Living Your Dreams - A Trilogy

Part One - Munich, Germany

Many people in today's world have stopped or given up on dreaming. This is for many reasons: money, time, obligation, family, etc. For as long as I can remember I have been a dreamer. I would daydream about all sorts of things ranging from getting married to living alone in a tree somewhere. (I have often thought about writing fiction but I really don't think I have the patience.) The reasons for not dreaming simply never made their way into my brain. I firmly believe that having dreams is a foundational part of who a person is and giving up on that is essentially giving up on yourself. Trust me, I've been in a place where I've said to myself: "Your dreams are unrealistic. They'll never happen." But somehow, I just couldn't stop dreaming.

I have had two major dreams in my lifetime and I have been very blessed to have both of them come true, especially at such a young age. Both of these dreams were things that had been repeated in my head as dreams for a very, very long time. One of my dreams was to find the person that I will marry in a ridiculously romantic way and to have this dream come true is beyond words for me (in the best way). The second dream, the dream which I will be talking about for the next three blog posts, was the dream to travel.

I distinctly remember how my dream to travel came to be. I was in the 5th grade and we had an assignment: pick one of the 50 states of the U.S. and do a report about it and present it to the class. Well, me and this one kid both wanted Hawaii but I wanted it far more and ended up getting it. I launched into my very first research project with a vengeance at 10 years old. Being the year 2000, research on the computer was not quite up to speed as it is today but I was already a computer geek and tried my best to come up with as much information as I could find. (One website I used is still in existence today, check out 50 States.) I found it surprisingly difficult to find much solid information on Hawaii (today, however, this is different), but just with the information I found I became addicted to the state I still have yet to go to. I started reading fiction novels set in Hawaii, I learned my name and others names in Hawaiian (my name is Hali, sadly pronounced the same way as Holly), I learned basic words and meanings in Hawaiian, when I tried taro flavor for the first time I decided I must try poi (a Hawaiian dessert made from the taro plant), and so, so much more. I think I only got a mediocre grade on my report but the impact it had on my life is monumental. If you were to ask my mother or grandmother about my travel guides, they would sigh very heavily. Researching the state of Hawaii also made me realize that you can order free travel guides from every state in the country and get it mailed to your house. (I'm pretty sure the mailman still hates me.) And thus, the desire-borderline need-to travel was born.

My first real experience traveling happened when I was in high school. Sure, I had been out of the state before, but it wasn't really traveling. It was simply driving to a location, getting out, doing one or two things in that location, then going back. Traveling to me is an adventure. It's an immersion in a new culture. Sure, theme parks and hiking and sledding and swimming and museums are fun, but that is not necessarily culture. A culture is learning who the people are in an area and learning how they behave and realizing that the way you do things isn't the way someone else may do something. The first taste of culture I got was when my family had moved for a short period of time to North Carolina and I went to a new school. A whole new community, new food, new accent... it was very fascinating to me, even though I desperately wanted to go back to my hometown. Then my freshman year in college I volunteered in South Carolina. That summer I worked in Wyoming. Then I became more involved in school and went to Washington D.C. and Albany. And then I worked in Maine and met my fiance. And so it continues...

If you would have told me last year at this time that I would be in Europe now, I would have laughed and said "yeah, right." I never thought in my whole life I would go to Europe. It never even entered my mind as a possibility. But here I am, 22 years old, already 5 months into being in Europe and I have had more dreams come true than I could have possibly imagined. And for me, I know this is just the beginning.

For the next three days, I will begin each blog post with a different introduction about living dreams and end with a city I've been to during my vacation week. Today I'm talking about Munich.

Being an au pair in Munich has been quite the interesting experience. I still have so much I want to see. Today marks the "two months left" day. I have mixed feelings about leaving; I love Munich and could live there forever but at the same time my friends, family, and residence are not here. Not to mention there's still more of the world for me to see!

Sunday and Monday of this week I went to two museums, Glyptothek and Alte Pinakothek, and the Sea Life aquarium. I have selected some pictures to share with you.

Keep dreaming everyone!

Glyptothek.

Part of Königsplatz, which is a square in Munich dedicated to various museums. (Literally "King's Place.")

