Anniversary musings

It's been a year since I arrived in Germany!

(That's a lie, September 10 actually marked a year. But acknowledging the fact isn't nearly so pithy.)

I'm not teaching this year, though I will be teaching for the next three before spending a final year finishing my thesis. If all goes well. Instead I'm getting a handle on the aforementioned theory - I even read an understandable essay today, which makes Susan Bordo my new favorite person! And I'm learning my way around an enormous campus. My undergrad institution was south of 1500 people. You could walk across the campus in ten minutes. Now? There's a bus that takes students from the center of campus to their dorms. I wish I was kidding.

I get lost whenever I try to find a new place and realize it's in the opposite direction. Then, because I'm convinced the world is paying attention to the stupid things I do, I pretend to get a phone call and tell someone I'm "really close, be right there!" before changing directions.

Kidding. I only did that once.

Yesterday I had a meeting at a totally new building in the north section of campus. Everything else I do is in the south section of campus. Uncharted territory up there. Here be monsters.

So I looked at a map several times throughout the day and repeated the instructions to myself like a mantra. Those instructions? Leave the building where I had class, turn left, turn left, turn left, and walk a while. Impossible to get lost.

I left-left-lefted and walked across the river, so I knew I was headed the right way. All I needed to to was hit a main road and my destination would be right there. But then suddenly the street I was following turned sharply right. There was a sidewalk that continued going straight and some buildings over there, but I didn't see any busy road. And the street was turning on me! The map hadn't indicated that. Probably. This was not the first time I wished the university would put up maps of campus at strategic locations, like you find in downtown London. Highly useful.

My brave choice was to keep going straight, following the sidewalk instead of the street. Big mistake. After wandering between several buildings which were not the buildings I was looking for, I returned to the street, followed its curve, and a block later found myself standing right outside the correct place. The streets know what's what.

Also? I saw a rainbow! It was raining as I got lost and then the rain stopped and right in front of me was this huge arc of color. It was beautiful. I found my way around a city in Europe, right? When I first arrived I thought I'd be lost forever and only ever get around with a map. I'd be a perpetual tourist, the horror! I can totally manage a campus, even if the campus feels like it's just as big and with 1/3 the population. Which, when you're comparing cities to universities? 1/3 the population is still a disproportionately high number of people.

I can only hope that rainbows will keep appearing to cheer me up whenever I get lost. Because leprechauns are following me or something. I wouldn't argue.

Theory

The further along one goes in studying literature (and other subjects too, I'd imagine), the more it all becomes about theory. Not the kind of theory that is an intelligent guess or the best-we've-got, but the kind that takes something completely not-literature and applies that thing to literature to see what happens.

Ugh.

Sometimes what happens is really cool. Take feminism and Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and put them together. What do you have? Well, on one level you have a man (Petruchio) who eventually teaches a strong-willed woman (Katherina) to submit, as the patriarchy prefers. That one isn't so hard - very few people living now watch the play and find themselves in agreement with Petruchio's methods, including withholding food and sleep. But there are other levels too: at the end of the play, Katherina delivers a speech about how wives should submit to their husbands. Put your feminist glasses on and you might wonder if she's being sarcastic. Maybe that she's acknowledging that the world is set against women, but using such hyperbole in her "submission" that it's obvious she's not about to be always sweet and obedient. Maybe she's just telling her husband what he wants to hear and does what she wants most of the rest of the time (recalling that husbands and wives wouldn't necessarily have spent all day together in Shakespeare's day).

And so, with an infusion of feminist theory, there are ways to leave the theater less uncomfortable after watching Taming of the Shrew. The same thing can be done with Marxism (class struggles), post-colonialism (effects of racism and imperialism), and so on.

The tough part here is reading all of the theory. Most of the original essays that began and continued these theories are long and complicated and mostly involve the author informing you that this word means something else for the purposes of the essay. I've read engaging articles and essays before, and theory writing is not the least bit engaging, at least not to me. But theory is also a really big deal in literary studies and when actually applied to a novel, it can show you a whole new angle. Often we read novels with something like theory in the backs of our heads because we've heard about feminism, class struggles, racism, and so forth. So we recognize aspects of the story that the author probably never intended and maybe never even considered.

