Labour Day

We spent our Labour Day with some of our best little friends: picking apples, munching on gifts from the garden, and going on a mouse hunt. What did you do with yours?

Flashback: Alberta Beach, Summer 2010

Taking Colin to the beach here in Santa Barbara puts me in mind to our other "beach" trip over the summer--and to all those months of blog posts I didn't upload because this past fall was too crazy. So for the next week or so I'll intersperse my regular blog posts with a few summer "flashbacks."

For the second year in a row, some good, good friends of ours invited us up to their family's lake house for a July weekend. I wish I could remember where it is, but suffice it to say, it is an hour or two north of Edmonton and really beautiful, if a bit chilly. What I do remember is good food, good friends, and good times. One of the best parts about these trips is that Colin has a playmate there his own age--our friends' daughter, Nora. In fact, we adults became friends because we first met when the kids were newborns at our neighbourhood "New Moms" group.



We are so grateful for their friendship--and not just because they invite us up to their lake house every summer. Colin just adores Nora--we all do--and we particularly love the good influence she has on him. On top of being a delightful child in her own right, she's also three months older than him, and has some serious skills. She's be practically speaking in complete sentences since she was 18 months old.

So every time he spends a weekend in her company we notice that his skills develop by leaps and bounds. Last year, he learned to sit up from Nora. This year, it's talking. He was barely saying any recognizable words at the start of the weekend, but by the time we had been home a week he was babbling away. Can't wait to see what Nora teaches him next...

Weekending

The past weekend we visited some friends at their family's lake house on Alberta's Skeleton Lake, a did all those wonderful "lake" things: picking and eating fresh fruit, knocking back a couple of cold ones, and eating and eating and eating -- all in the view of breathtaking scenery. I can't tell you how much I love it that we finally have friends in Edmonton (and that they have a lake house). It's always hard to develop a new social network after a big move, but it's been particularly hard for us this time around, since we have a young baby now--and no regular babysitter.

Fortunately, our friends have a young baby, too--a nine-month old little girl. In fact, that's how we met: at a group for new momsin the neighborhood. Only later did we discover that we all work for the same employer and in similar fields. It's been really nice getting to know people with whom we share so much in common -- including our stage of life as first-time parents. It's been even nicer that their baby is the older of the two: Colin can look up to her for new baby skills, and we can crib a couple of parenting queues from our friends who've already been there, done that. Why, after just a day of watching Miss N. (who is quite a skilled crawler), Colin was already rocking himself back and forth to get on all fours! And after just a day of watching N.'s parents feed their daughter all sorts of exotic solids, we decided to give it a try. Who knew that a six-month old would eat avocado -- all buy himself?!

It was a great, friend-filled weekend all 'round. It addition to good friends and good food at the lake, we went to another friend's wedding, while yet another friend of ours kept Colin for us. I can't remember the last time we had such a busy social schedule. But I think we're going to need another weekend to recover from our weekend.

Thank you, Amy and Andrew

Our friends Amy and Andrew are moving from Edmonton to Calgary this weekend, and boy, are we going to miss them! Amy was the first friend I made in Edmonton, and living here just won't be the same without her. Who will answer all of my random questions about dogs, babies, and gardening? Fortunately, Calgary is only three hours away, and after our inaugural trip this past weekend, we know it's a manageable trip -- even with a baby. And the good news is, that Amy and Andrew (and Susie, their Lab) are moving just a couple of blocks away from Kevin's Calgary relatives, so it will be even more convenient to see them whenever we do make it down to "Cow Town."

Until then, thank you, Amy and Andrew, for the cute outfit Colin is wearing in this photo. Thank you for the awesome elephant that is quickly becoming his favorite toy. Thank you for all those wonderful dinners and game nights and good advice. And thank you for being such great friends to us.

Aunt Sarah's Visit

We just dropped off Aunt Sarah at the airport, after a two-week visit, and boy, are we going to miss her! Now we're short an extra pair of hands to cook dinners, walk the dog (in -20 temperatures!), change diapers, hold babies, and laugh at the cheesy parts to romantic comedies. Please come back soon!

Through a Child's Eyes

I guess, it's because today is Valentine's Day, but I found myself getting all nostalgic and romantical, so I thought I'd post the pictures from our wedding. It's a little after-the-fact, but better late than never, right? And anyway, it's taken me this long to collect all the pictures from friends and family and upload them to Flickr. (I'm not accustomed to having someone else take my pictures. I'm used to being behind the camera, not in front of it -- and boy, does it show!)

You can see the entire collection of wedding photos, from the rehearsal dinner to after party, here. But really, the best pictures were taken by my little cousin Reed Andrew, who, with Sarah Catherine's camera, proceeded to take pictures of just about everyone in attendance -- and shot after shot of himself! Still, they're pretty good, and as a former photography major, I'm a little jealous of what a fantastic eye he has for catching people at their most natural. But as Sarah Catherine rightly put it, "Everyone loosens up when there's a kid behind the camera." Well, just see for yourself:

Remainders: Scenes from Arkansas

So, as I mentioned before, I went home to Arkansas for a week-long visit back in October for some much-needed time with friends and family. And boy, did I see some family and friends. In true Southern style, there was a party or a get-together at someone’s house every night for the entire week I was home. Sometimes, there were even two parties per day.

