Appreciate your Grandma

Dear S.,

the title says it all. My grandma called me today to fetch her from the retirement home to bake some things... She's 89. And definitely has a mind of her own. So, we ended up being in the supermarket and kitchen for more than 4 hours. She was exhausted afterwards- and so was I! We made some really nice Brioche and a kind of gingerbread (of which I don't have a photo).
So now I finally learned how to braid it, she wouldn't allow us to help here when she was still more mobile.


Another grandma-y thing: gooseberries/ Stachelbeeren. In my mind, they only grow in really old gardens-like ours. Grandma used to make jelly out of them, but I wanted to try jam- so I did:

It is really nice. Not too sweet, a little tangy and perfect on your morning bread. I definitely discovered jam-making this summer :)

hmhm.. it's good to see my friends again. really. they make me happy.
and they also remind me of how good it is to have you all around in A.

'til soon

M.

I blueberry you back

Dear M.,
before I forget: I love the Dirndel!!!! please bring it to antwerp and wear it every now and than.

I stay a bit longer in Germany than I expected. And I get weird by it. It's really strange to become a child again every time I enter my parents house. This strange weather made me ill. Litteraly. Caughing and have a blocked nose... . So sleeping became my favorite thing to beat time dead ( can you say this in english ?) . On plus, I have been in hospital yesterday, not for myself but to be some support. Hanging around in long, dark, cold corridors. Not knowing what will happend and if everything is going to be fine. Realizing how preciouse life is...
and how lucky I am to have time for all those little things which make me smile .

Food makes me smile a lot, blueberries, peaches, cherries...

[I don't know why my pc turns certain pics and how to change that ]

And some leather experiments:
an owl ( I think it'll become a brooch )
and some decoration for my sketch-book

That's it for the moment..., summer is slow. And I learn to give me the lazyness my body demants.

I send you kisses to Ö
oh and those bluberry ravioli mhmnjamnjam
S.

blueberry tuesday

Dear S.,

went to the local market yesterday and bought real nice forest-blueberries to make a polish speciality today, Pierogi. It's basically Pasta-dough filled with blueberries.. loads of work without a pasta-machine or a Ravioli-machine-thingy! But everybody loves them. We especially made my grandma happy, who used to make them very often but is now too old to do so.

Here they are:

The leftover blueberries, beautiful cherries and some sweet garden strawberriey and raspberries were turned into jam.

I also discovered this beautiful traditional Dirndl-dress in my grandma's cupboard:

... and it fits me like a glove. nice. I'm gonna wear it to my cousin's marriage, they want everybody to wear traditional clothes.... weird. whatever makes them happy...

I'm really busy with all kinds of family visits. I really enjow being with all of them, but it is quite exhausting. There is not much time left for me to read or do my own things... soon better.

That's all for now,
kiss,
M.

blear blab-blare.

Dear S.,

1. I really like your skirt, it turned out so well! and the high shoes too! your legs look really good in both of them ;)
2. I am extremely sad about what happened at the Loveparade in Duisburg this weekend. how could this tragedy have happened? I can't get it out of my head.
3. The words in the title really mean something
4. My day in a short (or maybe not so short) sketch:
   

8.03: alarm-clock... aaah I'll get up in just a min.
8.21: "Get uuuup"(Mama's slightly stressed voice). A cuppa Twinings' "Prince of Wales" to brace myself for church.