At its best, theory elevates the reader and gives us a fresh view. And I really like that. But reading it? Quite the chore. That's today's project. Wish me luck.

Parking v. Me

After living without a car for a year, I am both grateful and very frustrated to be driving again. Grateful because it's all but impossible to get around in the States without a car. Frustrated because that means I have to buy gas. Grateful because I can get somewhere whenever I want to with little physical exertion. Frustrated because driving is stressful and other drivers are mean to me. Grateful because if I'm two minutes late, I'm really just two minutes late instead of an hour. Frustrated because it's much easier to be a little bit late for things when you don't have to plan on being there thirty minutes early.

And then there's parking.

Thankfully my apartment has ample parking and so getting home is never a stressful thing. On campus, however, the story is entirely different. To begin, it's an enormous campus. There's a bus line that just serves the extended campus area. Walking from one class to the other can take a half-hour or more. As you might have guessed, a number of students have cars. And a number of students live off-campus and therefore have cars. And all the professors live off-campus, and therefore have cars. Is there enough parking for all of these entities? But of course not!

Now happily, as the recipient of some university funding, I get to be classed as an employee. That means that for a (rather high) fee, I can park in the employee lots, which are numerous and protected by a gate. I think there's more employee parking than student parking.

Before I could park in these magical lots, however, I had to buy my pass. I dutifully trekked over to the parking office (a twenty-minute walk from the visitor parking area) and stood in line for another forty minutes only to be told that the letter identifying me as an employee is illegitimate because it's a year out of date. Never mind that it specifies my program will take five years - the date at the top is 2012 and it's not good enough. So I go back to my department and ask for a new letter. First they try calling the parking office to verbally confirm my status. Not good enough. I need a letter. So they ask for a new letter. No can do - the dean of the graduate school issues those letters and is very busy right now. But one of the heads of the department offers to write a letter certifying my letter as valid. In record time it's written and signed and the next day I go back to the parking office.

I have ID, registration, letters, and a checkbook. I'm so ready for this parking pass. The man behind the desk inspects my letters, sighs, and tells me it's not quite right. He doesn't want to have to look through the letters to find the relevant information. He'll accept it this one time, but in the future, I need a letter dated from this year that simply says I have some university funding. Something that doesn't require him to look through anything.

The upshot is that I have my parking pass and have gleefully parked in the employee lots this week. Unfortunately the pass is only good for a semester, so I'll be back in the parking office come December, hopefully with the correct letter this time.

Dinosaurs and volcanos

The funny part about this is that I promised myself I wouldn't let moving take over my life. Haha. It did. But now I'm safely ensconced in my new apartment (and dwelling #10 for the last three months, counting the B&Bs in Europe) with a working internet connection and everything.

So, as a catch-up, I present a few more gems from my time in Colorado.

En route to dinosaur tracks

People actually lived here, and left an oven or sink or something.

Still trekking onwards...

Graves from a Spanish mission.

OBLITERATE!

5 miles later, look! A dinosaur track...maybe.

We waded across this river. It was an adventure.

My foot is so small.

Now that's a dinosaur track. A meat-eating dinosaur track.

In New Mexico, on top of an extinct volcano.

Ooooo!

Benches thoughtfully provided.

And mule deer.

I also floated down the Arkansas river, but for obvious reasons involving electronics and water, I don't have any pictures. It's very unfortunate, especially since half the pictures would be of me beached on a sandbar. There were many sandbars. And some of them would be of me covered in mud from our launching point under a bridge, which was very very muddy. Plus there would be the fact that we were using pool floaties rather than real inner tubes and so they didn't float quite so well. I was perpetually wet. It was hilarious. And then we walked a mile back to the car through some farmer's field. Actually next to the field - no need to trample the foodstuffs.

So now I'm starting - actually have already started - graduate school. And while that world is not nearly as exotic as Germany or Colorado, I already have a number of entertaining stories to tell. Next time: my battle with the parking people. And quite the battle it was.

Buffalo tongue and ruined candles

I've acquired quite the number of new skills in the past few days. A smattering thereof:

Skill number one: cooking over an open fire. I cooked buffalo tongue (which I'm informed was actually buffalo liver) and onions over an open fire. It smelled rather nice, but bled every time I pressed it until it was pretty well charred. I'm also not at all convinced that it was cooked in a way that is safe to eat. No matter, the point is simply to have something period going on for the visitors to see, smell, and ask questions about. The funny thing about food at the Fort is that we are not allowed to offer food to any of the visitors and if they ask for a sample, the answer is no. If, however, they just take some without asking, we won't argue. And that's the exact spiel that we give visitors when they ask if they can have a bite. Gets the point across without any legal liability.

