Monthly review: July 2016
There is only one lolita purchase by me for July:
I have bought a skirt with playing cards motif by the German indie brand Li-Paro from another lolita. Playing cards are among my favorite themes and I own a lot of matching items already. ;) I am planning to wear a coordinate with this skirt when visiting a local fair for board games in November.
Now I can sell another skirt with the same motif that is too small and do not need to modify it ;)
And we booked a hotel and train tickets for our 2-day-trip to Vienna in August ;)
I have plastics stitch markers and use them to mark the start of a new crochet row. But they sometimes fall out or damage a little the yarn when I remove them...
I saw knitting markers in the etsy shop of Hana Paimen. I contacted her and she agreed to make crochet stitch markers for me :)
(Knitting stitch markers are with rings and are put on the knitting needles between two stitches, while crochet stitch markers are attached to stitches directly and therefore can be opened.)
I have bought the woodland set in bronze colors. The price was 12 USD / 11,25 €: 6 USD for the markers and 6 USD for shipping.
You can find a big selection of stitch markers in Hana Paimen's etsy shop. She also published a nice pattern for a knitted headband with cables over at ravelry. (You can see and download the pattern without ravelry account.)
My boyfriend and me attended the birthday party of a friend. As usual, we had a barbecue. ;)
As birthday present, the friend had asked for a new charcoal barbecue (Holzkohlegrill). We discussed in the group which type of barbecue we should order, but could not decide what would be the best barbecue for his setting. So we asked our friend and he chose the cool barbecue cart (Grillwagen) that I had selected! I felt very proud ;)
Our friend ordered the barbecue cart and it took us approx. 1 hour to assemble it. The barbecue has a lid to close it, a chimney for smoking, space for four aluminium trays, an additional grill for keeping food warm, metal hooks to hang items, foldable side tables and wheels. (You can watch an advertisement video from the above link.)
The new barbecue cart is great, everybody loved what we made on it!
My boyfriend's birthday was at the beginning of July. We celebrated his birthday three times ;)
I invited my boyfriend to the Asian restaurant Ni House. I had been there twice for private lolita meetups (in April and June) and really liked the food, especially the crispy gyoza with the sweet-and-sour sauce. I learned that the sauce is custom-made by the cook! My boyfriend ordered a dish with peanut sauce, I ordered a dish with chicken and sweet-and-sour sauce.
My boyfriend went to a Bavarian restaurant with his friends. The food was very delicious! I think the french fries were fried two times, making them extra crispy. And the soups were served in a cute little pot! But the service was quite slow...
We also had breakfast with his family and my boyfriend had baked his favorite cake, a Sachertorte. ;)
I helped a colleague who is planning vacations in Japan in September for three weeks with his girlfriend.
Another colleague had recommended me because I "know" Japan ;) Well, I have been to Japan five times, but most of the organisation was usually done by our friends who came along and had been to Japan much more often than me. ;)
I asked my colleague what he expected from me, and it turned out that he had already done a lot of research, had been to Japan as part of business trips and was mostly interested in talking about Japan and asking questions.
I invited the colleague and his girlfried to my house to talk about Japan. My boyfriend was present, too.
It was a very nice evening! We cooked Japanese curry together, my boyfriend and me shared our experiences, showed some pictures and answered questions.
I even received Japanese green tea with roasted rice (genmaicha) as a present! The colleague had asked if he should bring something, and I had mentionned that we have Japanese barley tea and genmaicha at home, but that I am not "allowed" to open the genmaiche because I need to drink the barley tea first. So the colleague brought me a little bit of his three teas so that I could try genmaicha ^__^
These are some of my recommondations for Japan, aside from the "typical" sightseeing spots:
- Mount Koya
a Buddhistic cementary with a beautiful scenery with old trees and overall very calm and peaciful
MountKoya at japan-guide - Visiting a traditional onsen
My friend Sweet Manic recommended an overnighr stay at the temple Gyokuzo, near Nara. - Sweets Paradise
a restaurant chain with an all-you-can-eat buffet for sweet food like cakes. also has savory dishes like noodles. Most branches seem to have collaborations with manga/animes. The branch in Shibuya, inside the PARCO mall had photo points with motifs from the manga Hana Yori Dango - Japanese food
Visitors should of course try as many of the local food as possible:
sushi, noodle soups, tempura (fried vegetables), gyoza (meat dumplings), Japanese curry (tastes different from Indian curry), okonomiyaki, special seasonal items like sakura burger at McDonals, and drinks like green tea, barley tea, calpis/calpiko, ...
