Well Fed "Last Supper"

As Christians, Marisa and I believe that life is meant to be communal (not in the literal sense necessarily).  With that in mind, wherever we live we know that it's important to find a church community to plug in-to as well as a "small group" to share life with.  For those that aren't familiar with all of the contemporary Christian church lingo, a "small group" is a sub-group of people within a church that meet on a regular basis to talk, share ups and downs of life, discuss passages from the Bible or other Christian books, pray together, and sometimes share meals together.  Some may be short-term, involving the study of one particular book or topic, while others may be on-going, changing topics and studies.

That being said, we were members of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF) in Oberursel while we lived in Frankfurt and joined a small group called "Well Fed", since we always got together over dinner.  For international teachers, I think that it's imperative to have a community or group of friends outside of your co-workers and school community.  For us, Well Fed was that outlet.  We met a bunch of great people and really enjoyed getting to know them over the past three years.  As a last hurrah, we all gathered once more for lunch out in Bommersheim after church one Sunday.

Donata suprised everyone with "cookie monster" cupcakes.

Finn

Running against the wind.

Nature lesson by Craig.

Not sure but maybe he's telling us how much Iron-Bru he had before going on the walk.

Germany:  when the weather is nice, it's a beautiful place.

Our host, David

I love that a mere 20 minutes outside of the city you can look like you're completely in nature.

Well-Fed minus Marisa.

Well-Fed minus Nicholas.

We hope to find another "well fed" in Hong Kong.  It definitely makes the transition much easier.

--Justin

Marisa's 29th B-Day Dinner

As part of Marisa's "birthday month" we took a weekend trip down to Lake Constance, which will be featured in a separate post, and we had a dinner at a neighborhood tapas restaurant.  Since her birthday coincided with her friend, Janice, they decided to have a celebration together.

The birthday girls: Janice and Marisa

 The Treppenhauers, our traveling partners in Croatia.

The Spanish restaurant didn't have a proper cake or anything, so they settled for creme brulee and churros.

--Justin

Barbarossa Brewery "Bier Seminare"

There's not much more that Marisa enjoys doing than looking through deals on Groupon, and fortunately they have Groupon in Germany.  So, when Valentine's Day came around she came across a deal for two to a 4-hour beer brewing seminar not too far from Frankfurt.  I think that that in itself speaks volumes about German culture and their level of romanticism, but it sounded like fun so we went for it.

It took us several months before we were able to agree on a weekend to do it, but we finally had a date in June.  I tried, in vain, to recruit one of our German friends to come along with us because I knew that the beer-brewing workshop would be 100% in German.  Nevertheless we went in thinking that there should be plenty of hands-on participation that it wouldn't matter if we understood every word.

That turned out to not be the case as we found ourselves bombarded with very fast, and very detailed lecturings on the art of brewing for a few hours - all while sitting uncomfortably on beer garden benches.  I knew it was bad when the crowd erupted in laughter a few times in the first ten minutes, and I completely missed the jokes......

Brauerei Barbarossa in the town of Scholkrippen

It's a small-size brewery with a really nice, authentic atmosphere inside.  They are one of the few breweries that we came across that were so dedicated to sharing their knowledge with home-brewers.

 Our favorite of their beers was the Barbarossa Hell.  They also make seasonal beers such as Bock, Lager, Marzen, and Weizen.

 While only a small percentage of the seminar was hands-on, we were able to capture some of this action, like this guy stirring the barley and water while checking the temperature periodically.

After the mixture was heated and stirred for an hour or so, we dumped it through a strainer to separate out the wort from the malt.

The straining is a slow process since the wort has very fine grains.  We tasted the warm mixture and it was a sweet, grain taste.

After two passes through the strainer, he then tried this technique, pouring the mixture over the back of the spoon.

 After filtering our home-brew batch, we took a gander around the breweries equipment.  They had a few of these large, open fermentation tanks with floating thermometers.  As you can see, the top of this guy was thick like the top of a cappuccino or something.

 Marisa enjoyed a sample of the Barbarossa Hell.

I pretended to enjoy the Barbarossa Red beer - too sour for us.

     I'm glad that we got a chance to learn a little about brewing from a German brewer.  However, I wouldn't recommend this seminar for anyone without excellent German language skills.  Even if you speak fluent German, in the 4-hour seminar it was about 3-hours of lecture and 1-hour of touring the brewery and making a home-brew batch.  Just too much talking and not enough doing.........a reminder for my teaching that students have to be engaged with the subject before learning can take place.

--Justin

Luminale 2012

This post is way overdue, which will be the case of the next few blogs as we try to get caught up on the happenings over the past few months.  You may remember a post a couple of years ago that described the bi-annual light exhibition around Frankfurt, entitled "Luminale".

Well, since it is a bi-annual event, and that post was two years ago, then it's that time again for another Luminale!  We weren't able to get out and see as much as we wanted to during the week of exhibition in April.  Instead of strolling through the parks in Frankfurt, we took our chances on the Palmen Garten which turned out to have a few neat exhibits, but was far too crowded to be enjoyable.  Regardless, we'll share our photos:

This one sort of reminded me of dandelions from a distance.

One of my favorite exhibits was this collection of "jellyfish" that repeatedly ascended and descended.

--Justin

Heading East for Easter: Dubrovnik

We ended our epic Easter Break trip with the beautiful walled city of Dubrovnik.  When the weather is nice, this place is phenomenal.  This is a view from our rented apartment (roughly) of the old town.  It was a stronghold for centuries against the Venecians and the Ottomans and was brought to public attention during the war for independence in the 90's because the Serbian army shelled this city from the surrounding cliffs.

Inside the walls, Marisa is hanging out on the main drag through the old town.

Here's one of the gates above the former moat on the western side of the city.

By some stroke of luck we wandered around the inner edges of the walls until we came across this little gem - a cliffside bar through the wall with a great view of the surrounding coast.

One of the highlights in Dubrovnik has to be the walk along the top of the city walls.

The view from one corner of the walls gives you an overview of the layout of the old town and the size of the perimeter.  Many of these buildings suffered damage from incoming mortars during the siege.

We had gone our separate ways during the day, but chance brought us back together along the walking path on the walls.  It's a small town after all.

I must say that we were very fortunate to have the weather on the day that we decided to walk around Dubrovnik.  Normally there are large cruise ships that dump their passengers off to terrorize the town and clog up the wall walkway.  We had another day in Dubrovnik with the cruisers with rainy weather, which resulted in hundreds of umbrellas cramming through the narrow alleys and sidestreets - not as fun.

Hrvatska!

So this was our last stop on our trip through Croatia.  We were also able to take a day-trip into Montenegro, which turned out to be less-than-impressive.  Again, it was a rainy day and the wait-time driving across the borders is absolutely insane.  I suppose that can be attributed to the high volume of goods and stolen vehicles that cross the borders of the countries in this area. 

To summarize, I think that Croatia is a lovely country, but definitely much more so when the weather is nice (like anywhere).  While many of our colleagues have claimed Croatia as their favorite place to visit in Europe, we didn't get the same vibe.  If I come back I think that I would check out more of the islands, as that is where a lot of people visit - and it might be a better idea to go in the summertime.

--Justin