Greek bust in the Glyptothek.

Greek marble items. The Greeks really like marble.

Greek marble heads. Well, that's what they are!

Moving on to the Alte Pinakothek, it was truly one of the most amazing art galleries I had seen up until this point (my third blog post may have something different to say). In this picture you can see the painter and titles of the paintings.

Ahh food. I love older still paintings of food.

I thought her dress was beautiful.

I think it's Bavarian Royalty, but I'm not totally sure.

STARFISH!

SPECKLED FISH!

CLOWN FISH!

RAINBOW FISH! (One Fish! Two Fish! Red Fish! Blue Fish! [Dr. Seuss joke for those of you who don't get it.])

SEA HORSE!

RAY! (I'm not sure if it's a sting ray or not, I think it's just a flying ray.)

BIG FISH! (With sting ray. That one is definitely a sting ray.)

JELLYFISH!

SHARKS!! RUN!!

TURTLES!

To end my escapade of pictures, I took three pictures of Fred der Frosch. One on the 27th, one on the 28th, and one on the 29th. It's amazing what the change is!

May 27th, 2012. Look! Arms!

May 28th, 2012. Hey... the tail is shrinking...

May 29th, 2012. Wait... where did the tail go... He's almost a full grown frog! I can't wait to see him when I get back!

Let's see... I'll have the usual order of RECIPES, PICTURES, GENERAL INFO, and MALFUNCTION please. (But not necessarily in that order.)

Today's blog post will be presented to you in topic/list form.

TOPIC 1 - Malfunction

Let's begin with the worst news: my camera broke. I probably could fix it with a decent miniature screwdriver, but on the off chance that I would break it further (I am pretty good at fixing things), I think I should just pick up another camera. The one that broke is a Canon PowerShot a few years old which was a gift from my fiance and the lens has malfunctioned (and I may have slapped it too hard to try to get it to work... not that I've ever broken anything by hitting before...). I'm very sad about this because I have to buy a new camera AND because it broke while I was climbing an Alp! One of my dreams came true... AND I COULDN'T EVEN TAKE DECENT PICTURES! I did take a few with my cell phone camera (not great quality) and I went to my very first ever German electronics store: MediaMarkt which is kind of like a Best Buy. I did find a suitable replacement (not too expensive) camera (Would you like to see? Click HERE!) and I am thinking about getting a case for the camera this time (But what colors should I get? This is so important!). Seriously though, it's kind of a bummer because I really don't have the money to buy a new camera, however I really do need one. So half of the pictures you'll get today will be normal camera quality, and the other half will be kind of grainy.

TOPIC 2 - Recipes

I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world who has gotten inspired by her own blog, as weird as that is, but after my last post about the food list I started thinking about what I've said about everything that is in the store can really be made at home. Applesauce is the item on the food list I started thinking about. When I was looking up the recipes I realized that in every recipe I saw there was sugar added and possibly cinnamon. While I like cinnamon (and sugar too, just in moderation), I really just wanted plain applesauce. One recipe post even said that if you make the applesauce without sugar it won't be sweet! Then every recipe I saw said something different about water amounts. One recipe said 1/2 cup water with four apples. (No word as to how big the apples were.) One said a full cup with four apples. And so on. So I took matters into my own Holly hands (to my fiance and maid of honor: there will be no jokes please) and made for the first time:

HOLLY'S AMAZING APPLESAUCE

I so did not think that my boiled apples would turn into applesauce. I really thought it would all fall apart into a terrible liquidy mess. Obviously, it did not.

What You Need:

1 Kilogram or 2.2 American Pounds of Apples (about)

1 Cup of Water

1 Cutting Board

1 Large Pot

1 Knife

1 Wooden Spoon

1 Stove Top

1 Immersion Blender or Food Processor or Regular Blender or Potato Masher or Fork (you choose!)

Adult Supervision!

What You Do:

1) Before you do anything else, pour the water into the pot.

