The sky at night - #930

Not too sure if that's Jupiter there.

Pretty sure I can identify Mars.

Saturn for sure.

(Floor pattern with a tad of rotation in the latter, being an electronic megastore..)

Oooops - #929

I'll admit to having seen pink ELEPHANTS on numerous occasions during a fairly successful drinking career spanning 4-and-a-bit decades.

But pink BUNNIES?

Must be a combination of donating blood and 3 shots of Caffea Moguntia's industrial strength espresso this morning.

Either that or a blood alcohol level of 0.000.

Definitely unhealthy.....

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Location:Gutenbergplatz,Mayence,Germany

Spirits in the night - #928

I met Christa G a couple of years back when we both got bionic legs and ended up at the same physiotherapy clinic.

It turns out that she and Mrs jb have known each other for YEARS, given that Christa G works in a flash boutique and Mrs jb goes to ALL the flash boutiques, so we've kept in touch and I help her with odd jobs in the garden and accompany Ms jb on her frequent visits to said flash boutique in quixotic and heroically unsuccessful attempts to avoid fiscal disaster.

She felt obliged to invite us out for a meal at the Heilig Geist the other night, so I dressed up warmly to avoid another tongue-lashing along the lines of "you'll catch your death of cold and I'm glad I don't have to look after you" which is what happened at the TSOD in winter.

To which I muttered "So am I. You have no idea.."

And - being Germany - we of course address each other formally.

Frau G.

Herr B

It's a hoot.

Druckladen - #927

The Druckladen  - Printshop - is a reconstruction of Gutenberg's original workshop providing a "hands on" experience for anyone who wants to get their fingers dirty.

Moguntia - #926

 

Hans-Josef Schwarz reckons that he'll have to up his roasting schedule to compensate for our being back.

If he keeps making espressi like the 2 doppio I had at various times yesterday, I think he's right in assuming that we'll stay true.

Really good, with a wonderful crema and a flavour that seemed to last forever.

On a par with this place, in fact.....

Not to be missed - #925

It's that time of year again - the Rheinland-Pfalz Austellung (State Fair) hits town and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

First of all, I now get tickets at the Senior rate (and I have it on impeccable authority that all of 7 people since it opened last Saturday paid full price).

And then there are the perennial favourites:

A whole tent full of La-Z-Boy knock-offs, Cheese Fred from Holland who'll pack more cheese that you can eat in a year into a plastic bag for €10, Eel Hans from Hamburg who'll do the same with fish and various other entrepreneurs in soap/candied ginger/sausage with the same business model.

There's a whole tent full of people touting information about a wondrous variety of diseases, which makes you emerge feeling quite healthy. (At least, I don't THINK I've got any of them...)

The man selling Gecko pads. Attach it to your dashboard and ANYTHING you put on it will stick to it and not fall off. Just like a gecko. Unless, of course, it's an iPhone with a silicone cover and it's a good thing that my reactions are faster than gravitational force.

"Well, yes" he said "Silicone doesn't stick very well...."

And then there are the anomalies:

The City of Mainz Health Service, spending €800 a day on their booth and saving heaps by not staffing it and not telling people why they're there in the first place

A local radio station running a multi-choice sports quiz and not getting anyone on the stage who got the right answer.

The head chef of Weingut Nack, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in the region, preparing yellow fin tuna sashimi with a wasabi vinaigrette, Tuna tatare and something else equally exotic for an audience of grannies that sat there in stunned silence.

"Was hat er gesagt, Hildegard? Roher Fisch? Ei, des ess isch net. Ei, werklisch net. Igitigit..."

But there were a couple of disappointments.

ZDF, one of the national TV networks, has downsized significantly. They used to have a mobile studio and broadcast from there. This year they were giving away ballpoint pens.

And the guy with the outrageously overpriced spätzle sieve  - pour in the batter, squeegee it through the perforations into boiling water and hey presto, noodles - wasn't there either.

And just when I'd saved up €25 from my meagre pocket money to buy one.....

Watch your steppe - #924

Guest photographer: Andreas Los

This is the Mainz Sand Dunes (Großer Sand) Nature Park, 70ha in area and one of the most significant in Europe.

It was formed during the most recent glacial period of the current ice age (bet you didn't know that it hadn't finished...) by sand drifting into dunes from the Rhine Valley.

It's free-draining, nutrient poor, is in a region with low rainfall and high summer temperatures and thus supports a unique steppe flora that spread from the east and from the Mediterranean 12,000 years and 5 months ago.

