Shauna's visit: castles, cathedrals, and a capitol

Well, now that the pictures are organized and posted, how about a little narrative to accompany them? :)

The rest of Shauna's visit was great. After poking our noses around Burg Berwartstein during her first weekend here, I came home early enough on Wednesday for a little field trip to the nearby town of Speyer. This charming place boasts the largest Romanesque cathedral ever (cute, since the town's name is pronounced "Shpire"), along with the Historic Museum of the Pfalz and a number of cafes and pedestrian shopping streets. It was really cold -- for Arizonans -- but pretty in the light layer of sparkling snow, and we bought a soft pretzel (for which the town is also famous) and ooh'ed and ahh'ed at the sites.

That weekend, we finally went to visit Conny and Nate in Berlin. Berlin is an... interesting city. The first time I visited was just for a couple days during the summer of 2005, and unfortunately have few other memories of the place other than its being very, very big; rather smoggy and hot; and -- much as I hate to admit this, and I ask the other 98% of the world's population, who seems to absolutely adore the city, to please accept my heartfelt apologies -- that it was probably the ugliest German city I'd ever seen. Before you gasp in horror, let me explain:

Most German cities, at least in my experience, always seem to somehow stay amazingly clean and pretty, regardless of size: Munich, Cologne, Dresden, Karlsruhe, Leipzig; I've never been to Hamburg, but have heard it's also quite aesthetic. Granted, surface aestheticism should by no means be the metric for a city's sense of community, or economic, social, or cultural merit; it's just that, when you're used to fascinating cities also being pleasantly picturesque, Berlin can take you by surprise. It may impress a visitor -- oh, who am I kidding, I mean, me -- as overly industrial, dirty, spraypainted, overall unharmonious... and again, very, very big. There, I said it. Whew. I'm a little nervous admitting this to the wide wide world of web, and now I'll probably get tons of indignant messages now protesting that I have overlooked what a great personality Berlin has. That is certainly true. But sorry, I still wouldn't date it.

I am also being supremely unfair, given the city's tumultuous history. In addition, the thought occurs to me that Berlin is not overly beautiful because it's not supposed to be. When people talk about Berlin, they talk about what an exciting city it is, how in-your-face and fast; how the people themselves are in-your-face and fast and exciting, and the in-your-face art galleries and fast nightlife and exciting social undercurrents just combine into one big irresistable swirling whirlpool of inyourfasticitement. Maybe my problem is that I'm just too shallow for all this edgy culture, and find myself more at home in a laid-back Biergarten with a Hefeweizen. Not that I don't dig alternativiness; quite the contrary. I like to think of myself as a very progressive liberal. But maybe my kind of alternative culture aligns more with the hippy Seattle coffee shop than the neon glow of a nightclub.

This is not to say, however, that Berlin can't be really fun to visit -- which we found out during Shauna's last weekend. My friend Conny and her (hilarious, check out his blog on the right) husband, Nate, live near the Technische Universität, where Conny is working on her PhD, and we thought it was high time to go barge in on them. Also, prettiness factor aside, Shauna had never been to the capitol; and oh yeah, Bert's friends have an empty apartment there in which we could stay for free. Decision thus made, we hopped a train on Thursday evening and settled in for a cozy trip eastbound.

It was a really lovely visit. We decided to just chill, and see what there was to see without stressing too much about it. The apartment was adorable and cozy, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and an assortment of interesting decor that the owners had collected on their many world adventures. So Thursday evening, we took it easy and went to bed early, and then slept in so late that we woke up just in time to run over to Conny's building and bug her at lunchtime. In fulfillment of her prediction, the cafeteria on the 20th floor had awful food but a fantastic view: all of the famous landmarks, like the Reichstag, Victory Tower, Fernsehturm, and Brandenburg Gate, were visible through the huge windows.

After lunch, Shauna and Bert and I decided to just wander around and see what we could find to take pictures of. We walked around the dome of the Reichstag in a snowstorm; noodled around in front of the Brandenburg Gate; had an Amaretto coffee in a cafe on Potsdamer Platz; then went grocery shopping and stocked up for a dinner of fried potatoes, scrambled eggs with veggies, and Gluehwein. In the snow, Berlin was a lot better-looking than I had remembered it, and we Arizonans went crazy stomping through sparkling white drifts and flinging balls of the fluffy white stuff at each other.

Saturday was marvellous. We made a stop at the Hackescher Markt and realized that we could easily eat our way through the entire city. Multicultural doesn't even do it justice... on every corner, there's a Spanish restaurant or Thai grocery store or Indian buffet, not to mention the ubiquitous Turkish Döner. At the Hackescher Markt, Bert, ever the Wurst connoisseur, sampled a Blutwurst with Sauerkraut, which happily met his high expectations. Shauna and I found a crepe stand run by a talkative French guy, who explained his love of Berlin to us as we tried not to drool all over ourselves while consuming the delicious crepes. "See," he said, "Everyone here is completely free to be themselves. Berlin's plurality is exactly what gives it a common culture. In fact, I think it's the city for everyone who doesn't fit in elsewhere." We laughed at his last point, but overall it was an interesting sentiment -- and one I might agree with. So maybe the city is not my particular style; but I was starting to understand some of its quirky, spraypaint-expressed charm. The Hackescher Markt was itself pretty cool: standing in the sun and the brilliantly reflective snow, we stood chewing blissfully on hot crepes filled with Nutella and bananas -- or ham and cheese, in Shauna's case -- and took in the fruit stands, crafts, hawking vendors, and highly various passersby.

After this, we meandered over to a part of the city that actually is highly aesthetic: the Museumsinsel (Museum Island). It's an island in the middle of the river Spree which, true to its name, holds a number of impressive museums, not to mention the Berliner Dom (Cathedral). It's kind of like a big park scattered with huge stately buildings. We wanted to explore the cathedral, but given that it cost 5 Euro just to go inside, we contented ourselves with taking pictures from the outside and then heading over to meet Conny and Nate at the Pergamon Museum. This was awesome. Of course, Shauna and I have always been history geeks. But fortunately, so were the rest of our party, and so we wandered around for hours with our headsets, listening rapt to various explanations of 2500-year-old stone sphinx guardian figures from ancient Mesopotamia, or the looming, blue-glazed Ishtar Gate from Babylon, or the collection of marble frieze figures from a Greek temple in Pergamon (for which the museum is named). They also had a fascinating adjoining museum for Islamic Art, and we were arrested by the detail of brilliantly illuminated pages from a 17th-century copy of the Koran and by the exotic patterns woven into 300-year-old Turkish rugs.

After our brains had had about all they could handle, we went to Conny and Nate's apartment for delicious hot stew, great conversation, and a dignity-robbing game of Cranium, finally leaving around 11 o'clock at night. Conny suggested that next time, we should stay at their place so that we can maximize our time there -- an offer I will happily take her up on! :)

The train back the next day was also cozy and pleasant. We sat at a table for three next to huge windows, and thoroughly enjoyed the smooth ride as we flew through the beautiful, often snow-frosted, countryside. A couple cappuccinos, more great conversation, and we were back in Neustadt.

Now, Shauna had missed out the last two times we'd gone to this Didarius place. Remember, the underground medieval tavern? So that night -- despite the fact that it was Sunday and we all had to get up early the next day -- we paid a little visit to the Ye Olden Dayes and sat at a heavy wooden table, drinking cup after delicious cup of blueberry and strawberry wine and cracking up at the earnest medieval music. Now I hadn't realized it before, but this wine is pretty sneaky. It's cold and sweet, obviously made with geniunely fresh berries, and tastes as if it contains no more alcohol than a lightly fermented cider. You only realize the deception during the stagger home, when it takes the combined effort of all three people to propel everyone in a roughly straight direction, made even more difficult by the fact that you're laughing hysterically at every tiny stumble or uneven cobblestone.

Such an awesome visit made it even harder to say goodbye on Tuesday morning. I had a lot of (hungover) work to do on Monday, and couldn't get away until the evening. Then neither Shauna or I wanted to actually go to sleep, because we knew that once we did, the next thing we'd be conscious of was getting her stuff together for the taxi outside. Which is pretty much how it went. The alarm buzzed at 4:30, and the taxi arrived at 5:20. I went with her to the Neustadt train station, and then couldn't bear to part yet, so hopped the train with her to Mannheim. And then there we were at the exact same platform on which we'd parted in September, her standing in the door of the ICE as the whistle blew; looking back at me through the window as the door closed; and then slowly pulling away and accelerating off into the still-dark. When will I learn that that sucks?? I got ahold of myself again just in time to sprint for the train back to Neustadt.

Luckily, I had time to go back to bed for a couple hours before school; and then was so busy the rest of the day that I didn't have time to sit and dwell about it. We webcammed after she got back to Seattle, so that helped, too. And then I sprained my ankle on Thursday; went out with the teachers anyway on Friday; went to the doctor on Saturday (although by this time, my ankle was so mysteriously better that I could actually put a little weight on it, and the crutches they gave me felt a little superfluous); and then spent a lovely Saturday night with the Hamanns. The kids were over (Andreas is my age, 26, and Uli is 24), and we made homemade Spätzle with salad, followed by Birne Helene (pears with chocolate sauce and cream, mmm!) for dessert. As usual, the evening was so cozy and the company so great that we didn't part ways until after midnight!

