Meanwhile in Germany...

  Guten Tag aus Bayern! It snowed last night! If you look hard enough you can even see it... Sorry, Alaskans, but I am enjoying not having snow. It's been down to freezing, and maybe just a bit below, but the sun keeps popping out, and I enjoy sitting in the warming rays that stream through our living room windows.  Today at church coffee hour I had the fun of talking to two ladies, one who speaks German, but no English, and one who speaks English, but no German--at the same time. My spoken German is still sketchy, but I expect the language course we're going to start in January will help with that. We somehow managed to hold a conversation despite the language barrier. I read the Epistle today in both English and German, and they said my pronunciation was good.  I've been trying to take a walk every day, and have gotten into the habit of getting off the bus on the far side of the Altstadt, walking through town to the various shops I need to visit, including two thri...

  Grüß Gott von Regensburg! Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends and family! We are not celebrating it in the traditional way this year. However, it's not going uncelebrated. We took the bus to the western edge of the Altstadt, where there lies a hidden gem we hadn't heard of yet, and of which no one told us. Herzog Park, which has several gardens, will be much more beautiful in the spring and summer, but even now it has an ancient, old-world charm. I mean, old. I'm standing in front of a tower that was built in 1293. Back in those times, cities had walls before cannons made them obsolete, and Regensburg was no exception. The park covers an area that was part of the city's expansion. I guess even then there was such a thing as urban sprawl! There was even a moat, and I can't help wondering who it was supposed to keep out.  Many centuries later, in 1804, the grounds became the property of the House of Thurn und Taxis. They also built a stately palace farther...

  Guten Abend am Samstag Nachmittag! It's Saturday evening as I start this blog entry. We're shortly going to go to the Vigil service at church, but I have a few minutes to write a few things about another kind of adventure...cooking and baking in Germany. Well, it's a good thing I can read German. Among the things not findable in Germany are measuring cups and spoons in the measurements we use in the US. The apartment, which is fully furnished, has lots of cooking and baking equipment, but no US measuring vessels. It does have a scale that measures grams, and a container that measures milliliters. -Can I find any US-style measuring cups and spoons at any of the stores? No. Hmmm, okay, so I won't bake... ...Until I volunteer to take the 3rd Sunday of the month to provide the "Kuchen" for Kaffee und Kuchen at coffee hour after church on Sunday this weekend. I'm up for the adventure! So, I go online and look for recipes. Naturally, I look for English-languag...

  Guten Morgen aus Regensburg! It's been a quiet week, and we really didn't do anything picture-worthy, but I want to post so as to be consistent.  The crisp blue-sky days and dazzling orange and yellow trees have given way to gray skies and bare branches as latitude 48 N slides into fall. I have noticed the weather is very changeable around here, as it can be sunny one minute, and raining the next. However, the weather pattern the past few days has settled into a steady rainy spell. One advantage of no leaves is that the birds are more visible. We were treated several times last week to cheery, cheeky great tits, with their yellow breasts with a prominent black streak down the middle, flitting and hopping from bare branch to bare branch in the tree outside our kitchen window. Their slightly smaller cousins, the coal tits, resemble chickadees.  So I made a comical language/cultural mistake the other day. In Germany, each apartment building has a number, and if it's large ...

  Hallo aus Deutschland! On the left are chestnuts. They gather them in the woods, but I bought mine from the store. To prepare them you have to cut an X in the outer shell and then bake them for 25 minutes. After that you peel the shell off and eat the insides. Well, I'm so disappointed, because all these years of hearing the song, "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...", I had a romantic idea of what a chestnut would taste like. These didn't taste like that. I expected a rich nuttiness. Instead, I got something with a terrible texture and somewhat sweet. Neither one of us really liked them. So, the rest, unfortunately, went into the compost bin. But they were worth trying.  It has been raining every other day, with partly cloudy skies in between. The sun comes out now and then and shines into our apartment, and it's so satisfying to sit in its warm rays. The weather is really changeable around here. It could be pouring in the morning and sunny by afternoon, and ...