Christmas in Paris

(The following is a letter from Joe to our families detailing our trip to Paris.)

Greeting from the old world!  We are back from our Christmas in Paris.  Based on input from our German friends and our own desire to eventually see Paris, we decided that Christmas is a good time to see Paris.

We arrived on 22 December by TGV train, on the very same tracks that set the world speed record for wheeled trains.  The train hit a top speed of 200mph –I was tracking it with my GPS.

Cathedral Sacre-Coeur

From the train station we walked to our hotel, for about 2.5km.  Navigation was a little difficult, because Paris is a big city, and from street level most of it looks the same –5 or 6 story tall buildings built in the 1800s, the streets are straight, but don’t intersect at 90 degree angles.

After checking into our hotel, we spent the rest of the evening walking around.  We were in the neighborhood of the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur (Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris).  We came across a Christmas Market there.  And because the Sacré-Cœur is on a hill in relatively flat Paris, we got our first view of the Eiffel Tower.  We walked through the streets and eventually made our way to the river Seine.  It was quite dirty and fast flowing; and completely surrounded by stone walls.  On an island in the Seine sits the Notre Dame cathedral.  We marveled at the front for a while at sunset.  Then we used the Metro (subway) to get back home for dinner at a Parisian Café.

 On Friday we visited some other famous sites, including the 300m tall Eiffel Tower.  We purchased a baguette with cold cuts and cheese, and we had lunch in a park viewing the tower.  It was hard to comprehend the size until we were under it.  We went all the way to the top and got a view of the city, and we could just see the land beyond the sprawl of Paris.  We also walked under the Arc de Triomphe which is also impressively big.  We wandered around the National Residence of the Invalides, which is also the national military history museum and the burial site for Napoleon. Finally, we went into some more churches.

La St. Chapelle

On Christmas Eve the skies were blue.  We walked around town –in total we walked about 40miles in our 2day +2half day stay!  We visited the Louvre, and saw the most famous painting in the world –the Mona Lisa.  I was reprimanded for taking a picture of the crowd of people taking a picture of the picture.  I am still a bit upset that they didn’t reprimand all the people who were using their camera flashes, despite all the signs that say “No Flash”.  On average there was a camera flash at the Mona Lisa every two seconds.  That evening we enjoyed a fantastic meal at a corner café with some good wine, and then listened to an organ concert at the Sacré-Cœur.  After the concert we watched the Eiffel Tower, which was lit up with hundreds or maybe even thousands of strobe lights.

On Christmas day we walked around town and took our picture by Notre Dame.  We had a three-course lunch at a nice café.  And we departed Paris around 3:30 for Tübingen.

At home we unwrapped our presents, and talked to Betsy’s family by Skype.

Love,

Joe & Betsy

I (Betsy) have a few things to add to Joe's narrative. First, in the above picture I am not pregnant or fatter than normal, I am just wearing the tourist waistbelt with both of our passports, money, credit cards, etc., and I didn't want to take it off for the picture.

There are some other observations I made about Paris in addition to Joe's. I spend about two weeks in Paris and surroundings when I was 14, and saw it quite exhaustively, but that was more than half a lifetime ago now and these three things really stood out to me:

1. Paris is really dirty. I know, it's beautiful, but I sort of feel like I should throw my shoes away now. We saw so much poop, gum, cigarette butts, barf and litter on the streets. Each morning water flowed out from the sewers and maintenance people swept what they could away, but really, doesn't it just end up in the Seine then? Gross, Paris. I thought we'd moved past the Middle Ages.

2. Paris has a lot of rocks. Wow. It is a big city and just about everything is made of stone. Where did it all come from? Napolean must have employed an army to move it all in. Oh wait, I think he might have actually done just that.

3. Paris is really expensive. I was prepared to see a good amount of upscale boutiques, etc, but that was about all that was there, aside from a few immigrant neighborhoods and tourist districts. I don't know how people actually live there. It was nice to return home to "spar"-conscious Germany. 