Today, Verena -- one of the other teachers -- and I went running (obviously my ankle is practically back to normal. Must be taking my vitamins! :) )... and we're tentatively entertaining the idea of training for a half-marathon! It's in six and a half weeks, though; and right now, we can both run for about forty-five minutes before pooping out. So we'll see. But the marathon & half-marathon are part of the celebrations for the re-opening of the Hambacher Schloss, a fortification here in Hambach (the part of Neustadt where I live), at which the Hambacher Fest took place in 1832. It would be awesome if we could run with a crowd of Neustadter in celebration of the 175th anniversary of German democracy and unity. We shall see. For now, Verena's dog shows us both up by taking off into the woods and and then coming back with an exasperated look at the two gasping, lagging humans in her wake.

Okay okay, this entry is long enough. I hope everyone's February is off to a good start, and if you come visit me in the spring, we can celebrate the Hambacher Fest together!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATIE!!!

Happy birthday to my little sister, Kaitlyn Grace, who turned 5 on Sunday! I hope your day was perfect and sunny, Katiedid. And keep an eye on the mail! ;)

An American in Germany, Part Zwei

Well, I had a very long to-do list this morning. However, the mere fact of taking a shower proved an exercise in balance, flexibility, and strength as I attempted to keep from applying any pressure whatsoever to my left ankle. Even so, after turning off the water with an accomplished sigh, I pivoted around on my right heel only to come face to face with the ledge separating the shower from the bathroom floor, looming up as aggressive and challenging as Hadrian's wall. How does a person hop on one foot over three inches of obstruction, when the surface being sprung out of is soapily slippery, and the only things to cling to are two flimsy shower doors that would probably come down at the application of the slightest bit of weight? Solution: bend slowly down onto your hands and knees, left foot still held carefully out of the way, and crawl out of said shower. At this rate, doing laundry and dishes, much less grocery shopping, seem quite out of the question! So instead, I think I'll just continue a bit in the blog. :)

So anyway! Now that I've sort of touched on the American's perspective, let's talk a bit about:

How Germans deal with said American.

Looking back, it's interesting to note the various ways people here react to my nationality when they discover it. The typical reaction in the States to foreigners seems to be either, "Cool accent, where are you from? Aren't you just loving our fabulous country?" or "You aren't one of them ter-or-ists, is ya?" (This is assuming the hapless foreigner in question isn't Hispanic. In that case, the usual reaction would probably be, "Hey you, speak American!")

But strangely enough, despite the almost overwhelming friendliness of people here in general, I find myself hesitant to own up to my American citizenship. I'm sure a lot of this has to do with simple shame at our current leadership; unfortunately, that seems to be the only prevailing impression of America abroad, is that we have a xenophobic cowboy at the helm of a nation whose people's general attitude is one of ignorant, nationalistic arrogance. I gotta tell you, it's tough work trying to emphasize to my students the true multifaceted, multicolored, multireligioned, often-conflicted nature of the 300 million people who call themselves Americans, and the impossibility of trying to characterize all of them under a single descriptive umbrella. Here's a brief survey of various reactions I get when people find out where I'm from:

- Girl in the video store: "Oh my god. That's so awesome. I've always wanted to go to America." She giggled at me as if I were a movie star.

- My younger students: "Have you been to New York? Have you been to Hollywood? Do you know any stars?"

- My older students: "Is it true you have to be 21 in order to drink??"

- Guy at restaurant who came over and talked to us because he knew the Hamanns: "You don't look like an American."
Me: "Really? How am I supposed to look?"
Him: "You're not fat, for one thing. And where are your sports shoes?"

- Bert's dad: "We don't meet many Americans around here. It's nice to find out that they're not all raving Bush fans."

- Bert's aunt: "Isn't Thanksgiving a Christmas celebration of some sort?"

And various other little telling encounters, among which are:

- Bert himself, looking at a picture book of the States that Mom gave him for Christmas. He was vastly absorbed in the spreading photographs of canyons, praries, tundra, Rocky Mountains, everglades, and desert. "Huh," he observed. "It really does look like there are a lot of various and interesting things to see. No wonder people travel there -- there's more to the place than just Hollywood and President Bush." Not having realized that that had been his image of my country beforehand, I was enormously gratified to hear this. :)

- Some not-so-positive encounters, like the guy at the repair shop the other day. Shauna and I walked in and the first thing the older man behind the counter did was to use the informal address of "du" (instead of "Sie"). As customers at a shop, this is considered quite rude and patronizing, and tipped us off that we weren't dealing with a gentleman, here. After talking with us for a few minutes, he asked where I was from, and I hesitated a little before saying. He just seemed like the xenophobic type who didn't take well to foreigners, particularly American ones; and sure enough, his response was, "No, you're no American."

I was suprised. "I'm not?"

"No, you're not."

Since he didn't offer any further explanation, I couldn't help pressing a little further. "Um... is that a good or a bad thing?"

He smirked through his enormous waxed moustache. "It's a good thing."

Of course, this was a guy who was going out of his way to insult us, especially by continuing with the remark that "women and technology don't go together." (My sister, a brilliant computer programmer, didn't say a word. We exchanged knowing smiles and chalked the tasteless comment up to the idiosyncrasies of an older generation.) We left the shop without buying any services; but the one thing that stuck in my head was the man's lack of any sort of hesitation to tell me that "not being an American" was a good thing.

- Some of my coworkers don't really seem to know what to make of me. Not all of them, to be sure; many are supremely cool and interesting. However, perhaps some of the others haven't ever traveled to another country -- or at least outside of Europe -- themselves, and consequently don't have much of a concept of exactly how different the two countries are or are not. I speak relatively decent German, and would imagine that that would be a tip-off that I have some experience with the country. However, I have gotten some well-meaning but flabbergasting questions such as, "Have you ever had a baguette before? It's bread from France," or "We should take you out sometime to experience typical German food. Have you tried a Bratwurst yet?" Again, these inquiries are sweet and well-intentioned, and there's no way for them to know otherwise; it would be ungrateful and classless indeed of me to ruffle my feathers about it. After all, if I were talking to a Vietnamese girl fresh off the plane, I'd probably ask if she'd had good old fashioned American barbecue, yet. It's not the innocently ignorant questions that bother me. But maybe this does have something to do with why I find myself less and less inclined to hang out socially with many of the other teachers at the school: kind as they are, whenever these deliberate and careful invitations are extended to do something social, it is under the overt pretext of showing the lost and helpless foreigner around. Even if it is partly impelled by actual personal interest on their part, the whole interaction is still permeated with the view of me as the Outsider -- after all, my status as the Outsider was the whole reason for the invitation to begin with. (And believe me, I'm not falsely imbuing the situation with my own paranoid impressions. It is quite literally a matter of, "Have you been to a Christmas market before? You should taste some Gluehwein. Why don't you come with so-and-so and me this Friday and we'll introduce you to this tradition?") Again, I feel enormously ill-mannered to be complaining about such kindness. I'm sure that, had I fallen off the boat from China and found myself suddenly in a totally alien setting, I would be enormously grateful for such overtures. But as it is, I smile politely and accept, and don't mention that I know a Gluehwein recipe that's probably better than the weak stuff at the local Christmas market.

I should point out that this is not the majority attitude among the teachers. Many of them I like very much, and I don't get the feeling that they only want to hang out with me out of duty to the Token Foreigner. But on the whole, I personally enjoy socializing much more with (whom I've come to call) the Ludwigshafen crowd. There, I'm just another member of the group, and I can blend in and be "me" without sitting through the formal, interview-like setting of, "So, what brings an American to Germany? Have you had cappuccino before? We should go out for one." And even if you want to talk in terms of being truly being The Foreigner -- which of course I still am, technically -- one learns much more as a fly on the wall, and by being acknowledged and taken in as a member of the group, than by being formally presented with traditions and customs like so many attractions on a tour. All the experiences I've had by now with sitting around at a Gasthaus, drinking local beer and pounding a fist on the table to emphasize a point in a political argument, have not come about as a result of being formally shown around by a well-meaning colleague.

- At the doctor's office with Anna was another interesting culture clash. I had gone to a particular "women's doctor" (Frauenarzt -- haha, German is such a wonderfully practical language!) for my annual female brouhaha, and found him kindly, competent, and easy to be around. So when Anna needed to see someone about her mysterious stomach problems, I therefore made an appointment with the doctor's wife, who was a general practitioner in the same office where he had his. She was... intelligent and approachable, but much less easygoing. And definitely had no idea what she sounded like when making the following statements:

Anna started to explain that she'd had some mysterious digestive complaints off and on for the last three months, involving puzzingly conflicting symptoms, and not seeming to respond to experiments like avoiding dairy products or gluten. The doctor seemed to listen to this, but her first suggestion was, "Well, you're American, right? The Americans aren't known to eat a particularly nourishing diet. Perhaps that's the problem." I can't even begin to express the absurdity -- not to mention ignorance and basis in uninformed stereotype -- of this statement. First of all, the trouble began after Anna came to Germany; and even if it hadn't, and if we pretend that her assumption regarding the typical American diet is correct, then why aren't all Americans experiencing this problem? Secondly, how on earth does she even know how we eat at all? She admitted that she'd never been to the States herself. And even if that were the general stereotype, she didn't even ask what Anna herself ate. Many Americans, myself included, are actually verifiable health-food nuts. Even more ridiculous is the fact that German cuisine is not necessarily based on wheatgrass and bran, either. I would hardly call pig stomach stuffed with greasy and questionable pork parts, covered with heavy cream sauce, served with salted cabbage -- all vitamins having been leached out in the pickling process -- and washed down with unfiltered beer a balanced diet. Anna and I just kind of stared at the doctor and said, no, that wasn't it.

