb over/ram through the extra tough made-in-Germany wall of administration), and new blogging projects. Now I make new year’s resolutions every other minute, but this time, it is the start of a new (school)year, and I think this is ideal for resolution-making.

It’s probably best not to kill my fledging ideas by overexposure to public scrutiny, so I will not tell you about them right away, but let’s say if it all works out, there should be some interesting things in store. Let’s just say I intend to get as involved in Regensburg as I possibly can!

TTYS!

Off to Deutschland; let’s get packing!

Yes, your intrepid froggy narrator is off on a new adventure. I’m off to Regensburg for a year for my studies and once again somehow my life has to be crammed into a couple of suitcases and follow me along over a few hundred miles to my next destination.

Over the years, my packing skills have vastly improved:even I am impressed by my ability to fit very large amounts of stuff into a very small number of cubic centimetres. However, choices must be made of what I can take and what must be left behind. I hate having to make those choices. There is always something more I would want to bring along (usually a book – or ten)

But there’s no point in beating around the bush, something must be done, and not just because even my packing skills have limits. Yesterday evening I had finally finished (or so I thought) cramming all the stuff I will be “needing” into my bags and was taking a minute, looking with fondness on my finished work: a suitcase, a backpack and a sports bag neetly filled and piled over each other.  And then I thought it’d be fun to try carrying my stuff for a while. You know: 1:30 am, you can’t sleep, you’re bored, what’s a girl to do?

I heaved my rucksack onto my back and almost fell backwards (Fig.1). A great miracle of mind over matter allowed me to straighten up however and soon all was good. Or was it? As I looked at m yself into the mirror, I noticed I was indeed standing as straighat as a die, but at a 45 degree angle to the floor (Fig.2).  Subsequent weighing of the bags on the bathroom scales has informed me I am carrying the equivalent to 3 times an average airline passenger’s luggage allowance.

Good job I’m travelling by train!

Anyway, whatever happens, I am definitely leaving tomorrow (Fig.3)