May-June Grab Bag

Oh dear. It's been a month since we've blogged. We're sorry! Looking back at the past couple of months, several things have happened that, while they didn't merit their own blog posts, still bear mentioning. I've collected these things here--a few pictures and a couple of bits of news. Hope you enjoy them.

On May 1 I stepped out my door at 9:30 in the morning to find Aachen bedecked in young birch trees and streamers. It's traditional to decorate a Maibaum (May tree) for your beloved and place it outside of his or her house for a May Day surprise. Usually this task belongs to men, but this year, because it is a leap year, it was the women's turn. (People told me this several times before I understood that they really meant that it was the women's turn because it was Leap Year. Isn't that an intuitive connection? C'mon, Sara!) For the first couple of days I found the Maibäume quite charming, but after 2 months and many heavy rains the ones that remain (and there are a lot of them) are pretty bedraggled.

Maibaum on our street

I took this picture with my phone! Not bad, huh?

St. Jakob with Maibaum

News item #1: Our good friends Katie and Scott Stapleton have returned to Aachen! They were here for a month back in September. Luckily for us, they decided to come back. They're American, they're Mormon, and they live fairly close by, so we get to see them a lot. On a nice day in May we went up to the top of Lousberg (Aachen's most prominent hill) together. Most of the hill is a lovely park.

Columns on Lousberg

Slacklining with the Stapletons. Look at Tyler go!

News item #2: I got a job! It's a student position at one of RWTH's institutes--IMA, or Institut für Informationsmanagement im Maschinenbau. It only took me a month to memorize that name. Daunting as it looks, the salient piece is Informationsmanagement, which is of course two words in English: information management. The position was advertised as web-development-related, but so far all I've done is work on papers, first rewriting one that was already in English and then translating another from German into English. I hope to do some web development work eventually, but for now I'm happy to help them out with my native-English-speaking skills. And I'm very happy to have something to do this summer, since I'm not taking any classes right now.

At the beginning of June we had the pleasure of hosting our dear friends from Berkeley, Ben and Barbara. They were in London for a program that's part of Barbara's master's studies in costume design, and we were thrilled that they decided to come to Germany for a few days at the end of the trip. You can read more about their visit here, since Barbara already did a nice job of writing it up and I've still got a few more events to cover. It was wonderful to have visitors! As always, we would welcome more!

Our very photogenic friends in front of the Kölner Dom

Recently we went through a sort of European rite of passage: we watched our first soccer tournament. The Europameisterschaft ran from June 8 through July 1. Germany made it to the semifinals before losing to Italy; Italy went on to lose to Spain in the final. We watched all of Germany's games and a handful of others, too. After the first game Tyler kept saying, "It was fun. But it was boring. But it was fun." I was surprised by my own tolerance for watching. It IS boring, but it's kind of fascinating, too. A couple of times we watched games online. This turned out to be very convenient because, as the feed was about two minutes behind, we always knew when Germany was about to score by the neighbors' yelling, so we could hurry over to the computer to watch the action.

Flags up during the Euro tournament. The smaller one of the right has Rosie the Riveter in the middle with the caption "Wir können es!" I don't know how I feel about Rosie being co-opted for German men's football--a little ironic, no?--but at least it's funny.

Fans walking downtown on the evening of the German-Italy semifinal. After the game a parade of four or five cars full of Italians zoomed around the city center like maniacs, waving Italian flags and playing "Ole ole" on a loudspeaker. The Germans were sad.

On June 24 Tyler sang in his first-ever choral concert! (I sang too.) Our small a cappella choir, Figuralchor, performed nine pieces in a little church up on the Lousberg. Unfortunately, it was absolutely pouring with rain that day (as it is today, grr) so the audience was smaller than it might have been. The rehearsal immediately before the concert was terrifying, but the concert itself went quite well. None of the pieces crashed and burned, though a few threatened to. We got a recording of the concert last week, and Tyler wanted to listen to it immediately. Then he listened to it again. I found this quite cute. I'm turning him into a choral singer! Muahaha.

