I'm B-a-a-a-a-ck

...and now that I have an over-equipped kitchen at my disposal, I can't keep myself from cooking. (It also helps that I no longer have five classes with behemoth reading lists to occupy my time, at least for the next month.)

To herald my return to the deluxe world of KitchenAids and convection ovens, my parents decided to host a Christmas cocktail party and put me in charge of appetizers, cocktails, and desserts (much as I would have liked to round out the alphabet with breads, I wasn't even the one to buy baguette, much less bake any). So last week, in between writing twenty-five pages of term papers and parsing forty sentences of an obscure Central American language, I came up with a fancy title for myself ("First Notes and Finishing Touches, Plus Booze") and plotted my menu: adorably portioned miniature desserts. And the morning after I came back, at two a.m., I rolled out of bed and into an apron and got started, with six hours of sleep in three days, and made these:

Chocolate Soufflé Cupcakes with White Chocolate Mint Mousse

My mother, blessed woman that she is, even bought me a one-pound bar of bittersweet chocolate for the job. With almonds. Which meant that I spent ten minutes in front of a pan of melted chocolate fishing out nuts. (Never fear, those almonds found a second home on squares of French chocolate cake.) But they turned out beautifully, no? The secret, it turns out, to getting your parents' neighbors to beg you to open up a pastry shop is to whip half a pound of white chocolate with heavy cream and sliver dark chocolate on top.

The second item on the menu was a plate of individual pavlovas with berry sauce.

Pavlova is basically a fancy name for a huge meringue, all dolled up in pretty whipped cream and a dressing of fresh fruit. Australia and New Zealand have nearly come to blows over which country invented the dessert, which was named after Anna Pavlova - though how a Russian ballerina is related to a big puff of sugar and fat I'm not sure.

My real labor of love was this cake, though - three layers of decadent pistachio, marzipan (homemade!), and chocolate ganache. I sliced open my index finger leveling this thing, but it was all worth it because I got to taste the scraps of cake. Somehow I managed to decorate it one-handed; the pink marzipan rose on top was not colored with blood, thank you very much.

Leftovers, what leftovers? I had one cupcake and one teeny, tiny sliver of cake left for the next day, testament to the glorious success of the party. The bottle of homemade Irish liqueur I made surely didn't hurt. I still have half a bottle of it left, though,which I'll have to dispose of somehow.... maybe tomorrow I will post the recipe.

Stateside and So Behind

I'm back at home after ten weeks of wandering, and the first things I did after my long absence were tussle with Aja and cuddle with my guitar. I might also have hugged my parents, but only because there were too many kitchen appliances for me to decide which one to embrace - after months without a whisk your head starts to go funny.

That was Thursday; it's now Saturday and I'm no closer to being caught up on my updates than I was before. What did I do today instead of lovingly posting pictures of Prague? I ground a kilo of flour and kneaded dough for eighteen straight minutes, because I came home to a house devoid of any carbohydrates save tasteless crackers (Ryvita: cardboard's answer to bread). So out came the yeast and all of Mom's Austrian cookbooks, and in the sweltering jungle of Maryland humidity I pounded out a loaf of Weizenvollkornbrot.

The recipe I used was charming - the authors included explanations for all of the waiting and whacking peculiar to making bread. Why, for instance, one has to knead the bread for another five minutes after the initial kneading and waiting (so that it's a consistency that doesn't crumble when you cut it), or brush the freshly-baked loaf with water (so that it appears more appetizing, because we eat with both our mouths and our eyes). Oh, those Austrians, they are so wise.

There are dozens of recipes in the book that I want to try out, so I'll do an illustrated post on baking bread later this week, after I've finished off the second leg of my journey (Prague, Berlin, Paris round two), the tail end of Barcelona, and the recipes remaining from my Viennese experiments.... and to think, I actually made plans for tomorrow.

What are these plans, you may ask? Making ice cream.

