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