Minutes later, the doctor had Anna remove her sweater and lie down on her back so that she could palpitate her stomach. She did so, and the doctor exclaimed in surprise at Anna's slender torso: "Why, you're so trim!" As if she shouldn't be...? But no matter, Anna does indeed have a most impressive six-pack; perhaps the doctor was simply admiring the apparent health of a good human specimen. The likelihood of this, however, seemed to diminish when the doctor later called a colleague to whom she referred us: "I have a young American woman here to whom I'm referring you. But don't worry, she's quite slender and easy to examine."

It didn't stop there. I took the opportunity to also ask the doctor for a refill of the prescription I had obtained every summer from the UA Health Center (I get a natural mottling on the skin of my back when it gets humid, and a simple tablet taken every six months takes care of it quite well). She had a look at my back, also expressing surprise at my apparent lack of obesity, and offered me a lotion. I explained that I'd tried the lotion before; unfortunately, it was only a temporary solution, and the internal medication worked much more effectively. "You Americans!" she snapped irritably, "Popping pills for everything!" ...Huh? What was her problem? Did she think I was trying to tell her how to do her job, and so responded with annoyance? How is one type of pharmaceutical administration different from another, except in degrees of effectiveness? What did she know about the American medical community, anyway? Anna and I should have said something, but we were taken so off guard, and weren't immediately sure that we really could be hearing such ignorance and prejudice from an relatively young, educated professional, that we simply took the reference and our prescriptions and left. It was later that it all sort of sunk in, and I had to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the whole interaction.

Happily, there have been many more positive encounters than negative ones. But perhaps it is the latter which stick in your head, as they give more cause for retrospection, while the former are simply enjoyed as lovely bits of hospitality from a people for whom the majority are naturally friendly and curious. I can't tell you how often I've asked a stranger on the street for directions, and have been practically personally walked to said location; how many waiters have brought us extra slices of pie because they hear we're exploring the city as tourists and are interested in the local cuisine; or the lady behind the counter at the winery, who slipped two bottles of sparkling red wine gratis into our bag, because she had overheard me tell Shauna that she should try Dornfelder Sekt in addition to the usual array of sparkling whites.

Okay, well, like the last one, this post is way too long. Maybe my ankle feels up to tackling the dishes again... I'll ask it and see what it says.

Not an Englishman in New York, but a legal alien nonetheless

So, after five months of hanging out on the other side of the world, I figured it was time for an "impressions" survey. Not really sure where to start; there are a number of semi-connected ideas banging around in my head that I'm just too lazy to organize into any kind of premeditated structure, so I think I'll just start typing and see what makes its way out and what gets lost in the mad rush to escape the narrow confines of my brain. ;)

Living as opposed to visiting...
...has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. To be sure, I'd lived in Germany for six years before, but it was as a child: and needless to say, your perspective as such is much more limited. Excepting the excellent efforts of our parents to take us out to explore Europe, a kid's normal daily encounters are usually Home, Schoolbus, Neighborhood Kids, and the Half-Mile Radius Around Your House. Although we did benefit greatly from our parents' determination to see as much as possible of the area and surrounding countries, and to integrate themselves as much as two foreigners could into the culture -- Dad was stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base, but we lived off-base, in a village, and our friends consisted of equal parts Germans and Americans -- a person's recollections 14 years later of their life from age seven to twelve is bound to be a little hazy. Of course we were deeply imprinted with the basic feel and smell of German language and culture; that's the age when humans are still growing, and their surroundings become as much absorbed into their cells and subconscious as does the food they eat and the parenting they receive. Right now, church bells are calling outside from the distant Innenstadt below, and the stately, deep, arrhythmic "bong" is setting off answering rings from one of the inner chambers of my heart (maybe it's the left ventricle). It was this slow steeping in Germanness -- the absorption of the warm, dark brown language and the smell of Lebkuchen at a Weihnachtsmarkt, the high view of treetops from the wall of a castle ruin, the dim memory of a cozy Gasthaus that served Jaegerschnitzel (my favorite) and the comforting aroma of my dad's beer -- that drew me inexhorably to German Studies much later at the university. (Huh, funny, maybe that's why I love the smell of good beer on men. I have, probably certifiably, the best dad anyone could possibly wish for; and so my associations with beer are not only happy, but also somehow connected to the conviction that beer is How a Man Should Smell.)

Anyway, studying German at the university opened up a whole array of complicated currents (politics, culture, history, literature, and other various Zeitgeists) that had been swirling around us unnoticed as we played with our friends or stopped at a roadside stand for a Bratwurst. Kids just kind of accept their surroundings without too much consideration: sure, there was the field behind my friend's house where we weren't allowed to play, because authorities couldn't be sure if they'd ever really cleared out the landmines from WWII; and yeah, there were some cities where the ground was noticeably higher in some spots due to newer structures having been built on top of rubble, also from the war. But that was a background detail: real, but (to a child) long ago and irrelevant. What was realer to me was the fact that this particular cathedral was -- whoa! -- a thousand years old! I would wonder who had wandered down this nave before me. Or take for granted that the look and feel of some of the older villages as something from a fairytale, the surrounding forests cool and green and probably populated by witches in gingerbread houses or Tolkeinish folk. I loved Germany. But we were imaginative kids, and my impressions of it were thoroughly mixed with the whimsical world of childhood.

When you grow up a little, though, and start to study mindsets and literature, you gain, needless to say, a much more enriched perspective. I still think of Germany as the place of gingerbread, forests, and far-off church bells. But now I also think of the land of the Romantics and the Englightenment; before that, a medieval world just as full of discovery and struggle as the 21st century; religious conflict; an only recently politically unified country -- Germany became an actual nation only in 1871! -- from what was before a collection of highly factional principalities, each with their own dialect and culture and interests.

The struggle to define a national identity continues today: am I Bavarian first, German second? Or the other way around? What about my neighbor, whose parents are Turkish? She wears a headscarf and speaks Turkish to her family, but she was born and raised here; is she really "a German"? See, in the States, we're used to this: most of us are decendants of some immigrant wave or another, some more historically distant than others. But until recently, your average German was a part of the very soil he tilled. There isn't really a direct or even adequate English translation for the word Heimat: it's more than just "home". It means the land of your roots, of all your family, probably since the Middle Ages or before. Bert goes back to the Erzgebirge, and that's where he belongs. This is not to say he isn't a well-traveled and broad-minded individual; he is indeed. But being the vagabond I and all of my family are and have been, it took me a little while to realize that the Erzgebirge isn't just the place his family happened to buy a house a couple generations ago (like many of us gypsy Americans); no, in fact, you could almost call it his ancestral home. Bert will call himself a Saxon before he identifies himself with the more general term "German."

Which leads of course into all the other complications of a German identity. What about the reunification in 1990? Germans were just starting to figure out who they might be as a nation before a moustachioed maniac came to power and took it way too far. Immediately afterward, the young country was divided into a communist Eastern half and a capitalist Western half -- both of whom weren't even independent states themselves, occupied as they were by, respectively, the Russians and (eventually exclusively) the Americans. What's it like, to have a foreign air base next to your village? Foreign soldiers walking down your street in their uniforms, loudly speaking their own language and complaining that your doorhandles are handles instead of knobs? Or worse, on the other side, not to be allowed to leave your own half of the country, or even listen to radio broadcasts from the other half? Then suddenly, after forty years -- two generations -- the two halves try to fit themselves back together again. Try to turn that into a sense of national identity. To say nothing of the difficulty of coming to terms with a piece of the past that most of the younger generation would prefer to pretend had never happened, and yet it's there in front of their faces every way they turn. How do you answer for the crimes of your grandparents? Should you? How can we learn from the past if we don't remember it, study it, look it in the eye; but what if doing so comes with an almost crushing sense of blame which you feel you haven't personally earned? For sixty years, Germans have been practically allergic to any hint of nationalistic pride. One simply does not play or sing the national anthem, except maybe at the Olympics. Until last summer, no one flew the flag out their window, the way we Americans do at seemingly every opportunity -- at home, at school, in the workplace, in our back windshields. And yet... since the World Cup was held in Germany last summer 2006, there has been a shy attempt to maybe not stash all the "Go Krauts!" paraphernalia away again. Sometimes someone will wear a red-black-and-gold sock, or even more daringly, have not put away the flag hanging off their apartment balcony. I like this. It seems a much healthier balance. And maybe it's just the Germanistik student in me, but as I said before, I love Germany. The large black stain in the middle of the 20th century is indeed glaring and horrible; but there is so much more to the country than just that, and I personally believe it's high time we allow a nation to redeem itself and be a nation again. Go, Krauts. :)

All righty, well, to return to the heading of this little chunk, let me just reiterate that these are all things you can't get just by visiting a place. After all this study, it's wonderful to actually get to come and live it for once. To not view a people and country from the distance of a classroom or through the pages of great, but static, literature; instead, to once again sit in a cozy Gasthaus, and this time, smell more than just the beer. It seems like every weekend, I'm sitting around another table with someone new and discussing philosophy and history; exploring a new town; making dinner in someone's kitchen and arguing about comparative school systems or the future of higher education; world politics; American politics; cultural idiosyncrasies; unemployment; the chasm between East and West; dealing with the past; the list is endless. I think I had kind of intended this blog to be a record of such conversations and impressions, but perhaps I haven't been as conscientious as I meant to be. This entry alone has taken over an hour and a half, and there is still so much to say... sometimes the most I can do is a hasty listing of all the things we've done and seen, just to record them for the indistinct Future when I do have a chance to imbue it with the better retrospection that such experiences deserve. Ah well, my coffee's waiting, and there are lessons to be planned... auf Wiedersehen, for now. :)

Oh, de leg bone connected to de hip bone...

