Helsinki, running with popcorn

Brian and I arrived in Helsinki two days before Christmas with a very specific purpose. We had tickets to see Star Wars. We knew that in Finland the movie would be in original version. This is a phrase I never knew before moving to Germany, but original version means that the voices you hear are the actors' own. So Yoda sounds like Yoda, and the dialogue isn't dubbed. In our case, the movie had subtitles in both Finnish and Swedish. But first, the story of how we got there.

When checking into the hotel, we asked the bellman for directions to the kino (this is the semi-international word for movie theater). His eyes lit up. "Are you going to see Star Wars?" he asked. Brian nodded enthusiastically. Finns are not known for being chatty, but Star Wars is the universal language of males, at least those between the ages of 8 and 48. Talking sports works pretty well, but it hits a dead end in certain circles. Star Wars can't be beat. As our bellman, let's call him Tuukka (because I think that's a cool Finnish name) and Brian discussed the merits of the latest interplanetary struggles and the reach of various light sabers, I realized that Star Wars is also the way to loosen up a Finn's tongue. Probably vodka works too, but we didn't try that.

We quickly looked at the map from Tuukko, then headed out into the Helsinki night, in search of the aging Han Solo. We took a wrong turn. Then we headed back, made what seemed to be a right turn and asked directions. We started to follow the directions, but then found the movie theater, right inside a mall. We headed in and showed the blond teenage girl at the counter the tickets I had bought online. "Those are tickets," she said. Yes, thank you, I knew that. But at least she spoke some English. "You show them at the theater door." So Brian and I went down into this mostly dark shopping mall and found the concessions stand. A Pepsi and a bucket of popcorn later, we found the theater door and waited. And waited. No one was there and the show was set to start in 10 minutes. I went back to the teenage girl and expressed my concern. "That's ok," she said "someone will come in a few minutes." My Star Wars-loving husband was getting nervous.

 The teenage girl went on break and was replaced by a pimply blond teenage boy (of course they are blond; this is Scandanavia). He took a look at my tickets again and said "you're at the wrong theater." It turns out that Helsinki has a lot of shopping malls with movie theaters in them. So he gives me some directions and we're off running (literally) to the correct theater, in the correct mall, with 5 minutes to show time. Could we have just bought tickets to the later show, which was also showing at the 'wrong' theater? Sure, but that would have been too easy.

Instead, I was jogging through downtown Helsinki in the dark, clutching a bucket of movie popcorn. We made it, panting, to the correct theater. "Don't worry," says the pimply blond boy who scans our tickets at the door, "there are still 5 minutes of previews. As we sank into our seats and took off our coats, I realized that our popcorn bucket was obviously not from this theater. Thank goodness for the Finns - nobody said anything.

Christmas is coming

This past weekend was the one when the lady at the bakery counter (who talks in an incredibly high voice, as if she is inhaling helium balloons in the back room) wishes you a happy fourth Advent Sunday. For sale under her glass counter are an array of German Christmas-time treats. There are mounds of Stollen, and Lebkuchen and Zimtsterne.  You'd think something delicious would come from the land where they invented oh Tannenbaum.

But no. They all taste like sawdust. Some taste like spiced sawdust, dusted with sugar. They look nice until you bite in and reach for a bucket of milk to wash them down.

Which is partly why I spent many hours this week baking. I make very buttery, sugary, artificially colored cookies that melt in your mouth. Germans probably hate them.

I have written about Advent before, but it's been so long that I might as well do it again. A week before Christmas and people are just starting to take home their trees. There are some tasteful candles in windows and poinsettias at the flower shop. But the colorful, brightly lit, noisy Christmas celebration is reserved for the Christmas market in town. This is something that Americans, even with our light-up reindeer and inflatable Santas, cannot beat.

And this Christmas we headed to another market. Hamburg was the destination, to visit little Fiona (her parents too). A day-long Christmas market crawl is usually not appealing, at least not without several mugs full of hot Glühwein along the way. This year, though, record-setting warmth made it like Christmas in April. In weather that would have had Minnesotans pulling on their shorts, most Germans I see on the streets have been dressing in puffy coats and hats and multiple scarves. They're dressing more for the calendar than for the temperature. But after a few weeks of the warm spell, I noticed a change. The scarves have loosened and the hats have come off. The down coats are half unzipped. Pretty soon, maybe people will start breaking out their shorts.

I am not in Germany this Christmas, and not back home either. Brian and I are heading to Finland, where hopefully the temperatures are colder and snow is falling. We'll be skiing and looking at the northern lights and searching for Santa Claus. We might try eating some reindeer too (sorry Rudolph). We can also try out the Finnish cookies and see if they taste like sawdust.
I will make sure to write all about it.

