The Indians win! and travelling to Egypt

Last night Brian and I went to our third Hannover Indians hockey game. I know I've written about it before, but this time they actually won and so I thought I'd tell you more. We went to the game with Kent Todd, also known as Kent Todd Ice Hockey God. He's a Canadian from Alberta who used to play for the Indians and then coached them for a few years. Now he works at the International School but is Mr. Popularity at the games. I guess we were his entourage.

The stadium is all standing room and open on two sides with a big U-shaped roof over the rest. Last night it was packed - the Indians were playing the Bremerhaven Penguins who are apparently very good. The tickets and the signs and everything said Fischtown Penguins, which confused me because I didn't think the Germans would actually name a city Fischtown. They are not that corny. My lovely husband then told me that it's a nickname for Bremerhaven, which is on the sea. I guess that makes sense. The Indians have not been very good at all this season. I don't claim to know much about hockey but I'm learning a little and I really like going to the games. It's loud and crowded, you get to stand close to the action, and there's a smell of sausages in the air. The die-hard fans sing songs and beat drums and everyone high-fives when the Indians score a goal. They came from behind last night to win 5-4 in overtime. You can look at their website if you are interested: http://www.hannover-indians.de/
And for you Minnesotans out there, they did play the Gear Daddies zamboni song before the game started. We were proud.

Today is Christmas Eve and it's raining. That makes it sound kind of depressing, but we are not depressed. We are going to Egypt in two days. What says Christmas time more than camels and pyramids? I guess the 3 wise men rode camels, so maybe it is a good place to go this time of year. Packing for Egypt will take some thought - because it's a conservative Muslim country, modesty is important. Men can wear pretty much what they want, though shorts are not common, but women need to at least cover knees and shoulders in public. We will be in Cairo for 3 days, then we fly to Aswan, spend a night there, and get on a Nile cruise the next day. The cruise will take us to a lot of sights along the Nile and we will have plenty of guided tours of really old stuff. We will spend New Year's Eve on the cruise (there is sure to be a party in the 'on-board discotec') and end in Luxor, where  we spend another day and then return to Cairo and home.

Why Egypt? We are going with our good friends Tom (Dizzy) and Sonja. They had planned to go last year but never did. Then they invited us to go with them before we even moved to Germany. So now we are making it a foursome. It seems like a place that one should go at some point in life. The pyramids at Giza are the only remaining wonder of the ancient world. I think you should get a special stamp in your passport for that.

Yes, there have been protests and some violence in Cairo. From what we have heard, it's contained in the Tahrir square area of the city. We do not plan to head down there in shorts and tank tops, holding picket signs and waving flags. We do plan to stick to the other areas of Cairo that are safer and I am sure will be exciting enough for us without demonstrations.

So I will dig out some long skirts and get the camera charged up this Christmas. We will also continue our Christmas movie marathon, thanks to a Swiss website that is probably illegal but has all kinds of TV and movies in English. You won't hear from me again for a while - we are back Jan 4th. I plan to write the old fashioned way, in a journal, while we are there, so I can report the details to you later.

Frohe Weinachten to you all, have a very merry Christmas! Thanks for making this blog a fun project this year. There will be more to come in 2012.

New look

I changed the color scheme of the blog to mix things up a little.

Frohe Weinachten

It is the eve of Christmas Eve, and so I figured I would write about Christmas.
You should also know that right now one of our neighbors is playing Feliz Navidad really loud and we can hear it through the floor. That's the Christmas spirit!

Several people have asked how the Germans celebrate, so I will tell you what I know.  The word for Christmas is Weinacht, and the big day is Dec. 24th. German schools have about 2 weeks off and most businesses are closed the 24th and 25th, though the bakeries and grocery stores are open in the morning on the 24th. From what I understand, Germans spend the 24th with immediate family, go to church if they do that sort of thing, open gifts, and have a family dinner. On the 25th they celebrate more with extended family, and on the 26th spend more time with friends, neighbors etc. Christmas as Americans know it was largely invented by people in Germany and northern Europe, so they have a lot of the same traditions we do. No, there are no huge light-up plastic Santas, and no robotic reindeer on the front lawn. There are, however, lots of Christmas trees, Advent wreaths, stockings, candles in windows, and even mistletoe.