And in true Arkansas style, the parties were the perfect mix of high and low. One of the things that I love so about Little Rock is that you can go from a ladies’ tea at the Country Club to the livestock stalls at the State Fair with nothing but a costume change in between. And here are the pictures to prove it:

Wir haben gewonnen!

We won! We won! We won! Last night Kevin and I, and my friends Chris and Birthe won the annual pub quiz hosted by the university’s English department. You could say that we were at an unfair advantage over the other teams. After all, most of them were German and there were three native English speakers on our team – four, if you consider that Birthe’s English is almost perfect. But there were lots of teams made up of native English speakers, and they didn’t win. ‘Cause we won!

When it comes to pub quizzes, it’s all about picking the right team, or Gemeinshaft, as they call it over here. I picked my team very carefully. I knew that anything having to do with an English-speaking country was fair game, so I chose accordingly. We had Chris batting for the English, Kevin for the Canadians, me for the Americans, and Birthe, who’s German, pick up the slack for all the wild-card European questions. (Really, Chris and Birthe are pretty much my two best friends here in Würzburg.) We really needed one more person, preferably someone from Wales. There was a disproportionately large number of Welsh-related questions, owing to the fact that the organizer himself was Welsh. “What is the surprising ingredient in laver bread?” for instance. Or, “What is the English translation for the Welsh motto, ‘Cymru am byth’?” (The answers: “seaweed” and “Wales forever,” respectively.)

Still, we did our countries proud. We were ahead from the very first round and maintained our lead to the bitter end. Kevin covered science and politics (Q:“Which two Nobel prizes were awarded to Germans this year?” A. “Chemistry and Physics”). Chris did all the heavy lifting when in came to sports. And Birthe was responsible for identifying all the obscure European personalities. And me? Well, my specialties run the gamut from high to low. I successfully answered such brainteasers as “Who painted ‘The Nightwatchmen’?” and “Who is the on-again, off-again girlfriend of England’s Prince Harry?” (Rembrandt van Rijn and Miss Chelsea Davy, respectively.) I also got both parts to the final question, “For what two films did Dustin Hoffman win an Academy Award for Best Actor?” The answer: Rainman and Kramer v. Kramer – not Tootsie and The Graduate as our opponents so foolishly guessed. So I guess you could say that I won. I won! I won! I won!

Obviously, I have a penchant for trivia games; it’s the only sport I’m any good at. Back in Boston, when I was just starting out after college, my friends and I used to go to the weekly pub quiz at the bar near our office, where we were all slaving away as unpaid interns. The prize for winning was always $60 – just enough to cover our dinners and beer. So, naturally, we all tried really hard to win. And we did win – every week for six weeks in a row. We were kind of famous. The other teams feared us. Once, our winning score was twice as big as the second place team’s. That’s how good we were. And then one week, a new team appeared. They were interns, too – medical interns. And they destroyed us. We never went back.

And so, it was very satisfying to finally win a pub quiz again, even if we only won by one point. Hey, we won. Birthe was so excited she did a little victory dance. She said she had never won anything before. Afterwards, we took our winnings – 50 euro – and blew it all on beer and cab rides home in the wee, wee hours of the morning. Nothing gained, nothing lost, I guess. Except our self-respect.

Remainders: Oktoberfest, Pt. II

One day’s hard at partying at Oktoberfest just wasn’t enough for our intrepid group. At the crack of dawn the very next day, we went back for more, having lost only member of the party. (Jesse decided to leave early for Vienna.) And this time, Oktoberfest greeted us like returning heroes. We were able to waltz right into the Augustiner tent – the most popular tent on the Wiesn – and have our pick of tables. Believe it or not, the Theresienwiese at 9:00 am on the last day of Oktoberfest is a pretty quite place. The throngs of people who threatened to stampede the tents on Saturday were all gone by Sunday. No doubt they were nursing their hangovers or maybe even at church!

We should have been thrilled, but we were feeling a little the worse for wear, I guess. It’s hard to work up much of an appetite for beer first thing in the morning, and they don’t serve breakfast in the beerhalls, even though they do open at nine. Instead, we all ordered the obligatory round of beer and the world-famous Oktoberfest Wiesn-Hendl, or half a roast chicken. (Literally “half” a chicken: Each bird was cut vertically, straight down the middle, as if by a rotary saw.) According to Oktoberfest lore, every year they serve 500,000 chickens and more than 100 whole roast oxen. But we didn’t attempt the oxen, fearing what they might bring to our table.

By noon, though, things finally started picking up. At 11:00, the band struck up the Volkmusik, and the “stars” began crawling out of the woodworks. Rodney Dangerfield sat at the table to our right, and Fabio, with the torso that graced so many check-out counter romance novels, sat at the table on our left – and if not them, then their Doppelgängers. Our waitress even bore a striking resemblance to Kathy Griffith – and was about as charming.

It was exactly as I hope Oktoberfest would be, all Bier and Brezln, Dirndl-clad women and dapper men with extravagant Schnurrbarts (mustaches). There were even a few things I didn’t expect, such as all the little children in Lederhosen, dancing on the tables, and drinking what appeared to be bottles of beer! (Upon closer inspection they proved to be bottles of lemonade.)Before long, every seat in the house was filled, and we were even forced to share our table with a quartet of young people from Oberbayern. I thought the boys might object, but I guess once they saw the buxom blonde Bavarian beauties they would be sharing a table with, they moved over – but not too far over.

