Tuesday´s Photo of the Week!

I have worked in Restaurants as a cook for several years now. It’s an experience that gives me a strong sense of what is and what isn’t good, quality food. Something I have learned while living in Europe, both as a consumer and as a cook, is that restaurants located on tourist shopping streets tend not to have good food. Instead they sell something more like an idea and you just happen to get food along with that idea or concept. Now of course there may be exceptions to every rule, however I don’t think this is one of them:

Add to this that they specialize in schnitzel and then also have pizza. I don’t get how the two fit together so well.

Taking a train ride for ten hours (to and return) gave me plenty of time to read so here is the reading list as it stands:

1. Der Kleine Brüder by Sven Regener (finished)

2. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (finished)

3. The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood (finished)

4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (considering buying this after all the reviews it got)

5. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

6. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (orig. Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said)

7. The 158-Pound Marriage by John Irving (finished)

8. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

9. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa

10. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

11. Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante (finished)

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

13. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

14. The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (finished)

I am currently on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Dick, which will be followed by Ubik. The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood was so good that it’s going to get a review in this blog tomorrow so watch for it.

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Cologne

Its been snowing softly all day. Its cold outside and on the surfaces elevated above the ground, on parked car roofs and other inanimate objects, it’s staying. It’s still too warm to stay on the paved streets or sidewalks that are still busy. The minute the sun pokes its head through the overcast, grey skies is the moment that it will be gone even from those places. Its only November, there will still be plenty of time for blizzards and freezing weather.

Cologne is on the list of things to do tomorrow. It’s going to be a quick little weekend. The train rolls out around eight in the morning and then we arrive sometime after noon. There will be some time spent with friends and family. On Sunday there is mass and Clara’s cousin will go through some Catholic ceremony-not one that I am familiar with. Cologne is a place that I don’t care to live in but love to visit. It’s a small city yet it retains a feeling of its own steadily eroding self-importance. It was once one of the greatest cities in Europe. My how the mighty have fallen.

Sometimes, when living in foreign countries, we learn to make the most out of the small things. For instance: we learn to laugh at the signs that incorporate two languages at once. Sometimes it’s done to be cool, as if the native word wouldn’t suffice, a pattern all to common in Sweden, and others it’s done just for humor. This is probably one of the latter:

I am more than halfway through The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. It’s been fantastic this far and once I finish with it, I will write a post or two reviewing it. Have a lovely weekend.

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