The Way To a Man’s Heart is Through His Care Packages

I like to joke that I married my husband because the apartment he was assigned at the university in Beijing, where we met, was equipped with hot water, a bathtub, and a refrigerator.  In truth however, I married him because he received care packages from Germany at Christmas.

They were carefully wrapped and thoughtfully chosen collections of chocolate, gingerbread, marzipan, and home baking. His landlady even sent an entire Linzertorte, a cake that fortunately improves with age, through the diplomatic pouch. The first care packages – in the signature yellow cardboard boxes of the German post office - arrived in time for the beginning of Advent or the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6. Another set usually arrived in time for Christmas. Since both his mother and aunt were looking after him from afar, he was already getting double rations. But as soon as he announced that he had met a young lady, the size of the care packages increased. By Easter, they were sending two of everything.

The other Germans on campus were also being spoiled by their families. I remember being in the student dormitory – Building 6 – when Christine from Berlin and Astrid from Hannover opened their care packages and shared the contents with a party of friends gathered for the celebration. Bars of Milka chocolate, Ritter Sport, solid chocolate Santas, jars of Nutella and instant coffee, bags of gummy bears, and even loaves of stollen, or Christmas cake, spilled out of their lovingly wrapped packages to shrieks of delight and hectic gorging. It was 1987 and the selection of food at the cafeteria of our university was dismal in winter. Eggs and tomatoes, fried potato with bits of fatty pork and green pepper, fried aubergine, and the ubiquitous Chinese cabbage topped the menu in winter. Breakfast consisted of steamed dumplings stuffed with either meat or red bean. We weren’t starving, but by December all of us were craving chocolate. Besides, these students – among the first generation of foreign students in China to study Sinology - were paying to live in pretty desperate conditions. Their dorm rooms had poured concrete floors, metal beds, and rickety, ill-fitting casement windows. The washrooms on each floor had cold running water in trough-like sinks and squat toilets. The hallways were dimly lit with bare lightbulbs. Trash was swept to one dark corner of the hallway. The doors to the building were locked at 12:00 p.m. Hot showers could be taken once or twice a week at the public showers.

Into this scene then, imagine the comfort and joy that Swiss chocolate or mother’s baking can bring. Since then I have learned to bake the nutty half-moon biscuits with lemon drizzle that my husband’s mother perfected, and Linzertorte, prepared according to his landlady’s handwritten instructions and complete with a dash of schnaps in the mix,  is now a standard in my recipe canon.

Sketches of Spain

Today I went back to work after three weeks of paid vacation. I can’t complain. I have worked at companies where employees were grudgingly assented two weeks off per year. I get 32 days paid vacation at SAP. It is one of the perks of living in Germany. But. On my last day at work I left the office at 7:00 PM after an 11 hour day, thinking how wrong it felt. At home I dropped my laptop in a corner and didn’t touch in again until this morning when my inbox groaned open to reveal 750 waiting mails, spam and all. I am not bragging. Many other colleagues go on vacation with their Blackberrys and feel obliged to continue to be on call. Colleagues in other geographies.

Instead, my husband and I packed up the Volvo with essential kit for us (including a novel of 1,300 pages for him), loaded up the kids and their even weightier kit and drove across France to northern Spain. Where I was promptly rewarded for the stress of the previous weeks with a raging fever that put me to bed for days. But I wasn’t complaining. I had seen the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. In all its glory. A thing of true beauty:

 

I had two wonderful – shorter – novels waiting for me (Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes and The Sea, by John Banville) and nothing to do but enjoy the foreignness of Spain. At least once a year I need to get out of Germany. I need to experience a different culture for a longer period of time. Actually my job has taken me on some wonderful trips in the past years – to India and China. Although they are work-related, I still enjoy the people, the food, the sounds, the sites, the shopping. In Spain, it was no different. We were lucky to have a friend, Maria Eugenia, in Cantabria who was our translator, guide, and hostess for two weeks. Maru, as she is known, teaches Greek and Latin in the local school, and directs theatre on her summer vacations. Maru is an intellectual Lolita, who can talk Aristoteles and Lorca, who wears a tiny string bikini at the beach and had a considerable collection of low cut t-shirts that showed her best feature to full advantage. She recommended the following novelists to me, none of which I have ever read: Anita Nair, Rosina Lippi, Natalie Ginzburg, and José Saramago.

My boys were delighted to find a surf school at the beach at St. Vincente de la Barquera. Run by a university educated and multilingual German surfer dude, the school is located directly at the beach, which in turn is located in a national park. No highrise condominiums here. Just VW buses with German licence plates camping illegally in the meagre parking zone. Surfnsoul was lots of fun – highly recommended. My boys will return in glory sometime to ride the waves. The blistering hot beaches are not my scene however. I was the one hovering under a beach umbrella, wearing a hat the size of a wagonwheel and wearing a longsleeve shirt. I can just feel my skin frying like bacon in a pan if I stay too long in the sun. Not so obviously the five topless lovelies stretched out in their full glory at the beach. Not a book or newspaper in sight, these ladies were at the beach for the hard work of turning even nuttier brown. Occasionally one of them would reapply some tanning oil, but they did not talk, swim, eat or even drink. Now they look fantastic. In twenty years?