We actually had a great time spending the afternoon with the locals. They taught us Bavarian drinking songs, and we got them to join us in a round of “Country Roads.” (I swear, there is just something about Germans and that song!) With every new round of beer, we joined our Maßkrugs together with a loud “Prost!” and cemented our inter-cultural friendship. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to practice my German … at least until the topic turned to politics and the baby-faced Bavarian next to me turned out to be a raging racist. Our conversation went downhill something like this (translated from the German):

Me: What a wonderful day! Isn’t this just wonderful?

Him: Yes, but it’s such a shame. We Germans aren’t allowed to be proud of our heritage.

Me: What do you mean? What could be more German than Oktoberfest, and look around you at how happy and proud all these people are.

Him: You don’t understand. You Americans are allowed to be proud even through you go around the world starting wars and causing all kinds of trouble. But we Germans – we are never allowed to be proud to be German. And do you know why? It’s because we are not “rein.” Do you know what “rein” means?

Me: Yes, I know this word. (It means “clean” or “pure” in English.)

Him: The people living in Germany today – they are not proud to be German because they are not German. They are Turkish or African or Polish, and they are proud to be Turks and Africans and Poles. And so we Germans cannot be proud because we are not “rein.”

The above really requires no comment. Its uncomfortable historic connotations are self-evident. But let me just say that I think such attitudes are really rare here in Germany. This was the only time in my entire year here that I have heard anything remotely like this. However, as a Southern with my own historical cultural baggage, I know that even in societies where racist attitudes have been heavily “reformed” over generations, there are always a few holdouts. At least that’s what I hope this was – a one-off, a throwback—because I’ve really grown to like the Bavarians, and I hate to think of them as holding such poisonous views just as I hate to think of Southerners having them.

Needless to say, after this vitriolic explosion, I kinda lost my taste for Bavarian culture. And anyway, it was getting late. We all had to be on our trains back home by 5:00 pm. So I rounded up my fellow soldiers, and began leading the long march homeward. Unfortunately, we had a little incident on the way back. Without going into details, Dan #2 accidentally broke the sunglasses of a young German fellow who got a little too close during the crush to get out of the Theresienwiese. The offended party and his rather large buddy threatened to cause some serious trouble for us, but by employing deft diplomacy and my hard-won German skills I managed bring about a temporary détente – at least long enough for us to make a break for it and high-tail it onto our various trains.

And so the sun set on our second and final day at Oktoberfest. I left the Paul, Jeff and the Dan’s at the Hauptbahnhof – they were headed to for another week in Prague – and I headed back home, alone. Unlike on recent train trips, there were no revelers headed in the direction of Würzburg, so I could lean back in my seat and finally get some much-needed sleep. I’m glad I went to Oktoberfest. I had a great time hanging out with my friends again, and partying like it was going out of style. But now that I’ve scratched that off my “life list,” I think I agree with my German friends. I don’t feel the need to go back. It was a little too much German culture.


For the others’ version of events, see Jeff’s pictures here and Dan #2’s pictures here.

Remainders: Oktoberfest, Pt. I

I few months back – October to be exact – I finally did what all of my German friends and colleague warned me not to do: I went to the Münchener Oktoberfest. My German school friends who went last year all vowed never to go again. My teacher warned me about the inevitable bar brawls, and a friend who lives in Munich actually witnessed one, broke it up, and handed the culprits over to the police – before vowing never to go again.

Still, I don’t think one can live in Bavaria for a year and resist the pull of such a world-famous event. Even far-flung friends of mine succumbed to its draw. Jesse timed his visit to coincide with it. Jeff, Dan #1 and Dan #2 came over from Boston for it. And Paul took the night train over from Prague. (I like to pretend they were all coming to Germany to see me, but I guess I know better.) Anyway, I figured with five strapping lads escorting me to the Theresienwiese, I would be all right. Little did anyone suspect that in the end it would be yours truly who saved the boys from angry mobs. But, I’ll get to that later.

Just getting there nearly proved too much of a challenge for us at first. We had decided to take the 4:00 am train to München – in order to beat the crowds, you see – only to find that we had booked a ride on the Oktoberfest Express. Pimply-faced youths in traditional Dirndls and Lederhosen seemed to have come to the train station straight from the diskos, and they brought the party with them. It was standing room only on our train, and everyone had a case or two of beer, which they emptied over the course of the 5-hour journey while singing folk tunes till they were hoarse. And to think, I brought along a pillow, so that I might catch a few Z’s! Too tired to join in the fun, Jesse, Jeff, Dan #1 and I stared at each other through puffy, sleep-encrusted eyes and cursed the energy of the young.

By the time we reached München, though, even we were raring to go. We met up with Paul and Dan #2 and followed the exodus of people from the train station to the fairgrounds. It was truly a migration of Biblical proportions, but we didn’t need a prophet to show us the way to the Promised Land.

However, the popularity of Oktoberfest is nearly its downfall. There are roller coasters, carnival rides, and games of chance, but the real attractions are the beerhalls, dozens of massive tents run by each of the major Munich breweries: Augustiner, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, etc. Each tent can seat thousands, but as we quickly discovered, they filled up within minutes of opening. We arrived at a quarter past nine and were turned away at every single door. Finally I managed to sweet talk our way into Ochsenbraterei – at last my German skills were useful for something! – but even though we were “in” we couldn’t get a table, and without a table you can’t get served.

