Cheryl on the Web

Here in Germany we are lucky enough to get Good Friday and Easter Monday off work - yes, a 4-day weekend which is pretty much a mini-vacation! Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking enough in advance when I left home on Tuesday for my business trip, and I didn’t leave my husband Tim a grocery list. Since I didn’t arrive home until Friday, when all the stores are closed, and we went away on Saturday/Sunday, that means here we are foraging for food on Monday, when all the stores are still closed. I’d love to make a comment like, WHY can’t there be any grocery stores open in Europe on holidays??! But I have to admit that perhaps it says more about our lifestyle than about the culture we live in, that here we are with no food on the last day of our 4-day weekend.

All I can say is, thank goodness for the Aral, the BP-owned gas station across the street from us open 24/7. We walked over there today around 3pm and it was THE place to be, completely full with cars in the lot and people in the store. It was the first time I have actually seen both cash registers open there. We stocked up on ham, milk, orange-flavored water with bubbles (orange juice was 4 euro so we skipped that), a jar of hot dogs, and a half-size pack of brown Golden Toast.

Brown Golden Toast is pretty much the only “normal” kind of bread you can get in Germany: it doesn’t contain rye, it wouldn’t sink to the bottom of a lake, and it’s not bleached so white you could blind someone with it on a sunny day. Unfortunately, it also has enough preservatives in it to remain fresh for a couple weeks at a time, and it still clearly contains very processed remnants of what once was whole wheat. You guessed it, it’s American brown bread in disguise. Tim’s comment today was, “Look what’s become of us! A year ago we wouldn’t touch this stuff, today we buy it without even thinking twice.” The thing is, in Holland you can buy all kinds of bread that are similar to this only processed ten times less and are 100% fresh, no preservatives - that’s REAL bread. But today, as with so many days here in Germany, we were foraging for food - and after a while, your standards lower.