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.

West Cork

In Ireland they use the work 'walk' for what a good sedentary-living American would call a hike. So for few days in the far southwest corner of Ireland, we did a lot of walking up hillsides, through sheep pastures, along the coast and through the mud.

To balance out all the Clonakilty fun, we stayed in a quiet self-catering cottage and went to bed early. Our plan was to check out the scenery and get plenty of fresh air.  I had even contacted the local bike shop about renting bikes. But with steady showers, tall hedges, and the best views being from in between grazing cows in a field, it seemed like walking was a better plan.

Brian drove our trusty Micra out to the Beara peninsula, where we found some Bronze Age wedge tombs and stone circles, a manor house that had been burned down during the revolution in 1921, and Ireland's only cable car out to Dorsey Island.

On our second day out in West Cork, our eighth wedding anniversary, we took a ferry from the town of Baltimore out to Cape Clear island. We hiked around for most the day, checked out the coastal views and the O'Driscoll castle, and saw a seal in the harbor on our way back. That night we tried to go to the pub in the nearest village for dinner. It was closed. We tried the next village - everything was closed there too. Finally, we made it the town of Skibbereen which had both a pub and a Chinese take-out place open. We were in luck. Last year on our wedding anniversary we flew to Istanbul and ate falafels on the sidewalk. I consider myself very lucky. Some people just go to the Macaroni Grill.

The sun came out on our third day in the country and we went to lighthouse at Mizen Head, at the tip of the Mizen Peninsula. The cliffs are spectacular, and they have also caused a lot of shipwrecks over the centuries. And we saw more wedge tombs.

Finally we hiked near Lough Hyne, a marine nature preserve. It's a salt water lake that fills up during high tide but is landlocked at low tide. We climbed up to see the best views.

We were certainly off the tourist track on this trip. We were away from the major attractions and it's the off-season, so a lot of hotels and restaurants were closed. There was not a sweater shop or a leprechaun hat in sight. On the drive back to Dublin we stopped for lunch in Kinsale, and were reminded of what we were missing. Kinsale is a tourist town and has been for a few hundred years. It has a beautiful harbor and lots of cafes and souvenir shops. Brian and I guessed that besides us, there was a bus full of American tourists and a bus full of British tourists, and maybe some Germans thrown in the mix. I usually defend fellow Americans, especially those who travel, but they can also be really embarassing. Here's the conversation we witnessed at lunch:
Older American man in shorts tries to order Jameson from the waitress. It's 11:45am. Then he turns to the people at the next table and says, "HOW'S THE FISH AND CHIPS?" They speak quietly so he thinks they must be Irish. "IS IT THE BEST IN TOWN?" (he is, of course, really loud). They say oh yes, it's good, or something like that. He detects a non-American accent. "ARE YOU LOCAL?" No, they are from South Wales. "WE'RE FROM NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES." They probably know that New Jersey is in the United States, even if he doesn't know where Wales is.

Suddenly I was extra happy that we had spent our trip among some actual locals, or at least away from most tourists. I was happy to give up the sweater shops and instead watch soccer on TV while eating at the only pub open Skibbereen. As for our friend from New Jersey, he might have been happier at the Macaroni Grill.

Weekend in Clonakilty

On day two we headed to Clonakilty.
Back in 1999, when Brian spent a semester abroad in Cork, he worked at a bar with Jason Collins. They lost track of each other but just this year, through the miracle of Facebook, got back in touch. I make fun of Facebook sometimes, and get annoyed at people who post about eating oatmeal for breakfast or jogging .78 miles yesterday, but it can be a great way to connect with people you haven't seen in a while. That's how we ended up with Jason, singing karaoke in an Irish cop's basement at 3am.

Clonakilty is a small coastal town, famous for being Michael Collins' home and a summertime resort destination. Jason considers himself lucky to be a policeman there. He's not the kind of cop that wants to see a lot of action in a high-crime area. Clonakilty's cases are minor thefts and traffic accidents, and Jason knows everybody in town.
On Friday we checked out a few of the sights around town
Incheydoney Beach:

Birthplace and childhood home of Michael Collins:

Galley Head lighthouse:

The lighthouse was closed for the off-season, but Jason wasn't worried. He decided we would just jump the fence. There was a van far off heading down the road between cow pastures, but were pretty sure it wasn't coming all the way to the lighthouse. We also came up with the plan that if anyone asked what we were doing there, Brian would play the loud American tourist and say something like, "HI THERE, I'M AN AMERICAN, HERE TO FIND MY ROOTS. THIS IS A GREAT LIGHTHOUSE YA GOT HERE, BUT IT WOULD BE EASIER IF YOU UNLOCKED THE GATES." Our plan was fool-proof. And wouldn't you know it, as we started walking back toward the road, we saw a white-haired lighthouse keeper getting out of the same van. Brian started to stride up with a little cowboy swagger, ready to recite his lines, but Jason choked and went with honesty instead.

