Summitting Grammar Mountain

Whew, I think a bit of catch-up is in order, isn't it? (Hi Mom, sorry, I know...I'm bad). I've been sitting in my room, working on The Great Knitting Project of 2011 (see a few posts back...that one with the pictures of the sweater...yeah, that one) and staring menacingly at a pile of flashcards that has somehow managed not to menace me back. Until now. Between trying to pick up Latin and working on my Greek, a large mountain of grammar is piling up in front of me, and the only thing keeping my spirits up is that, well, I'm not too shabby with languages and I have the whole semester (techncially...hah) to summit the damn thing.

My Greek class is particularly intimidating, though somehow also extraordinarily enjoyable, largely because my professor is the closest to what seems to be the elusive professorus americanus (that's masculine nominative singular, my friends, of very fake Latin). You know the type...kind, cares about your education, willing to be available at the drop of an email for any and all manner of assistance. Well, alright, my German professors have been pretty nice but my Greek class feels a lot like the one at home; my professor is extremely sweet (and adorable!) and cares a lot about the learning experience of his students. There are only ten of us, and four aren't native English speakers, so he's very considerate of that fact. After our tutorium/ta session, though, I (and a couple of others) discovered, to my (our) horror that our German compatriots seem to be able to translate fairly accurately and speedily at the drop of a hat. For example, I stare at a sentence that's two lines long and think "I want to say this means something about a man...and there's the word for 'god'....I just wish the hoplites and good goats from Greek 102 would come back", and they say (in German, of course), "Socrates did not believe in those gods in which the people believed, and for this he was dishonored by such and such at such and such a time and hahahahaha look at my mygreekisawesome!!!". And then I die. Every time. I was commiserating with my fellow American, a lovely older woman, who agreed with me that it would be worth sticking the class out since by the end of the semester, we will have learned A WHOLE LOT, which is really, after all, the point. And did I mention I love my professor? (I'm a little mortified that I ran into him, crossing a street, just having stuffed the last bite of apple turnover breakfast into my mouth to be able to go into the bank, but he seemed amused and waved so enthusiastically I can't be too embarassed. Or can I?)

The other upside of the class is that I've made a new friend, Brazilian Fernando #2, who majors in Latin and Greek back in Sao Paolo. We exchanged phone numbers so we could get together and do HW. Is there such a thing as an English-Latin Tandem partner? Can you mix dead and extant languages like that? I'm going to find out.

On the opposite extreme of things is Latin. Sure, I have lots of flashcards to learn, but MAN do I feel good about myself in that lecture. First off, all of the other students grumble when we get assigned homework. And not even that much. I want to stand up, slam my binder down, and go 'For God's sake, aren't you people here to LEARN?! This man teaches in your NATIVE LANGUAGE. Get over it'. I sit there and listen as people find it impossible to pick out the Dative Masculine Plural ending for a verb and match it with the Dative Masculine Plural conjugation ending on the nice big chart. I mean, come on, your is a language of matching cases and endings. Hello? But I digress. My professor for this class is also exceedingly adorable. Klaus Arnim Benkendorff (great name, right?) is quickly becoming my new best friend for several reasons. 1. He speaks slowly, loudly, and repeats everything he wants us to write down three times. This means even if I can't decode what he means, at least I can write down what physically left his mouth and figure it out later. 2. He definitely likes me. I introduced myself after the second class and explained that I'm an international student (which we've been instructed umpteen times to do). We chatted about how I was doing with understanding everything and how Latin and Greek are harder and easier in different ways. Then, that wonderful old man, bless his heart and his fabulous orthopedic moon boots, asked me where I had learned German. In school, in the U.S., I told him. He looked shocked. "Did you attend a German school?" he asked? No, I explained, I'd had a bit of German in high school and then in college. He looked thoroughly impressed. Klaus Arnim, you make my mornings, even if I have to be in your class at 8:15 to achieve such an effect.

It's back to flashcards, I'm afriad, but I'm hoping to finish The Great Knitting Project of 2011 on Thursday, after my insanely busy Wednesday, and I'll definitely be posting the results of all of my work (and the reason I have gotten back into Start Trek: TNG) when it's finally complete.

Bis dann!

