Aachen and Baked Apples

Last weekend was another Rotex Wochenende with all the inbound students in district 1810. This time we went spent it in Aachen. The first night was a big Christmas party with music and dancing. It was after 3am before we finally got some sleep. Then we were cruelly awakened at 6:45 to get ready for a German test. We spent the morning taking a test that consisted of German listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills. After the test we went to the Aachener Weihnachts Markt. Aachen has a very well known Christmas market in the center of the city. It's a festive display of food and gift stands. One of the most common German Weihnacht traditions is Gluhwein. Gluhwein is a very sweet wine served hot. Very tasty! Aachen is also well known for the Aachener Dom. This is one of the oldest cathedrals in Germany. Charles the Great began building it in 792. It was consecrated in 805 by Pope Leo III. The Aachener Dom was extremely significant in the early Catholic religion. It was built as a shrine to Mary. It was also the church where coronations of 30 German kings and 12 queens took place between the years 936-1531. When Charles the Great died in 814, he was buried in a vault of the Cathedral. He has been dug up and reburied several times, but his remains are still there. Perhaps the most famous part of the Aachener dom is Shrine of St. Mary. It contains Mary's cloak, John the Baptists beheading cloth, Christ's swaddling clothes, and his loincloth. These are brought out of the shrine and put on display every 7 years. The weekend in Aachen was a lot of fun and NOT a lot of sleep. It was sort of rainy on Sunday when we left Aachen, but Aachen is considerably lower in altitude than Haan. I was welcomed home by about a foot of snow.. slushy, wet, gross snow. It normally wouldn't bother me, but it's much more snow than the people here are used to getting. So it was slightly chaotic.

On Thursday I attended my Rotary club's Christmas party. It took place in an old church in Düsseldorf. We had a personal pipe organ concert and then a VERY nice dinner.

Last night I spent the evening with a group of girls in my class making baked apples. It's a popular Christmas treat here. They were super tasty and I had a great time getting to know the girls. You can check out pictures at www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation Don't be alarmed when you see pictures with a handsome little man named Flat Stanley. I'm taking pictures of him around Germany for Mrs. Ulseth's third grade class in Minnesota, and sometimes I forget to take my own pictures without him. =)

Thanksgiving

I think I wrote something along the lines of a promise not to neglect my blog so much in my last post. Is it too late to apologize? School has taken up most of my concentration this past month. I've recently joined the school choir and was selected to be in a swing choir of six girls. It's been a lot of fun (and a lot of work).

Some highlights of November were another trip to Oma's (including another hedgehog incident with our dog Paul), a trip to the Ruhr Museum, and Thanksgiving!

The Ruhr Museum was really interesting. It's in an old cool washing plant in Essen. They restored the original building and much of the original machinery but added some modern twists. The museum has three floors. The first floor focuses on "present". It has a great display of photographs of the Ruhrgebiet (valley of the Ruhr River). One of Ginette's best friends was a photographer for this display. He's the one who took us to see the museum. The second floor is about "memory". This floor displays much of the original machinery and things from the industrial revolution. The third floor is "history". It focuses on the history of Germany. It includes geological and archeological artifacts and displays of the early church. It was really interesting to see history this old. America is so young in comparison!

It was really strange to still have school when Thanksgiving came around. I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to share some American culture with my host family and some friends, so I cooked an authentic Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. It was a lot of work, but the cooking itself went rather smoothly. The difficult part was grocery shopping. I had never realized how many canned items Americans use at Thanksgiving. Well, I discovered that Germans don't can much, so some ingredients were very hard to find! I ended up having to use fresh pumpkins for the pumpkin pie. Turkey is also rare here. We had to call a butcher to have a fresh turkey ready for us by Saturday. We named her Gertrude. She wasn't a butterball, but after lots of added butter and seasonings she tasted great! The Thanksgiving menu included Gertrude, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie. We only had one normal pie size dish, so I doubled the recipe for the pumpkin pie and put it into one big dish. BIGGEST PUMPKIN PIE EVER! And it tasted just as yummy with fresh pumpkins! The dinner turned out perfect, and everybody enjoyed the all-American experience! It was worth the work! Check out pictures at www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation

Fall Break

The past two weeks have been fall break. Two weeks off of school in Fall is a concept I could get used to! I'm not going to get to sleep in on Monday... my body may be slightly shocked. I told myself that I would get time to write blogs, a new Gazette, and finish scholarship applications during break. But I didn't. I've been out and about almost constantly.

