Another so soon??!

I know. I'd advise not getting used to it, as I've proven myself to be not the best of posters.

So last night for dinner Bill and I made one of our favorites. We call it "the Asian thing", but it's pretty much a stirfry, I guess. We cook some rice (that comes in these nifty little cooking bags called, phonetically, cock-boytels) while I cut up chicken breasts into bite size pieces. When the rice is done we put in in our bowls and Bill sautees the chicken with olive oil, garlic salt and lots of pepper while I chop onion, half a red and half a yellow bell pepper, part of a head of broccoli, and some mushrooms that Bill has cleaned for me. When the chicken is done it's set aside and we add some olive oil and sautee the onions until they're translucent, then add the broccoli and cook that for several minutes (I guess it's not so much a stirfry because I cover the broccoli with a lid to accelerate the cooking). And then come the bell peppers, then the mushrooms. Then we pour over a bit, perhaps close to a 1/4 cup, of Thai Chili Sauce, add the chicken, and heat everything really well. Then dump it all over the rice. Then we eat a lot. And we feel really good about ourselves for eating so many vegetables.

Also, last night I felt a cold developing, my nose getting stuffy, a bit of a scratchy throat. And I told Bill before I went to sleep. At some point in the night I woke to what I thought was Bill sleep talking. The conversation went like this:
"Shut up!" (Bill)
"Huh?" (me)
Silence.

And then I woke at 6am and Bill was in the kitchen, sounding like he was making breakfast. But I wasn't getting up until 730, so he normally wouldn't get up until 830, at least. But I went back to sleep, because I'm lazy. When I did get up (at 8, not 730), I asked if he hadn't been able to sleep, since he hadn't been in bed at 6am. No, he hadn't been able to sleep, and had in fact moved out to the couch at 3am. Wow. And then I had an inkling of the cause.
"Was I snoring?"
"Well, yeah. A lot."

So I went to get in the shower. But realized something before I'd even closed the bathroom door. I ran back into the bedroom where Bill was getting back into bed to attempt a nap.
"So, you weren't sleep talking last night when I woke up to you telling me to shut up?"
"Um, no. But I didn't expect you to respond."

post-Dresden (ha. pun.)

Hello my friends. I'm taking a few minutes before I head to school to provide a bit of an update, or at least a bit of something for you to read.
I'm finishing my coffee (having a cup and a half this morning, since I have to be in so early) and have already eaten toast and jam. Bill's computer (mine doesn't connect to the wireless here, so is basically useless) seems to have caught a bit of a virus. This is probably because in our desperation for American television, Bill tried to download some random player that would facilitate viewing The Wire on a particular streaming site. I think the virus protection we had at BC has probably expired, and Bill's computer already has enough trouble with everyday functions, so I'm not sure what we'll do.

Speaking of jam, we got new jam yesterday in the Czech Republic. Not nice, local jam. Just cheap jam from a discount grocery store. Everything is cheaper there, so many Germans, at least in the south, cross the border every couple of weeks to fill gas cans, buy beer, wine and other random crap. And the Lehms wanted to take us on a driving tour of the region, which turned out to be sitting in the car for 4.5 hours, with a few stops to pick up cheap Czech goods. So we bought a case of beer and a bottle of olive oil and some jam and paper towels. Since we were there.

Dresden was nice. We were visiting a couple of friends Bill made in the Fulbright program, and it was just lovely to spend the weekend with Americans. Such an unexpected relief to have everything you say, every joke made, easily understood. One difficulty was that Grant, the kid we were to stay with, lives a 40 minute train ride from Dresden. And the trains stop running around midnight. And Grant and Bill (and me, I guess) wanted to go out and drink and dance in the city. So we did as Grant frequently does, which is stay out until the trains start running again at 5am. Needless to say, I didn't fare too well. Ended up falling asleep in the booth of the last bar of the night. And was not the friendliest person on the trip home. But we slept until the afternoon on Saturday, which was needed.

Unfortunately, when we woke up, what I thought was Bill's hangover turned out to be more serious and he spent the day throwing up. We think it was a bad doner. So Grant and Liz and I went to the grocery store and bought stuff to make dinner, and I got stuff for grilled cheese to feed Bill (he'll always find a way to get grilled cheese down, barfing or not). And we watched a lot of American tv on Grant's computer (Always Sunny, Law and Order, Extras). And it was lovely. And Bill felt well enough to eat some dinner, and then a whole bunch of leftovers, plus more than one grilled cheese, for lunch the next day. So it all worked out.

