7 quick takes Friday

1. Happy Easter to all! I had a great Easter with four good friends. We had a lovely afternoon cooking, chatting, and hearing about the trip to Turkey that three of them had just taken.

2. In the spirit of Easter, or in a fit of madness, I have committed to spending one hour in a church every day until Pentecost. Usually I go to the cathedral, because it's always open, and spend some time just sitting in a pew and reading Jesus of Nazareth. It is a great book, and I am really enjoying it. If I go to the cathedral late enough, they close it to tourists and have Eucharistic Adoration, which is always wonderful. I haven't made it to a daily Mass yet, because they are all either much earlier than I feel like getting up, or right in the middle of dinner time.

3. There are almost exactly two days left until the start of the Freiburg Half Marathon. I am super excited, as well as a little bit freaked out. I am quite sure I can do it, since I ran 11 miles two weeks ago, but I am a competitive enough person that I am worried about my time, especially since I paid to have it engraved on the back of my medal!

4. Classes started on Tuesday. I have had two sessions of my German theater class. My medieval art class is once a week on Mondays, so the first meeting of that is on Monday. My other three classes are through the university and don't start until the 15th. I like my drama teacher a lot. Yesterday we picked our topics for our two presentations. I will be giving a presentation on costumes and one on the play Daniel Stein (which is based on the book by the same name) which is about a Jewish translator for the Gestapo who saves many Jews and then becomes a Catholic priest. I'm looking forward to reading it!

5. I finished my 1000 piece puzzle of Tuscany. However, it's missing a piece! This is probably a metaphor for something.

6. Since I share a kitchen with relative strangers, I wasn't sure how I felt about the prospect of dying Easter eggs with vinegar and food coloring the way I usually do. So I improvised! Behold Sharpie-decorated eggs! I think they came out quite well:

I made the first, third, and fifth ones (counting from the left). Kevin made the other three. Clearly, he has more artistic talent than I do. Between the six eggs, we have three different languages going on! The tricky part of decorating German eggs is that every egg has the region where it comes from stamped on it, which is not attractive, but can be tricky to cover.

7. Speaking of eggs, we got a box of free-range eggs from the open-air market a few weeks ago, and my goodness you can tell the difference! Keeping chickens in the cages PETA likes to complain about is illegal in Germany, but even so the yolks of the free-range are much more orange and the eggs have more flavor.

The eggshells are also much harder to break. I'm not sure why that is, but it's rather annoying. This week I bought the regular eggs from Aldi instead of the free-range eggs. The free-range ones from the market are more than twice the price of the ones from Aldi, which is a little hard to pay given how many eggs I eat. I will probably switch back and forth--it is more fun to buy local food!