Thunder on the mountain

I am at the university, waiting for the clock to strike 17.00 in order to talk to a man about an upcoming exam. All very exciting. Outside the wind is howling, with trees struggling to remain rooted in this wet earth. In order to concentrate, I am listening to the rain. Not actual rain outside, but a collection of rain sounds on my iPod. The rain sounds drown out the voices of the other students in the common room discussing their various projects, it drowns out where I am and what I somehow still need to do today. The rain sounds mute whomever is snoring in the room at the hostel we booked, they make my roommate watching TV in another room less audible, they surround my head in a space of white noise crafted for thinking and concentrating. 

I wrote to a friend of mine that I wished we could all turn off the social media, our phones and tablets and gadgets, since often they distract us more than they help us. My task app keeps reminding me of tasks that I know I still need to do, making me more nervous and feeling as though I can't accomplish anything. Whatsapp messages, spam emails, FB messages, they all distract. And not because I am actually that popular and receive a lot of messages, but rather because once I have the phone in my hand I will check all social media channels and emerge 30 minutes later wondering what I was even scrolling through. It is making meaningless meaning, continously reposting outdated information to satisfy our desire for constant online stimulation. 

Then again, I am reliant on exactly these media to remain in touch with friends an family in far away places. Without Skype, FB and WhatsApp living far away would mean restricted communication. Perhaps a resolution here is not to give up these media, but to gain controll of them again, to not be reliant on the to maintain contact, to not be a voyeur in the lives of people who could just as well tell me the stories that fit whatever it is they posted on social media. 

20 minutes left. 20 minutes of possibly answering emails, of prepraring for a meeting when I would much rather just be at home already. 

Reminders, Defeats

This year, man, this year.
The days a twisted game of Jenga,
with stacks of bureaucratic paperwork
and nothing really to look forward to.
Alas, this is just what everyone feels like
when big changes
are just around the corner
ready to shout "BOO!"
when you least expect it.

No Rest

2015 gives me great pangs of anxiety before it has even begun. This is perhaps not the right way to start a new year, but what is a new year? Just a change of a date, not the clean slate most purport it to be. Little rays of sunshine in the form of Skype sessions with friends and family interrupt the permanent sensation of panic (that is, in part at least, self-inflicted through my procrastination and weak prioritisation, which goes a bit like this: hmm, we should read those texts. Ja. Let's bake cookies instead and iron the clothes that have been gathering over weeks. Smart move.).

Yesterday I spoke with two friends, both currently in Pretoria, both complaining about the heat and the mosquitoes, both in summery clothes. Then there was me, heater turned up, with a cup of peppermint tea in one hand and an enormous sweater wrapped around my body. We talked as though distance did not exist about the trivial things, the everyday embarrassments and tiny bits of gossip. My one friend was knitting and laughing as I told him about a series of cringe-worthy events from the past week. It was wonderful.

Sons & Daughters

My mother.
My mother makes the best food.
Sometimes she'd make Spätzle, and my sister and I would steal a few noodles before they went into the oven until the cheese melted over them.

Because I found some Spätzle flour in our cupboard (and after the insects-in-flour-scare of the cookies), today I made some. It was easier and quicker than expected, although there were a lot of dishes involved. Spätzle are a Swabian noodle type, originally made by scraping the dough from a wooden board into boiling water where they float to the top when they are done. These days there are Spätzlepressen if you are making a potato kind or Spätzlereiben for the egg-type. I have a Reibe (it looks a bit like a flat grater that attaches to the pot), so I made the egg Spätzle with some added parsley in the dough.

The recipe is quite simple:
One egg for every 100g of Spätlzeflour, plus some water to make the dough more elastic
I used:
300g flour
3 eggs
120ml water
A pinch of grated nutmeg

You need to beat the ingredients together until the dough becomes elastic, quite a task for the arms. After letting the dough rest for 10 minutes, beat it again.
Then use the Spätzlereibe to drop the dough into boiling water.
When the noodles float to the top after a short while, use a ladle to scoop them off.
I then fried an onion and added the Spätzle and some cheese to a pan until the cheese had melted. Some salt and pepper and it's a done deal.

