Sunday, January 27, 2013

A Few Deutschland Differences

I have now been in Germany for more than a little bit more than a month, and leave in exactly 3 weeks from yesterday. It's crazy to think that I have been in Germany for 1/4 the time that I was in Spain! Though technically I haven't been in Germany been with Germans for 1/4 the time that I was in Spain since I have been to two other countries in this time also (yes, we know Marie, no need to rub it in).

So now I will give you a brief update on my life and then go on to talk about some differences that I have noticed between Germany and Spain and/or the US. This past week I went to all of Anna's classes except for the morning of one day when she had 3 straight hours of history (4 periods in a row of history sounds painful in a language I speak, let alone one that I don't). There was also a snow day Monday so unfortunately we missed my two favorites of her classes (English and Spanish, are you surprised? ;) ). I would also say that although I still really cannot speak German, my German has actually improved quite a bit in terms of how much I understand and of course I can speak more than when I got here.

Then last weekend the Bosch's told me about a benefit concert that their church was having this weekend and asked me if I would like to play in it, so I on the spot got out my flute and played a bit of a piece that I hadn't touched in literally maybe 4-5 months (since I didn't have any other pieces that I thought could be ready in one week) for their friends who were organizing the concert. I "passed" the test so this week worked on getting the piece back to performance ready and this evening played in the concert! I originally thought there would be other solo instrumentalists, but actually it was just choirs and a vocal solo and me, but that was okay and I thought it went pretty well. And in case any of you are wondering (which you probably aren't), the acoustics in German churches are very very different from those of American Churches.

Anyway, on to the fore mentioned differences.
-The language! (duh)
-FOOD.

  • A big food difference is the use of Butter instead of Oil. You may remember me writing that Oil is used with pretty much everything in Spain. Here, that is replaced by butter. And not only do they eat/use a lot of butter, but I have also noticed a slight phenomenon here. The Germans have a really quite incredible butter spreading talent. You may think/be under the false pretense that butter spreading is not a talent, as I was. Butter is simply soft and nicely spreadable, or cold/hard and impossible to spread, impossible. Wrong. There are not just two kinds of butter spreadability, but rather two kinds of butter spreaders. Those who can only spread the soft (like me), and those who can spread it all. So far every German that I have encountered in a butter spreading situation (which have been several) has been the latter. (As a disclaimer, if you are german, reading this, and not an EBS (extraordinary butter spreader), I do not claim that all Germans fall under this category, simply those that my path has crossed thus far).
  • As in Spain, dinner is also lighter/not typically the main meal. Here, a spread of fresh breads, cheeses, meats, maybe a saldad, and of course butter (straight from the fridge) is set out. I attempt to just do what Anna does but instead end up with embarrassing chunks of cold butter on my now crumbling and broken bread while she (and everyone else in her family) have a perfect smooth coat on their intact brötchen. 
  • On the topic of food, perhaps it was just my 'host family' that didn't eat much bread, but in Spain I would say that tomatoes and olive oil came first whereas in Germany the bread wins. (Take a moment to note the play on words since Germany's economy is doing so much better than Spain's).
-The word "doch." it doesn't really translate to english, but it's a great word. Example of one usage: in english we might say "nuh uh" "uh huh" "nuh uh" "uh huh" but in german they would say "ja" "doch" "ja" "doch" or "nein" "doch" etc.
-My personal experience of going from living in a the very middle of a decently large city to living in a smaller area (but everything is still closer together/often walkable unlike the US!)

And actually there are many more differences but none in particular that I can think of now so maybe I will just add some more in my next post. I am also currently in the process of almost being sure of what I will be doing for the rest of my gap year after I get back from Germany! But to leave a little suspense, I will talk about that in my next post. 

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Schifahren in Austria!

Schifahren in Austria. What a title for someone who before this week long trip had only ever skied for about 4 hours on fake snow and fake hills.

We got to Austria and it seemed like almost as soon as we crossed into the country there were snowy mountains everywhere. We then went and rented skis and helmets and I signed up for 3 days of Schischule. I started off ski school with a bang by falling on top of who I assumed was one of the instructors while attempting to put on my skis. Fortunately this young lad helped me into my skis and then it was smoother sailing from there. I had assumed he was one of the instructors because he could do everything but it turns out he was actually from russia, pretty much spoke no english or german, and just better than the 4 romanians in my class and me. I was in the English speaking class, but I was the only native English speaker, so basically it more like the non-german speaking class.

