More Catching Up: Baroque Garden Days

In my previous post, I mentioned that my Mum and I went to climb the church tower on our way to the park, where a gardening exhibition was taking place. This is an annual event going by the name of Barocke Gartentage (Baroque Garden Days), using the "baroque" element because the palace and its grounds actually date back to that period.

In some years, the exhibition should have rightly been carrying the name of Baroque Rain Days, but certainly not this year - the sun was shining from a brilliantly blue sky, and it was warm enough for us to go shortsleeved and barelegged.

Us being us, of course we dressed according to the theme and were both wearing flowery dresses, as you'll see further down.

But now, some impressions from the exhibition:

I quite liked this set-up with the hammock, although I actually am more in favour of old fashioned gardens and not so keen on a lot of what goes as modern features today. I especially can't see the point in those caged stone walls; they look so industrial. Why not simply have the stone wall alone, without the steel bars around them?

My mother-in-law in England used to have one just like the green bench in her garden at the old house in Wath before she moved to Ripon.

In my opinion, flowers and plants are decorative enough and you don't need more deco to clutter up a garden, but I do like the classic round glass ball (we call them Rosenkugel, rose ball, because they are mostly put into rose beds here). The heartshaped one made me think of Kay! (I am sure you know I am talking about "Georgia Girl with an English Heart").

These are called Margeriten in German, and I am quite sure their English name is similar.

I would have liked to show you more from the exhibition, but most stall holders did not allow photos, and of course I respected their wish.

After having a glass of rose champagne each (a very, very delicious drink, I assure you!), my Mum and I moved on to the other parts of the park.

This lilac was just glorious, and brimming with the hum of countless bees:

We then went into the large glass house / conservatory (called Orangerie here, because it stands in the place of the original orangeries from baroque times). There, all through the year, art and plants are shown in changing exhibitions. Right now, what they tried to sell us as "art" was, in my eyes, taking the mickey out of people:

When my Mum saw these, she said, "your Dad has several of those in the garage".

The prices they wanted for a bundle of entangled cables was ridiculous!

But there was more to see in the Orangerie, such as these orchids:

I am not that much of an orchid person myself, my favourite flowers being forgetmenots and roses, but I do appreciate the beauty of all flowers, really.

We had now seen enough exhibits to last us for a while and went to the part of the park that is called Märchengarten, fairy tale garden. It has a few rides and plenty of scenes with moving figures from all the German fairytales which (almost) every German child knows, the ones made public a long time ago by the Grimm brothers.

One of my favourite bits there is the boat ride; it is very safe (intended for small children, of course), very slow and very un-exciting - and that is why I love it. It's been there since 1954, and I must have been on one of these boats hundreds of times.

We had a lovely day, as I hope these pictures are able to convey!

(My Mum knows her picture is on here, she has nothing against it.)

Catching Up: On Top Of The World

...or, at least, (almost) on top of my home town!

This is where I found myself on the Saturday before going to England.

It was a lovely day, very warm for April at about 28 Celsius (82 F), and I knew I was going to have plenty of time on the Sunday to do all my packing and getting ready for travelling, so I intended to spend as much time out in the open as possible (especially since I knew it was not going to be anywhere near as warm or sunny in England...).

My Mum and I decided to go to a gardening exhibition at the castle grounds, but it was one of the very few times a year when one of the church towers was open to the public, and my Mum suggested we go there on our way.

It was an unforgettable experience - my very first time up there! - and I am grateful my Mum had the idea.

Of course, I took my camera with me, and here is what we saw:

The largest and most comfortable part of the staircase.

All very light and airy here.

It is getting a bit steeper now, and darker.

And narrower. Nobody there but my Mum and I!

Not quite there yet - this is the clockwork. The sound was fascinating, I imagined it being The Sound Of Time Itself.

Further up...

We're there! This little chamber in the top of the tower is still in use: every day at noon, a small group of people (volunteers, I am sure) climb up here and play a choral on brass instruments from the narrow balcony surrounding the chamber. I'm afraid I don't know for how long this tradition has been going on, but it dates probably back at least 200 years or so. The church itself was finished in 1726 - Ludwigsburg is a young town, having been founded only in 1704 on what used to be a favourite hunting ground of the then duke of Württemberg, Eberhard Ludwig.

We met the lady whose horn it is resting on the chair and talked to her a little bit. And then we went outside to enjoy the view:

The other tower, not open to the public, on the opposite side of the church roof; we had climbed its twin.

Looking north east across the market square. The arrows point to (from left to right): the park, where you have seen me spending a sunny afternoon every now and then already; the palace, where we were going to go next; the hospital, where I spent a week in September 2010 before I wrote this.

Looking west/north-west. This time, the arrows point to my old school (left) and the place I've shown you here.

Looking west, the arrow pointing to where my house is - you can see how close to town centre I am.