Elastic dough. 

Orange sky

Breakfast of Champions.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. 

Breakfast Club, Breakfast at Tiffany's, He stayed for Breakfast, Breakfast in Paris...

The list goes on as breakfast becomes a social and cultural institution. People eat in the mornings, simple as that. Or at least grab a muffin and a large coffee on their way to work. On weekends people brunch, Mimosas in hand. 

And yet I am not a fan. Never have been, never will be. When my parents were separating my grandmother came to live with us, and she would have none of my nonsense. Everyone has to eat breakfast, me included. For a while there I ate yesterday's leftovers, preferring pasta to corn flakes or toast. Then I progressed to weetbix, and from there I discovered instant oats, preferably the strawberries & cream flavour. 

Somehow, my grandmother forcing me to eat in the mornings has remained with me, so now I do it without thinking too much about it. The best thing is overnight oats, where you marinate an equal amount of oats (with a tablespoon of linseed) in water or milk (so 1/2 cup of oats in 1/2 cup of milk) the evening before, and the next morning you have a delicious porridge. Add some yoghurt and fresh fruit or compote and boom, it's going to be a good day. 

My other favourite is muesli, the crunchy kind. In store it is superexpensive and has raisins, which I also don't like that much. By comparison, a 500g pack of oats costs 0,39€, so I now make my own muesli. It is easy peasy and you can adapt it as you want (or with whatever you have at home). 

You need: 

- 1/4 cup  honey

- 1/4 cup brown sugar

- 1/4 cup oil

- 3 cups oats

- 1/2 cup bran flakes

- 1/2 cup coconut flakes

- 1/4 cup sesame seeds

- 1/4 cup sunflower seeds

- 1/4 cup finely chopped hazelnuts (or almonds)

Alternatives:

- other nuts

- cranberries

- dried apple

- linseed

1. Preheat your oven to 150°C.

2. Heat the honey, sugar and oil over a medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. 

3. Mix the dry ingredients together before adding the sugar-honey-oil mix. Mix well, ensuring that the oats are evenly coated. 

4. Spread the mixture on greaseproof paper and bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes, stirring one after about 15 minutes. 

5. Let the muesli cool. As it cools it will harden and little muesli clusters will form. 

6. Store in an airtight container. 

Tadaaa. muesli. Easy. 

Don't you worry about it

No one has a clue what they are doing. What the point is. And yet most people pretend at it so well that it intimidates the few who are ready to admit they realise no path is final, no choice set in stone. As a tween I wanted to be a chef, then a marine biologist, then a lawyer. When I started studying, I still had notions of becoming a lawyer. Luckily, what I felt was bad luck intervened at the time and I was presented with a way that I was not even aware of.

2015 is the year of big decisions that weigh heavily on the heart and mind at night. After this place of friendly people, water and small universities, where do I go? What do I do with my stuff? WHAT IS THE PLAN SABINE. And always, always this question, ghost-like behind everything I do: what do you want from your life?

I don't know. I honestly don't know what it is I want.
I want to learn. I want to teach. I want to make it better, not worse.
I want to spend Christmas with my mom and sister. I want to get to know places, not merely travel them. I want a room full of books. I want a dog (or 2) again. I want to smell yesterday, today, tomorrow in spring. I want to have my own space. I want to have things but not be bound to them.
I want to find a place that again feels like home.

Remnants

During December everything seemed to happen at once. I had an additional job working at the Christmas market, suddenly the lecturers at the university decided that we needed to complete everything we hadn't done in the past months in a few days and yet it was the month of Christmas parties and having to be social when all you want to do is sleep for eternity.