So from my home to yours, wherever it may be, I wish you a very peaceful and joyful Christmas.
Frohes Fest!

Directions

A man on the street stopped me as I parked my bike one afternoon, and asked for directions the housing office. I used to cringe when people stopped me to ask directions. Partly it was because I usually didn't know where they wanted to go, but also because I was often unsure how to explain that to them without sound like a complete idiot. Now, after four years, my attitude has changed. I may still not know where my fellow pedestrians are heading and maybe I still can't articulate that perfectly. But if they don't like my answer then they should have just asked someone else.

This new-found confidence failed me the other night. When it was already pitch dark at 5:30, an old man asked me how to get to the tram stop. I pointed to it, told him where to go and watched him walk away. He hobbled right past the entrance to the station and kept going. I felt deeply, awfully guilty. Somebody's Opa was now wandering the streets of Hannover with his walker, and would probably get mugged and cause a car accident and have a heart attack from the shock. Then he and all his family would curse the foreigner who didn't walk him right to the tram. In all likelihood this did not happen, because nobody gets mugged in Hannover.

Back to my original story - the housing office (Wohnungsamt) is an easy one because it's just down the street from my building. I have a lot of confidence giving directions there. Every day of the week, a small crowd mills around the entrance. They are either waiting for the office to open, or staring at the door, puzzled why it's locked. If you want to visit the housing office, you have a window of just a few hours a day. If you show up during between the hours of 9 and 5, it's a long shot as to whether you can get in. If it's a Wednesday, forget it.

The fact that the housing office is there definitely increases the number of foreigners in my otherwise white, German, yuppie neighborhood. One day when I was in the grocery store, a couple (who had probably gone to visit the housing office and found it closed), stopped me near the bakery case. "Do you speak English?" They asked. Do I ever! They asked me to help them read the labels in front of the different croissants. She was wearing a head scarf and he looked vaguely Middle Eastern, and together we decided that the ham and cheese-filled croissant was not what they were looking for. There one next to it was labeled 'Nuss-nougat', which is the generic term for Nutella. I asked if they knew what Nutella is. She wrinkled her forehead for a moment in concentration, then said, "oh! chocolate." I nodded enthusiastically and they grabbed a few nutella croissants with the plastic tongs. I may have failed the old man looking for his tram, but I had helped this couple. I too had been baffled by items at the grocery store, and more than once took something home not sure of exactly what I'd find in the package, As women, as foreigners, she and I found common ground in love of chocolate.  Some things are universal.

Planes, trains... Thanksgiving 2015

There are tons of movies about Christmas, about Santa and elves and coming home for the holidays. There is only one real movie about Thanksgiving: Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It's important to watch this film if you are not traveling for Thanksgiving (to be glad you aren't) and especially important if you are an American trying to celebrate Thanksgiving in a foreign country (as I am). It's also important in our house because it's one of Brian's favorites. I guess I love it too - when Steve Martin makes it home for Thanksgiving dinner, I cry every time.

Like all classic movies, you can find its characters somewhere in your life. This year I found a couple of Del Griffiths of my own. In case you are not familiar, Del is a traveling shower curtain ring salesman who has nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. The pair of Dels at our dinner were not shower curtain ring salesmen, but teachers, American teachers at that. When you know that an American is going to be alone on Thanksgiving - even in a place where no one celebrates it - you'd have to be even meaner than Neal Page to not take them in.

Thanksgiving celebrates all that is good and idealistic about America. Sure, the Indians and Pilgrims may not have been as peaceful as the story says, and I know they didn't eat Buterball turkey. But the idea that we celebrate together despite all the things that can drive us apart is more important than green bean casserole. And truly, consciously, being thankful for all the great things in life means more than whether your pumpkin pie is any good. There are a lot of aspects about the United States that I'm not proud of, but I am proud of this holiday. I like to explain to people that we - Americans of all religions and cultures - celebrate gratitude and unity on Thanksgiving. I know you don't see it lived out in the news every day, but we still can hope.

Neal Page would not have made it to suburban Chicago without the help of Del Griffith, a burned up rental car, a bus, a broken train, a cancelled flight and a meat truck. So bringing a couple of Dels into our Thanksgiving party helped Brian and I to make it a little closer to home too.

