That was the day that was¶
Uh, what a day… after a long night out – with there being light outside (as it has only been dark and rainy all year, everybody was surprised by that summerish fact when leaving the club), people setting up the market and the milk and newspaper already being there when I returned home, I had to get some sleep before heading off for a late start in the day. After taking a photo of our concrete city hall in the light of the sunrise…
With that football thing coming up, there are basically no areas left where you’re spared of it. They even have posters and little plastic balls up in the university restaurant. Also, the Mexican national team is staying in Göttingen (which, judging from an article I saw, is quite ridiculous as all the other teams seem to be staying in posh or fancy places, but the Mexicans just got). As a consequence there are flags put up everywhere in town to welcome the guests. And everbody who isn’t actively offended by the mere existence of football seems quite enthusiastic. In fact, the Mexican team played against a local team today and loads of people were going to see that.
The flags are remarkable in a way. Germany isn’t like the U.S., say, where people are keen to display their national flag all the time. Usually just official building will have a flat. And most of them will only have them on public holidays. And people putting up a flag at their house will likely be of the less savoury conservative or nationalistic kind. Of course big sporting events are more likely to also turn your average sports fan into a flag carrying moron. But it’s still unusual to see that many flags up. But people always make sure not to display the German flag only. There’s always a Mexican – or other foreign – flag to go with it. Oh, and even the streets start looking like football has come home:
The weekend magazine of our paper made another football-related experiment. There is the tournament’s mascot ‘Goleo’ (probably there should go ™ © ® whatever marks with that…). Which is a dumb looking lion that has a vaguely stupid names and forgot to put on his pants. Hehe nudity on telly if you wish. I guess they can’t broadcast that kind of perversion over in the U.S.. So the paper took the lion on a trip to see what they could do with the lion. They went into a barracks and gave commands to soldiers, they visited closed areas of Neuschwanstein or a local meeting of the conservative party and they even managed to get into restricted areas of an airport without being properly checked. The only thing they couldn’t get away with was looking around behind the counter at McDonald’s. Well organised business!
I tried out the new supermarket they opened this month. It’s in an extremely ugly building which they put up in town. And it’s horrible. Not just because of the typical ‘eeek I don’t find anything in this place!’ problem that unknown supermarkets have, but also because it wasn’t comfortable at all. The aisles were too narrow. Even just two people trying to pass each other with shopping carts required care and attention. Add to that that the whole place was full of signs screaming ‘cheap cheap’ and I couldn’t even find a fresh meat or cheese counter inside the store and I wasn’t impressed. File as: another bad supermarket.
While shopping I picked up some sweets and found ‘mini’ Haribo Colorado. It’s a bag of mixed sweets with a lot of licorice stuff in there but also containing fruity pieces. So I thought the tiny ones looked even nicer and might be better for eating less in one go (ah, well, I was fooling myself with that of course as the winning strategy for these things is to eat the whole bag in one go…). And, yeah, they looked pretty. But they don’t deserver their name as the sweet in there weren’t really tiny versions of the usual stuff but mostly sweeter and somewhat yucky bits. Never getting things right those marketing people.
My shopping also included other aspects. I went to the fabrics department in a store to get a better idea about the fabric I want for my next laptop bag. They had many different fabrics. Which didn’t help. As quite a few of them could be considered ‘interesting’ but I’m not really sure which one to choose. After the bags I’ve had so far with classical fabrics like pinstripe or corduroy, it might be good to go for something new. The problem is that I really like simple black and white patterns or fabrics with some kind of texture. So in the end I kept returning to those ‘old’ ones or staring at really unfashionable black and white patterns which my grandma has used in her days.
Perhaps some flowery pattern would be good. One that is a real pattern and has both interesting yet-not-too-bright colours and some good symmetry to it. But this seems to be hard to find – particularly if you don’t really know what you’re looking for. Yikes, difficult! I should just let my mum find something…
While shopping I also got some steak with the plan to indulge in yet another cool recipe (p. 130 of Jamie’s Dinners ): You prepare a kind of salad with radish, coriander and chilies (actually there should be daikon as well, but I couldn’t find that) and make a sauce of sesame paste, soy sauce and lime to go with it. To that you add fried and then thinly sliced steak. Sounds yummy? You bet it is.
Looks a bit vegetarian perhaps, but there’s enough meat in it. So much meat in fact, that we had some rucola salad as a starter / side dish with it. And to finish off everything, some baklava with coffee… hmmm.
