German Summer Fashion Trends

Socks with sandals (a classic)
Harem pants with a 30" inseam
Forgetting to put on pants/shorts/skirt and just wearing a button-down shirt
Manpris
Not wearing shoes on public transportation
Dressing in all one color (white shirt & pants, brown tank top & skirt...)
Dogs

Pictures describe castles better than words

A couple weeks ago, my friend Julia and I rented a car and took a road trip up the Rhein to see some castles and visit one of my friends in Bad Godesberg. It was amazing and definitely one of the best weekends I've had here yet. We drove on the Autobahn - most places actually do have a speed limit, but it's about 80 mph, and in the few places that don't have speed limits people go faster than 90 - climbed up lots of stairs and hills, saw suits of armor, ate Apfelstrudel, rode a ferry (in our car) across the Rhein, ran around the ruins of Rheinfels, bought souvenir bottles of Rhein wine, sang along to Justin Bieber on the road (uh I mean what?), pretended to be princesses and planned our weddings in the rose garden at Rheinstein, drove through countless little towns with blind corners and two-way streets wide enough for one car, learned how gas stations in Germany work (jk, only Julia did that), took tours of castles in German and were excited that we could understand everything, mostly avoided hordes of tourists, and made it home in one piece. All in all it was a very exciting weekend.

Burg Eltz

Marksburg

St. Goar/Loreley

Loreley Statue
The previously-mentioned Apfelstrudel
Adorable resturant in which Apfelstrudel was eaten (outside pictured below)

Rheinfels (castle ruins!)
Note: it would be awesome to come here as a 13-year-old boy with a sword/nerf guns and friends with swords/nerf guns. There were so many fun secret passages to explore and things to climb!

Rheinstein
It had a drawbridge!!! And one of those gates, just like in the Disney Robin Hood movie!
The sky was like 6 different shades of blue on the way home, and it was really cool.
Our trusty car!

So, yeah. If you are ever in Germany, do this trip!

'54, '74, '90, 2010!

Until this week, I'd seen maybe one professional soccer game in my life. Then the Weltmeisterschaft (WM / World Cup) started, and it's such a big huge deal here that it's like all I've done all week. Every bar in town has put up TVs so that people can watch the games, and the big grassy field across the street from the train station has been turned into a "WM-Park" - there lots of large picnic tables, semi-permanent stands selling beer and wurst, and a HUGE screen at the front of the park so that everyone can see the game, even from hundreds of feet away.

This picture is Germany in a nutshell.

I went there to watch the US-England game on Saturday, and it was pretty cool, but there weren't many people there because it was a game early in the tournament that didn't involve Germany. On Sunday I went to the Irish pub in town to watch the Germany-Australia game, which Germany ended up winning 4-0, and it was absolutely CRAZY. Everyone was all decked out in German flags, colors, and facepaint, and after the game the town just went nuts. The Neckarbrücke, one of the only bridges over the river, was so packed full of people celebrating that no traffic could get through, so I couldn't get a bus home for a long time. People were running up and down the main street waving German flags, and other people were driving up and down this same main street honking their horns, singing, and just generally partying for over an hour after the game ended. And that was only Germany's first game, in the preliminary round! I'm really excited that I'm here this month, because it's cool to see how things go down in a country that actually cares about soccer and has a decent team. Relatedly, I've been hearing this song a lot lately. It's basically about how Germany is going to win the WM.

Other than soccer craziness, nothing unusual is really happening here. One fun thing I did recently was go to the annual Stocherkahn race in the Neckar, and even though it was rainy and gross that day, there were still a ton of people there and it was a lot of fun. Stocherkahns are these boats that are kind of like canoe-gondola hybrids; most dorms in town have them, and on sunny weekend days there are always a lot of people relaxing on them, drifting down the river. Pictured below are two of the boats from the day of the race and what the finish line looked like.

So yeah, that was pretty neat!

Because I like organizing my thoughts in list form, here are some lists I have thought of that relate to me being here in Germany.