The centerpiece of the concert was a 6.5-minute Magnificat by Schütz, by far Tyler's and my favorite song, and the song that sounds by far the best on the recording. After several attempts I have successfully embedded it below for your listening convenience. We love Schütz!

Play Song

(If playing it here doesn't work, you can right-click the link and download it to listen.)

Finally, Aachen just finished hosting CHIO, Europe's largest equestrian event, as it does every year. This is a big deal, as we learned back in January when we were looking for hotel rooms in Aachen (for a prospective visit that fell through) and found that six months out there was not a bed to be had during CHIO. The tickets also sold out months ago, too, so we wouldn't have been able to go even if we'd been inclined to fork over a whole bunch of money to watch a sport we know nothing about. (Yes, yes, we know nothing about soccer either, but watching it online is free, okay?) So the only part of CHIO we got to experience were the decorations in store windows all over Aachen.

Lots of display windows featured horse merchandise, saddles, horseshoes, and/or decorated horse statues. This one, on Jakobstraße near our house, was perhaps the ugliest. Sorry about the glare.

The Marktplatz was decorated much more tastefully, with the flags of participating countries lined up in front of the Rathaus.

So there you have it, all the happenings of note in May and June. During the last week of June Tyler went to Dublin, bringing his lifetime count of countries visited to 16, one ahead of mine. (Curses.) Between new experiments with paint and job applications (eep!) he's been extremely busy since his return, but hopefully he'll find a few moments to write an account of his visit to the Emerald Isle some time soon. Here's the short version: it rained.

The Coolest Bridge You've (Probably) Never Heard Of

Italy is starting to feel long ago and far away, so it's past time I finished blogging about it. This post is about two Umbrian towns: Todi, which Tyler and I visited together after our night at Titignano, and Spoleto, which I went to see by myself on Tyler's last day of measurements in Perugia.

Like Assisi's, Todi's buildings have a remarkably consistent look. Every street in this hilltop town looks much like the one below--i.e., every street is lovely.

Count the arches!

As usual, we found a church tower to climb. The sweep of red roofs in all directions made for beautiful views.



The arches over the doors of the church, like so many in Umbria, were adorned with column after column, each carved in a different intricate pattern.



One of the wonderful things about Italy is that there are drinking fountains everywhere. (All of Germany's decorative fountains have plaques proclaiming them "KEIN TRINKWASSER," and American-style drinking fountains are almost unheard of.) I particularly liked this angry yet helpful duck.



For those interested in sociological aspects of our travels, I photographed this notice board announcing deaths in Todi. Some of them are funeral announcements, some are from families thanking the community for its support in their time of grief, some are memorial notices from societies the deceased belonged to. We saw boards like this one in a few other Umbrian towns, too. I think it's both a nice tradition and a good way to learn some new Italian names.



As you can tell, Todi was very pretty, but not the most stimulating place we visited. The most exciting part of the trip was trying to get home. The train station was at the bottom of the hill, and though there was a bus, we feared that it would get us to the station to late to get tickets. Google told us it would take about 35 minutes to walk down to the station, but not that we would have to walk on the shoulder of a small highway the whole way. When we finally made it to station (with shoes full of plant matter, but otherwise none the worse for wear), the ticket office was closed. A sign informed us that we could buy tickets at a shop on the main square--back up at the top of the hill. Luckily, the conductor sold us tickets on the train with no more reproach than a weary look that clearly said "turisti."

Spoleto's train station is a mere 10-minute walk from its old town, and the slope of the hill it sits on is fairly gentle, so it was the easiest of the hill towns to visit. As you'll see, though, the buildings get cooler the farther up the hill you go. This is a picture of a section of the city wall in which you can see several different building techniques, from several different centuries. The earliest part, the middle-right section where the stones are unshaped, dates from the 1st century BC.



After a lunch of polenta with gorgonzola sauce and roasted vegetables (every bit as delicious as it sounds) I followed the signs for the Roman theater, my first. A church and cloister were built over it some time in the Middle Ages. The church, now an archaeological museum, still stands, taking up about half of the space that used to be the stage.

