Do-gooder hiatus

One of our good friends here resigned from the international school this week. His reason is primarily that he's not doing the work he wants to do.  He wanted to become a teacher to help kids who needed it most. Now he feels like he's teaching privileged kids who would do well in life with or without him, and collecting a paycheck rather than making a difference. His situation is actually more complex than that, but it certainly makes me think.

In the past I have described Brian and myself as professional do-gooders, save the world types, idealists, bleeding hearts etc. That's a little exaggerated, or sarcastic, or maybe both. I don't want to make it sound like we deserve some kind of award. We don't hug trees or take in stray animals or spend our weekends working at food shelves. In fact we never really volunteered at all. Brian taught at an inner-city school and I worked at a nonprofit human services agency. We would get up and go to work and sometimes gripe about it like everyone else. There were days I sat in meetings and dealt with paperwork and staff problems. It was not always heroic or gratifying. It's just that Brian and I both chose work that ultimately had a positive impact in our community, or at least we felt like it did.

Now that we live in Germany, we mostly just take care of ourselves. Sure, there are kids at the school who need help with their lessons and need attention and maybe even need a role model. But they all come from well-to-do families and will generally be ok to handle adult life no matter what they learn in Geography class. And as for me, I am learning German and working on my masters program for my own needs and interests. I am doing subbing and consulting work to make some money and because I like it.

And I have decided that's ok. We are not developing nuclear weapons, advertising cigarettes, or chasing ambulances. Nothing we do has a negative impact on other people. We are just trying something different for a while.

Someday we'll be back to professionally saving the world. For now we understanding how people live in another culture in another place. Some of those people are rich international school students. Maybe we can learn something from knowing them too.

Teaching English, Re-learning German

For the next couple of weeks, I am pretending to be a primary school ESL teacher. I've got kids from first to fifth grade, but only in small groups. I had the fifth graders working on mad libs today, and the verbs they kept picking for their stories were all forms of "to poop". There's a first grade girl who keeps talking to me in Japanese, and I made a couple of third grade boys sit in opposite corners of the room and do their work facing the wall. It's been a good week, considering I don't really know what I'm doing.

Learning English as a kid is not so different from learning German as an adult. You learn by topics - family, transportation, work, school, foods, holidays, etc. You spell things wrong, try to answer in as few words as possible, ask why complex grammar rules make no sense, and say 'I don't know' a lot. The more these kids are in school, the more English they are exposed to. The more I am in this school, the more English I am exposed to and the less German I use.

I can definitely tell that I lost a little of my German language skill over the summer. I heard myself order food at a restaurant last night and it sounded pretty bad. I half believed that I'd do some studying on my own while we were in the U.S., but that never happened. I guess I am not the most dedicated student in school. The words are in my brain somewhere, it's just the grammar rules that I might need to learn again.

I have not given up; I've just gotten distracted for a while. My class starts again in a couple of weeks, and hopefully all of us will need some extra review. Helga and I are planning to meet again to practice conversation soon, and my German over cocktails group meets next week. So I should get back on track pretty soon. In the meantime, I might research all verb forms of  'to poop' in German. That's one I haven't learned yet.

The McCarthy Austerity Plan

I know I have not been up to my usual standards lately. I guess I've felt out of ideas or out of the groove or just out to lunch. Don't worry, though, there will be plenty of posts about mundane and quirky moments in my ex-pat life to come. There will not, however, be exciting tales of fabulous travels for at least a few months. That's not because I don't want to write about them; it's because we won't be going very far. Blame it on the McCarthy Austerity Plan.

You may recall me mentioning that when we got back from the U.S. there was a letter from the friendly tax office telling us that we owe them 718 euros.  We were expecting about 2000 euros in a refund, so this hurt. At the request of our good friend and loyal reader Nick Falk, and various other people who are interested in German taxation, I will write a whole separate post explaining why we owe the money and how taxes here work in general. For the moment, though, I'll just say that we found out there was no mistake and we really do have to pay Herr tax man what asks for. So if you add that to the extra money that we had to pay to change our plane tickets and return from the U.S. a week later than planned, it adds up to a lot of cash. I don't care which currency you use.