Things that I have tried to explain to Germans, but I don't think they really got it:
Marching band/drumline
Big Ten football
saltine crackers
chili


Nights that were fantastically memorable, even though I didn't really do anything special:
Grilling with my roommates and then allowing myself to be convinced to come out with a few of them, which turned out to be a great choice because it was "Rock Night" at the bar we went to, and not many things are better than German boys singing and dancing to "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys

Things that are going to kill me when I come home:
4 classes + NUMB + SAI at Northwestern
open container laws

Now I'm going to go take a nap, because last night I stayed up too late writing a paper that I should have started before midnight, and I had to wake up for class earlier this morning.

Well, hey there. Sorry about another monthlong hiatus... I promise I have a good reason this time! I can now say I've experienced the health care system in Germany pretty thoroughly - I had mono this month, so I was pretty out of commission for the past 3 weeks. But they know me real well at the doctor's office and the local apothekes now. I would also like to say that German health care is awesome. Back when my doctor thought I had strep and prescribed me antibiotics, they only cost 5 euros. And although I went to this doctor like 6 times in the span of 2 weeks and had blood tests done twice, and ended up at the ER one Sunday night when everything else was closed, I never paid for any of it. Wooo socialized medicine! When it got bad enough that I couldn't make food for myself or even really get out of bed, my dad came over and took care of me (he just left 2 days ago), so that was AWESOME and helped a lot. Thanks daddy! :)

So, as far as things I've been doing this month, there haven't been tooo many... before my dad left I was feeling good enough to get out of my room for a while, so we took a day trip to Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bayern, and that was really fun and super cute. Rothenburg is very, very medievally German, and also quite touristy. It's not high season yet, though, so we didn't have to deal with the 'hordes' of tourists that Rick Steves warned us about. Apparently they have both a traditional Christmas market during both Christmastime and in July, for those who can't handle rural Germany in the winter. I'm sure it must be a mess. But anyway, what we saw was pretty cool. The entirety of the old part of the city is surrounded by a wall, and they let you walk on top of parts of it, which gives a great view of some of the houses and old buildings. All the houses are SO cute and SO German - half-timbered, pastel colored, flowerboxes in every window, ivy creeping along the corners and also through some now structurally unsound walls. It was great.

You don't get more cute and German than this.

We had dinner in a restaurant directly off of the Marktplatz, a tourist-oriented place specializing in Fränkisch and Bavarian food. It was tasty - I had a deliciously manly meal of fried potatoes and a pork steak in bacon-onion-beer sauce. But please, please, don't ever be like the people who were sitting at the table next to us. Topics of their very overhearable conversation ranged from overpopulation of deer, to bringing their dogs with them on their next vacation, to whether they were in Bayern (yes), whether the Schwäbisch region is a state (no), and whether Baden-Württemberg is a state or a cultural region (the former). I also learned from them that Bayern is the German equivalent of Texas. I think what bothered me most is that the 'leader' of this small group did speak some German and was talking about the country as if he was an expert on it, yet didn't really seem to know anything. So I guess they could have been way worse... I just don't like people who are simultaneously arrogant and ignorant.

Other than that day trip, I've pretty much spent the past week eating ice cream, sitting outside in various cafes, and procrastinating on doing anything remotely productive for school. There were no classes this week because of Pentecost - guess a lack of separation of church and state isn't ALWAYS bad. It's interesting that there are so many national religious holidays here (we got a day off in May for Ascension, and classes are canceled again next Thursday for Corpus Christi), because everyone here is wayyy less religious than at home. Baden-Württemberg is even supposed to be the most religious region of Germany, but it's really not that visible.

As long as I'm talking about differences between Germany and home, here's another big one I've noticed in the time I've been over here: personal responsibility. Here, you and only you determine how your life goes. It ranges from little things, like the lack of screens on windows that fully open, to preparing yourself for university exams. You're stupid enough to lean over too far out that open window? That's your problem, buddy. You fail a final? You haven't learned enough yet, so you'll move on when you personally are ready, and retake the class. I'm not 100% informed on how the legal system works here, but I get the feeling that lawsuits must be much less common here, because there are no warning labels on the coffee cups that the beverage you are about to enjoy may be extremely hot. I like it, because it makes me feel like the Powers That Be don't assume that everyone in the country is stupid and lawsuit-ready. That's why there's no speed limit on the Autobahn - you drive as fast as you can handle, and don't be stupid about it. Within my dorm, it's the same thing - the kitchen is shared between 14 people, so everyone's expected to do their dishes right away and clean up the stove after cooking. There are rules like that for probably every shared kitchen everywhere, but here, it actually works.

