The packers are here, and my time left in Germany is now extremely limited! As I’ve been reflecting on my final days in Frankfurt, I’ve decided that although I’m very happy to be going back to the U.S., there are a few things that I definitely will miss. In no particular order:
1. The Christmas markets, and specifically the Gluhwein and Kartoffelpuffer sold at them. There is nothing like having a steamy, warm spiced wine and a hot glorified hashbrown with garlic sauce to make me happy.
2. AFN commercials, specifically the ones with Squeaker the Hamster and the spy cats. A close second are the “what to do when you’re marrying a foreign bride” ones. Third are the ones giving advice on what I would normally assume is common sense, but apparently isn’t: “Eat Breakfast!”, “Don’t shake your baby!”, and “Pick up your stuff off the stairs!”.
3. Tax-free gas coupons. Rationally I know I’m not paying any less than what I’d pay in the US, but the fact that I only have to hand in pre-paid coupons always makes me feel a little like I’m getting it for free!
4. The Greek restaurant that Steve and I go to on Eschersheimer Landstrasse. I don’t even know the name of it (something like Elinikon?), but I will miss the always good food, wine, and funny table-waiting from Georgio, the owner (Steve says this is his name, although I don’t think he ever told us that since he never communicates except with surprised hand and eyebrow gestures). Anyway, if I ever have a night’s layover in Frankfurt, this is where I will go.
5. Lenore and Daniel, who have been the coolest friends, especially Lenore, who has taken such good care to keep me entertained when Steve is gone for weeks in distant countries! She has also recommended many good books that have gotten me back into reading, which I’ve always loved.
6. German wine. I know it probably shows my lack of taste and discrimination when it come to wine, but for me you can’t beat the sweet white wines from the Rheingau region. Unfortunately, a low-end bottle that would cost you two euro at a German grocery store is at least $8 in the U.S., so I’ll definitely be cutting back...
7. Pork. I never particularly liked pork before (although I didn’t dislike it), but there is so much here in so many forms, and they always cook it so well, that you can’t help but eat it at least five times a week. Then, when you leave, you get this strange craving for it a few days later. So I’m expecting pork withdrawal when I get back.
8. Recycling. It’s a funny thing, because I never particularly cared about recycling before, but they make it so incredibly easy here. Now I almost find it fun to think about which bag what trash goes in, and it seems incredibly wasteful to throw a whole newspaper or big plastic bottle (like a detergent bottle) in with the other trash. The nice perk with this system is that the recyling stuff is normally fairly “clean”, i.e. does not have icky things rotting on it, like newspapers or shampoo bottles. As a result, the actual trash is a much smaller bag and has to be taken out less, which appeals to my lazy, non-trash-taking-out side.
9. The little toilet seats in gas stations that spin around and clean themselves after the flush! Those are so cool! The fact that you have to pay to use the restroom almost went on my “What I Won’t Miss” list, but it was saved by the super-neat rotating toilet seats. Very Jetsons-like, and pretty hilarious the first time you see it.
10. The tower in back of my apartment. It is literally so close to my living room windows and so bright, it’s almost like a person sitting next to you when you’re on the couch. I also think it’s pretty, and I will miss it’s constant presence. It’s become almost like a well-behaved and really cool roommate.
And now, what I will not miss (I’m limiting myself to ten, to be fair and balanced...)
1. Nothing being open on Sundays (literally nothing, no grocery or drugstores, movie theaters, newstands...). This is such a pain. It forces you to sit in your apartment all day, doing nothing but watching tv in your pajamas. “Nothing wrong with that,” you say, and I agree, maybe once a month. But when it happens every Sunday, you start to feel like a total bum.
2. Having to bag my own groceries at the grocery store. This is how it was in England, and I hated it there too. I always get this panicked feeling, because by the time you’ve only filled up one bag, the lady has already told you the total and is waiting for the money. So then you have to get out your wallet and pay, put it away, and resume bagging, while the next customers groceries are already coming off the belt and bumping into yours! Related to this is...
3. Having to pay for your own grocery bags. This always got me, because, not having grown up here, I don’t instinctually grab grocery bags to take with me to the grocery store like the Germans do. So I always had to buy my own, and then I always kicked myself for forgetting - again - to bring bags along. This is why my kitchen cabinets are full of unwieldy plastic bags that I never use again, because they don’t even work well as trash bags...
