Finally...

Snowy, icy, and stormy in Minnesota.

52 degrees and foggy in Hannover.

This is what I signed up for!

Not every day in Hannover is interesting

I realize that it might seem cool when you read about us going to Berlin for a weekend, and playing weird ball throwing games, and visiting Mini Wunderland. There are plenty of days when life in Hannover is not so interesting. There's not much going on here this weekend.  This morning after Brian shook off the hangover from teachers' Friday happy hour we took advantage of spring-like weather and took a bike ride. But being spring-like weather, it was really windy and we got blown all over the place. It did feel good to get out on the bike in February with no snow or slush or grit to deal with.

We stayed in for the evening and our biggest excitement was the plan to try out food from the Texas-style steakhouse. They deliver and you can order on-line. In addition to onion rings and hot wings and ribs, you can also buy donuts and hot dogs. Sounds delicious, right?

We knew it would probably be disappointing as most quasi-American food in Germany is, but when you see a picture of onion rings and you haven't had onion rings in 6 months, it's tempting to try them out. I placed the order online but got a message that our postal code was outside of their service area. That seemed unlikely since they had left a menu on our doorstep. So, as any normal customer would do, I picked another postal code. That one worked. Then time went by - 30 minutes, 40 minutes - and the screen still said that the order was being sent to the restaurant for processing. I started thinking that the postal code thing was a problem. After an hour I got up the nerve to call.

I'd rehearsed what to say in my head - carefully, since this required using the past tense - and dialed. I managed to say that I'd placed an order online an hour ago, they asked my name, I replied - and the guy on the phone understood it all! Then he said something about how the restaurant was really busy and the order was still coming. I was pretty excited that I'd managed a short conversation with no hand gestures.

The food did come about 15 minutes later. And it wasn't very good. The onion rings and the chicken wings were ok but the ribs were a little tough and the potatoes were nothing like the picture on the menu. We may never order from the Texas-style steak house again, but at least the experience boosted my confidence a little. Someday I might even call to order Chinese food.

It's too wet for a bike ride today and the only phone calls we will probably make will be to family and friends back home. Today promises to be a very normal and uninteresting Sunday. That's ok with me.

once upon a time...

I am a little tired of living this story, so in order to tell it to you, I will simplify it and write in the form of a fairy tale. Here we go.

Please note, names of the characters have been changed to protect the innocent.

Once upon a time, Julie and her beloved Mac moved to a far away land. They were excited to go but it was very different from the kingdom where they used to live. Both Julie and Mac were official employees of the kingdom, but now in the new land, only Mac was an official employee for educating the children of nobles, important people from far away, and other rich folks. Julie had no official job other than getting their new life going.

At first it was strange for Julie to not be an Official Helper of People and Person Who Runs Things, as she used to be. But as time went by she started to learn the language of the new land, worked a little at home and at the school for the nobles, and adjusted to living far away. She sort of liked being unofficial.

Then one day, the royal educator at the school for nobles asked if Julie would like to work as an assistant to a teacher of very small nobles and children of important people from far away and other rich folks. At first she was excited about being an official employee again, and so she told the school that she was interested. Then Julie found out that the teacher in need of an assistant was actually a witch, and that the school would not give her very much gold for the time that she would work there. Julie didn't know what to do. For so long she had missed being a Person Who Runs Things, but now she had other unofficial work to do and wasn't sure if working with the witch was a good idea. Julie worried about this for two whole days and nights.

Then she decided to tell the royal educator that she would not like to have the job. And Julie felt much better. She knew that the school for the nobles might need her in the future, and that being unofficial is not the same as being unimportant.

And they lived happily ever after. The end.

Miniatur Wunderland - Hamburg

Just to clarify, my title does not mean that Hamburg IS a miniature wonderland. Everything there is normal-sized, at least as far as I could tell. Hamburg HAS a miniature wonderland, and we visited there last weekend.

After leaving Berlin, we continued our little tour of big German cities and went to visit Dizzy and Sonja in Hamburg for the weekend. After wandering around visiting bars throughout the city on Friday, we had a lazy morning Saturday and then went to Miniatur Wunderland.

It is basically a museum of model trains, cars, planes, people, buildings and all kinds of moving parts. They are designed to look like various countries in Europe, and there's even a USA section with some wild west scenes. There is an airport with planes that take off and land, and a Scandinavian harbor scene with boats sailing on water. If you look closely enough, you can make out all kinds of details - a kids' birthday party, a crime scene, cows scuba diving, and the occasional R rated romantic encounter.

I can imagine my nephews leaning over the railings, mouths hanging open, fascinated by all the trains, pushing buttons to make the little scenes move. Of course, there were plenty of grown men doing that too.

Here are some photos to give  you a better idea.