The back of St. Agatha's Church and the orchestra, with remains of its colorful marble floor still visible.

For a measly two euros I was allowed the clamber all over the benches and run through the tunnels underneath.

A cool column in the yard behind the theater.

The remains of the theater's facade.

I loved the theater, but I was on a quest to find Spoleto's most famous sight, so I soon continued up the hill. Spoleto is just as lovely as Todi, but has a much greater variety of styles.

A house with a fountain built into the facade.

I pulled myself away from churches, piazzas, and interesting twisty streets until I came to a wide promenade encircling the crest of the hill. Only the fortress stands above it, and the whole town is spread out below.

The cathedral, as seen from the promenade.

I followed the promenade around to the back of the hill. With my goal in sight, I went down into this olive grove to get a better look ...



... at the Ponte dei Torri (Bridge of Towers).

View of the bridge from the olive grove. You can only see about 3/4 of its height in this picture. The gorge at the bottom is steep-sided but dry.

The bridge was built in the 13th century, though according to Wikipedia, some scholars think it was built on the remains and to the plan of a much earlier Roman bridge. It connects Spoleto's hilltop to the much higher hill behind the town. The fortress stands above it on the Spoleto side, and a ruined guard tower at the other end.

The bridge is only wide enough for two, maybe three, horses to ride abreast.

View of the bridge and guard tower from the other side.

I spent about an hour walking across the bridge, climbing on the ruins, and gawking at the view from as many angles as possible. Afterward, I still had some time to walk up to the fortress and wander back through the town before my train came.

Wild poppies growing along the road up to the fortress. We were too early to see sunflowers in Italy, but we caught the poppies right at their peak.

Fortress tower and roses

Fortress training yard with Umbrian hills beyond

Flowers growing on the wall above the training yard

I love how you can see the painted ceiling of this covered terrace from below. Quite a few buildings in Florence and around Umbria had top stories like this.

Here is the cathedral and main piazza. The clouds very obligingly made a dramatic backdrop but refrained from soaking me.



The cathedral boasts amazing frescoes by the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi. It is dedicated to Mary, so the fresco at the front depicts important moments from her life: the Annunciation, her death, the Nativity, and her coronation as the Queen of Heaven.



I saw a lot of Annunciations in Italy. I wish I could tell you about all the different formulations of the scene that I observed, but I'll just point out one odd thing about this one: the Holy Ghost is about to strike Mary on the shoulder.

Female prophets, sadly damaged.

I'll leave you with a picture of the floor of the cathedral. At the time I couldn't think where I'd seen something similar, but during our friends' visit last week I realized that it looks rather like the floor of the Aachen Cathedral.

German Drinking Games

A few months ago we received a tip from a friend and former resident of Germany saying that if he could have anything to eat from Germany he'd choose Döner Kebabs and Müllermilch. Döner you may have heard of--huge skewers of meat slowly rotating in a heater, part of which is shaved off into a bread sandwich with some salad and, if I have my way, a spicy sauce. Allegedly developed in Berlin and the canonical German street food, it's something that I like fairly well and that Sara tolerates occasionally. The Müllermilch is, as they say in Deutschland, total anders (completely different). We hadn't even tried one for a long time since they looked simply like expensive, flavored buttermilk in a bottle. Neither of us typically care for buttermilk, so we didn't bother. Until one day at the store, Sara decided to bring some home and we got hooked. This hooked:



I may have gone a little crazy, but we decided to try ALL of the flavors one day. (We'd only tried one or two before, so we decided to got bold.) If you can't see the picture clearly, we have (left to right) strawberry, cherry-banana, banana, pistachio-coconut, coconut, and vanilla. And yes, those are little tiny shot glasses in front. (I searched until I found a pack of disposable ones, so we wouldn't have to buy 12 real shot glasses.) How was it?

Sara struggling to keep a straight face.

Fantastic. (By the way, pistachio-coconut and vanilla are the best. And I recently discovered a buttermilk-ier version with lemon that is fabulous. Now we treat ourselves with Müllermilch whenever we lug groceries up the 79 stairs, thus countering any caloric deficit incurred by said lugging.)