The Germans sometimes use real candles on their wreaths and Christmas trees. This sounds like a fire trap to me, but makes more sense if I try to think like a German. You see, they believe a lot in rules here and people follow the rules almost all of the time. Consequently, things work pretty well. So the logical rule about trees is, if you light real candles on your tree you need to be in the room and watching so that you'd know if the tree starts to burn. If you decide to leave and your house burns down, well that's your own fault. We've noticed this about other parts of life in Germany too. Like at the hockey game they don't stop selling beer after the 2nd period. In fact they sell it well after the game has ended. You are a grown up and should know when to stop drinking, and if you don't and you make a fool of yourself or fall down, that's your own fault. When I go to the pool, there are no life guards. I guess they figure that if you are going to swim laps, you already know how to swim and shouldn't need someone to watch you. If you need to walk across the train tracks, there's no gate to keep you from doing so. You should, however, look both ways so you don't get hit by a train.


So back to Christmas, Germans traditionally eat goose for Christmas dinner. I thought it would be fun to try cooking one, or part of one, since Brian and I are here for Christmas. At the grocery store yesterday I saw a whole fresh goose, which was about 10 or 12 pounds. It cost 42 euros!! That's like $58. Just to buy the breast or the leg was expensive, even the frozen ones. So I bought a beef roast instead. I will experiment with goose another time. The other foods they have a lot around Christmas time, aside from chocolate (which there is a lot, and it's delicious) of are:

Marzipan - It comes in all shapes and sizes, it's creamy and sort of nutty and people seem to either love it or hate it.
Stollen - which is sort of a dense pound cake with raisins in it and powdered sugar on top.
Lebkuchen - similar to gingerbread but more cake-like and with stronger spices (cardamom maybe?) and is often sold covered in little hearts or cakes covered with chocolate.

There is a shortage of Christmas cookies, which I have personally tried to eliminate. I made about 5 batches that went to a couple of friends and school staff who have been nice to us and the rest went to Brian's eighth graders. I just made another batch yesterday so we'd have more for ourselves. There are also not a lot of candy canes. There's nothing I can do about that.

Of course the Weinachtsmarkt is the big outdoor market that goes through all of Advent. I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago so look back if you missed it. Sadly, the market ended yesterday.

I apologize to any real Germans if I have misrepresented you holiday celebrations. Feel free to correct me. This is just what I have figured out by talking to people and looking around.

What are we doing for Christmas? Well, we leave for our 10 day Egypt trip on Monday the 26th, so that's the big excitement. We have a tree, but with electric lights. I guess we don't trust ourselves with the candles... For Christmas Eve we don't have much planned, other than watching some Christmas movies and eating our roast beef dinner. On Christmas day we will go to church, eat some brunch, pack, and probably watch more Christmas movies. There are some packages that arrived in the mail and allegedly a few more coming in January, so we have a couple of gifts to open too. And we will play Christmas music. Apparently Germans like Feliz Navidad so we will make sure to put that one on the playlist.

Score a point or two for me.

Score a couple of points for me making my way in German society this week. I am not sure if I'm winning  yet, but I got a couple of things done.

I made the bike trip to Ikea yesterday. If I had tried something like that back in the Twin Cities, I would have had to dodge the interstate and Mall of America shoppers. Thinking about it that way made me realize this was not such a big deal. I had bike lanes and sidewalks almost all the way - why wouldn't I go?
I made it in and out in 30 minutes and got enough shower curtain liners to last a year. I also managed to fit a floor lamp in the saddle bag, and did not get sleeted on. It was a successful journey.

Today I went to get a library card. I actually went last week, but learned that I needed not only my passport but also a copy of our apartment lease in order to get a card. So I got the passport and lease together and went in. I found the info desk and told the librarian I'd like to register. I knew this was the word for it (rather than 'to get a card') because there was an exercise in my German textbook where a girl goes to the library to register her sister.