Unhappy News

While Prague was the city of cheap, Berlin is the city in which they charge for everything, including internet access. Blog posts are thus on hold until I find a nice café that will let me while away a few hours at one of their tables, because it would be too weird to sit in the 'business corner' of the hotel lobby in the wee hours of the morning. :(

Prague, Day One: A Hell of Hike

Sunday morning in Prague, I awoke not to the sound of churchbells, but to the sight of half the bathroom ceiling on the floor. Luckily, having stumbled into bed in the wee hours, I stumbled out of it at noon, at which point the hotel had an extra room available with all of its ceilings intact. Reassured that I would not have insulation in my toothpaste the following morning, we happily headed off to brunch at the same vegetarian restaurant from last night. I'd seen by chance that they served a brunch buffet on the first Sunday of every month, and having so enjoyed last night's meal, we were all too happy to revel in the coincidence with a big plate of vegetarian goodness. I've never had Thai green curry alongside baked beans, Mediterranean spreads, and spinach quesadilla, but it is a combination I will gladly encounter again.

It's not called "food porn" for nothing.

I also decided to be adventurous and try another exotic drink - a Middle Eastern concoction called sahleb, "a milky drink from the tubers of the Orchis mascula plant, popular in the Middle East for its aphrodisiac effects." I can't speak for the last bit, but it sure was tasty with cinnamon and walnuts - like warm, thick yogurt, only mildly sweet instead of tart.

I might have made a reservation for our last night in Prague. Maybe. (Don't look at me like that - I have a third bizarre plant drink to try!)

Then it was off across the Vltava River from Old Town to New Town, and then to Prague Castle, home to many treacherous cobblestones and narrow staircases. Instead of walking along the famous Charles Bridge, Gothic postcard star extraordinaire, we opted to take its less famous northern cousin, and thus get a picture of it in all its glory. I rather fancy that the arches look like the trails of skipping stones, bouncing across the surface of the river.

Also across the river in Malá Strana is the world-famous Kafka Museum. Oh, you haven't heard of it? That's because it's unfinished, buried under the footnotes of dozens of literary scholars. I am afraid to go in, lest I find myself stuck in an attic with a bunch of lawyers.

What they don't tell you is that the hot air balloon ride never ends.

The climb to the top was refreshing, with a nice view of the city below - but not nearly as the view I'd get later from the top of Petrín Hill. The buildings in the castle's vicinity confirmed my impression of Prague: it's as though someone shrank Vienna down to a children's toy set, decorated it with gingerbread house trim, shook out all of the normal inhabitants, and filled it with tourists, souvenir shops, and fraudulent currency exchange stations. Perhaps we can call the kitsch authentic to Prague because it's Slavic.

Austria's fingerprints are all over Prague - behold a building devoted to Maria Theresia, mama dearest of the motherland. She did many a good turn for the city, like letting its Jewish populace remove the enormous ruff collars they had been forced to wear. The empress is also responsible for the enormous sculpture of the Titans duking it out in the courtyard. Symbolism, perhaps?

Easily my favorite building was St Vitus Cathedral, which featured some of the most stunning stained glass I have ever seen. The enormous, vaulted ceilings have fantastic acoustics, as I learned when a visiting choir group started up an impromptu a capella session. There ain't nothing like a Latin liturgy at two in the afternoon.

The view to the altar.

Alphonse Mucha, of Art Nouveau fame, designed this window depicting the Slavic saints in the 1930s. Incredibly, the glass itself is painted and not stained at all - maybe that's why the colors are unbelievable. Who would have known that genius with posters would translate to genius with glass?

I also liked this secret door, concealed behind Gothic stalactites.

Unfortunately, every building of any interest that wasn't a cathedral cost far too much money to enter, so we contented ourselves with a stroll through the remaining courtyards and sidestreets. Tucked behind the Castle, in his sister's house on Golden Lane, Kafka took his tea with a side of biscuits and enormous bugs. Alas, the street was closed for construction - another area in which Prague takes after Vienna, in its constant restoration - but K. cropped up elsewhere.