Discouraged but not defeated, we moved on to “Oktoberfest Plan B” and headed across town to the original Hofbräuhaus. As I mentioned before, every day is like Oktoberfest at the Hofbräuhaus, with a full Oompah band, steaming Weißwürste, and never-ending rounds of Pilsner, Hefeweißbier and Dunkelweißbier. You could have fooled us that we weren’t at the “real” Oktoberfest – especially after the third or fourth Maß!

Later in the afternoon, we moved the party over to Chinesiches Pagoda in the Englisher Garten for giant pretzels and even more beer. I considered that I was doing my sex proud by matching the boys one-for-one with the five liters of beer we drank that day. Only later Jeff informed me that they hadn’t wanted me to feel like a lightweight, so they had been taking drinks from my glass whenever my back was turned. Everyone except Jesse, that is. Jesse was doing no team proud that day. But what happens at Oktoberfest, stays at Oktoberfest …

At about 6:00 pm we threw in the towel and took the train to Augsburg, where we had rented hotel rooms for the night. Oktoberfest is such a big tourist attraction – some 6.4 million people attended the two-week event this year – that every hotel room in München had been sold out for months, and we were forced to overnight some 100 km away. But we weren’t the only ones, the train to Augsburg was packed full-to-bursting with fellow Oktoberfest revelers.

So, we ended the day much the way we began it: positively swaying under the combined excitement of a couple thousand people. The second-class cabins became so overcrowded that the normally law-abiding Germans ignored the strict seating rules and moved the party into the first-class. The conductors gave up trying to chase us out. And this time, the boys and I were wide awake, partying with the best of them.

Next: Oktoberfest, Part II …

Thanksgiving in Bavaria

Well, it wasn’t best Thanksgiving meal Kevin and I have ever prepared, but it was one of the most fun. Saturday night, we had the Fakhers – the whole family – over for a belated Thanksgiving. It was their first, so we wanted to make it as traditional as possible. And, as I’ve been getting rather homesick lately, I was looking forward to some real comfort food. However, creating a traditional American Thanksgiving halfway around the world proved to be trickier than we had imagined.

For starters, I didn’t realize until I was out of my own culture, how very culturally specific most Thanksgiving-related items are, such as turkey basters. They just don’t have those over here. Or what about meat thermometers and disposable roasting pans? In Germany they build things to last; disposable items are considered bad for the environment and thus, verboten. Consequently, they only sell the BMW of meat thermometers for 40 euro ($80) and heirloom roasting pans for 250 euro (that’s $500!). Needless to say, we decided to take our chances and do without. Oh, and you can forget about pumpkin pie. Not only can you not find pre-made pumpkin pies at the local grocery stores, you can’t even find pumpkin-pie-in-a-can! I asked all the Germans I know where I might find the necessary ingredients and they looked at me in horror, “You mean, you put that in a pie?”

Finding a turkey was the easy part. The German’s love pute – in Bavaria it’s often easier to find turkey breasts than chicken breasts – but they rarely want the whole bird. Goose is their feast bird of choice. Luckily, I found a frozen Turkey at a fancy department store downtown, but like most department store purchases, it was small and expensive. The largest one they had was only 5.4 kilos, or about 12 pounds, and cost about $40. I’m pretty sure I paid less than that for the 20 lb. Kosher-brined, free-range organic Turkey of previous Thanksgivings, but beggars can’t be choosers. In the end, it was enough to feed our six guests and still have a few leftovers – if you’re not too picky about what part of the bird you put in your turkey sandwich, that is.

Stuffing was a challenge, though. Every stuffing recipe I found called for a 14 oz. bag of bread cubes. This was not a problem in Boston, where I could buy bags of “gourmet organic herbed bread cubes” at Trader Joe’s, but Germans buy their bread fresh, every day, from the baker’s. I approximated it as best I could by purchasing two white loaves at my corner bakery, cubing them, and letting them sit out and dry for a couple of days. I mean, that’s probably what the Pilgrims did, right?

Now my favorite Thanksgiving dish is not so much a dish as a condiment. I love cranberry sauce, in particular, the kind that comes from a can and retains its perfect cylindrical form even on your plate, but I knew better than to expect that sort of delicacy here. In fact, cranberries are so uncommon here that German doesn’t even a word for them. So I was forced to make my own cranberry sauce, using 1 part Priesselbeeren jam (whatever a Priessel berry is) to 1 part fresh cranberries, again purchased for exorbitant sums from the fancy department store. It worked more or less, but I never could get it molded into the shape of a can.

The one area where we encountered no difficulties was in the fresh produce department. The Germans really excel at this. Any day of the week you can stroll over to the open-air market in the middle of town and find exotic fruits, vegetables, and spices, as well as picture-perfect seasonal vegetables. I bought beautiful green beans from France, sweet potatoes from Israel, and big red Amaryllis to brighten my table. They even had a wide array of pumpkins, but I refrained. As much as I love pumpkin pie, there was just no way I was going to attempt to make one from scratch. I mean, has anyone in the history of American Thanksgivings ever even attempted that?

Despite all the difficulties in assembling the ingredients, cooking went off without a hitch. Everything came out of the oven just as our guests rang the doorbell, which was fortunate since as soon as they arrived we were bombarded by kisses and gifts and well-wishes from the whole family and couldn’t get back to the kitchen. And would you believe, Christine and Louise even brought a pumpkin pie, which they made from scratch that very morning! I nearly cried.

