Christmas begins

Wednesday, I found a massive 2,5 turkey leg for sale at PennyMarkt and also some sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner. Thursday night, I brined it and set it in the fridge.

Friday night after I got off work, Saori surprised me at home with a table already set with mallow pie, salad, and home made cranberry sauce. It was really sweet. I threw the turkey in the oven and started baking but I couldn't wait so we started in on the mallow pie while the turkey baked.

The turkey was great. The mallow pie was super creamy so it was more like a sweet potato pie, topped with scorched marshmallows. Saori also cooked us some string beans in a brown butter and balsamic sauce. It was a serious feast and we both throughly stuffed ourselves in the exemplary American fashion.

That night Saori woke up with difficulty breathing around 4AM. She boiled some water over the stove with teatree oil and peppermint oil which helped, suggesting that the problem was more about mucus than allergies, but it made me really worried. This is over if my biggest fears actually since in case of medical emergencies I am not really sure what to do. Of course, if one of us accidentally chops of an arm, really life threatening things, there is 112, the 911 of Europe, but up to that point, it's a bit hard to say, since there's no urgent care clinics here. It's a big gray gap between sweating until the doctors offices open, sometimes waiting over Sunday, and going to the hospital.

More to the point, I didn't have antihistamines and I didn't know where I could find a place to buy them at that time of the morning. So that was one thing we did today, was pick up a box of antihistamines from a pharmacy. The person we talked to was so concerned she marched Saori and I outside so we could read the name and number of the lung doctor in the same building. She wasn't really satisfied, but sold us some antihistamines anyway.

Tonight, I met Shiva, one of my two old Indian roommates from the old house on Zepplinstrasse (actually my new office is on Hindenburgstrasse- in starting to see a dark and unnerving pattern here). We met at Weihnachtsfes, Stuttgart's Christmas fest and honestly the best time to be in Germany. The buzzy lazy summer afternoons in the beer-gardens are nice, but there is something that all clicks when the old narrow cobblestone streets between the half-timbered buildings and stone architecture are filled with gaily lit wooden stands and hot spiced wine on a cold winter night.

We started with a cup of Glühwine and then had a special variation, where the mug had a little metal stand and a cone of sugar is doused with schnapps and the whole thing is set on fire. The fire melts the sugar which drips into the hot spiced wine. Afterwards we moved on to the brewery at on the Schlossplatz and had a glass of fresh Wulle Biere.