Skill number two: lighting fires. Previously I'd lit fires with a lighter and a bunch of newspapers. Now, however, I can light them with flint and steel. And I learned a new way to do it that involves making a little wind tunnel with two logs, lighting the char-cloth and kindling and sticking it in the middle, and then putting a third log on top. Wind or human breath through the tunnel helps the fire to grow and it burns hot, so it catches the logs pretty easily. I built a fire with this method without a problem, when I'd previously struggled to get one lit.

Skill number three: making candles. This one didn't go so well. I started out attempting to make dip candles by heating up a mix of tallow and beeswax over the fire I built, then dipping a string in (as one does). The strings refused to stay straight and the candles grew very very slowly. Since I was working in the hot sun I decided to switch to candles in a mold. Under instructions from one of the Fort bosses, I sprayed the molds with PAM (secretly, of course), mixed the tallow and beeswax, forced strings through tiny holes in the bottoms of the molds, and poured in the hot wax. I also poured the wax all over the ground until I found the little dip-cup used to make pouring easier. Then I moved a bench over to shade the molds and waited for several hours. At the end of those hours, the candles resembled a funnel - wax had leaked out the bottom where the wicks were drawn through and given them a collapsed center. Plus, though I sprayed the living daylights out of the molds, they apparently weren't non-stick enough and I only succeeded in snapping off several wicks. As this was happening at the end of the day, I tucked them inside and plan to ask someone what to do tomorrow.

Skill number four: cat wrangling. The Fort has two cats, as well as four oxen, two horses, three peacocks, three peahens, a dozen or so peachicks, and ten chickens. The cats are allowed to roam freely but have to be put in every night to keep them from being eaten by coyotes. I don't have any keys and can't help lock up, so while everyone else is closing down the fort, my job is to find the cats. They don't particularly like being shut away, though they tolerate it because food is there. So they don't fight me too much when I pick them up but they do hide themselves in various places around the fort as a matter of course. Today I found one sprawled out in the sun by the blacksmith's workshop, while the other was stalking some sort of creature in the woodpile out back. Turns out the creature was a bat, so I took the cat away. He promptly jumped out the window I'd forgotten to close and went straight back to the woodpile.

I'm hoping to churn butter tomorrow, and praying that turns out better than the candles.

Entr'acte

Last night I went to the second school play, this one put on by the older students. Called "Gefährliche Liebschaften" or "Dangerous Liaisons," it follows the plot of a 1782 French novel by the same name, wherein a group of French aristocrats play with one another's hearts, reputations, and bodies out of boredom and jealousy. 

Obviously it was a light and entertaining drama.

Any play called "Dangerous Liaisons" would indeed have said liaisons, and there was a lot of sex going on. I was a little uncomfortable because I knew and had taught so many of the students, but they handled the more risqué aspects very well. The whole play was enjoyable and fun to watch, even when the speed of delivery meant that I couldn't always catch what they were saying - they acted enough that I could follow the plot just fine. Although originally French it seemed an excellent choice for German students because Germans are rather obsessed with stories that don't end well. Watch any German movie and the ending will be depressing. Germans, for their part, find the American obsession with das Happy End in films and stories to be overly optimistic and annoying. Culture clash at its finest.

During the Pause I was reminded how much I still have to learn about German when a colleague's husband asked me where I was from in the United States and my brain couldn't process the question. I'm blaming it on the previous hour spent listening to the play, but who knows. Anyone who insists I must be fluent after ten months in Germany, meet my case-in-point as to why that's not true.

In a completely separate vein, I received a package today from an overly attentive delivery man who announced himself by popping his head into my open window rather than ringing the bell. At the end of the little dance of scanning and signing, asked if he might know my age. I blinked at him and said no. He was delivering alcohol, but didn't press it when I refused to answer, so I presume it wasn't any kind of official question. I'm assuming it was some sort of pick-up scheme, all things considered, but find myself mostly just confused.

