We've been struggling with the transition from travel blog to everyday-life blog. Or rather, we have utterly failed to make this transition. In the past month, the most noteworthy thing we did was to go to the movies in Aachen for the first time. We saw
The Artist (the placards, translated into German, sometimes went by too quickly for us to catch every word, but we got the gist) and
The Iron Lady (in English with German subtitles, hooray). Both times we went to a little independent theater right by the RWTH campus. The people who work there look just like the people who work at little independent theaters in Berkeley, which made us feel at home.
Tyler just got back from a week-long trip to Italy, so he will be blogging about that VERY SOON (*nudge nudge* *prod prod*). While he was gone I made another trip to Maastricht with a friend. As soon as I get the pictures from her I'll write a little bit about that. Finally, we'll be breaking our financially-mandated no-travel vow shortly to go to Prague and later Keukenhof (the tulip capital of the world), so we'll be in fine travel-blog form again. All this to say, we're sorry for our long hiatus, and we're back now.
Meanwhile, spring has come to Aachen! I was able to bear my abandonment during Tyler's trip much better because the weather here was perfect--65 degrees and sunny every single day. On Sunday we sprang forward (bringing the time difference from California back to nine hours), and since then we've been looking at each other every evening around 7:30, saying, "Is that really the time? I guess we should eat dinner," because it is now staying light until
8 PM. Woohoo!
I've been buying tulips once a week for the past six weeks or more. I wish I'd taken pictures of all of them, but this week's are particularly lovely.
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| It pleases me that they look more like peonies than tulips. |
When I went out to run some errands the other day, I found Jakobstraße in bloom.
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| Daffodils and pansies |
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| Grape hyacinths on the windowsill and a little dog in a crate |
Easter wares are on display everywhere. The bakeries all have rather scary-looking red-eyed bunnies made of Printen or sweet bread dough in the windows. My favorite display by far, though, is at Neuhaus Chocolatier.
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| These chocolate eggs are serious business. |
We hope to go to back to Monschau some time in the next couple of weeks to see more springtime beauty. Alternative weekend plans:
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| Down with capitalism! |
Flowering trees, or action against capitalism? These are the kinds of dilemmas that arise when you live in Europe.