Pumpkin patch

Dead body in a river

The command center

Berlin - take 2

Brian's school had last week off. Usually the international school's breaks line up with German school breaks, but not this time. The international school families wanted a week to go skiing all by themselves, I guess.

We, however, did not go skiing. Since we had a big trip to Egypt a couple of months ago, we decided to have a more low-key vacation this time. We went to Berlin for two days and then spent another two days in Hamburg with Dizzy and Sonja. .

Why Berlin? Because it's cool. Hannover is a nice place to live and all, but there is so much more to see in Berlin - there's a lot going on even in the winter. We'd gone in November because Brian had a training there, but there was still plenty we hadn't seen.

We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and our plan of wandering around until dinner time was somewhat wrecked by gale-force winds. We managed to break up the walking with a hot chocolate stop, a visit to a free exhibit on Chinese history at the university, some browsing at a fancy wine and liquor store, and a stop at the ATM. We talked about taking the subway but it seemed simpler to just walk to the next destination. Then we ended up at a fancy bar drinking fancy cocktail that we had definitely earned by walking into brutal head winds all afternoon.

We met up with Giulia, who you may remember from a previous post. She was there working at the film market which is part of the Berlinale film festival. Her job was to sell movies to distributors from different countries. So she would meet with somebody from, say, Slovenia, who wanted to buy an action movie. Giulia would convince them that it would become the most popular action movie in Slovenia, they'd make a deal, and the Slovenian would have to get it subtitled and distributed. Giulia is good at this because she speaks French and Italian. She is also good at convincing people they are buying the next blockbuster when she's only seen the trailer. We had dinner with Giulia and drinks at a little hole in the wall bar in East Berlin, near our hotel. It seems like a lot of places in Berlin are holes in the wall - a little dim and a little out of the way, but full of character and potential for a good time.

On Thursday we checked out the German history museum. It covers everything from pre-history to the 20th century. We knew there was a lot to cover so we skipped huge chunks of the 17 centuries, stopping briefly at the Crusades and the Reformation. We focused in more on the 1800s and I could still absorb information until just after World War 1. Somewhere in the 1930s it got a little blurry. Taking in a country's entire history was sort of exhausting, so we got lunch and headed back to the hotel for a nap.

The best part of our trip came that evening when we went to a Cuban bar. By coincidence, it was the 13th anniversary of our first date. We don't really celebrate that anniversary any more, but it did make us reminisce a little. Brian pointed out that on our first date, we went to the Olive Garden in Roseville in a borrowed beat up car (it was Dizzy's and it's name was Thunder Chicken). Now, 13 years later, we were heading to a Cuban bar in Berlin on the city bus. Two steps forward on the adventure side, one step back on the transportation side.

We knew they'd have food and live music. We did not know that Brian would smoke the best cigar of his life there, that it was the Latin American ex-pat hangout, that I'd get to speak Spanish to the waiter, the band leader, and a Guatemalan musician named Negro (who is white). It was a little island of fun on a cold night. I can't imagine that we would have had a better time skiing in the Alps. And I don't think that you can take the bus there anyway..
Here are a few photos:

Eis on the Maschsee

The Maschsee is a big man-made lake in Hannover. It was created in the 30s as a depression-era public works project under Hitler. And last week it froze. This doesn't sound like a big deal to those of us who are used to frozen lakes, ponds, etc in the winter. But here it is a HUGE deal. There is an official proclamation that the ice is thick enough for people to go on. And there are not just a few people going out on it - most everyone in Hannover seemed to be there on Sunday afternoon. Some were skating, some played hockey, some were pulling kids on sleds, we saw a few people on the ice with their grill, and a lot of people were just walking and sliding around on it. We went with David, a teacher friend from Brian's school, who is from the north of England. He had never walked on a frozen lake before and was fascinated by looking down at the cracks and bubbles under the surface. Since everyone in Hannover seemed to be there, the line for skate rental was way too long to wait in. Brian had some borrowed hockey skates, but David and I just walked and scooted along.

 There were stands selling gluhwein (hot red wine), hot chocolate, sausages, crepes ... and there was a feeling like this icy wonderland might not last.Which it did not. We now have temps over freezing (or 0 in celsius) for the third day in a row. The ice is full of puddles. But here are a few photos to commemorate the event:

Bosseln

On Saturday we played Bosseln. What is Bosseln, you ask? It's a game that people play in the middle of winter when there's not much else to do. Our friends Kaska and Thorsten (the ones who had Polish night) host a Bosseln tournament every year. It's a game that comes from the far north of Germany near Kiel, where they used to live. It's one of those games that people in cold places play in the middle of winter so they can entertain themselves and not go crazy indoors.... sort of like the St Paul Winter Carnival medallion hunt (or the Winter Carnival in general), or broomball, or ice fishing. They all happen in the winter, they are all sort of silly, and they all involve drinking.

