Housewarming

This is the latest chapter in the story about our neighbors. To recap - first the people downstairs complained about noise from our washing machine, then we dropped ashes and tools and a passport on them, then there was a meeting about standing up to the landlord, and we are sure there has been gossip about us along the way. We did get invited to another neighbor party a few weeks ago, which we skipped. There wasn't a great excuse other than we were getting the house ready for Serena's baby shower and that we didn't feel like being in a potentially awkward social situation. It's not that the neighbors are bad people, it's just that when you are the only non-native German speakers in the room you either just talk to each other or the two people there who are comfortable speaking English interrupt their normal socializing to talk to you because you're a novelty.

So when the new neighbors Norbert and Jorg invited us to their housewarming, we kind of had to go. Novelty or not, I didn't want to get a reputation as never associating at all. And luckily, we had another party to go to later. Plus, as the only foreigners in the building, maybe we'd have some solidarity with the only gay people in the building. So we went early with our escape plan ready, and it was ok. I was glad we went early because can handle German-speaking social settings when there are only a few people there. Once there are multiple conversations happening at once, I'm lost.
 I learned that their apartment is way cooler and better decorated than ours, Norbert can pull off a bow-tie, and the apartment opened up because the previous tenant died there. Now I understand why I haven't seen him around.

By the time the people from the third floor who are the target of things falling from our balcony arrived, it was time to go. Multiple conversations were happening and the hallway was full of people. Norbert and Jorg seemed genuinely glad we had come, and we liked them a lot. Did our appearance score us points with the neighbors? Will there be more gossip about us now, or less? Hard to say. If they are all talking at once, I can't understand anyway.

Boss pork chops

We are going to the Bruce Springsteen concert on Tuesday. We also went last year, in Cologne, with Kaska and Thorsten (our Krakow traveling buddies) and our host, their friend Alex.

Alex is a serious Springsteen fan. Maybe devout is a better word. He knows every word to every song and has multiple t-shirts and memorabilia and other stuff that serious fans have. What I learned about Alex when we stayed at his house is that when he likes something he likes it intensely, fiercely and fanatically.

Even though I am nowhere near as big a fan as Alex, or Brian, I still like Springsteen's music and love a good live performance. And, unlike in the U.S., the concerts in German venues don't have an end time. The band doesn't have to stop because of noise ordinances or police issues. In Cologne Bruce played for almost four hours, having a blast on stage the whole time. One of the three German stops on his tour this year is little old Hannover. Not only that, the stadium where Springsteen is playing is in walking distance of our apartment. You can even see it from the balcony.

Getting back to Alex, what I learned when we stayed at his house is that there are three things that he loves intensely, devoutly, passionately. Other than his wife and kids, those things are Hamburg's HSV soccer team, Bruce Springsteen, and, most recently, barbecue. Yes, the art of the grill. He's dived into it and taken classes and read up and tried and tested different methods and marinades and sauces. When Alex first explained this love to us, Brian's Kansas City side perked up (I think he acquired a bit of a twang). He started to talk about rubs and sauce from Gates and Haywards and burnt ends and pulled pork and the differences between Carolina and Kansas City and Texas style barbecue. They had another love in common.

If you put these two things together, what you get is this that Alex has taken a couple of days off work, is traveling to Hannover from Cologne for the Springsteen concert, he's coming over for a pre-Boss barbecue. There will be 6 or 8 other people there too, but Alex was the inspiration for us acquiring some big fat KC style pork chops. Brian made it clear to me a couple of months ago that I had the important job of acquiring said pork chops. This is harder than it sounds. First of all, we are now buying and eating a limited amount of meat, which we know comes from "happy," sustainably raised animals. More importantly, they don't make big pork chops in Germany. There is a lot of pork to be found but the chop is generally no thicker than my finger. Getting a pork chop worthy of sauce imported from KC was going to take some effort.

So last Friday, I went to the weekly farmers' market where I sometimes buy meat from a "happy" butcher, and put my German language skills to the test. I asked to special order chops that were double the normal thickness. I didn't know if it was weird to ask for a special cut of meat, or to put in an order at all.  My habit in potentially awkward German cultural situation like this is to go for cuteness. I smiled and told the butcher lady that we were having a special American barbecue and my husband really wanted to have special thick pork chops like we have back home. It probably didn't sound quite that good in German but I was hoping she'd like my accent and that would score me points. Or maybe she'd just feel sorry for me, which could have the same effect.

