How to celebrate Thanksgiving in Hannover

Thinking of Hannover as your Thanksgiving destination?

Ok, you weren't. But just in case, here is what you would need to celebrate Turkey Day in a place where no one cares about the Squanto or pumpkin pie.
Is your family overseas? Don't worry, you can make your own holiday with these ingredients.

A day off - Friday, that is. Brian and I will both be at home on Friday, getting ready for our weekend extravaganza. It includes: a small Thanksgiving dinner for 9 Friday night (we had 18 last year), football game Saturday and a party Saturday night. Plus, it doesn't feel like a holiday if you have to spend it with a class full of 4th graders.

Hokkaido squash - There's no Libby's in a can and no pie pumpkins here, but the Hokkaido is a worthy substitute. In English you call it Red Kuri squash, but I had never heard of that either.
Here they are cooking in my oven, after which I will scoop them out and end up with orange smears of Hokkaido on my clothes and somehow on the wall. It's worth it - pumpkin pie is an exotic treat here.

Real cranberries - Those also don't come in a can and pop out as a perfect ridged cylinder. But they do show up in the grocery store for a month or two each year, imported from the U.S.

Will power and disdain - to protect yourself from the lure of chocolate Santas and Christmas decorations that have been taunting you at the grocery store since early October. You need to tell your American self that it's not time for that yet. There is no progression of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas here. We just slide right from September into Santa Claus.

Gravy mix - I do most everything from scratch for Thanksgiving, but gravy is where I draw the line. It's the last thing I want to do when the turkey is out and the potatoes need mashing. You also cannot buy gravy mix in Germany, but I thought ahead and bought some while we were in Ireland.

A strong back - to carry the food, beer,  etc. up all the flights of stairs to our apartment. In preparation for our party, Brian and I have been going to the liquor store once a week and coming home with a case of beer each time. He holds one handle and I hold the other. Halfway home we set the case down and switch sides, then he carries it upstairs on his own. We make a good team.

Vegeta - Or to put it better, when don't you need Vegeta? It's an Eastern European blend of spices, vegetables and salt that is sort of like a bullion. You can put it in anything - rice, potatoes, meat, soup, casseroles - it will probably go in the stuffing this year. Maybe I should try making gravy with it.
 

A red or black shirt - If you want to play in Puten Bowl Zwei (Turkey bowl two).  It's an American flag football game played the day after Thanksgiving (or Thanksgiving observed). The original turkey bowl happened in Leawood, Kansas when Brian was in middle school, and it continued on and off for over a decade. The turkey bowl is always Pilgrims in black vs. Indians in red. When played in Germany, the North Americans get split up since they know how to play, and the Europeans and Australians are spread between the two teams. The game will likely attract the attention of locals walking by with their dogs, who, in their German way, will slow down and look but not stop to watch or ask what's going on.
Here are last year's players, post-game:

A (small) happy turkey - You can buy frozen turkeys here. They are stuck in the far back corner of the freezer section. But, in keeping with our sustainable meat policy, last year I bought a farm-fresh, local, organically fed turkey that once walked and was capable of reproduction. It was delicious. I ordered one again this year (by myself, in German, thank you) and I pick it up at the farmers' market today. I hope they remembered. If it's too big, it won't fit in the oven (look back at that pumpkin photo for an idea). But turkeys don't really come small. The smallest I could request was the runt at 5 kg (11lbs) but I have a feeling it might end up more like 6 or 7. We may have to chop off a leg or two to get it in the oven.

Turkey baster - Imported from the U.S. last year. Thanks, Mom!

An eclectic group of international friends - When your family is not around, it's a good alternative to spend Thanksgiving with friends. It also makes us Americans the ambassadors of Thanksgiving - no one compares my stuffing to their grandmother's, and no one judges me for making gravy from an envelope. Everyone is amazed by the sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie.

Four Lithuanian folk dancers - For Saturday night's party, we have invited about everyone we know. We even invited the neighbors again this year. My Polish friends Kaska and Charlotta are in a folk dancing group, and they have a big performance Saturday afternoon. When there is a big show to do and they don't have enough men (which is almost always), they call in the ringers from Lithuania. So we told the Polish girls to bring them to the party. These are four guys of Polish heritage who Charlotta met at a folk dancing camp years ago. I think they are going to play in the Puten Bowl also. Maybe later on in the party, we'll clear out the furniture and get them dancing.

