"Bond"-ing with Germans, Saucy Popcorn, Thanksgiving!

On Thursday I was invited to eat dinner with my tandem partner Christine and her roommates Lena and Sarah (and another girl whose name I can't remember!) at their apartment. It was a wonderful time and I got lots of practice speaking and listening to German, reading German recipes, and watching Germany's version of "The Voice" on television. For dinner we cooked Kartoffelbrei (mashed potatoes), Rotkraut (red cabbage), and Frikadelle (fricadelle), a very German meal. We had a mixture of sparkling water and apple juice to drink, then we lounged on the couch and ate gummy bears for dessert while watching the Germans sing their hearts out.

"Skyfall" movie poster

My tandem partner Christine, Sarah and I went to the movies together Saturday evening to see Skyfall, the new Bond movie! The movie was stunningly excellent, it definitely lived up to the hype, and I think I may have loved it even more because I saw it in German and I understood almost all of the dialogue! That's a milestone for me. :) German movie theaters, like almost everything here, are very logical. The tickets cost different amounts depending on where you sit in the theater, so the lower level seats are less expensive than the higher seats. Also, every ticket has a seating assignment on it, so they really maximize the space and make it less chaotic. For popular movies like "Skyfall", people reserve seats in advance, but if they don't pick up their tickets earlier than half an hour before the show starts, they can be sold to others. It's definitely an interesting system. And of course, since it was my first German movie experience, I wanted to go all out! I decided to get some popcorn and a drink from the concession stand. I was feeling mighty grown-up 'cuz I had my money ready and I already knew what I was going to say in my head. It went quite smoothly until- "Salze oder süße?" The guy was asking if I wanted salty or sweet popcorn, but in my mind "salze" sounded like "soße" which means sauce in English, and I surely did not want any soggy, saucy popcorn! So I asked for süße and munched happily throughout the film, but I learned my lesson and next time I'll go for the regular salty popcorn!

Thanksgiving is this Thursday and AYF is having a group Thanksgiving dinner and I wasn't sure what to bring, but since I've never cooked heavy duty dishes like Mac and Cheese (not out of a box) or stuffing, I decided to play it safe and bake my cheddar/garlic butter biscuits. I finally found extra sharp cheddar cheese here in Germany so I think I'm all set for Thursday!

Later this week I'll do another post about the Thanksgiving gathering, hopefully with pictures!

Bis dann!

Overview of my Winter Semester Classes

I am currently in my third week of University classes here in Freiburg and I seem to have fallen back into the rhythm of the whole school thing pretty easily, considering the fact that I actually went 6 months without having a full semester of classes since U of M let out so early for the summer and Germany's classes didn't start until the end of October. I must admit it's kind of strange not having any technical classes. No math, no science, just literature, grammar, and history. It's different but still enjoyable.

My classes:

The USA in WWI: A University history course about the role of the United States in the first World War. We read texts about the war in English and German and discuss them as a class. We also choose topics to give an oral presentation about each week. This is probably my most challenging class because it's full of native German speakers and the conversations can get a bit deep and beyond my knowledge of German vocabulary. Also, the professor speaks a mile a minute, but I get the gist of things.

Contrastive Linguistics: This is one of my favorite classes. It is an introductory English seminar about linguistics and comparing and contrasting the English and German languages. The professor is this cool, funny old guy from Berlin who speaks a ton of languages (or a least a few words from a ton of languages) and is a fan of class participation. It's basically a large group discussion comparing the languages which is quite helpful for me because knowing linguistically how German and English differ from one another will help me grasp the German language better.

German Grammar and Composition: This is a good class, not because it's particularly interesting but because I know it's extremely helpful. It's basically a continuation of the intensive language course I had during my first month here in Freiburg.

German History from Unification to Reunification: This has been interesting so far, it's just rather difficult since the text we read is long and in fairly complicated German and I spend half of my time looking up words, but on the bright side my vocabulary is expanding! It's not terrible though since all of the students in the class are part of my study abroad program, so we all suffer together and the instructor takes what we say into account. Also, we're taking a class trip to Berlin in January, so that's something to look forward to! :)

German Literature: This is probably my least favorite class, but I've never really been one to enjoy being assigned a book, having to read it and discuss it, and then being told that I'm "thinking the wrong things" or "not getting the meaning the author intended." How do YOU know?! This was written in the 1800s, I doubt you know what he meant either... But aside from that the class is nice. It's a comfortable atmosphere so we feel fine with speaking up and making a fool of ourselves in broken German. Some of the things we've read (poems and short essays) haven't been too bad, but I don't quite know what to think about this section on German Romanticism...