Who doesn't want a Kafka Fun Explosive, at a Good Price?

These beauties awaited us in the Royal Gardens, even though I have no idea what they were doing there.

Work it, baby!

The next four hours are a blur of gardens and trees and hiking up all the way up Petrin Hill. Some highlights, working down: a pair of nuns strolling merrily along; the onion domed Church of St Lawrence; an overgrown garden lining the thirteenth-century Hunger Wall; a picturesque stairway before it turns tortuous; an ornate bench in the midst of roses; a pond with a seal fountain; Aja's brothers tussling on the lawn.

The Hill is also home to the Church of St Michael, an old Orthodox Church that was moved here from the Ukraine Valley. It's smaller than it looks, but it's made all of wood - even the nails holding it together.

We returned, exhausted, to the streets of Malá Strana and the welcome Vietnamese respite of Mály Buddha, Czech for "Little Buddha." The restaurant doubled as a gallery for Asian trinkets and tea paraphernalia, so the table next to us was stacked high with ceramic teapots molded into the ample-girthed likeness of Siddhartha himself.

I tried ginseng wine for the first time, and it's vile. I thought I'd like it, since I've enjoyed both plum and lychee wine, but I should have known better since ginseng isn't actually a fruit. But the squid was good! It's buried underneath all those delicious leaves of cilantro and slices of red pepper.

By the time we finished with dinner, it was late enough that we could walk across Charles Bridge without getting trampled underfoot. I tried in vain to find the passage underneath the bridge to the café where the former president of the Czech Republic served the former president of the United States a beer, but alas, was flummoxed. Another night!

Nostalgia: Vienna, City of Night

One fateful night in Vienna, I literally ran right into the middle of some kind of socialist/anarchist/communist/general rabble-rousing protest. I think I'm subconsciously attracted to this kind of thing, because three years ago when I visited the city I arrived in the middle of a massive pride parade. There were people wearing t-shirts with catchy anti-capitalist slogans done up in various corporate fonts, signs exhorting people to forgo voting in favor of "making trouble" (a rather vague request), and marchers carrying banners suggesting the dissolution of all international boundaries. Along with the usual crowd of pierced, dyed, and alternatively-clothed youth, it all made me wish I'd gone running in a ripped Social Distortion shirt and a lot of hemp.

The reason why ended up there in the first place was to figure out the source of the percussion that'd made its way past my headphones, and it turns out that no political gathering is complete without a political band. I wanted to figure out exactly what was being protested (and which ideology(s) were doing the protesting), but my timing was terrible, given that I was in the middle of an hour-long run. So I sped away, resisting the siren song of electric violins, and resolved to come back once I was done, figuring that surely they'd still have something to protest in an hour.

Wrong! Turns out these things run on a schedule, and so they were all cleared out by ten. I got to watch the stage getting packed up into a van, and there weren't even any posters strewn on the ground or scrawled chalk messages left over to give me any clues as to what the hell I'd just seen. Damn European socialism, so timely with its state-sanctioned sanitation - this sort of thing would never happen in America! I had to resign myself to taking pictures of the city at night, instead of enraged activists. It worked out kind of nicely, since the following is my walk to work in reverse.

I was amused to find that the rearing horse statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy is the place to go if you're under thirty and drunk on a Thursday night. It's a big change from the tourist crowd.

My place of work, looking rather dazzling in the moonlight

The Rathaus, not actually full of rodents.

Pretty by day, the Museum of Natural History shines at night.

One of many classy Kaffeehauser in Vienna.