And now I must go get dressed. But I'm still waiting for some one-pot dinner ideas. And some indication that it isn't just my mum and Becca reading my blog. Helllooooo?

Job!

No time to chat today, or at least at the moment, because I have 5 minutes to tell you all about a recent development.

Sticking with the blog's theme, last Thursday Bill and I did not have dinner because we were invited to go bowling with the 10th grade class for their St. Nicholas party. We all met at the bowling place at 6pm so Bill and I thought that food would be available. But it wasn't. There was, however, a bar. And at age 16 in Germany, kids are allowed to drink beer and wine (hard alcohol at 18). So all of the students were drinking. And the teacher was having a watered down white wine. So Bill and I had a couple beers. It was a good time.

Then when she was driving us home, Frau Hocher (the teacher, maybe in her late 20s, tiny, almost shy, quite pretty, seems like a bit of a perfectionist, loves her job), asked if we wanted to stop for a drink. So we took her to our favorite local bar, had a couple more beers, and talked about education and politics for almost 2 hours. She has some very interesting views. But, also, she invited me to help her teach her 5th grade English classes. So now I must leave for the first, starting this morning at 730. And then another tomorrow. And continuing next semester. Volunteer basis, but I don't mind and I think it will improve my German.

And for breakfast this morning I had 3 (big day!) pieces of toast with butter and strawberry jam, and one cup of coffee.

Biss shpetah!

Monday = Empty Cupboards

We generally do our big grocery shop every Monday afternoon, so Sundays and Monday mornings can be a bit of a scavenge for food. We're always out of cheese and crackers after Saturday's binges, and the loaf of bread is down to the ends, we've long shared the last banana, and the only veggie left in the fridge is half an onion. This week, though, I discovered that the yogurt I bought is both fat and sugar free, leaving it pumped full of aspartame and artificial color and rendering it borderline inedible. Yogurt being my Monday morning breakfast/lunch/snack of last resort, I was particularly disgusted by my choices yesterday.

Breakfast: The plainest cornflakes imaginable. Bill toasted the last shrivelled end of bread.

Lunch: I was starving (like, how I sometimes feel like I'm going to pass out if I don't eat immediately) as well as late, expected to meet Bill at 1pm for the 5th grade's St. Nicholas Day party. I threw 2 of the 3 remaining eggs in a pan and the last of the gouda on a tortilla (from our refrigerated tortilla stockpile) and ate the resulting breakfast burrito in less than two minutes. I felt sick. So I grabbed my coat and walked 25 minutes to the Katharina-Peters-Schule (Bill's school).

Second Lunch: I arrived and was employed by Frau Teacher (I couldn't understand her name) in carrying tins of cookies and bags of candy to the 5th grade classroom. We filled three double desks in the center of the room with two crates of lemonade, hundreds of cookies, many bags of candy, peanuts, clementines, fruit and chocolate kabobs, potato salad, cucumber salad (doused with vinegar and sprinkled with a ton of dill--I don't like the way Germans treat their vegetables), "muffins" (which Bill was completely excited for, as "muffin" is what Germans call cupcakes. But then the cupcakes were as dry as poorly-made muffins and we were terribly disappointed), chocolate covered pretzels which turned out to be not pretzels at all (another particular disappointment for Bill, though he couldn't describe for me what was under the chocolate that was so un-pretzel-like), and tubs of mustard and ketchup for Bill's true German love, sausage.

There were probably 50 foot-long sausages of hot dog width, all piled into an enormous pasta pot. Every kid (including Bill) ate at least two, often three. They did smell delicious. But further investigation revealed that they also tasted just like hotdogs. Luckily, after my eggs-on-the-go, I wasn't particularly hungry. What astonished me was that before the sausage/hotdogs had been brought from the cafeteria, where they'd been heating (Bill was afraid they'd be served cold and straight from the package, something we'd seen Germans do on several occasions), the teacher had students hand around the cupcakes (some kids took two) and the fruit and chocolate kabobs and a few tins of cookies.

