Ausländer in an Ausland

So, Anna and I have been in Germany for more than 2 months now, so I thought I’d share some of my experiences as an Auslander (foreigner) in an Ausland (foreign country).  It has been a great experience so far, and full of adventure!  Living in Germany is much like living in the United States, except that everyone here speaks German.  Actually, that’s not true, since it is one of the most international places I’ve lived, and for many of the internationals, English is the common language.  It’s not uncommon to overhear conversations on the street corner in Spanish, and in my GSL (German as a Second Language) course, I’m the only person from the United States.  But a lot of people speak German.  And it is a little strange to be partially illiterate.  I’m also trying to figure out what the word is for when you can’t speak a language.  Whatever that word is, it applies to me with respect to German!  But that’s changing slowly and steadily.  But you really don’t need that much German to get by from day to day.  For example, I’ve managed to go grocery shopping, rescue my books from customs, get a hair cut, and figure out why an international wire transfer failed (they sent our money to Bosnia).  Granted, many of these activities have benefited from the English speaking skills of the Germans (which are generally pretty good), but still, I take pride in what small victories I can.

Kohlmeise (Great Tit) on our feeder

The birding here has been slower than I expected, but there are lots of fun new birds, and I still enjoy watching the Kohlmeise, Blaumeise, and Kleiber coming and going to our feeder.  It has been a switch to go birding primarily by bicycle – especially on rainy days.  For example, there is no car to duck back into to wait out short showers, and coupled with my poor direction sense, a shortcut home might actually increase the length of the trip by about 5 km .  On the other hand, the roads are very bike friendly, and you can get to a number of locations very easily by bicycle.  I’m starting to get a good idea of what is where in the region, and working on tracking down a lot of the local common species.

Blaumeise (Blue tit, bottom) and
a Kohlmeise (top) on the feeder

Kleiber (European Nuthatch) at the feeder

 Restaurants are also a little bit different in Germany.  Fortunately, most of the restaurants (if not all?) are non-smoking, which is a pleasant surprise given the prevalence of that deadly habit here.  But they don’t automatically give tap water (das Leitungswasser.  If you’re wondering, all Nouns are capitalized in German.  Weird, I know).  In fact, one Restaurant refused to give me Tap Water unless I ordered another Drink as well and when the Water came, it was in a Glass the size of 2-3 Shot Glasses (okay, I’ll stop with the German capitalization with English words).  On the topic of capitalization, it turns out that capitalization of nouns is important, since sometimes the uncapitalized version is a verb.  And it turns out the word for bird, (Vogel) when conjugated improperly in the plural and not capitalized, is slang for having sex (synonym for the f word, basically).  Yes, I found this out the hard way in my German class by trying to write that I study birds...  Live and make mistakes, right?

The pricing system here is better – all the prices include sales tax.  So if something says $5, it really is $5!  Not $5.05 or whatever obscure amount it is with sales tax.  Unfortunately, the Germans say their numbers backwards though, so I still get some funny looks when I try to give drei und sechzig (three and sixty) instead of sechs und dreiβig (six and thirty).  By the way the funny β is called an eszett – it’s actually a double ss, and makes no b sound whatsoever, unless mispronounced by a foreigner.  But generally people are pretty forgiving here.

So far, it’s been a great experience, and a lot of fun.  And it’s certainly given me a greater appreciation for what international students in the US are experiencing!

Kassel and the stinky cheese

Hello family and friends!

After a few quiet weekends in Marburg, I decided it was high time for a new Adventure, and I was in a castle sort of mood, so after a bit of googling, at the end of the week, I asked Sasha if he wanted to go to Kassel on Saturday.  Since the forecast was for yet another cold rainy day (ie.not so good for local bike rides or birding), and since he likes castles almost as much as I do, it did not take much convincing.  SO, we got up a bit earlier than usual on Saturday, and took the train to Kassel for the day. 

Kassel was great. Although there isn't an "Altstadt" (old part of the city) since the town was heavily bombed in the war, there is still a lot to see and do. We decided to first explore the region called Wilhelmshöhe to the west of the city.  We got a map in the train station and took a Strassenbahn and a bus to our first stop of the day: 

Nice, convenient, clean public transit!!!

a giant Herkules statue of which Kassel folks are perhaps not unjustafiably proud.  Our Lonely Planet calls it "a massive statue... atop a towering stone pyramid atop an octagonal amphitheater atop an imposing hill" which pretty much sums him up.  Although it leaves out the fact that he is stark naked and bright green.  Minor details. There was a visitor's center, which probably explained something about why he was built, etc. but we skipped that and went right up to the top of the amphitheater and pyramid, which have nice views of Kassel and surrounding areas.  While it was a bit misty, it was still a nice view. The amphitheater was covered in scaffolding because apparently they used a local stone, and tuff is just not very tough and is falling apart, but it was still impressive.

Herkules in all his green and naked glory

Tuff is not very tough

We still got our spiral stair fix, even though there were no castle (or cathedral) towers this trip. Thank you giant green Herkules.