In other regions, the steppes have been reclaimed by encroaching forests, but a combination of climatic conditions (56mm of annual precipitation) and a frequent military presence (French, Austrians, French, Austrians, French, French, Germans, Americans who thought it would be great fun to use the place for manoeuvres/parades/airfields) kept the area free of trees.

Sort of, anyway....

Not that we're posing of course... -#923

Icecreams at the Eiscafe Italia in Heidesheim.

Great icecream, brilliant espresso

Summer is definitely just around the corner.....

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Lost souls - #922

These are "Seelen" - translation: Souls - that a baker sells on the market on Tuesdays and Fridays.

They're a southern German speciality, made from spelt wheat and rather like a mini-baguette.

Interesting story to the name.

They were traditionally given to the poor on All Souls day (2 November), this act of generosity supposedly guaranteeing that the next years harvest would be good, you'd get a 6 in Lotto and your team would win the FA Cup/Superbowl/whatever.

So seeing that Ms jb has cleaned out the bank accounts with a spending spree in Los Angeles that's beyond comprehension, I'd appreciate some alms at the appropriate time.

I'm down to buying day-old ones as it is, in a futile attempt to make ends meet.....

Spring is sprung - #921

 

It's pretty cool when you get back after 4 weeks away on the first day of spring and it really IS spring.

Temperatures zoomed up to mid-teens over the weekend, the sun even came out for a bit and the first daffodils are showing a flash of gold.

And then there was big bunch of tulips (this is maybe 20% of it...) waiting for Ms jb, courtesy of Famous Journalist Birgit S from across the road.

And a bottle of draft beer from Eisgrub in the fridge for me.

I'm pretty sure it was that way around, anyway....

Bipolar? - #920

 

 Or just schizophrenic?

There are moments that define that "you're back".

In New Zealand, it's having fish and chips and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc on the wharf in Mapua.

Here it's going to Klaus and Isabel Gres's wine bar and - while you're chatting with Isabel about the vacation - Klaus turning up and saying " You have to try this 2009 Riesling. Just bottled. It's got so much fresh fruit, it's almost a New World wine", grabbing 2 glasses and filling them.

Just to try.

And then there's the legendary Appenheim Flammkuchen: paper-thin pizza dough, fresh sauerkraut in a light cream sauce, Leberwurst, Blutwurst.

It's a hard call....

And as the sun slowly sets on "Not the Nelson Daily Photo".... - #919

Just PRETEND that this is a sunset, OK?

Poetic license

It's actually been the morning view from bed for the best part of the last month.

Will we miss it?

You'd better believe it.

Thanks to Meg and Ben for letting me encroach on their territory.

Look forward to seeing you again soon.

(And show me some stuff with that new  10 - 20mm lens, Ben...)

New Zealand's a funny place - #918

 

Everything's OK as long as you go with the flow.

If you get served the worst fish and chips you've EVER had, just accept it.

If someone promises to call you back and doesn't (because "we didn't have any new information"), just accept it.

If someone  SO OBVIOUSLY rips you off , bite your tongue.

If you DO complain, people will say "Crikey, you'll get a BAD NAME"

Small towns are even worse.

"Wild Tomato" is local Nelson/Blenheim magazine and is smart enough to straddle the fence.

But you do have problems when you review a restaurant and have a really naff experience.

The reviewer started with "My mum used to tell me that if you can't say something nice, it's better not to say anything at all" and then proceeded to relate everything that went wrong during a meal

Including a menu that appeared to have been printed sometime in the last millennium and was tatty and germ-ridden beyond description.

They appear to have taken note........

Kitty and Charlotte - #917

Kitty and Charlotte go to Nelson Intermediate.

If you're lucky, you'll experience them singing acapella on Trafalgar Street in Nelson.

They're really quite good.

If you hang around and sling a gold coin in the violin case, they'll even get the fiddle going as well.

And if you're REALLY lucky, a whole bunch of their classmates will saunter by and you'll see just how mortified young ladies can be.

"Oh nooooo! This is just SOOOOO embarrassing"

Why would you want 2 black holes...? - #916

Went to see my mate Houghton at the Boat Show at the Viaduct Basin in Auckland on Sunday.

He's the very proud owner of "Raindance", an 80 year old 30' cabin cruiser that he's restored beautifully.

Came as a bit of a surprise when he bought it out of the blue a couple of years ago and I asked him if he was fulfilling a childhood dream.