Well, those are my classes for the first semester! And I truly can't complain because this is the first semester that I've never had a Friday class! Three day weekends are wonderful things...

Until next time!

Munchin' in München

The Rathaus or the Town Hall

Almost two weeks ago Tuesday and Wednesday I went with my friends Allison and Tucker on an overnight trip to Munich, Germany. Even though we didn't stay very long, I had a wonderful time! We caught a bus and arrived in the late evening after five hours of travel. Tucker has a friend from U of M who is studying for the year in Munich and he met up with us and took us out to eat at a popular restaurant called the "Hofbrauhaus." I had roast beef with little potato dumplings and a glass of beer. It was wonderfully German and wonderfully delicious! We also saw the Rathaus, which is this big elaborate building that used to serve as the town hall. We lamely turned in early for the night because, after discussing it, we realized that we were all dead tired and weren't really in the partying mood, so we headed back to the hostel and slept. Wednesday morning we got up early, partook in the free breakfast offered by the hostel (bread, jam, meat, cheese, boiled egg, juice, coffee, same old), checked out, and began to head out into the city. Off we went!!! Left right, left, right, le- uhhh, hold up! Where were we going? We realized we had no idea where to go or what to do, so we turned around and head into the lobby of the hostel where there was a huge stand full of pamphlets. Tucker whipped out his laptop to find ideas (and check his email) and I, firmly establishing myself as a tourist, leafed through the pamphlets and picked out a few places to see. We decided on a leisurely sight-seeing day since we had lots of time to kill until our bus left later that evening.

The first place we went was the "Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst München" or "The Munich City Museum of Egyptian Art." I know what you're thinking: 'That's not very German, why did they go there?' And you know what? It wasn't! But it was cool all the same and the free audio guides were auf Deutsch so I got a bit of practice in! We saw ancient Egyptian weapons, coffins, jewelry, hieroglyphic scrolls, cat sculptures, books, sphinxes, scarab beetles, egyptian gods, and more! I've always wanted to learn hieroglyphics or some sort of script language, and ancient egyptian history has always seemed really interesting to me, so maybe I'll read up on it some more in my free time!

Me with the City Garden in the background

The next stop was the City Garden, which was basically this huge expanse of green. Green grass, green trees, green people (as in environmentally friendly). It was beautiful and I got a ton of pictures, but too many to put in this entry. They will, however, eventually be on Facebook! :) After our visit to the City Garden, we became hungry and sought out some food which landed us at some kind of outdoor Turkish restaurant/stand. I had curry wurst which is basically just a weiss wurst in some curry-flavored sauce. It was okay, but it's apparently very popular in Berlin, so I suppose I should develop a taste for it before I visit there! After lunch we had a bit more time to kill so we visited random stores and churches (there were so many churches!) before finally heading back to the bus and beginning the journey back to Freiburg. I thoroughly enjoyed Munich and I would love to go back for another visit. The city has so much more to offer than just Oktoberfest and I'd love to seek out more cool spots that I didn't have time for during this first visit!

With any luck I will have another blog post up later this week detailing my first week of classes!

Waffles and Chocolate - Breakfast of Champions!

I apologize for being MIA for the past couple of weeks, but I was on vacation. Luckily for you I have plenty of stories and photos to share with you about my travels! Three Fridays ago I finished my final exam for our intensive language course, rushed to the main train station, and caught a ride to Brussels, Belgium. We arrived around 11 pm, spent two nights, and arrived back in Freiburg around 11 pm Sunday night. Brussels is the capital Belgium and also the de facto capital of the European Union. Both nights we went out and explored the town and the culture. For being such a popular city, everything seemed to close really early. There was one little street with about 5 bars that stayed open until the wee hours of the morning and that seemed to be where all of the younger people hung out, so we stationed ourselves there for the most part. I met a ton of international students from Spain and France and even one from Germany! I also noticed that most of the beer in Germany has an alcohol content of about 5 percent by volume, but in Brussels the beers were anywhere from 9-11 percent alcohol by volume.