Hence we have established the McCarthy Austerity Plan, effective immediately. What does that mean? We traded our upcoming weekend in Barcelona for a weekend in Des Moines. That's not a trade that most world travelers would make. We, however, are not just any world travelers and needed to be at the funeral in Des Moines, so we made that choice. We kept looking for the Picasso Museum and Gaudi architecture, but somehow just found corn. Sadly, we won't get to hang out with our friend Erik in Spain but I did manage to reschedule the trip for February. Austerity measures should be lifted by then.

There was also supposed to be a trip to Regensburg, in Bavaria, to see the World Baseball Classic qualifying games and also drop in for a day of Oktoberfest in Munich. That won't be happening either. What other austerity measures have we imposed? Much of that is yet to be determined. We don't have a lot of other extravagant expenses to cut out, but it looks we will at least forget big vacations and embrace stay-cations for a while.

So, like our friends in Greece and Spain, we are tightening our belts in order to save the euro. Actually, the belts are already pretty tight due to all the eating and drinking we did in America.

Prepare yourself for plenty of posts about things I do around Hannover, because we'll be staying put for a while.

Schultuten

It's the first week of back at the international school in Hannover, and time for the little guys to get a Schultute. That literally means school bag. It's not a bag, though, it's actually a paper cone. On the first day of first grade, kids get cardboard cones from their parents that are decorated on the outside and filled with school supplies, candy, and toys inside. It's sort of like a back-to-school Christmas stocking.

I was subbing for primary ESL on the first day of school, so I got to witness the throng of big people coming into the classroom of little people, bringing huge paper cones. They look like this:


At an international school, there's no guarantee that the parents will all know they are supposed to get their kids a schultute. Since a little less than half of the students are German, it's possible there could be a huge whining disaster on the first day of school as the kids without cones to cry, feel unloved, and become emotionally scarred and in need of therapy until age 50.  In the meantime the kids with cones start could start waving them around and taunting the rest with their chocolates, Spiderman stickers, and Hello Kitty pencil sharpeners. To prevent this sort of chaos, the first grade teachers emailed all the parents in advance to tell them about the tradition and even bought some little schultuten for kids whose parents missed the memo. These of course did not have cool cartoon characters on them and were not big enough the kid to practically climb into, but they would probably prevent a riot or at least lasting psychological trauma.

Happy first day of school, kiddos. May your cones be full of surprises.

Back on the road

We went to Hamburg this weekend. I guess five nights in the same place was just more than we could handle.
The actual reason was that our friends Dizzy and Sonja were having a barbecue, it sounded like fun, and we had nothing better to do. So we went up to Hamburg yesterday and spent the night.

It feels good to have been here for a while already, and think about how clueless we were last year at this time. We know what time the trains leave to and from Hamburg. I can understand most of the announcements that the train conductor makes. I know which buttons to push on the Deutsche Bahn ticket machine, even when the text on the screen is in German. Just imagine how great it will be when I can read all the words!

The machine was our downfall today, though. From Dizzy and Sonja's apartment we needed to walk to the tram, get our ticket on the way, take the tram to the main station and then got on our train for Hannover. By the time we got out the door we had precisely 40 minutes to do that. Our 'I'm trying to catch a train' walk and fast packing was a total waste. We were foiled by the couple that was using the ticket machine when we got there. They were pushing buttons and discussing and flipping screens forward and backward... That's ok. Those machines can be confusing and they give you the ability to buy tickets to and from any city in Germany (and a couple of other countries) with any number of transfers in between.


If this was an American couple, their thought process would have gone something like this: Wow this is taking a long time and people are waiting behind us. I will tell them I am sorry for the delay and let them go first so that I can mess around with this machine and not worry that I'm holding them up. Or maybe I'm in the middle of booking a ticket but I will at least turn around to say I am sorry it's taking so long.'
The couple, however, was German. So their thought process (I imagine) went something like this: 'Wow this is taking a long time. People are waiting behind us but that is ok. It's my turn now and I will do what I need to do even if it takes a while. Once it's their turn they can take as long as they'd like.' Their thoughts were most likely thought in German but I don't know how to construct sentences that are as complex as those, so use your imagination.