Because a blog often consists, simply by nature, of self-indulgent ramblings, I'll start this post by observing that I have weird joints. Specifically, I think my bones might somehow be more loosely connected than most peoples'... For example, I remember doing crescent kicks in Taekwondo when I was seventeen -- an action requiring one to swing one's entire extended leg in an arc from the hip joint -- and having to subtly twitch my hip afterward in order to "click" the femur back in place. A year later, I sprained an ankle after a jump side-kick because the foot I landed on bent sideways toward my leg, and ended up on crutches for three weeks. Two years after that, I fell off a scooter and landed front down on both elbows, the result of which being that my right shoulder popped clean out of the socket. (It has never since rightly healed; the tendons in that joint have gotten so weak, in fact, that I am incapable of the simple motion of extending my right arm up and back without the shoulder slipping again -- to the accompaniment of excruciating pain. I know I need surgery, but what's a TA with minimal health insurance to do?) And actually, now that I think about it, even sometimes when chewing something especially crunchy, my jaw clicks slightly sideways and I have to un-stick it before proceeding. Does this herald a mass of joint problems in forty years? Am I going to get up from my rocking chair one day and collapse to the floor in a heap of disjointed skeleton? Just this afternoon, I stepped out of the drugstore and landed slightly unevenly on the same foot that was sprained eight years ago; by this evening, the danged ankle is swollen up and I can hardly put weight on it. That's not good. I walk everywhere. Well, lemme sleep on it and see how it is in the morning...

Anybody know any good remedies for too-elastic joints? :)

Through the wind and weather

Germany isn't particularly rife with the "traditional" natural disasters -- tornado, earthquake, flood, apocalyptic horsemen -- but man, can it whip up a heck of a windstorm. Last Thursday morning, earnest newsbroadcasters ("toupee alarm!" one warned) urged everyone to stay inside come afternoon, as they were expecting winds of up to 120 km/hr. But since I was only teaching two classes early in the morning, I thought I'd brave the mere 40 km/hr winds to valiantly bring English to some German schoolchildren. Not rain nor snow nor hail nor monstrous wind will keep this foreign language assistant from showing her 5th graders a silly Rowan Atkinson movie!

All was well until I decided to walk home, at which point my umbrella was promptly turned inside-out, my hood was blasted off my head, and the wind carefully parted the back of my hair so as to allow a more direct rain-pelting of my scalp (and shortly thereafter, my eyeballs and ear canals). I was bent nearly double by the time I stomped up to the door. This in turn was thrown open by a concerned sister, armed with a cup of hot tea -- and who then promptly burst out laughing at the apparition before her. We spent the rest of the day with the Rollladen pulled down against the increasing battering of the world outside, making pot after pot of exotic tea and snuggled up with books.

A more snuggled Shauna, the world has never seen.

Oh yeah! I should mention, Shauna is here! YAYY! I feel like me again. :) She flew in last Tuesday morning, and we have had a great last week or so. After Thursday night's Sturm und Drang, the world was sparkling and fresh on Friday morning. We got up early; hung out; made more tea; hung out some more; then went for a long walk through the wine fields where we, quite literally, chased a rainbow. We were just walking along and spotted a bright one: then, seeing that its end appeared to be no more than a hundred feet away, we just kind of started walking toward it. Everyone knows that the illusion will never let you get closer than it already looks -- but it was RIGHT THERE! We had to try. We squelched through the muddy fields until we were almost at the foot of the hill that proudly displays the Hambacher Schloss, before turning back down into the town and wending our way through some cobblestones.

That night, Bert came over, and we made an American Dinner: chili con carne, salad, and even a dessert of chocolate chip cookies. These cookies are incredible!! Sarah sent them with Shauna from Wisconsin: a huge tupperware box full of moist, thick, nutty, chocolatey goodness surrounding a gallon-sized bag of walnut-strewn fudge. I just about ran around in circles when she produced them from her bag. Thank you, Sarah!!! What a marvelous surprise! I in no way exaggerate when I inform the Internet Community that the best baked goods ever are to be found in my stepmom's kitchen. Bert was awfully impressed, and we gobbled the rest of them hiking the next day through the Pfaelzer Wald. Sarah, I've told this nice German man that I will try to obtain the recipe from you and make my own lame attempt at these divine things. Might I impose...?

Saturday was lovely. The weather was kinda icky, but we were all in an adventurous mood when we took off through the Pfaelzer Wald in search of its secrets. We drove almost all the way down the Weinstrasse, deep into the forest, and through old wine villages before we reached the top of a misty wooded hill, crowned with a 12th-century fortress carved right out of the rock: Burg Berwartstein.

You can find some pretty comprehensive information about the castle on this site. It's a fascinating place, rife with legends and even ghost stories!

Before storming the castle, however, we first took a stroll through the forest. But as Amy can tell you, hiking is really just an excuse to eat hiking food. We walked through the rainy woods just long enough to finish Sarah's cookies before heading back to sit on a wide stump in the shadow of the castle, and make a picnic of hard boiled eggs, cheese sandwiches, and coffee from Bert's old army thermos.

Thus fueled for our attack, we scaled the steps and ferociously joined a small guided tour. The guide was a university student who has loved the castle since his childhood, and his enthusiasm for it was infectious as he told us stories and described medieval fortress life. We poked our heads into old bedrooms, goggled the armor and obligatory torture devices, peeked up a narrow vertical tunnel that used to be the only entrance into the castle (which apparently made the place completely impenetrable, as hot oil and such could be poured down this stone tube!) and clutched at each other as we were led down a dark secret passageway that the castle inhabitants had used to escape enemies. There was also a 100-meter deep well, into which the guide tipped a bucket of water; and we held our breath for nine long seconds before we heard the distant splash at the bottom. Cool! And yet another interesting feature were the numerous round dents peppering the rock on one side of the structure. Apparently these were made by American aircraft during World War II! I felt an unpatriotic surge of indignance that someone would open fire with modern weaponry on such a stately marvel of medieval history, regardless of what was being hidden inside. (You're not going to get at it by firing at the cliffside, anyway. Might as well try the oil tunnel!)

After exploring the place, we had a cup of Gluehwein in the restaurant down below, and then drove across the French border to a charming little town called Wissembourg. Somehow, doing so imbued me with a funny familiar feeling that I couldn't quite put my finger on... until I started to say something loudly in English, and Shauna whispered jokingly, "Shh! Somebody is going to know we're gringos!" Hahaha! Yeah, last time I drove south to cross a border, we ate enchiladas instead of crepes. :)

That night, Shauna succumbed to jetlag while Bert and I went out to continue our medieval-themed day at a medieval-themed tavern with some of the Ludwigshafen folks. It's this so-cheesy-it's-awesomely-cool underground place called Didarius, with arching stone ceilings and torches on the walls, and you drink your mead out of wooden cups while stridently medieval music plays in the background. Thus sated on dark beer and blueberry wine, we prepared to sleep in until noon on Sunday.

Yesterday (Sunday), we expended more gasoline by driving to Schwetzingen, another pretty town with huge gardens that you can get lost in. However, being quite cold outside, we chose not to pay the six Euros to get lost, spending them instead on Bratwurst and coffee before heading back to freak out the Ludwigshafen crowd with my red-headed Doppelgaengerin. We watched The Simpsons in German, ate some pizza, and then turned in early so that I could arrive as tired and unprepared as possible for school today. :) Ahh! What a weekend!

Michael's Blog!

Check out Michael's online musings to the right... the lovelily-titled, "Wood Between the Worlds"! :)

Sad news

A dear friend just received some very sad family news. Please send him your prayers...

Hang in there, du.

New old pics

Just posted some pictures from last September, when Mom and Shauna and I went to the airport for our Germany send-off. They're pretty funny, mainly due to the sheer amount of baggage we are attempting to transport! See the "And More Pix" link to the right...

There and back again

Well, good middle of the night, Interweblandworld! It's 1.13 in the morning, and my alarm will go off in about four and a half hours, and I've slept all of nine of the last sixty hours... and I am wide awake. Too exhausted to sleep? Could be. Funny how jetlag seems to get reliably and noticeably stronger every time. It took me almost the entire two-week visit home to Tucson to not fall asleep at 7.3o on the couch every evening, only to then be awake for good at 3 am; and now, regardless of total, burning-eyed, achy-bodied exhaustion, my fingers are typing merrily away. Betrayers!

