Sore arms, I overdid it on the groceries for tonight.
Trying to perfect those salmon-asparagus roll entrees, the cheese mix is hardening in the fridge right now and it's too early to chop onions for the gnocchi.
I had wanted to make something more complicated than another tomato-spinach sauce for dinner but six people is a lot to cook for. Next time I'll launch myself at the couscous or make dijon-turkey with rice.
I'm reworking my CV into an english format for my boss to present to another company.
Walking a few blocks to the HYPERmarch�, the streets were darker than in Merseburg and the noise of the cars is still pounding away in my brain, despite the best efforts of a new Tragically Hip CD to whisk them away.
Saturday afternoon I left David to his work and wandered the hard-to-pronounce streets of the town (Banner�trauss and Shultz�trauss and Kleine Ritter�trauss I still remember the windy corner where Uberlatenberg crosses Bahnof�trauss, I wonder how long they will stay in my memory?), staring up at the (only?) church in Europe that discovered ancient pagan (I think they mean wiccan pagan not heretic pagan) documents within their scrolls.
Everything was quiet, closed, and aside from the modern facades of uptown Merseburg, everything was as it has been for eleven hundred years.
The cracked cobblestones, dark stone houses with sharp slanted roofs (gods I despise modern flat buildings), the tiny town butcher beside the tiny town bakery filled with REAL loaves of bread,barely a bland baguette in sight.
A glance at the pastries and I was already reminiscing about the polish sugar-coated donuts filled with homemade prune and blueberry jam that we used to have on Sundays.
I walked for hours, head spinning, eyes drowning, and when I sat down by the lake in the lee of a beautiful stone bridge, I was immediately approached.
Non-threateningly, despite my Paris-jadedness.
Oba, an elderly woman with thick white curls protruding from her woven cap, jabbered at me in German whilst I attempted to explain that I didn't speak any, that I was from france... She happily nodded her head and handed me leftover bread and rolls that her grandchildren hadn't eaten and showed me how to throw it far enough for the little swans to get it before the big swans chased them away, and before the Seagulls dove for them.
Watching the swans swim over so serenely from the other end of the lake was breathtaking, their impermeable feathers a dazzling white.
Lemmetellyou though, that when one of them thinks that it isn't getting enough stale hunks of dough, they get VICIOUS. Swans are nasty beasts, man, when they flap their heavy wings and trumpet-roar and race across the water beaks snapping and wings beating to chase off competitors.
Taking me firmly buy the arm, Oba led me to a caf� owned by a chinese couple who spoke fluent german, but no english. They fed me strange germano-asian rolls of pork and spinach and made me try pieces of everything, and drowned me in delicious coffee whilst I watched Oba frolick with their son and offer him chocolate cigarettes. They refused to let me pay for a thing... And I walked back to the hotel fuller and warmer than I have felt in a long time.
Sunday, wandering with David was dreamily surreal, the most romantic thing, better than the candlelit dinner in the posh restaurant the evening previous.
Showing him the swans and searching out a place to buy bread for them, his profile so graceful against the heavy sky, cheeks ruddy from the wind.
Wandering together down a path I hadn't seen the day before, steeply sloped cobbles led us to an abandoned windmill and the broken walls of unused buildings on the north-western edge of Merseburg, behind the castle-gardens. (schloss-gardens)
The number of blackened windmills, water-towers, turretted-homes was a glorious vision as they held themselves against dark clouds.
Monday, I wandered again as David cabbed his way to work in the neighbouring town, had lunch at the same caf� and managed to ask for chopsticks to go with the pork-fried rice.
Gods, they eat so much pork. On the menu in the posh-restaurant they had the word steak written so many times, only one of them actually referred to beef - the american steak one. The rest were all various thick slices of pork, pork steak, pork roast, ham anything, tangy but difficult to finish.
Monday, walking past the lake again on the other side, I crossed paths with an old man fighting to keep his cap on in the wind whilst opening a bag of bread for the birds... I offered to help him hold the bag and he happily shared his bread with me.
Again, this is such a glorious thing and has me yearning to leave the big cities.
Watching a woman carry her groceries up the avenue, she stopped to pick up the sole piece of litter (a bubblegum wrapper) to carry it with her until she found a bin. I wanted to do the same thing today, walking behind the streetsweeper, looking at the reams of cigarette butts still lying in the cracks of the sidewalk in his passing.
But I am tied to my metier, and corporate whores belong in cities, not towns, and the feeling remains that I will always be yearning after something. Perhaps it is the part of my nature that drives me to fulfill as many dreams as I can whilst I breathe.
I am forgetting so many things, the kugel that they use instead of english cream, egg yolks beaten with sugar just like my parents had when it was the only thing available as sweets during WWII. As a child, I remember learning to beat the eggs with a fork, knowing how to separate eggs long before I was allowed to use the stove to hardboil them.
The egg whites we used to wash our hair once a week, beer if the hens hadn't been laying.
A thousand of these memories were reflected in the shining feathers of the swans.
And I am forgetting so many moments, the beautiful waitress' hand gestures as she enthusiastically tried to mime sauerkraut from the menu. We went to her cozy bar for dinner our last two evenings, enjoying the Kostriker Scwarzbier (black beer) but not nearly so much as the glowing atmosphere underneath the dark wooden beams, sitting at a table made from an ancient black-iron manual sewing table. (I kept playing with the swinging pedal with my feet)
She was wonderful, the waitress, whose name we didn't even get, who pouted as we told her that we wouldn't be back the next night as I was leaving in the morning for France and David for Canada.
Her smile was enourmous, a thousand times more vivid than the falsely timid faces of overdressed parisian girls. Her hands flew as she popped up behind us, beside us, to chatter and grin and surround us with her bright character, her dazzling smile.
There was endless warmth in the evenings, in the streets together, in his arms...
And don't think I didn't notice that you didn't let me pay for anything, mon cher. It was lovely and generous and gentlemanly and I appreciated it and it was nice to be pampered on such a romantic weekend, but don't think you're getting away with it very often.
I... don't know how to finish that thought other than to thank you for sharing your bed with me, to thank you for every kiss, every time you pressed me to your chest, everytime you took my hand on the cobbles, everytime you launched yourself into crazy conversations, everytime you laughed at my antics or simply sat across from me smiling that gorgeous smile.