Finally home

July has been a busy month. Usually it's a supremely lazy month - day off from work for the Fourth, heat and humidity driving everyone indoors, no end-of-summer rush yet. The flurry of final summery activity belongs to August, with July kicking back in the shade.

I spent July moving. First I moved from interesting site to interesting site. Then I moved out of my apartment in Germany. At last I moved back to the States and am temporarily ensconced in my parents' house before moving to my new apartment in August, thence to begin grad school.

But more on that later. To the stories!

My family came for a vacation and to help me move. We saw my apartment and school, visited cousins, and then set off for some dedicated sightseeing. The town of Dinkelsbühl was probably our cutest stop. It's at least 1200 years old and was completely ignored by bombers in World War II, so its medieval buildings and cobbled streets are original, unlike the rest of Germany.

A look down the adorable street

All the buildings were titled with similar fonts...

...except this holdout at the edge of town.

And that holdout flower shop? Out of business. Serves it right for breaking the rules of cuteness and conformity.

Dinkelsbühl offered a few other memorable moments. In the evening we took the night watchman tour, which ended up resembling a pub crawl more than anything else. Interspersed with more educational stops to impart information about the town, we stopped at ten different guest houses where the night watchman sang a song, and each house brought out a glass of wine or beer for us to drink. In our group of eleven, five people refused anything more than the occasional sip and we weren't allowed to take the glass along. It became something of a chore to down a full glass every time we halted and at one point we poured a glass into a potted plant. The night watchman himself refused to drink anything and forbade us to give any to the patrons as well. Plus, he only spoke German, so I was the translator for my family and a Japanese couple who knew some English.

"Snails meeting for the first time, sniffing eyestalks"

 My brother titled this sculpture.

We got a parking ticket not because we were parked incorrectly, but because we'd parked in a one-hour zone without putting up the little "we'll be back at" clock that all German cars have. I'd forgotten to mention it to the family when we unloaded the luggage. Then it turned out that city hall closed at 4p, despite their door listing official hours as 8:00-17:00. We paid the next day before leaving the city.

Sad to leave though - it's really like a storybook city.

Then it was on to Salzburg, Austria, where we retraced Sound of Music sites and I picked up a little Jägermeister bottle full of holy water (no really!) at the church where the wedding scene was filmed. Several visits to the oldest bakery in town and a trip to the cathedral completed our time there.

The Untersberg, one of the famous mountain sites of Salzburg

I officially checked out of my apartment, though not before breaking the toilet seat when I stood on it to clean the shelves in the bathroom. Oops.

The penultimate stop was Bruges, Belgium. There we ate chocolate, climbed a clock tower, took a canal tour, and wandered around happily.

Typical Belgian architecture

Swans in the canal

 The story goes that the citizens of Bruges once killed a tax collector called "Long Neck" and as punishment were ordered to keep sixty swans alive to forever remind them of their crime. They now have two hundred.

Bruges clock tower, 82 meters high. We climbed it.

Isn't he cute just before he bites your finger off?

It's a trap!

View of the city from the clock tower

 And finally we found ourselves in Cologne for a day before flying out of the Cologne Airport.

Naturally we saw the cathedral

The official seal of Cologne

 The commas stand for St. Ursula and the ten virgins who where martyred in Cologne.

At least, on our way home

Twenty hours of travel, with flights from Cologne to Munich to Toronto to the States, and we were home. I went straight to bed, and spent the last four days sleeping, making and attending appointments, and generally trying to get my head screwed back on straight. It's good to be home.

Stop in the name of a pedestrian!

Germans really earn their reputation for being a rule-conscious, order-conscious people. This manifests itself in a number of ways, from street cleaners literally sweeping the sidewalks at 5am to homeless men chastising you for putting a recyclable into the trash can. Not that I would know.