9.11: preaching of "bitten und beten". checking out the interesting construction an elderly man sitting in front of me made with his few resting hairs on his head; you know the way they like to comb them all on one side to make them cover their baldness... I tried to find a picture on google, unseccesfully. (wth I am all doing at 2.30 in the morning.) discovering a new species of spider that perfectly adapts to the color of the singing book covers.

afterwards, we went to my Grandma. She is one of the funniest old people I know, her spirit and her face are so youthfull! She thaught me how to make Marillenknödel mit Topfenteig- apricot and fresh cheese dumplings. And the best trick to replace the stone of the fruit with a piece of sugar: just use the stick of a wooden spoon /Kochlöffel to push it out. SO easy. (dough: 200-300g of fresh cheese (kwark), 50g flour, 50g breadcrums, a pinch of salt; blend those well, take a little bit of the dough and push it flat between your hands (make your hands wet before, it helps). then take the apricot, put it on the dough, cover it carefully. cook. sugar. noms. at least I hope they were yummy, I didn't eventually try them myself. My bossy cousin (who is a forrest ranger) got them. all. but when I saw that my grandma started to cook something non-meaty my enthusiasm took over and I had to stick my nose and hands into her business)

then: home. convince my family to have some kohlrabi in cream with their Schnitzel. eat. I had baked cheese, so nice! Then I repaired mum's sewing machine together with my dad. Took 2 hrs. Ironed to help mum, 'cause she is in pre-vacation-leaving stress. family-similarity? CHECK. (my last post). Ate some nice stuff I baked yesterday. Took my other grandma (who is ridiculously proud (WHY omg?) of only weighing 38kg.. she's really weak and can't eat well... strange woman, but lovely too) for a grand tour in our/her garden. Helped her with weeding (= Unkraut jäten... schraal), collected some flowerseeds to take to Antwerp. Sewed some pants up for mum. ate. more tea. and then: staring. at multiple media. and disliking that. but being stuck. I'm pretty sure most people who will read this know what I am talking about, don't you? why are you still here? ;)

(oh well. I feel rather cynical. I need some relaxation, but at the same time I don't want to stop being busy and all)

where was I.. yes:

4. yesterday my dear friend M. came by. We decided to have some traditional English Tea and baked Scones. It was such a perfect evening, too bad you couldn't join us!

And then there also were these:



my usual lemon-cakes. In an awkward model position. M. and I had tried to photograph them beautifully but it was night, so we couldn't take them outside.. and the potplant as a co-star didn't really work it, neither did the prison-shot. So: this is a cut-out piece of a pic.

Ok, originally a wanted to show you the bag I made for E. last week, but as my "short" day-survey got a little out of control and I really need to go to bed now because I want to go to a market tomorrow morning, I will do that tomorrow.

So, 'til soon!

x

PS: since the day I have arrived in Austria, I have found (and pulled out) 9 white hairs... 9! in 3 days! should I be worried?

Allerlei= randomness ?

Dear M.,
just some verry short notes.

That's the black skirt I started back in Antwerp and finished here. (I also wear my new wedge heels, painfull ... started jogging again and my legs hurt like hell) .

and some almond-nectarine-pie, perfect for a lazy saturday with my family.

This morning my mother had to work so I had breakfast with my father. It's nice to ba alone with him, because when the women of the house are together he barely gets the chance to talk. Morning sun , Jaque Brel, gugelhupf with selfmade jam and some father-daughter talk...great!

This weekend there still will be family posts but in the middle of next week I'll go back to Antwerp, to find myself a new nest.

kisses
s.

home? I am. I am. I am.

My dear S.,

sorry for not answering in a while.. I am now in Austria. And, as always, I had a lot of stress around going there. Sigh. I just hate leaving places and people and kitties and stuff. Even though I know it is only for a few weeks and that I can relax where I'm going to. You might think I got better at it after 4 (!) years of travelling back and forth, but no, I didn't. After a twelve-hours trainride I arrived, and brought with me a big thunderstorm, which accompanied me for at least five hours of the ride. (The most exiting things on the ride: a guy who asked me for a nailclipper because his toenails were so lang that they started bleading- yuk!, but my helpers-syndrome still made me borrow him mine (I already cleaned it); a policewoman stopping me at Munich and asking whether I had cigarettes and what I was doing traveling about Europe.)