Last of all, Joe forgot to mention our most magical Paris experience. On Christmas morning we saw a motorcade heading down a broad avenue. I thought, "It must be French president Nicolas Sarkozy". Actually, it was Pere Noel (Santa Claus). He waved to us and went on his way. I couldn't figure out though what he was doing parading around Paris when it was still night time in the western hemisphere. Shouldn't he still be out delivering toys?

Frankfurter Weihnachtsmaerkte

This past weekend we headed to Frankfurt to visit two of Joe's former Peace Corps Tanzania volunteer-acquaintances. We experienced the "ICE" train for the first time ("Inter-City Express"; which is the German version of the Bullet train, although it's not allowed to go as fast). We've wondered with other Americans why it has an English and not a German name, but, alas, "Keine Ahnung" ("No idea..."). Fortunately, the couple owns two cars, and so we experienced our first ride in a private vehicle since arriving in Germany. I was a little squished between the couple's two kids!

Because we all needed to do Christmas shopping, we spent most of the weekend visiting Christmas Markets ("Weihnachtsmarkt"). Christmas markets are shopping events for Germans, of course, but more than that they are a great excuse to drink mulled wein (Glühwein; it's COLD out there, and Glühwein is HOT!), and eat different kinds of sausage. There is also a special kind of Glühwein that involves a flaming cone of rum-soaked sugar that we tried for the first tame. Pretty much tasted just like Gluhwein.

We went to one Christmas Market in a town called "Bad Homburg", which the 4 1/2 year old son of our hosts called "Bah Humbug". Actually, the atmosphere was quite the opposite, but that was pretty cleverly ironic of him, although I'm not sure he intended it as such. We also went for a soak in the family's local "Bad", which had a heated outdoor pool that overlooked some castle ruins. One final observation from our weekend was that German words can have three consonants in a row, as evidenced by this sign.

Der erste Schnee

Joe and I recently celebrated our birthdays and interbirthday, since our birthdays are just two days apart. It's been too busy with language classes to celebrate formally, but we managed to visit the Tübingen chocolate festival on Joe's birthday, where we saw... a lot of chocolate, some of it as art. We celebrated by meeting our new American friends for drinks, and I did manage to get Joe the one thing he wanted: an advent calendar. Advent calendars are more of a secular tradition here, just a fun way to involve chocolate in the count-down to Christmas.

We took off on a Friday and headed to the Allgäu region of Germany, to celebrate with a long weekend in the Bavarian Alps. The University that I work for owns a cabin in the ski town of Oberjoch, near the Austrian border. We spent two quiet days hiking and got to experience the first snowfall of the season. We made it up to the top of Mount Iseler via the old smuggler's route ("Schmugglersteig"), but got turned back by snow and ice that prevented us from walking the narrow ridge that turns into the Austrian border. We headed down into town and celebrated my birthday with hot chocolate and cake.

We went to the cabin in Oberjoch partly because my research group was heading there for a retreat on Sunday. So I sent Joe back on the bus and train to Tübingen while my colleagues turned up in Oberjoch for the retreat. We spent the next two days discussing some science, and having some fun presentations. I made a "USA Jeopardy" powerpoint presentation to introduce my colleagues to some of the subtleties of American culture. We also played a rousing round of trivia, which I am happy to say my team won. We celebrated by drinking a round of schnapps from the winner's cups we were presented. I think the highlight for my advisor was the much-anticipated and compulsory snow hike and snowball fight, although he appears to have torn the meniscus in his knee in the ensuing scuffle. Fortunately, it snowed about a foot for the annual snow hike and snowball fight, and kept snowing until we left the next day.

This weekend we head to Frankfurt. We'll be sure to post an update about our next adventures.

