weekend

Friday night, Saori was busy with an office party, so I went out to meet my coworkers and Lyz who just came back from a month traveling around Europe before she goes back to Mexico.

There is an academy of fine arts up by Killesburg and they were having their end of year open house and party late into the evening. This is actually really cool because it attracts a lot of people from the community- of all ages, but mostly drinking age. It was pretty packed and quite lively when I showed up around 10pm.

I never actually ended up going inside to see the buildings and the exhibitions, which were also filled with people and small booths selling booze and snacks. I got a glass of wine, caught up with Lyz, ate some Indian food from one of the food stands, and then I was just too tired to see the work.

Saturday was lovely- I made eggs and salsa for breakfast, and then Saori and I went into town to run errands. First up was the glass bottle return.

I love the fact that Stuttgart is so good about the lifecycle of its containers- the vast majority of the beer they sell and nearly all the wine come in glass bottles for which you pay a deposit in addition to the (low) cost of the beverage. If you buy beer like a typical German, always shopping at the same place, buying beer by the crate, they easily get their bottle deposit back. I tend to buy a bottle here and there, of a most diverse array of beers from a wild array of stores. So instead of lugging tons of glass bottles around to five of six places around the city for five dollars back, I decided to just return the bottles that have a special mark that lets me take them to the local corner supermarket automated return and all the rest go into the glass recycling bins.

After grocery shopping, we walked to stadtmitte, stopping off at a speciality furnature and lighting store where we bought a giant round fillament "edison bulb" to fit our living room light. The bulb ended up being more expensive than the light fixture although to be fair, we got the fixture from IKEA and the bulb should last as long as a halogen, and not a typical incandescent.

We also went to Amercian Apparel which was having a sale and I ended up buying a few things 70% off, which is very nice. After shopping, I stopped for a coffee at the windy kleiner schlossplatz and headed home.

Sunday, Saori went to yoga in the morning and I cooked up breakfast and studied German while waiting for her to come back. After breakfast she had to go into work so I went on a long walk back to the Acadamy of fine arts and got a better look at the student work on display. The architecture building was interesting to see in its own right, although there was a really interesting project from one of the masters candidates about future housing in Japan, with a lot of really great models and drawings.

Sadly, architecure is losing him to film or theater or game design production because frankly our profession has degenrated to the point where curved surfaces are about as visionary as you are allowed.

Still excited about the pressure cooker, I made pork carnitas tonight. I went all out- with fresh onion and cilantro, home made salsa, and fresh diced pineapple and some grocery store wheat-corn toritllas. Delicious. Really good. The combination of pineapple, chiles, cilantro and onions really brings me back to Mexico City.