The attack that wasn't

Until last week, I could hardly imagine Hannover as the center of a terrorism scare. Hannoverians take an odd pleasure in lamenting how boring and unremarkable their town is (that's the subject of an upcoming post). But our sleepy little city made international news on Tuesday night. The German and Dutch national soccer teams were scheduled to play at the Hannover stadium, and Angela Merkel was coming to watch. Given the attack on Paris just a few days earlier, security was tight and people were nervous. And with good reason - an ambulance filled with explosives was found nearby and police received a threat of a bomb somewhere in the stadium. Players and fans were evacuated. No game was played. Another tip pointed to a bomb on a train at the main station. Police shut down part of the station and found a suspicious package.

No one was hurt, and no game was played. I don't know who won in this situation. Was it the good guys, because no bombs exploded and everyone went safely home to bed? Or the terrorists, or would-be terrorists, because they disrupted our peaceful, boring, lives? Because they shook up our town and got in our heads? Terrorists seem to have super power capabilities to be everywhere and nowhere. They have no territory and their enemies can be anyone.

The stadium is just a block from our school. Understandably the kids, families and staff were worried. But there was no reason to stay home - you're not safe there either. The only way to react is to do all the little things you usually would in your sleepy city - to go to school, play soccer, take a train somewhere. That's all you can do.

I was actually in a few airports on Tuesday night. I flew to Edinburgh for a school counselor's conference and didn't know about the developments in Hannover until I landed. I don't know anyone who was evacuated from the stadium or whose train never left the station. And so the news about Hannover is something that could have happened, but didn't. Even though the events of Tuesday night happened right where I live, I feel distant from them. I wish the same sort of distance to people around the world.

Missing and being missed

Hello again, dear readers, how I've missed you.

Since we last spoke I've been in Texas, Kansas City, Baltimore, Washington DC and back to Hannover. It was a strangely relaxing trip the US that was not actually a trip home. It made me appreciate the value of just sitting around with people who are family and people whose connection is harder to pin down but are just as much a part of our lives. Several of them are very tiny people.

I also received an imaginary cardboard check, visited the state department rubbed a few elbows on behalf of Play Global.

So, back in town and over the jet lag, today was my last day teaching grade 6-8 Spanish. I've learned a lot over the last couple of months, but I do not call myself a teacher by any means. Much like living in Germany doesn't prepare you to go anywhere less organized or safe, teaching at the international school does not prepare you to work anywhere where the kids are difficult or unpleasant or rebellious. But I will miss the little goofballs.
And, judging by the homemade cake and the sweaty pre-teen hugs I got today, they will miss me too.

On the road

I am traveling and will post again soon. Check back in November and I'll have something for you!

Hungry to be noticed

The European refugee crisis that was all over the front page a couple of weeks ago is now mysteriously absent from the media. Did it go away? Was there just nothing new to report? Or did our collective attention span run its course?

I won't answer that question, but there is a group of people in Hannover who don't want to be invisible. A few months ago, I wrote about the Sudanese migrants in Refugee Protest Camp Hannover. They are here without a status, not deported but not given a place to live or a right to work. They are squatting, basically, in a nice part of town, living in tents and trying to get refugee status from the state government. No one has arrested or deported them. No one has given them rights either.

This week they staged a hunger strike outside the Staatskanzlei, where the governor works. I knew this not because I am that connected with current events but because I ran right into it. The state government building is on my way to school and the Sudanese guys were all set up on the sidewalk Monday morning. They were there Tuesday also. On Wednesday, I stopped to talk with them. It was day three of the hunger strike and a few of the 45 men were looking, even for people used to living in the elements, pretty worn down.

I asked if they had talked to anyone from 'in there' (as I pointed to the Staatskanzlei). The man who seemed to be in charge said that some people from their group had gone in and delivered a letter explaining their case. Someone from inside was now supposed to come out and address them. I wished them luck and asked if I could take a picture. They wanted to make sure I got the government building in the background. I mentioned the blog and said I'd write about what they are doing.

According to a local news article, the Sudanese want to have the same status as people fleeing from Syria, who are classified as refugees. They have also pledged to continue the hunger strike until October 23rd, nourished only with water, tea and cigarettes. It baffles me to think how that is even possible.

And as I pedaled past on day four of the hunger strike, my belly full from breakfast at home, my heart sank a little. It was hard to believe that these people would be heard by the officials from 'in there'. They have no rights, no power, no money, no political clout. There is not a Sudanese community in Hannover pulling for them. Sleeping under tarps beside their protest signs, they are fighting to be noticed.

The Sudanese protesters do have a few friends in town, and a Facebook page, of course. A recent post mentioned that the protesters need: "water, tea, sleeping mats, sleeping bags, their rights."
As a foreigner myself, I don't think I can help with that last one, but I might drop off some tea on Monday. I wish the Sudanese guys, and the other refugees coming to Hannover, a roof and a full belly and a chance to be noticed.