Apparently it worked because today I went back to the market and picked up five big fat pork chops, somewhere between 2 and 3 fingers thick. There is a bottle of Hayward's in the fridge waiting for the big day. Will the pork chops meet Alex's standards? I'll have to let you know next week.
If Alex is not intensely, fanatically in love with them, he'll have to eat somewhere else.

Thanks

It's a day of sad news in places not far away. A bloody terrorist attack in London, devastation from the Oklahoma tornado, a little boy killed in a St Paul mudslide while looking for fossils. There are people I know well who are sick and stressed out and grieving.

Most of my posts are light and silly and maybe a little bit interesting, but I haven't lost sight of how completely lucky I am. Maybe a better word is blessed. I won't get into the specifics but I know I have a lot of the things you can see and the things you can't. I know that life will get difficult at some point, but now (despite my basic getting-around-in-a-foreign-country challenges) it is happily simple.

I am feeling grateful today, so thanks everybody, for making this blog a meaningful project for me.

Berlin... again

It's May in Germany (and everywhere else in the world, actually), which means that nobody works very hard. We had May 1st off for Labor Day, then the 9th and 10th off for Ascension, and this Monday was the Pentecost holiday. So even though we'd just been out of town, Brian and I decided to go back to one of our favorite cities - Berlin.

We'd been there before but never in warm weather, never along the river, never in a hotel so colorful it was like staying in a box of Froot Loops. When we checked in, they asked if it was ok to put us in a pink and yellow room. I of course said yes.

The lobby

The outside of the hotel Nhow, from the River Spree. The hanging bridge reminds me of the Guthrie Theater in Mpls.

Chunks of the Berlin Wall were decorations on the sidewalk along the hotel patio

Basically, we wandered much of the weekend. On Saturday the weather was gross and grim and appropriate for a long walking quest in search of Karl Marx Allee and other socialist architecture.
Karl Marx Allee was built in the 1950s and early 60s, and originally named Stalinallee. It's remarkable because it was a huge boulevard with fancy "wedding cake style" buildings. Even though these buildings looked luxurious, they were built to house common workers.

On Karl Marx Allee

On Karl Marx Allee

We went back to the Cuban bar where we'd had such a great night in February of 2012. While it wasn't quite the same, I still enjoyed a delicious mojito while Brian bought a Cuban cigar from behind the bar and smoked it in the cellar. We also talked to the bartenders (in Spanish) about baseball and where to go when we visit Cuba. I don't know when that trip will happen, but we are going to go since it's not really illegal from here and since the Castros won't be around forever.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day, and we took the "bridge tour" - a boat ride over the Spree river and the canals around Berlin, going under something like 65 bridges. Sure, it was touristy but we had nowhere else to be except on a boat in the sun for almost four hours. And we were tourists. It also gave us a new perspective on this city where the old and ornate and new and raw and decaying somehow fit together. Grafitti doesn't look ugly there and construction is just part of the landscape.

The Technical Museum, with a "raisin bomber" from the Berlin Airlift

"vote for the minimum wage" mural

I know we will go back to Berlin again at some point. There are a lot of neighborhoods to explore, and a lot of its stories to uncover. Though when we do return, I want to stay in the Froot Loop hotel, and I will probably ask for a green and purple room.

Krakow - Kazimierz

Where can you visit a medieval synagogue, a bar so run-down that it's trendy, and a square full of street food? In Kazimierz, of course.

This part of the city was once its own city, across the river from the rest of Krakow. Eventually the river dried up and was filled in, and Kazimierz became part of Krakow. It was the Jewish district of the city for hundreds of years, and still has almost as many synagogues as central Krakow has churches (meaning, a lot). The Nazis established the Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of Kazimierz, and after the Holocaust the communists didn't pay much attention to it. The neighborhood was mostly vacant, poor and crime-ridden. Many of the scenes from Schindler's List were filmed here in the mid-90s, since no effort or money had gone into updating the neighborhood since the 1940s.
Here are a couple of Kazimierz photos:

These days, Kazimierz is the place to be. If "shabby chic" were an urban planning term rather than a home design fad, this would be it. Edgy, hip, artsy, raw - this is the cool part of town for going out. There are a lot of bars with old photos and mismatched furniture and communist-era posters on the walls. There are shops and galleries and some touristy restaurants with live Klezmer music.

I didn't really know what Klezmer music was until I heard it and realized it's like a soundtrack from a movie scene you've watched but can't quite remember. There is a lot of violin and accordion and, in the case of one band we heard in concert, bongos (though it is highly likely that one band we heard was just a front for some kind of Polish gypsy mafia). Here's a good Klezmer music clip if you are interested.