2) Peel, core, and chop the apples (I recommend one at a time) into even sized pieces. They don't have to be super small, just as even as you can get them. Then place the pieces of apple into the pot with the water. (Stir occasionally as you add the apples to coat them with a bit of water.) Note: In many of the recipe posts I saw, there was debate with whether or not to peel the apples. I have the solution: peel them. Why? Because I decided to try leaving one out of my four large apples unpeeled and seeing the taste difference in my second applesauce batch. Honestly, the taste was about the same, but now I have apple skin flecks in my applesauce! The skins don't blend evenly with the rest of the apple. So if you like little pieces of tough flesh in your sauce then be my guest. Otherwise, peel them.

3) Place the pot with the apple chunks and water on the stove top over medium-high heat. You will notice that the water level seems awfully low. This is okay. The apples will start to leak juices and add to the water.

4) Stir relatively constantly. This insures even heating which means even flavor.

5) When the water finally starts to bubble (about 20 minutes or so), test your apples by using your spoon to see how easily you can break a piece of apple in half. If you want really smooth, soft applesauce, the effort should be minimal. If you want applesauce with a bit more substance (like the picture) there should be a bit (just a bit) more effort. A good guide is this: once the water boils, stir for two or three more minutes before shutting off the burner for "regular" or the picture applesauce. For smoother or softer, heat for another 5 to 10 minutes. You can also pull a piece out and taste it for flavor and consistency as the flavor will also change if you heat too long. Note! Overcooking isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you may end up with apple butter instead of applesauce. You don't want the color of the apples to start really changing, they should stay whitish-yellow (the water will be brownish).

6) Using your method of choice (I love immersion blender!), blend your apples into beautiful saucy-ness.

7) Stir and let cool in the pot until room temperature before moving it into a Tupperware container and putting it into the fridge.

8) Enjoy!

I also did get to do one other thing that I am exceptionally proud of. I made my very first:

HOLLY'S POLISH POTATO BREAD!

Okay this picture isn't great quality (cell phone), but it is delicious.

The inside of my masterpiece. I have enough ingredients to make one more loaf!

 I can't take any credit for this recipe. I got it from About.com and you can see it here (thank you About.com!). I do have a couple notes though. First, this is really a project. Three full rises. It's totally worth it, but do laundry, a craft, a blog post, research, or something while you do it. Second, I know mashed potatoes is kind of vague. My advice is use mashed potatoes that only contain potatoes. You can use chunky mashed potatoes if you would like chunks in your bread, you can leave skins on if you want, or I bet you could even use sweet potatoes if you'd like. I used very smooth, peeled, plain mashed potatoes. Next, scalding milk? How do I do that? About.com gives only a description of what it is, not how to do it. Taste of Home gives a very short, very easy, and wonderful way to show you how to scald milk. Check it out! Lastly, the baking time. By the way, for those of you who don't know this trick, if you turn on your oven light (only the light!) and place whatever you want to rise in the oven and close the door, it's the perfect warmth for rising. But the baking time says between 30 and 45 minutes. That's a big time difference for baking. I checked my bread at 30 minutes and I rushed to pull it out because the top was starting to turn black. The inside's perfect, but the top is too dark. I would recommend using a wet hand to pat down the top before cutting the X and sprinkling with flour before placing it in the oven, or pull the bread out 5 minutes sooner and letting it sit. That's it! This bread, like the applesauce, is very easy to do. Unlike the applesauce, this is a bit time consuming!

TOPIC 3 - General Info

I would love to announce (and I'm doing it with permission) that my Grandma is healing wonderful from surgery and I am so, so happy and relieved that she is doing well. I could do a whole separate blog post on how happy I am that she's okay. (To everyone else in my family, yes, I love you too.)

My host family has left for vacation to go to an Italian island. Can I just say I wish I had the money to go to Thailand or an Italian island? They're also thinking about going to Disneyland Paris next month. For only a weekend! They come back from Italy just to go to France? Anyway, this means that I'm alone for the next nine days or so (yay), but it's not without plans! I would like to see the aquarium here in Munich while they're gone, or maybe swing by the botanical gardens again. I am definitely going to Salzburg on Tuesday I decided, then on Wednesday I finally leave for PARIS! I'm just so excited about that, and I know I'll never want to leave. I will try to put in a Salzburg blog post before I leave for Paris.