Belgian Waffle with Strawberries
and whipped cream :)

Saturday morning we went out and explored the town. We went to the town square where they had an interesting flea market with fragrances, scarves, handmade jewelry, pottery, and more. We also visited a museum about the famous Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte. We went to a store called the "Beer Temple" where they had hundreds of kinds of beer, we visited many a chocolate shop, and of course we had Belgian waffles. Ohhh, those Waffles...They were amazingly warm and crunchy on the outside and hot and fluffy on the inside. The whipped cream was so delicious and different than in America, and the strawberries were incredibly fresh. And they didn't skimp either; there was a strawberry for every bite! :) 

Brussels Cathedral

On Sunday we had time to kill between checking out of our hotel and heading back to Freiburg, so we walked around the city, visited the Grand Place, got my friend Sonya a coffee fix, and saw the city cathedral. Even though every major European city seems to have a big, historical cathedral, they never fail to floor me with their beauty. Seeing the cathedral might actually rival the waffels for my favorite memory of Brussels. We went on a Sunday and mass happened to be in session, but it was interesting because I noticed that there were actually more people just touring the cathedral that what there were attending the service. The Brussels experience was fun and relatively painless even though the main languages spoken there are French and Dutch. It was funny because I never realized how much German I actually know until I couldn't speak any of the languages around me and found myself responding to the locals in German! All in all, Brussels was a very enjoyable city and I had a good time!

Oktoberfest! Just kidding...

People climbing over the tracks. Shoulda seen the
girls wearing Dirndls and  heels, poor things...

Once upon a time (last Friday to be exact) a group of five intelligent young people traveled to the main train station after their German class and spontaneously bought a ticket for five to Stuttgart for the following day. That Saturday in Stuttgart just so happened to be the Volksfest, a crazy festival/fair that seems like a slightly scaled down version of Oktoberfest. They met at the train station Saturday morning around 8, took three different trains to get to Stuttgart (the last of which stopped on the tracks for a hour and everybody had to get off, climb down the rocks, risk getting crushed in a landslide of dirt and pebbles, then scale a concrete wall and hop the fence), met up with some friends of theirs who had arrived the previous night (and who had had an adventure of their own!), scarfed down some food from the food court in the Stuttgart train
station, then hopped on a tram to where the Volksfest was being held.

Carnival ride from Hell. Not really, but it lasted
forever and I had bruises for days...

Little did these young people know that the following 14 or so hours would be incredibly fun, alarming, hilarious, and tiring. The most tame period of the adventure was during the time they were actually at the festival (only six hours or so). They "snuck" into a beer tent (they still can't figure out if they were supposed to get a wristband or not), ordered huge 1-Liter mugs of beer, danced on tables with the natives, belted out the lyrics to popular tunes that the DJ spun, ate a whole chicken, lamented over the fact that they were going to miss the Chippendale's performance the following evening, ate some pasta and macaroons, made friends with some dudes from Mississippi and Florida (they were battle buddies on leave from the Army for a while), rode a carnival ride (the longest ride ever-it lasted for SEVEN MINUTES! No exaggeration!) and finally called it a night and wandered back to the main train station. Then the real adventure began.

There had apparently been an accident or something that caused huge train delays and resulted in the majority of the tracks being closed. Well now. These young people needed to get home because their ticket was only good for a 24 hour period and they had class on Monday and homework to do! Some dude came by and yelled, "There's a train and it's leaving NOW!" Then it was chaos-these intelligent young people were sprinting madly toward this train, along with everyone else. They just barely made it, having to squeeze together and get cozy with a group of Germans wearing Lederhosen. These Lederhosen-wearing Germans just so happened to be going the same way for two of the three trains, so the young people struck up a conversation and had company on the way home.

The third and last train home stopped suddenly and unexpectedly and announced that it would be having a 30 minute delay. So two of the young people hopped off in search of a restroom (didn't find it) and made friends with a 27 year old law student named Christian who has perfect English because he studied abroad in Ireland. The intelligent young people (and the 27 year old law student) finally made it back to Freiburg at 3:30 Sunday morning, a full two hours after the scheduled arrival time. They then had to walk 40 minutes back to their dorms because the trams weren't running at that time, but that's nothing new!

All in all, it was a wonderful experience, although we were all slightly disappointed because the Germans were not exhibiting their typical punctuality. However, it resulted in a wonderful adventure with wonderful people and I wouldn't change any of it even if I could!

