Day 56 – Dios mio, si bebiendo te ofendo con la cruda te pago y me sales debiendo

I awoke early in the morning, and while Inge and I were having coffee Gustav came by to pick me up (“Bose, bose” he said as he condescendingly waggled his finger at me) so we could go to the Frankfurt Markthalle for the traditional ceremony of eating a Graef-Voellsinger wurst. This would be the equivalent of having a very spicy menudo after a night of carousing: brutal but effective.

When we got home everyone was sleep, so Gustav spent a couple of hours teaching me the fine points of Backgammon. He happens to be a devotee of the game, and I nearly drove him to despair by my total lack of strategy and inability to count quickly. Finally the family woke up, I gained the last game by one point, and Gustav took off to keep a billiards appointment.

What next . . . ah, yes, Chrissy and I went to the shopping center to buy me a new camera, and then went shopping for food. We had decided to invite Andrea and Frank to an African meal, and I had to buy the ingredients for a dish of lamb, egg plant, and garbanzo beans.

Later that afternoon Gustav gave me a second round of instruction in Backgammon (another disaster as far has he was concerned), and we made a mess of Chrissy’s kitchen cooking a fine meal of roasted Cornish hens (Gustav), my lamb dish (Horacio), and cous-cous with saffron and broccoli (again Horacio). The dinner was a success, and we finished by playing the Horacio-Spiel until 1 am (The Horacio-Spiel has an interesting history: According to Chrissy I taught them this card game when we celebrated Christmas in Puerto Vallarta a few years ago. They “imported” the game to Germany and made it popular among their friends, and so every time I come visit we have to play it. The only problem is that I never remember how it goes, so in spite of having my name I have to have it explained to me every single time).