Things Germans Do That Confuse Me

First of all, a big fat apology for my lack of diligence on the blog-updating is in order! You know that feeling when you procrastinate on some harmless task, and the longer you put it off, the more daunting it seems? In order to stop being terrified of having over two months of blogging to catch up on, I’m going to just do a series of shorter posts instead of one long, boring recap. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch all the highlights over the next week or two!

I have been similarly lax on my Amikinder videos (I’ll try to get back on track with those too), but if anyone has been following the YouTube channel at all, you may be familiar with Lydia, who has a hilarious running theme of “things Germans do that confuse me.” Well, here’s something Germans do that confuses me: as you may remember, Germans buy their water in Kisten. Instead of drinking tap water, they buy big plastic crates containing glass bottles of mineral water. Normally, we buy Gerolsteiner water, but Tobi prefers Spa water, which is not sold here. So, we drove to a foreign country in order to procure, yes, water. Of course, this is Europe, so the nearest foreign country is pretty much as a rule day-trip distance away. (Russia is partly in Asia, so it doesn’t count.) And I live near enough to the border to drive to Belgium in the morning, visit two different grocery stores, take a leisurely stroll through the town, and enjoy the weather in a terrace café, and still make it home in time for lunch.

Gabi and Tobi with an éclair in Belgium! the sign in the background says "Bienvenue - Wilkommen"

Another thing that I am pretty confused by are “Maibaüme” or May trees. May Day was one of the weirder traditions (although not necessarily in a bad way) at my high school, but it did not prepare me for the German “Mainacht” celebration. Aside from being a Karneval-like excuse to hang out with people and drink beer (minus costumes, plus nice weather and fireworks), “May Night” brings with it the very strange custom of erecting “May trees.” This had been mentioned and even explained to me multiple times, but I just really did not get it until I drove past a friend’s house after the May Night festival to see that her boyfriend had placed a huge birch tree with colorful ribbons hanging from the branches in her front yard. And when I say huge, I mean taller than her three-story house.

Just kidding. I still don’t get it.

I didn’t get a picture since it was around 1:30 in the morning, but here is an approximation:

ein Maibaum (source: http://www.maibäume.de/)

In other news…there is a lot of other news. I’ll try to spread it out a little bit over the next few days instead of dumping everything on y’all at once, in case I haven’t built up enough anticipation already by waiting months to write this. 😉 Bis dann!

“it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”

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While I’m thinking about photos, I just remembered that those of you non-Facebooking people can still see all the photos I post there by following this link! (I’m looking into making a Flickr or something of the like.) I haven’t been taking many, though, because my camera has been a battery-eating monster. Or, as Tobi would say (in perfect “American”), “on the fritz.” Actually, my entire host family has picked up on that and I think I will refer to all of my cameras as “Fritz” for the rest of my life.

Anyway, as you may have heard, Germans really like Christmas! My host family had a party a week…before I started writing this post on Saturday the 11th. Oops. Sorry, everyone! These are photos from the party and some of the decorations in and around our house at the beginning of December.

If I remember correctly, when my host family moved into this house several years ago, they had a housewarming party in December and everyone loved it so much that it became a tradition (sound familiar, my caroling friends? ;D). It is held outside in the backyard, which initially sounded like a terrible idea to me, but is bearable and even gemütlich for a few reasons: soup, a heater, Glühwein, and crepes! The second half of that list calls for some further explanation:

Personally, in cold weather, I generally opt to drink hot chocolate or mulled cider, when available. Unfortunately, there is no apple cider in Germany (afew people have insisted that I am wrong, but nobody has produced any yet), which means no hot mulled cider, so Germans drink hot mulled wine instead! I still miss cider, but Glühwein is pretty tasty stuff, and ubiquitous at holiday parties and Weihnachtsmärkte.

Tobi has fitted out an old French automobile with a mini-kitchen in order to sell crepes (though they were free during the party, of course), which is really wicked cool. I hadn’t seen the inside until the night of the party, and I was totally blown away. Mona and I both spent a while helping out in the crepe-mobile. I’ve wanted to learn how to make crepes for a few years, but I was always convinced that I would be hopeless at it. Happily, by the end of the evening I could make a half-decent-looking crepe, and they taste great regardless of appearance, so…it was a fun and successful venture, haha!

I hadn’t met most of the guests before, but they were very friendly people (as one would expect, since they’re friends with Gaby and Tobi!). Several of them came to chat with me while I was manning the crepe operation to ask me about my impressions of Germany, tell me about their travels to the US, compliment me on my German, and suggest that I fund my education by starting a crepe-and-Glühwein business when I go home (seriously, more than one person came up with this…not a bad idea!). Really lovely folks. At the end, I spent a while chatting by the heater with Gaby, Tobi, and several of the neighbors. Froitzheim people are great! My host grandparents and aunt also came for the weekend, and it was generally nice and fun and Christmas-y.