To start off vacation, I had my first swin golf experience. Frank, Ginette, and some family friends took me out to spend a lovely Sunday afternoon playing 18 holes of this strange variation of golf. It's the exact same concept except there's only one club. This club is three-sided with a driver, pitcher, and putter. The balls are slightly bigger and soft, and the holes are much bigger. It was a lot of fun! After the first nine holes we took a break for lunch (which is actually eating at about 3 here). The golf course raises ostriches and uses the meat in their restaurant. I had a delicious salad with marinated ostrich meat. That was new. I was also quite surprised to see a wallaby at the golf course too. "Kangaroos in DEUTSCHLAND!? WAS!?" All-in-all, it was a great day!

My next big adventure was a trip to an art park outside of Wuppertal. It was very modern art. I've come to the conclusion that you can call anything art. And usually calling it that somehow makes it appear cooler than it really is. This concept is now a running joke between Ginette, her friend Gabriela, and me.

The other day, Ginette took me to tour Zons. It's an old medieval fort/castle right on the Rhine. There isn't a bridge to get to it, so we had to take a car ferry. It was fun. The little town is under the German equivalent of the Historical Society, so the surrounding wall and towers and houses are required to stay how they were in the 1300's. It was neat to see the look out towers and the little alleys.

Those are three of the major events of my fall break. I've also enjoyed doing some cooking with Ginette, meeting new people, seeing Duisburg Harbor, shopping, and spending time with friends and my host family. It's been a great vacation. In about an hour I'm going English style horse-back riding with a friend, and tomorrow I'm going to visit Holland for a day of shopping with Ginette and Kolja! I'm having too much fun on break! I'm not ready for school to start again!

Check out pictures at www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation

Rotex Wochenende, Haaner Kirmes, Starting School, Rotary sister club Potters Bar Weekend, and Köln Dom

I realize I have been extremely negligent with my blogging responsibilities and I apologize. The last two weeks have been insanely busy. I will attempt to fill everyone in without writing a novel.

Weekend of September 24-27: Friday, I went to my German course and received my certificate for passing with a 1,3 (1,0 being the best and 6,0 being the worst). Ginette was very proud of me and gave me a beautiful orchid plant (my favorite flower) for a congratulations gift! It already has 4 blooms open! Friday evening, I packed a sleeping bag and a change of clothes and headed to the Rotex weekend lock-in in Solingen. The first night, all the students were split up to stay with host families from Rotary. I was paired with Maria from Equador, and we stayed in the pool house of a very wealthy Rotarian. We were having a splendid time with the family until we went to the pool house to get ready for bed. There we discovered that our bathroom had a shower and toilet COMBO. This is apparently a French style, but the toilet had no toilet seat. It was a hole in the floor that doubled as the toilet and the shower drain. We were both quite shocked and confused. Let's just say that we urgently ran to the bathroom in the house the next morning. But we had a good time laughing at the situation. The next morning we met with all the other exchange students and went to visit Schloß Burg. We rode up in pairs on a little lift (like a ski lift). At the top we were allowed a couple hours to wander and explore the castle. Most of the rooms were turned into a museum. After the castle, we took a long hike through the woods to Müngstener Brücke, the highest steel railway bridge in Germany. We then returned to the little sport hall in Solingen where we stayed the night. We started out with presentations of our countries. The Brazilians and the Mexicans did some traditional dances for us, and then it was the Americans' turn. The Rotex member in charge of the music had spent a year in America so he started playing popular teenage dances like Cupid Shuffle and the Cha Cha Slide. No other countries had to present after that because it turned into a huge dance party. The Rotex lock-in ended the next morning with several new couples (apparently the no dating rule isn't very important to Latin Americans) and more importantly, new friends from all over the world. Sleep deprived friends that is.