"Sort of" he said " I almost bought one about 10 years ago, but Bill talked me out of it"

Bill was his father-in-law and probably our closest friend.

He was Captain Sensible personified.

He'd come up with stuff like:

"Reduced from the outrageous to the merely ridiculous"

"I'm one of those people who actually likes their beans cooked"

"Why would you want to buy an old house? You have to reblock it, the wind comes in through the walls, they're not insulated"

"Houghton's bought himself a new car. Used BMW. You've never seen anything like it! What a wreck!"

So Houghton tells Bill about this boat.

I've never heard Bill swear and neither had Houghton, but he said:

"You've got an old house. Why the &*$% would you want to buy an old boat? Why would you you want 2 black holes to pour your money into?"

Took him 10 years to get over it.

Really glad he bought it, though.

Never seen him look so happy

A creative, hugely talented woman in full and marvellous maturity - #915

The International Dateline lets me do two posts today. I bet you're all just squirming with delight.....

Christine Boswijk is one of New Zealand's major artists. (They don't hand out he New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Ceramic Art freely or frequently)

Her work has been gifted to the Taiwanese government by the New Zealand government.

It's really cool to have her as a friend.

When you get to Nelson airport, you see this massive poster hanging from the ceiling, announcing "Before Words", her current major exhibition at the Woolaston Winery.

I was lucky enough to get a preview of the work when I was down in November - huge shared and universal symbols in  brightly coloured fibreglass, way out of her comfort zone and a parallel universe away from her ceramic work.

Went to see it when we got to Nelson and when Christine and Patrick, her husband, came around for dinner she cornered me and asked me what I thought.

I just said "Impressive" and she said "That's all I wanted to know"

She's brought up 3 kids of her own, 2 younger ones from Patrick's first marriage, is virtually self-sufficient in olive oil, veges, fruit and eggs from her garden and turns up for dinner with a decent bottle of red wine and a massive sage plant she's just dug up from the garden.

She says things like "you're all burps and farts" when the mobile reception's breaking up and dresses in a flash evening dress, high heels and a black t-shirt with the arms cut off at mid-sleeve.

Just drips style.

 

Patrick, on the other hand, reckons that a clean pair of jeans and a good t-shirt is all you should be expected to wear at functions. (Although legend has it that he wore a shirt to the vernissage...)

He's from a family that's been in Mapua for so long that there's a road named after them.

He's got massive trucks, diggers and bulldozers. He's also got a Peugeot 404 (he picked Prince Edward up in that when he visited Christine's studio a few years back - "A very nice young man" she said), a Fiat 500, a Mercedes with an obscene number of horsepower and - when we win Lotto - a Trabant.

He's an electrician and he can build anything you want building.

His house.

Christine's studio.

Our house.

He refuses to own a mobile phone.

"That'd be no good" he says "People would CALL you all the time. I wouldn't like that AT ALL"

We had a bet recently. 

He said that he'd eat his hat if he lost.

Shame that he turned up on his Ducati 900 wearing a crash helmet.

"I like your hat" I said......

Matrons at the Suter - #914

Words fail me....

(No they don't)

The Suter café is consistently good - imaginative cooking, decent coffee, affordable wine and cultured customers.

And some REAL sights......

Meg Nakagawa - World famous in Nelson - #913

You've probably by now cottoned on to the fact that we've been encroaching on Meg and Ben's "Nelson Daily Photo" territory for the last couple of weeks.

What you probably don't know is that a) she's a hugely talented weaver and b) a very skilled writer and observer of society.

Plus enormous fun.

So it's been fun getting together with them (although Ben rarely gets a word in, even edgewise. Crikey, can she TALK....) and Zumo got a renewed visit.

Meg's even committed to keeping in touch, so I guess I can't be as curmudgeonly (or whatever it was) as she makes out....

The Neighbours #912

We have excellent neighbours.

Erika and Siegfried, the 163 year olds and the Famous Reporters from across the road in the Fatherland.

And these folk from Mapua:

Frank (2nd from left) and Lynn (far right) and Jan (left) and Don (2nd from right).

Lynn's a Perry from Mapua (her brother Honk's got the garage, the other brother's doing the welding work on Steve Fullmer's new kiln), Frank's been there since 1961 and Don and Jan are relative newcomers after finishing farming in North Canterbury.

