About Me

Gischt in de Lung, Soltwater in't Bloot ...

No, unfortunately I do not speak Low German, but being born in Hamburg in the eighties and having lived in the north of Germany for over ten years before moving to Berlin, I do at least understand it.

Although looking back, a decade does not seem like a long time span, a decade during childhood is a lot of time to coin a personality, and so I learned to love Hamburg, the sea and especially the tides. (Sorry to you guys living at the Baltic Sea: Two centimeters does not qualify as tide.)

... un Tee in de Tass

This seems to be quite unusual in the programming community: People who do not consume coffee in large quantities.

While mentioning that one does not drink coffee always raises a few eyebrows, I can at least keep up (or surpass) with my coffee drinking colleagues in respect of the quantities: At times, I consume three or four liters of tea per day.
Of course at these rates, a single flavour would become stale over time – that's why I always keep a small stock of at least four or five different (»real«) teas available. This basic stock consists of:

This palette is usually completed by one or two flavoured black or rooibos teas. Mentioning rooibos: Because it is free of caffeine, I keep some unflavoured rooibos especially for the late evenings.

Also (not only) for the evenings, amongst my palette of spices, some herbs can always be found in my kitchen for some fresh herbal tea. Worth mentioning here are fennel seeds and dried mint leaves for fennel or mint tea – sometimes »spiced up« with a chili or two to give it a mild afterburn effect.

On a neverending quest to find (and eat) a good Franzbrötchen ...

Of course programmers can't live on tea alone (even though it sometimes seems that they can on coffee). Raised in Hamburg, I got hooked by a very special local drug, called »Franzbrötchen«. Being available only in and around Hamburg, these crisp pastries with lots of sugar and cinnamon are among the things I miss most since I moved away and I make sure to get one (or two, or three) whenever I go there.

Then again it's not like Berlin offers nothing to eat: Starting with the »Berliner« (which curiously enough is called »Pfannkuchen« in Berlin), a pastry pretty similar to a filled doughnut without a hole, over the Currywurst, for which there is even going to be a museum, to the Kassler, which – despite the name – does not originate from Kassel.
And that's just the local cuisine: Being Germanys largest melting pot, Berlin offers many different cultures. In my vicinity, I have not only the huge German supermarket branches (one of which has a fish vendor and a small Greek food shop inside), the market and a few wholefood shops, but also an African food store, a Polish one, two Indian/Pakistani ones and countless Turkish stores which also sell fresh fruit and vegetables. On top of that there is an Asian food shop just around the corner, where I could buy my Basmati (a variety of rice) in 20 kilogram sacks. Fortunately they sell kilogram pouches as well.

With this paradise in terms of food logistic, it is easy to try out many different cuisines or just try to combine different countries ingredients. I really enjoy to do some experimental cooking, and most of the time my guests do so, too. Should it fail altogether, there is still the possibility to have it delivered instead, so you would at least know what it should have tasted like and laugh about the failure over a good beer, wine or whisky – or tea.