The first two days we did basic stuff mostly on the smaller practice hills, and there were many funny moments because my ski instructor, Herbert, was quite the character. The third day, my basic German and advanced English helped me understand that Herbert decided not to teach us "I'm done. I don't teach today" "But Herbeeeerrrrt we like you Herberrrttttt!!!!" (conversation between Herbert and an entertaining Romanian woman) and put the Romanians in a lower class, me in a slightly better one, and the Russian with the higher class that had some other Russians so he could finally comunicate with language instead of us playing charades. Side note: Since I seemed to be the only one who understood that "Ruski" means Russian (note to world, the word "Russian" sounds similar in pretty much every language) and could decipher/communicate with charades, everyone in my initial class thought that I was Russian so were surprised to learn otherwise.

Anyway, I think I improved a lot in those two days, and then the third day of ski school the instructor took us up a very steep red slope (the colors are different) with an unfortunate amount of moguls (little mounds of snow) and told us in his very heavy Austrian accented German (oh yes, I forgot to add that I was placed in a german speaking class for the third day.... "sprechen sie englisch?" "nein" and that was that) that he would not have taken us up there if he didn't know we could do it. He made us do this part of the mountain several times until everyone could manage to get down decently smoothly. After the third day, I went with the Boschs and Abby everywhere and was by far the slowest, but it worked out and by the last day, I was even going down blacks. Maybe not the steepest blacks, but that is an unimportant detail.

The ski day is typically 8-4, so we had nice relaxed afternoons back at the lodge filled with chocolates, games (in particular; banana grams, german trivial pursuit, trouble), sherlock, and more food. One of the days we ended early so Abby and I went to an indoor pool/water park (while Anna studied...I'm glad the US does not have the Abitur). This was pretty fun actually because it was a very high tech pool place with fun areas and two slides. I should also mention something that Abby left out in her most recent blog post. One of the slides used a tube, the other did not. So we are standing in line for the non-tube slide and I go first then am waiting for Abby to come out when who should appear from the slide, not Abby, but an old man. I'm a little confused because the slide didn't look scary or anything so why would she have backed out... The old man looks very confused and concerned and is trying to tell me something, but I couldn't really understand what he was saying... but I did get something like "I think your friend is coming" so I continue waiting while the man continues to stand there concerned when who should come out next but a little boy. At this point I'm slightly concerned because she would have made it down the stairs had she backed out, but who knows. Finally a very slow moving Abby comes out of the slide laughing and somehow she was having difficulty sliding down the slide/got stuck and two people passed her on the slide. Note that the slide doesn't have a huge circumference and is also dark so it's very lucky they didn't run into her. Also note that there is a decently long wait between sliders. So that was pretty funny.

Basically Austria and skiing was really fun and I'm very glad that we got to go! I should also mention that all of the food was fantastic and the views were nice too ;) As Abby put it "I've only ever seen mountains like this on a Toblerone bar." Gotta love her.

And here are a few pictures from the trip:
The females!
The funny Romanian forementioned 
Mountains!
Abby and me with the mountains!
A wonderful germknödel
Yes we did ski [and anna snow boarded] through clouds.
Top of the mountains!
A little bit pretty. Just a little.
Outside of the lodge we stayed in.

After getting back from Austria, Anna had to go right back to school, and Abby and I accompanied her for half of the day every day except for Thursday when we took the train to Frankfurt and toured around. That was fun, though quite cold, and we got to see some famous churches,  a very very very (can't emphasize enough) odd modern art museum, and more. I think it didn't help that we were pretty much the only people in the museum other than the workers that just stared at us, and construction workers. But we left with kind of a creeped out vibe. Maybe it was the toilets that played creepy music. Maybe it was the exhibit that was a locked room with a wall that had a mans legs sticking out from behind it. Maybe it was the dark room with a slideshow and a tv screen with a guy just watching us and pictures on the walls of creepily face painted people in a sunflower patch. Maybe it was just the general vibe. There was actually a pretty cool "America is terrible" exhibit though. That wasn't the actual title of the exhibit, but it was just a bunch of pictures of decently upsetting things going on in America with descriptions of what was going on. Examples: picture of KKK, picture of mentally retarded cross bread tiger, picture of nuclear bombs in a body of water, picture of a decaying dead person in a forest for a forensic study, etc. Here are some pictures from Frankfurt and some of the other touring we did in Germany:
what?

America is terrible room

The history museum on an island that Herr W always talked about (in my Uni High German 1 class)

This is an exhibit?

I'm pretending to be a mouse in front of the mouse castle. (duh)

The Rhine river! At the Loreley view point.
Frankfurt

A wee bit windy.