Some of it -- check that, all of it -- has to do with the fact that my luggage took a little vacation in Denver while I continued on to Frankfurt. At first, this was exasperating: "Great, just what I need after 20 hours of travel." But then I remembered that the two bags, densely loaded as they were with Christmas goodies for myself and others, weighed in at a hefty 50 lbs each; and that I was also about to take two trains and a taxi to get home. Which can be quite an adventure, with two anvil-like bags, two bursting-at-the-seams carryons (I could actually hear them groaning), and arms already full of wool coat and purse and pillow. (Yeah yeah, I bring a pillow on international flights. I will do this until I am eighty. After which I'll bring the bedspread, too. ;o) ) Anyway, so after being assured by the highly apologetic Lufthansa clerk that my bags would be delivered right to my front door the very next day after work, I lightly skipped aboard the respective trains and arrived home to my bright apartment, thoroughly tired but relieved, on Monday afternoon. Too bad my bags wouldn't come until the next evening; I was excited to give out the gifts I'd packed. But hey, free delivery service! That was worth a little wait.

Well, without going into further details, suffice to say they did finally arrive... but not before Tuesday night had become Wednesday morning. And because I didn't want to miss the delivery guy and face the prospect of making a trip to the Frankfurt airport, and then having to lug all the stuff home after all, I resisted the strong urge to fall asleep at 6 in the evening, though I was pretty sure I could easily have slept through to the next morning.

So here I am, at now 1.30 in the morning, still in the world of the waking. Dang second wind. Er, seventh wind. Whatever. I'll just fall asleep in front of the ninth-graders tomorrow, and they can spend an amusing class period drawing things on my sleeping face with a ballpoint pen. At least I'll get some rest!

The holidays were great, though. Really great. After the initial flightmare of finding myself heading, not from Frankfurt to Tucson as planned, but instead from Munich to Los Angeles -- where I then made a Chariots-of-Fire, 1.5-mile dead sprint, comically bulging and bouncing luggage in tow, to catch a chancy new connection via Southwest -- I collapsed gratefully onto one of mom's couches with her, Michael, and Shauna. Yay! Amy arrived the next day, and the five of us spent a lovely holiday together. Steve flew in on the 26th, and we all spent the next week running around trying to visit everyone in the entire city, run stateside errands, do more Christmas shopping for some folks here in Germany, collect some sunlight to take back to our northern latitudes, see as much of Mom as possible in her free time, and eat as much Mexican food as we could cram into our guacamole-starved bodies. Gallucci came down for a whirlwind overnight visit (after much schedule-juggling and other hitches -- thanks, Matt!), and then, for the last day and a half, mom and I actually had some time to spend just one-on-one. There is never enough of that! It was so great to be able to see everyone. But sometimes, in order to see all the people you want to see, you sacrifice spending any real quality time with any of them. Thanks for understanding, guys. I promise there's less going on over here -- come visit me on this side of the pond! :)

Speaking of visits, though, Shauna arrives in less than a week! Huzzah! That really eased the pain of leaving. We have all these grand designs of trying to get to Denmark or maybe France while she's here; but I kinda get the feeling that, once she gets here, all we're really going to want to do is while away the hours at a cafe. Though a weekend trip to the Erzgebirge would be cool. I'm trying to finagle a way to visit Conny and Nate in Berlin while she's here, too; we shall see!

All right, I'm sure there are more riveting details from these last few weeks that are just not surfacing in my dried up, sleep-deprived brain; but it's now almost two, and I really really should try to get some more sleep before another long day at school tomorrow. Happy New Year, everybody. As they say at Rosh Hashanah:

Let the new year and its blessings begin. :)

Homeward bound!

As beautiful as Neustadt is, it's missing a key element or two. So I think I'll hop a plane tomorrow and see what they're all up to in Arizona for Christmas! :)

A new roommate

My cozy apartment just got cozier, thanks to my new roommate from Dresden. He's quiet, doesn't eat much, and he sure smells good!

Lemme explain. The Erzgebirge is a mountain range near the eastern German border, which is famous for its woodcarving: especially around Christmastime, the area's hand-carved wooden figures, finely-cut Christmas tree decorations, Pyramiden (diaramas in which the figures spin around by means of a candles and wooden fans), and especially the characteristic Schwibbogen (arched candle holders with traditional images underneath) are staples even in western Christmas markets.

Pyramide:
Schwibbogen:


The most famous of the hand-carved figures, however, are the Räuchermännchen: "little smoking men". These are hollow, often wearing miners' costumes -- "Erzgebirge" literally translates into "ore mountains"-- and have round holes for mouths. When you place an incense cone inside one, the scented smoke comes drifting out of his mouth. Eeee! If ever smoking could be made adorable..! Anyway, they range anywhere in size from a couple inches to a couple feet. The problem is that, no matter how simple or detailed, their fame and quality make them pretty pricey. I was coveting every Räuchermännchen I saw when Bert and I visited the Annaberg Christmas market a couple weeks ago. Alas, they were too cute for my pocketbook.

Well! Bert went back to the Erzgebirge last weekend for his sister's birthday. And what did he return with? My very own Räuchermännchen! Except this guy isn't a miner -- he's a rockin' wizard. Delicately stained, with a long beard, walking stick, dark red hood, and heavy-lidded eyes, he is cool indeed. We lit him up (with appropriately-scented "wood moss" incense), and the long tube of smoke curling out of his mouth made him look strange and sorcerous. I wonder if he comes alive at night and casts spells? We shall see. I might wake up tomorrow morning in a forest of mushrooms.

staring:


smoking (while contemplating some spells):


Dunno about you, but I hear a men's choir when I look at him. Ahh, AAHHH, aaah!

So! What should I name him? Merdalf? Gandlin?

How to make Feuerzangenbowle

Step One: fill a pot with mulled wine.

Step Two: suspend a cone of sugar above the pot.


Step Three: douse the sugar in something tasty and flammable, like rum.


Step Four: fire!


Step Five: watch the sugar burn, until Step Six....


...when it has almost entiredly melted down and dripped, caramelized, into the wine.


Step Seven: Enjoy!

Step Eight: Enjoy again.

Step Nine: Apply Christmas wreath to head. Dance around a little. Pour more Feuerzangenbowle. Sing off-key and loudly along to Burl Ives' "Holly Jolly Christmas."

Step Ten: Spend entire next day in your pajamas, eating Nutella straight out of the jar because getting up and making real food sounds like too much effort! ;o)

Happy Hanukkah!

Last night was the first night of Hanukkah, which means that Temple Emanu-El back in Tucson is enjoying a flurry of activity. To Rabbi and Marjorie, and all the Temple staff: I hope you had a fun and successful first-night service! Wish I could have been there to sing this year. To everyone else who lit the first candle last night: chag sameach!

Slate magazine posted a lovely series today of photos taken of Hanukkah observances over the last fifty years. Some are quite introspective; others make an impact. Have a looksee!

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20061215/

Neustadt at Christmastime

Ooh, speaking of Weihnachten: went for a lovely long walk today with the camera. Check out this Rheinland Christmas paradise! :)

(The above album can also be found under a new link to the right: "And More Pix". The pictures have finally overflowed onto another picasa page!)

Eine kleine Nachtmusik

Well, this week has just been brimming with culture! Some high, some not so high... though I suppose it all depends on your perspective. ;)

First of all, I should mention that Frau Griesemer is a champ at making sure I have access to all the yummy little cultural tidbits around Neustadt: clipping out newspaper articles on exhibitions and concerts, finagling me free tickets for various excellent performances... a couple weeks ago, it was a Klezmer concert by a world-famous Jewish music trio! That was awesome. Last night, we saw an operetta: "Madame Pompadour". If you haven't seen/heard it, I'd recommend it! Although my enjoyment was probably exclusively the doing of the fantastic cast. I've been to operas before where the players could sing... and that was pretty much it. Mom and Shauna, remember when we saw "Romeo et Juliette," and during the death scene, the two expressed their undying love for each other by standing stiffly on opposite sides of the stage and reciting their arias like dutiful human clarinets? Or Ron, remember when we saw "Carmen", and the set consisted entirely of a single chair and an abstract, sloping wall? Not this troupe! They could not only sing, they could act. They were funny, creative, engaging -- and the sets and costumes were so sumptuous that sometimes I had trouble focusing my ears on the music, my eyes were so preoccupied! And to top it all off, Frau Griesemer treated me to a glass of sparkling wine at intermission -- and as you can imagine, sparkling wine in this region is almost as good as an entire opera. All in all, 'twas a lovely evening.

...And quite different from Monday night, when Bert and I went to a metal concert! It was in Mannheim, with a band called "In Extremo" (hahaha, love that name). I'd enjoyed a couple of their songs before, and Bert had gotten me a ticket to accompany him that night with some of the other Ludwigshafen crowd; so, always open to new sounds, I went gamely. And it rocked! Their music is pretty hard, but also surprisingly melodic at times. And get this -- they have bagpipes! Three bagpipers stalk about the stage while the lead singer sings his studded dog collar off, occasionally punctuated by the Standard Bursts of Flame, Without Which No Metal Concert Would Be Complete. Actually, at some point the drummer even lit his sticks on fire, and proceeded to play almost a whole song with these fireballs on the end of his drumsticks. Awesome. Oh, but no worries, family: I think we were not only sweaty enough from dancing to be pretty flame-retardant, but we also stood near the back, anyway, 'cause Bert forgot his earplugs (though weirdly enough, I just happened to have some floating around in my purse; however, he insisted I keep them for my virgin American ears). It was really fun. The music was good, and I don't think there was a single person there who wasn't all decked out in black... though the band's reputation for using bagpipes brought a funny array of SCA-types, too. Haha! So now I can say I went to a German metal concert.