And then there is arriving of course. Coming back home, to this old place of growing up. I remember, that always when I was a child and we went on a holiday abroad for two weeks, everything in my hometown seemed to have changed in that short time, everything felt so new when we came back. Now I usually spend three or so months away from home, and nothing ever changes. Only my brother, who's getting more and more grown-up every single time. He is such a cool guy, I really miss having him around.

SO, in your last post you asked me a really difficult question about "home". This is of course a topic that keeps me busy a lot of times. Until I was 18, there was only one home for me, in my small mountain town in Austria. Now I guess I'd say that Antwerp feels more home to me. There I can really be myself and go further in my life. Coming back here feels very much like going into a golden cage... (I feel very sorry for saying that somehow-- but this is just what it feels like at the moment.)

My past here, and what I used to be and do here seem so incredibly far away right now. I feel so estranged from my former self sometimes.. This proces is rather painful sometimes.

Hm. At this very moment I would say, that home is, where I am not obliged to hide any part whatsoever of myself. Where my love is, where my heart is, where my thoughts are able to circulate.

If you'd asked me this same question two years ago, my answer would have been a rather different one: for Antwerp I used the expression "zu Hause", meaning something like "living at" for me; Austria-home I would call "daheim" - "at home", where my heart lives.

So there definitively has been a change, a change of perspective. I am still trying to work out a durable solution though.

I think, that for us, who left their country for studying abroad and building up a whole new life there, "home" is exceedingly dificult to find and define.
You said, "home is where I am". This is a goal, a big goal I am aiming to achieve. I want to feel so good with/in/about myself that I can call myself my own home.



This thought is one I can connect to the last book I read, "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath.
It is an extremely intense book about the breakdown of a young girl. Sylvia Plath lets her protagonist Esther describe her feelings so beautifully, with the metaphor of a bell jar, which in German you would call a Glashaube/Glasglocke.
I'll try to find that one passage online, since I left the book in Antwerp...
found. Digital age and all that.



"Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. [...]To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."



So, I guess this is really so true. Home is only wherever you are ok with yourself. If you are not in one particular place, then it is unlikely that you will be in any other. This sounds a little dramatic and overgeneralising- but this is my experience at the moment.
(Plath compares feeling depressed to being locked up in a bell jar, you can see everything outside and are there, in the middle of it, yet you can only breath in your own sour air and think your own sour thoughts. Sylvia Plath was a very wise woman.)

It was so intense to read this book, at times I thought that I couldn't handle any more. Yet I couldn't put it away, it is so good.

The other main thought of the book, also related to the home-and-self- question:



"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am. I am. I am."

This is the life-saving thought. For all.
--
Some time ago you drew a plus- sign on one of your pulses. I wanted to have one too, and a minus on the other side. And now I want them always to be there, as a sort of reminder of how things go naturally. And then "I am. I am. I am" would fit so perfectly with it. of course other people had that thought already, look:

And there are plenty more to find on the interwebs. I prefer the plain six words though. And, yes, also still fitting to the topic (and with credits to N.), this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we_czU9sJ3g

Please do listen to it. It's Metric with "Help I'm Alive" and a heart-pounding film.

My dear S., this was a whole lot of emotional and semi-philosophical shit. My next post will be about crafty things, I guess. I wanted to add them here, but this as enough material for one read. Now I will enjoy listening to the heavy wind outside, lie in my own bed (the one of my two own beds that I had first- that is) and think about that I am and my heart is beating like a hammer

loads of love,

m

Home oh Home is where ever I'm...

Dear M.,
I guess you are on your way home. I'm still addicted to the song "home" by Edward Sharpe and the magnetic zeros thanks to N. .
This time I just send you some images about what home means for me. Home is something I actually just can explain in German because I don't have the right words for it in English but I will try anyway. In German there is this difference between "zu Hause" and "Heimat", which is ...well..same same but different. "Zu Hause" is the place where ever I live at this moment. So it can be alover the world, just a bed in a room and thats my "home". But than there is also my "Heimat" and this is where I grew up where all my childhood memories are hiding under stones, behinde trees and and locked in the smell of a storage room.