4. Not being able to wash my car on the street. It’s illegal here. You have to go to a car wash or some other designated area where the runoff water is caught, so nothing gets polluted. Of course, this is expensive and time consuming, since everyone goes to the car washes on the weekend.
5. Not having English-language bookstores. I’ve always gotten excited passing bookstores, and if I have spare time, always stop in. So I still get this reaction when I pass them here, just for a second, until I realize that all the books are in German, and more than likely too difficult for me to read (except maybe the children’s books). It’s minor, but always makes me a little sad and disappointed.
6. Every single time I’ve gone shopping in Germany, the stores and the streets have been unbelievably crowded. This has to do with the aforementioned Sunday closure, and the early closing hours. Also, Germans will not move out of the way, they just recklessly bump right into you to shove you out of their path. It always turns what is normally a pleasant experience into a hectic, stressful, chaotic mess that leaves me exhausted after about two hours.
7. German road signs. They will inevitably (literally, always) not tell you anything that you need to know. For one, the autobahn signs don’t give a direction like “North”, they have city names. And it’s invariably not the city that you’re driving to, it’s a bunch of random little towns and a large city about five hours away that’s not even in the direction you’re going (I believe the logic is that that highway leads to another highway that will eventually go to that city). So everytime I get near an exit that I know I’ll need (they are not numbered), I have to frantically create a map of Germany in my head based on my poor knowledge of these hundreds of towns (“Where is Aaschaffenburg? East? South? Maybe I want Mannheim, where’s that? Aghhh, I’m driving 90 miles an hour and have to decide right now!”). Once you do make a choice, you won’t know it’s the wrong road until you’ve driven about sixty miles and you finally see a sign for something you know is definitely in the wrong direction (note: this is how, when trying to drive to Munich with my grandparents, we ended up circling in and around Frankfurt for literally four hours).
8. Euro pennies. They are about half an inch in diameter, and weigh almost nothing. I can’t recall a time when my total actually involved an odd number that required euro cents (they always round to the five), so they’re always just taking up space in my change purse and confusing me.
9. German toilet paper, which is like bark. I don’t think this point needs elaboration.
10. The general complexity and difficulty of doing anything here. This is the most hard to define, but basically, if there’s anything that needs to be done (paying a bill, visiting a doctor, anything involving starting or canceling a contract), you can guarantee that it’s going to involve multiple steps that must be done in a certain order, lots of big words that no one will ever have taught you, legal issues, calling toll numbers where you’ll be transferred to multiple people, and sending things in writing (unless it’s something that, in the U.S., would need to be in writing, such as promising to pay a doctors bill). It is so pervasive that it’s actually made me not do things I might otherwise have done (such as signing up for ADAC, the German version of AAA).
As promised, I'm uploading a few photos from my trip to Castle Mespelbrunn last weekend with Lenore and Daniel. It's a small castle about an hour away from Frankfurt that was built by an artistocratic German family (whose decendants still live in a part of it). It's the only castle I've ever seen with a moat! Unless you count the Tower of London, which is more like a bunch of castles, so I don't. The castle is really beautiful, and small enough that you don't have to spend four hours touring it (you can only see about ten rooms in total, but they're all decorated, and you aren't roped off from any of it.) There are lots of quirky things around that the family collected over the years, including a real shrunken head (Daniel said it used to look better several years ago, and now it just looks like a little orange with a mouth. It's only kept in a little glass cabinet that everyone can walk right up to!)
Surprisingly, Castle Mespelbrunn doesn't seem to be in any of my Germany guidebooks, perhaps because it's a bit out of the way of other major sights, but I highly recommend a visit to anyone visiting southern Germany! (Bringing down the cultural level a notch, I also recommend a visit to ChiChis restaurant in Hanau, where we went afterwards! It's no La Paz, but you have to take what you can get for Mexican food in Germany...)
Okay, I've had enough teasing now from Steve and Lenore to realize that I'm quite possibly the world's worst blogger. Maybe there's an award for that!? So, apologies to all my loyal readers (although six months since my last post, I'm not sure if there are any of you left!) :) Since it's already (unbelievably) June, I thought I'd give a recap of this year so far...