I spent the 24-26 at my friend's mother's place in Göttingen where we played boardgames, ate too many cookies and sweet things and hung out by the Christmas tree. As a present I had gotten a very cool cookie cutter, so when my friends came to Flensburg for New Years I had to bake some cookies.

The recipe was for Jamie Dodgers, which I found attached to some Jamie Oliver cookie cutters I had bought earlier:

- 250g softened butter
- 140g icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 egg yolk
- 375g flour
- 30g caster sugar (for sprinkling the cookies when they come out of the oven)
 - 170g jam (I used watermelon-strawberry jam that I had made in the summer)

1. Mix the butter and sugar until it is fluff. Add the vanilla and the egg and beat well. Then sift in the flour and work the dough into a ball with your hands. This took a little while because the dough is rather dry. Then cover the dough ball in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for an hour. I left it there overnight and had to let it soften quite a while before it could be rolled out.
2. Turn your oven to 190°C. Prepare 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper or spray 'n cook.
3. Roll out the dough on a floured surface until it is about 3mm thick.
4. Here I multitasked: I used the 'eat-me' cookie cutter to just cut out some plain cookies, and used the other round cookie cutters for the Jamie Dondgers. You need to cut out an even amount of cookies and then Jamie uses a mini cookie cutter to cut a shape in the middle. Since I did not have a mini cutter I just used a knife and attempted to shape little hearts. It worked fine.
5. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes until they are pale gold, not golden brown.
6. Sprinkle them with the caster sugar and wait for them to cool.
7. Once they have cooled, use the jam to sandwich together the cookies.

And now for the bad news: I had to throw ALLLLLL the cookies away, because I used 'Dinkelmehl' (Spelt flour) and the brown pieces which I had thought to be the actual spelt turned out to be... little insects. So ja. In the end my friends saw the cookies, and then they were quickly dumped in the trash. NOOOOOOO.
 

Step out

It's a weird time of the year.
Idealised memories of Christmas spent with cousins cluster like grapes around the realities of the non-season here. In one we are all at my grandmother's first house, the one with the patio above the garage (above some other room?) where one had a startling view of the sea. My aunt asked someone to play Santa Claus and to a pack of preschoolers the man in the red suit arriving at our doorstep was everything.

In another memory we are again at the beach, always at the beach, and my grandmother has tossed the traditional idea of a Christmas tree by using the long branch-bloom that extends from the middle of some type of succulent. She has made little packets for each grandchild containing a host of tiny 'onbenullighede', things she has picked up at farm stalls and convenience stores during the past year in her pursuit to be fair to us all. The families are all there, the aunts and uncles and my mother and sister.

A different year sees my grandmother, always my grandmother, with us in 2000, the first one without my father. I remember him gifting me a Celine Dion CD, a sign that he had not noticed I had moved away from 'My Heart Will Go On' to falling for my sister's Backstreet Boys collection.

Then there was the one year my sister and I spent Christmas alone. The sad year, the bad year, the one where we fought and ended up in our separate rooms.

But it is the Christmases of my 20s that I yearn for now. I miss planning how to get my grandmother to wherever the celebration will be; coordinating a menu with everyone doing different dishes; thinking up cool presents; bickering and fighting and the feeling of needing distance from the overdose of family; having everyone unpack each present individually, stretching the time spent with one another; hanging out with cousins that are so very different from me and still so relatable; sitting outside in the sun with whomever is there at the moment, sipping on a glass of wine and catching up; and lastly, more than the event that is Christmas I miss the sense that blood is thicker than water.

This Christmas will surely be its own shrewd kind of miracle, and I look forward to spending it with people close to my heart. And last year was experiencing Christmas as an observer more than as a participant, by no fault of the kind family that hosted me. It was still a lot of fun and I enjoyed getting to know the little rituals of a family quite different from mine.

Nevertheless, none of this is Christmas. Forget about the religious aspect of the season, dismiss the name and the particular date all together, and center on what it is that makes the time spent together on those few days so memorable: the people. Sometimes, it is as simple as this - I long for my people.

