Is it Pumpkin or Squash?

One Saturday in October we were heading to Cafe BilderBuch on Akazienstrasse to have breakfast and do some work.  What we found was Akazienstrasse blocked off to cars and vendors setting up and a very full cafe with no open seats. 

We had found the Schöneberg Kürbis Fest.  Kürbis is pumpkin in German (as a noun it is capitalized throughout this post as all nouns are always capitalized in German).  Important to note is that there is no separate word for squash in German, so Kürbis also means squash.  They distinguish between types you can eat and not by putting the word Speise (food) in front of those you can eat.  We were there just as the festival was beginning, so we walked through but moved on to find somewhere else for breakfast.

Sunday we headed over to see what the festival had to offer for lunch as festivals always have fun food stands.  We were not disappointed.  Our strategy for trying different things is to only get one of any one thing and share so we can try more things.  It's the best way.  The first stand that called to us offered a variety of pickles.  We had a garlic pickle as we continued to walk the crowded street. 
Next we tried a spicy Kürbis soup from an African food stand.  This is one of the things that I most wanted to try from our walk through the day before so we waited on the line for it.  The soup was excellent.  Not too spicy to cover the flavor, but enough kick to really add something to the soup.  We still have no idea if it was pumpkin or squash as they taste similar enough and the sign saying Kürbis doesn't help.

Berlin is big on being green.  Instead of using disposable bowls, you got the soup in nice heavy bowls.  You have to pay 2 extra Euros which you get back once you return the bowl to make sure people don't take them home but so you can walk around with the bowl.  A good system really.

We then wandered around past crepe stands (the kid one has gummy bears and chocolate sauce), wooden furniture for sale, marzipan and nougat stands, a mini-ferris wheel, all types of crafts, the electric companies trying to get people to switch to them (since here you can pick who is your provider even as an individual in an apartment building) and of course pumpkins.

Ready for something more to try we headed to the stand with a sign saying they had old Bohemian Kuchen (loosely translates to cake but is used to mean many dessert-y things or cake-like breads).  We really had no idea what we were on line for.  As we got closer though we saw that the reason it took so long was because they were making the pastry and giving them straight out of the oven/grill and only two were ready at a time.  At this stand the dessert (seen here) was called  Feuerkringel or fire curl.  We found this in Prague (which is in Bohemia) where it is called Trdelnik.  They take a snake of dough and wrap it around a metal rolling pin.  They put another one on the other end. Then they roll it so that it is the dough becomes two separate rolls around the pin.  The rolling pin goes in a special grill that lets them rotate as they cook.  When they were just browned they take them out and roll them in cinnamon and sugar and slivered almonds and give it immediately to the waiting customer.  It was worth the wait.  It was a bit like a sweet bread.  The dough itself was not sweet, but the sugary outside made the whole thing sweet since it was so thin. 

Before getting pumpkins we decided to get a Wurst to split.   While on line we realized that they had a line of different types of mustard to try on the Wurst of your choice.  In the end we each got our own because there were about 10 types of mustard and they wouldn't have fit on half a Wurst.  Actually they didn't all fit on one.  They were so good though:  garlic, wild garlic, hot, horseradish, sweet, tomato, standard to name a few.  And no yellow mustard in sight.  While I am not he biggest fan of sausage, I do love mustard.

No pumpkin fest would be complete without buying some pumpkins.  We went to one of the farm stands that was taking over the whole front courtyard of the church selling pumpkins and squash.  It was interesting to see pumpkins we had never seen before, like the watermelon pumpkin.  We bought a what we called a Zombie pumpkin but is apparently as Blue Hokkaido Pumpkin.  The types that you can eat (which you can with this one) were all cheaper than the Halloween pumpkins (yes, that is what they called the regular orange ones here).  However, we will leave our Zombie pumpkin as is.  Although it may end up with a marker face by Tuesday.

What Happens When Our Apartment is Furnished

Notice that the last post was in September.  That was about the time we finished furnishing our apartment.  So now we have time to go out and do things.  Hence the lack of blogging but more interesting things to post.  I will now take you back in time to the beginning of October.

October 3rd is German Unity Day celebrating German unification on October 3, 1990.  I was told that while we had off from school there would be no parades or fireworks ("This is not America," a Berliner told me). 

We started our celebration of German Unity and the three day weekend (and our apartment being furnished) by having our first dinner party.  We made chili and cornbread, which I suppose was not in the theme of the weekend, but went over well anyway.  The obstacles of this party were getting all of the cans of things home without a car (I started going every day that week and picking up a few cans at a time), having to make cornbread with no help from Jiffy, dealing with the only icing option really being chocolate glaze (unless you go to a specialty store and pay a lot) and melting your own caramel if you want to use any.  In the end it all worked out, though.

To continue our weekend we went on Sunday to Brandenburger Tor for the Festival of Happiness.  Officially it was the Coca-Cola Festival of Happiness.  The American company logo all over the area celebrating German Unity was quite funny.  The festival was a big concert at the back of Brandenburger Tor.  The stage was at the Gate and the festival with food and stuff stands, rides, and screens to see the concert continued down the street though the Tiergarten. 

We arrived on the wrong side of the Gate for the festival at first and because the stage was blocking it we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to get through at first.  Not a good way to promote German Unity if we couldn't get from East to West Berlin.  We were happy to find that they didn't make this mistake--we just hadn't noticed the way around.

After listening to the band for a bit we wandered all of the stands.  It was a beautiful, warm day out.  It seemed more like summer than October.  It is fun to see what kinds of foods different places sell at festivals.  There was more beer and wurst than we are used to at home.  Also wine and wine with fruit in it.  There were also a variety of ethnic food stands selling things, but not as many as you see in general in Germany.  Cotton candy and candy apples reminded me of fairs at home.  Marzipan and the number of types of nuts were new things at a fair for me. 

The best part about the festival's location was that if you got tired of walking through the crowds you could wander off into the park and sit for a while.  We took some of these nice strawberry-wine-with-strawberries drinks with us.

We wandered back through the stands for some wurst and beer for dinner.  While there the screens from the stage started showing us these people who seemed to be trying to teach us some dance moves.  The dance was somehow reminiscent of Kris Kross, but not quite.  Then the band came on: Culcha Candela.  Once they started singing and dancing it was clear that this was a boy band with the band members being older than 30.  At first we just couldn't stop watching because the whole thing seemed so absurd.  Then it sucked us in and became fun.  We discovered the dance moves they were teaching were for the band and tons of festival goers were dancing in unison.  Wow!  I think that all unification days should include mass groups of people learning a new dance together.

As no band could top this one, and the sun had been down for long enough to make it get colder, we headed home.  We may have missed the last weekend of the Munchen Beer Fest, but we can say that we participated in the German Unity Day celebrations (and there is always next year).