FOOD

        Let's be honest, the last post was a little anti-climatic but the past is the past and something new is about to start here at Karin's blog. If you don't know me, I am a cook. Four years ago I joined staff at the bible school I attended for two years as a cook. I liked eating, I didn't mind cooking, and baking was always rewarding once the finished product exited the oven and entered my mouth but I never saw myself as an actual cook. Chefs were always snobby and obsessed with their food in my head. I did not want to be associated with any of that but there I was, September 1, 2006, putting on checkered pants, a big white jacket that made me feel fat and a navy blue hat that had an appearance of a bowl. Well, four years have come and gone (my last day was Sunday), views have changed and  now I just laugh at how much I have become a foodie. With that said, I have also gained a nice amount of weight. That wasn't really what I had in mind but for me it turned out to be part of the package deal. Fresh bread, delicious pastas, homemade, amazing desserts, oh my word! What I'm trying to say is that it's time for a weight loss program. What does this have to do with my trip to Europe? Well, seeing as I also have to travel on a budget and food is expensive but necessary for life,  I have put the two and two together and have come up with a million dollar genuis idea! "New Weight Loss Program: Going to Europe on  Budget" It's brilliant, I know, except that I'm kind of against weight loss programs and believe in just healthy eating and exercise and I am also really looking forward to thoroughly enjoying the delicious, authentic foods that the countries I am visiting have to offer. So in conclusion, I will not starve myself but I will not be eating like I have been these last years and maybe, just maybe I will lose a pound or two. I'd be okay with that.

        So with all this food talk I have come up with a fun idea to blog about while waiting for my departure. I want to cook a traditional meal or close to it from almost every country I plan to visit. I think I will enjoy learning new things and it will also give me a little taste of their culture. Haha, taste, I didn't even plan that pun. I will try to post recipes as well if you'd like to try it for yourself and I think it'll just be a fun time!

       Last night was Italian night. I made pizza!! Who would've guessed? It was definately a fun evening. It started off at the Liqour Store because you need wine with an Italian meal so I headed to the back corner of the store and found the Italy section. I'm no wine expert that's for sure so I didn't really know where to start except at the price tag. I went for the ten dollar to fifteen dollar range and ended up coming across a red wine called Castelli Romani, 2008. This wine is from the hillsides surrounding Rome and is a medium-bodied, premium dry red wine, says the label. It was also the first one I had picked up that said it went well with pizza. I was a little hesitant, though when I pulled it off the shelf and noticed the nice collection of dust that was making itself very comfortable on the bottle. But then I thought, 'No one should be forgotten or ignored and that goes for this bottle too!' So I bought it with satisfaction and headed to the Grocery store!

       This was no night for ham and pineapple, barbeque chicken or perogie pizza. No, this night was Italy night not North American Pizza Chain night. I picked up some parmigiano reggiano, mozzarella cheese, prosciutto, a fresh basil plant, fresh spinach, artichokes and a tomato! Mmm...I could taste it already. My only disappointments were that I totally forgot about goats cheese which I am deeply in love with and I also failed to read the 'Organic' sign underneath the tomato which made for a very expensive tomato but what can you do?
      I got started right away and drafted Terry, my little sister, to help. Before we could start I had to find some Italian music so I searched the world wide web for an Italian radio. We needed to set the mood and I succeeded. Terry did very well to make fun of me but I knew she fell for it all when she placed the tomatoes on the pizza and said, "Magnifico!". Heather, one of my older sisters came up for supper, my mom arrived home from work, as did my dad and we all sat down at the table to the smell of roasted garlic and melting cheese! I would say it was a successful meal. Heather, who has been to Italy and ate a whole pizza nearly every day said it tasted pretty close to that. The wine was actually really good too. Heather who is a bartender and has taken some wine courses first looked at it and said, "It's probably cheap table wine." But she ended up enjoying it along with the rest of us.
      We finished the night with the movie, 'Letter's to Juliet' with Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Egan. Cute and cheesy but takes place in Tuscany and is beautiful. It was two for one day at the movie rental so I also got 'When in Rome' which we will be watching tonight!
      So that is Italy night and a fun night it was! Enjoy the photos. Ciao!

Terry and her mad cheese shredding skills

                                                            

Me kneading the dough

         



The finished product







Enjoying it all!

 

Must See sight Number Ten: .....

So this is kind of hard and unfortunately I think I may have to cop-out.  You may be thinking,  "You Lame-O, what do you mean?" Well, first off, thank you for calling me lame and secondly, here is my thinking process... I was trying to decide which place to choose next and I thought, well, maybe London because everyone goes to London when they go to Europe and there's so much to see there. Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, the list goes on. But then there's Austria and its beauty and the Sound of Music tour. How fun would that be?! Scotland would be beautiful, Spain and it's unique architecture, the Swiss Alps, I could skip back to France and see Vimy Ridge, so many museums, so many tours, I just couldn't decide! And if any of you know me well or even not well, you probably know I am an indecisive person and here I am stuck in a pickle. Hmm...now I am feeling like this post should have a turn around point where I would say " BUT!..." and everyone would cheer and say "Yeah, that is so great, Karin!" but the only but I have is the but I just typed and that type of but didn't bring any exciting turn of events. I did just use the word 'but' five times in one sentence, though. That's pretty impressive.
So anyway, to conclude this post and this series, I would just like to say hi my name is Karin,  I'm traveling the world in 35 days and I'm indecisive.