That was about where I stopped understanding the language around getting a library card. The librarian gave me a copy of the rules and talked a lot about them and I nodded a lot. She looked at my lease and my passport with the residency permit page in it. Then she asked (at least two times until I understood) if I had received a document in the mail from the foreigner's office that also had my address on it. I guess the lease with my name on it and the passport with my name and the residency permit issued in Hannover weren't quite official enough. She asked a colleague, who then went and asked someone else, and they decided that they'd accept what I had brought, since they were dated recently or something like that.

They did, however, accept my Metro State student ID card. I brought it just in case, because there is a 20 euro annual fee for a library card, but it's only 10 euros for students. The librarian was a little concerned that there was no expiration date on the ID. I told her that I would be a student for at least two more years and that seemed good enough for her. In Germany people are students for what seems like a decade on average, so it was a safe bet that my ID from 2010 was valid.

Other than making all the librarians in my family proud of me, the point of me joining the library is to get books in English and Spanish, which they have, and then to check out kids' books in German to help me learn. They also have a lot of books for learning German, my favorite being Deutsch for Dummies. I didn't check anything out today though. I'd had enough of the library for one morning, and I had to bike home in the sleet.

Bike cargo

Usually I really like not having a car, though it does make carrying things around town more of a challenge. Brian went to a bachelor party on Saturday for one of his fellow teachers. They started with a soccer game at school and Brian had offered to bring a case of beer for the guys to drink after the game.
In our former lives, Brian would drive there and make a quick stop at the liquor store to buy some beer on the way. In our lives in Hannover, it's another story. I have two bikes. My older bike is the one I take around town to do errands and such and it has two saddle bags on the back. While Brian started walking, I rode to the Getrankmarkt, which is the store where you buy beer and and any other sort of beverages. I then bought a case of beer, which is 20 beers. (Why do Americans like to have things in dozens? Eggs come in boxes of 10 here too). I had to unpack them and load them into the saddle bags, putting towels in between so they didn't clank too much as I rode down the street. I met Brian at school and we wheeled the bike in to unload, making sure the kids playing basketball in the gym didn't see us.

I am thinking about riding my bike to Ikea. I have to go there to buy shower curtain liners, which Ikea must have a monopoly on, because I can't find them anywhere else. The other times I've gone there I take a tram and then have to walk about 15 minutes to the store, so riding my bike seemed easier. Plus I could get my exercise in and save 4 euros by not having to buy a ticket. Now I am debating about just how much stuff I can fit in the saddle bags (you can't go there and only buy shower curtain liners), and wehther it's a good idea to wear a backpack too. I won't be buying any furniture, but I wonder if I could manage to bring home a floor lamp somehow...

Of course, it could be raining and sleeting when I decide to go, since that's happening about every day now. Then I might chicken out, or I might still go and be totally miserable doing it. If only they sold shower curtain liners somewhere else... There are times I really miss Target.

So far the saddlebags have worked well for carrying boxes to the post office and for carrying bottles of soda and wine. I even carried a bike pump in the saddlebag last week, though half of it was sticking out of the top and I thought it might fly out if I made a sudden stop.

Even though carting things around this way seems odd to me, it's pretty normal for Hannover. A few days ago, I saw a couple carrying a Christmas tree by balancing it on a bike and walking the bike home. I've also seen someone walking a bike home from the flea market with some furniture loaded on it. I guess cars aren't the only things with wheels that you can use to cart your stuff around. They just move faster and don't clank as much when you go over a bump.

