Berlinale

We've enjoyed the Berlin Film Festival, also known as the Berlinale. We didn't really get to the big name films, or even get to see the restored big screen epics like West Side Story and Ben Hur. But it's still been pretty interesting to see it going on and to be a part of it in some small way.

Each of us grownups has taken our class to see a set of short films, which is a fun thing to do with a group of students. My class went to see 6 short films, all of which were about young people, with topics ranging from bullies blowing things up to a boy disappearing in a cave opening onto the ocean (did he die? Don't know!) to the finale which involved a trio of girls taking turns pretending to do something they shouldn't in a closet with a spoon. Eewwww....but suffice it to say that this one too was about bullying and in the end the bullied girl spectacularly turned the tables on her tormentors. A little bit of the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. The kids were really talking about that one! We'll have to hope for not too many parent emails about this trip!

Today we saw an interesting film from the Czech Republic, called Who's Afraid of the Wolf? It was billed as a romance you can take the kids to, but I didn't think it was so kid-friendly. A little girl sees her parents' relationship breaking up after the sudden arrival of her biological father (which she doesn't know anything about) and interprets her mother's weirdness as evidence that she's really an alien. A great reminder of the dangers of making off-hand comments to kids without thinking through how they might interpret it. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I weren't worried about what the kids were thinking.

Soccer (excuse me, Fußball) fans

We got on the train today to go wherever it was we were going--just how we get around now, what with no car--and it was jammed with people. Everyone seemed a bit surprised at the crowd, but a few people with blue-and-white scarves, or caps, clued us in that perhaps some of them were headed for Olympiastadion for today's soccer match. Hertha BSC, the local Bundesliga club (for those who don't know, that's like the German major league in soccer), is very good this year. Apparently they are perennial cellar-dwellers who suddenly find themselves atop the league standings.

Anyway we had to change trains at Friedrichstrasse. The train we were switching to was on the track opposite the one going to Olympiastadion, and this platform was even MORE crowded. Now everyone was wearing blue-and-white and it was a bit like Kenmore Square before a Red Sox game. The train pulled in, and we could tell before it stopped that it was full--but the doors opened and it turned out to be full of Bayern München fans! Not surprisingly, the BSC Hertha fans couldn't get in, and as the doors sat open we began to hear some Bayern songs. One brave (foolish?) soul even stuck a Bayern flag out the door and started waving it. The train was literally bouncing on the tracks as it pulled out of the station.

Fortunately everyone seemed pretty good natured about it. Probably with Red Sox-Yankee fans it wouldn't have gone so well.

Tropical Islands. In Germany.

For more photos of this adventure, check out our SmugMug gallery by clicking here

Wednesday, we went tropical. Or maybe we should say Tropical, as in Tropical Islands. Something of a cross between Club Med, an enclosed stadium, and your typical suburban mall, Tropical Islands boasts the world’s largest indoor rainforest and the highest water slide in Germany. It also has a “spa,” which translates into English as “naked sauna” and to Russian (I think) as something about “nudystlow,” or “place for the nudies.” Not surprisingly, TI also appears to have the world’s highest prices for a mall-quality burger and fries and the most-understaffed ice cream bar. Despite this particular annoyance we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. And no fear of sunburn!

We found ourselves at TI thanks to a lovely (and much appreciated!) gift from some parents in my class. As we weren’t going anywhere in this dreary February vacation, and we had gift certificates that covered the entrance fee (which isn’t unreasonable), we decided to give it a shot. Sadly, the beach tents and hotel rooms were all fully booked for the whole month, so despite assurances from the folks on the phone that it would be OK if we just wanted to sleep on the beach, we decided to just go for the day.

Up and out early (for us), on the train by 9, arriving at TI via a shuttle bus ride through the abandoned air base where it’s situated (ah, capitalism!). Having fought our way through the crowds, we are assigned lockers, each of which is opened magnetically by a numbered wristband. This is genius. There is no need for money at TI (see the ClubMed bit here?) because all you need is your wristband. Just wave it at the register, or the entrance to the water slide, or whatever, and the cost is added to your bill. The problem, of course, is familiar to those from Boston—kind of a Charlie and the MTA issue. Whatever you spend, you have to pay to get out. We all wondered what would happen if you didn’t have the money.

Anyway, the first sign that things were different was the woman changing into her swimsuit right there next to me in the locker area. Not like the good ol’ USA where you could get arrested for something like that. We all managed to get changed (some of us in changing rooms, some not) and headed out to the beach.
The beach turned out to be about 5 yards wide, facing the “sea,” a giant 1.5-meter deep swimming pool faced on the other side by a giant blue wall painted to look like the sky. If you’re thinking “The Truman Show,” you’ve got it about right. People are packed into every available millimeter, and we had to shoehorn ourselves into a spot. It’s not really summer-hot in there, and it definitely isn’t sunny, but it was nice enough to go swimming. Lifeguards (and space) seemed to be in short supply, so there wasn’t much in the way of relaxing on the beach for the grownups.

After an overpriced lunch, we swam some more and then headed to the spa area to try to relax and warm up. Our children demonstrated their deep-set sheepiness and baa’ed their way after Mommy despite assurances that they didn’t HAVE to go to the spa. Well, anyway, it really was for the nudies. They even had an attendant come over to the whirlpool and tell those cowards who tried to sneak in with their suits (not us!) that they had to get out and take them off. We saw a lot of different comfort levels with this concept…some folks kept a towel wrapped around them while they stripped down, looking around nervously, some just couldn’t bring themselves to do it at all, and others just strolled about in their nothingness. It didn’t take long for the kids to recognize that although they were mostly OK with the naked thing (after all, we’re not so modest at our house), they didn’t really like sitting around in a REALLY hot room doing nothing. So it didn’t end up being all that relaxing as we kept having to get up and go back out. I never did try the room which was listed at 85-90° C (about 190 F) and 5% humidity. Now THAT’S hot.

We waited in an excruciatingly long line for excruciatingly mediocre ice cream, then split up for mini-golf and a trip to the lagoon, which turned out to be a lot of fun. Two water slides in the dark, a huge waterfall, kid-friendly depth, and warm water made it a great place to play. Should have come here first! Then we chose play time over another excruciatingly overpriced food experience and headed to the WATERSLIDES. No joke here. The red one was cool, big enough to ride with inner tubes. The yellow was high, lots of twists and turns, fast and much fun. The blue slide…a different kettle of fish all together. Straight. High. Steep. Very narrow and closed, so you can’t sit up. Once you’re in, there’s just about time to say “Oh my God, this is too stee—“ before you’re whipping around the corner, water shooting up your nose, and into the tank at the bottom. Worth doing once; maybe the second time, when you know what it is, it’s more fun, but none of us were interested after one trip down.

By the time we finished on the slides it was 7:00 and we were running out of steam. We watched a bit of the “show,” (clearly still in the rehearsal stages, though there were some cool acrobatics) then packed up and headed out. Stood in the changing area with daughter no. 1 in full winter dress while a woman at the other end walked about in her bikini. Strange juxtaposition. Missed the shuttle bus we wanted, and had to wait 45 minutes for the next one.

The bus was late. We knew the train wouldn’t be (it IS Germany, after all). The driver seemed in no hurry…stopping to chat with his pals, taking his time, casually meandering through the parking lot…it wasn’t ONLY us uptight Americans who wanted to grab and shake him. The next train, after all, wasn’t leaving for TWO HOURS. After 15 agonizing minutes of cruising back down the deserted taxiways, past abandoned hangars, and out onto the local roads, we arrived in time to send the bus full of people sprinting through the tunnel to the Berlin side of the tracks. We all made it with at least two minutes to spare…and so, home.

In case you didn't know...

you need plenty of gas for a "gute Fahrt." 'Nuff said.

Musings on a wayward son

M.'s first grade teacher leaned over to me during our last staff meeting. "We need to talk," she whispered. Hmm, I thought, nothing good can be in the offing. There are three possibilities that occur to a parent at times like this. Possibly something embarassing happened, like a big spill, or wet pants, and she wants to let me know that his feelings were hurt. Or, door #2, someone did something bad to him, like knocking him down at recess (though here that happens to kids all the time with no one paying any attention at all). Or possibly, worst case scenario, he did something bad enough to be worthy of notification from the teacher. It's not quite like getting a phone call home, but this little whisper, "we need to talk," has that odor to it. (I'm reminded of the occasional phone calls I've made to parents where before I say anything parents are asking "what did he/she do?")

So after the meeting we step aside, and his teacher doesn't pull any punches. "He started a food fight in the cafeteria." Somehow I'm not as shocked as I would have expected myself to be. Maybe because I can't quite picture a bunch of first graders winging noodles and sauce about and dumping potatoes on each others' heads, so it can't really have been that bad, but maybe also because perhaps I've seen something like this coming. M has been a bit edgy lately, and struggling to do what he really knows is the right thing. Not being bad, just having a hard time making the right choices.

So of course I'm apologetic, and his teacher is very kind and not at all blaming (though maybe she was more than a little annoyed, she seems to be thoroughly over it by now--a nice characteristic in a first grade teacher). And I promise to be firm with the boy, and to let him know that it isn't OK, and that I expect him to make some action of apology to make up for it, etc.

But lurking in the back of my brain...high five! You started a food fight?! You are SO much cooler than I ever was! Way to go, little buddy!

Don't tell him I said that.

Trick or Treating in Berlin

On Hallowe’en, we still had not gotten candy so we went out and bought some but not very much. There wouldn’t be so many kids. We all got ready to meet Malcolm’s friend for Trick-or-treating after we decided what to be. I was a prisoner with a shirt that said “PRISONER,” black and white striped tights, black and gray striped socks, navy blue shorts and a pillowcase. The pillowcase was two things: a bag of stolen money (not really) and a candy bag!

Seanna was a witch with my witch cape, purple and black striped tights, and a black shirt. Malcolm was “Karate Man” with his karate uniform. He didn’t have a belt with him so we tied a pair of long purple socks together and used that. We didn’t go to very many houses but we went to a lot of stores. There were a few funny things:

At one house, they gave us cough drops.

At one restaurant they gave us sugar packets.

We went to an art gallery where the man said “Sorry, I only have two pieces of cake and I can’t give each of you a piece.”

Somebody else said “I can give you wine…”

At one store they tried to give us lemons.

And then we got back home and our friend had just got back from France so we shared our candy with him. It was really fun!

Acrostic Alps

Adventurous

Long walk in the hills

Perfect view from the top

Sounds of trees swaying and water rushing

Life As A One-School Family

We all go—all five of us—to the same school every day. At home we have been at as many as 4 different schools—a preschool, two elementary schools (one for teaching and one for learning) and a middle school. We’ll have that again when we go back, only with two middle schools and two elementary schools.

But right now, we all walk three blocks to ONE school. This takes about ten minutes, or 15 when the boys (we’ve picked up a friend along the way) walk slow. Which is most days. Getting out of the house is its own issue with Mommy and Daddy invariably FRUSTRATED!! because we need to be there before our students and one or another of the kids dawdling along. Once we arrive, drop-off consists of a 10-yard detour to one child’s locker, a hug and a kiss in the stairwell for another, and with the third there IS no drop-off, as we share a classroom. We all see each other throughout the day at recess, lunch, in the teachers’ room, passing in the hallway…we’ve never been so together for so long. It’s like camp, but we get to go home together every day for whatever dinner we can summon the energy to cook.

Even more interesting is the effect on our dinner conversation. There’s no opportunity for the usual “What did you do today at school?” “Nothing, I don’t know,” interchange—because we’ve seen all the teachers at least once and we know all their friends and we’ve even been in class with them. So we TALK. There has never been so much conversation about what they’ve been doing. We talk about funny things that happened in class, injuries on the playground (see my previous posting on playgrounds for thoughts about that), what we learned…it’s great to know that we can as a family have conversation about what we like and what interests us and what’s frustrating. It’s possible (likely, even) that we won’t ever have an extended time like this again. What a blessing that we get to take advantage of this experience together for this year!

Klassenfahrt II

Be sure to read "Class Trip" first, so you know what in the heck I'm talking about here.

Essentially, on this trip we were up against the flip side of the fabled German bureaucracy—while some things are efficient, no one will do anything that isn’t part of the job description. So some pretty amazing things were left to chance because nobody bothered to think through whether it was actually a good idea. What follows is hard for anyone who has done this kind of thing in the US to imagine, but it’s all true:

On Wednesday, we had scheduled a bike tour …as we (3 adults, 30 nine- and ten-year olds) arrived at the equipment area I looked over at the wind whipping down the river and commented bleakly on the prospects for Thursday’s canoe journey. (This may seem like a non-sequitur, but it will come up again!) Anyway, we found waiting for us a row of 19 adult sized bikes. And nobody to direct us. Hello? Eventually a guy from the adjacent water sports group wandered over and said “there are some more bikes over there,” pointing to a row of 10 somewhat smaller bikes on the other side of a field. We headed over there to see what we could do, but things went rapidly downhill. Not enough bikes, wrong sizes, helmet didn’t fit, kids riding and running all over the place. By now there were two guys helping out but they didn’t seem to have a plan either and I got more and more aggravated. After an HOUR and a couple good rounds of “You are happy! Now you’re happy! You are happy! Hooray!” we had almost everyone on a bike and in a helmet. Which basically meant that we couldn’t all ride. At which point we said, “SCREW THIS!” And as soon as we had cast aside the pitiful and pathetic plan provided by the place we were staying, we discovered how ridiculous it really was.

It turned out that the guys helping us actually only worked for the sports training site next door. They had been alerted FIVE MINUTES before our arrival that we were coming and were only helping out the camp to be nice. As they fitted our kids with bikes they kept getting calls from the woman in charge at our place wondering where we were. How is it that she had never wondered how our group was going to fit on the bikes that she owned? Not her problem, apparently. Our new bike friends hadn’t wanted to steal customers, but they were pretty pissed at being left holding the bag on a bike trip that they hadn't planned. So once we had ditched the bike trip they immediately offered an afternoon of archery and rock climbing! Cool! The kids cheered loudly. So half the kids went off to shoot bows and arrows while we took a smaller group biking. Needless to say we didn’t have a clue where we were going and discovered some terrain that was, well, OK for a hike but not so much for bikes—a hill that seemed to go straight up and a windy, slippery, steep trail down the other side. But we only made two kids cry. And then they got to go climbing!

I tell you, I was really happy to sit back with a beer after the campfire that night. Ah yes, by now you’ve forgotten the fact that the kids were in cabins on their own! Which meant that we were free (encouraged, even—nay, commanded, I kid you not) to supply ourselves with beer and wine for our evening use after the kids went to bed. Nothing too surprising at camp, maybe, but on a school trip???

Anyway, the next day we were scheduled to go canoeing. After the biking fiasco I was a little worried (a little?) about this plan. One of our rescuers from the day before came by to clue us in—our uninterested and incompetent host had one giant war canoe for about half the kids, the rest in small boats twos and threes--with no instruction but with a motorboat to accompany us and pull the kids out when they flipped. Which, given the winds I’d seen the day before, they certainly would. Only the motorboat guy had called to say he wasn’t coming. By now I was having visions of the fabled Waramaug trip spread across half of Lake Champlain.

Thankfully our helpful friends from next door stepped up again and produced a second war canoe to take the other half of the kids—and thankfully I know a little about paddling and was able to guide it. So we piled 15 kids in one and 15 in the other (a bit squeezy, but OK) and off we went. Nobody knew the first thing about paddling and for much of the way it was complete chaos. Eventually I remembered to be along for the ride and just sat back ruddering while the kids fought with each other about who was paddling harder. Eventually they more or less got it together and we made a good learning experience out of it.

That night after dinner the kids threw a party in the “house” they had built in the woods, complete with a paved floor and benches. They pooled their money and bought refreshments at the snack bar. No planned activities could ever produce this kind of teamwork and initiative from 30 kids. When we did our final positive sharings on Friday morning, sang “Aroostasha” one more time, and did a rousing “Grade 5” cheer, it was—at it was meant to be—a TEAM. What fun!

The Class Trip

We’ve been back for a week and I’ve had time to reflect on the Klassenfahrt (what? A class fart? Are you paying attention now?), which is German for Class Trip. Over the years I’ve been involved in a lot of these adventures in US middle schools, and while this one was similar in its basic structure, in many ways it was an entirely different experience. Remember that these are 5th graders and that we took them for 4 days and 5 nights, which in itself is somewhat remarkable. But I think I need to tell more of the story…

The week began like many other class trip Mondays—whether it be Nature’s Classroom, KEEC, Sargent Camp, whatever—the kids gather at school with their various bags, parents mill about looking alternately proud of their grown-up kid, worried they’ve forgotten to pack Teddy, thrilled they have a week with one fewer kid to think about, and panicked that something might happen without them there to fix it. But as always, we managed to collect the various forms we still needed, get medications gathered, make a pile of the pocket knives (?see? I told you it was different) and, when the bus FINALLY arrived (OK, not so different from home) we herded everyone on.

The bus wound its way through the city streets for a remarkably long time—Berlin is amazing in how far it goes at a fairly high density—until we finally headed out into the Brandenburg countryside. Brandenburg, the German state to the west of Berlin, was part of the DDR (East Germany) and while Berlin is quite modern and cosmopolitan it remains quite conservative and has a reputation for harboring a significant neo-Nazi population. We didn’t experience any of this, but I suppose it’s sort of like driving an hour out of Boston and being in, say, Idaho. (PS I have since been reminded that while Brandenburg IS in fact to the west of Berlin, it is also to the East, North, and South. So I have revealed myself as painfully ignorant regarding German geography. Ouch!)

Anyway we arrived easily enough climbed off the bus to the first main difference. Those of you who have done some work in environmental education know that usually the staff greets the arriving campers immediately to begin establishing the expectations and showing kids where things were. In contrast, we milled about while one of the teachers (the ONE of us who speaks German) went to collect the room keys. Someone came by and dropped off a big wagon to carry our gear. We went off (on our own, mind you) to find our cabins. We gave the kids their cabin groups amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth, passed out the sheets and pillowcases (another big difference—no sleeping bags!) and retreated to the adult cabin.

This bears repeating. We retreated to the adult cabin. That is to say, there were no adults in the kids’ cabins. You heard right. Each group of 5 kids had their own “bungalow” with two rooms and a bathroom. We three teachers had our own bungalow, separate from any kids at all. Whoa. You’ll see why that is REALLY different later on.

OK, back to our adventures. Lunch was pretty uneventful; essentially it was like a little cafeteria, but it was gradually becoming clear that we the teachers were really on our own. This theme really carried through the week—while some of the activities planned were “guided” (in a manner of speaking) we pretty much had to run things ourselves, as there wasn’t in fact any staff there. A few examples:

• An art activity in which kids made small animals from toilet paper tubes or painted pre-cast plaster molds. Um. This taught them what?
• A “grill night” which meant that we had to cook dinner. OK, granted that they provided the meats, but it was pretty much like Thursday night BBQ at camp with me slaving over a hot grill.
• A campfire (which, by the way, we paid for) for which we had to collect our own wood, build the fire, and provide the entertainment. Good thing I’ve done a few of these over the years…Keewaydin folks would have recognized most of it.
• A “fox hunt” in which one group went out and left a trail of little paper foxes so the other group could track them, then hid in the woods. This filled (if you can believe it) a whole hour! And (imagine my voice dripping with sarcasm) it took SO much planning!

I was really worried about the disco night but that turned out to be a blast—obviously the woman in charge had spent the whole week playing with her song list instead of taking care of activities. And in the end, the kids had a great time, learned a bunch of crazy new songs from yours truly, and came together as a team. Which is what the whole thing was for, anyway. What curriculum did we cover? None. What standards were we addressing? Only the ones that have to do with behavior towards peers and learning to get along. Are those important?

Komputeren

One issue that has taken some getting used to is that the computers here speak German, and I don’t. An interesting point in the translation of English and German is that there are many words which have analogues; for example, the word for shoe is schuh and the word for hand is hand and the word for glove is…handschuh. Which isn’t exactly an analogue, but if you’re paying attention at least you can figure it out.

Computer terminology, on the other hand, is NOT the same and appears to have few overlaps. One exception is kopieren, which means (not surprisingly to those of you still reading) copy. But drucken for print and speichern for save are not immediately obvious, and I won’t begin to try to recall words for “move file” or “log out.” Thank goodness for universal icons like a little disk or a little picture of a printer. And really all of this would be fine if everything were in the same place—you know, there’s a drop-down menu called “file,” and that’s where one finds commands like print and save. Next to that is one called “edit,” and while I can’t name those commands off the top of my head past cut, copy, and paste, I pretty much know how to find what I need without worrying about what it says. I figure it could be in Russian and if the commands were in the same spot, I would find them OK.

Here is where we’ve been thrown the proverbial curveball. Our school has nothing but the best, of course, which (naturally) includes updated software like (again, natch) Windows and Word two thousand-whatever which are new and improved and totally different. Everything’s all like spiffy and streamlined and fancified and looks nothing like it used to. Which, (and now you’re starting to see my point) would be fine IF IT WAS IN ENGLISH. Which it’s not. It wouldn’t even help to have one of those Dummies books, because not only am I a dummy I’m a dummy who’s functionally illiterate. Thus rendering the book functionally useless, except maybe as a doorstop or perhaps on the kitchen table to hold a hot bowl.

Even typing a simple line of text requires mastery of something new. The keyboard is in German, too, and to make room for all the different letters with umlauts, and the fact that German hardly ever uses a “y,” things have been moved around. “Today is Monday” suddenly becomes “Todaz is Mondaz;” the apostrophe and colon turn into umlauted a’s and o’s. I spend minutes looking for a question mark or a slash. Not to mention the @ sign, which turns out to be on the Q but you have to use the “Alt Gr” key, whatever that is.

SO…tasks which used to be simple become time-eating missions on the starship Impossible. “Can anyone tell me how to insert a page break?” I say, and immediately a crowd gathers around my computer with people suggesting various combinations of left and right mouse clicks, pointing to German words in unfamiliar spots, and asking each other what that icon means. “What do you want to put a break in for anyway?” someone asks, and three other people recommend that I just find some other way to do it while everyone else wanders off muttering. Eventually someone who speaks German (but not computer) happens by and, after mulling it over for about ten seconds, says “try that one,” and of course it works. At home this would have taken all of 6 seconds for me to do; here, it’s taken about 6 of us 10 minutes which accounts for one human-hour of work time. Gads.

Needless to say, when a variety of things that look like error messages (“Achtung!) pop up as I’m trying to Abmelden, I generally click “ja” or “nein” or “OK” as quickly as possible in the hope that I can get away before the computer begins to smoke and I get blamed. So far my strategy has worked and nothing has broken for which I can be held responsible. I do most of my email and type these posts at home where I can happily sit in front of my own laptop, which listens to me when I tell it what to do.

Which brings me to the other problem, which is that my own computer apparently doesn’t speak German either. In this day and age internet use and email seem essential for communication, and we thought it would be fairly easy to link up somehow. When we arrived, our upstairs neighbor offered to help us get connected, and when after a couple of days we were still struggling, we took him up on his suggestion. He told us there was a wireless network in the building (in fact we could see a number of them, but all were security protected…darn) and he’d get us the password. Only this particular network wasn’t available. We searched. We tried again. We went up and got his key to the other guys apartment and went in while they weren’t there and sat next to the stupid wireless router with the computer and…nothing. Meanwhile his iPhone is happily talking to it. ???? Apparently our computer doesn’t speak enough German to communicate with the router. Do you suppose it gets frustrated, too?

Einschulung

Einschulung always has a “Zuckertute.” I don’t think you know about it. A Zuckertute is like something where you get a lot of candy and things for school. You can choose whatever you want to be on your Zuckertute. Mine had Hot Wheels on it. It’s like a giant ice cream cone but it’s cardboard. Some have pictures of things or the name on it and they all have chocolate and candy and gummy bears inside.

I went to a theater and I stood on stage and got a sunflower on Einschulung Day. There were a lot of people there. Some people wear nice ironed jeans and a fancy shirt. Other people wear fancy clothes like fancy new pants, new shoes, dresses, fancy shirts… Afterward you go to school and meet your teachers and play for a while. You also get to read books and have cookies and juice for snack. The day before you meet your classmates. It’s really fun and afterwards you might be able to get some balloons. Then you go home and you’re able to open your Zuckertute and you eat the candy!

PS The boys don’t wear dresses. And that’s all!

I just want to make sure that I keep adding things, even when I don't have much to say. We start school tomorrow and everyone's pretty keyed up. The kids are excited, especially the girls, who get to start for real. Malcolm doesn't get to begin until next week, after he has his Einschulung, which, for those who don't know, is a big German celebration for kids starting first grade. We'll be sure to write more after that happens.

Meanwhile, I'm struggling to learn how to use computers here (all commands and keyboards are in German, so I can't really tell what I'm doing...more on that later, too) but overall feeling pretty good about getting started finally.

We're just back from a weekend in Hamburg and Elmshorn (a big town in NW Germany, Schleswig-Holstein) which was lovely and we had great weather. Hamburg has a part that was the basis for the design of the Charles River basin, but overall it's really a BIG port city. We also saw a good museum about Hamburg's role as the port of exit for a huge number of emigres to the US and elsewhere.

Con-FOOD-shun

Most of the time when we’re buying things we can figure out more or less what it is. Almost everything we see in the grocery store has a comparable or even identical item at home in the US. Granted, some of the packaging is a little different to accommodate smaller German refrigerators (i.e. square 1-liter cartons of milk instead of our big gallon jugs) but mostly it’s the same stuff.

There are a few notable exceptions. For one thing, there are different sizes (have you seen sausage by the meter—or even the yard—in the US? Me neither) or varieties (many, MANY different kinds of deli ham products, almost all of them some form of ham sausage—chopped, pressed, formed—and noone I know is enthusiastic about pressed ham). For the most part I can tell what it is, even if I don’t want it. On the other hand, it can get confusing when confronted with an entire dairy case filled with Frischkäse as to which one I want. Incidentally, I chose incorrectly and came home with the cottage cheese instead of the cream cheese. Sigh. Now I know to look for the cremig stuff.

Some things, however, have no identifiable corollary. Quark, for instance. I don’t really know what it is. It’s a dairy product, sort of a cross between yogurt and sour cream?—I can tell you that much and no more. It comes in many varieties. I’ve seen herb flavor, chili flavor, garlic, speise quark (which seems to mean quark for eating—why else would you buy it?), and vanilla quark which is a really yummy sweetened thing. But what’s actually in it? I have no idea. I bet it’s good with Rote Grutze on it…another one that doesn’t carry over. More like berry pie filling than anything else, but go ahead and put it on your yogurt, or your breakfast cereal, or your waffle, or, well, your quark. Why not.

And then there are the times when we’re just completely at a loss. We stopped for Kaffee and Kuchen the other day after going to a ceramic studio to decorate some items for our kitchen. The hostess was getting a little grumpy with our indecisiveness (not to mention our lack of German) and was pushing for orders. The kids kept picking up the cover over the muffins to see what kind they were (apparently quite the faux pas here) and then we couldn’t get a straight answer about what made hot chocolate different from kid’s hot chocolate (“there’s dark, and Italian, and this kind, and that kind, and kinder chocolate”) so by the time we finished ordering everyone was impatient. We sat and waited for a while and played with the ubiquitous bees in the sugar shakers, and eventually our food came. I got a lovely Mice-plate (a variety of cheeses), the kids got their muffins, Katy got strudel with both ice cream AND vanilla sauce (grrr). Mary (the one German-speaker among us, mind you) got a lovely bowl of ice cream with strawberries and whipped cream. Well, we assumed there was ice cream under there, because it was invisible under the mountain of sahne. We nibbled our way along like good little mice, and gradually plates emptied out and the ice cream became evident…and it became clearer why there had been so much cream. The Eis was…well…green. Not your mint-chip green, or your garden-variety pistachio green, no. This was GREEN. “What flavor is it, Mary?” we all asked. “Actually,” she said, “I can’t tell.” Seanna tried it. Malcolm tasted some. Annika too. Nobody could put a name to it. But, well, Eis is Eis, so she ate it all up. Eventually our hostess came and cleared the plates, and Mary asked what kind it was. “Elk-land,” she said. What? “ALGIN Eis,” (nice clear enunciation that time). “Did you like it?” Mary mumbled some non-committal answer, being unclear as to what she had just eaten. Keep in mind she’s the German speaker. “What was it?” we all asked. “I still can’t tell,” she had to admit. We all agreed on the word, especially after Annika confirmed having seen it on the board, next to vanilla, but none of us had an inkling what it could be. It seemed, oddly, to resemble algae. But who the heck makes ice cream with algae in it? And why? Is this some weird health-food thing where you to eat something bad for you and good for you at the same time? Or is it just a vengeful booby-trap for unsuspecting and annoying Americans? After looking it up in the dictionary, we’re fairly certain that it was in fact algae ice cream. Mary spent the evening convincing her stomach that now that it was down, better that it should stay there even if it was pretty gross.

Never let your guard down. Not for a second.