How to Build a Bed

Imagine the "How to Train Your Dragon" soundtrack playing in the background of this whole post, because a) it was on for the whole bed-building process and b) everything is more epic with the proper music choices. You may also substitute the "Lord of the Rings" or "Pirates of the Caribbean" soundtracks if you prefer.

Last week my Mom came for a visit. It was really fun to show someone else around the places I've gotten to know and try new things with her - for example, we discovered a new part of the old city and ate at a simply fabulous Italian restaurant. She flew in Saturday morning, slept most of Sunday, and went with me to IKEA on Monday morning. Why IKEA, you ask? Because I really need furniture. See, I arrived in Germany in early September and spent the first two weeks living in my contact teacher's guest room. My attempts to find a nice shared apartment close to the main train station ran up against the propensity of every German under the age of thirty to smoke like a trucker, and so I temporarily moved into a one-room apartment in one of the city's "suburbs" while continuing to look for a permanent place to stay.

A dozen apartment-viewing appointments later, I was ready to move in to any non-smoking apartment that would take me. Some prospective apartmentmates lit up in the living room while we were chatting. Seriously. I don't breathe well around cigarette smoke, so the lack of it was quickly becoming my only criteria for an apartment. By the time we got to early November, the settler in me gave the rest of me an ultimatum: find a place within a week, or decide to stay where I was. I chose the latter. Up until now I'd been sleeping on a camping mattress borrowed from my landlady, with the expectation that I would move out in a few weeks and didn't care to carry a bed from one living space to another. With the decision to stay, it was time to find something slightly more elevated than my foam pad. And while I've struggled to find some things here in the past, I knew that IKEA was the place to go for furniture.

Mom and I caught the appropriate bus out to a gigantic warehouse of a store, typical in the States but very unusual in Germany. Once there we weighed the merits of a bed versus a couch-convertible-bed and estimated the size of the furniture versus the size of my room. In the end, we left with a single bed frame, a mattress tightly rolled up into a compressed cylinder, a bunch of 2x4s to use as a foundation for the mattress, and a "clothes valet" meant to hold the next day's outfit. I meant to use the last one as a bitty closet, since I don't have enough space for a normal wardrobe setup.

I had presumed that, lacking a car to carry off these purchases, we'd take advantage of IKEA's shipping services. Mom's "old bones" protested the idea of waiting for a comfortable bed and we wrestled all the components on to the bus instead. Regrettably I only had my cell phone to take a picture of that spectacle. One box was seven or eight feet tall, while my mattress roll was too thick to carry under one arm. We'd briefly considered the idea of buying an IKEA rolling dolly for ten euros, before remembering that I had nowhere to put a dolly for the next seven months. So with frequent stops and some huffing and puffing, we got the furniture components on to Bus #1. Bus #2 was a little more complicated, as it runs on the normal commuting route between the center of the city and my area of "suburb," but several nice people helped us to hold the pieces for the short ride. Home at last, we took out the instructions and discovered that IKEA is fabulous. Their furniture is designed to have all components in the package, including the tools necessary to put them together. No need for extra screw drivers, nails, hammers, or pliers. It's a beautiful thing for a temporary guest like me.

The boxes, minus the mattress

See, for a rolled-up mattress, you gotta unroll it first.

 Maximum fluffiness is apparently achieved after three days. Mattresses, you can't rush them. I can report that mine feels no different now than it did last week Monday.

The mattress waiting to fluff. With instructions.

Frame, built.

Slats, laid down.

Not-quite-fluffed mattress, placed.

Sheets, put on.

Look, a it's a real bed! I call it Pinocchio.

Except seriously, Pinocchio is a really creepy film. The cat is cute and I do love Jiminy Cricket, but the island of boys turning into donkeys was the stuff of my nightmares. Along with Ursula. Ursula is scary.

That whole setup took maybe a half-hour or forty minutes, which I found pretty good for first-time IKEA furniture assemblers. Within another ten minutes we had my closet all set up too.

We're so good at this game.

