Our New Project

Burgess, deeply pensive, peering into the baby's cot.

Ten days ago, Burgess and I had a sleepless night. In the morning, just after sunrise, our little family became just a bit bigger. 3.685 kilos and 53 cm to be exact. After my initial shock of baby’s very spontaneous arrival (She was a week early, and I’d been told by the midwife that the average first-time labour would be 18 hours. She came in eight.), I must have drifted off briefly into a painkiller-induced sleep because the next thing I remember is taking this photo.

I also remember looking out the window onto a beautiful Sunday morning. I thought it beautiful even though all of the grass on the hospital grounds had been burnt brown from the incessant sunshine and lack of rain this spring and summer. But that’s what love does to you.

Ten days later, we are trying to keep up with the little sprog as she eats and sleeps her way into this world.

Mimi's first glamour shot.

Marie, our amazing and wonderful midwife. I'm now mad, mad, mad about midwifery as the best kind of birthing situation. We said goodbye to her on our way out of the hospital last Monday and she said "See you in 12 months!" We can't thank her enough.

Napping on our pet crocodile (the best £2.99 I ever spent at Ikea)

Napping on our bed

Posing, while napping, next to 'Freddie' the teddy bear I sewed for her from the beautiful wool sweater Don got me for Christmas, and which I unfortunately shrank in the laundry. OOPS. Sewing, by the way, is an excellent way to pass the time while fretting or trying to avoid fretting, a lot of which I was doing in the weeks leading up to now.

Our first Saturday at home after seeing the midwife for her first check-up. Big brother Brendan couldn't wait to come over and see her. He's delighted with his sister, although sort of distraught that she can't have a bicycle yet.

Napping, with what I'm calling a smile.

The new bunch of us. And she's not napping in this one!

Stay tuned to this blog for more photos, which I’ll update as frequently as new-motherly possible.

Oh! We finally decided on a name. It was not, as my father suspected, a plot to keep everyone guessing–we just wanted to get this one right after we’d been so attached to ‘Mimi’ for months.

She is Emelia Miryan Louisa Burgess

Nicknames: Cookie Monster (for her nyum nyum nyum noises), sproggy, Mimi

Yes, you can still call her Mimi. We do. In fact, we are currently having a family dispute on the spelling of this nickname. Burgess has devised Miu miu in homage to her Chinese heritage (he knew a Chinese nurse named Miu miu), even after I told him it was a trendy shoe brand, while I’m going with Me-Mi from looking at the name we settled on. I’m sure that just as soon as she can, she will tell us what she’d like to be called and how she’d like it to be spelled and lots of other things.

Shares a birthday with:

• Style guru Yves Saint Laurent — hooray! days of fun shopping ahead!
• Notable Americans Herman Melville and Francis Scott Key
• Eccentric American musicians, Jerry Garcia and Coolio
• Footballers Bastian Schweinsteiger (the coolest name of all the 2010 World Cup) and David James (the only English footballer who actually deserved to get paid for this year’s World Cup performance) and Caribbean sportsmen Frank Worrell (cricket) and Trevor Berbick (boxer)
• Many, many eminent scientists



I just found another reason to watch tennis

Dustin Brown, 25 year-old, 6 ft. 5 inch Jamaican German flying the Jamaican flag, currently ranked 106 by ATP. Watch out for him at Wimbledon and maybe US Open! Check out his ATP profile page with videos and photos: http://www.atpworldtour.com/Tennis/Players/Br/D/Dustin-Brown.aspx?t=mf

Progress :o)

According to CNN:

The World Bank has canceled Haiti’s $36 million debt, the institution announced Friday.

Haiti owed the money to the International Development Association, the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries. The nation, wracked by a devastating earthquake on January 12, now does not owe any more money to the World Bank.

[. . .]

The debt cancellation was made possible by contributions from Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, the World Bank said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/28/haiti.world.bank.debt.canceled/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Thank you (most of) Europe, Japan and Canada! But where’s the UK and USA? Thought they were a big part of the world economy. . .?

What we did in Fallujah

UPDATE: CNN reports this story on May 11, 2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/fallujah-birth-defects-ra_n_571119.html

If you’re afraid of seeing and hearing the truth of who really loses in war, then don’t read this. If you’re already saddened by the tragedies of the natural disasters in Haiti or in Chile, then you really shouldn’t read this. Because this disaster, which will be happening for at least a generation, did not have to happen. It happened because of what most people now agree was and is a needless war.