In the end, despite all our preparations, the turkey and dressing were a little dry and the gravy was too salty, but without any means of comparison, our guests thought it all tasted great. As is usual for little kids, they ate only turkey and rolls, but they said my rolls were the best they’d ever tasted. I was happy to share with them my recipe: Pillsbury sourdough rolls from the can. So much for traditional German bakeries! Our guests didn’t think much of their pumpkin pie, though. The kids wouldn’t even try it. Too “fremd” they said. But all the better for us. Kevin and I had homemade pumpkin pie for breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day.

It was so much fun to get to share our traditions with people who were experiencing them for the first time. The Fakhers have become our ersatz family over here and whenever we’re with them, I feel completely at home, even if dinner table discussion happens in a miss-mash of English, French and German. Although we didn’t have a single family member present and we were celebrating three days late, it was one of my favorite Thanksgivings ever. We might have to try this recipe every year.

Remainders: Jesse's visit

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two months since my friend Jesse spent a week with us here in Würzburg. He arrived on the last day of September and stayed a week before traveling on to Munich and Prague, and somehow managed to time his trip with last week of glorious fall weather in Germany. I’m beginning to wonder if the leaves didn’t hang onto their branches a little longer just for him. Kevin and I have had such a never-ending flurry of travel since then that his visit passed undocumented on these pages. We are nearing the end of November now, and steel-gray skies and cold drizzle have rendered Fall a blurry memory, but Jesse’s visit was not so easily forgotten.

I had the most wonderful time with him bumming all over Bavaria. We toured Würzburg’s two castles: the old Festung Marienberg and the more “modern” Residenz. At the latter we went sampled the local wine and even spied a couple of vintage sweethearts necking in the park. We biked along the Main River in both directions, south to Frickenhausen and Sommerhausen and north to Veitschöchheim. We even took a train to Bamberg one day, where Jesse, a journeyman printer, could taste the delights of the local Antiquariats. Although I had already visited all these places many times before, it’s amazing how seeing them with Jesse gave me a fresh set of eyes. As much as I pointed out all the highlights for him, he caught all the little miracles I had missed.

However, the trip was not without its disappointments. One day we made an excursion to the Hessian city of Darmstadt to visit the famous Hessiches Landmuseum, only to find that it was closed for repairs until 2011! (Who closes a museum for 5 whole years without evening mentioning it on the museum’s Web site?) We didn’t let that keep us down. We hopped another train to Frankfurt and spent the afternoon staring in wild-eyed wonder at an exhibit of Dürer prints at the Städel Museum. In the end, I think we were the better for it.

But the best part of Jesse’s visit was having a constant companion for good ol' English conversation. The dearth of vigorous conversation is one of the hardest things about living in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language fluently. And while many of our German friends speak “fluent” English, there is always something lacking in the translation, even if it is more cultural than linguistic. Of course Kevin and I always have each other, and we have such similar interests and the gift of the gab that most of the time we don’t need anyone else. But sometimes it’s nice to have a new audience to whom to hold forth, and Jesse was both a gracious listener and energetic supplier of fresh conversation. We are still talking about his trip now, and now doubt will be for some time to come.



For Jesse’s version of events, see his photo set here.

Back in the Rock

Well, ladies, you needn't miss me any longer! Tomorrow I arrive in Little Rock for a much-anticipated, week-long visit. It will be my first time on native soil in almost 10 months, and the longest time I have ever been away from home. I'm really curious what -- if anything -- will appear different to my world-weary eyes.

Anyway, you can read all about it when I get back to Würzburg on the 22nd. I'll also bring this blog up-to-speed regarding Jesse's visit here last week and our big adventure to Oktoberfest with Jeff, Paul, and the two Dans. I promise it will be a lot more exciting than my posts about Berlin architecture or Rococo gardens.

Aufwiedersehen!

Around Deutschland in 14 Days

Kevin and I just returned from a two-week trip around Germany, organized and paid for by the Humboldt Foundation, and while I never want to look a gift horse in the mouth, I am glad that it’s over. Ten cities in 14 days means that we never got to spend more than a day or two in each city, and sometimes significantly less time. On the final jam-packed day of the trip, we managed to leave Bamburg, visit Rothenberg and arrive in Würzburg all during normal business hours. It was just a little much. When you visit new cities at such a fast pace, the most you can take away from each is a snapshot of its most famous building and the flavor of its most famous dish. My memories of the trip read like a laundry list of such things:

Bamburg: the Bamburger Reiter, Rauchbier (that’s smoked beer)

Münster: the Münster Rathaus, Haxenfleisch (that’s a whole pork leg)

Hamburg: the Hamburger Hafen, Matjesfilet (that’s raw pickled herring, and I like it!)

Fortunately, since Kevin and I had visited many of these cities before on longer more leisurely trips, we didn’t have to feel that we were missing much. This time on our layovers in Berlin, Dresden, and München, we got to see some of our favorite museums one last time and a few new places that we never would have seen on our own. The workshop of the luxury watch manufacturer A. Lange & Söhne, located high up in the Ore Mountains, was actually pretty cool; the tour of the Airbusfactory in Hamburg, I could I have done without, although I bet there were engineers on our trip who would have disagreed.