(Here are some of the girlies from Ludwigshafen, at the concert.
L to R: Anne, Nadia, Julia, me):



Ooh, and now I jusht got back from a -- hic! -- Chrishmash party with some of the teachers from shcool. It wash fun... more tomorrow! ;oP

Cookery

As a side note, cooking/baking is always fun in my apartment. My "mixing bowls" consist of various saucepans, and a plastic bucket that must have originally come with a brightly-colored sand shovel. The "cookie sheet" is that pot roast pan -- you know, the one which comes standard in every oven? -- luxuriously covered with a fine layer of brown wax paper. (Only as they do in the finest bakeries, of course.) And Nigel discovered for himself the joys of making an omelette with a wooden spatula in a non-nonstick pan. Oh yeah!

But hey, it all still works. :) And thanks to Mom's piemaking tools, Dad & Sarah's measuring cups, and Brigitte Hamann's electric mixer, my first attempt at self-made piecrusts for Thanksgiving actually came out pretty well! :)

A proud display of two rootin' tootin' all-Amurrican punkin pahs.

Ach, du lieber Dezember!

Yayyy! I love this time of year. Especially when it's in such a beautiful place... went for a long walk yesterday, and kept stopping to look around and pinch myself that I get to live here until at least next summer. It's been three months, and I still do that on a pretty regular basis!

Gosh, so much to catch up on, and so little time before I have to pack up and catch a train to Ludwigshafen (where I'm meeting Bert to drive to the Erzgebirge today). So I'll try to just hit the highlights real quick:

Thanksgiving: marvellous! Cooked a dinner on the evening of Friday the 24th with a bunch of other English teachers at the high school. My coworkers are so great. Funny, friendly, open... and brave! Mom (bless her!) had sent me a bunch of ingredients for various holiday goodies that I just can't find here in Germany, some of which being pureed canned pumpkin and pie tins. So most of the teachers were able to try pumpkin pie for the first time... a leap of faith, given that my description of it was "sweetened, spiced squash filling in a dessert crust". And then they proved themselves even more valiant when I ceremoniously removed the lid from the Watergate Salad: pistachio pudding, whipped cream, crushed pineapple, multicolored minimarshmallows, and coconut, all blended up into a radioactive green goo. Yum! Everyone at the table peered into the bowl, glanced surreptitiously at each other, and then dug right in. And happily, both desserts appeared to be quite the hit! :)

The next weekend, Nigel came to visit, and we had a nice, chill (heh heh, get it?) start to December. On Friday evening, he and Anna and I, along with Annette (another new English teacher at my school) checked out the Christmas market in Landau. Then we went to see the new James Bond; and the next day, Nigel and I hopped a train to Heidelberg to see what it has to offer during the Adventszeit. Answer: an even bigger Christmas market! We had a lovely time... strolling around in the low winter sunlight, sampling gingerbread and candied almonds... and about three cups each of various forms of Gluehwein (mulled wine). Mmm! That made for a very merry trip back on the train! :)

That night, I went to a party in Ludwigshafen with some of Bert's friends; and like everything else, it was a blast. We listened to music, made dinner, and exchanged gifts. Bert was the "Weihnachtsmann", and he even showed up in a white beard and Santa cap. At some point, he pulled his beard down to take a drink of something... and one of the other guys pretends to burst into tears, yelling, "There is no Weihnachtsmann!! It's only Bert!" Hahahaha! Oh man, I like the Ludwigshafen folks.

Oops, I gotta wrap this up. Long story short: December has been fantastic so far. :) Will take lots of pictures this weekend! Huggles aus Deutschland...

On second thought...

Well, just make a liar out of me! After that whole introvertist manifesto last night, I go around being totally chatty and sociable all day today. Hm, well, I guess, being the complicated organisms we are, you can never just pidgeon-hole people -- including yourself. (Either that, or that Myers-Briggs test was pretty accurate when it pegged me as an E/INFP, which means equally balanced between extroversion and introversion.)

Okay, how about this: a lot of the time I like to chat and hang out. But if I'm just sitting there listening rather than talking, please do forgive me, and don't take it as a sign that anything's wrong. I'm just letting my inner introvert out for some exercise. :)

INFP

Wow! This post is even longer than the last one. Should ye decide to embarke upon its rambling depths, be ye forewarn'd! ;o)

Here it be...

******

Amy found this article on introverts.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

Huh. And I thought I was just getting antisocial in my old age. (Same thing? ;o) )

I always thought I was an extrovert, because I really like people. I'm generally happy, friendly, and, I think, pretty open -- I mean, hey, I'm bearing my brain practically every day on these here internets! But when I think about it, I derive lots of things from socializing: pleasure, heart, learning. However, I don't derive energy from it. In fact, after a day of lots of interaction with lots of different people, I really need time to recharge my batteries. I'm not at all shy; in fact, I have no trouble at all talking to strangers. I just don't always "need" to. Sometimes after a day full of people, I just need to not talk for a while! Mom says that, during her breaks at work, she'd often just rather read a book or eat lunch with her own thoughts than sit around and chat. I certainly identify. However, unlike what the author of the article suggests, I don't (and I don't think Mom does, either) find extroverts boring or irritating -- quite the contrary! I even admire their ability to turn on a constant stream of effortless communication. But it can be frustrating how, in our society, you're expected to keep this up all the time.

I wonder if there's an assumption that being introverted means being misanthropic or unhappy? Maybe that's why people often mistake my general good nature with gregariousness -- if I'm happy or friendly, I must also be an extrovert. I wonder if this is why I sometimes feel like I disappoint my friends, because I give off the impression of needing more social interaction than I really do? Don't get me wrong, I'm no loner. Everyone needs friends. And I have some pretty cool friends. But I also don't have any problem being by myself either, and even need a pretty good measure of it in order to recharge. I've often scratched my head at the apparent need for most everyone I know to be socializing what seems like all the time. But maybe it's not them at all: I'm the weird one! According to this article, the majority of the population are extroverts: socializing is how they relax and re-energize. So what seems like "all the time" to me is pretty reasonable to everyone else.

It certainly is more practical to be wired that way. To be successful in school, your job, and relationships requires constant social interaction. It's a sign of leadership. This is what makes a person likeable and what makes them appear proactive. And because I can do this pretty well when I need to (I mean, I'm a teacher, for goodness' sake), I haven't let being introverted inhibit my success. It's just that it seems to take so much more effort for me than for others, and I really need my downtime in order to keep it up.

What gets me thinking about this is that it seems my predecessor at the school where I work was naturally very extroverted. From the sound of it, Elodie made her colleagues her life. And she had a marvellous time, and her German became perfect, and they all loved her and still miss her. I met her myself, and liked her enormously: she's funny, smart, friendly, and sincere.

But I'm slowly realizing that the other teachers expect me to be just like her. I mean, if one more person reminds me one more time about how she spent like 20 hours a day in the teachers' lounge, while giving me one more "meaningful look"...! What actually baffles me is that I do socialize with the other teachers. They're great. I lucked out in how fun and nice and interesting my coworkers are. I hang out and chat while at the school, and have gone out with them several times in the evenings and on weekends. But for one thing, they're not the only people I know here; and even if they were, do I have to spend all of my free time socializing in order to show that I like them and want to be a part of the group? I suppose so; it's part of living in an extroverted society. But compounding this is the fact that I'm also getting to know lots of other (German, I might add) people who have nothing to do with the school, and so it spreads me even thinner.

Because of this, I get the feeling that Frau Griesemer is worried about me. I've mentioned being able to talk to my family on the webcam at home, and now she seems to think that's what I do all the time, to the exclusion of getting to know my coworkers. Don't get me wrong, Frau Griesemer is fantastic. She bends over backward to make sure I'm happy and comfy and have opportunities to make the most of my time here. She even clips out newspaper articles about the region which she thinks I might find interesting, and leaves them in my box at work! But maybe this is just part of what is misunderstood about introverts? Sometimes, when I get home in the evening, I don't need to talk to anybody. I'm not sitting around bored and lonely and homesick, or holing up in my apartment and avoiding integrating into the city and the culture. In fact, a lot of my "alone time" includes exploring the city or going for long walks to check out other towns nearby. I just don't always need to be surrounded by a bunch of other people to do it.

But I can't complain. I mean, people like me and want to hang out and make sure I am enjoying myself here? How terrible! I guess it's just hard when you realize that in order to show your appreciation, you have to constantly be fighting your own nature. Sigh. Did I pick the wrong career path? Maybe I should be an arctic fisherman or something, so that in my free time I'm foaming at the mouth to have someone to talk to.

Okay, I've now spent over an hour posting on my blog. Maybe I am holing up in my apartment! ;o)

Alles nur geklaut

Well, that cinches it. November, I'm sorry, I know you're my birth-month and all, but you haven't been so very kind to me this year. I'm afraid we have to end it. Don't try to talk me out of it; I already have a date with December this Friday.

