Welcome to the weekend,
In thinking over my time here so far, one stand out is the pride that shows up in the food. One of my favorite parts of Germany, and our little town especially, is the bakeries on every corner. If you pop in early in the day, you’ll find an expansive selection of loaves, sandwiches, croissants, pretzels, and various rolls. Everything is presented with such pride; the pastry case holds rows and rows of uniformly baked rolls and baguettes, nestled next to pastries which are immaculately decorated and freshly made. Part of my routine has become picking up a few different breads every other day to eat with fresh butter to complete our lunch or dinner. This is something we really don’t have in the U.S. – fresh whole grain bread available on every corner for less than a dollar? Imagine replacing most Starbucks and McDonald’s locations with fresh, high quality bakeries – sounds delicious, no?
Most bakeries (or Bäckereien, in German) offer a selection of sweet pastries, as well. The stark difference here is European sweets are not cloyingly sweet like American sweets tend to be. My husband and I shared a strawberry pastry made with flaky pastry dough and strawberries arranged on a custard filling in the center. It was just sweet enough to enhance the juiciness of the strawberries, and the custard was rich and creamy. It was fruity, delicious, and filling; a lovely fruity bite to end our dinner. While American sweets are packed with sugars, as well as artificial colors and flavors (think of popular donuts, cakes or cookies), those artificial flavorings and colorings are mostly banned here. Flour, sugar, fruit, custard, jam, chocolate; sweets are made from real ingredients which actually produce satiety. High quality foods make you feel full. One can often gorge on American sweets, but you won’t on European treats, because they fill you up.
Here is the best of the Internet for the week:
A few weeks back, Dracula passed its 125th anniversary of publication. This was my favorite fiction title in high school, which makes me quite happy to see glowing reviews from 1897, in one of which the writer gushes, “Such is Mr. Stoker’s dramatic skill, that the reader hurries on breathless from the first page to the last, afraid to miss a single word…” That was certainly my experience. At the link you’ll find a collection of interviews with Stoker after its release.
Whimsically clever cutouts, via Kottke’s Noticing.
A unique, but inevitable problem of our digital age: the TikTok trend of filming strangers and posting to social media. This piece works through the legal, ethical, and philosophical questions involved with recording someone without their knowledge or consent, then uploading that to your social media account as “entertainment”. Susan Sontag wrote about the aggression of the camera back in the 1970s, and how it can create an entitlement in the photographer, if everything is worthy of being photographed, anything one can see is fair game. Has the ubiquity of the camera, in part, weakened our society’s standards and understanding of decency? The writer here also posits that the current loose restrictions on recording unsuspecting strangers paves the way for governments to rely increasingly on surveillance. There are many implications to consider, whether one participates in social media or not.
Queen Elizabeth II marked her Platinum Jubilee (seventy years on the throne) last week, with all the flair and pageantry we expect from the British. Here is a look at other British royals through history celebrating their Jubilees.
Finally, I enjoyed this short treatise on the beauty of everyday things.
Currently reading: How Then Should We Live? by Francis A. Schaeffer
Photo by Denis Lesak on Unsplash