Kazimierz is where we ended all of our evenings in Krakow. A couple of times they ended with the eating of Zapienkanka, Krakow's most popular street food. It's basically an open-faced sub sandwich, with whatever toppings you order and a bunch of ketchup or mayo or dressing on top.

Credit for information about the history of Kazimierz goes mostly to Kaska Tours, but credit for eating the Zapienkanka in the foreground goes to Brian.

Krakow - A dragon and and ATM

Here's a riddle for you - what do a dragon and an ATM have in common?
They both eat up things that should not be eaten.

During our lovely mid-day tour of the market square, I stopped to get some Zlotys out of the ATM (in case you care, there are about 4 Zlotys to euro, or around 3 to a dollar). I chose the ATM outside of the Deutsche Bank, since that's the same bank where we have an account. And the machine ate my card. With Kaska's help, we learned that the ATM actually does not belong to the bank at all, and that I could not even withdraw money inside or request a new card because the Polish Deutsche Bank has no relationship at all with the German Deutsche Bank. Plus the teller lady was crabby. So Kaska called the phone number on the ATM and sweet talked the guy on the other end into restarting the machine in hopes that it would spit out my card. This meant that we had to keep anyone else from using the ATM for about 20 minutes. So while the boys went to get something to drink, Kaska and I fended off tourists by telling them in English, Polish, German and Spanish (actually they spoke Italian but it was close enough) that they could not use the ATM. This got funnier and funnier as they kept coming at us and we threw any language we could at them. The Italian lady was not satisfied and tried to shove her way past us to try and get some cash. I re-told her in Spanish that it was not going to happen.

When the restart didn't work, we had to call Deutsche Bank (the German one) where apparently no one in the entire call center that day could speak English, and Thorsten helped me ask them to cancel the ATM card.

There's another creature in Krakow that devours things, or he used to. His name is Smok Wawelski, and he is a dragon who lived in the caves below Wawel Castle. He had the nasty habit of eating virgins. So one day the king offered a reward half his kingdom and the princess's hand in marriage to any man who could kill the dragon. While many men tried and got eaten themselves, a young tailor decided to take on the challenge. He made sewed a sheep and filled it with sulphur, then set it outside of the dragon's cave. Smok gobbled up the fake sheep, which started a fire in his belly. He was so thirsty that he gulped down water from the Vistula River and exploded. The tailor married the princess, became king, and they lived happily ever after.

 

 

Fire-breathing statue of Smok

 The legend is, of course, true, and Wawel Castle is still there. It sits up on a hill and inside the castle walls are the official buildings and the Krakow Cathedral. Unlike St. Mary's, the cathedral is more of a religious/political museum than a place for people to gather for Mass. There aren't even many places to sit. My favorite part of the castle was the view. You can look over the river and see the city - modern, medieval, and socialist, laid out below.
And on a beautiful spring day, who needs to worry about bank cards, fire-breathing dragons, or sabotage by sheep? We just enjoyed the view.

Wawel Castle

Krakow - Old Town

Our days began mostly like this -
Wake up kind of late (for us), to the warbling of the pigeons who have taken over the Dec family balcony. Poles, or Krakowians at least, seem to love their pigeons. I did not love them, at least not early in the morning. We were staying in the apartment where Kaska grew up, though her parents have moved back to her mom's hometown and only visit now and then. It was in a block of socialist-looking apartment buildings and it was smallish but homey and full of pictures of Pope John Paul, who is not the patron saint of Poland yet but it may not take too long. We'd have some breakfast and get on a tram headed to the Old Town.

Hannover has an Old Town too, but it's mostly reconstructed and full of buildings that were moved there from other parts of the city after WWII. Many German cities are that way. But in Krakow, we saw the original stuff - city walls, churches, marketplaces, synagogues, just as they had been since the 1400s and even earlier. The Bastova (Barbican in English, maybe?) is the main entrance to the Old Town (Stare Miasto in Polish) and is where the moat and the big drawbridge were. It's connected to St. Florian's gate. St. Florian is the patron saint of Poland and a sort of holy fireman martyr. His legend is that he scared ancient Romans away from burning him at the stake and they ended up drowning him instead. Now he protects against fire (not against drowning). I learned that Krakow is a city of legends, and Kaska seems to know them all.

St. Florian's Gate

Musicians in traditional Krakow costumes

The Bastova

Off of Florianska street, Brian found a hat store down an alley. Those of you who know my husband understand that he likes hats a lot. The old woman running the shop brought out stacks and stacks of hats in different shapes and sizes and said something (in Polish) along the lines of "any hat looks good on a handsome man". So even though Brian only bought one of them, he probably made her day.