Vienna, Last Day / Prague, First Night

This morning I bid Vienna a bittersweet farewell, and prepared for the next leg of my journey to Prague, home to golems and goulasch. As the city disappeared through the window of the train compartment, smeared with the thumbprints of past passengers, I thought about all the things I'd miss: seeing the baroque church spires lit up at night, tripping on the cobblestone streets in the rain, eating gelato underneath the towering statue of Gutenberg and his printing press. I won't be able to run along the overgrown and rubble-strewn banks of the Danube, or take a bicycle ride through the wide and wild poppy fields of Niederösterreich, for a long while yet. These are things I won't easily forget, and don't want to.

I never did a moving-in post on the apartment, but I'm making up for it now with a smörgåsbord of photographs, taken with a heavy heart.

The last view, looking out onto the street.

Walnuts, ahoy.

Before we caught the train, I ran into the Naschmarkt to get one last Hungarian baumkuchen, which only shares its cooking method with the German variety. It's a single, long piece of dough wrapped around a thick spit, baked, and then dusted with various flavors - cinnamon, walnut, cacao, vanilla, "bounty" (coconut and cacao). Je l'adore.

The Czech countryside was stunning, particularly because our train cut through the Sudetans. This meant that in addition to feeling like I was zooming through a Venetian blind - tunnel light tunnel light tunnel light - I got some lovely mountain views. (Seconds later, a train roared past on the neighboring tracks, and I saw my life and a lot of seventies-era paint flash before my eyes.)

Let's ignore the big grey pole, shall we?

A democratic nation with communist stylings.

The train ride was about five hours long, but it was pleasant enough, especially considering that we had an entire six-person compartment - and thus, three seats each to sleep on - to ourselves for most of it. About thirty minutes from Prague, a slight Czech girl dressed for a Victorian tea party joined us, but this hardly changed matters as she silently clutched her umbrella in the corner.

Having learned from our handy guidebook that Czech taxi drivers are a treacherous lot just short of serial killer material, we opted to take the metro to the stop nearest our hotel in Josefov and then walk the remainder of the way... on cobblestone streets. I think the wheels of my suitcase are made of kryptonite; there is no other way they could have stayed on otherwise.

I decided that I liked Prague as soon as we checked in to our hotel, where we were cheerily handed "welcome drink" vouchers for either mojitos or champagne at the bar. It was about dinner time by the time we rolled out, so we decided to meander around the Jewish quarter and Old Town until we found something suitable.

Clockwise from top left: the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, whose right tower is indeed stouter than the left; a quaint Old Town street; St. Wenceslas' horse on the façade of the Storch House; the view down Na Prikope to Palác Koruna.

The first thing that struck me about Prague is that it feels really small. At first I was under the mistaken impression that it was quiet and empty of chatty tourists, too, until we arrived at the Old Town Square and I was rudely disabused of my delusions. Then the city started feeling like Barcelona, with Old Town Square replacing La Rambla and souvenir Bohemian crystal taking the place of teacups shaped like the Sagrada Familia. I think it's the Gothic architecture, and the streets deliberately arranged to lead to the greatest amount of confusion, and all of the scantily-clad and tanned women (tourists, no doubt; natives are pale and actually wear clothes) scampering off to the various clubs and bars arrayed around the center.

A sampling of the oddball stores we passed: I think I know what inspired this glass shop's name; marionnettes!; the bicycle parked by the Absintherie; look what I found! Not pictured: the Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments.

To get to the vegetarian restaurant selected for tonight, we passed by the Charles Bridge. It was spectacular, even with tourists crawling all over it like lice. There was a queue to cross it.

The restauraut's name, Lehka Hlava, translates as "Clear Head," and was located on a warmly lit side street (cobblestoned, of course). It was all vegetarian - one of about half a dozen in the entire city - and featured a ton of different culinary influences and several exotic drinks.

The decorations inside were beautiful, but it was too dark to get any good pictures. Apparently, in the Czech Republic it's not uncommon for lone diners to join other tables if there are seats, so we split a large table with a pair of women from Tel Aviv. They were so friendly, and just as impressed with the menu as we were.

The Greenhorn, juice pressed
from young barley shoots.