He told the lighthouse man that he's a policeman (Garda) in town and we were visiting and wanted to see the lighthouse, sorry for the trouble. The lighthouse man went on to explain that it's so lovely out here and he wishes it could be open year-round but the trouble is that someone came out here to walk a dog once when there was construction work going on, and the health and safety board got worried about people falling off the wall and such, and if that happened then he would have to take the blame for it and be in a tough situation. But it really is a shame and he's glad we enjoyed the view and Jason can come back anytime he likes, just give the lighthouse guy a call and he'll come and open it up.
 (If something like this had happened in Germany, we would have just gotten yelled at).
We saw the lighthouse keeper in town the next day, walking down the street with his wife. It's good to be nice to people in a small town since you will certainly run into them again...

We happened to be visiting during the retirement and 50th birthday celebration (that's right, retiring at 50) of Tim, Clonakilty's most popular police officer.  Tim looks about 38, goes tanning regularly, spends most nights at the bar and most mornings at the gym. He eats fish and drinks seaweed smoothies. He has traveled the globe. He may have been the inspiration for the TV ads about the most interesting man in world. We got to be part of the weekend-long event in Tim's honor. Friday night we took over a pub in town and had a lock-in, which means that instead of closing at 12:30 like the pub is supposed to, they lock the doors and everyone stays until they have long forgotten what time it is. Technically this is illegal, but since most of the law enforcement in Clonakilty and neighboring towns was there with us, I felt pretty safe.

On Saturday I got to see my first hurling match. Jason is on the Clonakilty team through the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) and it was one of their last games of the season. In hurling you hit the ball with your hurley stick to a teammate. You can catch the ball with your hand, usually aided by the hurley, and you can run with it for a little while if you balance it on the hurley. If the ball goes through the posts (field-goal style) then it's worth 1 point, but a ball in the net scores 3. That's about as much as I learned about hurling anyway. And then it poured rain and I ran for the car. The game was a tie at the end; they have to play a rematch.

Saturday day/night was a party at Tim's house, part 2 of the birthday and retirement extravaganza. It involved a lot of karaoke in the basement. Brian stole the show.
I had a great time Friday night, but struggled a little on Saturday between 12 and 3am . Eventually I found a second (or fourth) wind somehow.

It was a great weekend, and I felt more like visiting I was an old friend than being a tourist in a foreign country. So the next time I go on Facebook and get annoyed at a picture or someone's dog trying on a new leash, I will remember that it can be useful too. Without Facebook and Jason, we would have never me the most interesting man in Ireland.

Glendalough and St Kevin's cave

As we flew into Dublin it was hard not to recall our last trip there, two years ago. It was the day that our shipment of stuff finally showed up after we waited three months, made few dozen phone calls, and sent several mean emails that got us nowhere. Since July it had probably been stuck on a container ship or forgotten at the back of a deserted warehouse in some English port. Two hours before we had to leave for the airport the movers came and told us they couldn't unload because the people we'd hired to block off the street had never showed up. We got them to leave our boxes at school (unloading a lot of them ourselves) and took off for the flight, realizing when we got to Dublin that Brian had left his wallet and drivers license at home and I don't know how to drive stick. Then we got lost in the dark leaving the airport, on the left side of the road.

This trip was smoother than that.
We started at Glendalough (pronounced Glendalochkgkch or something like that), in Wicklow Mountains National Park. Our most stressful moment was trying to find the hiking trail without get hit by a car. St. Kevin found it relaxing there too. In the 5th century he walked to Glendalough, found a cozy cave in the beautiful valley, and lived as a hermit for seven years. We arrived in a Nissan Micra and stayed at a B&B for one night, but we thought the valley was beautiful too. A monastery was built on the site in St. Kevin's honor, with most of the buildings dating from the 12th century. The cemetery is still in use.

On our hike up the hills we saw some lanky soldiers-in-training with their combat boots, pretend rifles made of wood and heavy packs topped with flourescent caps. The first few soldiers moved at a steady pace, even talked to each other and said hello to us. The last few let their wooden rifles hang, heads bobbing with every step, and barely grunted as we passed. The Wicklow Mountains were the heart of the 1798 Irish rebellion, where defeated rebels hid out in the hills for years. St. Kevin probably climbed all the hills barefoot and foraged some berries along the way. I don't think these last few troops would have been able to keep up. 
We just hiked a while and then jumped back into the Micra on our way to Clonakilty.