Recent photos

Here a few photos I have taken lately:

Powdered wig, tri-corner hat, motorcycle jacket. Taking a smoke break on a 17th century fountain in Hannover

Grand Theatre in Groningen, Netherlands

Train station and some public art, Groningen, Netherlands

Farmers and agricultural workers protesting the drop in dairy prices, Hannover (note the man in the pig hat)

A sticker on a light pole brings some hope.

If you remember the watch tower post, here is the Döhrener Turm decked out in ivy.

Right on time in Hannover

When you live in Hannover, there are only two places to meet up with people: under the horse tail or at the clock. You could choose somewhere else to meet, but that would be unusual. The idea that everyone in town uses just two meeting spots is one of the reasons that Hannover, despite its big city aspirations, is really a small town.

Unterm Schwanz is the way to say under the tail, which only makes sense if you know you are at the train station looking at this statue:

I wrote about the horse and his rider Ernst August a couple of years ago. Go ahead and read about them if you want, but now I'm going to tell you about the clock.

The Kröpcke clock is on the busiest pedestrian corner in town. It's between the opera house, the train station and the main shopping streets in the city center. The spot is named after a guy named Kröpcke and his cafe, which is still a perfect place to sit outside and watch all the commotion. Mr. Kröpcke opened his cafe in the 1870s, and the city built the clock about ten years later.

Notice the Nazi flags waving on either side of the clock

During the war

While most of Hannover was leveled during World War II and half of its residents lost their homes, the clock survived. It ticked away among the rubble until the 1950s happened. The city planners wanted a modern, progressive city and there was no place for  19th century clock. So they built this one:

It stood until 1977, when Hannover realized that mid-century design wasn't cool anymore. A replica of the original clock was built in its place and is still standing today.

Public clocks are everywhere in Germany. If I had been a watch-wearer before, I would have stopped by now. There are clocks on church steeples, above banks, sometimes just on the street corner as a public service. There's no excuse to be late. In case you are not looking up, somewhere nearby a church bell rings every fifteen minutes. Germans are punctual, and almost everything here runs on time.

People complain about the DeutscheBahn arriving ten minutes behind schedule. Apparently they have never tried Amtrak in the U.S., or the Hershey train in Cuba. I wanted to ride the Hershey train through the sugar cane fields of the old Hershey plantation, but there's no way to know when it will arrive and some days it doesn't show up at all). This is why, as I may have mentioned before, living in Germany doesn't prepare you to live anywhere else in the world. In most places people, and trains and buses, are sometimes late (but hopefully show up on the same day).

I most recently waited at the Kröpcke clock for two people who come from the polar opposite - culturally and almost geographically - of German punctuality. Olga from Colombia and Surama from Cuba are hard-wired for la hora Latina. Latin time runs anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes later than German time. If my Latina friends call at the time we are supposed to meet and say, "I'm on the way," that means they are about to leave the house. Since I'm chronically 5 minutes late (sometimes a little more), they make me look good.


I wonder about the people hanging around the Kröpcke clock. If everyone arrives on time, then nobody in Hannover would stand by the clock for more than 43 seconds. Are they showing up early? Are the friends they plan to meet not German? What's going on?

The friends I was meeting, despite not being German, showed up within the hour. We all laughed about it as the clock ticked away behind us.

From the left: Olga, me and Surama

We bought a TV

Brian and I bought a TV. 

It was a first for me. I think in my whole life I have never actually bought a television. They have been handed down or given as gifts (thanks, Mom) over the years. And since we moved to Hannover, Brian and I have not had one. We haven't gone Amish or anything, we were just using a projector. It seemed like a great idea - hook the computer to a projector and use the white walls to our advantage. But then the projector broke, we hung a nice picture on the wall, and it was time to move on.

Buying an electronic appliance means going to an electronics store. You might think that these places in Germany would be quaint, with fresh bread and a beer stand and lederhosen-wearing salesmen. You are wrong. The big box store is international. And it's my least favorite kind of store. I would rather be Amish and write this blog on a slate with chalk than go to Best Buy at Christmas time.

Check out the length of the word above the TVs. German is hard.

