halfjapanese hamburger (HH)

Hamburg - Essen & Trinken - Restaurants - Italienisch & Pizza - Essen & Trinken - Fast Food & Imbiss - Sandwiches

I love the last block of the Eppendorfer Landstrasse because it’s full of cute places and Mercato Piazza is one of them.

From the outside with French antiques on the sidewalk and a slew of rainbow colored pottery in the window, you’d think this converted butcher shop dealt only with interior design items. But when you walk in, it hits you: a tiny little delicatessen offering a huge selection of Italian yumminess: lasagne, tagliatelle with shrimp and garlic, tortellini in gorgonzola sauce, roasted eggplants, salami, prosciutto, olives, freshly made tiramisu and torta della nona and panne cotta.

But that’s not all. There’s another three rooms and more upstairs filled with furniture and household items. It’s sooo cute.

Prices aren’t bad either. Hanging in the stairway was a used gold-framed mirror which had been rescued from a hair salon. The frame was made to look antique and had a small nick in the corner, but the mirror itself was of the highest quality. This 120 cm x 200 cm mirror cost me €350 plus shipping. A mirror this size at any other store in Hamburg would have set me back about €800.

Mein Beitrag zu Piazza Mercato - Ich bin halfjapanese - auf Qype

Hamburg

Just signed up for a trial month to see if I like it. Circuit training is supposed to be the most effective way for women to lose weight and keep it off.

This club is small but clean. I’ll have to update my review with more details in a few weeks, after I’ve visited the place a few more times.
Check out my review of Mrs. Sporty - Club Barsbüttel - I am halfjapanese - on Qype

The first blossoms have appeared in our strawberry patch. I counted them this morning: We have 57 mother and daughter plants now. I believe we had only 39 last summer, 3 rows of 13. I cut the umbilical cord between the plants when I weeded the bed a few weeks ago. I read later that cutting it produces larger berries while leaving it attached produces more berries. I wish I had known that before. I prefer the intense flavor of the smaller strawberries. It’s something I’ll have to remember for next year. I can’t wait for the harvest, though. I’ve already started collecting strawberry recipes in anticipation.

Haven’t found the inspiration to write. I’ll just photoblog for a little while until I get past the block.

Successfully finished reading the book Steffi lent me. Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink, the book upon which the film The Reader was based. Haven’t seen the film yet, but am looking forward to it. My first German book.

I killed a cactus.  I was following a watering schedule I found on the internet where the gardener starves her cactii during the winter months. She starts again in mid-January. I kinda missed that schedule by about three months, to the fatal detriment of my Astrophytum.

I thought I heard the distant sound of an approaching thunderstorm and then realized it was merely the grumbling of my upset stomach. I’m full of caffeine and have been lying in bed in a half-sleep for the last three hours. If only I could find the switch to turn off my brain…

I finally started sorting through the thousands of digital photographs stored on thumb drives, SD cards, external hard drives, back up CDs, unmarked DVDs and yes, floppy diskettes scattered throughout our apartment and in various cardboard boxes in the basement. What prompted this undertaking was a combination of insomnia and a warning that my laptop’s internal hard disk was running out of space. Sigh.

I came up with a plan…

1. My main folder will be called Images. It’ll have two subfolders: Photographs and Illustrations.
2. Photographs will be further divided into Originals and Modified.
3. Originals will be organized by Photographer.
4. Since the Akiko photographer will be the largest folder, the photographs there should be organized by Camera. (I have three or four, I think.)
5. Within the Canon Powershot folder, I could organize by Person, Place or Thing…

The schema at the end gets a little sticky. I finally decided to just look for all my food photographs and stick them in one folder.

I love taking pictures of food, which is where I found the cute photo of the pink sugar cookie I used for this post. It’s from last year, when I was staying with Jacqui, the same time period I wrote the post Addicted to Sugar.

Ironically, I am still addicted to sugar. They don’t sell sugar cookies here in Hamburg and the Happy Kappy cupcake bakery is too far for me to drive. So, I’ve been making and eating lots of divinity fudge. And pumpkin pie. Mmm mmm.

It does come with a price, however. I am now 30 lbs. overweight and jogging an hour a day hasn’t the slightest effect. I took a glucose tolerance and insulin resistance test this morning and in nine days I’ll get the sober results.

Until then… I’m going to enjoy my last week of diet freedom.