Now I know many things in Germany are, understandably, different from the way we do things in America. But. To give kids cupcakes, chocolate and cookies-essentially, an overload of dessert-before they'd had the main part of their lunch? To let a kid take two cupcakes before you knew if there were enough for everyone? To let the kids demonstrate their skill with a bottle opener and not supervise while they opened every bottle of lemonade in the crate and handed them around the class (though it was amusing to see one kid miming opening one bottle with the top of another, and with the edge of the desk-German drinking culture is pervasive, I guess)? And, I suppose, in wake of the American fight against obesity and allergies, to heap a table with home-made goodies full of sugar and butter and the threat of food poisoning (potato salad? seriously?), not to mention the big dish of unshelled peanuts out on the table for any little punk to hide in the peanut butter sandwich of the poor geek with a peanut allergy and send him to the hospital where his friends think he's going to die and the punk comes to apologize and reveals he's actually jealous of how much fun the geek and his geeky friends have.

Despite my instinctual indignation at the chaos of this party, it was way more fun than I imagine class parties in America are today. And it totally reminded me of being a Y counselor, except that these kids were fascinated by me and couldn't understand a word I said, while my campers at the Y resented my authority and preferred to ignore what I said. There was a craft, just like at the Y, and just like at the Y the glitter first went all over the table, then all over a boy, then he rubbed some in his hair to make the other kids laugh, then it got all down the just-mopped hallway when, right in front of the janitors, the kid ran out of the class and slipped and then slid stomach-down across the wet floor. And Bill and I played hangman with this nifty hangman board game. Notable words: pontiff, ennui, salutary and (Bill stumped me with this) aporia.

Dinner: No snack this afternoon after the sugar orgy of the party. For our late dinner we sauteed the two sausages left from lentil stew last week, then cooked pasta, then combined the two with a tomato-mozzarella sauce from the store. It was terribly rich, in a good way. Could have used some vegetables, Bill said (what?! I know. Bill's starting to care about nutrition). So next time we'll add mushrooms. Thoughts on other additions?

PS, I don't know that I've mentioned that our only cooking surface, besides the microwave and the toaster, is a single-burner stove. And it doesn't really have a medium heat--we boil the hell out of stuff or we warm it very slowly. There's no oven. We can't boil pasta while sauteeing the sausage and heating the sauce. Every meal is made in several stages. I try to cook a couple meals worth of chicken breast in one afternoon to make dinner a more manageable process.

Meal suggestions? One-pot wonders? I'd love to hear from you all.
Choooss (as the Germans say--I hear it as a sort of mangled version of "cheers", but I can't remember what it actually comes from).

The blog needed a gimick

And I've got one that I think will work well. In order to chronicle my life in Germany, I've decided to make this into a journal of what I eat. The idea is that describing my meals will lead to the stories that make a blog worth reading. I think it'll work because our life here seems to revolve around meals, and most of our income is devoted to feeding ourselves. Considering this, I think that most of the interesting things that happen to us, besides our laundry troubles, will be in some way connected to a meal or a snack or a cup of coffee or a trip to Kaufland (the Walmart style grocery store - a 35 minute walk from us, but worth it because they carry tortillas and "taco sauce").

I don't want to backtrack too much, as I'm afraid of getting mired down in all of the noteworthy food I've had in the three weeks I've lived here. But I do want to mention, for Becca's sake, that while in Amsterdam last weekend, I introduced Bill to goat cheese. I think, to some small but significant degree, it changed his life. We ducked into a little place, Cafe Captein, to escape the driving hail. The entire weekend was a battle with the elements - rain (as we drove from Chemnitz to Holland), Peanut M&M-sized hail, sleet (we were taking what was meant to be a quick walk to a grocery store to buy wine - so we'd left behind our umbrellas, hats and gloves. Unfortunately, we were out for almost an hour and returned to the hostel soaked and freezing), heavy snow, and very occasional periods of sunshine. So after exiting a used book store (where we made some great finds. I think we came away with six books for 20 euro) we had to seek shelter, and lunch, in the first place we came to. And being on a budget, we decided to share an appetizer and each get a sandwich. Bill had never eaten goat cheese, but is a noted fan of cheese in general. He agreed to the goat cheese and french bread for a starter, and ended up choosing a goat cheese and marinated bell pepper sandwich. And since we've been back, we've twice bought logs of goat cheese at the grocery store. The first we ate in a single sitting. The second made it through our viewing of the Royal Tenenbaums yesterday morning, but didn't survive our post-dinner cheese run.

And now we're going to make some hhhwayvose (aka huevos, or eggs) for lunch. We have tortillas from Kaufland and shredded gouda (the only shredded cheese we can find is gouda or emmentaler) and Bill will surely put "taco sauce" on his.