You see, I am not into gadgets. I like them when they work and I like using them to the very minimum of their capabilities. This means I have an automatic communication gap with people who are into gadgets - like anyone who works at an electronic store - even before you consider the language gap. What I do have working in my favor is that I've always been a bit of a nerd magnet. And though they are not wearing lederhosen, the guys working at the big box store are definitely nerdy. Therefore, when buying an electronic device in Germany I pull what I call the double bimbo. I ask the salesman in my heavily accented German, filled with cute grammatical errors, about what a smart TV is, actually. Not only am I a foreigner (hopefully a cute one) but I apparently know nothing about electronics. This means that the nerdy salesman should take pity on me and walk me to the precise point in the precise aisle where the HDMI cables are hanging. It's not an act; it's a survival skill.

I am not helpless with technology; I am just not that interested. I'm also old enough to know that it's faster to just let the interested people help me. My generation learned how to program the VCR and make mix tapes. I can use iTunes and pull off a mail merge. But I have no idea what HDMI stands for.

So we bought the TV. Then we had to get it home. No, Brian did not strap it to his bike and roll it back (though he did that a few weeks ago with an armchair). We took the tram. It reminded me when we bought our grill and took it on the very same tram four years ago.

For that purchase, there was just a lot of pointing involved. A grill does not have any electronic parts so I didn't need to ask any questions. I think the Amish even use them.

My new day job

I have a new job to add to my collection of part-time endeavors. In addition to running Play Global, coaching cross country, helping international school kids apply to college and finishing my Master's, I am now teaching middle school Spanish.

There was a time when I thought a degree from a good liberal arts college would get me places. That was a silly idea. Español has been my ticket to just about every job I've had. There were a couple of social service jobs, an immigration law internship, some translation work and - most interesting - a job at a used car auction. It was the place where old, donated cars got a second chance every Saturday. It was also a destination for people who didn't have much money to buy a car, but were not afraid to fix one. There was a fast-talking auctioneer in a ten gallon hat there, and more cash than I had ever seen. The crumpled 20s and 50s and 100s made my hands grimy. A lot of the buyers spoke only Spanish, and almost none of the staff did. I had no idea what I was doing, but I could at least communicate.

So now, after a couple years of substitute teaching, I am actually... teaching. Preface that by saying I am not a teacher, have never been trained as one, and I know nothing about educational theory or anything that real teachers know. But I can speak Spanish and I show up for work, just like at the car auction. And the kids seem to like me, so I guess it's going ok.

Where will Spanish take me next? It's hard to say. Hopefully nowhere else for right now.  I've got enough to do. I don't know if they even have used car auctions in Germany, and if they do exist there are probably hundreds of laws about them. But if a man in a ten gallon hat shows up to offer me a job, it'll be hard to say no.

The invasion

They're coming.
The invasion has begun.
It's not the undead. The zombie apocalypse is not here yet. What we are facing is a horde of... refugees.
Ok, when you put it like that, it sounds less scary. Some of them are brown people. They are going to need jobs and health care and places to live. Maybe that sounds scarier.

The flood of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans makes headlines here every day, and with good reason. It's the largest refugee crisis since World War II .  Germany is stepping up to the challenge. As Europe's political and economic leader (I guess that could be debated, but nobody messes with Angela), Germany has opened its doors to more refugees than any other EU country. It will accept about 500,000 asylum seekers this year.

Germany's public services are responding. Shelters and tent cities are springing up around the country. In Hannover, a school gym has been converted into a refugee shelter. There are rumors that Waterlooplatz, originally a training ground for the Prussian army, will soon be filled with trailer homes for refugees. 

Some refugee shelters in Germany have already been burned down. As many Germans as there are who want to help, there are plenty who are afraid. There's also a slimy underbelly of those who are afraid and react with violence.

I think that Der Spiegel does a great job of describing the mindset of the German public:

"These are people who are determined to do everything right and to atone for Germany's sins, even 70 years later. They know that they owe something to their collective conscience, and that whenever they give something up, they also gain something in return. That something is the feeling of doing the right thing, the important thing.
 
But there is also the fear of being overwhelmed. It is the fear of people who are willing to give, but only to a point, only as long as it doesn't hurt them. People who are willing to share as long as they don't have to make sacrifices. And that, all generosity aside, is why so many people now feel that limits should be imposed on immigration. They may not know where these limits should lie, but they are convinced that they should exist."

I was subbing in fifth grade last year as the students worked on research projects. One girl was researching refugees. Her survey to the class asked whether Germany should be accepting refugees or not. Most of the ten and eleven-year-olds in the class answered, something like "yes, but..." or 'yes, to a point..." or "yes, as long as...". Even though many of these kids had immigrated once themselves, they (or their parents) wanted to put a limit on just how welcoming Germany could be. 

