Langlauf im Schwarzwald

First trip to Schwarzwald!

Winter has come to Germany, but it only stayed for two days. We had two days of cold this week, but before enough moisture built up for snow, it got warm again and now it just keeps raining. That's ok, because now we have rainboots! Nevertheless, we managed to go skiing for the first time today. My colleague Aude rented a car for the weekend, and we went with her to "Langlauf" (cross-country ski) in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest). It took a little over an hour to get to the ski area, and on the way Aude graciously explained what all the traffic signs mean. She is French, but has been living in Germany for 3 years, so pretty much knows everything in comparison to us neophytes. This exercise in road signs was very helpful and timely, as we'll apply for our German driver's licenses this week, and maybe borrow a car share car for the first time next weekend.

Joe guesses the tree's age

The Schwarzwald, even though it is higher than our river valley home, is also suffering from a lack of winter. It was above freezing when we arrived and it had rained the day before. Nevertheless, Germans were out in droves to enjoy their favorite winter sport. The trail conditions were suboptimal, but not enough to stop us from having a great time. We're contemplating a Schwarzwald ski weekend in February, and maybe even doing the 100 km ski trail that runs from North to South along the Schwarzwald next winter (don't worry - towns in between to eat and sleep). It's nice to know that even though our nearest trails don't have snow, these are quite close, and there are many more areas to explore. Plus, it only cost 1.50 euro for a trail pass! That's almost an order of magnitude less expensive than for a comparable area in the US.

In making Germany our home we've had to adapt ourselves to the local cuisine. After a few months, we now have a repertoire of home-cooked meals that have a Schwäbisch flair. So much so that I've even typed up a list of ingredients for all our successful meals and stuck it on the refrigerator so we can easily buy what we need for each meal. One of my favorite modifications of a Schwäbisch classic is spicy Kässpaetzle, where I make cheesy noodles and add Siracha. We're not gourmands here, ok, but a little spicy now and then goes a long way in this country. I like this with schnitzel, which I have made, but this picture is of a prepared cutlet (mine looked almost as good). This is made with chicken, but the majority of the meat here is actually pork ("Schwein"). Joe and I aren't so fond of pork, so we usually go for chicken.

Although Germany has wonderful bakeries and amazing sweets, one thing they don't have is pie. Our friends Chris and Rachel have long lamented this, because Chris really likes to bake and loves pie. Well, their sadness about the lack of pie or pie sympatico here must have rubbed off on Joe, because one day this week he decided to make an apple pie. I thought it was quite good, although we still haven't purchased a dish that will properly cook a pie or quiche. He's turning into the perfect Hausherr and my evil plan is working... I mean, until next time, "Auf Wiedersehen" from Germany.

Schönes Wochenende

Winter has finally come back to Tübingen in the form of cool weather, but it's brought with it blue skies, which has ended the rainy streak we'd had (it rained every day of the year until... January 15). Joe and I took advantage of the bluebird day to head to Bebenhausen on Sunday, a town in the Schonbuch forest, just north of us by about 3 km. We finally visited the cloister there which was founded in the 12th century, which we'd spotted on a previous bike ride. At some point it was converted into a royal hunting lodge, and it is very scenic because the town is very small and nestled in a little valley. After walking around for awhile my toes about froze off so we headed back to our apartment.

We started off the weekend by drinking beer with about a dozen of my colleagues in our all-to-small kitchenette at work (we do this regularly). Then Joe and I went off to "Spielabend" to play games with Geology undergrads, who would be our unsuspecting German conversants. We ended up playing a very complicated version of Settlers of Cattan (my new favorite game!) and Risk, but we did it all in German! On Saturday I ventured to our local outlet mall to take advantage or end-of-year sales. If you've ever been a grad student then you know what graduate school can do to your wardrobe. It was just time to take action. The holes on my shirts are starting to grow their own holes, if that is even possible. We ended Saturday with burritos and margaritas at our local Mexican place (or probably the only Mexican place in 50 km) with other American post-docs and spouses. Not a terribly exciting weekend, but that in itself is somehow exciting.

Christmas, Part II

An update from Joe (with minor edits and interjections from Betsy): 

We celebrated our second Christmas on Saturday.  We received a package from Gabe (Joe’s brother) of popcorn and special spices to make a pork rub. We will have no problem finding pork in Germany to try this out. Plus, we received several things we ordered from Amazon.de (our first time using the German Amazon).  Amazingly, we only placed our order on Wednesday and nearly all of it arrived on Saturday –and Friday was a Federal Holiday!  Mail travels faster in Germany, probably because Germany is smaller than Minnesota and Iowa combined.