Don's worried about the horses that some other neighbours are grazing on our land.
"I don't like horses" he says " Cattle and sheep are good, but I don't like horses"

Everytime I see him: "John, I'm not happy about those horses. They'll ruin your pasture..."

Frank's the sort of guy who comes home and tells his new wife that they've bought a pig farm together with a house inhabited by chickens and rats, he's just made a log splitter from spare bits, he's got a 1930 concrete mixer and a Porsche 968, he's just wrecked his pick-up ("The towbar was THIS FAR from my nose...") which he's going to rebuild, he builds houses (in Germany and Samoa, despite having left school at 14 and thus wasn't allowed to do an apprenticeship. At various times, he appears to have owned and sold large chunks of Mapua and he tells these wild tales which you just KNOW can't be true (gold-mining, owning this, building that) and them you look at Lynn and she gives you a resigned look and a nod and you know that it IS true.

And Lynn's got the driest sense of humour imaginable. I called her up and told them that we have some guys coming over to do a topographic survey.

"So I shouldn't shoot them, then?" she says.

Frank would have probably bellowed:

"Too late, boy!" (He calls me "boy". I'm 6 years younger than he is....) "Too late. I set the dogs on them, but one got away...."

WoW - #911

You can say that again...!

WoW was/is the World of Wearable Art show (an opportunity for fashion designers to push the envelope to the point of perforation ..) that originated in Nelson and was stolen and corporatised by Wellington. (A state of war simmers between the 2 cities....)

They even built a museum, which now houses remnants from past exhibitions and a delectable collection of antique cars, including a MkII Jaguar parked reflectively in front of the entrance.

(Used to have one of those. For 3 days. But that's another story...)

Looks a bit Batman-ish, come to think of it....

Dinner @ The Fullmers - #910a

Great people, great food, great art.
























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I've caught the bug - #910

 

I've always liked boats, but having lived in landlocked Germany for the majority of my adult life, it's been a fairly remote attraction.

The closest I've got in recent years was drinking rosé on my mate Houghton's lovely 80 year old 30' cruiser "Raindance" at the marina in Bayswater.

So the Antique & Classic Boat Show on Lake Rotoiti last weekend was a definite must-do.

It's a good hour's drive south of Nelson on the way to pretty much nowhere and the location is just stunning.

Pristine parklands (with people reminding smokers to pick up their discarded cigarette butts...) surrounding a lake of utter purity.

Yacht races, a Le Mans start for a Seagull-powered race, rowing races (slower rowers had a shorter course), steam-powered boats, an exquisite antique Chris-Craft, recently imported from the States and the Royal Kerr Bay Motor Yacht Club, who turn up with their private jetty, wheel it into the lake and sit around drinking all day.

And Richard Shepard, our friend and future builder, with "Phoenix", a restored 1960 R-class yacht with which he won the Saturday race and came in a close second on Sunday.

A good day out.

More over at Classic Yachts, courtesy of Houghton

If Anathoth is real jam, then the Pope's.....#909

Owen and Kaye Pope bought an over-run farm in the Moutere in the late 1980s.

Rampant raspberries amidst the wilderness

Kaye made some jam, they took it to the Nelson market and things took off.

Local heros, regional success, then national and still using the cheapo plastic pottles that they started out with.

Called it Anathoth (after their farm) and branched out into other varieties. (Their apricot jam is a dream, Nothing better)

They sold part of the business to a group of investors, there was acrimony (I heard the figure of 5m disputed dollars), the brand got sold on to a competitor, they ended up with not much money out of the shamazzle and that was that.

Except that the Popes are back on the Nelson market, selling their original recipe jams in the same old cheapo plastic pottles that they started out with.

Tastes just as good, too

The second best whitebait fritters in the universe - #908

No-one makes better whitebait fritters than Robin Fullmer.

Period.

Especially at 4:30 am when you've been invited around to watch an All Blacks game in the northern hemisphere on their massive plasma TV screen.

But these folk on the Nelson market come a close second.

There are, in fact, 2 whitebait fritterers.

One outfit does fried bacon and eggs and fizzy drinks and similar, with whitebait as a sideline.

These folks are purists.

West Coast whitebait. No flour in the batter. Real butter on the bread. Olive oil from our friends at Kakariki Olives. Squeeze of fresh lemon.

Yummy.

And get this - I got a slice of wholemeal bread from the organic baker and asked to have my fritter on it.

Pay for it ($7) and she gives me $1 back.

Huh?

"Well, you brought your own bread" she said "It's only fair....."