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...