Glacier

I've decided to dance when gravity becomes too much. So I twirl around, never on my own in a world of sound.

Lonely Souls

This past weekend I went to Bremen, again with the international students. It was miserable, gray and the kind of cold that infiltrates your bones and refuses to leave for the next months. Even our arrival at the central station was marked by how unspectacular everything there was: simply another big building with groups of anti-establishment homeless young adults and other homeless skulking about, reeking of beer and piss. The city tour was immensely boring as the lady who showed us around did not seem to notice that she was talking to students and not a group of geriatrics. Luckily that evening some of us went out and met up with my friend Pina, with whom we ended up at a gay club, dancing to Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and other 90s hits.

As half the group is Catholic, we attended mass in the Bremer Cathedral, which must have been the first time in years that I sat through a sermon. More interesting that being preached to were the stained glass windows and the architecture of the cathedral. Afterwards, a Russian girl accompanied me to the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, which divides its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions between 5 floors.

After exploring four floors and contemplating rooms filled with Rothko-ish colour paintings, children's drawings and cultural artifacts exhibited next to art works we opened the door to a black room in the fifth floor. Initially I thought it would be another strange video installation that I refused to suffer through, but Richard Mosse's The Enclave (2012) was miraculous.

Four large screens formed a rectangle in the middle of the dark room, with a screen hanging at a distance on two more sides (so 6 screens in total). We went into the rectangle and focused on the film shown on only one of them, the rest were blank, bathed in black. The film showed what looked like a refugee camp in between strangely pink hills, with African people moving out of the camera's way as it progressed through the makeshift village. As we followed the camera's path, the other screens went on and suddenly we were overwhelmed by this pink colour that did not seem to fit the suffering these people must have endured (and are still enduring).

Turns out the footage was filmed on 16mm infrared film, used during wartime to differentiate between plants and people as the chlorophyll in the plants shows up in red-pink tones. For this film alone it was worth going to Bremen.

Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image from Frieze on Vimeo.

If I don't have to

Arnold Böcklin, Die Toteninsel (The Isle of the Dead), 1883

During this month of November I have been gone more than I have been here. Throw in a darkness that clung to me like bubblegum to a shoe, well, then let us say it was the best of months and the worst of months, and it isn't even over yet. 

One of the first trips was to Berlin, accompanying the international students to the capital. That weekend the conductors of the Deutsche Bahn (the rail services) decided to strike. Luckily we took the arduous journey from Flensburg to Berlin by bus, but in the city transport was made more difficult as the S-Bahn was striking as well. Luckily we could get to most places by U-Bahn and managed to see the Festival of Lights, an old DDR Prison (Stasi-Museum near Lichterfelde), go on a walking tour of the city, visit some museums on the Museumsinsel, do a little shopping, go out to a club in an old furniture factory and spend the last hours enjoying beautiful sunshine at the Mauerpark. For 72hours, we really did cram it in. Nevertheless, I doubt the students realise how stressful it is to look after them. At times it felt like having 25 children who could legally get drunk. 

A good distraction from being mother/mean-bitch to 25 people who are just a few years younger was taking one of the other tutors to the museum island. I should perhaps be more of an art connoisseur, given that it is partially what I studied. But I find art to be an extremely subjective thing, dependent on mood and timing and how an individual reacts to a work. The Isle of the Dead is mesmerizing to me, although inexplicably so. In total Böcklin painted 5 versions, four of which survive to this day (one was burnt during WWII). I have seen the Berlin and the Leipzig versions, and both made me want to disappear into the work, rather than having to quietly tip-toe around it at a distance. 

The Festival of Lights was astounding on a different level. For one night many famous buildings have various images projected on them as citizens walk around and observe the city at night. That weekend Berlin really pulled out all the stops, as on our last day there we soaked up the sun in the Mauerpark as various artists played music all around us. We also had the best Vietnamese dish I have ever tasted (it was some kind of beefy broth, but not really having tasted Vietnamese before this was perfectly spiced). All that remained was a long ride in a crowded bus back to a tiny city that keeps playing hide and seek with the light. 

