Six Wheels in Germany – January 2021 (Month 82)

Well hello everyone.

This German calendar used to belong to my grandmother and is about the same age as me.

We have survived January – and this will be a short blog post as basically nothing has really happened. Germany is in lockdown which means you can only meet one person from another household – that is Klaus’s daughter Lara. Apart from seeing her, we are staying at home or going out for a walk or I am going for a run 3 times per week.

So here are my exercise statistics for the month of January:

And here is where I went:

As you can see, I did some more cycling than last month – this was mostly made up of commutes to work as I started the year back in the office. It was a rather stressful time and so in order to enable me to work more effectively, plus due to new recommendations from the German government, I worked the last January week from home and will work at least the first week of February also at home.

“Your papers, please!”

One thing I managed to do very early in the year is pick up my new paperwork as a German citizen:

The photo makes the German passport look larger than the British one but it isn’t.

There was quite an interesting difference in the decoration inside too. This is the first page – British passport on the left, with lots of lovely flowery language.

My Mum also got a new passport this month – one of the new blue ones which doesn’t mention the EU. Her pages inside are rather plain whereas my UK passport has lots of pictures of various British things such as a telephone box, underground train, the Angel of the North etc.

Life in Germany

Because it has been pretty cold this month, we required Poppy to put on her fleece when walking with us, especially after I gave her a haircut. She is not impressed by this.

This month Poppy has been able to go on holiday. Lars visited from Berlin and took her back with him for a two week visit, she will return in early February. Berlin had a lot more snow than us – we had proper snow on just one morning, it looks as though Berlin has had several days of snow and Poppy has been enjoying it.

As you can tell from the lack of info in this blog post (yes, we are almost at the cake gallery!) it’s been a very quiet month. We have watched quite a lot of TV compared to normal, and I also completed the puzzle of the UK that my sister gave us for Christmas. I did this with Lara Klaus’s daughter in an afternoon.

So January started quietly. Klaus and I have not done much except stay at home or go for walks outside. He is working from home about 2 days per week but has to go into the office on some other days.

Klaus has also been trying out interval fasting (16:8) for the last three weeks and it’s going well. This means that you eat with an 8 hour window and fast for the other 16 hours. I have been doing this for over a year, and it just means for me (and him) that we don’t have breakfast. Because we both eat low carb this is easier than it sounds, although Klaus has found it a little challenging on quiet mornings when there’s not much to do.

He has been using various protein shakes to supplement his calorie intake as otherwise he was rather under-caloried for the day. By missing breakfast (he used to have yoghurt with apple compote and blueberries most mornings) he was also missing out on 300+ calories. As he also decided to stop eating peanuts as they are too moreish we realised he was probably only having 1800 calories in a day which isn’t really enough, so he started having a protein shake after his salad lunch. That seems to work really well for him and it helps him to feel satisfied and full. He has tried 3 different brands of these shakes and they all seem to work equally well but some have a better mouth feel than others. He makes the shakes with full cream milk rather than with water as some of them recommend. My workplace are going to start selling this stuff in the future and so our Christmas gift from work was the kit (a special shake mug thingie, and a 200g sachet of powder) and he has been using that each day. When he goes into work he has to take the milk in a separate flask as the work shaker kit isn’t waterproof enough to trust for the journey to work.

Cakes this month

I have been experimenting with some more keto cake recipes just to make things more interesting. I have had a couple of successes.

Low carb Apfelstreusel (has a small amount of wholemeal spelt in it)
Keto cheesecake – tasty but rather crumbly!
Apple cake from Gudula
Apfelkuchen from Gudula
Himmelstorte from Tönisvorster Obsthof. Well worth the 25km round trip!
Cake from the local café Poeth – we walked back with it
Poeth again
Poeth again

So that’s it for January – very little to report! Life continues, we are fortunate to both have jobs that we can do partially from home and that we live in the countryside so can go out for nice walks. We are glad to see that the number of corona infections seems to be reducing in Germany and also in the UK, and also that Klaus’s father and my mother have both been able to have vaccinations (both Pfizer BioNTech). We hope that they both stay safe!

I hope to have a little more to report for next month, we shall see! Stay safe / bleibt Gesund!

2 comments

  1. Wouldn’t it be better to eat normally that follow 2 different restrictive diets and need artificial supplements to maintain basic calorie intake?

    1. When I eat ‘normall’ I end up obese. When I eat Keto (which is fresh vegetables and meat) I lose weight and feel much better. So ‘eating normally’ isn’t great for me.

      For Klaus, he is reducing calories unnecessarily as we are eating the same food, thus wanting to supplement with more protein. He doesn’t need to lose weight. Not eating breakfast can have benefits (it definitely does for me) but he is doing a month-long test to see if it is an advantage to him or whether it is actually not worth it.

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