It’s been one heck of a weekend, I tell you! All good things happened, all involving the letter “P” – unfortunately, no pics of any of these good P-things.

On Saturday night, my bosses took the three of us (so five people in total) to Harald Wohlfahrt’s Palazzo, which was super cool. (To enjoy his website fully, click on “Stuttgart” and wait til all the pictures run through: those are the characters we had in our city. Then feel free to click on the small British flag in the upper right-hand corner to read about it in English.) The Palazzo is a big tent, the inside of which is done up like a magnificently luxurious restaurant in the 30’s. The ceiling is dark red draped velvet with a trapeze hanging from it, for instance. The walls between the booths are wooden and mirrors line the outside walls around the whole tent. The deal is that Harald Wohlfahrt is a five-star chef and he cooks a meal, but during the meal, it’s half dinner-theater and half circus. There is an emcee, who “owns” the mirror palace and runs the restaurant and is a sort of ringmaster. His “wife” was a character, and then there was the maitr’d , a chef with his assistant, a maid, a singer, two waiters, etc. The story they played out during the evening was that the wife got mad at the husband, because he was flirting with the singer and he had to woo his wife back. So between every course (there were four), different performances happened. Some were a contortionist, some acrobatic things, some singing, some Italian guys who performed using bolas (which I had never seen before – more on that later), and a guy from Russia who hung from two cords from the ceiling in very impressive positions. I can’t really express how cool the whole night was. First, it was really extravagant – I had no idea which silverware to use. I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – and then there were far too many glasses on the table, as well! Second, I could only think of Bonnie while I was there. Bonnie, you’d love to dress up in those clothes and act like you were a part of this restaurant community and you’d be GREAT at it! Third, the performers were really fantastic. As soon as we sat down, Daniello (scroll down on the German-language Stuttgart site to see which one he is) came to us and did a magic trick and chit-chatted us and then he made us the first table of the night to be in Daniello’s little fan club. He then spent the next two minutes stopping every waitress who walked by (and there were a lot) and telling them that we’re his fan club and we get preferential treatment. And every time he walked by when they brought food out, we had to cheer for him. And he visited us the whole night long. The actors were simply so funny and so good at what they did. One of my co-workers is a little innocent and she really believed everything she saw – even when two of the performers fell down and “hurt” themselves. She was really worried about them! Then the two guys with the bolas came and needed a volunteer – who but my innocent colleague, of course. So they took her to the middle of the stage and swung these chains with heavy balls around her head, so close to her head that her hair moved! It was very impressive. Two of the actors played waiters, who went around trying to serve a plastic lobster to anyone they could, before the meal started. The chef and his assistant, before the show really started, were “trying” to find Manfred, to give him his birthday cake, but of course, they always got halfway through the song before they realized it wasn’t Manfred. It was all slap-stick and all hilarious. I could go on and on, but it won’t do it justice, so I’ll let it rest there – oh, and the only disappointing thing was the food… a little too frouffy for me!

The second wonderful thing involving the letter “P” happened on Sunday – I preached in our church for the first time. They let me do it in English this time, with my friend Kira translating for me, which was fantastic. If you’d like to listen to it, click here and push the ipod icon on the right of the website to download it. I had been a bit nervous about the whole thing until Saturday morning, God finally told me to just be myself. So I did. And it went great! I taught on the basics of the prophetic – what it is, how does it work, what do you do when you receive a prophetic word, etc. We’ve gotten really good feedback and we were able to pray for some people who’d been hurt in the past, through the prophetic and we got to see them set free, which is awesome. God is so good. He let me be myself and I let him be himself and when we let him be himself, he just moves big. On the 26th of January, we’re doing a day-long seminar to go deeper into that topic, for those who want to, so now we know that hearts have been touched for it and they’re getting an appetite for God’s voice!

Thirdly, I got a Mexican cookbook for Christmas and I tried my first recipe out of it this weekend. I tried to make a soup, called Tinga Poblana. Well, it wasn’t really soupy when we were done (Flo helped) and I have no idea what we did wrong, but I can tell you: this is one fantastic meal! You know how good it feels to just eat food that tastes good? It does a body good. I went to the butcher to get fresh pork shoulder and a red sausage (’cause like, who knows what chorizo is called in German? Turns out it’s called chorizo, but it only comes dried here, so I just took any ole red sausage) and then we put little red potatoes in there and we left out the hot chilies, so in reality, we probably had tinga without the poblana, but that totally wouldn’t go with the theme of today’s blog entry. Anyway, it was amazing and you’re all jealous and hungry now, I know. Come over and I’ll make it for you.

Don’t miss the next blog entry, whenever it shows up – it’s gonna be a good one!

This entry was posted on Dienstag, Januar 15th, 2008 at 7:56 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.