Must See Sight Number Nine: Italy

Italy

I want to see Italy. Yes I do. But my problem is I can't just pick one spot in the country. There's too many places I want to see that to pick my top one is near to impossible. There's the colleseum in Rome and just Rome itself, Venice, Tuscany, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Cinque Terre, and oh what I would do to sit outside of a quaint little resturaunt, sipping wine, or eating pizza or eating cheese or eating pizza...did I say pizza already? I think I am most intrigued by their cooking. Italian food has always been my favourite. My mom makes the best spaghetti and lasagne. I swear I've loved it since I was a fetus. It's hard to believe anything could be better but apparently the Italians know where it's at so mom...well, we'll just have to see I guess. I will still love you. That is all for now except that if anyone has any technique for warding off the greasy, creepy Italian men (sorry if any Italian men are reading this but unfortunately this is your stereotype) please let me know. I have been warned plenty of times about the Italian, Greek and French men and all I've got is, "GEH WEG!" which is "Go away!" in German. So ya...I'm just saying.

Ciao!

Must See Sight Number Eight: The Louvre, France

The Louvre, France

                
               "Art is never finished, only abandoned." - Leonardo Davinci


Hmm...I am feeling a little sleepy right now and not quite sure what to write except that I really would like to visit the Louvre. "Duh," you're thinking, "that's why it's on your top ten places to see". It's true. Well, I'll tell you something I suppose. The first time I heard of the Louvre was hmm...must've been the Spring when a friend of mine was showing me some of her photos of when she visited France. She excitedly said, "...and I visited the Louvre as well! It's massive!" I didn't hear the very important 'V' so I thought to myself, 'The loo?...like a big massive toilet?' Of course I knew this wasn't true, or atleast hoped it wasn't true as that would be quite a frightening sight...or on the otherhand very intriguing but anyway, I decided to be patient and let her show me the photographs. 'Ooooh...the louVre!' Very cool.  It is massive and full of all sorts of things! Yep, that's about all I know and it's in Paris incase you happen to be just as uninformed as I once was. Suppose I could write more when I'm actually there so I will leave it for now and here is Rick Steeve's for ya, he's got the goods...The Louvre

Must See Sight Number Seven: Auschwitz, Poland

                                                                 Auschwitz, Poland

                                         "Work makes you free"


I would really like to visit a concentration camp when I am Europe and if it can be Auschwitz that would be exactly what I want. Depressing subject I suppose but it is something that should not be forgotten and something that clearly displays the potential that we as humans all hold for such evil. The Holocaust is a part of our not so distant history and as someone who lives a very fortunate life I believe to see how other people have lived often makes you appreciate your life even more. I think Auschwitz will be one of those places that accomplishes that. 


I will let Wikipedia do the rest of the talking and afterwards there is a link to a Rick Steeve's video on Auschwitz. It is a four minute tour through the camp and if you haven't bothered to watch any of the videos I've posted, I beg you to at least watch this one. It is well worth the four minutes. Thankyou.


Auschwitz (German pronunciation: [ˈaʊʃvɪts];  Konzentrationslager Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or base camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslageror extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna-Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps.

Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town in and around which the camps were located; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, who was the Reichsführer and Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the locus of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe". From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million exterminated, and 500,000 from disease and starvation), a figure since revised to 1.1 million, around 90 percent of them Jews. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and medical experiments. Denis Avey, recently named a British Holocaust hero by the government of Britain, had escaped and spoke of conditions inside the camps.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 1994 had seen 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes you free").

Rick Steeve's: Auschwitz

Must-See Sight Number Six: Neushwanstein Castle, Germany

I have a little bit of a fetish for castles so it is inevitable that a castle would be on one of my top ten places to see. I don't know where this fetish came from but it's in me. Maybe I just like big stuff. I have a hard time taking my eyes off the huge lumber ship that docks just across the ocean here. It's massive and makes tiny little Chemainus look even more tiny. I probably should've grown up in the 80's because I most definately would have had big hair. On second thought, I did grow up in the eighties but there's only so much you can do with fresh two year old hair. There's no backcombing that. And then there's the Nintendo. Good 'ol Mario and Luigi. My favourite world is giant world and you know it's
yours too. Hmm...I guess not all castles are big, though. Take this one for instance...

it's on the smaller size. Atleast compared to this one...

I guess it is not all about size, though. I am intrigued by the small one just as much as I am with the bigger one. I suppose it is the intriquicy of each castle and the fact that real people once lived in it and in some still do and there seems to be such a beautiful story behind each castle. Perhaps my dream to see lots of castles has something to do with the fact that I'm pretty sure I've never seen any in my whole life. Family, you can correct me if I'm wrong but these next photos are about as close as I've got to castle viewing...

This is the castle at Parksville's mini-golf. Best mini-golf in the world but not really the place to go check out a stunning castle.

 

                                 The classic sandcastle

Again, gotta love Nintendo.

What kid doesn't love these?

...you get the point.

So with all this castle talk, the one castle that I would love to see is Neushwanstein Castle located just an hour outside of Munich, Germany.

                                          

I love how it's white and has many different levels and is situated right on a hill. It's stunning. This very castle was the inspiration for the Walt Disney Castle too!

So, Germans, don't worry, you are in my Top Ten places to see and I assure I will be spending a lot of my time in your beautiful country due to all the wonderful people I know there and the castles of course.

If you want to learn more about this castle check out some good 'ol Rick Steeves: Neushwanstein Castle