And the Iraqi government is not speaking up about it because they don’t want to offend the Americans. This report was bravely made by the doctors working in the hospital that was built with American aid. With tied hands and open mouth, here’s what they had to say:

From the BBC, March 4, 2010: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8548961.stm

From the Guardian, November 13, 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects (story and video)

I checked on CNN this morning and there is no sign of the story. So, for now (and I hope only for now) it doesn’t exist in America and for Americans (including me) who are partly responsible for it. In fact, it corroborates the cases of U.S. military personnel suffering with Gulf War Syndrome and other debilitating, deforming consequences of chemical warfare. And if memory serves me correctly, we are still getting around to the idea of connecting the sickness of these soldiers to the war in Iraq.

The nay-sayers may be able to explain away the soldiers as willing participants who are suffering nobly or by choice, but I’d like to see an Independent Panel of anybody look at these kids and explain it away.

Fishing for warmth

I know it’s the end of February, but Britain has been COLD this winter. Snow showers are regular and temperatures have been hovering around the 0 degree celsius mark for months. It’s more WILD than MILD, which is what London winters normally are.

But that’s enough moaning. Time for some optimism to bring on the warmer weather. And what a day I picked to start writing again. The temperature may reach 10 degrees today, and it’s been sunny all morning. And the sun is staying up after 5 pm these days. The dark days–the 3pm sunsets–are over!

As an encouragement for the eminent arrival of warmer days and to celebrate making a deadline today, I made  a Caribbean-style lunch for us. I say Caribbean-style because this particular meal would usually be made with snapper, grouper, or parrot fish–something gotten out of the actual sea– and would come, served with a little sand here and there on a 20-year old plate with cracks on the edges and would be enjoyed while sitting around in the delicious heat with friends or family enjoying a view like this:

Anyway, using the jar of escoveitch pepper sauce that Burgess made at the end of the summer from the hot peppers grown in our garden (with seeds smuggled in from Florida), we had pan fried rainbow trout and festival. Bet no one’s ever done THAT in the Caribbean!

As we spooned out layers of beautiful vinegar-soaked red pepper, onion and scotchies over the sizzling fillets of trout, we had our doubts about whether it would taste ‘right’.

But it was better than right, it was WICKED!!!!!

It was just like we were sitting off at Hellshire or Fort Clarence beach, like in this picture.

We just needed the Red Stripe.

And the heat.

And the beach.

And the sea.

Ok, I’m beginning to lose the thread of optimism here.

We should have taken pictures of our lunch to show you, but we were too hungry to wait!

Recipes

Fried Rainbow Trout

Rinse rainbow trout fillets with vinegar or fresh lemon juice. Then marinate in a mixture of milk, salt, pepper, dried rosemary, and any dried spices you like. Dust on both sides with a batter made of flour, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper. I didn’t use eggs (because I didn’t have any) and the batter ‘stuck’ just fine.

Place fillets, skin side down, in a pan with vegetable and olive oil mixture at medium heat. Use enough oil to completely cover the bottom of the pan. Cook both sides of the fish. You’ll know the first side is finished when it starts to curl up and you can see the that the skin is browned.

When finished, drain fillets on paper towels and then place on a plate. Spoon escoveitch sauce generously over the fish, to your taste.

Escoveitch Sauce

Roughly chop these vegetables and place them in a clean, sterilized jar, layering them neatly to make it decorative, if you like. I tend to just chuck them in, but Burgess did this layering thing which made it quite pretty.

• Onions
• Scotch bonnet peppers
• Bell peppers (any colour)
• Cucumber (optional)

Add allspice berries and stalks of thyme. Top up with white vinegar to cover all of the ingredients. Seal the jar and store at room temperature. Leave to infuse. The taste changes over time, as does the vibrancy of the colours. Open the jar and taste an onion or something once in a while. But be careful!