To conclude, I must mention the fiasco we experienced at the airport dropping Abby off yesterday. We get there a litte over 2 hours early (as you are supposed to), go to check her in at the kiosk, but the kiosk just wouldn't do it, so then wait in line for after all of the Koreans going home on Korean Airlines (she had a layover in Korea) finally get there and the woman says she can't let her through because she doesn't have a visa or return ticket. So then another person comes over, also says no but he can call the New Zealand airport and ask. He calls, they say no she won't be able to enter the country. So then we go to the last minute ticket booth to see if Abby can buy a ticket to Fiji (what...?) halfway through her stay because somehow that makes things legal and the man apparently pulls a maybe not legal thing and gets her a cancelled ticket or something so it looks like she is going to Fiji but she won't actually go to Fiji and that will somehow make it legal for her to get into New Zealand and then work out getting a visa once she gets there. So this takes quite a bit of time and struggle but eventually she is able to check in and we finally get the group photo that I had been wanting the whole trip (since there wasn't one of just Anna, Abby, and me, and I mean who knows when the 3 of us will be together again? it just had to happen). Then we had an odd parting of ways (odd because knowing you won't see someone for at least 5 months is always odd) and hopefully Abby has now made it safe and sound to NZ. 
Look at that beautiful approved ticket!






London, Paris, maybe Tokyo...

First off, I apologize to all of my loyal readers for the nearly month long blog hiatus, it has been a busy and exciting month though so you might want to sit back, relax, grab a cup of tea (or coffee depending on your personal preference and perhaps the time of day) and several cookies, and prepare to read what will probably be a long (but hopefully interesting) post.

Secondly, you may be wondering, "why on earth would she make the title 'London, Paris, maybe Tokyo...'" and here is my answer, when I was a young child, I had a slight obsession with Hilary Duff (embarrassing, I know) and this was the line in a song of hers. At the time, I had never been to any of these places and they all seemed so foreign and far away, yet here I am now, having been to all three. "What in the world? I've read the blog post about Paris, remember Marie went to Tokyo with the Uni High Japan trip...but London? when did this happen?" is what you must be thinking now, so I will start by talking about London which I went to this past month and got to spend New Years with my friends Anna and Big Ben.

My last day in Granada I went to part of the Alhambra that I hadn't been to, walked through the city and took pictures of cool Graffiti (which there is a lot of!), and also sent a bunch of postcards because I had several that I had been meaning to send, and I also realized that the 15 euros of stamps that I had bought probably would only work with the Spain post office... so I couldn't wait until I got to Germany to send them. I also sent a package to my family. The last day the post office was open before holiday break. Talk about timing.



I was a little bit bummed to be getting to Germany the evening of the 23rd, because Anna had said that all of the Christmas markets would be closing. However, I actually got there just in time to see the Rüdesheim Christmas market. After hearing so much about them, it would have been a shame to miss it. And it did not disappoint. The germans that I met in Spain were always saying that Spain didn't even know what a christmas market was. And now I must say that I agree. This was not just a little Christmas market in a plaza, but rather the whole town transformed into a Christmas market. So that was a fun welcome. Also nice to be greeted with open arms by Anna and her wonderful family! So I spent Christmas in Germany, and for those who don't know, Christmas is officially both the 25th and 25th of December here! With Christmas Eve the 24th still, but most people open gifts the evening of the 24th.


Then a few days later, we left on a night bus from Frankfurt to London! There were 8 of us in total, and I had briefly met everyone going to London with us before, so that was good. It's also a pretty nice way of travelling to leave at night and sleep on a bus then wake up and be there (more or less). I also got to sing the song "I see London, I see France, I see ____'s underpants" while crossing the English Channel and have it be true ;)

The first day there (which was New Years Eve) we saw Buckingham Palace and ate a traditional English meal of Indian food, then went into the heart of the city and saw the count down and fireworks and walked around and such. Then the next day we did a lot more touring and I got to feel like Harry Potter on several occasions, from walking through platform 9 3/4 to being surrounded by death eaters on Millennium Bridge and ending the day by walking through Diagon Alley and bumping into the Weasley clan with the trips night bust tour (yes of course all of this really happened, I would never exaggerate). We also saw London Bridge, Big Ben, went through Camden Lock area, St. Peters Church, Westminster Abbey,  and other touristy stuff. But anyway, London was really really fun and it was so cool to be there over New Years with the 250,000 other people along the Thames River.

For those of you who don't have facebook, here are a few key photos from the trip:
The whole group!

Then just a day after we got back from London, Abby arrived and we hung out in Rüdesheim for a few days and then headed off to ski in Austria! To keep this post from getting too intimidatingly long (I've found that the intimidation level in reading two medium sized posts/articles/anything is much less than in reading one long one).