The concern with order really comes out in things like traffic signals, perhaps because American me is accustomed to Bostonians ignoring walk signs and nearly getting themselves run over twice a day. Germans wait until the light tells them to go. Pedestrians usually don't walk across the street until walk signal comes up, even if there aren't any cars coming. When cars come to a crosswalk without signals, the presence of a pedestrian hovering at the side of the road will cause them to stop, even if there are no other cars behind them and they have to brake hard to keep from jutting into the crosswalk. I can count on one hand the number of times a car has not stopped for me.

I certainly don't mind waiting a few extra seconds while the car that is nearly past the crosswalk already goes on through. Also, I don't trust that the driver is actually going to stop, because American, and usually wait for the car to fully halt before crossing. This makes some people impatient, as all the Germans step blithely out into the street, secure in the knowledge that they will not be run over. Often I end up scurrying across the street like some sort of foreign mouse to keep from feeling like I've overly inconvenienced the person who didn't have to stop for me in the first place.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

This practice of yielding-to-pedestrians-with-a-vengeance became especially surreal when I left school yesterday to walk to the train station. I got to the street I always cross (it doesn't have a signal) and did my normal fearful inching out, only to step back smartly when an ambulance came around the corner. It didn't have lights or sirens, so I can only hope that it was just out for a relaxing drive and not headed to the hospital because it stopped and waited for me to cross the street.

My scurrying was especially fast, I assure you.

It's getting cold in here

Last week my landlady dropped off a bill for miscellaneous costs associated with my apartment. These include things like trash and recycling, as well as any excess utilities I've used over the last five months. I pay a set utilities cost in addition to my rent every month that is meant to cover gas and electricity, but it turns out that I've been using more gas for heating than is covered by these monthly payments.

The thing that startled me about this news is that I thought I'd been using my heat normally. When I'm not in the room, I turn it off.

This is as low as it goes

At night, I turn it to night.

Complete with cute little graphic

During the daytime when I'm in the room, I turn it to day.

Cute little graphic #2

And sometimes when I'm especially cold, I turn it above day for a while.

I have no idea what temperatures these numbers account for

I am not in the room from 7:30a through 1p Tuesday through Friday. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday see me in and out. During the months covered by the bill, I wasn't in Germany for nearly five weeks - more than a month - because I was traveling. And because my heater operates by radiating rather than forcing air, the general room temperature is never what you would call warm. Despite all of that, I managed to use close to fifteen euros extra of heat every month.

The Germans, I've decided, are an exceptionally warm-blooded or exceptionally stoic people. Probably both. Presumably they don't actually turn on the heater a great deal of the time during the winter. Do they use blankets? Bundle up in jacket, hat, and gloves? Grin and bear it? It's a mystery to me that they manage to be comfortable at home if my use of heat is extravagant.

I think my blanket and I will become close friends over the next few months, and I hope that the warmer weather is here to stay. At the end of the day I prefer to be warm rather than save a few euros, but it would be interesting to try staying within the German-approved limits of heat use.

A recycling story

As I mentioned before, Germans take recycling super seriously. When I first came to my apartment my landlady explained the recycling/trash rules, but in the rush of other information, I totally forgot. Two weeks ago my upstairs neighbor, having noticed that I was doing it all wrong, offered to explain everything to me again. Here goes:

All waste material is split into one of seven categories: paper, plastic/metal, clear glass, brown glass, green glass, compost, and trash. You throw things in the trash only as a last resort - if something could possibly go into one of the other categories, it darn well should.

Plastic, metal, and the three glasses should be washed clean of food waste. If, for example, a glass jar has a label, that label should be removed and put into the paper container, because it is not glass. The washed-off food waste should join normal food waste in the compost containers.

Within my apartment building we have communal compost, plastic/metal, and trash bins into which our apartment's smaller versions should be emptied. The compost bin should not have any paper or plastic in it, so no putting food waste into bags to throw away. Compost and trash are picked up on alternating Monday mornings at 6am, so the appropriate bin should be dragged to the front of the building on Sunday night. If the bin is not dragged back into place by around noon the next day, the neighbors get irritated with the eyesore and tuck it away somewhere, leaving us a note detailing where to find it. Recycling is picked up every third Thursday at 6am, and must be put into special yellow bags that one can only get from city hall. If the recycling is not in the yellow bag, the recycling people will leave it.

