Again with the lunch

Today it's sheep's cheese, apple and honey. Have not tried it yet, as it is packed for later. I am excited for this. I could be the next hip person to open a fancy-schmancy sandwich shop in the states and charge 9+ dollah for my "gourmet" bread/topping combinations.

*Edit: This sandwich was really, really good.

Best home sandwich ever.

I have just discovered my new favorite sandwich to fix myself for an evening snack here: toasted bread, honey, sheep's cheese and slices of ripe pear. Ambrosia. Seriously. Especially with a sweet cup of coffee and a good book.

Lit Update (Not That You Care)

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray today. At first, I had made up my mind that I really didn't like it, but the macabre twists and the sinister ending improved my opinion. I just wish that middle part, in which Wilde goes into minute detail about every single hobby Dorian Gray has ever had, could have been cut down. I mean, it's important to character development and all, but did I really need to know about his budding obsession with rock-collecting? Does that really give me insight into his personality? Couldn't it have just been mentioned in passing instead of taking up an entire page?

Every so often, I read someone's opinion that the literature of today is so short and to-the-point that everybody's standards have changed, nobody is capable of reading the complex, nuanced sentences of old, etc. I used to dismiss such statements, but I'm starting to think there's some truth in them. I mean, even when I look at the difference between what my parents can read and what I can, it's huge. My mom reads Edith Wharton, and her books make me snore. My dad enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities, perhaps one of my least favorite reads of all time. On the other hand, I have two friends of my age group who read Edith Wharton and love Charles Dickens, respectively. So perhaps all it really boils down to is individual taste. Or maybe I have the attention span of a three-year-old after birthday cake. Who knows?

Honey

I really believe that honey is one of the most amazing substances known to mankind. It tastes amazing, it looks beautiful, it is made by insects, and there are unending varieties of it, each one astoundingly different from the next. But perhaps one of the most amazing properties of honey is one I had never even paused to acknowledge before reading it on a honey farm's informational webpage: honey never goes bad. It crystallizes, but one could theoretically keep using the same jar of honey indefinitely with no adverse effects. As someone who has often been disgusted by the amount of moldy, unidentifiable food products in their home refrigerator, this particular trait makes honey very dear to me. Well, that and the fact that it's better for you than refined sugar and tastes really good on peanut butter/banana sandwiches.

I wish I had more exciting things to blog about than my love of non-perishable food items, but life has been so normal and uneventful lately. Tomorrow I am planning a trip to my fave Bio-Markt to buy some more natural peanut butter that doesn't include plant fat/doesn't taste rancid. I'm reading two books at the same time: The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The first one I'm not wild about; the second has promise, but I'm not very far in yet. On Saturday I'm seeing Alice In Wonderland with a couple of friends--Tim Burton doing depraved with pedo undertones, should be interesting.

More on the above literature later. And I really will post something about the German language. But right now, I have a mountain of laundry that ain't gonna do itself.