Feuchtigkeit

Weimar is really different than El Paso. Now I am going to share with you several ways in which it is different, all of which are probably pretty obvious and you could have guessed yourself.

This is El Paso:


As you can see, it is brown, except for the sky which is blue and cloudless. When I moved there last fall, another woman who had moved there several years ago, also for her husband’s work, told me that you learn to savor and appreciate the little bits of color wherever you can find them. As we have moved into spring, I can say this is true, but at the same time there is so much more color than I anticipated. This, for example, is a claret cup cactus—from nearby White Sands, admittedly, but it’s the only flower I have a photo of on my camera right now.


It’s shockingly red, more so probably on account of the drabness around it. These splashes of color are all around El Paso, but that’s just it—they’re splashes, not swaths.

Germany, though, is green. Continuously green. At the beginning of the train ride, I actually felt a tiny little twinge of discomfort at the mass of trees surrounding the train tracks, because I couldn’t see as far as the horizon. Within Weimar itself, there are lots of trees lining the sidewalks, and although we’re in the middle of a city, as long as our windows are open I can hear songbirds. And it rains! Regularly! I suppose the surprise here is not that it rains, but that I’m amazed by it. A few months in the desert will do that to you. By the end of the day, the fact that I straightened my hair makes no difference. The humidity really isn’t bad, especially since the weather is fairly cool, but I can feel the difference in my viola, too.

And while I’m on the subject of green, it is already obvious to me that a daily economy for the environment prevails. We thought ahead to bring some reusable grocery bags, which is good because grocery stores will charge you for every bag you need them to provide for you. The stores we shop at in El Paso give us a five cent discount per bag we reuse, but I can only imagine how much of a difference it would make if American stores charged by the bag. I have also seen many more recycling bins than in the USA, and the size of both the shower stall and the hot water heater in our apartment lend themselves to much shorter showers on my part.

Weimar has a significantly smaller population than El Paso: about 65,000 people compared to 740,000, and that’s not including the 1.5 million people just across the border in Juarez. And yet those 65,000 people are much closer to each other, and not separated in their giant cars (except for delivery trucks, cars the size of my Chevy Cobalt are about as big as they get). I feel so much more aware of all the people around me than I ever do in El Paso. We’re all friends, right? Even when friends decide to play soccer in the cleared-out Marktplatz at 4 AM.

I mentioned our petite kitchen in my first post. Here is my dedicated husband, cooking dinner tonight:

On menu is one of our favorites, a wild rice and mushroom soup, but adapted to the fact that we couldn’t find plain wild rice, green onions, or thyme (except in potted plant form) here. From now on, though, we will make this recipe a la Weimar: mit Porree. That’s pretty much it for the kitchen. Behind where I’m standing is a small table for two, and to the right, outside of the photo, is a small refrigerator disguised as a cabinet and a microwave whose controls continue to baffle me. How can you reheat a piece of pizza for over five minutes, but find it as cold as it was straight out of the fridge? Grocery-wise, everything is also smaller. This is great, because we can’t possibly use an entire package of flour the size that we buy at home. Internet access is also great, because we didn’t bring any cookbooks.

After dinner we headed out for ice cream and a little walk around town. I had peach (Pfirsich), and I’m going to go ahead and say it: it was the best peach ice cream ever. Nothing wishy-washy and conditional, not “the best peach ice cream I’ve had thus far in my life” or anything like that. This is it. I will never have peach ice cream for the rest of my life that is better. Actually, that’s kind of depressing now that I write it—what else could I possibly have to look forward to now?—but it was really good, and it just means that I will have to eat this the rest of the time while I’m here.

There are many other things, no doubt, that are different, but this is long-winded enough for now. To close, here’s one more photo, this time of the Rathaus on the Marktplatz.
Our apartment is in the red building to the left; we’re located on the third floor, which is really the second floor, because Europeans have a perverse desire to fool you into thinking that you don’t have as many stairs to climb as you really do. Tomorrow we will spend the whole day in Leipzig and return late, so no posts tomorrow.