Festival

In a large mixing bowl, combine some flour (if you must measure it–use about 1/2 cup per person), slightly less cornmeal (about 1/4 cup per person), even less sugar (1 tsp per person) and a sprinkle of salt. Mix dry with a fork to get out all the lumps. Then, SLOWLY drizzle in some water. The idea is to mix it all up with your hands until the dry ingredients are bound together.

I lightly rub some vegetable oil on my hands so the flour mixture doesn’t stick. Once the mixture is bound, you can shape the dough. The most common shape is a long oval. I do a slight variation on this so that I don’t ever have too much soft ‘middle’ in the festival. Pick off handfuls and rub in your palms until it’s in a nice egg shape. Then hold at both ends, pull, then twist a bit. It should look like a twisty pastry or a big cheeto when you’re finished.

Place the festivals in a pan on low-medium heat, the oil heated until sizzling. Brown on all sides, turning often. Take them out when the festivals are brown on all sides and drain on paper towel.

Deadline? What deadline?

Is it genius, nonchalance or laziness or some mysterious combination of the three.  .  .   You know, that ‘thing’ that causes one to dawdle about while the important business of invention is knocking at one’s fingertips. Perhaps it’s the naked dread that the thing realised won’t be even a distant cousin to the thing I imagined.

Yes, that’s it. This happens to me a lot when I paint. The disappointment of seeing the shapes of the paint conforming to gravity or the forces of material physics rather than to how one imagined them is positively gut-emptying . Perhaps this explains why I also am behind on my painting project.

Oh, Kate, Kate–this being the part where I have a serious talk with myself–just get over it! You have 20 more days to meet the crazy 50K word count. 20! You promised Oliver (nephew) that book for his first birthday. He’s going to be four soon! OK, that didn’t scare me. I shall have to invent some other tactic.

Trouble is, my brain always has a plan to circumvent itself. Way before my ‘left’ brain, that’s the analytical, sensible side–has figured out how long it will take to complete anything, my true intuitive brain–call this one ‘right-but-SO-wrong’ brain because I have a crap sense of direction anyway–already ‘knows’. ‘SO-wrong’ brain also has a way of sabotaging pretty much everything. For example, I finally made good on my promise to self to go jogging on Sunday despite the cold damp.  .  . well, despite England. When I returned home from said jog, ‘SO-wrong’ brain already had a big plan to thwart my quest for health and fitness, involving sitting on the couch and watching the X Factor results while polishing off nearly an entire bottle of wine. Accidentally, of course.

I guess I just go with it. Anyhow, I promise now. . . back to work. Thanks for writing to my last post, caring friends. I feel your cheering me on in the cyber distance.

Name troubles

I began my effort at the 50,000 word-this-month goal this morning, but I’ve been thwarted by a conundrum, if that’s even possible. I’m sort of cheating, going back to a story I started last winter then abandoned at the first sign of good weather. In this story, I have characters whose names are not yet there. I mean that I give them names, but then it doesn’t feel right because the character hasn’t fully been shaped yet. The story is based very loosely on my family’s ancestry. Very loosely. I’m imagining lots of it.

I can’t imagine George Eliot having this problem. She is my favorite Victorian writer and I’m now reading her novel, Silas Marner, the one she liked best. I  finished the first chapter last night. I was so impressed by how she drew the character of Silas Marner–his past, his aspiration, his physical and emotional being–in one short chapter. His name, Silas Marner, already gives him so much character. It’s plain, but uncommon. I’m not sure what a marner is, but I imagined correctly that it comes from some kind of tedious occupation. I was sort of right–he’s a weaver and he lives in the time when one still wove a tale, as in cloth. But he doesn’t seem like a storyteller. He’s very quiet, speaking up only once in the chapter, to defend himself against a grave crime.

And I’ve now spent the better part of the morning trying to find a name for this character who’s been part of my mind for my whole life.

My November Novel (hopefully)

So last year, I found out about this kind of manic writing contest, National Novel Writing Month. It sort of reminded me of the dance-a-thons from Happy Days. You remember when Fonzie and some girl were holding each other up and making out on the dance floor at Big Al’s while everyone else was crashed out on the floor?

This one has to do with producing a goal of 50,000 words in the month of November. In an attempt to reach my goal and not get distracted in a rant as I might usually do, the blog this month will feature excerpts of stuff that I’m writing, questions seeking answers, foggy notions seeking ideas, and so on.