My family arrives in two days for a trip around Germany, Austria, and Belgium. I'll be back in the States in less than three weeks. It's all moving rather fast, but I'll keep you updated as the internet permits.

Public transportation

Normally I'm a big fan of European public transportation. It's (mostly) non-sketchy, fairly cost-effective over distances under four hours, it runs regularly, and it saves me from the expense and stress of actually having a car.

I wish the States had a similar system. Seriously, I'm headed to Colorado this summer for a friend's wedding and my choices for transport are a) rent a car or b) rent a car. Or c) ride the Greyhound at 2am by myself from the sketchy bus station in an unknown city. So really, just a) and b).

But I digress.

Last Thursday was the Feast of Corpus Christi, called Fronleichnam in Germany. Don't ask me what that means. As is often the case, largely-secular Germany has a tradition of religious holidays and no one is willing to give that up because of silly things like not actually following the religion in question, so we had a four-day weekend. I headed to England to visit some friends who are studying there. As a cost-conscious person, I flew Ryanair, Europe's budget airline. They manage to be cheap because they fly out of the most inconvenient, non-central airports possible. In Germany it's not an issues - there's a bus that goes straight from my city to Frankfurt Hahn (the budget airport): eleven euros, one hour, badabing, badaboom.

Not so easy in England. London's budget airport is called Stansted and it is the spawn of the devil. Buses travel the two hours from Stansted to London with some frequency, but I was going to Oxford and I was on a pretty tight schedule to get there before my hosts left for an evening engagement. I wasn't keen on wandering the streets for several hours Friday night. I bought a ticket for one of the few buses that goes from Stansted to Oxford - as Oxford is a student town, you'd think there would be more buses, but no - and was three minutes late thanks to a combination of plane delays and England's obsessive, excessive border control. I missed the bus and discovered that the next direct one left in three hours, too late for my agreed-upon meeting time.

Thankfully I was able to work out an alternate route through London, switched buses, and made it with four minutes to spare.

On Monday, I again pre-booked my ticket on a bus direct to Stansted, waited at the nearest bus stop, and watched my bus drive right by without stopping. Again I found an alternate route through London, inquired at the main office as to the reason my bus had not stopped, and was told that I'd booked it for the wrong stop. That particular bus, uniquely of all the buses in Oxford, only stops at the places where you have pre-booked. I had accidentally chosen the city center rather than the stop closest to where I was staying when buying my ticket, and so the bus passed me by.

Equally thankfully, I was able to buy a ticket on another bus that got me to Stansted just in time for my flight back to Germany.

So this morning I was already feeling a little sour towards European public transportation. Just to tease me, my bus was late this morning, so I missed my usual train, and the second train was also late, though only by five minutes. I power-walked to school, arrived somewhat sweaty but (barely) on time, and promptly began to think longingly about my environmentally-unsound personal car waiting for me in the States. I know buses and trains are the way of the future and I'd really prefer that Colorado had some useful ones, but right now I'm not feeling kindly towards public transportation. Give me a car with automatic transmission over National Express or DeutscheBahn any day.

At least until tomorrow when I'd actually have to drive it. The Germans drive like crazy people.

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.

Abi-this and Abi-that

In the German education system, students at a Gymnasium (where I work) go to school from fifth grade through twelfth grade and then have a six-month preparation "thirteenth grade" before they take their school exit exam. This exam is called Abitur. Unlike in the States, where SATs and ACTs can impact school funding and college acceptances, a student who does not pass Abitur does not graduate from high school. They can leave with the equivalent of a tenth-grade completion certificate (which is what students from the Realschule, the high school that is a level down from Gymnasium, get when they graduate after tenth grade), but the extra two years of school and previous eight years of generally more challenging work will have pretty much been for nothing. And without Abitur, it's very difficult to get into university.

So this test is a big deal.

This week marked the Abitur oral exams. The Abitur written exams happened several weeks ago, and a combination score will dictate if the students passed. The students taking Abitur, known as the Abiturenten, append the prefix "Abi-" (which means nothing by itself) to everything vaguely associated with the test or their lives during this time. So we'll have an Abi-Ball on Friday, the theme this year was Abi-Vegas, the students write an Abi-Zeitung (Zeitung means newspaper), they have an Abi-Motto, and the list goes on.