In Bosseln you have two teams. Each team has a ball. One person from each team rolls the ball down a frozen path until it stops. Then you walk up to where that ball stopped and someone else from the team rolls it. The team that gets to the end in the fewest throws wins. It's actually a little more complicated than that. If your ball goes out of bounds, for example, you have to drink. And if it takes your team two throws to get past the other team's throw, you have to drink. There are more rules than that, but they were all explained to us in German and no one on my team seemed to care about them too much anyway.

So on Saturday about 30 of us showed up in the Eilenriede, which is the forest in Hannover. It's really more of a tree park - there are not a lot of wild plants or animals living there, but it's big and it has a lot of trees and some paths, which happened to be frozen. A lot of the Bosseln players had been a part of the event for years and came from out of town to play. They were all a lot of fun. And most of them spoke English really well, but unless they were talking directly to us it was all German. I am starting to understand a lot more, but it will be a long long time before I can join the conversation at a party, or a frozen ball throwing game. We had two games - one to the end of the path and one back. Then three hours later, in various stages of frozenness and drunkenness, we walked to a restaurant called the Schweinhaus and ate - you guessed it - a lot of pork. There was sausage, and smoked pork something, and pork belly. And there was a lot of green cabbage and potatoes. Once the feeling in our fingers and toes returned and our bellies were full I got really sleepy. I suppose all of those balls I rolled out of bounds didn't help.

There was no sleeping, however. Kaska would not hear of us going home. We all went back to the youth center in the woods where our game began to have a party. I lasted maybe an hour and declared time to go home and to bed.

I decided that Bosseln is a fun game to play once a year, and that's about enough. It's not really cold here for so many months that you'd need to play it often. If that were the case, maybe we'd take up broom ball.

Here are some of my photos from the event:

Brian decided to play into the American stereotype and dress (and shave) like a cowboy.

If you'd like to see some more photos (better ones) you can check out this link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrchris96/sets/72157629290826489/

Deutschkurs

I started German class again this week. We had been on break since Christmas, and I had to study for a whole month so that I wouldn't forget everything I'd learned. So it was a relief to go back to class and no longer be responsible for teaching myself. This class is a little more intense - 3 classes a week for 2 hours each time. And while I really liked my teacher last semester, we did a lot of icebreakers and kindergarten-type games. Of course, when you can't even speak as well as a kindergartner that may be appropriate. This semester I hope to advance to first or second grade conversation.

My classmates are interesting to me - finding out where they are from, why they are here, how long they've been here, etc. On the first day we had to talk to everyone and learn where they come from and what languages they speak. Here's a partial list:

Hoa - Vietnam - Vietnamese
Ibrahim - Azerbaijan - Russian
Mohamen - Afghanistan - Persian
Miriam - Spain - Spanish
Ronak - Iraq - Kurdish
James - Zimbabwe - English
Ai Xi - China -  Mandarin Chinese
Andrey - Kazakstan - Russian

You get the idea. I also have classmates from Eritrea, Lebanon, Georgia, and Russia. There is even a girl from the US who is an au pair here. During our second class, we had to talk in small groups to practice speaking and get to know each other. I was talking with Ronak from Iraq and Betu from Eritrea. When Ronak heard I was from the US, she started asking hard questions. "Isn't it hard there for people who have to live off of social assistance?" Well, yes, compared to Germany anyway. "I heard that it's hard to get health care there, and expensive." Yes, for sure. "So, how much would it cost, if I had to have an operation in the hospital?" If Ronak only knew how much I know about this issue and how hard it is to explain the health care system in English.... I managed to say that some people have insurance through work, others through the government, others have private insurance, and some don't have any, and it costs a different amount for all of them. The health care system makes even less sense when you say it in German.

Ronak also told me (she's chatty) that she has lived here 16 years and taken a lot of classes and that our teacher is the best she's had. I am not sure how to interpret that, if she's still in an advanced beginner class after 16 years. I guess she would know.

I decided yesterday that I should keep sitting next to Miriam when I can. First of all, I can speak a little Spanish with her and she seems to enjoy it (she speaks some English too). Second, she knows more than I do and if I'm her partner I will probably learn something from her. She has only been here since September but is in a university course for public relations, all in German. After the first day when I decided I don't want to sit next to Hoa. She who is tiny and cute, and insists loudly that her answers are right when they aren't. It's also not a great idea to sit with Kassem from Lebanon, who is really nice but doesn't do his homework and smells like cigarettes.

I have a good feeling about this class - like I might start to pick up things faster now that I have the very basics down. Maybe by the end I will even hold my own with some third graders.

Rats, and stairs

There is a dead rat in our basement. At least I think he's dead by now. And he's not the first.