Thanks to those of you who have already encouraged me, checked up on me, etc. I need it!

We did it!

Hiya.

The big day was October 6, 2009, and we had an amazing one.  Though we chose to have a ‘wee’ wedding as the Scots say, we know that the love surrounding us out there was big. We felt your well wishes!

After struggling with Flickr for days only to decide it was rubbish, I’ve gone back to what I know best: my blog. Please click here to go to the ‘The biggest unplanned adventure page’ or simply use the tab at the right of this page.

The photos were taken by us and by our photographer, Kathryn McGeachy.  We’ve included some of the other important moments in this story of ours that is really just beginning.  Burgess says this is sappy romanticated girl stuff, but I’m doing it anyway.

Love,
Kathryn and Don

Wir Lieben Deutschland! The Continuing Adventures of Kate and Burgess

For the past two weeks, I’ve been glued to the coverage of the IAAF world athletics championships in Berlin. During the women’s marathon yesterday, the commentators were growing very annoyed with the director for cutting away from the live action to show these short ‘movies’ about the sights in Berlin, a smart ploy to pitch Berlin as a vacation spot to the viewers. These commentators also marvelled at the host city’s spotless, well-organized planning, once remarking that the second lap around the Brandenburg Gate made the course accurate to a centimeter. DUH. They are Germans.

Trier, a German town we visited

And as we found out on our recent trip to Deutschland, there are a few things we knew about Germany and a lot more that we didn’t. They are sticklers for economy and practicality. They make beautiful automobiles and equally beautiful roads on which to drive them. Today’s Germany is progressive, excelling in manufacturing and engineering, having gotten on with it after the darkness and tragedy of the 20th century. Hell, they’ve already pulled themselves out of the global recession. They are definitely doing something right. I didn’t realise how beautiful Germany would be, how warm the welcome (and how sweet the Riesling).

As I sit here, typing on my PC powered by Electricite de France, Germany is moving ahead under its own domestically produced power and infrastructure. Because Burgess is a human encyclopedia, I was treated to a transcript of German economic development while we drove East from Brussels through Belgium, across the Netherlands and into Germany.

A charming village home in Germany

The countryside is a gorgeous pastoral of rolling green hills and long valleys. And it’s useful as well. Gigantic wind turbines spin elegantly, producing clean electricity, and farmers plant agriculture in plots of flatland and on slopes, unintimidated by the forces of gravity. Grapes, corn, wheat: Everything is grown here. No space is wasted, yet important spaces, like the forests, are protected.

I’m now persuaded that if they hadn’t gotten carried away with all that evil genocidal plotting to rule the world and create a master race a century ago, that perhaps the world would have been better served with the Germans at the helm or as the example today.  It’s very noticeable to anyone who’s travelled around Europe that there are far fewer ancient buildings in this country than in any other since the Allies bombed the place to bits. To a person, such a history of your place must carry some sting, tempered even by time and reconciliation. As an American, sometimes I’ve felt ashamed of my country’s hypocrisies, the hubris we’ve displayed on the world stage–and I’m just talking about the recent ones. I wondered, as we drove around, what the average German thought, how they lived with that burden of their history. But how do you ask a question like that?

Flower sellers in a marketplace, Bonn. In the background, you can see the irrigation truck which travels the town watering the flowers.

When you see the rare old building intact, you get the eeriest feeling like you’re in an old movie with Nazi spies and snipers and blonde women in pencil skirts and long cigarettes. Burgess had a great time with this, playing spy games, looking for bullet holes in cathedrals, lurking around corners, imagining where SS snipers would have been hiding.

I wondered why a country that’s so efficient can’t come up with a better sign for public toilets. And why there were so many Chinese people living there.

The rest of us may be miles behind the Germans these days. And buying energy from France and food from the cheapest farmers in the EU while relegating the British farmer to poverty and shameful navel-gazing on his patch of land in the countryside is just the beginning. I felt a tinge of shame and regret as I ate an ear of corn grown in Germany and imported by Tesco the other day.

Looking up at a statue of the great Ludwig von Beethoven in Bonn. He was born in a small village which we passed along the Mosel, but he lived in Bonn for much of his life.