What things cost

Ex-pats in Germany like to talk about what's cheaper here and what's more expensive. Why do we do this? I am not sure. It's not like we can beat the system somehow and import what we want. And comparing costs doesn't mean we can change them... but in case you too are interested, here is my short list:

What is cheaper in Germany than in the U.S.
Foodwise - basically anything that is good for you is cheaper here
milk, cheese, sour cream, butter
bread
fruits and vegetables
muesli (but not other cereals)
juice
beer, wine (yes they are good for you)
candles
getting places on planes and trains
rent (although it depends on what kind of deal you get)

What is more expensive in Germany than in the U.S.
soda
canned soup
chips
beef
electricity and natural gas
gas
electronics
fabric for sewing
bike tubes
running shoes
small appliances or anything electric
(It is possible that I have not yet found the best places to buy things for cheaper...)

Our expenses are really different here. At least until this blog starts bringing in big money, we are living off of one income plus the bit that I earn cover teaching. We don't have a car, car insurance, gas costs, car maintenance costs etc. We don't have a TV or a cable bill, but we do have a projector that hooks up to the laptop. Our rent is less than our mortgage was. We just have pre-pay cell phones because, as we realized when we got here, how many people are really going to call us anyway? We are still working off the first 30 euro credit we got with each phone. We have no microwave (mostly because I don't want to give up counter space) and no dryer for our clothes (no one here has one, that's something I do miss).

Our energy and water bill is funny - we pay a prorated amount every month and then at the end of the year they tally up what you actually used and either send you a refund or bill you for the difference. We take that as a challenge and throw on another sweater.

We can no longer steal wireless internet from the neighbors like we did in St Paul and had to buy our own.But our major new expense is all of the lavish travelling we plan to do. Brian has two weeks off at Christmas, a week in February, two weeks in April, and six weeks in the summer... You can go a lot of places in that amount of time!

The other difference is the way you pay for things here. People use cash a lot or bank cards, but credit cards are not accepted in many stores. Christmas shopping without a credit card is very different experience! There are also no checks. People just do bank transfers. Our rent, energy, and internet bills are debited from our account every month. If you need to pay a bill, you go online and type in the bank code and account number and do a transfer that way. It seemed odd at first to give our account number out but that's what people do here. Some companies even put it on their letterhead.

And look at me, comparing costs again. I guess it's interesting for a little while, even if it doesn't accomplish much.

Zuckerrubensirop

These are Lebkuchen hearts

This yet another posting about groceries. If you are not interested, just skip it. My feelings won't be hurt.

Yesterday I was on a quest to find molasses. Somehow I had decided that it would not be Christmas unless I made gingerbread cookies, and I could not make gingerbread cookies without molasses. I suspected they sell it here since Lebkuchen is pretty common, and it looks a lot like gingerbread. They sell it in big heart shapes at the Christmas Market, with sappy phrases written on the Lebkuchen in frosting (like Americans might do for Valentine's Day). Anyway, I did not know the word for molasses, and the dictionary did not help me. I looked at a big grocery store, and found nothing. I looked at a gourmet grocery store. I even asked there, but because I didn't know the word for what I was looking for I had to try describing it. I asked the lady who worked there about finding a syrup, for baking, that is a brown color. That was the best I could do. She took me to the section with food coloring and said that she was sorry, they didn't carry brown, but I could try mixing a few other colors to make brown. I gave up on that store.

I met up with my friends Renee and Kaska for lunch, two members of our hausfrauen club. Kaska is Polish but has lived in Germany for a long time and had a German friend from out of town with her. I described what I wanted to Kaska, who didn't know the word but asked her German friend and they talked about it for a while in German until he finally came up with the word: Zuckerrubensirop.  So I went to yet another store, this time the one where I usually shop, and looked over and over again at the shelves in the baking section - no luck. I decided to ask the guy who was stocking and said "Do you have..." and showed him the paper. I wasn't sure I could pronounce that word so that he would understand. Luckily he did not laugh at me. He took me to the section where they sell jellies and honey and pulled out a paper carton of Zuckerrubensirop. I had been looking for a clear glass bottle in the baking section, preferably with a picture of a grandma or a bunny or something familiar like that. Instead, this is what it looks like:

So now I can make gingerbread, which means Christmas can happen here in Hannover. But if I decide I need brown food coloring, I'm out of luck.