Back in November, I went away for two nights with the girls soccer team for their tournament. While I was gone, Brian decided to clean our storage room in the basement. We keep our bikes in there, some tools, suitcases, and clothes that are not in season. In a bag of my summer clothes, Brian found a dead rat. It had eaten through some of my summer dresses, pooped, and then went ahead and died in there. Brian is a champion - he resisted the urge to vomit, threw the rat in the dumpster, and cleaned up as best he could.
Our downstairs neighbor, the one who complained to the landlady that we were doing laundry too early in the morning, was in the basement while all of this was going on. In an attempt not to act more awkward with us than he already had by complaining, he struck up a conversation and asked Brian what was going on. "Oh, we don't have any rats here," he said. The small corpse in the dumpster would say otherwise.

Then just before Christmas, everyone in the building got a letter from our landlady. From what I could understand by reading it and using Google Translate, someone (gasp) had reported seeing a rat in the basement. The letter explained that there would now be rat poison in the basement, and that we shouldn't let kids or pets go down there. We should especially not store any bags full of recycling in the basement, since apparently the rats were after that and not just my sundresses.

So by now the rat poison must have worked. But whose job is it to search for the dead rat? Not ours. Brian has done his share of rat undertaking.

I will add this to the list of reasons it is good to live on the top floor. They are:
1. Who needs a stairmaster when you have real stairs? Involuntary exercise is the best kind.
2. The sun shines in better than on the lower floors.
3. There is no one above us to make noise in the morning, like we apparently do to our neighbors.
4. The pizza delivery guy really earns his tip.
5. Less street noise.
6. No robber is going to hike all the way up to our apartment and then carry our stolen stuff all the way down again.
7. Rats are very unlikely to climb the flights up to our place, especially if the recycling and clothes that they want are in the basement.

I will let you know if I see anymore rats or other rodents down there, dead or otherwise. And if one of them manages to hike up to the fifth floor, I might reward him with a sundress to chew on while I take him downstairs to visit the neighbors.

The Opera

Last night I went to my first opera. My friend Serena's husband Ed is an opera singer, and they moved here because he got a job working with the Hannover opera. It's a much better deal to be an opera singer in Europe than in the US - you get a steady paycheck, health insurance, paid vacation, etc. And you get a chance at the big leagues. If opera were baseball, Ed would be playing AA here in Hannover, hoping to someday get called up to Berlin or Vienna or Paris.

So since he was able to get some free tickets to last night's show, Serena and our friend Renee and I went to see Abduction from the Seraglio by Mozart. Every once in a while I have a moment when I say to myself, "wow, you live in Europe." Last night as we walked to the local opera house in the light snow, I had one of those moments. Then I noticed that my toes were numb and the moment passed.

Since I had little exposure to opera before yesterday, I kept thinking back to the movie Pretty Woman. Luckily Renee was doing the same. There's a scene where Richard Gere takes Julia Roberts to her first opera. As she puts on her fancy dress and long white gloves, she asks him something like "if it's all in Italian, how will I know what's going on?" and Richard Gere says, "don't worry, you'll just know."

Well, Richard Gere, you were wrong this time. I had no clue what was going on for most of the show. I was expecting scenery and costumes and props that could help me follow along in case I didn't understand the language. What I got was a dark stage with one leather couch and a cube in the middle that had string curtains hanging down on all sides. Later on in the show the cube would spin around. All the actors wore formal wear - suits and cocktail dresses. There was a little jazz piano played. There were some blindfolds that I am sure represented... something. And they spoke and sang in 18th century German. According to Serena, operas often have surtitles (opposite of subtitles) projected above the stage so that you can read the lyrics as the actors sing. Even written in German, that would have given me a fighting chance. There were no surtitles.

And the show didn't go too smoothly either. One of the main actors seemed to trip as he ran off the stage. Then they had intermission. After intermission, there was an announcement that (from what I could understand) the actor wasn't well and there would be an understudy for the second act. Afterward, Ed explained what really happened. The actor had run off the stage as planned through the string curtain. He parted the curtain, some of the strings were knotted together at the bottom. They caught him around the neck as he ran through (to use another sports analogy, he was clotheslined). He left in an ambulance and they called the intermission early to figure things out. For the rest of the show, another singer sang his part from the side of the stage, while someone else walked around on the stage in his costume but didn't speak or sing.
The female lead was about 7 months pregnant too, which wasn't so weird except the bad guy who was trying to seduce her was played by a woman. So the woman dressed as a man caressed the pregnant lady's baby belly while she sang soprano.

The singing, however, was beautiful. Ed seemed to do a fantastic job speaking all of his German dialogue. Considering he was on stage in front of actual Germans after only living here a few months, that was impressive. The orchestra played well and we had great seats. And now I have been to an opera, just like Julia Roberts. Just don't ask me what it was about.