And now, looking down, to give you an impression of how high up we were:

The market is a bustling farmer's market and takes place every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, with Saturday usually being the busiest of the three.
There in the corner, between the yellow and the white house, is "my" Irish pub, where I so like going for quiz nights with my friends. The large white building in the top left corner of the picture is Ludwigsburg's town hall, where Steve and I got married; behind it and not visible properly is the library, where once upon a time I was trained and worked as a librarian.

A close-up of one of the stalls; I tried to do more such shots, but there were always so many people, I couldn't get a shot without them, and didn't want to show people I had not asked for permission.

We stayed a while up there, enjoying the view across our home town and the sun, before we carefully descended the stairs (somehow, going down is always a bit more difficult than getting up, as any cat who has ever climbed a tree will confirm) and walked on, towards the palace grounds.

(And don't worry - I am not going to make it a habit of posting more than once a day; today is an exception because I still have some catching up to do before I'll start on writing about my week in England.)

Read in 2012 - 12: Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch

UNESCO had declared the 23rd of April to be the international day of books. My Mum, who goes to read to the children at a kindergarden once a week as voluntary work, was offered a choice of books specifically published for that day. The idea behind this offering (of a million books in total) was that they wanted it to make easy for people to give books as a gift to just about anyone, and thus inspire others to read, or read more.

Several books on the list I already knew, others I was not really interested in, so when my Mum asked me for my choice, I went for this book by Wladimir Kaminer.

Mr. Kaminer is an author of Russian-Jewish origin; he is a year older than myself and has been living in Berlin since 1990. He has travelled extensively, not only in Germany, but this book (the title meaning "My German Djungle Book", borrowing from Rudyard Kipling's classic) is about what he found out about German and the Germans during his travels. Most of it is quite funny, some of it makes you want to laugh, then think again. And even the most absurd bits I believe did, in some form or other, really happen - because real life can be a lot more absurd and bizarre than any author could make up.

It offers an interesting point of view on what all the big and small cities, towns and villages look like to a visitor, how people react to a stranger in their midst, what the place where they live tells about them and how, no matter where they are, home matters a lot to most of them, even it does not seem at all attractive to the outsider to live in that particular part of the world.

I enjoyed this as a light and (mostly) funny read while I was on the train to and from the office yesterday, finishing it in maybe three hours altogether.

What made reading a bit difficult sometimes had nothing to do with the book, but with my environment; as I said, I was on the train, and there were a lot of other people, chatting to each other. When I read English, I don't mind people talking around me in German; I can blend out their "noise" and focus on what I am reading. But while I am reading German, which was the case here, hearing all that German natter in the background sometimes made it hard to stay with the words of the book. Every now and then, I put it down and listened to the more or less entertaining conversations of the people around me - quite a few glimpses into their lives there!

Read in 2012 - 11: The Woman Upstairs

Another free Kindle edition I found while, for the first two or three weeks after I received my Kindle, I was almost daily browsing the Kindle store, building up a library of well over 80 books (fiction and non fiction), almost all of them for free.

This novel by Mary W. Walters was first published in 1989, Amazon tells me.

The main character, Diana Guthrie, is seen heading back to her childhood home, where she has not been for 15 years; driven away by not only a strict and seemingly loveless mother, but by the generally restrictive atmosphere in the small town she grew up in as well as by a tragic event that changed her life forever and left her scarred.

She is going there now because she feels it is the right thing to do: she was told her mother is dying.

Already on the way back, her mind goes back and forth between past and present. We learn about the way things were dealt with at the Guthrie household, and begin to understand why Diana wanted to leave, HAD to leave in order for being a person in her own right.

Once arrived, Diana gets mixed reactions from the people there - her brother, an old school friend, the housekeeper, the family doctor and others -, and she herself is thrown into a turmoil of conflicting emotions, too.

It takes a while before she decides to climb the stairs and meet "the woman upstairs" who is, of course, her mother. 

The book ends on a note that leaves the reader to imagine what Diana is going to do next; stay or leave again? Has she really begun to come to terms with the past?

I liked this novel. It was well written, atmospheric, and I could picture the places and characters in my mind. There were a few surprises for me; for instance, many authors like to use the weather or seasons for dramatic effect, and at first, I was sure Mary W. Walters was about to do that as well, and expected the oppressive humid heat described from when Diana first lands at the airport to dissolve into a huge tempest at the culmination of events and emotions. It does not happen, and that is maybe her way of using weather for dramatic effect - nothing goes "bang", suddenly changing Diana's whole approach to the past and to her mother, but things happen more subtly here, which is probably a lot more difficult to write.

I recommend this to anyone who likes stories about people who manage to find their own way.

A Nice Little Lunch

As mentioned in my previous post, I have quite a back log of things I want to write about and pictures I want to show you from the week before last, and tonight I am going to start with another food post - there have not been many of that sort recently, have there?

Last year, I already wrote about how much I like to cultivate the art of making do (alright, I am exaggerating here, it is not really an art, just something I do almost on a daily base), and the week before my sister and I left for our Yorkshire holiday*, I made sure to use up all the fresh food in my fridge so as not having to chuck it all out upon my return.

