Maribor and Pumpkin Soup!

Hello Friends and Family!


Tomorrow is the four-week anniversary of my departure from the US of A, and I'm happy to report that it's with nostalgia but not too much homesickness that I think back to that last day at JFK! I'm still pinching myself often, wondering when this honeymoon phase might end, but I'm hoping that I've really just found myself in a honeymoon-ish life!

Since my last post, after spending one last day tourning around Klagenfurt, Jason took off, heading first for Vienna, then on towards Italy. With the help of facebook and Skype, I hear from him rather often, and I get to keep updated on his crazy Euro-trip stories. It was great to have a friend in town for a couple days, and there's a chance that he might stop back through here before he heads home in early December!



On Thursday, my friend Britanny came back from several weeks in Germany, where she had tried out for another team there. Unfortunately, she's struggling to get back from a knee injury, and ended up deciding that maybe she should head home to the states for rehab before possibly trying to find a team in January. Anyway, she came to spend a last weekend in Klagenfurt, and we spent Friday morning at the lake, laying on a dock with our feet in the water.







Later, on our way home, we realized that there was a festival of some kind going on in downtown Klagenfurt, and we took a short video to document the fun!








That afternoon, Helli came by the flat to pick the "Rupees" up for our first team trip to Maribor, Slovenia (our apartment is on St. Ruprechter Strass, so Sophie, Birgit, Ellie and I call ourselves the "Rupee Gang"). From Klagenfurt to Maribor it is approximately a 2.5 hour drive, but it was through some of the most beautiful countryside I've ever seen! We arrived at our hotel on Friday evening, and left soon thereafter for a scrimmage with the team from Maribor. It was difficult to be playing so late and after a long day of travel, but we played well at times and ended up taking a set off of them, which was encouraging. We got back to our hotel close to midnight, and it was the start of a long volleyball weekend!








The next morning, Helli allowed us to sleep in a bit, but we met in the late morning for a team hike up the mountain next to the hotel. At the top of this mountain, we there was a large ropes course, and more importantly, a huge alpine slide! It reminded me of summers in Vermont where my Grandma and Grandpa would take me, Talia, and our cousins to ride the alpine slide at Bromley mountain, only this slide was a little more sketchy and made me fear death by bob-malfunction a little more than I did back in VT. Fortunately, the slide was better constructed than I had imagined, and we all made it down alive!



That night, we played the team from Maribor again, and it was good to see that we're showing improvement. We're playing with a strange rotation right now, several girls are injured, and we're still waiting for our second foreigner (an outside from Canada) to arrive (this Saturday! YAY!), so we're somewhat incomplete. But we did well with the personnel that we have, and we're getting better!


Sunday morning we played the team from Innsbruck, Austria, who are also in our league. We took them to 5 sets with our incomplete roster (the middles were playing backrow some of the time!) but ended up losing a tight game in the 5th. That concluded our weekend of volleying in Slovenia!


Helli gave us Monday and Tuesday off from practice, but surprised us on Monday with a team cooking class with a nutritionist. The 9 of us divided 5 recipes amongst ourselves, all meals that were designed to be quick, healthy, and practical for athlete's schedules (I know, what schedule is that, you ask? Lay by the lake between practices? I could probably cook a 7-course meal every day! But I think my teammates do have real lives that are busy though, so maybe the recipes were more designed for them..)


I was paired with "Anna Kleine" ("little Anna," because there are two of us, and they distinguish between us with the vast differences in size. I'm "Anna Grosse," haha) and we were assigned the pumpkin soup. I had never made pumpkin soup before, but as the weather starts getting colder, I'm realizing that it may be a go-to recipe for yummy fall comfort food! The other gals made such recipes as millet (?) with apples and cinnamon as a breakfast food, sesame seed and cornflake crusted chicken, and DELICIOUS potato pancakes. Everything was really really good, but the soup was pretty legendary, so I'll share the recipe:

• Take a small pumpkin, and after cutting off the stem and taking the seeds out, cut it two inch cubes (the recipe says 400g of pumpkin, but we grams are hard for Americans, and I really have no idea what a gram is... except a singing gram that I was always hoping to get around Valentines day in middle school..)




• In your favorite stew pot, saute a diced onion in a couple tablespoons of olive oil



• When the onions are soft and almost transparent, add the many grams of pumpkin, as well as a liter (a 4 or 5 cups ish? Again, a standard of measure that means nothing to me) of vegetable stock. Simmer for 20 minutes, or until pumpkin is soft.



• After 20 minutes, puree the pumpkin in the pot, until the soup becomes an evenly smooth consistency



• At the same time, add a cup of milk, a cup of cream, a teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons of soy sauce

• Puree until all ingredients are mixed



• Prepare to be amazed with your own chef mastry, and maybe steal a bit of soup for yourself before everyone realizes how good it is and gobbles it down!

Throughout this cooking session, I honestly felt like I was back in home ec. in 7th grade... Did I mention it was at the local high school with the cooking teacher? Yeah. I forgot what it was like to be constantly trying to follow the rules, especially rules in German! Don't sit on the counter! Don't add the cream too quickly! Warm the bowls before serving the soup! Can someone translate for me??

After we were all done with our recipes, we sat down to taste our culinary experiments. The nutritionist explained (in German) the importance of fueling our bodies correctly, and how we can all find time to prepare good food for ourselves blah blah blah. Wait, what was that last part?? Oh yeah, I only heard part of it because I was too busy scarfing the deliciousness!

Yesterday and today were pretty low-key, because my body is just so darned tired from volleyball! I did, however, manage to find time to finished my latest read, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I LOVED this book! It was a really quick read, which I like (of course, until the end, when I wanted it to keep going!!) and basically a great work of fiction. I have a copy if you want to come borrow it! :)

I miss you all and hope all is well in your neck of the woods! Remember, send updates to acmaylo@gmail.com, I love hearing from you!

LOVE,

Anna