Here are some of the typical "heimat experiences". My mum keeps everything... which my dad hates and I love. Because there are somany exiting things to be found...

...a hand knitting machiene( should be faster but I think it's really complicated). So old that it's still written in "Sütterlin" the old german handwriting...

...I didn't know what was in that sack( found it under the rooftop) , and just took it becase of the red-white vichy design...

...and in it were those babys with a playground

...an old papercut book. filled with nothing but black pages...

With help of this ancient ... I weight my butter for cakes . It's always funny because I replace the kopper bowls with porceleine bowls which never weight the same, so the lighter one is filled up with random things to reach the same weight as the havier one, and than the it#s possible to use it properly.and some slices of Gugelhupf baked (without c this time ) after the recipe of Sahra Wiener yummie .

That's it some randomness to share. What is homey ( heimelich) for you?
Greatings to your family and the mountains
kisses
S.

weddingcake, thunderstorm and random books

Dear M.,
it took a while, but now I have time to answer. I love the shorts they are so nice, my black skirt still waits to be finished...

I don't have a verry good picture of the wedding cake , in the afternooon I had to hide it from the bride and the groom. It was late at night when we served it, that's the reason for the shady pic. They were so lucky with the weather, the other days it was either to hot or really stormy, but they just had a perfect warm day. Well that's the cake, almond biscuit, with butter-philadelphia cream and raspberry sauce at the side( kind of "when harry meets sally" -style) . The decoration was rats made out of marcipane, black cherrys, black berrys (cassis), red rose pattels and rasberrys.This is one of the massiv thunder clouds builing up around oure home lately . It really raind cat and dogs, I guess nature was really happy to get some water , but I don't like rain that much.
Do you know that feeling when you go to your parents place to bump into yourself as a kid all the time. I always start searching in cupboards for my books and other things. This time I found one of my favorit books back: Mein Esel Benjamin. It's so cute, about a little girl finding a donkey in Greece and growing up with him. I love that it is full of black and white 70ies foto's.


And I found these two books, one a bout crafting, I already found inspiration to make new things. The other book is a guide for girls to mainly do everything : how to cook, craft, dress, wash, be a perfect host , travel, talk, organise... . Funny and nice illustrated.

Thats so far it. besides that we went on a cycle tour yesterday and lost my dad on the way. We found him back hours later at home.

I guess that you are packing, say hello and good-bye to the city from me. Kuddle the kitten from me, too and a big hallo to N.,

kisses and hugs, hear from you soon
S.

Ah, the tornado didn't pass here . Just the massiv storm surounding it. which was still quite impressing.

news oder so

Dear S.,

a tornado, oh my! how close was he, could you really see a swirl in the air?

It's so funny to see your enthousiasm about your measuring cups, they are really nice! (Yes I am a little jealous). I am so curious how your wedding-cake will turn out. In the meantime, Antwerp cooled down a bit. I spent quite some time on ridiculous things like shopping-without-buying, getting a vacuumcleaner and cleaning my place, watching series and ... sleeping. I'm so tired, I just don't know why! Maybe, because Charlie wakes me several times each night by jumping on my head, biting my toes, drinking from my water glass and then spilling it or trying to climb out of the window. One early morning I woke up because she jumped on the window sill.. and by doing so she made me see the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen.. oh, too bad that I didn't take a picture, but it was truly magical: pink-peachy sheep clouds forming a massive triangle towards the sun.. hm :) a good moment.

But next to all the useless things I was also quite productive:

Charlie was just as confused as me in the beginning.. can you guess what it is going to be?

... right! Night-shorts! my first ones, and I'm actually quite pleased with the result. I took the pattern (vaguely) from my favourite pyjama-shorts and made the legs a bit longer. the result:

I also made some nice muffins with strawberries and chocolate... what a combination!

(do you recognize the roses?)