And yes, I have a Hawaiian-print skirt. It was, in fact, my first skirt since about age seven that was shorter than my ankles. Ah, youth. Now I am happy to report that I live within the realm of "somewhere around the knee" for all my skirts and dresses, though I've never tried a miniskirt before. I think my thighs might get stage fright. They're rather shy that way.

With the addition of a toaster oven provided by one of my colleagues and a monthlong bus/train ticket, it's like I really live here! Such a nice feeling. I also bought a rug for the bathroom.

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.

Now for something slightly different

It's been a fairly quiet, normal sort of week for me. I went back to school on Thursday and don't plan on any more surprise week-long vacations - rest is good, but I find that too much rest is just boring. I like to have something to do that feels worth doing.

In about an hour I'm headed to a tiny town in Germany called Mörstadt, where my great-grandmother was born and her extended family still lives, to visit my cousins. I seem to be related to three-quarters of the town, based on a ten-minute tour that included explaining my relationship to nearly everyone buried in the little cemetery. It feels odd to me to call everyone I come across "cousin," but so this visit will go. Several of my cousins of varying degrees grow grapes and make wine, and I wonder if I might be able to see the winery.

In talking to my friend J about education reform last night, I realized that the German education system remains a mystery to most non-Germans (including me). Keep in mind I'm no expert on this, and please correct me if I say anything wrong.

Like in the States, German school children begin their education between the ages of 5 and 6 in a primary school, called Grundschule. At age 10, they can go into one of two tracks: Realschule or Gymnasium. Actually there are more than two options, but every state in Germany has a different system and the systems are changing, so we'll stick to the two I know best from my own state. When a student finishes Grundschule, their previous work, grades, and parental preferences dictate if they go into a Realschule or Gymnasium. Realschule goes until 10th grade, after which a student goes into an apprenticeship situation based on their abilities. For example, a student who is good at math may go into an apprenticeship to be an accountant, with part of their time spent at school and part of their time spent in training at a company that uses accountants. Realschule students don't usually go to university.

Gymnasium, where I work, goes until 12th or 13th grade, after which the students take a large exit exam (Abitur), much like England's system. This exam is not, so far as I can tell, like the SAT or ACT in the States. Gymnasium students often do go to university and become things like lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Teachers in Germany are well-trained (6 or 7 years of training) and well-paid, making education a desirable profession.

An interesting thing I've noted when talking with my students is the lack of American Dream "what I want to be when I grow up" ideas. Even my 10th and 12th grade students, who are about the same age or a little older than their US counterparts, usually answered my question about their preferred employment by saying that they would know what field they would study after they took the Abitur exam and got their scores back. Of course I can't generalize to all of Germany or all German students, but the German system doesn't seem to put the same sort of emphasis on "doing whatever you want to do!" or "following your passion" - certainly some people seem to enjoy their jobs, but many others view a job as something you do to live and enjoy their lives after work. The German education system sorts students by capability and provides them training in a field in which they excel, but the students' own passions don't seem to be a big part of it. On the one hand, unemployment is very low in Germany. The government will ensure that you have a job that supports you, even if it's not a job you particularly like. On the other hand, I don't hear my students super excited about what the future has in store for them. This isn't unique to Germany - anyone who's talked with American 16-year-olds can report a similar vibe - but it does seem more pronounced here.

Like so many of the differences between the States and Europe, it seems to boil down to the realization that both systems work. Both systems also need reformation, however, and I wonder what we might borrow from one another in the future.

Thoughts? Questions? Proclamations? Creeds?

Angels in Culture

I went to an event today called "Angels in Culture," which was not at all what I thought it would be. From its poster, I expected a discussion of the role of angels in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with visits to the appropriate buildings to see the angels (or the lack thereof) within holy spaces. The event was nothing like that.

Instead, it consisted of a cookie-cutter six feet in diameter, singing children, and walking in a group of fifty plus all throughout the city. Turns out the whole thing was arranged by a sculpture artist and a woman's group dedicated to inter-religious dialogue.

Here's the sculpture. See the angel?