Still, there were days when, in the middle of a three-hour walking tour of a city following a four-hour bus ride, Kevin and I would want nothing more than to slip off from the rest of the group and settle ourselves into a shaded café, where we could read novels and sip our double espressos. Sometimes we did. Those were my favorite memories of the trip.

But without sounding to hokey (I hope), what the trip lacked in leisure time it made up for by throwing us in the constant company of interesting people. There were 33 people on our bus, and they were of all ages, nationalities and disciplines. There were Jordanians and Egyptians; Chinese, Japanese, Thais, and Malaysians; Russians, Poles, Kyrgistanis; Indians and Madagasks. (The one Madagask being my friend Dina from my German class in Frankfurt). There was even one other American – a chemist from Washington State.

Oddly enough, although this was a German-sponsored trip of Germany, the working language was English. Everyone on the trip spoke English, more or less, and so Kevin and I got to purge ourselves of all the cocktail conversation that we’d been saving up for eight months. As some of the only native English speakers on the trip, we had a captive audience.

But don’t think that I didn’t practice German at all on my summer vacation. Our tour driver was a charming old Sicilian who looked just like Rosano Brazzi, and as he was one of the only people on the tour who spoke German but no English, and I was one of the only people who spoke any German at all, we often sat together at dinner. After many beers he’d open up to me about the secret to making good Spaghetti Alio Olio and everything he knew about the Mafia. (There was a terrible quintuple homicide at a pizza place in Dusseldorf during our trip; it was obviously a mafia hit.)

Also, as part of its effort to maintain and spread the German language, the Humboldt Foundation provided a German tour guide in every city,and so as the rare German-speaker, I was obliged to always travel with the German-speaking tour guide. Often, I was even asked to translate German into English, when members of our group hadn’t understood. At one point, I even overheard our German tour guide, telling another tour guide, “You know her German's actually pretty good.” It almost made it all worthwhile.


For posterity’s sake, the pictures in the slideshow belong to the following cities: Münster, Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Bamburg, München, the Danube River, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

And the Oscar goes to ...

Lest you think that I just sit around all day blogging and eating bon-bons, let me remind everyone that I really spend 4 hours everyday in German class. And here's the evidence to prove it:



Actually, that might not be the best case for my defense. I'm not really as drunk as I look here (that's acting!), and my German accent is usually a lot better than that. I was just nervous about having to film that scene in the busiest café on the most touristy street in Würzburg.

Anyway, I case you're wondering, these were clips are from a project I did with friends from my German class. The semester's almost over, and as a farewell gift to our beloved teacher, who's retiring this year, we've made her a video outlining all the things she's taught us. Each student gets to say something. They whole thing runs about 20 minutes. Some of the skits are earnest, but most like the ones above are meant to be funny. And as writer, director, and *star*, my goal is to make sure there's not a dry eye left in the house -- one way or another.

(Credits for the video clips here go to my friends Eunkyung, Erika, Sergey, and of course, yours truly.)

A Summer's Day in Sommerhausen

Paul has just left after a jam-packed weekend. Unfortunately, his visit happened to coincide with the "Umpteenth Annual German Musik Festival," when the city was completely over-run with marching bands in full regalia. An estimated 100,000 people were in town, and since we neither enjoy crowds nor marching bands, we lit out for the country. After all, a little marching band music goes a long way.

On Saturday, we rented bikes and rode about 20 kilometers along the Main to Sommerhausen, that pretty little wine village Kevin and I visited back in February. Even in summer it's a sleepy little town with nothing but antique stores and cafés, and we made our way through a selection of the latter, visiting no less than three different establishments in search of their best local wine, beer, and champagne cocktails. Afterwards we stumbled upon a wedding in progress and had our pictures taken with the honeymoon chariot: a 1930’s Rolls Royce. Finally, too tired (or tipsy) to ride the 20 kilometers back to Würzburg, we took a nap on the grassy riverbank. (Don’t worry, Mom. They don’t have ticks and chiggers in Germany.)

Back home in Würzburg, Paul and I visited the museums at the Festung and the gardens at the Residenz. And since he’s a big fan of German cuisine, we ate our way across the city, sampling a few of his “favorite things”: bratwursts, rostbraten, schnitzels and strudels. I very admirably refrained from bursting out the Rogers & Hammerstein. All in all, a wonderful weekend, and it will only take me most of this week to recover from it.

Prague: Redux

My friend Paul is coming to visit this weekend. We became friends back in Boston, when we both interned at the Atlantic, and now he’s the Business Editor of the Prague Post. I guess sometimes those unpaid internships really do pay off.

As he’s in town, I won’t have a chance to blog this weekend, but I thought instead I would post pictures of my trip to visit him in Prague, back in February. (Yes, I often fall very, very, very behind on the blogging).

Seeing Prague again after so many years was very strange. Kevin and I stayed there for several weeks back in the summer of 2002, when I was in college, and for me, Prague has always had the distinct flavor of the American “junior year abroad experience.” While Paul was at work, I toured the city visiting some of my old “haunts” from my first visit: the Globe Bookstore, Bohemian Bagel, the historic Kvarna Slavia restaurant and the hookah bar, Café Dahab. They were all almost exactly as I’d remembered them, except this time around I was less struck by their Eastern European flavor than how over-run they were American undergrads. The bathroom stalls in Bohemian Bagel were covered with graffiti (in English), that only the particular species of American liberal art student, abroad for the first time in her life, would think to write. A sample:

“Every man beholds his condition with a degree of melancholy.”
“Happiness sparkles on the sea like soda.” – Walcott
“Hemingway, bagels are the way forward.”
“Laws are like cobwebs which may catch small flies but let wasps and hornets through.” –Swift
“All who wander are not lost.” Scratched out and corrected to read: “Not all who wander are lost.”

But touring Prague the second time, with Paul as my guide, I got to experience it the way a local would: visiting neighborhood cafes like the kitschy Medusa, an all night movie marathon out in the suburbs, and dinner at a Papua New Guinea-themed restaurant downtown. There wasn’t an American undergrad in sight.

Arkansans Abroad: Freiburg Edition

During my Easter break from classes, Kevin and I decided to get some traveling under our belts, and so we set out for Freiburg, the warmest, sunniest, southwestern-most city in Germany. Its climate is perfect for producing light, sweet wines, and it’s a popular launching point for trips into the nearby Schwarzwald (Black Forest). But Freiburg had no real attraction for us, save one: It’s the home of my brother’s high school best friend, Jack.

This may seem a tenuous connection at first, but we’re Southerners – Arkansans at that – and all Arkansans away from home can claim one another as friends, even if they don’t actually know each other that well. And as it turns out, we’re even related: My great uncle married his aunt, etc. Although that may seem even more tenuous connection than the first, there’s something to be said for being able to talk to someone who know where you’re from and knows where you’re coming from, and there are scant few of those in Germany. Although maybe more than could be expected.

It had been a few years since I’d seen Jack, but I remembered his being one of the more ambitious of my brother’s buddies, and in his life after college it’s clear that he has lost none of that “get up and go.” After graduating two years ago from Centenary College in Louisiana, he decided to move to Europe and see if he couldn’t play soccer for a European league. Now, Jack is a great soccer player – I believe he might even have been ranked first in the state when we were in high school – but he was under no illusions that he was a big fish in a small pond. Arkansas is hardly prime soccer territory – and Europe is clearly the Mecca of the soccer world. “I knew I wasn’t a Pélé or a Mirabella,” Jack told me, “but I wanted to see if I was any good.”

Well, it turns out the Jack was pretty good and got picked up by a small semi-pro soccer club in the village of Durbach (pop. 4,000), about 40 minutes north of Freiburg. This, in and of itself, is an amazing accomplishment. Germans are crazy about their Fußball and have no shortage of their own highly skilled boys to chose from. Even their small, semi-pro leagues are highly competitive. Furthermore, Jack didn’t speak a word of German, and in this corner of Germany there are few Germans who speak English. “In order to understand the terms of my contract, I had to have a member of the team translate it into Spanish,” he said. “It was the only language I had in common with anyone.”

But what impresses me even more than his signing with a German team, is how he’s made a whole life for himself in a foreign country in less than two years. His first year here, he boarded with a family in Durbach and worked in a local winery (more on both of these later). Between the two, he became completely fluent in German, with only the slightest hint of a Southern accent. Now, he’s got his own apartment (and a German girlfriend) in Freiburg, where he’s studying for a master’s degree in exercise science at the prestigious Albert-Ludwig University. He also works at a wine research institute and occasionally schleps tables and plays guitar at a local Irish pub. And of course, he’s still playing soccer for Durbach.

I’ve lived in Germany for four months now and have come to feel myself quite at home. But I can never imagine creating a life for myself the way Jack has, even if I were to live here a dozen years. So more than anything else in Freiburg, Jack was the main attraction, and in touring around with him for several days, I saw more of “the real Germany” than I’ve seen all year. Funny that it was with an Arkansan as my guide.
[Jack with the lovely and talented Anja, who is studying to be a journalist for public television. Needless to say, we hit it right off.]

A German Easter

My Boston friends and I always made a big day of Easter Sunday: getting all dressed up in bright Easter dresses, waiting in line (yes, a line) for seats at Boston’s famous Trinity Cathedral, and then a big brunch afterwards. So it was a little sad to spend my first Easter halfway across the world without them; however, Easter Sunday with our adopted German family, the Fakhers, more than made up for it.

Since Bavarians celebrate Easter on Saturday night, we skipped the church service (besides, I don’t think there are any Protestant churches in these parts) and showed up at the Fakher’s house in a leafy suburb of Würzburg for the Family Easter Egg Hunt on Sunday at 11:30 a.m. I think this is a marvelous time to begin an Easter Egg Hunt. Growing up in rural Arkansas, my family always hunted Easter Eggs at the crack of dawn – six AM. I’m not sure if the ungodly hour of this occasion was due to our having to be fed and dressed in time for Sunday School at nine or because we children were too excited to waiting any longer to hunt eggs, but it must have been torture on our parents.

However, waiting until 11:30 to hunt Easter eggs, seemed to be torture on the Fakher children, because the second after we arrived they were off, racing through the garden, trampling over flowerbeds and freaking out the guinea pigs, all in order to capture the most eggs. The whole thing was over in less than five minutes. If only the children knew how much fun it was for the adults to watch their excitement, they might have gone a little slower.

Afterwards, we sat down on the terrace for a traditional German brunch: a little fresh salad, straight from the garden, and a huge slab of meat. It was truly delicious, but I’ll never grow accustomed to the amount of meat the Germans eat. Even Louise, the Fakher’s eight-year-old daughter, managed to clean her plate before I did. I’ve always maintained that my slow eating habits were a result of my having less teeth than most people (I lack the four back molars), but Louise lacks four front teeth, so there goes that theory.