I'm so tired

The holidays seem like a distant memory. As soon as I landed back in Germany work started and this week the university began. With it comes and endless stream of  To-Do-lists and everyday processes that tire me about before they have even really begun.

So I reminisce about time spent with my family, about road trips and vacationing in Istanbul. Our day of arrival in Istanbul is a hazy recollection: my friend met my at the baggage claim as she had landed hours earlier and then we stumbled into the bright sunrise of the city. A very friendly cab driver sped us across the Bosphorus to Beyoglu where our hostel was. In broken English he explained how he had traveled to 62 cities and as we feared for our lives he swerved across empty lanes while simultaneously scrolling though old photographs on his smartphone of him in Vegas.

When we got to the Neverland Hostel we weren't allowed to check-in because it was only 6AM. So we slept on dingy couches in the foyer for a few hours until the other patrons came down for breakfast. After a shower we wandered the city and found our own breakfast. After finally checking in we found Taksim Square, ate some grapes in a park and wandered down the Istiklal avenue, Istanbul's shopping street. My aunt had given me an enormous goodie bag filled with padkos, so for dinner we snacked on biltong sticks, nuts and dried mango and then passed out.

Taksim Square

 

Light home

Negester en stedelig

Terwyl die Negesterre en die stedeligte witter
in die donker suidelike nagte óm ons skitter,
slaap jy nog weg in nag en swye
langs mos en varings van eertye:
’n see-anemoon waar geel spirale
lig deur water in jou van ’n Oerson daal,
daal in jou slaap; jy roer,
’n vis teen riet en maan se perlemoer;
jy sluimer in ’n tonnel van die kuil –
’n otter in nat holtes nog verskuil;
dan stort jy skielik uit as mens, besitter
van die Negester en stedelig se skitter.
Saans as die rye ligte langs die strate brand
sal jy met wye oë en met kleine hand
vir my bedui en stotterend sê
hoe groot houttolle kabels in diep slote lê;
partymaal sal jy by my tafel neul
om na die sirkus of die mallemeul
te gaan; en vaster om jou groei bioskope,
fabrieke, speurverhale en mynhope;
saans sal die stad se ligte witter
in jou donker siel bly skitter.
Watter kaart of watter ster sal ek jou wys
om veilig deur die grysland heen te reis?
Sal ek van ’n God praat wat verdoem,
van Christus, en die Tien Gebooie noem?
Voorlopig dan, maar onthou altyd
aan jou dade grens ’n ewigheid;
gee sin aan voorgeslagte deur die eeue heen,
besef jy is ’n vegter weer van die begin, alleen;
en mag die Suiderkruis en Negesterre witter
as die stedeligte in jou siel bly skitter.
~ DJ Opperman


Hierdie hemel is nie myne nie, agter wolke sonder einde skuil geen sterre wat vir my iets beteken nie. Hier ken ek nie my pad nie, hier is geen Suiderkruis wat wys waar my plek in die wêreld is nie.


Gedurend die tuisvakansie het ons twee plaas toe gery. Daai eerste aand het ons met tee en komberse buite gaan sit en ons plek tussen die sterre gekry. Ligjare se ligte het oor ons geskyn terwyl die melkweg vir ons ons rigting gewys het. Salig en gelukkig om in daai oomblik met jou te wees het ek geweet dat solank jy by my is, solank hierdie hemel 'n stukkie myne bly, sal ek nie die pad duister raak nie.

Older chests

Not too bad second attempt. 

My grandmother knows how to make things last. I have heard them retell countless times how once a year everyone came to the farm to aid in slaughtering a cow and then using all of its parts, even cooking the fat with something to make soap. Somehow the Afrikaner legacy of preserving food gets passed on through the generations and when I see an abundance of fruit for a cheap price, knowing full and well that I can't eat it, I'll purchase it.