One of the traditions surrounding Abitur is that the students celebrate at school the day after the test. With a handful of teachers supervising, they rearrange all furniture, block the doors with tables, cover the hallways in balloons, and generally make a big complicated mess within the school. At my school, all students were given the first three hours of the day for this celebration. The students blew whistles, played music, and generally made a lot of noise and chaos. It was kind of stressful for quiet-loving me.

Traditionally at least some of the Abiturenten show up for this celebration very drunk, and indeed that was true. They also run around with stamps that say "Abitur 2013" or a variation thereof and stamp everyone, teacher or student, on any bit of exposed skin. In the middle of March, that usually means the face and the hands. Most of the students sported these strange face masks of Abitur stamps. The second half of the day we have school as normal, though naturally the Abiturenten don't. Instead, they dash from classroom to classroom, blowing whistles, stamping everyone, and interrupting the lesson. Generally they just wreak havoc.

What's crazy to me is that these odd traditions happen in Germany of all places, and that everyone just sort of tolerates it for the day. All the teachers, aware that their classrooms would be regularly disrupted, still held lessons but didn't expect to get much done.

I can assure you that the result of this day was a great deal of Abi-chaos and Abi-stress, as well as some Abi-laughs and regular Abi-interruptions.

Breakfast of champions

One of my colleagues is traveling to South Carolina for two weeks during our spring break as part of a teacher exchange/learning program. She's very excited and had a little brunch on Saturday with a number of other teachers to celebrate her imminent departure. We feasted on sandwiches, quiche, Tex-Mex salad, chili, muffins, and apple pie for six hours before taking our leave.

Let me tell you, living in Germany has been great for my listening skills. Ask anyone who knows me - I have opinions on a great number of topics and like nothing better than to bounce ideas back and forth with a couple friends. "Bounce ideas" can easily become "hold forth without interruption" because while I'm as awkward as a dancing elephant with strangers, I get very chatty with friends. And my friends, bless them, are a patient, adult lot of people who politely listen even when they likely have ideas to discuss as well. As I've gotten older and (hopefully) more mature, I've tried to work on the skill of listening. As it turns out, trying to follow a conversation in German is great practice, because all my concentration is taken up in attempting to understand what's being said. Usually I can't mind-translate and then speak fast enough to add much to the conversation, though I can sometimes ask a question. I hope this habit continues when I'm back in the States

Several other teachers had generously offered me a ride to and from the brunch, sparing me a complicated series of bus changes. We met at school and left from there, and I presumed we would return and I could take the train back home.

Ha.

In a further gesture of goodwill, these colleagues offered to drive me home, since they were planning to be in the general area anyways. Things got complicated when we realized that, by virtue of never driving in Germany, I have no idea how to get anywhere by car. I can tell you the buses and trains to take, and even recite their timetables, but work to home without public transportation is totally beyond me.

I do, however, know how to get from the center of my city to my apartment. Good. Thanks to highway signs we made it to the city center and went to turn left, when I remembered that the bridge over the river to my neighborhood is under construction and out of order. The bus has been taking an alternate route for the past week, but I could not find that route myself if my life depended on it.

Long story short, three adult teachers and their American assistant drove all through the city and eventually called someone who was sitting in front of a computer to get us across the river. Once there I could direct us, but all told it had been at least an extra twenty minutes of confusing alternate routes to get me home. My colleagues, kind people that they are, insisted they were having a fantastic time being completely lost and laughed regularly at our many aborted attempts to find the right way. And then they refused any money for gas.

tl;dr - take public transportation. Or get a map. Plus, be sure to have very understanding colleagues.

We've got a long way to go

Since autumn I've been attempting to pick up some teaching pedagogy. My English major did not include a single education class and, while I've muddled through reasonably well, it's always nice to learn some of the theory behind education. To this end, I've attended the student teachers' regular seminars, in which they discuss education theory and teaching strategies. This particular seminar is held in English (it is, conveniently, the English student teacher seminar) and I've learned a great deal from it.

Today things went a little off-script. We discussed cooperative learning, which essentially means giving the students some time to work in small groups regarding their homework or current class topic. Ideally, this kind of group work follows some individual work, and the students can all ask one another questions and give one another answers, allowing for more questions, answers, and (hopefully) understanding than would be available from the single teacher. The catch? This entire discussion was in German.