Speaking of being responsible for yourself, I'm hungry, which means I gotta go make some dinner!

Go 'Cats,
Christina

Hi everyone! Sorry I've been bad at writing about my life this month. I've been busy doing daily life boring things, which means that even when I do have time to write, I don't feel like I really have anything to talk about. This social psychology reading I'm supposed to be doing right now is not the most interesting, though (sample sentence: "Notably, the selective accessibility consequences of comparisons are faily ubiquitous and robust and have been demonstrated to result from different types of comparison." The whole chapter is just the author being stupidly full of himself.), so in this case blog wins out.

So, the month of April... what did I do?
-Dad came to Freiburg for a conference during my break, so I visited him for a few days (and went to the baths in Bad Krozingen while I was waiting for his train from Prague to get in!). It was cool to go back to Freiburg and try to remember where everything was, see the wurst guys in the Münsterplatz, and get a delicious vegetarische Yufka from my favorite Döner place in town. It would have been better if I hadn't been feeling sick and ended up taking a 3-hour nap in his hotel room for an afternoon, but sometimes life is just lifey like that. At the end of the week, he visited me in Tübingen for a day and we did all sorts of exciting things like eating lunch, ice cream, and dinner! Then this volcano blew piles and piles of ash into the air and he was stuck in Europe til the following Tuesday.

-Classes started 2 weeks ago, which means that at this point I have been to most of them once or twice now, because they only meet once a week. I'm taking a speech/language development seminar (here, seminars are smaller, discussion-heavy classes for people of a particular major) which has a 3-page essay due every week but is still awesome, a social information processing seminar which is less awesome, an evolutionary ethics lecture, and a lecture about European history 1050-1200. I can more or less understand everything that goes on, except in the history class, because the professor talks into his podium and is boring.

- Every so often, some of the people from my language program last month get together and cook dinner at one person's apartment. A couple weeks ago I had everyone over here, and we made chicken curry with rice and then had Belgian chocolate fondue for dessert. I don't think I'm ever going to leave Europe.

- I've been watching unnecessary amounts of Veronica Mars. But it's so good, and every episode is a cliffhanger... what else can I do?

- I went to the German equivalent of a frat party a few weeks ago, which is more like going to a club in someone's house as opposed to an American frat party. You had to buy a ticket to get in (7 euro, but my roommate gave me a free one), buy a 10 euro card to be able to get drinks, and pay for drinks at different bars they had set up in the house. These things are a much bigger deal here and need lots more preparation, apparently - all the walls of the house were covered in black tarp (to prevent damage, presumably), and they had a coat check, security, and a real DJ. It was pretty fun, but I'm glad I didn't have to pay to get in, or else it would have been a rather expensive evening.

- I finally gathered everything I needed for the "get the people at the Bürgeramt to give you a visa" scavenger hunt and gave it to them today, so I should be legal to stay here until August soon!

- Everyone from Northwestern who has been here since September is back from break now, so I've been hanging out with them a little bit since then. It's so good to see familiar faces! One of the girls, Julia, and I have made like 800 plans for the summer, including but not limited to: going to Heidelberg, Munich, the Rhein region, going on a bike adventure or hike and picnic in the forest behind my building, having pancakes and watching Mad Men on a Sunday morning, her giving me a culinary tour of Tübingen, and finding the cheapest place to buy a Longchamp purse (since they are substantially less expensive here). Hopefully we will be successful in all of our endeavors!

I think that's about all my attention span can handle right now. In summary, I am still alive and still having tons of fun in Germany!

Go 'Cats.

Frohe Ostern, or, Germans Are Really Nice!

Happy Easter, everybody! I hope you bit the head off of a delicious chocolate rabbit this morning. I personally did not, but I did have a Kinder Egg, which was almost the same.

I went to church this morning with my friend Philip from my German class. I didn't like the service so much (it was one of those song lyrics projected on a screen/we have a drumset churches), but the people were really amazingly nice. We stayed for probably an hour after the service just talking to everyone, and they were super friendly and were excited that we could speak German so well. Some people even invited us to have lunch with them, so we did - free food is always good!

