One more morning in and around Oldenburg! While Uschi did her grocery shopping for a cooking club that she is hosting tonight, Mark and I had breakfast and took another little turn through the Schloßpark with its cute little greenhouses and listened to the birds giving their morning concert.
Around 10, we left for a quick little trip to a nearby resort and spa, Bad Zwischenahn, which sits on a lake with the grandiose name “Zwischenahner Meer” (= Zwischenahn Sea; the walk around it is about 11 km / 7 miles). It was very cute and we had a good time walking around on the lakeshore and between an old farm house with outbuildings including a windmill (all of which were moved here from somewhere else). I learned that the lake is very young, geologically speaking–it was created 10,000 years ago when a salt deposit dissolved and the ground water filled the resulting sinkhole.
Around noon, Uschi took us to the (also very cute) train station and once we had equipped ourselves with a cheesy roll and a treat for a train lunch picnic, we took off via Bremen to Hamburg. We arrived around 2:45 and then took off for Peter and Andrea’s after running a few errands and had some ice cream and coffee with Peter while Andrea was still at her new job. Mark was my pack mule for a grocery shopping run (very sweet of him) and then I set about making a nice “First Day on the Job” dinner with salad, caprese, “Flammkuchen” from the freezer (extremely thin-crust pizza with a white sauce and leeks) and a big pile up of fruit and cookies on the fancy three-tier platter that Andrea gave me.
Once Andrea came home, we talked for a bit about the situation at the new job and about our days with Uschi. Peter showed us the AMAZING “rough cut” of the short movie he made of the “Head of Kafka” when we saw the sculpture in motion in Prague, and we watched a bit of “In die Sonne schauen,” a German movie that interweaves the story of four women across different historical periods. But I was pretty tired so we’ll watch the rest sometime later.
