Spiel Wochenende

This week has had it's challenges for us. It's been difficult for Joe to work in our small apartment and we're looking forward to moving in May. However, we don't have anywhere to move yet, and most places we find are looking for people to move in March 1. However, we did make plans to look at two places on Monday. The first one, due to communication snafu, had already been let before we arrived after a 20 min. bike ride and taking most of the afternoon off of work. The second one was horrible - claimed to be freshly-renovated, but all that was new was the botched parquette flooring. I've also had difficulty communicating with the support staff in my institute, which makes my workdays sometimes less than pleasant. Still experiencing culture shock, I guess.

At any rate, we've had a nice weekend, which helps to make up for the stresses of the week. Joe has been baking, so I've been treated to home-made pizza crust, sweet bread, and now a quiche crust. I actually enjoyed being in the kitchen for the first time since BD (before dissertation). I made home-made granola from Aunt Linda's recipe, and it helped me feel like we're on track toward getting "back-to-normal" after the craziness of the last year. We also had a successful shopping adventure, where we found everything on our list with minimal effort (including wheat bran) and even managed to cut off German shoppers when a new check-out line (Schlange) formed. Horrible, I know, but very German and "When in Rome..." In addition, we discovered an outdoor flea market where we can buy eco-conscious used items for our future apartment, a wine store with fill-your-own 3 euro/liter table wine, and we discovered that the public library has kids books appropriate to our level of German and that you can check out... GAMES!

This is fantastic and completely timely because we're obsessed with the German strategy game Die Siedler von Catan (Settlers of Catan). We broke down and bought our own Settler's game from Amazon this week so we don't have to wait for our friends Chris and Rachel to invite us to play on their board. But now we have access to all sorts of other games, including "Civilization", which is almost too much game for me. Thank goodness the directions were in English! The board took up our entire dining table. TTFN, as less time writing blogs means more time playing!

Fasnetsonntag

Germany went all medieval on us today with the celebration of Fasnetsonntag. Many of you may be familiar with Carnival or Mardi Gras, celebrating the period before Lent leading up to Easter. Germany has a strong tradition of celebrating this time, but how it's celebrated varies by region. Karneval, Fasching and Fastnacht are several names for similar celebrations in other parts of Germany, but the Schwabish in our region celebrate Fasnet.

There have been celebrations in the past week, like Weibertag (Women's Day) on Thursday, where women storm the Rathaus (City Hall) and cut off the men's Krawatte (ties). We also saw many school children with painted faces for celebrations at school. The towns with the strongest traditions are Catholic, and the nearest Catholic town to us is Rottenburg an der Neckar. We went there today for the Umzug (parade; specifically called "Ommzug" in Rottenburg). It's a 14 km bike ride from our house, and the day was cloudy and windy. We stayed until we couldn't take the cold anymore, but we saw our fill of Hexen (witches) and Narren (fools). It seems that each small town has a Narrenzunft (Fool's guild) that shows up in costume to perform in the parade. Tomorrow is Rosenmontag (Rose Monday) when the celebrations seem to wrap up. It's a public holiday in part of the country, but I don't know about here. Guess I'll find out when I show up to work tomorrow!

The rest of this weekend we've used to get a start on finding a more permanent living situation. We need to leave our furnished apartment where we've had a 6 month lease in May. We saw one place yesterday that we liked, however there were no light fixtures! It's quite common in Germany to have to bring your own washing machine, and sometimes even major kitchen appliances like a stove or refrigerator, but this place just had wires hanging from the ceiling. It's hard to stomach the idea of having to buy half a dozen fixtures, or at the very least, the basic connectors for a bare bulb. It'd be nice to find a place that is just a bit more outfitted.

International Ski

(update from Joe)

The last 2.5weeks have been a bit cold –lows around 5F and highs around 20F.  This has been a dramatic change from the rest of winter, which has been above freezing and flowers were still blooming.  While our apartment may have been a bit chilly, we have made the most of it by going skiing the last two weekends.  Last weekend we went to Oberjoch; the same place we went for our birthdays, and we saw the first snow of the season.

The ski trails were very nice and free.  Betsy says I made her ski over 60km in two days, but she wanted to fulfill her alter-ego’s mission:  “Bettina Bergsteiger –International Ski Spy”.  So we skied from Germany into Austria.  On Saturday’s ski back from Austria, the wind was against us, so I estimated the wind chill as -20F, which could mean that exposed skin could freeze in around half an hour.  After completing our mission, I surprised Betsy with chocolate and Sekt (German version of champagne), because it was close to Valentine’ Day. On Sunday we skied to another town in Austria to have lunch, and afterwards "smuggled" some prized herb bread back to Germany.

Betsy has been occupied with supporting the University's bid for Excellence (which means something like Ivy League status in German, plus lots of federal funding). She is also interviewing candidates for a PhD candidate on the project she is doing.

I am finally done with German classes, for now.  So after 13weeks, I am now an “intermediate” German speaker.  The language isn’t as intimidating, and I can actually hold a simple conversation in German –like yesterday when I called about a new apartment.  We need an apartment with an additional room, so that I can work without taking over the living room.  I am also contemplating getting a job in Germany, but I don’t think my German is that good yet.  A job would get me out of the house; working at home is rather corrosive after too many weeks alone all day.

Today I helped Chris brew some beer.  This batch is for our wives, who love IPA, but can’t find a hoppy beer in Germany.  We will bottle the batch next week, and it should be ready by St.Patrick’s Day.

Schifahren in der Schweiz

Joe got a chance to give his version of our trip to Switzerland, but I get to speak as well.