Thanksgiving, for real

This past Sunday we finally took time to celebrate Thanksgiving with two other American couples (one half of each couple is a postdoc in Geology, if that makes sense). It was also our turn to host this group, as we've had dinner at each of their places. We decided to start off the day with an informal Turkey Trot, since we're a sporty bunch. So after an hour-long run through the Schönbuch, I got to work cooking.

This was the first time we'd hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, our first Thanksgiving as a married couple. It's kind of a big step in the evolution of my pseudo-hausfrau identity. I used to really like to cook, so in theory I should be more excited about this milestone, but something about writing a dissertation made me go numb to enjoyment of activities such as cooking. During the writing, it was much more important that food was had than that food was made or enjoyed. However, I managed to shake off some of my numbness toward cooking and other forms of this thing called "relaxation" and get excited enough to make up a real shopping list and look up real recipes on the internet.

All was going well on Sunday afternoon as I was preparing delicious stuffing, completely from scratch, of course, because stuffing mix doesn't exist here. I then made a very delicious green bean casserole, also from scratch, as Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to my knowledge is an American phenomenon. Then it was time for the turkey. I called Joe in to help clean out the icky bits, but as Joe was wrist deep in fowl he discovered our turkey was not a turkey. I grabbed the dictionary and realized that what I'd thought was the frozen turkey display (for Thanksgiving) in the grocery store that sells American food was actually the frozen duck display. Oops! As you might know, turkeys and ducks are very different. In fact, ducks have quite a bit more fat. So instead of cooking my first Thanksgiving turkey, I ended up cooking my first duck. Very fortunately, our European convection oven comes with a long skewer that rotates, so the duck was cooked to perfection, and all it's fat dripped off into the special duck-fat collecting pan that also fortunately comes with European ovens.

Other than the duck snafu, everything went well, and we rather enjoyed our feast, complete with a Japanese pumpkin pie and hand-whipped cream, vegetarian wellingtons and glühwein (German mulled wine consumed during the Christmas season). We finished off the night with a game of Die Siedler von Catan (Settlers of Catan). Erfolg! (Success!)

It's also worth a mention that we went on Saturday to our first Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) with some visiting scientists and folks from my lab group. The market was at our local castle, Hohenzollern, which we've been to before. The actual market wares were kind of a bust, but we did get to try a lot of Glühwein and other hot toddies. My favorite part was eating the likeness of St. Niklaus in baked form, complete with a pipe.

Gedankbar Tag/Schwarzer Freitag

We've had our noses to the grindstone lately with work and language classes, so no fun adventures to blog post about. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, but it was just like a normal day here, except we threw a surprise breakfast for my advisor, Andreas. It was sort of like Thanksgiving in that it was celebratory and I got up early to make food. I fried potatoes and bacon to represent the best of America, and I even got a little American flag to present with my food and ketchup at the breakfast.

Thanksgiving doesn't really exist here, so I just made up the German names for our holidays in the blog title. I can do that now since I'm soooo good at German. I can even understand like 20% of the "Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten" (literally "slowly spoken news") from the Deutsche Welle. Black Friday doesn't exist here either, so it was disappointing that when we went to purchase a frozen turkey today for our upcoming Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday, it wasn't on sale! Frozen turkey should definitely go on sale the day after Thanksgiving. Well, at least we didn't get pepper-sprayed while purchasing our turkey. Pepper spray would be more useful here as a way to spice up the food rather than offensively shop.

In lieu of not having any exciting stories to tell you, I will give you a list of random stuff about Germany:

-You need a Euro piece to release a shopping cart or use a locker at the gym. When you bring the cart back or finish using the locker, you get the money back. Joe thinks this is why there aren't shopping cars littered throughout parking lots. Actually there aren't very many parking lots.

-Signs that say "Frei" (free) with a picture of a bike indicate that bikes can ride there and not, as we erroneously though, that bikes can't ride there.

-People speak to children and dogs in German, like we are actually in Germany or something.

-People don't pick up after their dogs, so that it is entirely possibly that you are innocently walking down the street when your heel smooshes into fresh dog-doo. Not from personal experience or anything...