The flow of refugees might be easier to swallow if all of the refugees came from Eastern Europe. It might be easier if they were not so different, at least on the outside. Dark-skinned people and women in head scarves don't blend in well in small German cities. It's harder to forget they are there.

It's not like my country has a spotless record on immigration either. I am not pointing fingers. We've had our share of failures, racism, deportations. We have just been doing immigration - messy or complicated or illegal or successful - for a really long time. Whether it's been a melting pot or a mixed salad or a tapestry or whatever you try to call it, we have some experience with this stuff. And, not so long ago, some of the refugees we took in were from Germany.

I'm interested to see whether the trailer park goes up in Waterlooplatz. If it does, I wonder how Hannoverians will react. My guess is that the trailers, and the people living in them, will make some locals uneasy. Most will smile and shrug and accept. Only a few will be out trying to stop the invasion. When Angela Merkel spoke in Heidenau, where a refugee shelter was burned down recently, only 200 people booed and called her a traitor. I don't think that Angela gets rattled that easily. She would probably be a good zombie killer.
 

In Hannover, again

Brian and I just returned from four weeks Stateside. Actually, we didn't just return. We've been back in Hannover for over a week. We are back to work already and it seems like that month in the U.S. is already long gone.

I find that I don't write much on visits back home. I'm not sure why. It could be because there are too many people to see and not enough rainy Hannover days pulling me back to the blog. Or maybe since I have a limited time to be in that American part of my life, I put my energy into doing things than reflecting on them.

It's not that I wasn't thinking about you people at all. I did have an idea for a blog post during our trip. In an odd reverse-tourism kind of way, I wanted to take photos of all the odd American things that a German tourist would find interesting. It would have included a mailbox shaped like a fish, a sign on the church doorways that said no firearms allowed, and a whole supermarket aisle full of salad dressing.

But I never got around to taking those pictures. There was a lake to swim in, a taco to eat, a friend to visit. And all those salad dressings to choose from. As much as I was ready to get back to my own bed and my car-free lifestyle in Germany, it was, as always, hard to say goodbye.

I did add a few photos from the trip. None are of fish mailboxes, but you might appreciate them anyway.
And now, dear readers, you are back with me in Hannover again, over and over.

Powers lake

Me and Phoebe

Dad and the nephews

Sunset, Minneapolis

A proud Minnesota moment: T-bone bingo

Brian won meat too - what a night!

"Dragging" the field , St Paul Saints

Americana

One of our favorite places

On vacation

I'll be back on the blog soon!

How I started blogging instead of playing football

I wrote a book in second grade. It was about Mars. That seems strange to me now, because I don't know about Mars or outer space. I don't even like Star Trek. It's entirely possible that I stapled that construction-paper book together because I liked to draw cute aliens.

After that literary debut I wrote in school of course, both because I had to and because I liked it. I was set (in my semi-tomboy way) against the idea of a girly diary with a heart-shaped lock. But kept a journal (which is the same as a diary, sans lock and glitter) off and on throughout my awkward years. As a teenager, I started to write poetry. It was mostly bad. I got a few pieces into my high school's creative writing magazine, which made me feel embarrassed and exhilarated all at once.  I wanted to be noticed, but felt more comfortable being overlooked. In early college, I let Brian read all of my poetry. No one else ever had. This was probably the first sign I had fallen in love.

I could always write when I needed to, but as my teenage moodiness disappeared, so did my bad poetry. In my twenties, I stopped writing for a while. There would be a furious bout of journal writing every year or so, followed by silence as I searched for jobs, moved apartments, tried to figure out the future. I didn't feel an urgency to write often because being a writer wasn't something you could really DO. It might be easier to make it as an NFL player than as a famous author. And I can't catch.

This blog is a little like my grown-up version of that construction paper book. Of course I enjoy it, but I can also make it cute and colorful and hold it up proudly for you to see. Posting in cyberspace is ultra-public, but private because no one is here at this moment but me and my keyboard. I can pretend it's no big deal. I guess as shy as I once was (still sometimes am) about what I've written, I do my best when I've got an audience. And let's face it, that NFL career was never going to happen.

and to Berlin

You may be tired of me writing about Berlin.
I don't care.
I've written about Berlin before but it's one of my favorite places and I'm going to write about it again. So there.

We wrapped up our trip with Luke and Jackie in Berlin. Our days of cathedrals and quaint half-timbered houses and Christmas souvenirs were over. We stayed in East Berlin hipster-ville, where grafitti is part of the landscape, where buildings are Stalin-esque, and where the hardest ethnic food to find is German. In Berlin we ate Sri Lankan food, rented bikes to ride from east to west, visited the 1936 Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens triumphed over Hitler.