Add a lot of gratitude and you have a real Thanksgiving - Hannover style. The Germans don't know what they are missing.

One more expat thing...

This is a good essay about living in another country:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/chelsea-fagan/2012/05/what-happens-when-you-live-abroad/

Wednesday night fever

Saturday night fever in Hannover has less to do with bell bottoms and disco and more to do with running a temperature and lying on the couch. This week, I learned that on a Wednesday night, the symptoms are even worse.

My Colombian friend Olga got the idea to go to Club Havana, a Latin-themed bar and dance club in Hannover's Steintor district. If there is a sketchy part of Hannover, Steintor is it. There are some strip clubs and lots of bars, a few questionable hotels and several late-night Turkish restaurants. In any other country, this would be a rough neighborhood, one you'd avoid at night unless you were in a big group of people. But Hannover is incredibly safe, and so is Steintor.  

Olga wanted to go out on a Wednesday mostly because her husband is working in another town and only home on the weekends. If we went out on a Friday or Saturday, she'd miss out on time with him and he would call her. A lot. Once when she was out without her husband, he called her 25 times, concerned for her well-being.

The whole idea of going out to a disco is strange to me. It's not something we ever did in the U.S. First of all, the word 'disco' meant Bee Gees and platform shoes. In German, Spanish, and probably a lot of other languages, it means dance club. In the U.S., we went to bars that had live bands or DJs, and sometimes people started to dance there. Clubs were for the very young or the very sleazy. They were good for bachelorette parties or special occasions. But there aren't very many bars here, and not a lot of live music, and sometimes in the bars that do exist, they don't play music at all. That's why you have to go to the disco.

What Brian and I do for fun has changed in the last few years. We don't go to the movies (they're in German) and don't hang out on our patio. We do go to biergartens and sometimes a minor league hockey game. We rollerblade. We also spend plenty of time in the living room. Going out dancing is only the latest addition to the list of how I spend my social time differently in Germany.

And Wednesday night at Club Havana? Salsa music playing, half the bar closed off, and three people sitting on barstools. That was it. There was no dancing. We left and ended up at another place with worse music and about 20 more people.

What we have learned from this experience is that, no matter how hard Olga tries, Hannover will never be a Madrid, a Berlin, or a Medellin. It will never be happening on a Wednesday night. It is the city that always sleeps.

If we want to go dancing we have to do it on a Friday or Saturday like everyone else, when the neon lights are flashing and Steintor is full of people. On Wednesdays they are home nursing German-style colds and ironing their bell bottoms.

Ten words or less

Living in Minnesota made me a public radio fan, and I recently discovered NPR's Project Xpat blog.  Project Xpat is doing a story about what it means to live as an American expatriate. They are asking readers to sum up their experience in ten words or less.

I decided to do something slightly out of character and submit something. This blog is the most public sort of writing I have done ever, and I haven't entered a writing competition or anything like that since high school. That's the beauty of the internet, I guess. If you want to be a writer, go for it.

So, especially since the most American of holidays is coming up this week, I thought I'd all share my thoughts with you on what it means to be an expatriate, in ten words or less. Here are some that didn't make the cut:

No Chipotle or Target in sight; where am I?

Showing the world, we don't all wear sweats in public

Expat = Learning to be confident while feeling like an idiot

Yes, the United States is just like on TV

I'm sorry to make you speak English around me

Just nod and smile

Moving away makes it easier to see where you were

Beer is cheaper than water, everything is closed on Sunday

I live in the place where fairy tales come from

The metric system really is better 

My state is bigger than your country

You think winter here is cold?

I now realize that American multiculturalism is a real thing

Real friends are close no matter where you live

I can't explain why Americans don't all have health insurance

If you ask 'how's Germany?' I'll smack you

People in other places don't always understand why we left

Yes, I really live here now

It's like the Omaha of Germany

How do you know when you're at home, anyway?

Is this a parallel universe?

I sometimes really miss it, sometimes never want to return


And finally, the one I actually submitted. To me, being an expat means:
Feeling at home while being out of place

This is not a food blog...

but, I like cooking and I like food and I think a lot about them both, more than I used to before moving here. Is this because I am not as busy as I once was and have more time to try out recipes? Is it because some of the foods I am used to don't exist in Germany and I have to make them from scratch or find a subsititute? Is it because Brian and I have gone semi-vegetarian and I have to do my homework to buy local food and meat that's sustainably raised? Is it because I have an inner fat girl that loves to eat and is constantly frustrated by my exercise routine?
The answer to all of these questions is yes.