See, in order to balance the karma a little, the Powers That Be saw fit to whittle down my fabulous wealth last Sunday night. I just happened to be carrying around some extra cash; which never I do, except that Anna had paid me back for something and I just hadn't gotten around to getting to the bank to deposit it. Besides, it's surprising how often places only take cash around here: the doctor's office, most restaurants, the cell phone store where I recharge my minutes; often even train tickets can only be paid for with cash. So I really wasn't in an urgent hurry to get these 135 Euros into the bank, since having them around was turning out just to be so darned practical. Plus I liked logging into online banking, to see that my balance hadn't moved. I thought, maybe this is how I'll budget myself: take a little bit out, and see how long it can last me before I have to dip into my checking account again.

On the other hand, every time I opened my wallet, I winced a bit to see that much liquid cash. Just has never sat right. Back in Tucson, when I'd accumulate more than 50 bucks at a time, it was away to an ATM to get it somewhere safe!

Well... nothing like being proved right. I guess. At the Frankfurt airport last Sunday night, I also had another first, which was to leave my purse on a bench as I leapt for an S-Bahn. Seriously, I've never done that before! Although, to be fair, I've also never lived in a truly cold climate since I've started carrying a purse, and so what with gathering up sweater and leather jacket, you don't immediately detect that that something's missing. Until five minutes later, when you get off the S-Bahn. I ran back to every place I had been in the last half an hour, including that bench and the bathroom, but no dice. Purse gone. I started having daymares about having to replace my passport before flying home in December; about not having my housekey; having no ID, no money, no anything; about identity theives posing as an American on a visa. I mean, German beaurocracy is bad enough -- but trying to sort out an identity theft on top of it all, while trying to re-instate yourself as a legal resident?? AAAAAAA!!!

So while I was hyperventilating, the police found the purse and called me in. Amazingly, everything was still there: passport, keys, phone, chapstick, credit cards, cappuccino receipts, even the check Dad and Sarah had sent me for my birthday. Everything except the 135 Euro. The shock of having lost my purse, and then having found it again almost intact less than an hour later, only to then re-discover that I had been relieved of the small fortune I knew I shouldn't have been carrying around, was too much. I should have been thanking my lucky stars that everything else was still there, unstolen and (most likely) unphotocopied. At least, now I appreciate that. But there was this saddening feeling of realizing that some people are capable of rifling through your very personal belongings, seeing what kind of gum you chew and which scent you wear, even your name and where you're from and what you look like -- essentially be able to look you right in the printed eye, and still have no qualms about stealing your money from you. Maybe they thought I was a rich American tourist, instead of a poor foreign teaching assistant whose mom and sister paid her credit card bills last month. They probably weren't thinking that far at all. They just saw cash, took it, and didn't want to get caught with the rest. It was actually found by a maintenance guy on the same bench I left it. I suspected him, but the police pointed out that it would be pretty stupid to be the one to both steal it and turn it in, where it is then immediately noticed that money is missing. There was nothing they could do except file a police report for my "insurance company." (I guess most Germans have insurance for everything, even personal theft.) Well, I have emergency medical insurance, and that's pretty much it.

But you know what? I woke up yesterday morning and was overcome with gratitude that everything else was still there. I am out one-fifth of a month's pay, but other than that, this will have no truly lasting effects. As Mom once said: it's not that I'm lucky because nothing bad ever happens to me. Part of it is simply, on those few occasions when something bad does happen, it's never so bad as it could -- maybe even should! -- have been. So I'll just restock the rice and beans in the cupboard, cut out the morning cappuccino, and enjoy this beautiful almost-December air. It's foggy outside, and looks whiter and winterier than it has in weeks. School is going fabulously (I love my job!), and there are lots of fun things coming up in the next few days: Nigel coming to visit this weekend, a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) with some teacher friends on Friday, a party on Saturday, and maybe frying up some fajitas with the Hamanns on Sunday.

If you're family or friends reading this, I'm not writing this so that anyone will worry! There's nothing to worry about! I'm not carrying around any cash any more, my purse is all but stapled to my side, and I can still pay my rent next week. And that's really the only kind of crime around here anyway, this petty "opportunity theft". Furthermore, even that was in Frankfurt, not quaint little Neustadt. So, again, no worries! I'm fine! I'll just have to teach my purse some Taekwondo.

However, let this be a lesson to anyone who could use it! DO NOT CARRY MUCH CASH! Especially those of you in the States, for whom it's not even very necessary to do so. Heh, the cop even scratched his head when I told him how much had been in there. "Really?" he said, "Odd. Americans don't usually carry cash around." I told him he would be right... usually. Sigh. Oh well.

Oh, but speaking of German conceptions of American habits, I just realized I haven't written yet about Anna's and my funny little experience at the doctor's office! Gotta go for now, but more on that later. Coming to a blog near you!

Happy almost-December, everybody. :o) Hugs from almost-Christmas-Season Land!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMY!!!

She and Shauna are heading down Tucson way to celebrate theirs and Michael's birthdays -- and also some obscure American holiday where they eat a weird-looking bird and a pie made out of a Halloween decoration. Crazy Amis!

Wish I could be there to celebrate with you, Aimster. You'll just have to eat my portion of the turkey and 'taters and birthday cake. :) Alles Gute und alles Liebe zum Geburtstag!

Runner's high

Wanna hear something? Lean in close. Ready? Here it is:

I HAVE FOUND THE SECRET.

Shh. Don't let it out or everyone will get in my way on the sidewalk. But after much drinking and eating and companionship and other such experiments, I have found the key to happiness. The best way to combat the cold and grey is with this:

Endorphins.

That's right, natural drugs. You put in your earbuds, turn the volume up on your catalyst of choice (currently it's noisy, clamorous, get-the-blood-rushing German metal, though just the other day it was happy bouncy techno) and you take off down the street at a dead run. By the time I round the corner and head down hill forty-five minutes later, pouring sweat and pigtails bouncing against the back of my neck to the same rhythm as my feet, "Erdbeermund" is pounding in my ears and I can see over the entire valley below Hambach. I can see for miles. As far even as the slender cooling towers of Mannheim in the distance, edged right up against the Rhein river. And I take off down the hill like I'm about to fly over the valley, and grab a handful of bright red autumn leaves as I run by and let them scatter out behind me, like some kind of crazy sprinting Hansel who needs to be sure to mark her path so that, when she comes back to occupy her body, she can find her way home.

To everything, there is a season

Dad had a point once, when he said that the "official" start of every season is actually late by twenty-two days. You know how summer does not officially kick off until June 22, autumn on September 22, etc? Why not just bump it all back to the beginning of these respective months? I mean, do we really think that December 18th, for instance, is still autumn? Or that Saint Patrick's Day is in the winter? We proposed the following:

Winter: December 1.
Spring: March 1.
Summer: June 1.
Fall: September 1.

There. Isn't that how we already think of it, anyway?

What puts me thinking about this is that it seems to have suddenly switched seasons. Here in the Pfalz, they call last month "goldener Oktober." And for good reason! It was sunny and pleasantly warm, but the leaves were still bronze and copper and beautiful. There were grapevines and winefests, and the sun rose at, like, six-thirty am.

All of a sudden, it's like a curtain has dropped! Just in the last week, too. One morning, it was eight o'clock and I was walking to school in the sunshine without a jacket. The next morning, it was dark, cold, and foggy, and the sun decided to go down at what seemed like four-thirty in the afternoon. Seriously! It was dark at a quarter after five today! If I get out of school at 3:30 (typical for Mondays and Tuesdays), then I have less than two hours of daylight in which to go jogging or run errands, before it's too dark to do anything by yourself. It's been raining for a week, and the grapevines are a bunch of scraggly sticks. Hmph. Most disagreeable. I think the standard way people add some sparkle to the darkness is with Gluehwein and gingerbread, both seemingly excellent options; but frankly, I've gotten fat enough since I've been here, and so I've *just* decided to cut out the sweets and alcohol for a while. Nice going, Nikki!

On the bright (get it? :) ) side, the Christmas decorations are going up already. Now in Arizona, I would scoff at the idea of ribbons on streetlights before December 1st. There, it feels like forced "Xmas" cheer, rammed down your throat as early as possible in a thinly-veiled attempt to cash in on the pre-season buyfest; holiday-themed car commercials and garish Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoons in shop windows, advertising 99 cent cheeseburgers... all made as shallow and meaningless as possible, because God forbid we actually admit there's some sort of *religious* connection to this holiday, and someone gets offended and decides not to spend their money at our chain store. Which is even more ridiculous, because no one is fooled, for example, into thinking a Christmas concert is not exactly that, just because one vague, generic, non-religious Hanukkah song about a feast of lights and a couple of "ya-ba-bim-bam"s are mixed in among the fifty other songs hailing the Blessede Birthe of Our Lorde and Savioure Jesus Christ, Hallelujah, to His Mother, the Blessed Virgin, Ave.