-Most milk is whole milk (3.8% fat) and the yogurt has about that much fat as well. I love this. Joe hates this.

-People put used household items to the sidewalk for pickup, but usually other Germans just take it. I got this really nice spicerack on while out on a run one morning, and Joe got a fancy office chair from our neighbor.

-There are no dryers for laundry. Sad face.

-Couples go for a walk together on Sundays.

-There are special escalators for shopping carts in multi-level stores. The shopping cart wheels have a special locking device so they don't slide down.

-Most glass and plastic beverage containers are refilled, so you pay a deposit when you buy them, and you get it back when you bring the bottles back to the store. Then you have store credit. Beverages, including beer are actually quite cheap.

-When it is foggy and there is an accident on the Autobahn, it involves hundreds of cars.

-The bikes have generators built into the wheels to power the lights.

(Most of these random facts were generated by Joe, so I have to give him some Blog-credit)

Schwimm, shwamm, ist geschwommen

Joe and I have been taking language classes now for two weeks. His is ~20 hours per week, and mine is 9 hours per week. This makes our lives a little bit busy when combined with trying to work full-time, but one thing that maintains my sanity when busy is exercise. I started swimming in grad school with a master's group, and the routine really helped me be more focused at work. So I have been exploring my options for swimming here in Tübingen. Unfortunately there are no groups or classes early in the morning, so I've been swimming in this tiny pool downtown between ~6-7am once a week with my friend Merle.

During intense swimming workouts in the US I would imagine what swimming would be like in Germany. I imagined the German swimming classes would be run by a stern coach (a la East German Olympic style-coach). I thought I might not be fast, fit or serious enough compared to tough German people. In fact, swimming in Germany is quite the opposite. This pool has only 4 lanes, and no floating lane dividers. This presents a problem when 20 people are swimming simultaneously, many of them senior citizens or backstrokers. There is absolutely NO ORDER in the pool! And most people are swimming only very casually, nothing that be considered a strenuous workout. Occasionally, people even decide to swim or walk ACROSS the lanes. It is hard for me to figure out, because there is a famous German motto, "Ordnung muss sein" or "There must be order", yet German swimming pools are entirely disorderly. However there is also a very strong respect for free time and relaxation, and I think that swimming in German falls into the category of a relaxing activity. Needless to say, I have really had to adjust my expectations, and take swimming here for what it is: Dodgeball.

Joe and I have managed to squeeze in some time for fun and socializing. On Thursday we joined my lab group at a place called the Altstadt Besen (literal translation is old town broom). The Besen is an ephemeral type of wine pub, open only October-Christmas, where the main attraction is this year's batch of local wine. It's exceedingly popular with the locals, and so Merle and others from my group had to arrive when they opened at 5pm to stake out the biggest table for our group. My new research group has ~30 people who all get along reasonably well, and there were about 15 of us there squeezed around the big table (group members Maren and Katja are to the left of me in picture). We drank late into the evening and most of us were dragging a bit on Friday morning. The Besen is apparently run by communists, and we were drinking a "red October" wine, which likely commemorates the 1917 Russian Revolution. I discovered that a little bit of wine really helps me to practice German, and maybe helps the group members tolerate all of my mistakes.

Exceprt from Joes's recent email update to family:

Martinstag, which is a Catholic holiday commemorating the life of St. Martin, a Bishop of Tours --it seems he is most famous for sharing his cloak with a beggar when he was a Roman soldier.  The protestants felt left out so they celebrate Martin Luther's special day in much the same way, which is children's candle light lantern procession followed by a goose dinner.  It also represents the start of winter and the Christmas  (Weihnachtsfest) season.  Our actual celebration consisted of eating a breakfast bread in the shape of a goose and reading about what culturally practicing Germans did last night.