I thought I'd been doing well with German. I'm no longer exhausted at the end of the day, I can eavesdrop pretty effectively, and I haven't completely confused someone with my butchery of their language in quite some time. What I'm definitely not prepared for, however, is a university-level discussion of teaching pedagogy in German. We were given a text to read and I understand how my students sometimes feel because I just stared at it, dumb. The student teachers - they can all speak fluent English - chattered away happily and I worked really hard just to understand what it was they were saying. Mostly I failed.

Pride goeth before the fall, I tell ya. I'll stick to my grocery store conversations. And the weather. I can very reliably comment on the weather.

Playing a shell game

One of my favorite autumn/winter foods is butternut squash soup, but as we're out of season for squashes, the internet offered up sweet potato soup as an alternative. The internet was right. Naturally this was no easily-microwaved Ramen noodle-style soup and the recipe called for creme fraiche as well as a garnish of buttered pecans. Should you ever care to make buttered pecans, drop a bunch of pecans in a pan with some butter and cook them for a bit. It's a very self-explanatory name.

Finding the bunch of pecans to drop was a bit more difficult. The grocery store had multi-kilogram bags of almonds, walnuts, and cashews and even offered more exotic options like Brazil nuts and macadamia nuts, but no pecans. I finally located a bag pecans in their shells and bought it, figuring that they couldn't be so hard to get open.

Hilarious.

First I tried prying, which didn't even begin to work. Then I tried poking the shell with a fork and knife. Also a no-go. The internet, that bastion of all information, suggested a nutcracker but grudging noted that a pair of pliers could work just as well. You may remember from earlier posts that my landlady is something of a DIY-er, and lo and behold, I found a pair of pliers in her basket of tools.

My pecan-shelling setup

Following digital instructions, I used the pliers to crack the shells and used the fork to help me pry out the meat. I pretty much failed to get them out cleanly and ended up with a bunch of pecan fragments. This was fine for the recipe but a bit of a blow to my pride.

The end result

You'll notice from this picture that there are far more shells than pecans. Often I couldn't even get the bits of pecan out of the shell and had to leave it behind.

I'm happy to report that while scanty, the buttered pecans turned out well and were a nice addition to the soup. And it was kind of fun to turn on Star Trek and shell some pecans for a while. I might even do it again. Hopefully I'll manage to get more whole pecans the next time, just for the sake of aesthetics.

Film studies

I woke up yesterday and it was December. Craziness. Since I live along the Rhine this month does not come with a blanket of snow or Jack Frost nipping very hard at my nose, but it does come with two very exciting movie premieres.

Guys guys guys, The Hobbit and Les Miserables are both almost here!!!

Now The Hobbit comes out on December 14 in the US, just under two weeks from now. It premieres on December 13 in Germany. I would stick out my tongue like a child at anyone in the US who is also a Tolkien fan because I get to see it first, except maybe I don't.

Here's the first trailer as seen in Germany. Notice it's not in English (and seems to have a touch of 3-D in the backgrounds). When I looked up the movie theaters near me, their websites all seem to indicate that they'll be playing the film, like the trailer, in German. Sadface. The dilemma is that between knowing the story very well and generally doing pretty well with German, I'll understand most of the movie. Its visuals will be gorgeous, its music will be stunning. But the voices will be wrong, the songs will be different, and I'll have to work to understand everything instead of being able to sit back and let it wash over me. All my attempts to find an English-language version have come to naught. Of course I still need to stop by the movie theaters and double-check that their movies will all be in German, as the sites don't say, but it's not looking good for our boys in blue.

So I might need to wait until I get back to the US on December 20 to see The Hobbit. I'll probably have to swear off Facebook for the period between the US premiere and when I get home, because everyone I know shares my love of Tolkien and can't be trusted to keep quiet. Despite this possible setback, I haven't given up! Updates to follow.

With Les Miserables I have no such angst - it comes out December 25, and I'll see it sometime after that. It is very likely that I will drag along some friends who haven't seen the play, and spend the whole movie either squealing with delight or muttering how Broadway did it better. My poor, long-suffering friends.

But! In case you haven't already seen it, I present the Les Mis trailer for your enjoyment. In English, this time.