The average German person is bi-lingual. Impressive. The region of Germany we visited–in the West, along the Rhine and Mosel valleys–is gorgeous and easily traversed, even if you don’t speak German. Lots of people in Germany ride bicycles instead of using cars, which are fuel-efficient and low-polluting, in any case. They make great beer, wine and sausage. The best wurst I ever had. (Sorry) The biggest grouse I had with German culture was the proliferation of cigarette smoking and the availability of cigarettes to one and all. Kids can buy them off any street corner, from a box called a kiosk that accepts coins. What’s up with that? It’s a pretty efficient way of decreasing life span, come to think of it.

This trip was supposed to be a sequel to last year’s trip to Belgium. The German Grand Prix was at the Nurburgring this year, so we thought we’d spend a few days. Because of some idiotic international visa regulations, our faithful friends could not make the trip with us. The Belgians were not happy that our friend who is a Jamaican national, but for all intents and purposes a UK resident and taxpayer had only two months remaining on his current visa. Perhaps they were afraid he would try to overstay in horrid Brussels. Eat chocolate waffles and try to get a job at the European Commission or something. Yeah, right. Trust me, I can’t imagine why they would want to think that.

Allow me to wander down a rabbit hole for a few sentences. Schengen visas to visit Europe as a tourist are required of Jamaican nationals, but never have been of American citizens (me–although I was born and still am a Jamaican national) and no longer of Barbadians (Burgess). After a too-long period of time  lobbying the EU, a small group of small places now are exempt from the Schengen visa requirement. These are six small, desirable, politically stable, and visitor-friendly island nations, including Barbados, St. Kitts & Nevis, Antigua & Barbuda, the Bahamas, Mauritius and the Seychelles. There have probably been more Jamaican immigrants to Europe, who are now resident taxpayers, than from all six of those countries combined. Alas, it is neither small, desirable, politically stable nor visitor-friendly. Apparently.  We will have to be content with producing excellent sprinters and entertaining Europe with our music and culture. It’s a good thing Jamaicans have a reputation for being contented. . .

Anyhow, it was just going to be the two of us this time. Maybe. Because of some idiotic UK regulations, we nearly didn’t make the trip either. Burgess and I had sent our passports to the Home Office five weeks earlier so that they could look at them and give us permission to marry, confirming that neither one of us had imported the other as an illegal or underage bride or bridegroom. We had assurances that our passports would be back in time to travel, but of course they weren’t. They were still in Croydon, sitting on someone’s desk, just to the left of a cheese sandwich and an old packet of crisps. On the Friday before our trip, I spent six long hours sitting in a drafty office building in Croydon, waiting on the retrieval of our passports from that office just two floors up.

Patience is required when dealing with the government.

We took the Eurostar once again–first class this time. Heh heh. Once in Brussels, we rented what we thought would be a sporty hatchback and got a brand new Ford Focus station wagon. Diesel. It wasn’t so bad, but next to all the Benzes, Beemers and Audis on the autobahn, we were feeling a little Charlie Brown. We had three hours to drive the 270km to the Nurburgring so we could catch the qualifying round. Somehow, the Focus managed it. Sorry about the engine, guys.

My first impressions of Germany were fantastic, as any drive through the beautiful countryside will show. I could figure out the German road signs better than I could read the ones in English in the UK. Weird! Once at the ring, everything went smoothly with no surprises. I was really beginning to like this place.

After a moderate hike, we found our seating section, which was located in the town of Nurburg, with a view of the Nurburgring in the distance. Had our faithful friend managed to come with us, Burgess probably would have beat him over the head with a wurst for buying those tickets. But that would have been a waste of good wurst, wouldn’t it?

Check out this biker getting a better view of the track from his bike than we had from a ticketed section. He's standing at the edge of the main road around the track.

To be specific, we were on “the grassy knoll”, up from the hedge, before the fence, next to the “Old Ring”, another fence, then forest and camping spots, then the public road, more bush, then another fence, and finally, the race track. Kinda funny when you watch (with binoculars) 6 men armed only with step-ladders, stand over the track fence to watch the cars. Or the bikers who parked next to the fence and did the same thing.

Saturday night was a recce of Koblenz, scoping out the parking so we could take the coach to the track. Somebody got flashed by a face-on speed camera in the middle of town. Nerves were calmed by dinner at an Argentinian steakhouse, complete with Chinese waiter!