Until later (biss shpeta, to put it in my phonetic German).

The Crucial Inaugural Entry

This one had better be good, I suppose. I have to grab interest with funny or compelling anecdotes, but I want to avoid giving an exaggerated or one-sided or, on the other hand, overly-boring account of my life in Germany. Of course, I also want to impress you with my fabulous writing skills and irrepressible wit. But I don't want you to think I'm an ass. Also, it's important that I don't set the bar too high in the first few posts, or I'll spend the next 7 months avoiding this website like I've been avoiding AIM for the past couple years. Not that that's about a bar set too high--I'm just too lazy to chat online anymore.

To jump right in, I just came down from the attic, where I was taking laundry off the line. The day after I arrived, about a week and a half ago, we decided Bill's laundry pile was too big to ignore and took it downstairs to Herr and Frau Lehm(pronounced "lame")'s laundry room. A couple hours later, with a load in the washer and another in the dryer, our doorbell buzzed. We opened the door to find the Lehms peering up the stairs, Herr L. wiggling his fingers for us to come down. Bill translated for me as Herr L. waved his hands at the washer and dryer and Frau L. pulled our still-wet laundry out of the dryer. "He says we can't use both machines at the same time...And he says that it's too expensive to use the dryer... That it's bad to use it... That we need to hang our laundry in the attic to dry." So Bill and I climbed up to the (very cold, rather damp) attic and I showed him how to hang stuff on the clotheslines that were strung under the roof beams. He broke several clothespins in the process. Most of the laundry takes two days to dry. Jeans are more like three. We get the last bit of dampness out by draping them over the lamp.

For the most part, we try to follow the Lehm's rules closely, as the apartment is nice and the rent is low and, frankly, there's nowhere else to go if they decide they don't like us. So we keep the bathroom windows open even though the temperature high is around 40 and the low is cold enough that I don't want to know. And we separate our paper waste (dirty kleenex, mostly), our "packaging" waste (gouda singles wrappers, wine corks, the knife Bill broke), and our food waste (coffee grounds, crumbs from onion crackers, the fat Bill pulls off of his sandwich ham), giving Herr L. the paper to burn in the furnace to heat the house, putting the "packaging" in the outside garbage, and emptying the moldy food remains into the disgusting compost pile at the back of the yard [more on the smells of Zwonitz later]. We vacuum at least once a week, do dishes several times a day, and generally keep the apartment spotless, an impressive feat for both of us (but special congratulations are owed to Bill if you saw either Mod 27A or his "apartment" in Philly this summer).

But of all the efforts we make to abide by the Lehm's rules for living in the apartment above their house, the laundry is the most annoying. It's cold here. I want to pull on a sweatshirt warm and fuzzy from the dryer, not a pair of jeans with back pockets damp on my bum and a waistband that chafes my hips. So when the Lehms took a drive to the Czech Republic yesterday to do some shopping (stuff's cheaper there, apparently), and we happened to be doing a load of laundry, when it came time to pull our wet clothes from the washer we decided to break the rules a little and put them in the dryer. We make great efforts to keep the energy bill low. We keep lights off and the heat turned down and I turn off the shower when I shave my legs (which is freezing, as the windows must meanwhile stay open for ventilation) and Bill showed me how to squeegee the shower doors because the Lehm's don't like water marks on the glass. So we figured we could indulge ourselves this once with dryer-warmed clothes. But the Lehms came home earlier than expected.

I heard them in the driveway. Bill and I stared at each other. They were at the bottom of the stairs, right next to the laundry room and the rumbling dryer. What should we do? How do we explain it? We decided to tell them we were afraid the clothes wouldn't be dry before we left for Amsterdam Friday morning, so we stuck them in the dryer for a few minutes but were planning to move them to the attic clothesline. We came downstairs, me trying not to look sheepish, trying not to blush, and Bill explained while I pulled armfuls of steaming clothes from the dryer, smiled at the Lehms, and squeezed past them up the stairs. Bill picked up the socks I dropped and followed me into the frigid attic.

I have some work to do to redeem myself as the girlfriend who exerts a good, house-cleaning and energy-efficient influence on the Lehm's original, once-messy American tenant. And I have to do it with barely a word of German. So now I'm going to go read more of my "The EVERYTHING Learning German Book".

And yes, we will be careful and safe in Amsterdam this weekend.