We already had snow, as you can see from the photos, although it was apparently early for this area. As you’ve probably seen in the news, in fact, it’s barely let up since! But that’s a topic for another post.

Sorry again for the huge wait! I’ll try to post some more tonight, and then tomorrow is Christmas (already! Germans celebrate on the 24th, Heiligabend), and I have two weeks off coming up so I’ll have time to keep catching up, if need be. (:

on German food

Hello, my poor, neglected blog-readers (Mom…and everyone else)! I apologize for disappearing, and there’s plenty of filling-in to do, but before I do a great big recap, I’d like to address the most important part of any cross-cultural experience: the food. (Get ready for lots of generalizations about Germans and what they like to eat when.)

Brötchen

Brötchen is basically the main staple of German food. In a perfect world, Germans would eat fresh Brötchen at least twice per day (breakfast and dinner). It is consumed with the contents of this refrigerator shelf…

a refrigerator shelf holding several hundred types of cheese and wurst

…along with butter or margarine. Other possible Brötchen-toppings include Frischkäse (I believe this is cream cheese), Marmalade, and of course, Nutella.

It’s harder to fake lunch photos in the middle of the evening, because lunch is generally the warm meal of the day. Potential lunch/dinner foods include Maultaschen, Flammkuchen, Schnitzel with Spätzle, and spaghetti with meat sauce. Some things we eat definitely scream “GERMAN,” but some things would be totally normal to eat at home. If I didn’t have a vegetarian sister. I’ve probably already eaten more meat in the past month than I had in the preceding half-year or so.

So far, I’ve liked pretty much everything I’ve eaten here. I’d say that the only things that I haven’t really liked are sauerkraut and cucumbers. Disliking something as mundane as cucumbers probably makes me a very boring person, but luckily it’s not a crippling disability. For example, Mona and I prepared our own Mittagessen (literally, midday food) today. We boiled potatoes, cooked sausages, and made cucumber salad. It was incredibly delicious. Even with the cucumbers.

Speaking of incredibly delicious, I had my first Döner on Monday. For the unenlightened, a Döner is a Turkish creation akin to a gyro. It’s made of lamb and salad and really really tasty sauce, all of which is stuffed into a big flatbread which is messy to eat but so worth it. They’re quite popular in Germany, because of the sizable Turkish-immigrant population here.

Mona and me with our Döner

Germans also love coffee. And cake. And coffee and cake together. Coffee and cake is a perfect before- or after-lunch snack. Or both.

my host family's amazing coffee machine

I’m learning a lot about various coffee drinks that I really never bothered trying to understand before. Latte macchiatos are appropriate for every occasion, and Milchkaffee means “café au lait.” (Why are some German coffee names in German, while others are left in Italian? Why are American coffee names almost exclusively in non-English languages? Ah, the great mysteries facing our generation.) Anyway, Germans do drink things besides coffee, and no, I’m not going to discuss beer.

"tap water"

Germans don’t drink tap water. One time we were at a restaurant and I ordered water. To my surprise, the waitress actually asked whether I wanted it “mit Gas oder ohne Gas,” and I asked for the latter, thinking it would be “simpler.” I still got mineral water in a fancy bottle; it just wasn’t bubbly.

drink of gods

I drink Apfelschorle about 80% of the time. It’s basically just apple juice mixed with seltzer. My host family buys both water and Apfelschorle in large cases. That’s how important this stuff is.

Ja! Keiner ist billiger!

That’s milk. It just seemed like a good opportunity to display (in poor focus) the phenomenon of ja! I think it’s the store brand of the Rewe supermarket. I just think that products that say “ja!” on them in large, blue letters look silly.

Speaking of milk, because I am stubbornly American, I occasionally prefer to eat this for breakfast:

new favorite breakfast cereal

However, I can only get away with it on school days. And speaking of being American, look at what I found at the supermarket today:

the label says "USA" in several places

I was very surprised and getting all excited to make peanut butter cookies when my host father informed me that he and I are the only ones in the house that like peanut butter. My mind is blown. I’m considering making the cookies anyway. And speaking of cookies (yes, I really am doing the lame “speaking of” thing again), look at what Mona and I made today:

molasses cookies!

Not exactly your mother’s (or, in my case, my sister’s) molasses cookies, between the sketchy metric conversions and similar-but-not-exactly-the-same ingredients, but they are still delicious.

This was actually my second attempt at baking American cookies, and I’ve found that the AFS mantra of “not good, not bad, just different” comes in handy more often in the kitchen than anywhere else. The chocolate cookies that Uta, Sebastian, and I produced without real chocolate chips, vanilla extract, or brown sugar were tasty, but really not American chocolate chip cookies. Today, once again, I found myself without the ingredient that gives molasses cookies their name, and apparently ground cloves are an alien concept here, but with some whole cloves and a pepper grinder, we made it work. Not good, not bad, just different.

Well, more like “not better, not worse, just different.” Because they’re awesome.

I have no school for the next week, so I promise you haven’t heard the last of me. Bis gleich!