I got a bunch of old clothes from a friend today and am now thinking about what I can turn them into. Any ideas for jeans and an oversized sweater? I've also been reading a lot lately. I'm so much enjoying that I have time for the books I've been wanting to read during the year now.. I'm gonna write about them next time.

what else.. oh yes! I made pudding. Without any pre-packed pudding-powder, grandma style... and truly, it was the most yummy pudding I have ever eaten. Here's the recipe:

100g of chocolate (semi-bitter), in small pieces

2 egg-yolks, beaten to a fine cream with 4 eatingspoons of sugar and a pack of vanilla sugar

1/2 l of milk

40g of Maizena (cornflower/ corn starch).

How to: take 1/8 l of the milk and mix it with the Maizena. Put the rest of the milk and the chocolate into a large saucepan and gently heat it, until it cooks. Then put the milk-Maizena mix in and cook the whole thing for a few minutes, until it is nice and creamy. Then turn the heat off and add the egg and sugar cream, mix all well and make sure that it doesn't cook any more once the egg is in, just heat it well. voila, that's it. let it cool down in the fridge for an hour or so.

It is really worth the effort.

so, that's it for now

I hope to hear from you soon!

Loads of love,

M.

good old germany: cakes, messuring cups, trains and chaos

Dear M.,
well a bit late but here it comes ...
the last two days in our hometown of choice where really strange, almost everyone was gone and I had to pack. It gets faster and faster to put my whole life into boxes. Okay I over exagurate a bit but in a way it just feels like it. All those relics of former homes and travel destinations. These are no objects anymore they are witnesses of adventures and just of the time that passes. What I really love is that most of the objects have a certain smell , too, with whoms help I can just travel beack in time and relofe moments. Smells just capture so much more than a picture can. You just are there than.
well that's so fare the sentimental part of it. But nevertheless it gets easier, the habit of packing. After a while I just figured out a system and it goes pretty fast.

I traveld back to my parents place like always with the train, crossing thre language zones, which makes it feel longer and further than it actually is. To hear the train anouncements in the dialect of my region always makes me feel "back home", besides that another proof to arrive are the traditional trainstation pubs with beer ads over the entrance.

The reason I went home at that date was the birthday of my father... he became 56 , I just got up when I decorated the cake... and had to ask daya, "euhm did I write the 5 right?" and she looked at it and said "NO". We decided to not change it anymore and have a proper laugh abou it.
The cake was the almond-choclate-rasberry one we baked together last summer when you visited me here. After the breakfast with a misspeled birthday cake, we passed the day in cologne. It was nice but also really hot, so most of the time we spent in churches. I don't like the gothic Kölner Dom so much. it looks a bit like a vampire castel, eaten up by moths. But there were two extraorinary ones: one with a Chapel decorated with real human bones ( whole patterns at the wall, and sculls wraped in velvet), and one verry quiet and light one with a round sanctuary.

The rest of the time I visit family, crafting the decoration for my cousins wedding and reading under the appeltree my father gave to me as a kid to climb on ( now it's verry old and weak and not so tall anymore as it has been when I was small)

Ah two more things : first we had a crazy storm here. a tornado it was so amazing to see the strength of nature. second ; I just write it once please be kind with my missspeling and gramma weakness ;). and third (ok one more) I have been with my parents in the rainbow cafe in marais in paris, it's really nice.

kisses
hope to see you here soon
s.P.S.: I got one of these massuring cups fom my mum. they are german classics. you can recognize the older one because it's written " made in W. Germany" on it. West Germany. so it has to be more than 21 years old. On my new shiny one its just Germany... backing is so much easier with it, no more massuring after feeling. (couldn't figure out how to turn the pic)

About Paris...

Dear S.,

back in Antwerp- and missing Paris already. No other city I know has so much of its own character, is so recognisable and consistent, no other houses have that same dusty-sweet smell, in no other place croissants with confiture de griottes taste so sweet. It is so nice to go back there again and again, without feeling the pressure to do and see as much as possible, but just stroll around, look at the swarming people and find nice new places.