Eating has entered the world of German politics as well. Over the summer, the Green party proposed that for one day every week, workplace cafeterias across the country serve only vegetarian dishes. They would have also added a PR campaign encouraging Germans go meat-free once a week at home too. If you are interested, read this article from The Guardian entitled Wurst policy ever? . Sausage jokes are just too easy sometimes.

Forget the euro crisis, the minimum wage, and immigration. German politicians and their constituents got all fired up about meat. Sure, eating less meat is good for your health and really helps the environment, but should the government really get between a German and his wurst? Socialism can only go so far. Sure, protect children from parents who give them funny names. Slap a fine on anyone who crosses the street on a red light. Make it illegal to wash your own car on your driveway. But don't tell us what we have to eat for lunch.

Germans eat a lot of meat, more than many other Europeans. But who eats the most meat of anyone in the world? The Americans, of course. We do everything big - even ourselves. There's no way an American political party would get away with imposing vegetarianism on anyone. They can't even pass new gun control laws. Imagine if the feds took away the Big Mac every Tuesday? They might as well take away freedom.

The Greens did pretty poorly in the election this Fall. Was it because they spoke out against eating meat? Was that the issue they wanted to fight for? It's hard for me to speculate right now... the inner fat girl is getting hungry. I'm off to cook dinner.

Hannover vs. Braunschweig = pig on the loose

There were a lot of two kinds of people in town yesterday:
1. Groups of men, young and old, in black jackets and blue pants, drinking beer.
2. Police. Lots of them. Police on horses, police in vans, police on foot, police in cars.

The reason? The Hannover 96 vs. Eintracht Braunschweig soccer game. Hannover and Braunschweig (the English call it Brunswick) have a rivalry that goes back to the middle ages. It's a long time to hold a grudge. Several hundred years ago, Braunschweig was a prosperous city, a member of the Hanseatic League, and a center for culture and commerce. And then came Hannover. Braunschweig's importance went downhill and Hannover took over as the region's capital. I am a little fuzzy on the details, but somewhere in there, Germans started playing soccer and took out their medieval frustrations on each other.

Fast forward to 2013, when Hannover and Braunschweig play against each other for the first time since 1975. In the U.S., you hear about crazy soccer fans in Europe and Latin America and wonder just how much harm could some fanatics in scarves really do. Apparently they could do a lot. Some friends of ours were in a bar near the stadium a while back when Braunschweig fans came in and started throwing the tables. And Braunschweig wasn't even playing. So the police were ready yesterday. They had even divided the central city into two fan zones. Trains from Braunschweig bypassed the main station and stopped instead at a smaller terminal near the stadium. The idea was to keep the fans segregated so there would be less chance of them starting fights.

Here's a map of the city divided by fan zones

The fan zones did not, however, protect the Hannover 96 pig. Apparently she is a big 96 fan that was captured and tatooed by the Braunschweig fans, then set loose to run around the city. She definitely ventured outside the appropriate fan zone, got really scared, and almost got hit by a car. She's now recovering in a shelter for fanatic farm animals.

And with all this uproar, all the riot gear, all the singing scarf-wearing hordes... the game ended in a tie of 0-0. The pig was disappointed.

The linguistic elevator ride

I called to order pizza last Friday night. That doesn't sound remarkable, except that year ago I probably would not have done it. For a long time our only delivered pizza came via online ordering systems, where I could take my time and plug the names of mysterious toppings into Google translate ("yes, they really mean you can order one with both corn and tuna").

A year ago I could have ordered the pizza. I knew all the words in German and would have understood all the questions, at least after asking the pizza man to repeat himself a few times. But I would not have called; I was scared.

It's humbling to go from a fully functioning adult who called government agencies and banks and - heaven forbid - Comcast all the time to being afraid to ask for a large cheese and mushroom. But now that I have progressed to a roughly 2nd or 3rd grade German vocabulary, I can do it.

When I got off the phone with the pizza place last week, Brian said, "you sound different when you speak German."
"How do I sound?" I asked.
"German."

While a real German would certainly disagree, it is true that different languages make you feel... different. This new article from the Economist is about whether our personalities and behaviors change depending on the languages we speak. The argument is that a language is more than vocabulary and grammar; it's a worldview.