On arriving home, I took a nap and then geared up for a night out at Haaner Kirmes, the city festival. International food, fun rides and games, and German beer make Kirmes the best weekend of the year in Haan. Frank (my host dad) got home from Mexico on Monday. The entire city is closed down for Kirmes on Monday. The weather was cold and rainy, but miserable weather doesn't keep the residents of Haan from spending the day at Kirmes.

Tuesday was my first day of school at Gymnasium Haan. Everybody in my class was very kind and helpful. They showed me to my classes and tried to help me understand the lessons. Most of the school is sleepy after Kirmes. Tuesday is the last day of Kirmes, and even though it is another school night, everyone goes out to Kirmes for the last hurrah with fireworks and fun. And school is once again slow and sleepy on Wednesday.

On Thursday, I finally had my first Rotary meeting with the Hilden-Haan Rotary Club. It was nice to meet everyone (even though I can't for the life of me remember all the German names that I'm being introduced to here). The Hilden-Haan club meets weekly at a very nice hotel for either lunch or dinner. Thursday was dinner and we had a delicious salmon dish. The presentation was about gold in the world presented by a representative of a jewelry company.

Weekend October 2-3: The Hilden-Haan Rotary Club has a sister club in Potters Bar, England. Each year they visit each other, and this year it was Potters Bar's turn to come to Germany. I was invited to spend the day with them. We went to Essen where we saw a beautiful Impressionism display at the art museum. Then we had lunch at a fancy restaurant before boarding a cute tour boat in Dortmund, and toured Germany's largest inland harbor where the Ruhr pours into the Rhine. Spending the day with the British Rotary members was very diverting. We finished the day with a formal dinner at a restaurant near Hilden. For all the Wayne Rotary members reading this, I have collected three foreign banners for the club thus far. I exchanged with Hilden-Haan, Potters Bar, and a special guest with Potters Bar from the Waltham Abbey, England club. =)

Yesterday, Frank and Ginette took me to Cologne to see the cathedral. The weather was gorgeous and we thought we had chosen the perfect day to visit Köln. We were wrong. The main autobahn route into the city from Haan was closed for construction so we had to take a round-about detour only to find that our second option was also closed due to the Cologne Marathon running through the central city. What should have been a 20 minute drive took nearly two hours in stand still traffic with an overheating car. But once we finally arrived, the afternoon was splendid. I climbed to the top of the Cathedral tower via a small, stone, spiral staircase. And I did it very quickly because Frank and Ginette were waiting for me at the bottom. My legs were a bit tired afterwards but it was really cool to see. We weren't able to explore through the cathedral much because they have services all day on Sundays so most of it is closed off. Ginette assured me we would go back again. I also got to see the digging site near the Cathedral where it has been discovered that the entire city of Cologne is built on top of an ancient Roman city!

So all-in-all it has been a wonderful and exhausting two weeks. Ok so I pretty much wrote a novel. I will try to stay more current on my blog entries from now on! You can check out pictures at www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation

Schwebebahn und Brake

In Wuppertal, their public transportation includes the Schwebebahn instead of a normal train. This train hangs from a rail that travels above the streets. Ginette took me to Wuppertal last week and we got on the Scwebebahn and took it all the way to the last stop and then back again. Wuppertal is well known for its wide variety of churches, most of which are "sehr schön" (very beautiful). It was a lot of fun riding all through the city looking at the architecture. I'll post some pictures of the Schwebebahn on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation

Friday, right after class, we loaded up with backpacks and our trusty terrier sidekick Paul and took off for a weekend at Oma's (Grandma's). Ginette's mother lives in a town called Brake near Hertford and Bielefeld. It's about a two hour drive north of here on a good day (more on that in a bit).