Here, on the other hand, there's something decidedly un-commercial about the garland-hung streets. It's like everyone just realized that it's time to drive some of this sudden darkness away with tiny points of white light, and maybe offer a bit of Lebkuchen in the bakeries, too. The decorations feel like something that is done for you, rather than to you. And maybe it's just the sixteenth-century architecture, or the fog on the ancient hills, but the way the Advent season is celebrated around here seems to recall the Yule traditions, born of ties to the land and seasons, that gave us holly decorations and lights in the first place. It's comfortable, calming, cozy; something about it speaks to the ancient part of you that remembers your ancestors huddling close together around a fire and telling stories, deriving comfort from the closeness of community against the vast dark forests around them. And yet at the same time, it is also unabashedly religious, which seems a much more honest way to celebrate the season than our American need to cover all our consumer bases. If you celebrate Christmas, then you celebrate Christmas; if you don't, no amount of calling it a "holiday" sale is going to trick you into thinking the rest of the religious majority isn't trying to foist their Xmas buyfest upon you.

All righty, well, this post is long enough. Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: it's getting dark around here, but there are tiny white lights aplenty. :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRO!!!

Today is my brother's birthday! Michael, Shauna, and I have all spent the last week sharing the age of 26. Today, however, he moves on and leaves us behind to join the 27-year-olds at the grown-ups' table. Hope your birthday weekend is terrific, bro... and wish I could be there next week when Shauna and Amy come down to celebrate with you!

Love ya. :)

Nachdenken

Leipzig was... pretty cool. The part that I remember, anyway. It must have been fun, because Anna sent a bunch of pictures of me with my eyes half-closed and everyone looking like they're having a pretty good time; so I must have had a heck of a birthday. Parts I do remember include:

-how great it was to see Matt Johnson again. As we all expected, he's taken Cambridge by storm and now bends his Almighty Eye on the rest of academia and, dare I say it?, the world;

-a cool '70's-themed bar called "Flower Power", with flower-shaped tables, felt-draped ceilings and lamps, and all the best music ever made between 1960 and 1979;

-Anna doing "the Twist" in said bar, and looking like a painting all weekend as she wandered around in her blue scarf. The girl is just a dear. I'm glad I met you, Anna. :)

-Ivan "Here, Nikki, Have Another Peanut" Grubisic being the catalyst he usually is. And Anna and Jason brainstorming the best ways to bring the fresh-faced young Croatian into a life of hedonism and debauchery;

-Jason's lovely description of the joy of using a Q-tip to clean your ears;

-remembering how seeing Conny is always a breath of fresh air, and making plans to come visit her in the Erzgebirge in December;

-Bert's shocked response to Americans profaning beer with Irish Car Bombs (for the uninitiated, you drop a shot of Bailey's into a Guiness and chug it before the cream curdles. The aftertaste is delicious -- after you've gulped for air, of course). I think it was something like, "Ach, nein!" followed by looking at me with knitted eyebrows as I wiped my lips, and scolding, "Aber Frauen machen das nicht!"

-Nigel just being... Nigel. Thanks, Nigel. :)

-And, well, to be frank, a lot of unspoken thoughts on the last time I was in Leipzig. I didn't really think about it when we planned to make this trip in the first place, but the city has a lot of memories associated with it that made it hard to be there without brooding a lot of the time. For anyone to whom I might have appeared rather distant: sorry. That's much of the reason why I spent most of the weekend with either a beer or a Gluehwein in hand. Thank you for coming up, however, and making it a trip to (un)remember.






And to the source of the memories:
It's not the same city without you.

Wandertag

We're off to Leipzig today for the weekend! Oh boy!

I got up at 7 this morning with a plan: clean, pack, shower, and prepare a lesson before leaving for school at 10.45, so that I could teach at 11.30; school over by 2.45; rush to Hauptbahnhof to catch the train at 3.30... all of which would of course necessitate bringing my weekend things to school with me, since the train station sits right between school and home. This I did. Anna had given me one of those awesome hiking-type backpacks, with hip and shoulder straps and everything; it's the size of a small duffel, and donning it with its many pulleys and levers sort of turns you into a backpack-human hybrid. So, thus clad, I lumbered out the door and began the 1.5-mile walk to school.

Maybe a third of the way there, it starts raining. I unpack myself out of the contraption, dig out an umbrella, foist everything back on, and continue on my way, holding the umbrella so low over my head that I must have looked like some strange humpbacked animal with a flat, green canvas head. The rain picks up; the rain starts pouring. I navigate down the million stairs that are the "Treppenweg" down the hill from my house; and by the time I've gotten to the bottom, my pants are soaked up to the knee and the rain is bouncing back up from the pavement so that it feels like it's coming from all directions. The Haupstrasse is a cobblestoned muck. Slosh all the way to school... finally emerge from the storm into the entryway, and shake out my mostly ineffectual umbrella.

Boy, it's quiet here. Well, I suppose it is the middle of a class period. Shoes squeak all the way up the stairs to the teachers' lounge. Open the door. Lights off, quiet. "Hallo...?" Nobody. Go to secretary, where there is actually a light on. "Um... good morning... did I miss something? Where is everybody?"

I should point out that the secretary always seems exasperated with me. To my credit at least, this is the first really dumb thing I've done since I arrived here; but I've still always gotten the sense she rolls her eyes every time after I leave her office, even if the only reason I entered in the first place was to pick up paperwork. But this time it was real: "Today is Wandertag (hiking day). It is CLEARLY MARKED on that tiny bulletin board, underneath the other bulletin board, in the paper-and-bulletin-board-covered corner of the teachers' lounge. (Eyeroll.) Good day, Frau Eggers."

I was sorely tempted to shake my droplet-covered umbrella at her, but instead I turned around, buckled The Contraption back onto my rain-and-sweat-soaked back, and went back outside. The rain had stopped! In fact, the sun was bright and glittery. Very bright and glittery. Noonday sunlight was reflecting off wet surfaces everywhere, and I ended up stripping off every layer but my undershirt as I huffed and puffed my way back up the billion stairs and the uphill march home.

Wandertag, indeed!

In the cold November rain

Well hey again, Ye Olde Interweb Worlde! Gosh, long time no post... sorry 'bout that... even though there be much a-goin' on here, yarr. Alas, as Amy points out, you get all these ideas when you're nowhere near your computer; but then there appears to be some kind of inverse relationship between how much contact is currently being exerted upon your fingertips by your keyboard, and the quality & quantity of aforementioned thoughts sloshing around between your ears. So how about I just start somewhere, and shake some of these incoherent thoughts out onto the keyboard, and see what comes up.

Lessee... Anna's buddy Mark from the States visited last weekend, and we had a grand old time. He was actually in England for a friend's wedding, and so just hopped across the creek to come see us Teutons on the continent, in exchange for a promise by Anna to pour lots of beer down his throat. And so we did! Thursday night, we sat around at a cozy little Gaststaette somewhere on the Weinstrasse and got thoroughly toasted. Friday, we wandered around Heidelberg, and then concocted some Gluehwein -- hot mulled red wine, with orange juice and sugar and spices, mmm! -- to ward off the cold evening. (Anna, I will never forget The Face!!) Sunday, we had the honor of being the only guests at this funny little medieval-themed pub downtown, where we polished off two liters of honey mead (mmm, mead...), strawberry wine, and blueberry wine. There's been quite a bit of alcohol flowing these last few days! No wonder I'm putting on weight, even though we must walk like ten miles a day!

Speaking of warm beverages, though, it's amazing how fast it turned cold here! I mean, richtig *kalt*. (For us Arizonans, at least... ;) ) Yesterday, I wore some thigh-high socks that Shauna sent from Seattle under my jeans, an undershirt, a sweater, another heavier sweater on top, gloves, a scarf, a wool coat, knee-high leather boots... and was still a weeeee bit chilly. Didn't help that it's kind of a wet cold around here... and they say this is the warmest area of Germany. Yikes! Though Nico and Ivan both rang to report of snow in Muenchen, sigh. Alas, Anna and I were unable to hold up our end of the pact to come down and roll in it. Well, it'll probably be a long winter. :)

Which reminds me! My birthday is this Friday. It's strange to type that: "my" birthday. Weird. Let's try this again: *our* birthday is on Friday. :) And since any occasion is an excuse to travel and meet up with other friends here in Europe, we're all meeting up in Leipzig! Yay! A city close to me heart. :) Even Matt Johnson is flying in. I'm so excited to see him! We will take tons of pictures. But anyway, so I've booked a hostel for 8 for Friday and Saturday nights, and we'll all meet up Friday evening somewhere (maybe Auerbachskeller, though that's kind of an expensive restaurant) and then play, play, play until tottering home Sunday afternoon. I'm so happy that everybody is willing to spend the time, money, and effort to come join us... Anna, Conny, Nigel, Ivan, Nico, Matt, and probably Bert, too. Heck, if I'm going to turn 26, I'm going to do it in a city that I remember fondly as a place of happy irresponsibility. :)

Oh, yeah, and work is going great... I finally put together a specific schedule, and got all the "good" classes to teach for the rest of this semester! Mostly the somewhat older ones, whose English is good enough to hold more meaningful discussions, and with whom it therefore makes more sense to talk about cultural matters with a native speaker (yours truly). And the other teachers continue to be fun and friendly, and constantly invite me to go do stuff with them. We're even all planning on cooking Thanksgiving dinner together! And sometime this week I'm supposed to catch up with a bunch of them for drinks... yeah, more alcohol. Well, I *am* engaged in cultural studies, you know. ;)

Allrighty, jetzt an die Arbeit. Hugs to all!