I love speaking Spanish. I've always liked the way it gave me access to a culture that I wasn't born into. I have this special pass to know people and music and books that were never meant for a Midwestern white girl. Speaking German here is different - instead of being in my own culture and confidently stepping into another, I am just trying to figure out the one around me. Even a few months ago, I mistakenly ordered the wrong appetizer at our wonderful Turkish doner restaurant. I asked for the right item, but didn't speak loudly enough and the waiter misheard. It's not logical - the doner guys know us and shake our hands and bring us free desserts when we eat there. It would have been the best place ever to make a nice loud mistake. But since I know I sound funny, my voice gets unintentionally quieter.

When we were in Ireland, several people asked whether I spoke German fluently. The answer is: not yet. But how do you know when you get there? It's not like an elevator that goes up and up and suddenly a bell rings and a door opens, and you've arrived at the level of fluency. Thinking and dreaming in a foreign language are the closest thing to knowing that the language has sunk into your brain and started to live there. I slept really poorly a few nights ago and had one of those half-asleep dreams and in it, a couple of people (including me) were speaking German. That doesn't mean that I am fluent, because I don't think that I understood what I was saying in my own dream. But it's a start.

Learning German in Germany as an adult is not like riding the vertical elevator of languages to reach a higher level. It's a more lateral kind of education. Yesterday I learned all the words for parts of a tree: trunk, branches, twigs. I also learned how to say either-or and neither-nor. I don't really care about writing formal documents or reading 19th century novels, but I would really love to chit-chat with the florist on the corner, or explain to my neighbors that it's not ok to park the bike with the baby seat in Brian's spot.  Forget Goethe, this is the kind of stuff we are dealing with.

I wish there was a set of flash cards for building confidence. Maybe tomorrow I will learn the how to say "hold the pickles and hot dogs on my pizza". But not the arugula - I kind of like it.

Adventures and the new normal

I got an email the other day from a friend in Minneapolis that I hadn't heard from in a long time. It started with the "how's Germany?" (the question that you know I love to answer), and went on to say "I hope you are having lots of adventures." Nobody ever said that to me before I moved to Germany.

So I asked Brian, "do we have adventures?", though I guess I can answer that question myself. We do have adventures, particularly when traveling. If I knew exactly what would happen every day, I wouldn't enjoy travel nearly as much. Daily life here can be an adventure too, and that's been the main theme of this blog so far. But in year three of life in Hannover, things like going to the post office and buying dairy products get less and less exciting. Life seems pretty normal and the days are fairly routine. Maybe that's why it's been getting harder for me to think of interesting things to post about. Don't worry, you have stuck with me so far and I am not giving up. I just have to think harder about how absurd those 'normal' situations really are.

For instance, yesterday I was in a grocery store which happened to be selling pumpkins, like the real Halloween carving kind of pumpkins, for just 99 cents. So I started to look through the bin and pick one out (I have plans to carve a couple for our Thanksgiving party, because otherwise no one would see them but me and Brian. That's one of the downsides of living on the top floor of an apartment building - no one to walk by and peek in your windows). And a man from somewhere in Africa, who was also pumpkin shopping, said to me in German, "hey that's a good price isn't it?" I agreed, then he asked me why I had put one pumpkin down and decided to take another. I explained that the one I had at home was round, so I wanted a long one. Then we talked about whether they were getting soft or would last a while longer. This situation and the whole conversation are completely absurd. Here I was, talking to a man from, let's say, Nigeria, about the size, shape and price of Halloween pumpkins, in a store in a country where they don't even celebrate Halloween. This is what's normal now.

I had a doctor's appointment earlier this week. I'll spare you the details, but I learned a new German phrase. The nurse told me "Sie konnen sich frei machen," meaning 'you can make yourself free.' I had no idea what that was about - I felt pretty free already. I came of my own will, I live in a highly developed Western society where women have a lot of rights, I can say and do and believe what I please... What she really meant was 'take your clothes off'. After she said it the third time I finally figured it out.

Living here isn't a vacation. It's not exile, it's not a sabbatical... I don't really know what to call it, except it's just life. And it's funny what you can get used to.

I might respond to that email this weekend. Maybe it's been so long since we talked that my friend doesn't know what else to ask. Maybe she can't imagine that daily life in Hannover has more to do with laundry and class and washing dishes than with amazing capers in lederhosen. It's a longer answer than she's expecting, but I guess that's how Germany is.