The glass and paper go into color-coded neighborhood bins that live in the little parking lot next to the neighborhood park. Green glass goes in the green bin, clear glass goes in the white bin, brown glass goes in the brown bin, and paper goes in the blue bin. Some buildings have their own glass and paper bins that get picked up like trash and recycling, but we don't have that. I was chided for mistaking another building's paper bin as the place to put my paper. You only make that mistake once.

In addition, batteries must absolutely be recycling and only an antisocial Neanderthal wouldn't recycle them, but I've yet to find where one does this. I'll have to take them home to my local library's battery recycling bin, or risk being shunned by all upstanding Germans.

Let me tell you, I took notes on this little talk and made a schedule so as to not get anything wrong. They'll make a German of me yet.

Loan words and false friends

German and English have been intertwined ever since English was created out of a mix of German and Latin/French a long time ago. English words derived from German include: good (from gut, pronounced "goot"), pretzel (from Bretzel), waltz (from walzen, meaning "to roll or dance"), angst (from Angst, pronounced with a short "a" sound), and bratwurst (from Bratwurst, a kind of sausage). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If my high school Latin teacher is to be believed, something like 40% of English words have Germanic roots.

Today we see a reversal in the relationship between German and English, with German taking a number of English words and pronouncing them slightly different. These are called loan words, as they are taken whole-hog from another language. Thus,

email = das Email
to flirt = flirten
to babysit = babysitten
camera = die Kamera
alcohol = der Alkohol
computer = der Computer
laptop = der/das Laptop
camping = das Camping
bestseller = der Bestseller
club = der Klub
tip = der Tipp (as in advice)
sexy = sexy
etc.

Most of these words also have an official German word (camera is actually der Fotoapparat), but everyone uses the English term to the point that my seventh grade students could not translate der Fotoapparat when they saw it in their book. A similar example is traffic jam, which is technically "die Verkehrsstauung," but the native German who taught me the word noted that everyone just uses "der Traffic Jam" and many younger people wouldn't recognize the German word anymore. Many technology words are English loan words, as are words related to romance and relationships - the examples of flirting and sexy above.

By comparison, here is the entire list of German loan words I can think of:

kindergarten = literally a garden for children or a space for children. The German is der Kindergarten.
zeitgeist = literally the ghost of the time. The German is der Zeitgeist.
schadenfreude = literally pleasure at harm. The German is die Schadenfreude.

That's it. Of course with English's roots in German, it's not as if we didn't steal a major chunk of our language hundreds of years back, so that feels better. It is a little odd to note how few modern German loan words we use, however, when the Germans use so many English words.

There are also some German words that sound like English words but mean something totally different.

das Gift = poison
der Schmuck = jewelry
der Arzt = medical doctor
bekommen = to get or receive (one of my students wants to work with "women who become babies")
der Chef = boss, CEO
das Gymnasium = secondary school, high school
komisch = strange or odd - "funny strange" instead of "funny haha"
das Mobbing = bullying
die Pension = bed and breakfast-type hotel

And I can assure you, both my students and I make mistakes with both loan words and false friends on a regular basis. It has become something of a running joke that whenever I can't think of the German word for something, the word is the English term in a German pronunciation. Except when it's not, on occasion, so I can't let my guard down.

Words, they really do trip you up.

Kitchenless Cooking

Warning: I got sick. I'm fussing. Sorry.

When I got back from break I wasn't feeling very well. Sore throat, slight fever, headache, and a funny rash on my hands and feet were the only systems; the internet informed me I had Hand-Foot-Mouth disease. Turns out it's usually pediatric and harmless, albeit somewhat miserable to go through. It's also very contagious. I made the mistake of indicating I felt sick to my contact teacher when I went into school on Tuesday (the not-workday I wrote of previously) and she insisted that I go to a doctor and procure a note that said if I could or could not come to work.