This Watermelon-Strawberry Jam is a result of one such impulse. During the summer strawberries were abundant at the farmers' market and I still has some frozen watermelon in the freezer from my birthday party. Not one to throw anything away needlessly, I figured why not make strawberry watermelon jam?! The problem was that both do not contain enough pectin (I think) on their own to ensure that the jam thickens.

So I dialed my grandmother, some 14 000 km away, and asked what I should do. Sadly, she misunderstood what I wanted to do and proceeded to explain how to make Waatlemoen konfyt (Watermelon jam made from the white rind). Then I tried Google, but to no avail.

In the end this is more error than trial, but it worked out quite well:

6 cups  watermelon juice
5 cups strawberries (650g), washed and hulled
1kg Gelierzucker (jam sugar with added citric acid and pectin available in Germany)
500g Stevia Gelierzucker
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup lemon juice

- Place a plate in the freezer to later test if the jam is ready.
- I first cooked the frozen watermelon slowly just to thaw it and then sieved it to just get the juice.
- Then wash and cut the strawberries, and add them to the watermelon juice. It is best to use the biggest pot you have to prevent the whole thing from boiling over.
- Add all the sugars and the lemon juice, the slowly bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
- Turn down the heat and let it boil on a medium heat (about 15min in my case). To test whether the jam is ready put a tiny bit on the plate that was in the freezer. If it jellifies after a few minutes it is ready.

Hah, now for all the fails in this recipe:
- the jam jellified, but then did not when all of it was in jars and ready to be given as presents.
- the strawberry chunks also looked weird.
- I went back to the store and bought a 500g packet of Stevia Gelierzucker because it has less calories and I thought well, there is already a boatload of sugar in it.
- For next time I'll just immediately use 2 kg of normal Gelierzucker (no Stevia, no normal sugar) and that should do the trick.

Botched first attempt.

Eatstanbul

By my own fault I had imagined Constantinople and not Istanbul. I had pictured a layer of gold gleaming across the city, opulent mosques and churches bordering on lavish little streets and fantastic markets. Instead, a vast modern city spread endlessly before us with its accompanying stench and filth.

The highlight, undoubtedly, was the food. By God, the food!
Everyday started out with a large Turkish breakfast at out hostel (9€ for the night including this very breakfast): thick yogurt, muesli, slices of watermelon, grapes, feta cheese, tomato/carrot/cucumber salad, fresh bread and various spreads with coffee and an endless supply of Turkish tea. This tea is brewed strongly in a tiny teapot,  then diluted with hot water to suit the individual drinker's preference in tea-strength and served in small glasses with sugar klontjies.

For lunch and dinner my friend and I tried everything:

The only breakfast we paid for: a cheese omelette with bread, feta and salad.

Hazelnut and pistachio baklava. 

Snacktime on the Bosporus boat ride. 

Chestnuts. 

Wonderful goat's milk ice cream at Mado.

A churro-thing with pistachio. 

The best grilled lamb in Istanbul. 

Kokoreç, or what I now now to be "lamb or goat intestines, often wrapping seasoned offal, including sweetbreads, hearts, lungs or kidneys". Thank you Wikipedia. It was really tasty though. 

Mince Pide. 

Börek filled with cheese. The only vegetarian thing we ate during the entire trip. 

Manti, or Turkish ravioli, with a yogurt sauce. Delicious. 

Waffle with Nutella and strawberries. Don't mind if I do. 

Weekly market

Fresh orange or pomegranate juice. 

Lamb (I think it might have been liver), köfte and chickpeas. 

Caramel dondurma, or an elastic ice cream that involves an entire game with the ice cream vendor. I was not amused but my friend thought it was very funny. Here is an example. 

Our last meal: döner. 

Even though I only just realised what some of the things I ate were, it was all extremely well spiced, tasted marvelous and was very affordable. Next time we head to Turkey I would suggest skipping the city and only going where your stomach takes you.