Some Food for Thought

It's been quite a week for food here in good old Tüb, both baking and consuming! I kicked things off last Thursday while at my usual babysitting gig; inspired by some brownie-like cookies from a package that my charges' mother had given us the week before, I thought we could try making the real thing. Charge #1 (henceforth refered to as such, I think, since hey, he hasn't consented to having his name on the internet) insisted he didn't like chocolate, and he usually busies himself with video games, but somewhat-younger Charge #2 agreed to be my baker's assistant, and their mother was thrilled at the prospect. We walked down to the small shopping center across from the student village to get a few supplies, and I only managed to see two people I knew there--somewhat of a disappointment. When we returned, their mother was home briefly before what I understood to be some sort of PTO-type meeting, so she chatted with us in Denglish while we baked and she made dinner (one of my favorite aspects about babysitting is the family dinner I get once a week). She even lent some real American measuring cups to the process, which were most welcome. One of the problems I've run into while trying to bake here is converting all of the ingredients. You can do it with various helpful online tools and phone apps, but it's a pain, and things never seem to work out quite correctly. Between converted quantities, slightly different ingredients, and slightly different ovens, things usually work out, but never the way they would at home. Our brownies were no different. They sat in the oven for an hour and were nowhere near done. We eventually turned the oven up higher than the recipe called for and they finally began to firm up. Charge #2 and I spent some quality time with the Cosby Family auf Englisch while we obsessively checked the brownies, and they finally got firm enough to eat (though they definitely weren't up to my usual standards). The kids said they were sure it was a problem with ingredients or too few eggs or something (we had to adjust for some pretty tiny ones), but I still felt the need to defend my skills as a baker. The one truly excellent result was that Charge #1 declared them, "sooooooo lecker" (soooooo delicious). And he doesn't like chocolate. Sure.

(Alas I have no photos, but they look like pale brown brownies. go figure)

Here's the recipe for anyone who wants to try. (Credit goes to Anya for finding this a couple of years ago on allrecipes, I believe)

Granny's Brownies

Submitted by: Carl T. Erickson

"This has been a recipe in our family since before the turn of the century. I am 70, so you can imagine when it started to get down to mysister and me. Now my grand-nephew enjoys them. Keep under lock and key, orthey will disappear in a trice!"

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 cup butter

2 cups packed brown sugar

3 eggs

4 (1 ounce) squares unsweetened chocolate, melted

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup chopped walnuts (Catie: I don't use these per old habit since my mom has a nut allergy)

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees F (120 degrees C). Grease an 8x8 inch baking pan.

2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and eggs until light and fluffy. Stir in the unsweetened chocolate and vanilla until well blended. Mix in the flour, and then the walnuts. Spread batter evenly into the prepared pan.

3. Bake for 1 hour in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan on a wire rack before cutting into bars.

(3 level tablespoons of cocoa plus 1 tablespoon shortening equals 1 ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate.)

My second baking adventure of the week was an attempt to replicate my mom's apple cake with German ingredients. Sure it sounds easy, but like I said, there's always something a liiiittle off. I suppose this technically can't be called 'my mom's' since we appropriated it from an Amish cookbook, but my mom's always made it and I've never found it elsewhere, so I'm sticking with the moniker.

The recipe for relative German baking success here is pretty simple. First you go to Kaufland and guesstimate five cups worth of apples. Then you peel them with the world's dinkiest apple peeler that you dug out of the back of your kitchen drawer because you forgot your housemates don't actually have real kitchen utensils.

See dinky peeler. Then you have to actually guesstimate what 5 cups of apples looks like chopped.

Mix everything else (see recipe below) together sans mixer. Not hard, but slightly messier.

(Oh aren't I spoiled)

Add apples. Delish.

(Why yes, that is approximately 50% apples, you are correct)

After 45 minutes or so in the oven, you have moist, appley perfection. I never bake for the full time, I check things at 30 minutes or so after one very lucky cake-baking experience in which my whole masterpiece was saved when I checked it halfway into it's 'cooking time' and realized it was done. Obnoxious thoroughness pays, my friends.

(My blogger interface has decided it wants the rest of the post's text to be centered, even though I've undone the formatting. Please enjoy blogger's artistic license...)

This didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it to, but it was still pretty close to mom's cake, and definitely close enough to help with my serious longing for fall at home. Here's the recipe!

Amish Apple Cake

1 cup sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1.5 cups flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp. salt

5 cups raw diced apples

1/2 cup nuts, chopped (I do not add these but recipe calls for them)

topping: 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1/4 cup sugar

1. Blend first 4 ingredients together in mixing bowl. Add the next 5 ingredients and stir well.

2. Fold in the apples and nuts.

3. Mix together cinnamon and sugar and sprinkle over batter.

4. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

Notice the lack of butter, milk/cream, or obscene amount of sugar in these. Anya, Sinead, and I reasoned this made them, 'practically health food!' so whip up a batch for guilt free munching any time. In my family, they never last more than 24 hours or so because every time we walk into the kitchen, we cut off a tiny bite. I mean how can you resist! I expect this would be delicious with a streusel topping as well, so if anyone feels like an experiment, let me know how it goes!

And finally, I leave you with some other yummy photos.

My Milchkaffee came with foam--this I can get behind.