And I am planning to add more posts about Japan!
I managed to visit the alternative festival Tollwood after work in its last week. I went there together with Rabbit Heart. She helped me a lot to find my way ;)
We walked over the festival and looked at all the stalls. Some of the items from the stalls: shawls, ethno clothes, Indian clothes, bags, wooden items, jewelry, herbs, oils, candy. There were also a lot of food stalls: falafel, doener, crepe, ice cream, sausages, cocktails, soft drinks.
And everything was alternative or ecological! For example some food stalls had edible plates or recyleable spoons. There were also vegetarian and vegan food options. Many clothes were hand made or made from organic cotton. I really like that the Tollwood "proves" that a festival can be big (900.000 visitors came last summer) and still have a small ecologically footprint.
I ate small grilled potatos with curd cheese and herbs (4,20 €) and ice cream: mango and hazelnut (3 €). Everything tasted really good! My favorite was the hazelnut ice cream because it tasted very nut-like. Unfortunately I do not know the shop name and if there is a shop in town...
I have bought dried mangos (5 €) and wine gum shaped as bears (1,80 €) from Oli's Teestube:
Both items are okay, but I had higher expectations.
We had to skip our monthly evening with board games for June due to our busy time schedule.
Therefore we really wanted to focus on playing games and decided to make pizza with ready-to-bake-dough from the supermarket. The plan was to make pizza at the beginning and spend the rest of the day with playing.
Well, our plan did not work out in the end :)
A friend brought "Buchteln", that is a sweet dish made from yast dough and a filling with apricot jam. We ate it at the beginning with Vanilla sauce.
Then we played some rounds of Camel Cup.
We had bought three packages of premade yast dough for pizza and assumed that it would be 12 servings. But when we opened the first package, we found that it contained only two servings. So two of our friends rushed to the supermarket, 10 minutes before closing time. The premade yast dough was sold out in the meantime, so they bought yast and flour and we made additional dough by hand.
We now have a pizza stone. It is not a big pebble, it is like a big floor tile (Kachel). We could only bake one piece of pizza at a time on the pizza stone, but it took only 5 minutes instead of 12 minutes. ;)
In total, making and eating pizza took 2 hours. So it was not fast. ;)
After the pizza, four people tried the Japanese card game Hanafuda. The other guests used the time to rest. ;)
We discovered a new Indian Restaurant called Ganesha. The food tasted really good and the service was good. (I sometimes have stomache pain from the spices, but not from this restaurant. ;)
To avoid the usual over-eating, we shared two dishes between three people. ;)
The picture on the list is a special limited dish, a dessert: Indian mango and vanilla ice cream.
The picture on the right shows the "house plate" (dish no 46) of another friend on the left, butter chicken in the middle (dish no 71) and a Tandoori dish with vegetables on the left (dish no 36). In the background you can see the peshawari naan (dish no 170) and in the foreground is Paneer-Pakora (Indian cheese, dish no 17).
I changed some of the items on my white board, so below is a new picture ;)
- Postcards with advertisement for the vintage event Flaneur Bonn in September in Düsseldorf that I will attend
- The packaging paper of the sack of rice that my boyfriend has bought from a Japanese supermarket in Düsseldorf in April 2016. It is an instruction in Japanese how to cook the rice with a cute Onigiri (rice triangle) as maskot ;)
- I hang all my boyfriend's birthday cards. ;)