Since we were feeling so healthy, we ordered carrot cake, thinking it wouldn't come doused in a delicious chocolate sauce. It did, and so it disappeared too quickly to take a picture. Oops.

Let's take it from the top: polenta gnocchi, barley risotto with tempeh, sesame stir-fry.

Barcelona, Segunda Dìa: Park Güell is Swell

Caution: this post contains pictures of cute animals, palm trees, sunshine, and amounts of whimsy that have been shown to induce seizures in adults. You may be inspired to listen to flamenco music for days, or consume alarming quantities of tropical drinks. You have been warned.

Rue de Gaudí is a lovely, shaded pedestrian boulevard that begins at the northern corner of the Sagrada Família and spans several blocks of cafés, restaurants, and souvenir shops. It culminates in the magnificent Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, for whose services I would deliberately break my arm. It has sixteen pavilions and numerous exquisite gardens - or so I am told, as I was not able to see for myself. Inexplicably, both the magic hospital and the magic fountains were conspiring against me this trip: the gates were closed and entry was barred. Perhaps someone especially contagious was running about the grounds, threatening to infect tourists. I would have braved the plague.

Yes, this is seriously a hospital.

Our infirmary dreams thus thwarted, we had no choice but to find solace in another garden - Park Güell, site of Gaudí's mad-hat adventures in landscaping.

That is not Ophelia.

We stopped by a smaller park on the way up, home to a lovely old abbey and many lovely nuns, and also a basketball court, where we paused to munch on Spanish pastries. While in some the sight of sun-soaked cobblestone churches inspires religious fervor or, at the very least, some beatific smiling, in the Czar it inspired a flurry of Hamlet quips. I ignored him and filled up our waterbottles at the old-fashioned spigot. Get me to a nunnery, indeed.

Two ensaimadas and endless steps later - Park Güell, like so many places with great views, is located at the top of a very big hill - we arrived through the backdoor, and were instantly transported to a tropical paradise. There were palm trees, and brightly colored umbrellas, and a café that probably served daquiris and piña coladas. "Why, there should be parrots!" I said, and lo, who should utter a scratchy hello but

It was then that it fully hit me that I was in Spain.

Our first stop was the Banc de Trencadis, one of the longest and prettiest benches in the world, is a tiled beauty curving around the perimeter of the Sala Hipóstila, a stone forest of massive Doric columns. It was originally intended as a market; had Gaudí's plan been implemented, I'm pretty sure it would top La Boqueria. What beats buying sugar plums in a stone temple, in the middle of a fantastical park?

The bench proved to be quite comfortable, and more than amenable to a photoshoot in front of the city skyline, with the Hansel and Gretel gatehouses peeking out from below us.

It would appear I have been inspired to intolerable heights of whimsy.

Having feasted our eyes on the beautiful tiles and gingerbread houses, we then walked around for a bit, and I discovered my future home.

Further on, from the top of a pile of stones and stone crosses, I shamelessly took a dozen pictures of the city. We spent a good fifteen minutes sitting up there, enjoying the wind (it was so hot! Gaudí forgot to build an oasis) and resting our poor, abused bipeds.

Also spotted: a rebellious Catalan roof.

We made our way back down and ended where we should have started, at the giant mosaic lizard that guards the front entrance. Mr Lizard was aghast that I had the aplomb to make a kissy face at him.

Then, as I turned around to wave my good bye to the park, I saw him. The most majestic pigeon I have ever laid eyes upon - the Lion King.

He made my day.

Barcelona, Segunda Dìa: The House that Gaudi (Half) Built

On my second day in Barcelona, I was determined to see every structure that Gaudi so much as breathed on. And where else to start but the Sagrada Famìlia, Gaudi's infamous, incomplete, incomprehensible monument to the Holy Family in stone. The Czar and I started out the morning with a lovely café con leche and croissant - which I am now able to order myself, in gloriously butchered Spanish - and then walked up to the cathedral along Passeig de Graçia, stopping by all of the Modernista buildings along the way. Some of the apartments - which people actually live in! - are incredible, like lost buildings from Atlantis, and I'll be doing a separate post on those later today.