Bergkaese Omelette--yes that's 'mountain cheese'...unclear why.

Possibly the prettiest Nutella crepe I have ever seen

General Consensus: Tastes Like Christmas!

"Catie, you could be studying Greek right now," you say? Yes, I could be. But I will be shortly, so hush. Instead I've been inspired by my current dessert and the festive explosion involved in consuming it. What is this mystery dessert you ask? Well, it's a little, innocuous-looking cookie that my friend Josh introduced me to last week when I offered to help him put up a rolling blind he'd bought at Ikea. Self-described as, "rubbish with these sorts of things," he'd gotten himself into a home-improvement situation that was a little more complicated than either of us had thought, and long story quite short, we wound up standing in his tiny room with his Verbindung (sort of like a frat...but so much more) friend Bertholt (who happens to be a paleoanthropologist) while Josh helped hold up the blind and I held the power strip aloft so Bertholt could reach the ceiling with the drill. Yup. I'm super useful. But good with tools, I swear! Just not determining the stubstance of strange walls. Anyway. Moving on. Upon finishing (such hard work), Josh offered us some of these cookies in a nice little holiday-red package. I took one bite and Christmas exploded in my mouth. It was amazing. Interestingly enough, Bertholt had the same reaction...I wish I could say it had been auf Deutsch, because that would have made for an even better story, but now I simply can't remember. We had these cookies again on Thursday when I stopped by Sinead's with some friends post-babysitting. Group consensus doesn't lie, folks, these goodies are Christmas in a cookie.

(thank you www.germanfoodgrocery.com)

They are, thankfully, available at Kaufland, along with the rest of the goodies that are part of the Christmas explosion that has taken place there in the last week. I guess it doesn't help that without Halloween and Thanksgiving, the next major holiday is Christmas and the weather has just gone from an unusally high week of 70's weather smack down to a solid 52. With all of the money I (...my parents) am saving on groceries (helloooo latest steal: potato salad, two large bottles of bio fizzy lemonade, two varieties of cheese, almonds, a squash, a huge bag of brussel sprouts, cookies, granola bars, and two kinder bueno for 12 Euro minus my 3 Euro Pfand return that I got for all of my plastic bottles) I'm going to knit myself 20 sweaters. Or buy all of the other cozy things appearing in stores. I did find it funny that everyone was in their winter coats today, however. Sure it was gray and a bit breezy but I wore a raincoat...

In other exciting news, my first day of English teaching is this Wednesday! I was informed today that I can pick up a book to use for the class, but it's not the kind of situation where my students will all have them. This basically means I have to put together a 90 minute class myself...for beginning English students. Just a tad daunting. The pay is great if you're not actually a professional teacher, though, and the experience will be great for grad school/professing, so I'm looking forward to it. On the plus side, I only have ten students at the company that is sponsoring classes for it's employees, so that takes a little bit of the pressure off.

I've also been working on my grad school applications, as well as trying to sort my courses out here. I paid a visit to the classical archaeology faculty today (in the castle, no big deal) and suddenly want to take everything they offer. Unfortunately I don't really have time for this, but after my Greek portraiture graduate seminar there are a couple of lectures that I could just go and sit in on. If you don't need a schein (a document that certifies you have credits for something) you can just show up and listen to lectures whenever you like, and both seem really appealing. One is given by the same professor from my seminar and is on the site of Olympia, and the other is given by the Erasmus liason for the department and is called Rome in the East. Something tells me as long as it's not dumping snow (unlikely) I'll be spending some of my extra time hanging out in the castle trying to understand German lectures. The Latin class is a little questionable right now, given that about a hundred people signed up for each of 9 sections and I'm somewhere down the list. When you sign up for a course, you can give a priority level of 1 (high) through 4 for the course, so I get the impression that a number of people must have put in for multiple course times to ensure that they got one...maybe? It seems impossible that 900 people want to take beginning Latin when many had it already in school. We'll find out. But seeing as it's necessary for me to take this class, it'll happen. Playing the international student card rarely fails.

Our DaF courses are also taken care of...we waited for an hour today while a supposedly bureaucracy-prone country botched a serious bureaucratic process and tried to get over 60 of us signed up for classes, but I'm firmly set in a course called Collage of German Post-War History with a number of people from my Startkurs class. I should have Thursdays and Fridays completely free if all goes well with Latin, so my schedule is shaping up rather nicely.

Now I'm off to actually work on my Greek. I've tried making sense of this language, but have realized it's a very inefficient use of my time....oh well!