Our Amazon haul includes a new Smartphone for Betsy (this means that Joe gets the cell phone we bought new when we arrived, and doesn't need to rely on the hand-me-down phone from a friend whose battery only lasts about 1 hour). Joe's home office is now nearly complete with a wireless network that includes a printer we found on sale this week, and the phone now linked in too.  Cellphones are new to Joe, and Smartphones are a new step for Betsy, but we already have apps for the German train schedule, Googlemaps +street view, Skype, a German-English dictionary, and a kitchen timer. Next up: teaching Joe to send text messages.  So far the most useful app has been the kitchen timer, since we were using it to simultaneously time both a pressure cooker for beans and corn bread in the oven for dinner last night.  But the other applications should prove their worth when we do some more traveling.

This weekend has been rather rainy, so we have been inside a bit more than normal, and Betsy has had time to catch up on all the sleep she missed last year.  And we each got one other goody yesterday – rain boots!  We got them at our local hardware/lumberyard store, on the suggestion of Betsy's friend Merle (after complaining about how "fashion" rainboots cost over 30 euro, and don't appear to be too functional).  This has been something that we have been sorely lacking this winter - it rains a lot and we bike a lot!.  This afternoon we will go for a walk like most Germans seem to do on Sundays.  Since the rain continues, we may take a stroll in our new rain boots.

We also feel that we are past the survival phase of our first few months. Obviously, we are now on to the "making our lives more comfortable" stage.  Although we have been having fun in Germany all along, we are now starting to make it our home.

Guten Rutsch!

The past week has been a bit of a second honeymoon for us. First, Paris for Christmas, but it was quite quiet in Tübingen the week between Christmas and New Year's and so we slept in, read a lot of books, and taken a break from our intense German courses. Some of the books we're reading are on German history, which is quite a heterogeneous macabre. I've discovered too that I have quite the horrified fascination with the Middle Ages. What an awful time to be alive! Joe has always loved Greek and Roman history, so he's happy that I have a budding interest in that as well, especially since remnants of Roman settlements can be found along the Neckar River just a few kilometers from our house. Here's a picture of me coming to terms with this history.

We've also had quite a nice New Year's, or Sylvester as it is called here. A refreshing change from the over-hyped parties one feels they need to attend in the US. Joe will take over telling you about it:

Blast upper center; landlord in smoke.

"New Years was a blast, too --literally.  There were lots, dare I say tons, of fireworks at the New Year.  It was amazing; I don’t know if there is a single word to describe it, so here is a paragraph:
There was a build up all day.  After night fall, it increased to a few loud booms every 10minutes or so.  Around 10pm some people started with the expensive rockets and mortars, which made quite a display of light.  From 11:50 until about 12:30 there was a continuous light and sound show.  There was a gunpowder haze wafting through the streets.  We had our 7€ worth of bottle rockets and fountains to add to the neighborhood show.  Our landlord is 70 or 80 years old, and he was very cavalier lighting off rockets and firecrackers which would be illegal in the US.  Even with all that exploded paper refuse, our street were clean before noon on New Year’s Day; however there are still some rocket remnants on roofs.  But public spaces are still filthy with spent ordinance casings.

But as fun as fireworks are, they were only just an intermission to our Settlers of Catan game.  Another American couple (Chris & Rachel) came to our place for raclette, i.e. grilled veggies covered by different types of grill-melted cheese.  And they have the Ritter Sport expansion pack for Settlers of Catan.  Ritter Sport is a huge chocolate manufacturer based just 20km from us, so their expansion pack allows for cocoa production.  Game points can be earned for manufacturing different Ritter Sport chocolate bars.  ...so  it made the board bigger and game play more interesting.  We played until 2am, fueled in part by actual Ritter Sport chocolate bars.

In our cheese & chocolate hangover, all of us (us + Chris&Rachel) took the train to Ulm.  Which is ~60km West of Tubingen.  It has the tallest church in the world at 161m (a little over half of the Eiffel tower).  There are 768 steps to the top, and we climbed them and were rewarded with a great view."

Betsy notes: It was once again reinforced that no holiday goes without its own baked good. We picked up this "Neujahrbretzel" at the bakery and had it for breakfast on New Year's morning. That is sugar, not salt.

Until our next adventure we wish all of you a "Guten Rutsch" (good slide) into the New Year.

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.