January
In January, Steve and I took a trip up to Amsterdam to visit my good
friend Melissa, who I originally met in London several years ago and
have been friends with ever since. We had a great time hanging
out with her and her boyfriend Arno and seeing Amsterdam, which is a
really nice city. I used to not be very interested in visiting
it, due to its association with dreadlocked backpackers, but I realized
that it's actually a beautiful and historic city, and definitely worth
a visit. We also went to a place outside the city where they have
the big windmills, which was neat to see:
I also took this really cool photo of Steve. He looks very mysterious and handsome!
I have the memory of a goldfish, so it's kind of hard to remember this far back! Let's see...aha, in February, Steve and I took a road trip to Berlin. Berlin was fun, but that city was covered in the previous blog post that you all had to look at for six months, so I won't talk about it again! The really cool part of this trip was visiting Tropical Islands, which is this old zeppelin hanger converted into, really, a tropical island. It's about 85 degrees and humid year-round (which is sooo nice in the cold German winter). The hanger is so large that they have an air balloon inside that you can ride in, and the ceiling is kind of hard to see because of the distance. There's a tropical rain forest, a beach, a lagoon, and Vegas-style shows throughout the day...it's definitely not a place for people who take things too seriously, but if you can just suspend disbelief, have a pina colada and fall asleep on the beach, it is so much fun! Here are some photos:
March
I don't remember a lot about early March. I think Steve was in Armenia or somewhere, and when he's gone on those long Eastern Europe trips, the days tend to run together around here. I spend a lot of time cleaning, working, and watching American and German Idol with Lenore (which is a really fun tradition that we started around this time).
Toward the end of the month, Steve and I took a road trip down to Bavaria. He had never been to Munich, and my friend Matt was having a big going-away party, so it seemed like a good opportunity. We started out the trip behind this funny little car. We actually weren't sure what it was until we got closer (it's so small and close to the ground, it almost looks foot-powered, like a Flintstone car):
We saw some nice, picturesque buildings:
We ate some good Bavaria food and drank some beer at the Hofbrauhaus (yes, even I drank beer!):
We also drove up to the Zugspitze, which is the tallest mountain in Germany. Unfortunately, both Steve and I are afraid of heights, so we couldn't go up on the scary cable car and this is as far as we got! :)
Whew, this semi-annual (bi-annual?) recap is harder than I thought! Okay, moving along...
In April, the big event was Steve and I flying back to the States for a
week. We started the trip in Washington for about two days, where
we saw some friends and looked at potential places to live in the
fall. We then spent a few days with Steve's parents, and we
helped throw a surprise 50th birthday party for his dad! It was
in the town firehall, which gave Steve and I a good opportunity to take
silly photos with a fire truck:
Finally, we drove to Wilkes Barre, which is notable for being near Scranton, where one of my favorite shows, The Office, is set. We went to a wedding of some good friends of Steve, so we got to get all dressed up and excited about our own wedding.
May
Almost caught up! May was a nice, relaxing month in Frankfurt. The weather was nice, and Steve and I had time to work on some wedding-planning stuff (although really, my ever-patient parents are the ones doing most of the work!), go to the park, etc.
May was the finale episodes of American Idol and German Idol (in Germany, the title is Deutschland Sucht den Superstar, or Germany is looking for the superstar, which I think is kind of cumbersome and silly). As I mentioned earlier, Lenore and I had created the tradition of watching American Idol at my house on Wednesdays, and German Idol at her house on Saturdays. When Steve was back from whatever Eastern European country he was traveling in, he joined us. I was hoping Blake would win on American Idol, because I was a fan of the beatboxing and scat, although I think Steve was going for that other girl that won and Lenore didn't really care. The German Idol was slightly disappointing, because the favorite of Lenore and I, who we nicknamed Crazy Eyes, threw some tantrum and refused to give interviews, and thus was kicked off the show by the producers. The winner was a guy named Mark Medlock who we strongly suspected was half-American, because he was the only one who could sing the songs properly, without some silly accent or incorrect words (for example, "I belief the childrens are ze future..."). I just looked him up on Wikipedia, and as it turns out, his father was from Georgia, just as we thought...
I don't have any photos from May!