Brake is about as rural as it gets here I think. The population is probably somewhere from 3-5 thousand. I can never tell though. Unfortunately Germans don't put population signs up, and the people are squished into much smaller spaces than they are in the United States. A town here may have the area of a very small city but the population of a much larger one. Brake has quite a bit of farmland around it where they harvest corn, asparagus, beats, etc. But even farmland is way different. Some of these farmers have to try to squeeze a field into an area the size of a Nebraskan's back yard.

Oma's home is a very large, very old house. It was built in the 1800's and was once a bakery. Since then, they have renovated it into a home, but kept much of the original style. She now rents parts of it out. I put a few pictures on getjealous. It was really nice staying there for the weekend. We had a wood stove burning and bird feeders outside. I woke up before everyone on Sunday morning and sat with a cup of tea enjoying the quiet and watching the Nuthatches and Chickadees bicker amongst themselves for the bird seed. It reminded me of Sowbelly Canyon in Western Nebraska. Oma is a splendid cook, and it's just like visiting Grandma in America. You always eat too much, sleep better than you would at home, and are never ready to leave.

There are several things I learned throughout the weekend at Oma's:

1) How a two hour trip becomes much longer: Ginette's car is rather old and objects to hills. The minimum speed limit on the autobahn is 60km/h. At times we were going 50. Poor little Mitsubishi. This is one way to extend the length of a trip. Another is a 16km long traffic stand still. Ginette always gets off right away and drives around through towns on smaller highways until she sees an on-ramp that's not backed up. This saves more time than the cars still on the autobahn, but still lengthens the trip considerably.

2) If at all possible you should avoid making regular potty breaks at autobahn rest stops. Why? Because there's a 70 cent fee to use the bathrooms. My stall was even out of toilet paper. What a rip-off! They do give you a little 50 cent coupon to buy something, but they know that 80% of the people won't actually use it... they're sneaky alright! This was probably the most shocking experience I've had in Germany thus far.

3) How to efficiently peel a hot Kartoffel (potato) after it's been cooked. They don't eat baked potatoes here, they eat boiled potatoes. And they don't eat the skins. They boil them and then skin them afterwards.

4) Cutting your potato with your knife is an absolute NO NO! It's considered very rude in Germany. You may only use your fork to dissect your potato. It made me giggle when Kolja was scolded at the dinner table for this... nobody mentioned it when I did it the night before, but I'm glad I learned this with my family and not in a more formal situation.

5) Hedgehogs are abundant in Germany. And terriers love to hunt them. It's virtually impossible for a dog to catch a hedgehog before they roll up into their tight little balls. When they're rolled up they can't be harmed by the dog. Well, I've learned that Paul has supercanine powers. He is somehow able to catch hedgehogs before they roll up. He's obsessed with it too. Even when his mouth is bleeding from the spines, he will not let a hedgehog go. Oma loves hedgehogs and feeds them so they stay in her gardens. I think you all see where this is going. We had a bit of a dramatic incident as we were loading up to go home. Pouring water on Paul was the only way to get him to release the poor critter. But after the battle was said and done, the traumatized hedgehog was not mortally wounded, and Paul received absolutely no sympathy for his bloody gums. He was repeatedly called a "Dummkopf".

All in all it was a splendid weekend. Today I began my last week of German Class. We are officially speaking only German around the house now. I'm getting along pretty well, but require everyone to speak VERY slowly... and to be patient with the lag-time while my brain translates German to English (what I can translate that is), processes a response (consisting of very few words due to my meager German vocabulary), translates it to German, and tries to get my tongue to utter the foreign sounds. I'm sure I appear to be lacking intelligence when this sequence takes place, but they are all very understanding.

Wednesday will mark a whole month in Deutschland! It's baffling how quickly it's going.

First Inbound Orientation

Today was my first inbound orientation. Dr. Probst and Dr. Staeding from my host Rotary club took me to Bonn for the meetings. There are about 75 students from all over the world in district 1810. We all introduced ourselves by country and then were oriented on the Rotary rules... again... Then we were allowed to mix and mingle and meet everybody. It was a lot of fun, and I exchanged a lot of pins! My jacket is filling up quickly! =) I posted a picture of the whole group on www.getjealous.com/cultural.cultivation.

