The rites of spring

Spargel Zeit

Those of you who don’t like your veggies have permission to skip this posting, because this is all about the green things—or actually, about the white things.

Springtime in Germany is synonymous with white asparagus season. White asparagus is the albino cousin of our green veggie. Called the “royal vegetable” in Germany, it’s grown under earthen mounds so no photosynthesis can take place to turn it green. As soon as the first little white head pokes out of the ground, it’s harvested by night and whisked away to roadside stands and open-air markets around the country.

Actually the first boxes of white asparagus appear in the markets in early April, but those in the know turn up their noses. It’s not German asparagus, you see, but imported from the hothouses of Egypt or Morocco. We wait and we wait until the beginning of May when we see the pale piles with the proud sign: Deutsche Spargel. And then we attack.

White asparagus is chosen for its pure white color and its thick, straight stems. The farmers recommend that you buy one pound for each person who is eating. For our family that makes a good five pounds at six euros a kilo—about $22. No wonder they call it the royal vegetable!

Those fat stems require a lot of preparation work—they all must be peeled and trimmed before steaming for up to 25 minutes.

Here's the maid a-peeling,
and the naked stalks a-steaming

The traditional accompaniments include boiled new potatoes,
Schinken (a bacon-like ham), and either hollandaise sauce or melted butter.

Guten Appetit!

Onkel Holger joined us in our Spargel campaign

Recommended dessert: a good nap.
(The rhubarb cream pie comes later.)

Tourists on the loose

Downtown, Downtown!

A fringe benefit of having so much company is that we get the opportunity to play tourist again and again in a place that's become our home. And once we leave our comfortable little neighborhood, we're reminded that this really is a city of three and a half million inhabitants. Here are some random "postcard" shots from recent forays into downtown Berlin with friends.

Hannes the gatekeeper, in front of Berlin's central landmark,
the Brandenburger Tor.
The Berlin Wall jagged out from the east
to claim the Brandenburger Gate for East Berlin.
President Reagan stood right about where Hannes is standing here
when he gave his famous 1987 speech:
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

This is one of the astounding skyscrapers
that tower up from Potsdamer Platz,
before World War II the busiest traffic center in Europe.
It was mostly destroyed during World War II,
and then for years during the Cold War it was the no-man's land
or "death strip" behind the Wall, a scene of desolation.
There are still scraps of the Wall left behind,
but definitely no more no-man's land.

Here's a view from inside the Sony Center Tower
at Potsdamer Platz.
We're down below sipping coffee and tea
at Jost's favorite historic watering hole, Cafe Josty!

A corner of the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament.
This building bordered the Wall on the west.
Photos displayed inside show it as a blackened hull
after the bombing of World War II.

This new glass cupola sits atop the old Reichstag
to replace the old conventional cupola destroyed in World War II.
We got up early to avoid the three-hour wait to visit the cupola
and enjoyed a spectacular panoramic view of Berlin.

Not far away is the new and very unusual
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Designed by an American architect, it's an entire city block
of tombstone-like columns on uneven ground.
The ground sinks so low at times that you can feel truly entombed.

Here's another memorial in front of the Reichstag
with the names of the government officials
who were killed during the time of the Nazis.

And finally, the true tourist shot:
Lara, Hannes, and Anna in front of
a remaining grafitti'd chunk of the Berlin Wall.

The family car

Zoom, zoom, zoom

I'd like to tell you all how grateful we are for this little car. It's an Opel Astra with snazzy Swiss plates that show all the Berliners we're foreigners, a handy identification in city traffic when we need an excuse for being erratic or a little slow on the uptake. The car belongs to Mom and Dad, who have graciously allowed us to use it for our time here. It has given us a level of freedom and mobility that we have loved—with it we've explored all the corners of Germany, transported heavy cases of fizzy mineral water from the beverage mart, and made day trips around the outlying regions of Berlin.

However, the other thing that I love about this car is that it stays parked most of the time. There are long spans of days during which it's not driven at all, when we have to sit down and ponder when we last drove it and where on earth it's parked. That's when I begin to realize the beauty of self-sustaining neighborhoods in a city of this size, and the high quality of life that's imparted when I can walk or ride my bike to find nearly anything my heart desires.

Yesterday Lara and I rode our bikes the three minutes to Wilmersdorfer Straße, our main pedestrian shopping street, to look for presents for Jost's birthday. We found many, many possibilities, but I didn't need to buy anything—I knew I could drop back in tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day before I actually needed to buy anything. For Reedsportians, that's unthinkable!

There's also something so sensory about riding a bike through a city—you can smell the foods being cooked in the restaurants, there's fresh air in your face, you hear snatches of conversations in many languages, and you're a part of the life around you in a way that a car completely seals out. Of course, the other nice thing about riding in Berlin is that it's completely flat, with nary a hill in the city—my kind of bike riding!

My recurring thought right now is how I can recreate some of this car-independence in my life back in Reedsport. The lack of infrastructure, of course, is the biggest problem. We simply are not a self-sustaining community. And Hannes’s suggestion to build a subway may not be completely realistic. But maybe we could build a grocery store somewhere in the uptown area near the hospital—anyone want to donate some land? And then if we could do something about the rain and those hills. . . .