June
Wow, I finally caught up! This month, Steve is in Moscow most of the month. I'm occupying my time trying to organize myself for the move (packers come on June 28!) and my short trip to Oslo for work at the end of the month. I've also been hanging out a lot with Lenore and Daniel, who I am going to miss sooo much when I leave. I think Steve and I may have to adopt them so they can come with us on our tours. If you have a minute, check out Lenore's blog. She has some really great photos and descriptions of their recent trip to Zimbabwe.
I have some cool photos from a drive we took yesterday down to a castle
about an hour away, but I will have to upload those later...as it is,
this has taken two hours to write and upload! I've definitely
learned my lesson about waiting too long between posts....for
now. :)
Last week I went up to Berlin for the long weekend, and for whatever reason haven't gotten around to uploading my photos and writing about it today. There was some distracting excitement this week regarding my job-related future and where I'll be - if you don't know about that yet and would like to, send me an email!
Anyway, as I said, I went up to Berlin on Thursday for an LSE alumni weekend. I took a high-speed train that got me there in about 3 hours and 45 minutes, which is fairly impressive considering it's about a 5 1/2 hour drive. Thursday I had meetings and stayed in at my hotel that night - it was absolutely freezing outside - and went to bed early, since I wanted to get up early for sightseeing on Friday.
One of the first things I noticed when going to breakfast the next morning was that Berlin has almost no crosswalks. Here's a photo I took while eating at Starbucks:
The result is that you just sort of stand on the corner and look all
ways and then run across, hoping any unseen cars will yield. It's
surprisingly third-worldish...although it's quite possible that there
is some kind of law about pedestrians and right-of-ways in Berlin that
I'm simply not aware of. Anyway, this reminds me of another
tangent I wanted to write about, which is how living abroad has made me
really like Starbucks. I used to dislike their coffee and thought
it was overpriced, but then when I moved to London it somehow developed
this association with home (i.e., the US) for me. There was one
right next to school that I studied at a lot, and I always knew they
would have big comfy chairs and would be playing Christmas music at
Christmas, for example. So now after going there for so long and
having developed these warm fuzzy feelings for it, I really love the
place. I hate it when big corporate marketing actually works on
me in such an obvious way (Starbucks = home!?), but it seems to have
done so in this case, for better or worse. In a related but more
innocuous way, I used to hate grits before I lived abroad, but now
absolutely love them. I also associate them with home, which is
strange because I never ate them growing up. But ever since
finding a box at this overpriced American-food grocery store in London,
they are one of my favorite foods. I can go through a box of the
variety pack in about a week.
Moving along...since I had never been to Berlin before, I used
to walk around on a self-tour, a book very nicely gifted by my grandparents after their last visit. It ended up being quite useful, offering a self-guided tour of the major sights in central Berlin that took me about 3-4 hours. I'm a little suspicious of Rick Steves' books sometimes, because they can be a bit simplified and arbitrary - one isn't quite sure why he picks one small Swiss town over another to focus on, for example, and whether that means that that town will be over-commericialized by the time you get there - but in this case, I really enjoyed it and found it helpful.
Anyway, one of the first sites I saw was the new Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. I particularly wanted to see this because it opened last year when I was in German class and I can't count how many articles I had to read about it. Anyway, it looks like this from the street:
After all of that, I went on to see more of the traditional Berlin sights: the Bundestag, where the German congress sits:
The Berlin library, which I don't think is particularly noteworthy except that it had a pretty courtyard:
The rest of the weekend was a very nice time. I met a bunch of other alumni from grad school and spent a good deal of time speaking German, which was refreshing. I went on a tour of the new Berlin train station, which is very impressive - five stories high, with trains arriving and departing on each level. Unfotunately I couldn't really take any photos because of the scale of the place, but there is a nice little article about it here if you are interested. One of the features is that you are supposed to be able to see all levels from almost anywhere you are standing in the station, which does indeed cause vertigo.
All in all, Berlin was really a fantastic city and I hope to go back to see more than the quick view I had. The only regret I have is not having been able to see it before the Wall came down - although of course I saw and can still see photos and videos of what the city was like before, it's really almost impossible to envision what it looked like anymore. There has been so much development that there is literally almost no trace of an East-West division, at least to an outsider and in the very center where I was staying (although I did talk to several Berliners who said that there are currently three clear areas in the city: the former West, the former East, and the Center).