Note: Armistice Day is not commemorated on 11Nov; in fact the closest thing to Veterans day is Volkstrauertag (national day of mourning), which is two Sundays before the first of Advent (in this year, it is Nov. 13), and this started in 1952. It is not surprising that the end of The Great War is treated differently in Germany than the rest of Western Europe, North America, and the rest of the British Empire. OK, enough cultural lessons.

Munich

We just returned from a weekend trip to München - our first "big" trip since we got here. We went to visit Joe's cousin Graham, his wife Jana and their two young kids who are here for 7 weeks as Graham trains for his job with a German company. They've been here 5 weeks already, so all we needed to do was get to Munich, and they pretty much took care of the rest of the details.

On Saturday morning we headed in the direction where most tourists go first, the Glockenspiel. But first, we stopped for warm chestnuts on the street. I've never had them before, but mmmm they were good. The Glockenspiel is basically a giant clock that plays out a court scene, complete with lots of bells making the music. I won't spoil the story for you in case you come to München for yourself someday, but I will hint that there is a dramatic jousting scene.

One sport popular in München is river surfing on the Isar. I have never observed this anywhere else, but it was very cool to watch. We spent a lot of time on Saturday just walking through downtown München and I have to say it is a very lovely city. We wandered through a large market and got a glimpse of what the Christmas Markets Germany is famous for may be like. I am excited for them! They have some very beautiful seasonal craftwork. We ended the day on the Olympic Hill (Munich had the summer games in '72), where we saw the sunset and had a nice view of the distant Alps. I'm really looking forward to coming back to Bavaria and spending some time in the mountains. We could also see the BMW headquarters. I never realized before that the blue and white in the BMW logo are the Bavarian colors.

Today we went back to downtown and visited the Hofbrauhaus for lunch. They serve up a modest meal - just a liter of beer and a pretzel the size of your head! Actually, the food was delicious. I never thought I'd say I enjoy something called pork knuckle (Hax'n). We really enjoyed eating in Bavaria because we definitely noticed dialectical differences in food names between our region (Swabia) and Bavaria. We eat "Brezeln", but in Bavaria the beloved pretzel is a "Breze". Off to sleep off that liter of beer!

Heilige Scheiss, Fledermaus Mann!

Yesterday, Tuesday (Dienstag) was the holiday All Saint's Day (Allseeligen). Joe and I went out for a 5 mile run in the morning and it struck me how quiet it was. No one else was driving or even outside yet. Because all the stores are closed I had to ask some German's what one is supposed to do on these holidays. "Relax..." they said. "Sleep in, go for a walk, enjoy it." That is a very hard thing for me to do. Instead I spent most of the day catching up on personal business from the move, did some German homework, and then I went in to work a half day in the eerily quiet Geology building. We did celebrate however by purchasing more holiday baked goods. This time Joe found a bat (Fledermaus) in addition to the ghost (Geist). Joe's dad spent part of his youth and young adulthood in Germany, and so has many useful tidbits to impart to us. One of them is the title of this post. You might figure out what it means if you are very clever!

It felt like a new week going back into work today, and I felt so hopeful we'd make progress on some of the problems that have plagued us since we arrived. I've been waiting for my key. It is a special digital key with a face that smiles when you put it into a room where you have access. It will allow me to get into my office, the lab, the kitchenette (and coffee machine) without having to constantly ask someone else to open the door for me like a lost puppy. I've been waiting for over two weeks for someone to inform me that the key was ready. Finally today I just went over to the key office. My key was waiting for me, for who knows how long! Arggh! I should've come last week to check on it. Sometimes it pays to be pushy here. So some things are getting done in this "new" week, but for every accomplishment, there is another issue to take its place.

I'm tempted to complain more about the specific problems of being foreigners who are paid in US dollars, which make things like accessing said money and finding the right health insurance for non-contracted workers very difficult. But, alas, we actually DO like it here, and we are gainfully employed, so we need to look past some of these logistical nightmares for awhile. One thing that is really cool about Germany is sheep. SHEEP! There is a large hill (Österberg) between our apartment and town that is covered in grass. For the past week and a half, there is a large flock of sheep parked on it just chowing away. Ever day the portable fence that contains them gets moved to the next section. Maybe by Christmas the entire hill will be mowed.