We took this shot using the highest setting on the zoom, from our seats in the grassy knoll, aka seating section T17.

Thank God the Warsteiner and wurst were good. We race fans were disheartened after the first lap. Lewis had his first promising start of the season, but got nicked by Mark Webber, the eventual winner, at the start, sending him to the back, a full lap behind everyone else. My race was over. Burgess is a Brawn supporter, and though they are the championship leaders, they weren’t doing such a hot job that day either. He blamed this all on the weather. Sure.

So we spent most of the race talking to the German couple sitting next to us, drinking Warsteiner, trembling in the weird, chilly summer mist, and giddily topping up our Nurburgring debit card so we could have more Warsteiner. We must have had 40E worth of the stuff by the end of the afternoon. And Burgess learned his first German sentence: ‘Ich wiestes zwei bier bitte’ which means ‘May I have two cold beers, please.’

Oh, and this is what some of the other people were doing. They had a lot more Warsteiners than we did. It must have been the three coolers they toted up the hill.

I guess they were really depressed about the view from our section. Still at 68E a ticket, you'd think they'd actually want to watch the race.They didn't!

Fans storming the track just after the race was over. I'm not sure why the tractor is there. Wish we could have done this, but we were at least a half mile away.

We dragged ourselves back to the coach and I tried to stay awake for the 1.5 hour drive back to Koblenz, where I hoped that the events of the previous evening wouldn’t be repeated. When we got in to the weinhaus the night before, we were given a room with twin beds in a new annex. ‘Better tv’ the landlady explained when Burgess went downstairs to change the room. Our new room with a king size bed had a tiny tv, to the landlady’s credit, but the real trouble was the 50th anniversary going on in the hall just opposite the room. Lotsa bier, lotsa food, lotsa chorale singing. YES, chorale singing is alive and well in the villages of Germany. Anyhow, we got back to a quiet wienhaus on Sunday and passed out.

The next morning, we decided we’d explore the Mosel weinstrasse, or wine road, having read about it in a corner of a shaded box in my library book. It was either that or a river ferry trip in the rain. With the aid of our rented sat nav, we drove on the autobahn to Trier, one of the oldest surviving Roman cities in Europe. We did some sightseeing, including driving through what I’m now is sure is a pedestrian-only wine road, with the aid of our sat nav.

Us, in front of one of the old Roman relics, the Black Gate. We didn't know this yet, but the weather would become suddenly and unbearably hot. Burgess, who likes to brag about packing half as much stuff as I do, would end up doing a little shopping.

Trier is a very touristy little town, but you can easily see the whole place on foot, which is nice. And there's lots of shopping.

Burgess, having some eis (ice cream) while pondering some street art and trying to cool off (it's a fountain).

Now he's looking for sniper escape routes and bullet holes in the stone gable. Maybe. That's his new t-shirt in the bag. Trying to play cool and not change into it just yet.

This is a marble foot from an ancient 12m high statue of Konstantin.

Back in the Focus, we decided to drive around to the Eastern side of Trier where the library book promised we’d find some vineyards and we could do some wine tasting. We put the coordinates into the sat nav and we were sent up a really steep hill. We were following one of those huge tourist buses, so I assumed we were going the right way. Then I got worried when the sat nav told us to ‘turn left here’.

Well, that isn't exactly what happened, but my human navigator will swear to this day that there was a sign directing us to drive into the vineyard roads. So, we did--passing walkers who gave us dirty looks and vineyard workers on narrow stony paths, some of which were just the edge of a precipice.

From the vineyard on a hill, looking down into the Mosel River valley and Trier.

Unfazed by the detour–rather, inspired by it–we kept looking for the Mosel Weinstrasse. I’m still not sure how we found it. The Tom-Tom doesn’t register a road called the Weinstrasse and the library book didn’t give a highway code. After about an hour of what I thought was aimless driving (Burgess will tell you he knew exactly where he was going), we were on the magic road.

Another charming village along the weinstrasse

Passing bikers and coaches on a fairly narrow road, we crossed the Mosel river at least 6 times in zig-zag fashion and drove in and out of several picturesque villages until serendipity called.