I arrived at the mosque (I didn't realize there was a mosque in my city, but indeed there is) early this afternoon and heard a reading from the Koran and brief homily, all in German. Then the sculptor put his sculpture on the ground and had the children in the audience help him fill it with some sandy/salty/grainy substance. We lifted the form away and left a temporary shape outside the mosque's main entrance. A girl's choir sang a song in German and a song in what I presume was Arabic, and we heard from the mayor. I'm not entirely sure how she got involved, but I thought it was really cool that the civil government was getting involved in both the event and its purpose. While there has always been immigration to Germany, in the last ten or fifteen years Germany has become home to a number of immigrants from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, especially Turkey. In fact, Germany's two street foods are sausage (of course) and a Turkish dish called döner kebabs: shredded chicken or lamb in a pita with lettuce, onions, peppers, and a yogurt sauce. As a result of increased immigration, a major discussion in Germany is what integration in German society looks like, and that has sometimes led to cultural tensions.

We repeated the form-filling performance at the cultural center, synagogue, main Protestant church, main Catholic church, and "alternative" Catholic chapel. I don't know what alternative means there. It was an interesting experience with the occasional really funny moment - a group of children turning the angel outside the cultural center into a pile of sand and making a castle out of it, for example.

In other news, I discovered peanut butter yesterday!

Pretty pretty pretty

It's not quite American peanut butter, but it reminds me of home and is very comforting. I'm keeping it for a snack when I need a taste of the US.

Finally, a report on my cookies. They never set, remaining vaguely liquid and gloopy even after a time in the refrigerator, but are delicious eaten with a spoon. I'm told that I used too much milk. Let it be known, I should have put in 1/2 yogurt rather than a full one.

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.

I'm Late! I'm Late! For a Very Important Date!

Gather 'round everyone, while I tell you the (picture-less) tale of Jessica and the Horrible Not-Workday.

It all started when she was a bit ill - nothing too serious, but maybe should stay home from school instead of going her first day back after break. This does sound rather suspicious. It is the truth. So she made the mistake of emailing her contact teacher and telling her of the situation, adding that she wasn't certain she was still contagious and could still come into school if needed.

The teacher suggested that she go the doctor to determine if she was okay. Only problem: she doesn't have a German doctor and the internet did not point her to any walk-in clinics. Happily her family is made up of medical professionals and so she asked them. They told her that with regular hand-washing and good hygiene, it shouldn't be a problem. So she tried to go to school.

The first problem came with the trains - she usually takes the :08 train into school, because they run every hour. That day (yesterday), however, she thought she'd get to school a little early and attempted to take the quarter-hour train, unsure if it was actually right but almost late for it anyways, so she couldn't stop to ask anyone. She listened carefully to the incomprehensible overhead announcement and didn't hear the name of her stop, so panicked, decided it was going the wrong way, and got off as soon as possible. It turned out that she got off at the littlest-used stop in the city, from which there were two trains: one train went back the way she'd come, and the other went the she wanted to go, but wasn't coming for another hour. Her class started in forty-five minutes. The train ride to school is only twelve minutes or so, meaning that as long as she could catch the right train it was no problem to get there on time.

So she took the train back the way she'd come and hoped she was in time to catch her trusty :08. No such luck, that train had already left the station. Frantically reading the train schedule, she ran for the next train and got on it, breathing hard, only to find she hadn't needed to run because she had a few minutes before it started off. She calculated times during her short ride and concluded that she couldn't get to the school in time if she walked. Thankfully there was a taxi stand just outside the train station, so she could take a taxi to school. Far too many euros and minutes later, she arrived at the school three minutes after classes had begun.

Normally this particular teacher was a little late, but today it seemed she'd gotten in on time. Jessica hurried upstairs and into the classroom, where she apologized and took up a place in the back. The teacher then told her that the students had a test and she wasn't needed in the class that day.

Emotions somewhere between frustration and hilarity, Jessica spent her next free hour productively and then headed down for her last class of the day. When she arrived the wrong teacher was there and the students informed her that their grade now had a different schedule to follow: that particular hour was French. Thoroughly deflated, Jessica went to go find the teacher of that class only to discover she had left a bit earlier. So, Jessica went to the store and took the train back home. This morning she learned that she did indeed need a certificate to come to school, now that she'd informed someone at the school that she was ill, and so she is writing this post and procrastinating the terrifying phone call to a doctor's office in German to ask if she can be a patient there.