One other thing I like so far is, surprisingly, the food. Not German food generally, but Schwabian food specifically. There are a lot of noodles (spätzle - egg noodles, schumpfnudeln - potato noodles) and tonight we made Maultauschen, which are some kind of giant ravioli stuffed with meat. Maultauschen literally translates as "mouth exchange" but I can't imagine that is what is actually meant. One drawback to the food is the lack of vegetables (Gemüse). Sauerkraut is sometimes as close as it comes, although this time of year there is a lot of pumpkin (Kürbis). I'm sure we'll be posting more pictures of food in the near future.

Update Nov. 25, 2011: My friend Merle told me yesterday that I spelled Maultaschen wrong. By adding in one letter I changed the word from "taschen" to "tauschen". No wonder "mouth exchange makes no sense. It literally is "nonsense". "Taschen" means pockets in German. So Maultaschen are little dough (Teig) pockets stuffed with other food. In the case of Catholic Schwabian people (the people from this part of Germany, who are the inventors of Maultauschen), these doughy pockets were used to hide the meat they wanted to eat on Fridays during Lent - hide it from God, of all people! The phrase for this in Schwabish is "Herrgotts-B'scheißerla" or "Herrgottsbescheißerle" (Schwabisch people like to end everything in an "-le" sound). Schwabisch people are known for being smart (kapsele). Well, I guess if they can fool God...

Blog title description (from Joe)

The title, "Gegenwart Bewältigung" needs a bit of explanation...
During our honeymoon driving Betsy and I read a book about German culture and learned the phrase "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," which means "coming to terms with the past," specifically the Nazi era. And Betsy made a song to help us remember it, and so we have. Therefore when thinking about blog names we modified our favorite German phrase-in-a-single-word to mean something like "coming to terms with the present" or as google translate puts it, "contemporary crisis management." Which sums up a lot of the first 3 weeks of getting settled here.

(Betsy adds: 1-800-fragt-de is a number we wished existed. We envision it as a hotline with a friendly, helpful, English-speaking German person on the other line, who could help us understand all of the road signs, customs, words and idioms that we don't quite get yet. "Fragt" is a conjugated version of "fragen" (to ask), and "de" is of course Deutschland.)

Feiertag (Holiday)

The part of Germany that we live in, Baden-Württemburg, apparently has many more state holidays than other parts of Germany. I think we will appreciate this for the opportunities we will have for long weekends of traveling, but we're not quite settled enough now to think of venturing too far. So, the fact that tomorrow is Allerseelen (All Saint's Day), and the University and all stores are closed is just kind of an annoyance. We're still adjusting to the combination of shops closed on Sunday and a small refrigerator (Kühlschrank), which means we need to take extra care to get everything we need on Saturday, but only what will fit in the Kühlschrank. This problem is magnified for us at the moment because we're still learning what everything is in the German grocery stores. Needless to say, we spend a lot of time there.

There is something nice about Allerseelen, though. That is Huibu. They are some kind of ghost-shaped bread covered in frosting, and they started appearing in bakeries last week. My friend Merle says that Huibu is a ghost character in a children's book. Maybe I can find it, because the level of difficulty in German would be about perfect for us right now. Joe and I shared a Huibu for breakfast on Saturday. Here are the before and after shots. All that remained of Huibu before Joe finished him off was his Cheshire cat-like smile.