It was time to taste the wine at last. But where? Entering cute town #34 along the Mosel Weinstrasse, I saw a white-haired man tinkering with something in a doorway. Burgess stopped the car and we spent a few hours with Herr Karl Schuh, owner/proprietor of Gastehaus Schuh in Neumagen-Dhron. His warm welcome included a round of his finest Riesling and a couple of verses of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Kingston Town’ in my honour. Turns out we’d just missed his 60th birthday party which was held the night before in his weinhaus. When we pulled in, he was moaning about his hangover and getting a little sad about the birthday. Good thing we came along then! I think this is what he said. . . He was speaking mostly German with a few English words here and there.

Since Karl wasn’t exactly sure where these places were that we said we were from, he took out his grandson’s old cardboard globe and we showed him where Barbados and Jamaica were. An older German couple out on a bike ride stopped in, and we all had an interesting conversation in German and English, although none of the five of us there were fluent in both languages. The wine helped. While he and Burgess continued to converse in English and German, I strolled around taking photos.

Burgess (much happier in his new t-shirt) and his new weinbauer friend, Karl Schuh, in the doorway of the Weinhaus

If you’re ever in the area, visit Karl at Hinterburg 28. He’ll show you a good time. Leaving Neumagen-Dhron, we drove past the gigantic stone wine ship, from which the town takes its name. Leave it to us to find the oldest wine-making village in Germany. By accident.

Here are some of the best views along the weinstrasse:

The Mosel river valley

View of an old ruin from the Mosel weinstrasse. Shelled? Or just ruined as a consequence of age? Who knows, but it's beautiful.

A strip of road with your choice of weinhaus. Next time, we're coming by bike!

A reminder along the way that innovation is a hallmark of the German people. A helicopter is hired to spray the vines along the steep valleys. Why not?

I'd forgotten that another hallmark of German history was devout Christianity. All along the weinstrasse, you can see stone monuments to Christian saints and iconic images like the ones of Mary and Jesus in the opposite corners of this photo. In many vineyards, you follow the path and do the stations of the cross at the same time. You can do the crime and the penance at the same time?? Thank God for Catholic school or else we may never have made it out of those vineyards! wink wink

Did I mention that Germany is a little bit quirky, too?

We spent the rest of our visit touring around Bonn and Koln, visiting marketplaces, the Cologne Dom (cathedral) and being happy tourists, enjoying German hospitality.

Here I am sporting a European tan in front of a church in Bonn, where we have a few more stone body parts. I'm not sure if there is some history or custom of using stone body part art in German towns or . . .

Stopped in to have a beer at this bierhaus across from the hauptbanhoff near the Dom. Right, that's a bar across the street from the bus station near the cathedral.

We took a short river cruise. From our boat, we saw Koln's (aka Cologne) most popular beach, frequented by elderly nude sunbathers on bikes and sheep.

This is an interesting view. In the distance is the Koln Dom. I took this shot from the steps leading to what's now a railway bridge. The bridge is flanked by two gigantic statues of horse-and-rider. This was done by a wealthy family (can't remember their name) that developed Koln. They wanted to be remembered and thought that statues of them riding straight on into the cathedral (that's the angle) would be memorable. What I remember, though, is the very sensible bike rail that runs at the edge of the steps. You can see it in the front left corner of the photo. You put your bike wheels in the gutter and roll it up and down the steps. Now that's cool!

A cool gargoyle hangin' out at the Dom

A cool portico at the Dom with inlaid mother-of-pearl sculptures. I must have stared at this for at least 20 minutes. This edifice is so intricate in detail that it forces you to look (and look and look). Gee, I guess that's why it took 800 years to finish this cathedral.

My flip flop tan. I'm including this snap to show you just how hot it was in Germany. I never had a flip flop tan while living in Florida, but I had one after two hot days in Germany. It's now much worse after several weeks of hot weather in the UK. Go figure!

And that’s more than enough about body parts, isn’t it? I’m now feeling squeamish because some pervert with a foot fetish will be having jollies tonight thanks to me. ewwwwwww

Anyhow, it’s the ‘volk’, the people, in Germany that made the place memorable and well worth another visit. In fact, there’s a man in Neumagen-Dhron to whom we owe a letter of thanks for one of the best afternoons ever.

Auf wiedersehen!