Is this normal in the US? I've lived my entire life thus far in school, where a parent's note or an email to the professor was really all we needed if we got sick. I rarely got sick anyways, so this usually wasn't a problem. But I had to make a same-day appointment with a doctor (I don't have an official German primary care doctor, being not-German) and get the appropriate note. The doctor declared that I could not go to school for a week (next Wednesday) and wrote me a prescription for some homeopathic powder to put on my rash. I kid you not. This is apparently not uncommon in Germany: most doctors and pharmacies use a range of homeopathic treatments as well as more conventional medications. I haven't found any study on if this is better than the US systems, which does no such thing.

The two paragraphs of whining there are the introduction to today's foolery. I'm stuck in my room and bored, so I decided to bake something. I like baking - it's stress-relieving, fun, and produces delicious edibles! It makes me happy. The problem is, as the title suggests, I don't have a kitchen.

This is my kitchen.

 As you can see from the picture, I'm lacking an oven, toaster oven, microwave, or crockpot. I do have a hot water kettle and a two-burner hotplate, both through the generosity of my landlady, and both serve me very well. I can make soup, stir fry, sandwiches, and tea - 95% of my typical diet anyways. When it comes to baking, though, a stovetop doesn't usually do it.

So I went to the internet and found a recipe for no-bake cookies without peanut butter. Why without peanut butter? Because Europe doesn't have it. Sadface. I love peanut butter.

I got my ingredients (sugar, butter, chocolate, milk, oats) and checked my recipe, only to remember that baking requires measurements. I also don't have measuring cups. I really need to find a permanent place to live soon. Happily, I've been eating a fair amount of yogurt since coming to Germany, and so I had several empty yogurt containers. A little internet checking and voila! Vague yogurt-to-cups measurement conversion.

US to yogurt baking conversions

With that bit of problem-solving out of the way, it was time to start baking! First I arranged all the ingredients and eyeballed my yogurt measurements to make sure they sort of seemed to agree with my idea of a cup. They did.

All the ingredients, plus the measuring cup there on the left.

I actually need two yogurts of sugar, but there you go.

Yogurt #4 of oats.

So, I boiled everything up, added in the oats, and mixed it all together. With my trusty metal spoon I dropped small clumps of the mixture on to aluminum foil.

They seem a little liquidy...

Tangential paragraph: see the bottle in the upper right-hand corner there? That's Federweißer (ß = ss) and I wrote about it before. It's a drink also called "New Wine" and made by fermenting grapes for only a few days to a week, so it's still very sweet and not very alcoholic. Since I generally dislike alcohol this is perfect for me and I got a bottle. Only problem is, because the busily fermenting yeast is still in there, it's a little carbonated. Unlike soft drinks, where the carbonation comes from a finite amount of commercially-produced carbon dioxide that has been forced into the liquid, Federweißer still has yeast in it constantly producing carbon dioxide. As a result it cannot be stored in a sealed container because the build-up of carbonation would cause it to explode, so all Federweißer bottles have a hole in them. I knew this but totally forgot and tried to carry it home with me on its side in my bag, causing it to slosh all over my arm and left side. As a result, I smelled strongly of alcohol on the bus ride home and probably made all the Germans think I was a wino. Goody.

Back to the baking - as I write this I'm waiting for the cookies to set and hoping that they'll become solid after an hour or so, as my recipe indicates they should. Then I can bring some to my upstairs neighbors, who have both been very kind to me and deserve baked goods. Fingers crossed. Actually, fun German fact: the German version of crossing your fingers is "pressing the thumb," so you might say "we're keeping our thumbs pressed for you" or something similar.

So, fingers crossed and thumbs pressed.

The Saga of the Copy Machine

I wrote before that Friday was a normal day for me. This was true: I went to classes and assisted the teachers, instead of visiting for the first time or going to a trip to Bonn. My first class on Friday, however, was one sympathetic teacher away from being an unmitigated disaster.