Regensburg, Oktoberfest, and an Umpteenth Visit to Heidelberg

When we first started talking about actually arriving in Germany, Anya and I knew we needed to go to Oktoberfest. The trouble, of course, is that as soon as you start researching such a trip you discover you should have made reservations in a beer tent 6 months ago (or more...not an exaggeration). We decided we would just arrive super early and try to stay the night before with friends in Regensburg. We left on Saturday morning at a reasonably reasonable hour for Regensburg and had quite the journey there on the train. A number of young German teenagers were on their way to the Volksfest in Stuttgart (their version of Oktoberfest) and had already been drinking (at 9am) before the train ride. After having been packed onto the train with them for a good hour, we switched trains in Stuttgart for Nürnburg and had one of the most embarassing train rides of our lives (I'm pretty sure I can speak for both of us, here). On the platform, someone American asked me whether the train was going to Munich, and I of course responded politely that yes, in fact, it was. He asked where I was from, and when I said New Hampshire he thought I said Nürnburg and was thoroughly confused. I cleared things up for him, but by then we had clearly 'gotten to knwo each other' and it was too late. We spent the entire train trip sitting in front of he and his extremely drunk and nonsensical friend whom he had met earlier that morning. They both said some pretty ridiculous things to us (though our first 'friend' was the only one I could actually understand in plain English), and I kept wanting to just switch into German and pretend to be from Luxembourg so that the other people on the train would be clear on the fact that we had nothing to do with one another. This experience was pretty hilarious, but I was also glad to be getting off in Regensburg.

Once we arrived, we met up with Frauke, Anya's friend from her semester abroad, and Birgit, my au-pair from about ten years ago, who I hadn't seen since my post-Trier trip to Munich in 2009. Birgit met us at the train station and we found Frauke and had coffee and lunch in a small cafe in the altstadt. Then I had a wonderful tour through the city, courtesy of two residents and Anya, all of whom know it quite well. We finished with a climb up a large tower for a beautiful view of the city.

Regensburg from the Turm

Birgit and I on the island in the river, looking across to the Altstadt

We woke up bright (dark, really) and early on Sunday, and Birgit very kindly took us to the train station in Beratzhausen (near her house just outside of Regensburg) at 6:45 to catch our train to Munich. This trip was much more enjoyable (and shorter). We got to ride in a compartment train, which I realized embodies the entire romantic notion of travel by locomotive that I had tucked away somewhere in the back of my brain. On our second train we rode through a beautiful valley in a crowded car with the windows cracked open, and I was instantly reminded of our train trip from Cusco to Aguas Calientes when I visisted Machu Picchu. Something about the sound of the train through the window and the breeze coming into the car brings with it a feeling of adventure.

We arrived and made our way to the U-Bahn to the Wiesn, which looked something like this:

We had arrived right one time, as the tents open at 10am sharp, and we were lucky enough to find a whole table to ourselves in the Hippodrome that wasn't reserved until 5:30! We were soon joined by other, and made some new German friends who shared shots of schnapps that they had snuck in asked us all about where we were from. The band started soon after (though not before chugging an entire Mass of beer onstage together), and we had a lovely few hours eating spaetzle, drinking beer (including a Mass of birthday beer for my Aunt Jane!), and singing along and prosting 'zu Gemütlichkeit' with the rest of the tent.

Our Festzelt

Inside the tent, before most of the crowd has arrived

Happy Birthday Jane!

After several hours in the tent we decided it was time for a breather and went out to enjoy the rides (and man, are there a lot of them). Instead of buying tickets the way you might in the U.S., we had to pay for each individually. Some of them can be a little prohibitively expensive for broke students, so we just did a couple before we made some new German friends. Having to forego a drunken invitation to live rent-free for a year in our new friend Albin's big apartment in Munich, we returned--exhausted--to Tübingen that evening around 1:30.

The following week, we joined some friends from the Startkurs in Heidelberg. In Germany, the rail system has something called Laendertickets; for around 27 Euro you can get up to 5 people on a ticket and use it all over one Bundesland for an entire day on regional (read: slow) trains. Using the B-W ticket, 10 of us went to Heidelberg for the day. I had been several times before but was really wanting to spend some time with people from our class, so I decided tagging along would be worthwhile. We arrived after three hours on regional trains (it's probably less than an hour by car on the autobahn) and found a tram that took us to the altstadt (Laendertickets are also good on all public transportation--talk about encouraging tourism!). We rode the funicular up the mountiain to the stop above the castle and enjoyed a spectacular view and a few minutes of lying around before finding the foot road/path back down to the castle.

After a rather precarious journey down on foot, we stop for a nice veiw of the castle

The only side of the castle I hadn't actually ever seen

After visiting the castle and seeing the world's largest keg that still resides within it, we separated into two smaller groups and went for a nice walk down to a large, statuesque gate, across the river, along the other side, and then back over one of the main bridges. We finished our day, pooped and thirsty, in a little cafe. Somehow this is becoming a trend...