I'll close with a photo of the Brandenburg Gate at night:
I've been getting into photography lately, on an extremely amateur level, but it's been fun. There have been two photo contests at work recently, where the winner's photographs are used to decorate the building. In the first contest, earlier this year, I won second place with the following photo:
A new contest was held last month - I placed fifth this time, with this photograph of the Main river:
This time, a lot of the photos I submitted weren't chosen, which I was a bit dismayed about considering that I thought most of my photos that won in the previous contest were terrible, and I put more effort into these. But I suppose that's the nature of a photography contest - you submit it for someone else's opinion, not your own! Also, a few really great photographers (including Steve, who won second place with this photo) entered the contest this time, so I had some extremely tough competition. Anyway, here are my favorites of the photos which I did submit (of these, the lemon photo, the asparagus photo, and the woman buying flowers photo were chosen):
How does everyone like my new Autumn-inspired theme to the page? It's getting chilly and dark early here, so I felt I needed something a bit seasonal. And for all of you who have been asking why I haven't posted anything new lately, it's because there hasn't been anything worthwhile to report! Well, maybe, but I only really like to write a post if I have some pictures to go with it.
Yesterday was Halloween, not literally the 31st, but the designated day when all the kids came around trick-or-treating. The really tiny kids, the ones whose parents dress them up but who are still a little unsure of what the whole trick-or-treating concept is, are my favorite. Steve and I invited some local friends over, and after the trick-or-treating ended, we all went to a party. Steve and I were barbarians and our friends, Lenore and Daniel, were goths. Here are the four of us before we left:
Daniel turned out to be a fairly good photographer, so he directed us for a few other silly shots. These two of Steve and I are my favorites:
This past weekend I went to Munich for Oktoberfest. I left with my friend Susan on Friday afternoon, and we stopped in Stuttgart first for a work-related event. Unfortunately we hit the infamous German stau (traffic), and it took us five hours to drive what is normally a two and a half hour drive. It was really disastrous, involving at one point moving only seven miles in an hour and driving around a city that we thought was Stuttgart for a half an hour, only to discover that we were in an entirely different city. Needless to say, I won't be using Mapquest Europe or Via Michelin for directions on long trips again. In fact, the best strategy for driving in Germany is to ignore the maps and the directions and simply follow the signs. Anything else is likely get you completely lost.
Anyway, we finally got Munich late on Friday night. Saturday we went to Oktoberfest, which I have to say was quite underwhelming. It basically looks like a typical German fest, which is very similar to a county fair in the U.S., but on a very large scale (i.e., the size of a U.S. theme park). It was extremely crowded, although I would say a sizeable portion of the crowd was German, many of whom were wearing dirndls and lederhosen. Susan also had a dirndl, which I was very jealous of until she pointed out that they cost around $250 and that I would never wear it again. So we walked around for awhile, but weren't able to get in any beer tents, which apparently fill up and close around nine in the morning (amazingly, people stay in them until eleven at night when they close). We did find a cocktail/wine tent with spaces open, but drinks were around $10 each. Needless to say, we didn't stay long. After about three hours, we left, and spent the rest of the day napping, ordering Indian food, and watching Bollywood movies, all of which proved to be much more fun. On the whole, I wouldn't recommend Oktoberfest, unless you can go on a weekday and get tickets to a tent. But I least I get to say that I went! Here's a photo of me in the middle of it all (this is also an excellent picture of my ring, which I am still unabashedly obsessed with! Hey, I've only been engaged for about four weeks, so that's still allowed.)
The rest of this week looks to be very low-key. Steve gets back
from Baku on Friday!!! He's been there for three weeks, and I've
been suffering from withdrawal the whole time. :)
In the spirit of all this engagement excitement, I thought I would put up a few more pictures of Steve and I, all taken over the last year since we've known each other and been together...
Here's us in Prague last November. We were just friends then.
And here is us at a friend's bachelor party in early December (still just friends)...
In February, we went to Venice:
This is us outside of a winery near Frankfurt in March:
In April, we took a road trip all around southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein and France. This is my favorite photo that we took at a farm in Bavaria:
Here's us in May, when the weather finally got warmer and we took a picnic to the park:
And then of course we went to Thailand. This was on our last night: