Ein Amerikaner in Deutschland

I'm back in the USA now. And yes, this blog did kind of die half way through my study abroad.

It's about 8am and I had to wake up this early for morning class. I went into the kitchen to grab some bread before I left, and forgot to shut the door on my way back out of the kitchen. Now I know I wasn't loud, because all I did was take bread out of a bag. On my way out, my roommate came out of her room, and she was obviously sleeping saying "Shut the kitchen door!"

Over the course of December and the beginning of January I did quite a bit of traveling with my parents. They came over mid-December and we went through Cologne to Munich, back up to Osnabrück for Christmas, and then down to Rome for New Years. After getting back and still having a week of Weihnachtsferien (break) left, I pretty much just hung out with Christine and waited for everyone else to get back.

After this whole trip I got to see another German city: Bielefeld. I got to see an old castle (more for the defense of the city than royal grandeur) and it was quite cool. Pictures may eventually come.

The language department here decided to attempt to rectify their crap German course by offering a tutorial for the Americans and Swedish who have been dissapointed with the course. As far as I am concerned, though, it's too little too late. The final is next week and we'll have had 2 tutorials before the final, and before we leave the total number of tutorials will be roughly 4.

I was going to write a lengthy post about Amsterdam, but Alec managed to sum it up brilliantly: http://alec.typepad.com/alecs_digital_peephole/2005/12/amsterdam.html

For those too lazy to click, here is a teaser:

"Han ordered us some Chinese specialty. Twelve plates of food later we were ready to dig in."

The Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) is an important tradition throughout Germany. Nearly every city, it seems, has some sort of outdoor market with numerous booths selling German chocolates, Christmas trinkets, sausage, Glühwein, and other warm drinks.

In Osnabrück, the market spans a few streets and parts of the Fußgängerzone (Walking-only street). Booths crowd the small cobblestone streets between the old buildings of the Altstadt, the only part of the city that lasted through World War 2. Large Christmas trees tower over the booths in some parts of the market, with long strings of lights coming off of the tree and continuing down the street. The whole place has a unique smell of pine tree, wine, chocolate, and sausage.

Despite the cold weather and snow on the ground, it's fairly easy to stay warm off of the Glühwein (Warm, spiced red wine) or Lamumbas (spelling may be wrong, it's hot chocolate with rum).

The whole affair has an atmosphere that isn't a Christmas-y baby-jesus type of feeling. It is one of tradition and simply having a good time in the holidy season, one I find very easy to enjoy and feel a part of.

At 9am we had to begin the cooking. We were lucky enough to have a class from 10-12 that normally we would be okay skipping for one day, but this week we were being assigned a project due at the end of the semester. Naturally it seemed like a good idea to go. We managed to get the stuffing finished and stuffed into the turkey before class started, and I was also able to complete the gorey job of hacking off the turkey's neck.

Turkey's in Germany just aren't the same as in America. There were no giblets, just a large cave. However there was a gigantic neck still stuck to the turkey that had to come off. The rest of the turkey was the same as in America, no more surprises.

Well, until we had to seal one side of the turkey up. Normally large metal pins are used to cover up the front of the turkey. We didn't have any of these and definitely didn't have the time to go find them. However, Brittany did have metal forks. It did the job.

When cooking the turkey, we forgot to add water to the pan. This meant we had relatively little broth to work with for making Brittany's noodles. We were worried that not only would the turkey not come out ("Where's the broth? There's no liquid!") and also worried that we'd have to eat the noodles plain. Normally her noodles soak up the broth and they use them instead of gravy. But now we were stuck without the ability to make gravy or noodles.

Jäger sauce to the rescue! We were kind of embaressed about using it with our study abroad advisor coming and all, but we had no choice. For the purposes of Thanksgiving, Jäger sauce has been temporarily renamed to "American Hunter Sauce." This "hunter sauce" did prove to be an excellent substitute for gravy.

And finally, after about 5 hours of cooking, we were ready to actually eat. The turkey came out with incredible skin thanks to my frequent buttering. Overall the meal was nice. Alec brought beans in a lemon sauce, Chris brought ice cream and whipped cream for the pie, and HP brought some nice white wine.

But I am never cooking thanksgiving in Germany again.

It was only about 3:50 pm when the blackout started, but it was already getting dark (as is the norm here in Osnabrück). It was over as suddenly as it started, leaving me barely enough time to light a few candles so I could see.

And then the power was back out. This process repeated every 5-20 minutes, for the next few hours. I simply unplugged my computer and read a book, switching between candle light and actual light every few minutes. The internet remained down for the next 24 hours or so.

It was the first snow of the year and it came down hard. Osnabrück doesn't get too cold, which probably made this snow even worse. It was rougly -4ºC, which is about 25ºF. The flakes were huge, sopping wet balls coming down from the sky. The snow started yesterday morning and finished sometime overnight.

This naturally made for some fun with snowballs and also problems getting cars out of driveways. (After much effort, I was able to help Christine get her car out of the snow). Some people built snowmen and had some fun with the snow, but nothing anyone did compared to Alec's brilliant idea.

Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out perfectly for this idea as someone had shoveled half of Heger Tor before we got there. Nonetheless, we had a good time in the snow. Before I explain his idea, Heger Tor is a large wall that used to surround the old city (Altstadt). Now there is a piece of it left that has some stairs leading up to it that are all slanted downword. When snow is evenly applied to these strange stairs it creates sort of a ramp going down quite a ways.

Alec's brilliant idea was to create a large snowball at the top and roll it down this ramp to create a massive ball that normally would be impossible because 2 people simply can't roll such a massive ball. A great idea, right? Hey, what the hell else do we have to do on a Saturday. Unfortunately for us, our ball was so squarish that it didn't end up rolling down. So we managed to leave a giant snowball on the steps up to Heger Tor and that was the extent of our accomplishments.

Wetter.de claims that it is going to continue to snow on and off this week. Hopefully there will be more snow-mischeif that is a bit more successful.