After a customary visit from the Easter Bunny (an enormous brown rabbit on a leash being led door-to-door by some neighborhood children), we were off to Bamburg, “the most beautifully preserved small town in Europe,” according to my guidebook. Indeed, it was very beautiful and historic: With narrow, winding, cobblestone streets and tall half-timbered buildings lining the Main, it had more the feel of a Dutch or Belgian town than one situated in the heart of Bavaria. I particularly enjoyed our visit to Bamburg’s enormous Kaiserdom. Begun in 1012, the cathedral straddles both the Romanesque and early Gothic periods, and so it has the Gothic’s awe-inspiring vaulted ceiling and beautiful stained glass windows, yet the Romanesque’s stone simplicity. This came like a breath of fresh air after the gilded mustiness of Würzburg’s Baroque churches.

Yet, the most impressive aspect of the Dom was its reliquary, which contains not one but two nails from the One True Cross. I felt supremely lucky to spend Easter Sunday in the presence of such rare and valuable artifacts and was impressed that they are owned by such a low-profile, out-of-the-way church, for if my Sunday school education serves me correctly, there were only three nails hanging Jesus to the cross. No doubt much wealthier, tourist-hungry diocese are always trying to buy-off the Bamburgers: “I’ll trade you two saints’ skulls and splinters from the Manger for one of your nails.” But I implore them not to sell – one of those nails must be worth a Holy Grail at the very least!

It being Easter Sunday and all, you’d expect the city would lazy and quiet, but in fact, the downtown was buzzing like Market Day, except of course that all of the shops were closed. Kevin expressed disbelief that the shopkeepers would give up such lucrative business by staying closed on what appeared to be the most heavily-trafficked day of the year. But the Bavarians are a very religious people, and like in southeast Arkansas everything stays shuttered on Sunday -- by law.

... Except of course the cafés, which were so packed that we could hardly find a patio table for our merry party of six. Fortunately, while we waited, Leon, the Fakher’s 11-year old son, who’s hip-ness has been well-documented on this blog, practiced his skateboarding nearby. The racket of a skateboard on the winding cobblestone streets and rickety wooden bridges crossing the Main must have seemed irreverent to these observant people, for several of the best tables soon opened up, and we were able to spend the rest of the day as God himself intended it: eating ice cream on a sunny terrace over-looking all of Creation.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye ...

Last weekend Kevin and I paid a visit to a fun fair that had recently set up on the Würzburg riverfront. It was pretty much just like any American fun fair, with carousels, cotton candy, and games of skill meant to rob you of all your hard-earned money. The only differences I observed were: one, a category of ride that would never pass U.S. safety standards (something called “The Revolution,” a double-pendulum contraption in which riders are tossed into the air on a giant rolling pin); and two, a local delicacy called “fish on a stick,” and by that I don’t mean fishsticks, but an honest to goodness fish – head and all – on a stick.

Anyway, Kevin and I had a blast reliving our youths. We went inside the ghost house, rode the Ferris wheel, and ate ice cream and hot-out-of-the-oven pretzels until we thought we would burst. But then we got a little carried away by our youthful exuberance and made the unfortunate decision of riding something called “The Break Dance,” like the "Teacups" but on crack. At first we congratulated ourselves for being young at heart – we were the oldest people on the ride by about 10 years – but as soon as the ride started up, with its intense, erratic spinning, we realized why we were the only adults onboard: Adult bodies just cannot stand to be thrown around like that. Kevin and I screamed for mercy, but the kids in the car next to us, all smiles, begged the conductor to go faster and faster, which he happily obliged. It was the longest five minutes of my life, and when it was finally over, we staggered off the platform like a pair of drunken sailors, while several of the kids who had ridden it with us hopped back in line to ride it again.

The whole experience was yet another reminder that here in Würzburg, Kevin and I inhabit a strange netherworld between old and young. We're too old to be young and too young to be old. Most of Kevin’s colleagues are in their late 30s or early 40s, with a house, a spouse, and a couple of kids to boot. And though I love playing with the children and participating in the fascinating conversations of their worldly parents, the evening always ends quietly at about 10 p.m.

On the other hand, I don’t quite have the stamina to keep with the undergrads in my German class. I’ve recently made friends with a group of international students at the university, and a couple times a week I’ll go out with them to a club or a party. But their outings don’t begin until 11 p.m. (on account of a large Spanish contingent) and often stretch out until five or six in the mornig, even though we all have to be in class by nine. I just can’t keep hours like that any more. I don’t even want to.

In addition, their ideas about the world strike me as a little naïve sometimes. I hate to sound like a world-weary 25 year old, but I want to laugh when they say things like, “I know I don’t do my homework like I should, but I just don’t feel challenged in this class. If I were really challenged, I would work harder.” I’m sure I said stuff like that when I was twenty, but I hope no one ever reminds me of it.

I'm sure there must be other 25 year olds somewhere in Würzburg, but I don’t know how to meet them. So, unless I stumble upon a sympathetic group of English-speaking young professionals at a bar somewhere, Kevin and I will keep rotating between groups of friends who are either too old or too young. And fortunately, the ride isn't as nauseating as “The Break Dance.”