After I got home, I found two notes on my door - one that I have cleaning duty this week (woohoo!) and that I should ask the girl next door if I have any questions, and the other saying that I should follow the trail of arrows and golden eggs starting at my door to find an Easter surprise! It led to the kitchen, where there was a basket of eggs on the table, each of them decorated like a person on the floor. Super cute! Then I had pancakes with my roommates, who were in the kitchen when I found my egg, and actually had a conversation with them for I think the first time ever. I was never really around my dorm this past month because of my German class, so I never really got to talk to anyone, especially because it's break and most people are gone. It was really good to talk to them today though - they're really nice! We went on a walk after that, and saw lots of neat things, like a double rainbow (worth being poured on for the 10 minutes beforehand) and squirrels (apparently they are not common here) and a 6-inch long slug (one girl said this sort can grow to be 1 meter long? ewwwww).

Later we're gonna watch Matrix: Reloaded cause it's on TV - happy Easter?

So this holiday has been somewhat untraditional, but fun nonetheless.

Also, I just want to say that German children are adorable, and I might have to find one and bring it home as a souvenir. (this statement prompted by how many there were at church this morning)

Saturday Morning German Lessons

Instead of talking about what I've been up to these days, the main point of this post is to teach you all some things I have been learning! This lesson will include Schwäbisch vocabulary, phrases, and some songs.

Schwäbisch words:

• Däddääle - someone unhelpful and squeamish
• Giftnudel - an angry woman (literal translation: poisonous noodle)
• Schnookehuschter - someone who is afraid of everything

Other German words:

• das Techtelmechtel - small love affair - like a fling
• das Blablabla - empty/meaningless words
• das Wischiwaschi - someone who can't decide what they want
• der Schickimicki - someone who is really trendy, to the point of they look like they are trying too hard
• der Schnickschnack - knick-knacks
• etepetete - OCD about attention to detail; pedantic
• der Krimskrams - clutter
• der Hickhack - a discussion that could turn into an argument, but isn't yet
  

Ways to say that you are drunk: (seriously, we learned this in class one day)
betrunken, blau, besoffen, breit, abgestürzt, berauscht

Idioms:

• du gehst mir auf den Keks - you get on my nerves ("you walk on my crackers")
  
• das ist kalter Kaffee - no one is interested in that anymore; it's old news ("that's cold coffee")
  
• es geht um die Wurst - to do with an important decision ("it's about the wurst")
  
• das ist mir Wurst - I don't care ("to me, it's wurst")
  
• das ist nicht dein Bier - that's none of your business ("that's not your beer")
  
• dir muss man ja alle Würmer aus der Nase ziehen - said to someone who only answers the question he's asked and doesn't provide any additional information ("one has to pull all of the worms out of your nose")
• ich geh auf dem Zahnfleisch - I'm exhausted ("I'm going on the meat of my teeth")
  
• ich hab viel um die Ohren - I have lots to do ("I have a lot around my ears")
  
• da hat er aber Schwein gehabt - he was lucky ("he had a pig")
  
• blau machen - to skip school or work ("to make blue")
  
• die Hosen anhaben - to have power in a relationship (literally "to wear the pants")
• einen Clown gefrühstückt haben - to make terrible jokes ("to have eaten a clown for breakfast")
• im gleichen Boot sitzen - to have the same problem as someone else ("to sit in the same boat")
• nicht alle Tassen im Schrank haben - to be a little crazy ("doesn't have all the cups in the cupboard")
• seinen Senf dazugeben - someone who always has to say their own comment about a situation ("his mustard has to be there")

Zungenbrecher (tongue twisters! also did this in class one day):]

• Wenn viele Fliegen hinter vielen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen viele Fliegen vielen fliegen nach.
• Russische Russen rutschen rutschend russische Rutschen russisch runter.
• Zwanzig Zwerge ziegen Handstand, zehn im Wandschrank, zehn am Sandstrand.
• In Ulm, um Ulm, und um Ulm herum.
• Zwischen zwei Zwetschgenzwiegen sitzen zwei zechenschwarze tschechisch zwitschernde Zwergschwalben.
• Im dichten Fichtendickicht sind dicke Fichten wichtig.
• Schnecken erschrecken, wenn Schnecken an Schnecken schlecken, weil zum Schrecken vieler Schnecken, Schnecken nicht Schmecken.

And finally, some songs!
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=xr1y7J_x-Oc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93bjNi8qIf0