So, even though we knew exactly which platform to go to, we missed the train to Hannover by 3 minutes and spent another hour hanging out at the Hamburg station. It wasn't a big deal, really. I suppose we could have blamed ourselves for not leaving the apartment ten minutes earlier. It's just more fun to blame other people. I guess just because I know when the train will leave doesn't mean I will get there on time.

Back in the saddle

You might think that title is a cute figurative way to describe our return to more or less normal life in Hannover after six weeks in the U.S.
But no, it's pretty much literal. I got back in the bike saddle yesterday after six weeks away, and I have to tell you that today I'm just a little bit sore. It's the bike's way of telling me it was lonely while I was gone. (Not so interesting aside: The bike seat is called a saddle but the thing that holds it up is called a seat post. Go figure)

It feels good to be back and in the place where I belong, at least for the time being.Jet lag is a funny thing. I went to sleep last night at 8:30, woke up at midnight, fell asleep again around 3, and now feel oddly refreshed. I will probably crash into noncoherent babble after lunch so I'd better write this now.

 Some interesting things we found in the mail upon our return:
1. A letter from the company that did a phone interview with me in June regarding a job teaching English. The purpose of the letter is to show that I have a possible job offer so that I can attempt to get my residence permit changed so that I can maybe work there. You might notice my subtle hesitation here... since the job would be as a freelancer rather than a real employee I think I probably won't be allowed to do it.  But I will bring the letter to the foreigner's office anyway to see if it's possible. That will be fun.
2. A letter from the tax office. It says we owe them 713 euros.  This is not cool. The letter is currently under review from our tax preparer/P.E. teacher friend who helped us do our German taxes in the first place. He told Brian not to get his hopes up that there's been a mistake. It's not that we don't have the money, but that I'd rather spend it on lavish travel than on taxes. We've already traded in our weekend in Barcelona for a weekend in Des Moines. Now we might have to trade in a fall break trip for a payoff to the German government. I don't begrudge paying taxes. I get that they are important. I just wish someone would take them away sooner and in smaller amounts. Being a grownup sucks sometimes.
3.  A request from the head of primary grades at the international school that I cover ESL classes (Americans call it ELL) for the next few weeks.  The reason that one of the two teachers is out is that she is returning from maternity leave and has to take her little one to day care. This doesn't make sense, right? The reason the kid goes there is so that mom can go to work. In Germany, however, when your child starts at a new day care place, the parent has to go too. For the first week or so it's all day, then half days, then a few hours, until the child is acclimated and happy. I guess this is a great thing for the kid, but not so great for the parent's employer. It's ok for me, though, because I know when I am working for the next three weeks.

I'm sure you will hear more from me about all of these items as they develop. That's enough for now, though.  I have to get my butt back in the saddle and ride to school.

The shoal

It's kind of like a slightly mundane but pleasant dream. Every day I wake up and I am still at Powers Lake, only no one is here except for me and Brian. We are not really supposed to be here but we are. There is no family gathering, no friends coming to stay, and no one who has just left. It's only us, the crickets, a faint smell of manure from somebody's lawn, and the hum of motorboats in the distance.

I mentioned in my last post that Brian and I have started canoeing out to the shoal. This is sort of our poor man's version of dropping the anchor of our big pontoon at the rock bar in the middle of the lake. It's a good system, though. We load up a red wagon with a little cooler, a few bricks to keep the canoe in place, a couple of beach chairs and some sunscreen. We put the canoe into the water and start to paddle.

I am not a good paddler. As someone who prefers to be good at everything this annoys me. I don't know if it's because I was never really taught how to paddle (how hard can it be?), because I lack upper body strength (I did recently win an arm wrestling contest, though), or because I lack hand-eye coordination. As Brian will report, I paddle erratically. My paddle is too shallow or too deep, too fast and then too slow right after that.

My canoe partner must help compensate pretty well because we eventually make it to the shoal and scare away the sea gulls who have been hanging out there. Then we set up our beach chairs and sit. That's about all. From far away it would look like we are sitting in the middle of the lake.

Other than shoal-sitting there has been some cleaning, some laundry, and a couple of chores around the house. Mostly though it's just quiet, and a little surreal. I think in a couple of weeks, I will miss the crickets.

Still here...

I write this posting is in memory of one of my most dedicated readers and biggest fans, Grandma Mac. Brian's grandmother Mary McCarthy passed away on Friday.