But first things first: Hitchhiking was really not as scary or difficult as I thought. After some 10 minutes of waiting in Antwerp (with a "Ghent- Kortrijk- Paris" sign and an "aub-svp-please" sign), two young guys took us to Kalken gasstation near Ghent. There we saw a quite angry/tired looking guy with a french license plate and we whispered to each other "NO"... and two minutes later we found ourselves sitting in his car on the way to Paris. Tja, so it goes! He turned out to be a really nice guy, a well-traveled and caring family father from Westmalle. Usually he never stops at that particular gasstation, and we were the first hikers he ever took. I think it was quite a pleasant experience for all of us, and I guess it was a nice change for him not to travel all the way to Paris on his own.

When we stepped out of the metro station, Paris greeted us with such a clichè thing: an old car with open windows playing Edith's "Je ne regrette rien".. hihi

Our hotel was situated at the backside of Montmartre, which is now, next to Le Marais, my favourite area in Paris. just look at that:

(ok, the pictures don't quite mirror the feeling you get when you climb the stairs of Rue Mont Cenis all the way up to Sacre Coeur, passing these beautiful, typical Parisian houses, and then, completely out of breath, reach my favourite Cafè/Bistro in Paris, "Francis Labutte")

It was so nice to live in a non-touristic part of Paris.

I could go on rhapsodising about Paris, but instead I'll write down some places you should definitely go to at your next visit to the french capital:

-Centre Pompidou- always great.

-climb Montmartre up to Sacre Coeur but then on the other side of the hill to see Paris from the view of a Parisian(metro Simplon might be a good starting point), take a rest at "Francis Labutte", where drinks are still affordable and tourists are rare (it's so funny to look at and listen to the young parisian in-scene ("bonjour bitcheeeees")

- Palais de Tokyo and the museum of modern art. Be sure to check out the old photoboot to take black and white pictures (metro Iena)

- Mariages Freres for the finest tea in Paris, mmmh! Thé Earl Grey Impérial is tea-extasy.

- In the evening, visit buzzing and rainbow-touched Le Marais (metro Saint Paul). Bistro "Pic-Clops" in 16 Rue Vielle du temple

-a new discovery: book-and-wine bar/bistro "La Belle Hortense" in the same street, très sympa!

- a nice and affordable shop (yes) for cute underwear and nightwear: "Oysho" in 74, Rue de Rivoli.

My dear S., that was it for now. Arriving in devilishly warm Antwerp, a kind of Ernüchterung/sobering struck me: all of you are gone for the summer, and I am still here, not quite knowing what to do with myself. I have some plans for creative work, reading and learning, but all the rest seems to me quite blury and a bit lonely. well, I will try to remember that now I have the time and freedom to do all things I've been wanting to do during the year, and just be a bit. Charlie is biting my arm, telling me to stop and play with her...

I hope you are fine and blij in MG!

Love,

M.

PS:

("aimer c'est du désordre... alors aimons!" - love is chaos.... so let's love)

Ma chère M.,

well my french lessons are ages ago so I hope it means my dear M. and not my flesh M..
Will you two went to paris, I went catsitting as I promissed. Partly I played with charlie and partly I try to go on stiching the skirt. The photos are an atempt to shoot charlie while playing with her favorite toy. But the battery died and before it was to slow for this little package of energy. These are the pictures taken. little ghost kitten and rainbow ribbon. That you wont miss her to much. Without having read the letter for all the catsitters I directly went to the bathroom cupboard and found her hugging the warm-water-bottel. It was kind of strange to be at your place without you.

My room is a mess, moving isn't fun. All that stuff to be put into boxes and bags... But I' m almost done.. hurray.

Enjoy Paris ( if it's hot, there is this fantastic icecream shop on the ille st. louis, try the framboise sauvage and chocolat amber!) .

Greatings to N. Kisses from here.
Your S.

N° 1