Krakow's market square (according to Kaska tours) is the largest medieval square in Europe. It's surrounded by white horse carriages, which line up and wait drive tourists all over the city.  Flower sellers and a big fountain, but much of the square belongs to the pigeons, the school groups, and the people who meander just like us.

St Mary's Basilica is a major Krakow landmark and the focal point of the market square. I've seen a lot of old churches in Europe, but this one was different. What struck me was the color on the inside - every surface was painted with stars and flowers and angels and Bible stories. There was no bare stone or polished marble. And the altar is what's especially famous. It is the biggest Gothic alterpiece in the world. During WWII it was dismantled, shipped to Nuremburg, Germany, and later returned to St. Mary's.

Here's another legend for you: Every hour, a trumpeter plays an unfinished song from one of the St. Mary's towers. The song is cut off in the middle to commemorate the trumpeter who was shot in the throat during the Mongol attack on Krakow in the 1200s.

Brian (with new hat), Thorsten and Kaska

Inside St. Mary's

Me in the square with St. Mary's behind me

In the middle of the square is the old cloth market building. This is where the old-time trading took place - cloth, salt, and probably pierogies were traded for spices, silk, and egg rolls from the East. There's still some trading in there, but it's mostly for souvenirs, amber jewelry, and funny walking sticks. You have to buy your pierogies elsewhere (which, of course, we did).

The cloth hall

Krakow - introduction

The time had finally come. Brian and I had been waiting to visit Poland, and especially Krakow, until we could go with Kaska Tours. I believe that the best way to see a place is with someone that lives there, or in Kaska Dec's case, someone who has lived there and has also learned enough about the place to run a tourism company or at least get some big tips from foreign visitors. Since Thursday and Friday were holidays (for Christi Himmelfahrt, which means Ascension but the name still makes me giggle) we made a long weekend of it. We also brought along Thorsten, Kaska's German husband, and butt of all German invasion jokes during the weekend. You can make those kind of jokes when you are traveling with a German and a Pole.

If you want to read the good stuff about Krakow, you should certainly visit Kaska's blog, but I will give you my impressions and recollections here.

Kaska tours operates visiting a few specific neighborhoods and wandering their streets, aided by Kaska's expert narration. The blog postings about Krakow will follow the same meandering format, guided by my meandering narration. Enjoy.

Accidental castle

On Wednesday (which was Labor Day), Brian and I took a long bike ride, and accidentally found a castle.
This is something that would never ever happen in the U.S. We might accidentally find a park we hadn't seen before, or a new neighborhood, or a grain elevator (Brian loves those), but never a castle. It was one of those days when it felt pretty awesome to be living in Europe.

We saw the signs for Marienburg Castle as we rode along, but I thought it must have been far away because we didn't actually see the castle. On the way back, BAM, it was there on the hill in front of us. We had been riding under it for about half an hour without seeing it at all. This was not like some German castles, which look like overgrown bank buildings. This was a storybook, princess-in-a-tower sort of a castle, and worth the extra mileage to ride over and check it out.

Marienburg Castle was built starting in 1858. It was a gift from the last king of Hannover, George V, to his wife Queen Marie for her 39th birthday. (Do they make red bows big enough to put on a castle?)

At this point in history, the House of Hanover was no longer tied to the British throne, and in 1866 the Prussians took over and got rid of the royalty anyway. George and Marie spent only one summer there before the Prussians arrived, and construction was not even finished by then. After the invasion, they went into exile in Austria.

Brian and I have a lot in common with George and Marie. Brian built the cigar lounge in the basement of our house in Saint Paul, but only got to use it for one winter before we moved to Hannover. True, there was no invasion of foreign armies. But like the cigar lounge, the castle remains largely uninhabited, used only for guided tours and special events. Our self-imposed exile in a foreign, German-speaking land currently has no end date.

What might we discover by accident on the next bike ride? Probably a new grain elevator, or maybe some more war memorials. If we are lucky, maybe a hidden Biergarten. There won't be any bike rides for a little while, though. Tomorrow we are heading to Krakow!

Luck and lady bugs

The words for luck and happiness in German are the same. To an American, this is confusing when someone wishes you luck on your birthday, or says the he or she is feeling "lucky" instead of happy.

Good luck charms in German culture include some things that are familiar to me, like horseshoes and four-leaf clovers, and some things that are not. Here's a short list:

Mushrooms - The red ones with white spots are considered lucky, and especially around NewYear's time. This kind of mushroom is called Agaric, and it's both poisonous and hallucinogenic when eaten. Maybe if you do, you'll start seeing leprechauns and pots of gold and rabbits popping out of hats.