I also have a chicken dish picked out for my next meal, so I'm very excited about that. June will be kind of light with meals because I am working very hard to do more sightseeing instead of spending tons of money on food. (I really don't spend much on food, but it does add up after a while.)

Before I launch into the pictures section I want to explain what's going on in them! I got to go to Olympia Park here in Munich, which was the site of the 1972 Olympics. Very cool structures. It just so happened that while I was there, there was a big, and I mean big, championship celebration going on for a couple days, leading up to the soccer game where Munich was defeated, leaving sadness in the city. (Soccer is a BIG deal here.) Also in that area is the BMW Welt (BMW World in English), which is the location of the BMW car factory and museum. I didn't get to look through the museum too much (only the beginning, the rest was nine Euros), but I did get some great pictures. The aquarium is also there which I will be going back to (once I get my camera).

I also have my hiking up the Alp pictures, which I was just so excited about doing. The hike was about two hours or so and the view was breathtaking. Truly worth it. I want to live in the mountains so bad. Thrown into the plethora of pictures is a new Marlboro ad (yay) as well as a picture that I took really for my Grandma and Great-Grandma. Here's another sad note: because of my current camera situation (which will be fixed today) I couldn't take a good picture of my froggy's legs which are growing so well. The family let me borrow a very old Casio camera for the time being, which I'm very grateful about, so I was able to take a decent picture of the plants. (Exciting news about the plants!)

TOPIC 4 - Pictures

Olympic Stadium.

The festival sign. If you look at the sponsors, some big name companies... and American ones at that.

View of the park...

... and if you climb up a hill you can view most of Munich... and the Alps from a distance!

Okay, BMW Welt was AWESOME! You can even take a tour of the factory! (Maybe I will...) Plus you can sit in the cars, and there's an area where they have displays showing their process with designing a car. Pretty cool.

Recent bike model.

And in BMW Welt they had all of these really expensive lounge chairs and high tech everything. Virtual fireplaces, lighting was amazing, it was like walking into a weird tech world. And visiting was free!

Old BMW models, a beginning exhibition to the museum.

They had an overview into the museum so I snagged a picture. Love the multicolored car.

Okay so from here the pictures won't be so great. This is a rock face on the side of the Alp I climbed.

Path I walked along the side of the mountain... it was kind of scary actually. One wrong step and well, you fall. I was surprised the family (and friend) took 5 kids with them!

View to the top... yes I climbed all the way up.

Waterfall on the side of the mountain. I actually had to walk through the water.

My hand in the mountain snow... in May!

Close up of the waterfall. The snow in the picture above was right next to this waterfall.

View of the Alps and Walchensee before I got to the first major "top" part of the mountain (it was really like I was between two smaller mountains at the top). Walchensee, by the way, is beautiful, and I was so excited to see it.

View at the first part of the top.

If you kept going around, past the little restaurant at the top of the mountain (yes, you can eat outside with the Alps as a backdrop), you can climb "Martinkopf" it's called, or "Martin Head" in English. I have some great views I took pictures of with the cell phone.

More Alps. I want to live here.

If you look the other direction (away from the Alps) at the top, it's towards Munich. We were only an hour drive away from the Alps, which I think is wonderful.

Better Alp picture.

Cross on the mountain.

This is interesting: the kids really like a movie/TV show called Wickie (pronounced Vicky in English). This was apparently part of the set for the real-life movie, and it was like a two minute drive from the mountain we climbed. (Click here for the movie synopsis.) I was so sure that the kid on the front was a girl, but it's a boy!

Windsurfing on Walchensee. I want to go windsurfing so bad.

4711 is a German fragrance. Very popular I assume. You can't find it in America, you have to order it from here and it will get shipped. My Great-Grandma really likes it!

Maybe Never Feels Free. Be Marlboro. I found this one to be kind of strange considering smoking is an addiction and therefore trapping you, but okay.

Recent plant picture. LOOK LOOK LOOK! I HAVE A BEAN POD! And the Oak seed the little boy gave me is really growing!

That's it for now! I'll write after Salzburg and then after PARIS!

Enjoy!