From the weekend before, I had some leftover spuds and an avocado, and they wanted eating before they'd start to grow a pretty greenish fur.

These were new spuds, the kind that can easily and most tastily be eaten without peeling them before. I had boiled them for our Sunday dinner, so all it took for them now was to chop them in halves and quarts, heat some oil in a pan, add a bit of salt, pepper and (dried) herbs, and fry them for a little while.

While the frying was going on, making my kitchen smell very appetizing, I cut the avocado in two, took the big heavy round smooth stone out (don't you just love that stone? Every time I open an avocado, I want to DO something with that stone, but I know planting it makes no sense, because it won't grow here) and lifted the lovely light green flesh (I've looked it up, it is OK to say flesh in this context) out and into a small bowl, where I mashed it up with a fork, adding (again) some salt and pepper.

The result was a combination of rather different textures and tastes, but they went together very well, and made for a really filling plateful of lunch. Plus I had reached my goal - that of using up some food, of making do in order not having to either buy something new or throw out something old.

*If you want to have a look at the pictures I took during that week before I start showing some of them here on my blog (which is going to happen over the next few weeks, I promise!), you can do that in my Photobucket album. 
As far as I know, you should be able to leave comments with each picture without necessarily having to have an account there, so in case you want to ask or remark anything, please feel free to do so. Not all of these are going to make it to the blog; therefore, to get the complete picture, I recommend to look at the first 10 pages of that album (everything after that is from previous holidays spent in England).

Quick Update and Reminder About Giveaway

Good morning fellow bloggers, friends, family and followers!

A quick update just to let you all know that my sister and I returned from England on Sunday night after a very good week there (not so much weather-wise, but we were still lucky, and what was most important to us was to spend time with the lovely people who are my family over there, and we certainly did that!).

Because I won't have time to organize my and my mum's giveaway until early next week (most likely Monday), I have decided to let it run for another week. Therefore, you still have a chance to participate.

Also, with some of you, it is still unclear whether you actually wish to be entered in the drawing or not. Please go back to the post , look at your own comment and what I have written in reply, and then let me know, if it was not yet obvious anyway.

Thank you :-)

I have quite a back log of things I want to write about, dating from before we left, and then of course plenty of pictures to show and stories to tell from our week in England - so, keep watching this space!

Read in 2012 - 10: George Washington

The daftest thing happened - and I do fully well understand now how John and Graham get so fed up with blogger sometimes. A bit more than a week ago, for the first time ever since I started blogging, I wrote something that I did not have the time for finishing there and then, and therefore left it as a draft.

I travelled to England for a week, where, contrary to what we had expected, I did have internet access through my sister's ipad. Although I did not spend much time online (we only had a week, and there were so many people to see, meals to eat and places to visit), once or twice I had a quick look at my blog. To all I know, my draft was still intact then.

Now, my first day back at work over, I wanted to give the finishing touches to said draft... only to find it empty. Completely empty! The proverbial white sheet. Blank. Rien. Niente. Nada. Null. Nix!

The only reminder of what I actually wanted to write here is the headline, and so I am going to write from scratch what I remember now, almost two weeks later, of the 10th book I have read this year:

A book I downloaded to my Kindle, because a) it was for free, b) I like biographies and c) I didn't know anything about George Washington except for that he was the first President of the United States of America.

William Roscoe Thayer wrote this biography in 1922, and the reason for him to do that is stated in the preface, in his own words:

"I was interested to discover, if I could, the human residue which I felt sure must persist in Washington after all was said. Owing to the pernicious drivel of the Reverend Weems no other great man in history has had to live down such a mass of absurdities and deliberate false inventions."

The author also feels he should

"...warn the reader that this book aims only at giving a sketch of George Washington's life and acts."

Well, he succeeded in this, and I did enjoy reading it, also because of the style and language used. There were many words I had to look up, not being at all familiar with military terms (furlough? That certainly wasn't part of the curriculum when I learnt English at school several decades ago!), and Mr. Thayer must have done a lot of research; there are footnotes on almost every page, and an extensive source register makes up the last 10 % of the book.

What he did not manage to do, at least not for me, is to convey a clearer picture of George Washington as a person. Yes, his character, his habits (apparently, he was very fastidious with his clothes), his looks and his way of dealing with problems are thoroughly described, as are the military campaigns and political events he was part of. But if I had to sum up in one word what I feel is lacking here, that word would have to be "atmosphere".

(The Washington family, picture nicked from Wikipedia; it shows George and Martha Washington with the two children she - a widow when the two of them met - had from her first husband, as well as one of the many slaves the Washingtons owned, in spite of George being convinced it was economically - not ethically! - wrong to let slaves work on one's land.)

You know when you can really delve into a book, into a story, the characters becoming real for you, the places being conjured up in front of your inner eye, complete with sounds and scents? That did not happen for me here, and I certainly do not blame the author; he probably never intended to create something so personal and atmospheric - after all, he said it himself, the book was supposed to be a sketch.

And at that, it is very good.