After the meetings, we drove to the hotel where the UN Conference on Afghanistan was held in December 2001. It's a really beautiful hotel with a fantastic view of Bonn and the Rhine River. There's also a random castle nestled into the hillside visible from the patios of the hotel. There are pictures on getjealous.

It was beautiful weather for the orientation, but it just started raining again as we were getting home. Typical.

Future events:

Sept. 16 I will attend my first Hilden-Haan Rotary Club meeting. Topic: J.S. Bach =)

Sept. 17-19 Weekend visiting Ginette's mother

Sept. 23 The final for my German Class in Düsseldorf

Sept. 24-26 The District 1810 Rotex Club is throwing all the inbounds a slumber-party weekend. =)

Sept. 26-27 Haan Kirmes! The annual 4-day fair of Haan. It actually goes from Sept 25-28, but I will be at the Rotex weekend until sunday morning, and then will have school on Tuesday. Gymnasium Haan doesn't have school on Monday because of Kirmes.

Sept. 28 My first day at Gymnasium Haan!

Oct. 2-3 Hilden-Haan Rotary club's sister club from England is visiting. We will attend a French Impressionism art display! =)

Kleine Unterschieder

I've established a list of kleine Unterschieder (little differences) that may seem quite trivial, but I found them interesting.

1. Emergency exit signs are not red, they are green with a little man running toward the exit.

2. Stop lights not only turn from green to yellow to red, but also from red to yellow to green. I've decided this must be because nearly all cars here are manuals. An extra second before you can go gives them a chance to put it back in gear...

3. Door 'knobs' are non-existent here. I have yet to see one. They are all handles. Ginette told me that she saw a door knob one time and it took her a long time to figure out how it worked. That made me giggle.

4. Windows here don't usually have screens. They also have two opening options. I haven't seen a window that slides like most American windows. Instead they have option one: turning the handle 90 degrees will open a window out like a door. Or option two: turning the handle 180 degrees will keep the bottom of the window in place and the top will fall in toward you a few inches. Straaaange, but option two conveniently keeps the rain out.

5. Window shades are on the outside with a pulley contraption from the inside to lower them. If you're real sophisticated they might be automatic with just a button. =)

6. Right on red is not legal. But most people do it anyway.

7. Chevy's are really rare, but I saw my first one yesterday. It was a blazer. I've only seen two pickups since I got here. One was some sort of metro pickup. The other was a Dodge Ram. I never thought I'd be excited to see a Dodge, but I was.

8. All the light switches here are those ones that are like plates that work like teeter-totters. But I think they're backwards from the ones in America. You push in the bottom of the plate for on and the top of the plate for off. I don't know if I explain it well enough but I can't find the name of the switch. But they don't have the up and down switches that a lot of Americans have.

9. Public bathrooms are usually two separate rooms; one for the toilet and one for the sink. This is rather efficient for one-seaters, because the next person can go in while you're washing your hands.

10. Toilet flushers are never handles. They're like big buttons and they always have a little picture of a hand and water waves just to makes sure you know the function.

11. Many people don't have dryers. They hang their clothes out to dry. Except it's usually raining so they actually hang their clothes IN to dry. They make clever use out of stairway banisters and the backs of chairs.

12. Hardly anybody drinks normal water here. It's almost always carbonated mineral water. I'm starting to get used to it, but it makes me burp. Nobody else seems to have that problem so I must just be strange. Or maybe they have a discreteness I could benefit from acquiring.

13. In Germany it's not three-ringed binders, but TWO-ringed. It's actually not so bad. I would normally worry about the corners flying so free, but when their in the binder they're fine. It makes hole punches much more compact. (I know, trivial, but interesting)

14. In German, bitte means please and you're welcome, and danke means thank you. However, in restaurants, the waiters say bitte as they hand you your food kind of as a "here you go. enjoy." It was really awkward the first time this happened to me because it was like they were saying you're welcome before I got the chance to say thank you. I just stared at the waitress in confusion for a minute and then mumbled "danke??" I'm getting used to it now, but it still seems so backwards.