And while there were hundreds of bars and restaurants and dark thumping techno clubs to visit, it was the end of our trip. Our friends had been on the road for three weeks. We had been traveling hard for one. So on the last night we went back to a familiar place. There's a Cuban bar that made Brian and I feel warm and welcome one February night a few years ago. It offered live music and cigar smoking and bar tenders who wanted to talk baseball. That's where we took Luke and Jackie. We'll save the techno club for next time... maybe.

Smoky Bamberg

On the way to Bamberg, a Turkish samba band boarded our train. They had flown in from Istanbul for a music festival in a quaint German village. These sorts of things don’t happen when you rent a car.

Bamberg is famous for beer. It's most renowned for Rauchbier, or smoke beer. 'What is smoke beer?' you ask. Imagine biting into a ham sandwich. Not just any ham, more like leftover Easter ham. Now imagine that the sandwich is not a sandwich. It's actually beer. And you’re not biting it, you’re sipping it. That is what Rauchbier tastes like. They make it by smoking the malt before the beer is brewed.
 
We smelled the malt roasting when we got off the train in Bamberg, right behind the Turkish samba band. So under this haze of smokey malty aroma, Jackie, Luke, Brian and I started to explore the town.

Bamberg is still in Bavaria, but not by much. It’s in the north Bayern region of Franconia, where Frankish is still sometimes spoken.
Remember that Germany hasn't been one country for very long. Franconia was its own kingdom until 1803. Then it joined in with those redneck Bavarians but never quite gave up its own identity.
That's how the Frankish language survives today, with lots of words ending in a pretty-sounding "la". This would never happen in German, whose words often end with a clunky "gung," "lich" or "chen".

Our foursome’s energy level was a little low after three nights out in Regensburg, but that suited Bamberg just fine. It’s a small city, good for slow wandering and church gazing. There’s a 12^th century convent on a hill, a cathedral where a pope is buried, a riverfront with old bridges, cafes and breweries, of course.
This is postcard Germany.

Though any postcards from Bamberg should really be scratch 'n sniff. They would, of course, smell smoky. 

Crystal ship - Regensburg

Inspired by our elderly countrymen and their Danube cruises, we set out from Regensburg on a river boat trip of our own.

We headed to a place called Walhalla, but more on that later. 

When I went to buy tickets for our boat ride, the woman in the ticket booth glanced at the screen and her eyes lit up. “You are in luck,” she explained, like maybe I’d won a door prize. “Today the Crystal Queen is cruising to Walhalla.” The Crystal Queen, she explained, was the flagship of the fleet. It is inlaid with Swarovski crystal elements and even has an on-board crystal museum. I guess many people would be amazed at the luck we had. Brian was not impressed. He looked longingly at the creaking wooden ship with picnic tables on its deck.

When I was a freshman in college, some of the guys on my floor built a ship out of some old boxes and dorm furniture. They called it the crystal ship and sailed it down the hallway every night for about a week. They were taking a lot of drugs. I don’t think that ship could have made it to Walhalla. 

The  Crystal Queen lived up to her billing. There were crystals in the stairs, on the walls, encrusting the bar, and even a strobe light in the bathroom stall to show off crystals on the stall door. It was a lot more bling than I am used to seeing in Germany. Would this have been a hit in Texas?

Aboard the crystal ship

Crystal stairs

Creepy bride mannequin in the crystal museum

Walhalla is a monument built by a king of Bayern, King Ludwig I. He’s the grandfather of crazy King Ludwig II, who built the Cinderella castle at Neuschwanstein and bankrupted his kingdom in the process. Like his grandson, Ludwig I liked to build things big, and shiny, and impressive.  I imagine him wearing cowboy boots and a huge crystal-encrusted belt buckle.

Walhalla is named after a Norse temple and built to look like the Parthenon (it's also the name of a town in Texas).  It’s filled with busts of important Germans in history: scholars, scientists, writers, politicians. Most impressive is the location - it stands on a steep hillside overlooking the Danube.

After a picnic and a some time to enjoy the view, we boarded our boat and sparkled all the way back to town. Unlike with the crystal ship of my college days, it was smooth sailing.

The Texas of Germany

Luke and Jackie came to Hannover on the hottest day... ever. I don't mean it was really hot. I mean it was bewilderingly hot. Unnaturally hot. Melting into the sidewalk hot. No air conditioning, bad ventilation, if my body were this temperature I'd have a fever, kind of hot. Hannover is not used to this.

So we traveled to the part of Germany that seemed best suited to a hot climate - the Texas of Germany. That's right, we went to Bavaria.