Grandma Mac and I never got to spend much time together, but she said that reading the blog helped her to get to know me a lot better. She was from a farm in Rochester, MN, worked as one of the first stewardesses on Northwest Airlines, met Brian's grandfather at a bar in Minneapolis, and raised four kids in Des Moines.

Whenever it's my time to go, if getting hit by a bus is not an option, it would be ok to die like she did. Mary had just turned 92, lived independently in a senior apartment and enjoyed pretty good health until about a month ago. She went downhill fast but got to see all of her kids before she died.

Brian and I are supposed to be packed up and ready to get to the airport about now. I am ready to go back, to be in our own apartment and sleep in our own bed and see some friends and get into the day to day patchwork of all the little things I do. After about five phone calls yesterday, I was able to rearrange our flights so that we have another week in the U.S.

We will likely exhaust all possibilities of fun things to do at the lake house over the next few days as we hang out before the trip to Des Moines on Thursday. Our new favorite is to canoe out to a sandbar and set up beach chairs in the ankle deep water. We could get our fill of movies in English at the movie theater nearby. We could top up on Americana and go to the Kenosha County fair. We could clean the house. I could swim across the lake and have Brian pick me up in the car (I am not that good of a swimmer to come all the way back).  I might actually do some work or try to refresh my German vocabulary. Those flash cards I brought along have been collecting dust for a month.
I can't think of many other places I'd like to be delayed for a week. 

It's of course a very sad thing that Grandma Mac passed away, but since it happened now we at least have the chance to be at the funeral and say our goodbyes with the rest of the family. They are certainly her biggest fans.

West coast

The next phase of our US tour was a trip out west.
When our friend Kate announced that she was getting married during the time we were planning to be in the States anyway, we decided to make the trip to Coos Bay, Oregon for the wedding. Kate had, after all, come to our wedding in the Twin Cities, and even to Dizzy's wedding in Hamburg two years ago. She was Brian's first year floormate at Macalester and I met her in my first couple of months at Mac. Even so, I was a little resentful at first. Maybe that's the wrong word, but we had so many people to see and several actually wanted to make the trip to Powers Lake to visit us. The wedding trip took a whole week out of the schedule and all of a sudden our dates were booked up. So if you are one of those people we missed, I apologize, but the trip out west was great.

We flew into San Francisco and met up with Dizzy who had flown back to Germany from Nigeria, spent a few hours at home, and got on the plane to SFO. He has a superhuman tolerance for jet lag. Dizzy's friend Allison has a house in Oakland, so we stayed with her for two nights and did something that a lot of people wouldn't - a day-night baseball double header. We went to the Oakland A's game in the afternoon, followed by the Giants game in the evening. It was a great day. I realize that this is an abnormal amount of baseball. But the guys I went with are abnormally into baseball, and I kind of like it too.

The next day we spent driving north to Coos Bay. It is not an easy place to get to. If we'd flown into Portland, it still would have taken 5 hours to drive there. From San Francisco, it's a little over 9 hours. Of course, it's a beautiful drive and we had to stop to drive your car through a redwood tree, check out the herd of elk on the beach, and have a slow lunch at a main street diner. So it took us more like 11.

I went to Portland once, and even had a side trip to Salem. And I envisioned Oregon as this enlightened, liberal, latte-drinking, granola-crunching enclave of the northwest. I had not been to the southern Oregon coast. What we found there were some trailer parks, plenty of Harley riders, some wealthy lumber baron estates, and a lot of greasy spoon restaurants. Somebody at the wedding explained that on the coast you can't always tell who is a fisherman and who is a bum. They are all pretty scruffy. Even though few chain stores had penetrated the Coos Bay area, there were drive through espresso huts every few miles. I guess I was right about the latte-drinking part.

The day before the wedding we hiked along the foggy coast and ate clams, tuna, and crabs that the bride and her family had caught during the week. Dizzy somehow got drafted into scooping out raw clam guts with his hands. The wedding was beautiful, out in a field, and the first karaoke wedding I had ever attended. Kate's family had enough singing talent to pull that off. Kate was genuinely happy we were there, even if we didn't sing, and I certainly can't resent that.