While my expectations for this one aren't nearly as high as for The Hobbit, I'm still really excited. Throw in a Christmas Market, friends, family, and home, and this is shaping up to be a lovely holiday season. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to clean my apartment while listening to Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas albums, because it's that time of year.

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.

A collection of smiles

#1: The buses here are often between two and five minutes late. This is very un-German, and I'm assured that the problem is unique to my city. Very reassuring. Despite (or maybe in response to) the lack of punctuality, German bus drivers have no interest in braking for a couple more seconds while you run onto the bus. Can you tell I have personal experience with this? Today, however, a bus driver waited for me. Thanks, nice bus driver.

#2: Fortunately or unfortunately, the lateness issue is only true of the buses. I've had a few issues with plumbing since moving in to my apartment, so this morning a repairperson was scheduled to come in at 8am. Not my idea, let me assure you. At 7:46am sharp my bell rang and it was the repair guy. This morning I was irritated, but in hindsight, German punctuality really does make my type-A self smile.

#3: Germans are obsessive about environmental cleanliness. Except for the smoking thing. Every trashcan is actually three trash cans: paper, plastic/metal/glass, and real trash, and these are very important - my first day in Germany a homeless man berated me for throwing something in the wrong bin. Sometime soon I'll tell you all the rules governing recycling and garbage for my apartment. It's a serious thing. In fact, most German cities have a dedicated team of people who wander around with bags and those little claw-on-stick tools picking up garbage. These people are dressed head-to-toe in reflective orange or yellow and seem to generally be burly forty-year-old men. Imagine my delight when I passed a toy shop today and saw one of these men happily playing with the "create a path for the marble" toy on display while his cart of garbage-collecting tools waited nearby.

#4: Starting next week I have a new school schedule, since there are more English classes than hours I'm allowed to work every week. This means I had to start saying goodbye (possibly temporary, possibly not) to a couple of my classes. One seventh-grade class greeted my announcement with a collective sad sigh and a round of applause.

#5: My landlady is an amateur DIY-er, even for jobs that maybe shouldn't be done by one's self, like electricity and plumbing. You can imagine, therefore, that prior to calling the repair guy mentioned in #2, she tried to fix my plumbing problems herself. On Saturday I got a knock on my door and she came in to try tightening the washer on my kitchen faucet. When that didn't work she took the whole faucet off the wall and went away to a hardware store to see if she could find a solution while I stood there somewhat dumbfounded. As it turns out, she did indeed fix both my dripping faucet and clogged shower drain. And no, hair in the drain was not the problem. Now I have a bitty plunger I'm only to use on the shower if it backs up again and a new washer on my faucet. Problems solved.

It's a German thing

We're talking about jobs in my ninth-grade class, and on Tuesday started to describe the skills needed for different paths of employment. I asked the students to think of a job they may want to do in a few years, and make a little word map regarding the skills, positives, and negatives of that job. Then I wandered about as they did so and tried to translate the un-translatable jobs they wished to perform (turns out there's a general word for someone who works in an office). Happily, the teacher I'm assisting has a smartphone with a German-English dictionary.

I also chided some French exchange students who spoke no English and little German, because I thought they were just not doing their work. Oops. My actual students quickly corrected me. The struggles of only seeing a class once a week.

With word maps finished, we shared some of the attributes of their chosen jobs. The students told me about what was needed to be a nurse, engineer, banker, police officer, lawyer, and computer repairperson. I asked if anyone had picked a creative job, like interior designer, actor, musician, or even a museum guide. Please guess how many people raised their hands.


Got a number in your head?


Remember that number.


You'll want it in just a minute. Ready?


Zero. Not a single person in a class of thirty had chosen a profession in either the humanities or creative sectors. And this is a class of ninth-graders, with four more years to go before they have to take their big final exams. They weren't choosing their jobs, they weren't declaring anything, they were just picking something they might be interested in to write about for a classroom exercise and they all picked very practical, useful jobs. I was flabbergasted. I said so, and told them that an American classroom would definitely have included some aspiring actors, singers, artists, or communications majors. They looked at me with polite disbelief, as if I'd walked into the classroom wearing Princess Beatrice's hat from the royal wedding. I gave them the same look. It was a fascinating sociological clash.