First stop: Regensburg.
Regensburg is on the Danube, which is Donau in German. Of course we can all pronounce that word (dough-now), so why change the name to Danube in English? It's the same case with the state, Bayern. That's not so hard to say. But the Germans don't trust us not to screw it up, so in English we say Bavaria. Of course, no one but a native German could say München correctly (most of the sound comes through your nostrils), so I will happily call it Munich.

Regensburg was originally an outpost of the ancient Roman Empire. The doorway to the huge fort is still intact, unearthed just a couple of hundred years ago. The city has winding medieval streets, a towering cathedral, a charming river front, shops and restaurants and bars on every corner. There's also a bike trail all along the Danube, and even baseball. It makes you wonder why anyone lives anywhere else in Germany.

So what makes Bayern like Texas? Until the mid 1800s, Germany wasn’t Germany at all, but a group of independent kingdoms. Bavaria, like Texas, still acts like its own country. Most of Germany is Lutheran; Bayern is Catholic. The churches are more colorful, more ornate. Instead of the squared-off steeples of the north, they have rounded domes that look like Hershey Kisses. In Bayern, the people are bigger, the meals are bigger, the beers are bigger, the parties are bigger.  Most Germans are reserved; Bavarians are loud. They are considered the rednecks of Germany. 

Jackie with 'normal' sized beers

There were actual Texans in Regensburg too, and Midwesterners, and New Yorkers. Every day, Danube cruise boats would dock in the harbor and release a chattering band of retired tourists headed to their walking tours and swarming around the world’s oldest sausage stand.

Baseball is not the only evidence of a U.S. presence in Bavaria. Southern Germany was under American control after World War II, and is still home to major U.S. military bases. This is why, when I tell Americans that I live in Hannover, they ask “How far is that from Munich?”. They never manage to call it München.

As for that skin-melting heat - it broke on our second day in town, with a storm of Texan proportions.

As American as

July 4th is approaching. That has me thinking of flags, parades, the freedom to shoot your hand off with fireworks, and barbecues. What is an expat to do when looking for groceries from back home?

You can find some American foods in Germany, particularly the ones at Burger King, McDonald's, Pizza Hut and KFC. Apple pie does not exist (no pie pans either) but there are a lot of products at the grocery store with stars and stripes right on the package. Now that I finally have a smartphone, I get to take photos of all this mundane stuff so you can see it with me! I snapped pictures up and down the aisles at the supermarket last week. Because this is Germany, none of the other customers commented. The guy stocking shelves didn't make eye contact or ask what I was doing. Here, the only people who strike up conversations with strangers are crazy people. I was the one laughing while taking photos of groceries. Clearly if anyone was going to start a conversation it should have been me.

Here are some of the American items for sale:

American salad dressing. We call it thousand island.
In Germany, they still call French dressing French. I wonder what the French call it?

 Peanut butter.  I actually prefer the Dutch peanut butter which you buy at the Asian grocery store (of course).

 It's pretty exciting that I found Pop Tarts. It's pretty incredible that they cost 6 euros and 49 cents.

 Marshmallows. I never knew they were American, but I should have. Marshmallows+chocolate+graham crackers = s'mores, and s'mores = freedom.

 Another gourmet American treat: Campbell's tomato soup for 2.39.

 Chocolate chip cookies. These are not very good. As far as I'm concerned the only decent chocolate chip cookies in town are made in kitchens (like mine) of real American bakers (like me) using real American chocolate chips. Did I mention I bake a mean cookie?

 Cheez Whiz, the hallmark of American innovation.  It's yours for just 4.49.

Hot dogs in a jar. This grosses me out. I don't know why, but I think it's the water inside. Americans usually buy hot dogs in a plastic bag, which is filled with equally murky hot dog water. I used to love hot dogs, as most kids do. Then when I was in college I had to cook hundreds, possibly thousands of them, at a concession stand and my hair smelled like hot dogs for days, possibly weeks. I have not eaten a hot dog since. I don't care how patriotic it is.

 American pizza, with a thick crust.

And, from the freezer aisle, the pizza burger. Pizza, burger - why should you have to choose? I think this is a little like a sloppy joe but I am sure I have never seen one in the USA.

So Germans must believe that Americans live off hot dogs topped with Cheez Whiz, cookies with marshmallows and peanut butter, and pizza and burgers, or maybe both at the same time. No wonder they think we're all fat. Or maybe they just think we're all nuts. You'd have to be a little crazy to shoot your cheese out of a can, or walk around the grocery store taking pictures of food.