Friday is my long day, starting with a class at 8am and going almost straight through until 12:30pm. I recognize from the start that this is not a long day to anyone (or any teacher) who works full time, and I know my complaints can be called "whining" without the least bit of untruth. Having said that, it's a stressful and early day for me, with a range of ages (13-18) and a range of different levels of English to keep in mind.

My first hour on Fridays is the 10th grade class with the boy who laughed at my English. The teacher for this class asked me to bring in a story in English. I decided on "The Lady and the Tiger" by Frank Stockton (it's good, I recommend reading it), and presumed she was going to use it later in the year. I presumed wrong. She was planning that I would teach the class on Friday, and I found this out at 7:55 on Friday. To make matters worse, I'd thought I could quickly print out and copy the story before class started, so I didn't even have a paper version, though I thought I'd been clever in bringing my USB drive so I didn't need an internet-connected computer to print it out. Ha.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine was the picture my high-school textbook used to accompany the story of "The Lady and the Tiger" and I present it to you as an accompaniment to my own story.

The teacher assured me that she could take over for this class and we would plan on me teaching on Tuesday. I could take the class time to print and copy the stories, then give them to the students before the end of the class period, which is forty-five minutes long. Plenty of time.

I discovered earlier in the week that the computers without internet needed a username and password, and so dutifully asked the nearest teacher what those might be. She sent me to the secretary, who told me there was a general password and I should ask the teachers. I found another teacher who gave me the password and I plugged in my USB drive, only to find that the computer is running old software and can't read the file. No problem, I got the story off the internet in the first place, I'll get it off the internet again. Scurrying into the storage room with internet-connected computers, I discovered that they need a separate, individual username and password, for reasons I do not know. Back to the secretary, who tells me that someone else is in charge of those and I can find him in the smaller teacher's lounge. I can't. Thankfully one of the student teachers kindly allows me to use his account for the moment, so I chase down the story, copy it over, add a bit of vocabulary at the bottom, and print it out.

Now to copy. I ask one of the teachers I'll be working with later that day to tell me how to use the copy machine, and she tells me that I first need a copy card. Europe in general is attached to environmentalism, and so teachers at the school must purchase a card to make copies, thereby encouraging them not to do so. The secretary tells me my first card is free, and I should initial it so as not to lose it. Obstacle #1: overcome.

The teacher and I go back to the copy machine, where I attempt to make my one-sided stories two-sided in order to save paper. After five minutes of hunting for this option, we make a trial copy, which proceeds to jam up the copy machine and cause it to beep loudly while I'm scrambling to find the source of the problem. A technically-inclined teacher happens by and sees our difficulties, so he stops to help. We un-jam the copy machine, re-find the one-side-to-two-sides option, and try again. This time the machine beeps a little song and the words on the screen inform us it is out of paper. The paper closet, conveniently located right next to the machine, is also out of paper, so one of the teachers went downstairs to the supply closet or somewhere and found another box. We load the paper and finally make my thirty copies. It feel like too many, but when I count, there are indeed thirty copies and thirty people - twenty-nine students plus the teacher.

By this time class has finished and I hurry back to the classroom to find everyone gone. The teacher assures me that all is in order and I'll teach the story sometime next week. She insists that I don't worry about it. The day goes well after that except for accidentally being too informal with a member of the testing board for student teachers. Once she hears I'm American, she's not offended. Thank goodness for that.

Cologne Adventure

A great deal has happened in a couple of days.

On Wednesday I helped to teach a lesson on parts of the body to “nine-year-olds” comprised of my fellow teaching assistants acting like children. After another evening of information about the Fulbright Program, health insurance, and alumni organizations, I went to bed early and got up dark and early for our trip back to Cologne.

The Cologne main train station (Hauptbahnhof) has these amazing short-term luggage storage containers: you put in €3, shove your suitcase into the little box that opens up, and wait. The door closes, your luggage is whisked away, and you can retrieve it with a little card the machine spits out after taking your money. I think everything goes to underground storage. Wherever my huge suitcase was stored, I appreciated seven hours to explore Cologne without dragging along sixty-something pounds of my life behind me.

