Sun, Aug 31 - Germany - last day :(

9.16am - whole grain bread rolls with quark, jam and kiwi, on my parents' balcony, with Laurence and Jacob, and Schadeck castle in the background.9.23am - a close up of the German bread rolls we've been eating, with sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, poppy seeds and sesame

9.49am - some Bienenstich (simple cake w/ vanilla custard) and a tea made from dad's home grown and dried lemon verbena, while catching up on Obama's convention news, at Mom & Dad's, with Laurence and Jacob

10.21am - wild blackberrries along the path up to the forest, on a little Sunday hike with Lo and Jacob.

Almost everywhere we go we stumble on places where Nadi and I used to play when we were little. The area below also happens to be where the women of the village used to do the laundry in centuries past, before there were washing machines. It's also the place of a small American military camp after WWII, and just a few steps away from the place where refugees like my grandparents where allotted a tiny piece of public land to grow potatoes and onions, part of which they then traded with the American soldiers for canned meat, oranges and chocolate. When my dad was three or fours years old, some US soldiers taught him how to throw an American football right here. And my grandmother was killed by a falling tree while chopping trees for firewood with other refugees less than a mile from here.

a German cousin of Bonnie, Margo and Falvia

and more countryside. I wanted to take Lo and Jacob through the woods in the background, too, but they were ravaged by Germany's first ever tornado a couple of months or so ago. They're still trying to clean things up. They've done a good job of some parts we've been to today, but others are just impossible to get through, strewn with fallen trees. And this is an area that is protected by surrounding mountains (Westerwald and Taunus) and as such not terribly exposed to winds in general. Crazy times. Tornado in Germany. Who's ever heard such a thing? And what's next?

11.35am - got home super thirsty. It's a hot day out, in case you can't tell from the pics.

1.12pm - a Korean chicken hot pot, at the Alte Burgschaenke in Schadeck, with Mom 'n Dad (who's back from the annual Master Brewer conference where he'd been for the last couple of days), Kay and Anja, and Jacob and Laurence, who are off back to Paris after this.
This is at the centuries old village pub that for the last 30 years or so has been run by a small Korean family. These are the guys who taught me how to eat with chop sticks when I was about 10. Very nice people. They have family in Los Angeles, too ( I bet half of Korea does), and at some point, they told us, considered moving to Los Angeles. But then they went for a visit and decided Los Angeles and the lifestyle there was "too wasteful". So they ended up here. They have a couple of traditional German things on the menu, pork chops and sauerkraut and the like, as well as some random other Asian dishes ranging from Nasi Goreng to duck with peanut sauce, but overall, they've turned this village into a place where people eat Korean when they go out for Sunday lunch and don't even think about it twice.

3.56pm - blackcurrant cake and some of the puerh-coffee tea (with coffee beans, but brewed like a tea) that I gave dad for his birthday, after taking Lo and Jacob to the train station.

4.04pm - and some more cake, what with it being my last day and all...

a little farewell trip through the garden - this is one of the many apple trees planted by my granddad

and my dad's yellow zucchini

and my mom's roses, finally getting some decent sun

7.18pm - cherry tomatoes from the garden

7.23pm - braised fennel w/ orange juice. I'd bought the fennel in Frankfurt and had wanted to make it for Lo and Jacob, but of course forgot all about it. Didn't find it until today when I was raiding the fridge to see what I would take back to the States. So made it today for a last dinner w/ Kay, Anja and Mom.

7.33pm - last serving of Mom's vanilla apple sauce

8.07pm - and a farewell Botinchen