In which Geri and I Play a Game.

Last year when I was in Berlin, I was crossing Potsdamer Platz on my way to or from somewhere. On that day they were having a market, which is when various and random vendors set up tents on city squares and sell random wares, good food, and usually some kind of beer or Bratwurst as well. Walking through I noticed a vendor selling a beautifully carved chess set in what looked like a well constructed case with drawers to hold the pieces. It was only 25 Euro. The problem was, I was feeling poor that day, having just spent most of my liquid assets for tickets to a concert in the Philharmonie for me and my students. So I didn’t get the chess board. I felt bad, even though I already have several chess sets, and really display exactly none of them. And even though it was probably made in Poland or somewhere else in eastern Europe, I still like the idea of a chess set as a souvenir. A good one has beauty and function. When I told my dad about it, who also likes chess sets, even though he hasn’t played me since the first time I beat him, he told me I should have bought the board anyway if it were only 25 euro. I thought this was odd, since he is, if anything, even more conservative with his money than I am.

Which leads up to this year. When I took the students to Dresden, there is a market place near the Frauenkirche with all the typical shop tents and wooden huts set up – I had some roast rabbit and Rotkohl with klöße there that was amazing. I also saw a chess board with stone figures and a stone-inlaid playing surface. 25 Euro. So without thinking too long. I bought it. I broke it in at the train station on the way home by beating one of my students in its first game. I don’t like to brag, but I demolished him, sucking him into a gambit and then picking him apart piece by piece. I still don’t like to brag, because he wasn’t a bad player, – but the game wasn’t really that close.

So now the board sits in my room, and I have no one to play. So I have been playing myself–Geri’s game style. If I wait long enough between moves, the left half of my brain can’t remember what the right half was thinking, and it is a pretty fair fight. We can’t play for false teeth, since neither of us has any, just a few crowns we both share. Maybe the loser will have to buy the winner a chocolate bar. Winner chooses the flavor.
By the way, no stone lions were injured in the composition of this post, but 3 of the four stone horsemen have already left the game. My apologies to Ron Weasley.

Am I in?

Now that I have avoided posting on my blog for long enough that it is just me again talking to the air, I will probably do two posts here maybe even tonight. A while ago my brother joined an exclusive group started by one of my friends from high school. The stone lions are the biggest rage of the internet. I hate being shown up by my little brother. So I had to find a stone lion that was stone-lion-y in a Deutschlehrer kind of way. This lion is in fact over a fireplace in the Goethe-Institute that I visited in Boston last month. I saw it in an assembly room during a very crowded reception for German teachers during a convention for language teachers in general. It was the bright point of the evening--except I didn't have a camera with me. Luckily there was another reception the next night, which I was late for, which meant I had to stand in the back next to the wine for an hour--which would have been fine, except I don't drink--but great accomplishments sometimes require sacrifice. When the talk was over (it was an author talking about her book about--and I am not making this up-- two siblings with a sick cat that they cured by feeding it a very specific type of coffee bean that they then recycled after the cat was finished with it, by roasting the passed beans, grinding them, and making coffee out of them--which they then sold. The high point of the evening was when friends of the author served coffee according to the recipe in the book. There are days when the Word of Wisdom really comes in handy. Anyway, when everyone got up to enjoy the "refreshments" I snapped this picture. So, Charlotte, am I in?