The cathedral, in addition to being huge and awe-inspiring and breathtaking and all of those other obvious adjectives I have to get out of the way, is also hilarious. There are all this strange little details, like spires topped with cobs of corn or bushels of blackberries, turtles with columns growing out of their backs (a creation myth not entirely in line with Catholic doctrine), and the words to 'Hosanna in the Highest' wrapped lurid yellow around several towers. I can only imagine what all of the people Gaudi hit up for money for this thing thought they were patronizing -  it is a simultaneous ode to Christ, sea creatures, and the agricultural glories of Spain (to which I would myself erect a staggering monument - where else can you find cherries for two euro a kilo?).

Given its enormous size, it was somewhat difficult to fit the whole thing into one photo frame. I tried, backing away as far as possible and trying not to fall into the curiously large and curiously green and scummy pond behind me, but it was a lost cause. Instead I took several dozen pictures of the Nativity façade, little knowing that they would lead to innumerable future headaches as I tried to piece them all together. Oh, if I had only known then what I know now! But I succeeded in the end: behold my triumphant victory over Photoshop and the interminable mockery of my peers.

This behemoth has been under construction since 1882 and is allegedly going to be finished in 2026, but I don't believe them for a second. Why settle for a mere hundred-and-forty-four years when you could go for a solid hundred-and-fifty? There is glory in round numbers, after all.

There were about that many people in line to get in, so while we waited, I amused myself by taking pictures of some of the elaborately detailed metal doors, which are on the Passion façade, the side of the church featured in the first picture. I love all of the details included here, and the myriad ways in which the metal was molded: there are embossings, engravings, impressions, and many more technical terms that I don't know for making copper look cool. It really just looks like someone took a sheet of copper and went wild pressing the contents of a fleamarket into it. The Que es la veritat? door is my favorite.

I would argue that the inside of the cathedral, as bare of a construction scene it may be, is even more impressive than the outside. Even though it's even more of a construction site than the exterior, the huge, vaulted ceilings, towering columns, and echoing spaces of the nave are the manmade, indoor equivalent to being on top of a mountain looking over hundreds of miles of open air. I felt like a sacreligious ant.

Only two of the gargantuan - I am running out of synonyms for 'big' - stained glass windows are complete, but there are many, many windows waiting to be filled in. Once they're finished, standing in the nave is going to be like swimming in a rainbow, every conceivable color of light setting the entire space aglow. In the upper righthand picture below, you can see a window work-in-progress, which is what most of them look like.

It's actually quite a short walk through the inside of the cathedral, since most of it is filled with heavy duty construction equipment and is cordoned-off with aluminum fencing. Unsurprisingly, the vaulted ceilings are quite good at amplifying the whirring sounds of drills, although the dulcet sounds of sledgehammers did not quite approach the majesty of organ music and angelic trumpets.

Once we emerged from the light of God into the light of day, it was back to another queue, this time for the lift to take us all the way to the top of one of the turrets. A staggering amount of architectural detail was visible in the alcove where we waited: rows upon rows of lacy stone trim; tiny, twining flowers; elaborately wrought Gothic script. Stone demons and nefarious toads crawled along the bottom of the arches, while an unnamed bishop stood above us writing his Christmas list ('Item one: nefarious toad repellant. Item two: socks for mother. Item three: more construction workers.' I feel like priests placidly limit themselves to three things in the interest of piety.)

The view from the top of the stairs was well worth the two euros we paid for the elevator. I do not begrudge them this money, as I want to see this building finished in my lifetime and every ripped-off tourist helps.) I took many, many pictures, including these, shot while leaning against what I think was a pineapple stuffed with turtledoves. That thing that looks like a field of grass, that is liquid seaweed.