At the Giants game

Redwoods

Kate and Brian on our hike

The main event

Powers Lake photos

To catch up a little, here are some photos from the first two weeks at the lake:

Phoebe 3 months, and Dad

Jaden and Jonas battle it out with squirt guns

The annual family photo

Tommy, Pete, and Charlie

Amy roasting marshmallows

Twin Cities, part 2

It's a rainy day at Powers Lake, so I am getting caught up on my blog posts.

The last three days I spent in the Twin Cities were the best. My friend Karissa flew in from DC so that we could celebrate our other pal Julie's bachelorette party. Karissa and I had planned the whole thing long distance and we pulled it off. There were no strippers (though we did see a movie about them) and no limos (but we have a Nissan Sentra). We did pedicures and a movie and a sleepover with just the three of us on Friday. On Saturday we tailgated before the St Paul Saints baseball game with ten other friends, a scavenger hunt, and a pinata. We wrapped up the night at a dueling piano bar in downtown Minneapolis. It was a little obnoxious and a lot of fun.

On Sunday I got to spend the night with my good friend Naomi, her husband, and their four cats. We hung out at their house, made some dinner, and went out for a couple of drinks at the neighborhood bar. It reminded me that my favorite visits are the ones that feel kind of normal, when we do nothing out of the ordinary and pick up on conversations that could have ended yesterday.

And Monday I took the Megabus back to Milwaukee to meet up with Brian and our friend Luke, catch a Brewers game, and begin the next phase of the trip.

Me and Naomi at Grumpy's

Brian and Luke at Miller Park

  

Twin Cities, part 1

No, I have not run away to join a cult or a commune or sunk an internet black hole.
I have been away from the computer. This might be hard to imagine... in my usual life I'm on the laptop multiple times a day. But this is not usual life. This is "hey I'm back in America and you should hang out with me before I leave again" sort of life. This "let's eat out and drink beers and have a good time" sort of life. Every day is like a weekend. Brian and I have each put on a few pounds.

We spent last week in the Twin Cities. We rolled in with style on the Megabus on Monday and the action started there. There was dinner at Moscow on the Hill, a visit to my old office, Como Zoo with my pre-teen girl pals, and large group get togethers with my work friends and Brian's work friends. It was a little exhausting, but that's ok - we can sleep in Germany. Our house is still small and blue, the plants are alive, and the inside looks even cuter than when we lived there. We dodged light rail construction, drove through Minneapolis rush hour, crossed the Mississippi a few times, a and even went down for a visit to Apple Valley.

Since my very loyal reader Nick requested it, I will share a few thoughts on the suburbs for you. Before we moved, driving to Apple Valley felt like going to Iowa. It still does. It's a foreign land of strip malls and subdivisions that look (as my friend Julie, also an Apple Valley resident says) like a Dr. Seuss Whoville. Nick's house is huge and the carpet is soft and I am completely envious of its dishwasher and shiny countertops. Driving around the housing development in our borrowed car made me a little dizzy - the streets are curvy  and all the Who houses look the same. It's not just Apple Valley that's like this - Germany has suburbs too. It's just that I generally don't go to them. My life has become more urban even though I now live in a much smaller city. And I can't really dislike strip malls. They are home to Super Targets, after all.

It felt good to be back in St. Paul. It felt like home. In many ways it felt like we'd never left, which makes me think that if we're not back for a few years, we won't miss out on much either. With close friends I could just  pick up a conversation like everything was normal.
 
With more peripheral friends and other people we ran into it was more work, like I was on a strange sort of job interview. "Tell me about your life in Germany,"or "What is your favorite thing about living abroad," or my favorite "Rate your experience from one to ten". Even those people who didn't sound like they were reviewing my resume liked to ask "what are you doing over there, are you working?" and the favorite, "'when are you guys planning to move back?". They are obviously not blog readers. You guys would never need to ask.

There are several things we didn't get to do in the Twin Cities. I didn't make it to the Cleveland Wok. Brian didn't get to eat a Tex Mex for breakfast. We didn't make it J.D. Hoyt's or to a Twins Game. But we did get to see almost everyone we wanted to, at least for a little while. Maybe the next visit we will stay a little longer. Or maybe the list of people who want to see us will get shorter the longer we are away. Or maybe we just won't sleep again until we get to Germany.