Terror. Terror. Terror.

I See London...

English author Samuel Johnson* once noted "When one is tired of London, he is tired of life." England's capitol is a very large city and was once the center of the largest empire in the world, though the country has come down a ways from 19th century imperial glory. It's still big - I had a forty minute train ride and a fifteen minute walk to get from the center of London to my friend G's house in one of the suburbs.

I left Cardiff on Wednesday at the crack of 9am and traveled three hours by bus back to London. Once there, the first stop was my absolute favorite musical, Les Miserables, at the Queen's Theatre in the West End.

My heart, it aches.

In additional to be a stage favorite, Les Mis is a very long book by Victor Hugo, of “Hunchback of Notre Dame” fame. It’s a beautiful story of redemption, with questions of grace, justice, and goodness, as well as pretty pretty songs. My seat partner, an Australia post-doc on his way to Duke University to start a job studying vision in lizards, noted that multiple scenes gave him shivers up his spine. I quite agree. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. (There’s a Les Mis movie coming out at Christmastime, for which I am cautiously optimistic. No matter how it turns out, I’ll likely buy it. Just doing my part to support the film industry.)

I also got to talk with the tech people because I was sitting in the back – their board is very high-tech and the number of different faders and pages they have to keep track of is dizzying. There was a little bobble with one character’s mic coming on a few seconds late, but otherwise the sound was great, even with such a large number of mics on stage. That’s a tricky balance.

Wednesday evening I made the aforementioned journey to my friend's house outside of London, where his family was very kind and welcoming. Thursday morning we made the forty minute trip back into London to go to the British Museum. I’d been to the museum two or three times before, but it’s so large I’d only ever gotten to a few of the bottom floors. This time I went up to the special exhibition to learn about “Drinking in Asia” – rituals and beliefs associated with alcohol, tea, and water in various Asian countries. The similarities between India, Nepal, Mongolia, China, Japan, Korea, and the Phillipines were interesting, but the differences especially so, because I’m guilty of lumping all of Asia together and assuming their cultures are basically the same. Even when they did trade ideas, materials, religions, and ceremonies, each has their own distinct cultural mark. India has a very distinctive liquid-carrier made out of a hollow gourd (and later metal in the shape of said gourd) that is vaguely pear-shaped, where Korea’s liquid carrier is much more round. Both, however, have spouts out of which you can drink. I don’t recall if one gave it to the other. Tea ceremonies in China and Japan are totally different – China traditionally used a powdered tea whipped into a frothy drink in a specially shaped glass, while Japan developed an elaborate tea ceremony. Things like that.

A man making a funny face/"In intense religious devotion"

Very shiny 12th century sword that will kill you.

London is known for its architecture, both modern and ancient. I don’t particularly like the more modern buildings and I really dislike the height of their newest one, but I know the city has to grow upwards now that it has no further room to grow out.

A building I don't like so much. It's called the Shard.

A building I do like very much. It's called the Gherkin.

On Friday I went to Greenwich, home of the median line that marks the center of the world for time.

Greenwich is also home to part of the Olympic stadium and several lovely houses. The town of Greenwich boasts a lovely little market, the Royal Navel College, and the restored tea-ship the “Cutty Sark.”

Center of time, right here.

This little thing made the crossing from England to India and was one of the fastest ships in its day. I can’t fathom that trip in such a small vessel.

The Cutty Sark

Former Royal Naval College, now a museum.

On the grounds of the formal college, I saw the lovely “Painted Hall” as well as a very Baroque-style chapel.

Very ornate.

And to finish, one of my pictures from the Doctor Who Experience:

Saving all of time and space. That's right!

*(Samuel Johnson's quote comes to me by way of a friend from college back in the States. J is witty and very intelligent and studying at Princeton, so I would be be doing her a disservice if I didn't cite my source material.)