A survey some years ago named the Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) the most beloved place in Germany. It’s certainly huge, beautiful, and very Gothic.

It was raining that day, but I like the idea of the cathedral stretching through the clouds.

The outside is stained black with city smog, even though Cologne’s air is very clean – enough centuries of anything but pure air turns the stone black. The city has undertaken a cleaning project since the mid-1960s, when they finished repairing the damage from World War II. As with all European cathedrals, the detail is gorgeous.

The inside is very tall and plainer than I expected. I accidentally joined the 9am Mass (Gottesdienst) while exploring and got a blessing from a rather confused priest. The priests in German-speaking countries all seem so bemused that I don’t take communion but want to participate somehow. Maybe most non-Catholics just don’t go up. I knew I was in Germany when a woman visiting the cathedral started throwing out the burned-down candles and straightening the hymnals. Naturally, everything must be in order.

Outside the cathedral I found a number of living statues as well as a ton of people. In addition to school groups, I saw two men “floating” (it’s a clever chair contraption) and one adult man walking briskly after a pigeon. The pigeon just walked faster.

Later these people will become "living statue" buskers.

Cologne’s main shopping street boasts a number of high-end stores, including one called Louis Vuitton. Having never been in such a store, I thought I could browse the thousand-dollar merchandise and popped right in. I should have known I was in trouble when the man employed to open the door opened the door for me, but it wasn’t until he asked me to stay on the little walkway in the middle of the store (where I couldn’t see any of the merchandise) that I realized this wasn’t a browsing sort of place. Sure enough, one of the women working there came over to take care of me and asked what I was searching for that day. I told her a present for my mother, at which point she showed me a number of very expensive purses and I tried not to look like I wanted to bolt every moment. After a few minutes I “picked” a purse and asked her to write it down so my mother could look at it online, then left and never went back. I think that was a class faux pas rather than a cultural one, but I felt ridiculous nevertheless.

The shopping street also boast more low-brow clothing stores:

Because twenty-one is pretty much ancient.

Today was my first day in school - I fielded questions (in English) in three classes and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. It was a little awkward because no one expected me today, but we smoothed everything over and eventually the students even talked. It took some coaxing. Between the school day (which ends at 1:30ish) and the school fair (Schulfest) in the afternoon, I ended up speaking a lot of German and it made me very tired. Amazing how difficult it is to talk when talking doesn't come naturally. I look forward to the day I'm not translating in my head the whole conversation.

To end on a smile: a centurion and Gandalf having a smoke.

Ready or Not!

Tomorrow morning I fly to Toronto then to Munich then to Cologne, where I find the main bus terminal and look for all the other sleep-deprived Americans. We'll all try to stay up until a normal bedtime in Germany because that's majorly helpful with jet-lag. (No joke) It'll be fun.

Cologne Cathedral. Very gothic.

 
Of course, I don't have to wait until Germany to start making stupid cultural mistakes. Oh no. I have those mistakes covered right here at home. See, I went to the bank to get some Euros, because trial-and-error has taught me that the only thing worse than exhaustion when you first land in a foreign county is exhaustion and no local currency. Being the seasoned traveler that I am, I asked for some of the money to be in small bills so I don't hand a cafe worker a fifty when I'm trying to buy a cup of tea. (Fun story: in Trinidad, I handed an ice-cream vendor a hundred Trini dollar bill to buy my 2.50 Trini dollar ice cream. She wasn't happy. I got a lecture) So I say "can I have part of that be tens, fives, and ones? And some twenties too?" and the nice bank teller says "sure" and I go on my merry way. When the money comes in, there's a note that apologizes for no one-dollar bills, because every country in Europe has dollar coins. Which I knew, of course, being in England for a year...

No one-euro bills. Unfortunately this is not my money.

I'll be hanging out in Cologne for a while after my orientation is finished on Wednesday while my teacher-contact gets home from school. So, anyone who has been to/heard of Cologne, what should I see? My luggage will be in a locker in the train station. I will be footloose and fancy free. Also tired. (Please use small words)