The weather here has been beautiful. We were glad to hear that our friends Megan and Kevin completed their bike ride from Switzerland to Vienna (with a stopover in Tübingen). They're traveling in Europe all fall - hiking and biking - and have had great luck timing their break days for nasty weather. We hope their luck holds. Meanwhile, we took advantage of the nice weather to go on a 34 km bike ride up the Neckar River valley yesterday. We saw some cute towns, and serendipitously we came along some kind of fall festival in Unterjesingen, the town just west of Tübingen. We stopped in for some local beer and wine, and polished off our Currywurst with some kind of delicious apple-pie-cake-thing. We felt very proud of ourselves for figuring out what real Germans are up to an a beautiful Sunday.

First Three Weeks in Germany

It has taken us awhile, but we finally have a blog to chronicle our days as newleyweds living in Tübingen, Germany. Our first week was pretty successful. We arrived in Tübingen with all ten of our checked bags. We found an apartment in the first 48 hours of looking. Even though it is not perfect, it was a better option than squatting in a the hay loft of a barn we spotted on the bike path, along said suitcases. Our second week was more difficult, as we were struggling with the language, finding language classes, applying for our residence permit, opening a bank account and most importantly getting INTERNET to our apartment so Joe can work and so we can communicate with you all.

To catch you up on what has been going on, I have pasted in the text of Joe's emails to family in the last two weeks. I have retained his characteristically engineerical typos and misspellings!

Joe's update to family from Wednesday, October 26

Subject: Internet hat gekommen!
The technicians finished a few minutes ago, around 4pm local time. We now have internet at our house! ...so I can get back to work, after 2months off, but first a few pictures of our new place.
...as I was taking pictures of our apartment, the hotair balloon went right over me. I could hear the roar of the flame. It became a very nice afternoon after a few sprinkles during the first half of the day. ...and, Betsy & I will start language classes next Monday.

...and here are a few more pictures.

6 days ago Megan (brides maid) and Kevin stopped by for 2 nights. They are on a bicycle tour of Europe. Their timing was very good, because it rained (not just misted) the full day they spent with us.

Bebenhausen is the town directly north of Tubingen in the nationalforest. It is very small, but we have been told that it hosts musicconcerts and other artistic events. Although other access points to the national forest are several hundered meters higher in elevation, Bebenhausen is not too much higher than Tubingen; therefore it is an easy bike ride.

This photo shows the Hoenzollern Castle outside of Hechingen. It is the ancestral home to the Prussian kings, who became the emperors of Germany. in the mid 1800s the prince and future king visited his ancestral home and was taken by the romance of the ruins which go back to around the 11th century. He decided to build a romantic style castle.

The photo at left shows the heron which we have seen nearly every morning in the the brook/drainage ditch across the street.

This is a main bridge in Tubingen which connects the old town to the more commercial & industrial south Tubingen. We live in a residential area east of old town and northeast of the commercial district.

Joe's update to family from Mon., Oct. 10 Saturday night is a difficult time to arrive in Germany --nearly all the stores were closed until Today. We did manage to find a Turkish food shop and a smokey pub to have a locally brewed beer. Betsy is my translator. Since we have been here it has been mostly cloudy to rainy. The weather is cool --between 40F and 60F, but not too windy. Yesterday morning, after Betsy figured out how to get messages from the phone we went to the university to rent a bike for her. I assembled mine, and everything works just fine, so we were off. We biked up to Pfrondorf (~5km [3.2miles] from university and ~300ft elevation gain) which is a village just northeast of Tubingen. Betsy has recieved some phone calls from an ad we placed in the paper on Saturday. We went to see one place Yestarday evening. It is very large, more room than we need, and a bit more than we want to spend, but it has a wonderful view of town including the castle and Schwabain Alps (foothills to the Apls). We will also see a place tomorrow, which may be too small, judging by the advertised area. Hopefully we can find a place that is just right, and soon, because we must leave the guest house on Thursday. Yesterday evening we went to the castle, but didn't see much inside. So far the bakeries are very nice, the bike paths are very confusing, and phone calls are very short/kurt. Much is similar to the US, but in different language. The JohnDeer picture I took as I was writing, to show that some things are indeed the same.