All photo credit in this entry goes to Allison!!!

A few things I've noticed...

I just wanted to write a quick post about a few things that I’ve noticed about the Germans since I’ve been here, some good, some not so good, some funny, some interesting, but all worth writing about!

1. People always say that Germans never jaywalk and they will give you murderous looks if you ever dare to do it, but all I’ve experienced is waiting (for forever!) for the light to change to green while everyone else around me crosses the street while the light is red. Maybe it’s because Freiburg is kind of a college town and is full of young people who don’t care, but that kind of surprised me.

2. I also read an article back at U of M about how the Germans hate open windows and breezes because they’re afraid of getting sick from a draft, but everyone here keeps their windows open! They love breezes and fresh air here in Freiburg.

3. If you’re eating in a restaurant, the waitress will not come up to you periodically and ask you how your meal is, if you need anything else, or if you’d like the check. Once you order, you’re essentially on your own and you have to flag down the waitress when you want to pay. I actually like this system because the waiters/waitresses in America have an annoying habit of speaking to you when your mouth is full of food and all you can do is nod and grunt.

4. If an elderly person comes on the tram and you try to give up your seat, more often than not he/she will refuse it and choose to stand. My intensive course instructor said you know when they want to sit because they’ll look you in the eye and ask for your seat directly.

5. Where are the water fountains? I feel constantly dehydrated and have taken to carrying around a liter bottle of water everywhere I go because I have yet to see a water fountain in this city. Not one. They’re playing “Let’s Hide from the American!”

I don’t know how the Germans do it.

6. Everyone knows this but I’ll say it anyway. Germans are very prompt and on time. They are also dependable, I asked my roommate Temel for the time and place where I pick up my router for my internet and he said he’d look it up for me. Apparently I was out when he came to tell me and he didn’t have my phone number, so he slapped it on my door in the form of a Post-It note and it was waiting for me the next morning!

7. Almost always strangers on the street speak to each other when they pass each other. It caught me of guard the first couple of times but now I’m quick to respond with a friendly “Hallo!”

8. If you start a conversation with a German in German and they can tell you’re American, they automatically switch to English. I’m sure they think they’re being helpful and making it easier on us, but all we want to do is practice our German!

That’s all I’ve noticed for now but I’m sure there will be more things to come!

Markthalle, Reward Hiking with Good Food!

Early last week I ate a wonderful dinner of chicken curry with my friend Allison. We went to a place downtown, which is essentially a food court, but a thousand times better. You can choose from Persian, Indian, Arabic, Brazilian, French, “American”, and Bavarian dishes, and probably a lot more that I’m forgetting! Allison and I both opted to have the chicken curry dish. It was a plate piled with fresh rice, huge chunks of chicken in curry sauce, lettuce, a tomato slice, and a chip (yes, just one), all for just 7 Euros. It was perfectly filling and magically delicious, just like lucky charms!

By the way, this entire entry is going to be about food. Just a heads up!

On Sunday morning, Allison, Michael, Marisa and I met around 9:30 in the morning and grabbed some coffee and something small for breakfast, then hopped on the trap towards downtown. We got off at the same stop where the restaurant that we had the fancy reception party a short while ago is. That restaurant is built onto/into a mountain and that’s the mountain we needed to hike up. The goal was to find another restaurant (whose name eludes me at the moment) located about 4 kilometers up the hiking path that has an absolutely wonderful Sunday brunch. There were a lot of signs along the path so it was easy to get there and the walk went pretty quickly because I was with good people and there was no lack of conversation!

Delicious brunch spread

Once we made it to the restaurant one of the waitresses took our drink orders (the buffet came with one cold drink like orange juice and one hot drink) and told us to grab a plate and head on through the buffet. The spread was incredible: regular croissants, croissants filled with chocolate, an assortment of breads, three different kinds of jams/spreads, little packets of Nutella (they love Nutella here!), fresh fruit salad, fresh sliced tomato and chunks of mozzarella, strawberry and plain yogurt, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, salmon, what I believe was thinly sliced turkey, granola and muesli. The food was delicious and it was the perfect reward for our morning hike, despite a freak incident involving a fork, flying cheese, and an unfortunately placed cup of coffee.

We should make everyone back in America hike before they eat. They’ll enjoy the food so much more!

Until next time!