Limmat River

I went to Switzerland with my lab group a few days before Joe. This is a semi-annual workshop we do with another research group at the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule), a very famous scientific university in Zürich. The meeting was quite nice, and we got to see how the ETH designs completely modular laboratories that can be reorganized in short order due to open ceilings with all the wiring and gas lines easily accessible. Cool! We were hosted overnight by members of the group. I stayed in a town called Pfäffikon outside of Zürich with an Argentinian postdoc and her Swiss husband. Joe joined me the second night, and we had real Raclette and got to hear some real Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German) spoken by the kids and father. Almost completely incomprehensible to us, despite our long hours of studying Hochdeutsch (High German, or the Lingua Franca of German speakers).

Swiss doors through time

Some of us went on a tour of Zurich after our workshop. Zürich was beautiful, but unfortunately it was quite cold and it was a walking tour. We enjoyed it even though we were mostly all icicles at the end. Zürich sits at the edge of Lake Zürich, which flows out into the Limmat River through town. We saw some interesting things, like these two doors: one from medieval time and the other more modern. Another reason Medieval times must have been the absolute worst time to be alive.

The research group in Zürich had booked a large house in the town of Valbella for us to stay and ski at the resort of Lenzerheide. I was excited about this because Lenzerheide is in the Romansh-speaking part of Switzerland. Romansh is a derivitive of Latin, and only spoken by about 60,000 people. We didn't get to hear anyone speaking Romansh, but many of the signs and place names were in Romansh. "Voa" is Romansh for road or street, and our house (Haus Casoja) was near Voa Casoja.

Tucked skier crossing sign

Rothorn tunnel on roadcut

Despite the cold conditions that Joe described, I downhill-skied for two days. This gave me ample time to reflect on the differences and similarities between skiing in the US and skiing here in Europe. My first observation was that T-bars are much more frequently used here, and they often cross trails. In fact, many trails of different types (i.e. downhill, uphill, cross-country) cross each other and so there are special signs to warn you. It seemed quite cavalier to have a ground lift cross a trail to me, but conversely, the use of a restraining bar on the actual chair lifts (Sesselbahn) is required here, whereas many chairs in the US don't even have these bars. I was also astonished to take my first ride in what seemed to me a bus-sized gondola that held 60 skiers and riders standing. Even more astonishing to me is that it went to the top of a quite craggy peak that accessed steep couloir skiing. We opted for a milder trip down the back of the mountain, which wound around a roadcut that was protected by a sort of "tunnel" built onto the roadcut. One final difference is that there were very few telemarkers. This is a bit of a change after Colorado, but kind of nice in a way. My friend Aude, who was rocking her mini-skis, claimed we were both kind of retro or vintage for our unique styles of skiing. But with so many über-cool telemark skiiers in Colorado, it always felt like a bit of a cool competition. It was sort of a relief to just, well, SKI and not feel like anyone cared how you did it or how rad your turns were.

Joe below Rothorn (i.e. bus-gondola) peak

Swiss terrain

Apres-ski

Despite these new adventures in ski culture, some things were still the same. Although there was plenty of powder to be had, albeit slightly tracked, most skiers opted for the groomers. Fortunately, the members of my lab group were not opposed to hopping off the well-marked trail into happy powder land. Also fortunately, Lenzerheide is like Arapahoe Basin on crack, where most of it sits above treeline and the 10% of groomed trails punctuate vast tracts of "off-piste". Another similarity is that European skiers, who probably invented "Apres ski" by the way, love to pop into an on-slope hut or chalet for a hot drink or cup of soup. Happy trails until next time.

Die Schweiz war super!

(Joe and I just returned from a weekend in Switzerland. Since I also want to tell you my version of our trip, I'll post his update first and mine separately later).

Betsy & I had a lot of fun this past weekend in Switzerland.  Despite the weather was cold (highs in -10sC, lows in -20sC; or in English units highs in +10sF, lows in -10sF), we did a lot of skiing.  Betsy did mostly telemark skiing on the groomed slopes (Betsy interjects: I most certainly did not ski corduroy the whole time!) at a very expansive resort called Lenzerheide.  Because of last year's ankle twisting mishap, I stuck entirely to cross-country.  While the main draw to this part of Switzerland is the downhill skiing, the cross country trails were perfectly groomed every morning.  I managed to ski a total of over 80km (50miles) in 3 days, including a full marathon in distance on Saturday.  While I was checking out the valley, Betsy and some of her lab-mates were cutting up the slopes.  They were adventurous enough to take a gondola to the very peak.  Up there they took a few pictures of the spectacular view, before quickly descending out of the wind.  They also stopped into several ski chalets for warm drinks and a chance to get out of the wind.  Betsy even tried the “Scheymli-Pfleymli” which is a Swiss favorite while skiing; it is weak coffee, with plum schnapps, topped with whipped cream.

After the skiing, Betsy & I hung out with her lab group and a collaborating lab group from Zürich.  There were some games, lots of talking, and several crates of beer for the 35 or so folks.  Meals were prepared by the other group, and the much smaller Tübingen group did the clean-up –although a number of us helped with Pizza on Saturday night.

This morning Betsy & I got up relatively early, and packed our things quickly so we could go cross country skiing together.  The weather was very cold, I estimate it was around -15F before the sun finally came into the valley around 10am.  We were the first people out and skied over 10km on freshly & perfectly groomed trails.  The landscape was very picturesque --snow covering cute little Swiss houses standing next to 70' tall pine trees, and all surrounded by massive snow covered peaks.

 

We are now warming up in quiet Tübingen after warm showers, hot drinks (tea & chocolate) and waiting for dinner which includes bread baking in the oven.  …speaking of  which, I must go to tend.

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.