Later, talking to a friend about this, she said that such a response is very typical for Germans. The students may have indeed cherished secret dreams of becoming the next big actor or actress, but these dreams are considered non-serious and possibly a bit shameful. Definitely they remain a secret. I told her about the American slogan that you can achieve anything you want, and she laughed at me. Germans don't say that, she said, because it isn't true. We don't tell our children they can do whatever they want because they can't.

Yikes. Part of me feels like German students miss out on something important by not hearing this message. Then again, Germany has one of the strongest economies in the world, along with one of the highest standards of living. I've not seen Germans unhappy with their lives, they just enjoy themselves outside of work. The concept of not loving your job - or at least not wanting to love it, in an ideal world - is entirely foreign to me.


On a totally different note, I found Hobbit-themed super-sweet fake chai at the grocery store. Did I buy it? You bet I did!

Tastiness, plus Elrond. Win-win.

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.

A Traveling Tale

I spent the past weekend with my great-grandmother’s family in a town near the city of Worms. This same Worms played a starring role in a certain Diet with Martin Luther, for anyone who knows their Reformation history.

It's also the site of the German epic "Die Nibelungen" featuring, you guessed it, dragons!

Getting to the town was somewhat complicated. I was supposed to take a train to Mainz, switch trains, then take a second train to Worms, where my cousins would pick me up. Regrettably this smooth plan hit an unexpected bump: train delays.

Before I came to Germany I thought all German public transport, like all Germans, ran on time. Having taken the bus and train for a few weeks, I can assure you this is not true. I’ve been on the frustrated receiving end of trains running five or ten minutes late, and my bus always seems to be a few minutes behind in the mornings. Despite these minor issues, I’m impressed with the transport system in Germany. On Saturday morning as I stood yawning in the main train station, however, I heard the unfortunate news that my first train was going to be around thirty minutes late. Those of us waiting for that particular conveyance stood shivering in the little strip of sunlight on the platform and waited. When the train finally did arrive and we boarded, the conductor came on over the loudspeaker and apologized for being thirty-two minutes late. Very specific.

Unluckily, my planned layover in Mainz was only thirteen minutes, meaning that I missed my second train. The schedule on Platform 5 informed me that the next train was leaving in a half-hour from Platform 6. My hot chocolate and I waited on Platform 6 while trains to other places came and went and the half hour had passed. No train to Worms.

With some trepidation I checked the train schedule on Platform 6 only to find that it said my train would leave from Platform 5. Keep in mind these schedules are printed out on paper, so it’s not as if they update electronically every time there’s a change. I went to wait on Platform 5 and attempted to call my cousins to apologize for running so late. Wrong number.

I finally arrived in Worms ninety minutes late to find my ride, quite logically, nowhere to be seen. After some forlorn wandering around the city I found the bus station, where a nice driver pointed out the proper bus and told me it would leave in two hours.

It's a happenin' place

Germany tends to shut down by Saturday afternoon and stay shut down through Sunday, except for churches and restaurants. By 4:50p when I got to Worms, all the cafes were closed for the weekend. I sat in Burger King sipping hot chocolate for the better part of my two hour wait.

From there everything went pretty well. I got to the proper address with little trouble and my family insisted it hadn’t inconvenienced them at all to wait for over an hour and return home without me. Sunday morning they fed me a big German breakfast with jam made by one cousin from the fruit of another cousin’s garden. In the afternoon we went back to Worms for the Almond Festival Day, which has nothing to do with almonds.

"Reserved for women," found spanning the first fifteen-ish spots in a parking garage.

Various women's organizations set up food stalls. I had pumpkins soup.

You could also buy cars here. I have no idea what kind of business they did.

The Almond Festival reminded me of state fairs in the States, only without the 4-H farm animals and world’s largest pumpkin competitors. We saw lots of food for sale and munched on some candied nuts.

My cousin's dog Nala

A quintessential German village picture. Notice the church spire.

Chickens. Their attending rooster woke me up at 6am both mornings.

Beautiful fall color!

Sunday night we had a lovely family dinner with fresh roasted chestnuts (delicious), bread/meat/cheese, and local wine from another cousin. Monday we corrected phone numbers and I caught the noon train back to my apartment. It was such a nice visit, and now I know I can handle my travel plans going all wrong with the help of Burger King and friendly bus drivers.

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.