Going down the hill from the Herkules is a set of man-made waterworks, ponds and fountains and waterfalls and such.  They turn the water on every Wednesday and Sunday between May and early October.  Since it was neither the right day nor the right month, we did not get to see water flowing (except a natural trickle from previous days' rain), but on the plus side, we didn't have to contend with crowds, either.  We decided we'd have to come back at some point on a water day, so didn't make too much of an effort to see all the cool things.

Still impressive even without the water.

Instead, we headed for the first castle of the day (since the impressive Herkules isn't really a castle),

Löwenburg. Löwenburg was built in the late 1700s by a local Landgraf/Fürst, Wilhelm the 9th I think, who had a thing about the middle ages.  Lots of rich people back then were pretty keen about the middle ages, so they constructed all sorts of fake medieval castles and ruins on the grounds of their own "modern" castles, and Löwenburg was built as a retreat and was actually inhabitable, although the interiors were Baroque and austensibly much more comfortable.  World War II helped turn parts of the castle from quasi-ruined to actually ruined, but much of it has been re-built and a lot of the original stuff was saved, so it was actually quite a nice 1hr tour, and it was nearly a private tour, since there was only one other couple and a family with very small kids who left after the first room ("no touching" tours are difficult for toddlers, it seems).  Alas, the tour guide still spoke only German, so I don't think Sasha understood more than a word here or there (and it was all said too quickly for immediate translation), but I learned some interesting random tidbits (which I have not fact-checked).  For instance, the baroque beds seem rather short to us, and that is partly because people were shorter, but the tourguide also claimed that people did not sleep laying flat on their backs back then, because they believed that if they did so, their souls would leave their bodies.  And that "eau d' toilette" was not just used to cover the odors of people who didn't bathe more than a handful of times a year or to cover your nose whenever an inferior peasant walked by, but also was used in copious amounts for handwashing.  And since the water was not very clean, the high alcohol content probably would work for killing germs.  So, these were some of the random tidbits (true or not) that I learned during the tour.  We would have had to pay extra money to take pictures inside on the tour, so no inside shots here, and I apologize for the mist that made this picture blurry.

Gotta love medieval castles, even Baroque ones

After that, we went down to the "main" castle, the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe.  There is a wing with period furniture, etc. but I was more in the mood for art, so instead we went into the larger center part of the castle, which has an impressive collection of paintings by the old Dutch Masters like Rembrandt, Dürer, Rubens, and their less famous contemporaries.  Some were nice and others were, shall we say "not to my taste" but it was also funny to see some of the English translations of the commentaries.  Like you will be interested to note that Cleopatra died after being bitten by a poisoned snake (rather than a poisonous one).  Perhaps in fairness, I will make a post later about my own humorous mis-speakings in German...except that I probably don't even notice many of them.

Wilhelm's baroque baroque castle.

After that, we took the Strassenbahn into town, had an early dinner, and then wandered around being entertained by random public art and trying to  balance locating the church with the interesting steeples (Sasha) and staring at all the stuff in the shiny shop windows (me) before catching our train home.

Modern art and Anna

Although we had quite a nice day, the trip was almost ruined by a series of compounding small mistakes that I shall call: "The Tale of the Stinky Cheese".  Mistake #1: we stopped at the grocery store before the trip and got sandwich fixins to make lunch to take with us and we grabbed a New Cheese.  Our usual grocery store has 100g packages of sliced cheese that are just right for sandwiches, and we often just get Gouda because it's cheap, and it's fine, but I like change and trying new things, so every so often I decide we should get a different cheese.  This one had all sorts of small holes and looked cute, so we got it.
Mistake #2: since we stopped at the grocery store after going out for dinner and then ice cream with friends, it was very late by the time we got home, so rather than making sandwiches on the spot, we decided to take the package of meat, the package of cheese, and the bread to make sandwiches somewhere in Kassel.
Mistake #3: I was hungry after we had left the Löwenburg, and since it was raining, we didn't want to sit down anywhere for a real picnic, so I decided to open up the package and have a slice of cheese.  Now, I must say that ordinarily, I like stinky cheeses, but this one was VERY pungent and it was warm-ish from being in my bag instead of the refrigerator.  For those of you who don't ordinarily venture broadly in the cheese department, think of the smell of really gross gymsocks and concentrate it, and it will be close. 
It tasted OK, but the smell was a bit overpowering and while I could eat a piece and could imagine that it would be better with bread, Sasha took one bite and then couldn't finish his slice and didn't want to bury it in the woods (we were walking through the woods between castles at this point) so carried it for a ways in his gloves (mistake #4).  
Mistake #5: we reached the next castle and were still thinking that the cheese and bread should be eaten at some point, so we put the bag and the cheese (although we had it in a ziploc, the package now opened, remember) in a locker.  Needless to say, after much looking at paintings, not only did the pocket of the bag containing the cheese smell, but the whole bag smelled and our coats that were merely in the same locker with the cheese also smelled.  I nominated Sasha to take the bag and make a bee-line for the nearest trash can, but it's rather amazing how cheese smell can linger, so although we no longer had the cheese, the rest of the trip found us walking a fine line between being as far away from the still stinky bag as possible, and yet maintaining control over the bag that contained such important things as our passports.  I am happy to say that a day later, the bag now mostly doesn't smell.

The moral of the story is: boring Gouda will now be our default cheese for travel days, but Kassel is definitely worth another visit.