Pigs - This has something to do either with the piggybank (Sparschwein), or with the fact that that people who own pigs have it figured out. The pigs live off of scraps and trash and produce a lot of tasty meat. This is only lucky for the people, not so much for the pigs. Either way, pigs have something to do with prosperity. Marzipan pigs are a popular New Year's Eve candy. I think marzipan is gross, so maybe that makes me less lucky. In case you are not familiar with it, it's a sugary almond paste that makes cute shapes but tastes like glue.

Chimney sweeps - Run into one on New Year's Day and you are set. They are good luck anytime, though. It has something to do with keeping a chimney clear and preventing your house from burning down. It worked for Mary Poppins.

I was in Scotland for the New Year, so I missed out on all of these opportunities for good luck. I could still avoid the Pechvogel (the bad luck bird, as opposed to the good luck mushroom), if I stock up on lady bugs.

Lady bugs-  The lady bug one is what's been on my mind lately. I am throwing an American-style baby shower for my good (Texan) friend Serena on Saturday. Serena lives on Marienstrasse, not far from my house, which is translated as Mary Street. I couldn't figure out why there were ladybugs painted on the tiles in the Marienstrasse tram stop, and otherwise un-decorated place, until I learned that the word for ladybug in German is Marienkaefer (Mary bug). The baby's room at Serena and Ed's place will have a ladybug theme and for the shower I decided to make a ladybug cake. I made a practice cake last weekend, which turned out to be more of an albino ladybug since I ran out of red food coloring and made the frosting pale pink.  By now she is mostly eaten, her face is sort of runny and her antennae are askew. What's left of her will be joined by a redder, happier-looking cake for the shower.

On the wall at the tram stop

Now that I have been looking around I am noticing ladybug cards, ladybug chocolates, ladybug travel agencies... and I am wondering what Mary, the mother of God, has to do with these little critters.
So, of course, I looked on the internet. What I found out is that Medieval farmers prayed to Mary when their crops were being devoured by insects. The little red bugs arrived and ate the pests. The farmers considered them a gift from Mary to bring a healthy harvest and better luck. So Mary's bugs became Our Lady's bugs in English, and that turned into ladybugs.


The new ladybug cake is in the works. Hopefully she will bring us plenty of happiness and luck, because I am not planning to eat a pig made of marzipan, or a hallucinogenic mushroom. But if I had to choose, I would go with the mushroom.

Labor day

Yesterday was labor day for Germany and several other countries. It's actually International Workers' Day. Since I know you hang on my every word, you'll remember that, even though the U.S. does not observe the Workers' Day holiday, it originated with the Haymarket Riots in Chicago in 1886. The riots occurred during a strike by workers who wanted to establish the eight hour work day. 

Today, German workers have a 38.5 hour work week, 5 weeks of paid vacation time, paid parental leave, paid sick time for up to 6 weeks, employer contributions to health insurance, as well as free coffee, someone to walk your dog, and foot rubs at the office. Ok, I made that last part up. But in general, German workers are treated pretty well (though the grumpy cashier lady at the grocery store might not agree).
One thing Germany does not have, however, is a minimum wage.

This has been a political issue for a while; liberals support a minimum wage of 8.50 euros per hour, and the conservatives oppose it. So you can get your 5 weeks' vacation and your foot rubs, but you can also earn next to nothing and it's perfectly legal.  My suspicion is that a lot of the people suffering most from this policy, or lack of a policy, are not Germans at all but the immigrants who do low-skilled jobs. Immigrants are usually my favorite people in Germany. We have all been confused, laughed at, and defeated by this country at some point. We forgive each others' accents and grammatical mistakes. We sympathize withe each other.

In Berlin, about 6,000 participated in a demonstration yesterday in favor of a minimum wage law. 6,000 showed up for one in Hamburg. Similar protests were held across Germany, led by the labor unions.

Did I protest? No. I went for a long bike with Brian and we saw a castle. Then we had kebabs for lunch and hung out at the Kleingarten with friends into the evening. It was a great day.  If anyone asked whether there should be a minimum wage in Germany, I would say "ja, naturlich." If we in the U.S. have had one since the 1930s, then certainly the land of sick time and 7.5 hour work days can do to the same.

Besides, the Turkish man at the kebab shop shook our hands when we arrived, asked how we were doing, and gave us free tea and dessert after lunch. I want him to earn at least as much as the grumpy German supermarket cashier.