Benzinpreise (gas prices)

And you think you're paying a lot for gas?

Gas prices in Germany are about 1.45 a liter right now, which translates into $8.759 a gallon. How would you like to be paying those prices?

Dzien dobry! (POLAND!!!)

Square of Warsaw at night.


below: at the Russian Market in Warsaw
KRAKOW

POLISH FOOD
consists of lots of lard-cooked things

above: cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat, mushroom sauce

above: complimentary "Polish peasant bread with lard"
(Yes, that is a whole little vat of lard. just for us. mmmm...)

Perogi, yum.

CRAZY POLISH SIGNS

So this restaurant lured us in with the promise of "a greeting gift", and then once inside I thought this was the best menu I had ever seen. Here are some highlights: (And I really shouldn't laugh at their English translations, as I can speak NO Polish (po polsku).

"Piglet in plums and garlic"
"...slaughting of pigs..."
"Fare for a woman" (thin veal petals)
"Winged Poland: that is chicken wings roasted in honey and sesame"

below: please note the poster for "Friends". If you know what the American logo looks like you will laugh at Polish for FRIENDS. Sooooo many consonants!!

below: Polish Zloty (We were rich.)

Berlin!

More text later...these are just some pictures while I'm waiting to have time to write thoughtful commentary.
Fernsehturm (TV Tower, icon of East Berlin) on Alexanderplatz, looking towards Rotes Rathaus (city hall, red brick building on left)

Below: Brandenburg Gate looking down on Pariser Platz.
My amazing friend Katie ran the Berlin half marathon on Sunday, so we cheered her on from the sidelines.


Plaque on Bebelsplatz, where there was a Nazi book-burning. Quote from Heinrich Heine reads: "That was a prelude. Only where people burn books do they ultimately burn people." Below: Holocaust Memorial with German Reichstag building in the background (actually titled: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)
Remains of the Berlin Wall: In certain spots there is this row of double bricks marking where the Berlin Wall used to stand.

Ole Reunion!

Schnecken!

So these are one of my favorite bakery treats, they are called Puddingschnecken, or snails with a vanilla pudding filling and raisins. mmmm....lecker! I am going to spend the next three months perfecting my baking skills so I won't have to live in the United States without German baked goods. You will all benefit from this.

Also, I wanted to share this picture with you, because after all my travels in the US, I got to Frankfurt airport, came down the escalator to the train platform with a high-speed ICE train departing and thought "Ah...back in civilization..." where people know what public transportation can be... I have hope for the US. I do. I hope you all realize this is the future and where we need to be headed. Imagine a high-speed train between Duluth and Minneapolis, or Chicago-Ann Arbor-Detroit. Cities like this should be connected. Okay, enough of me on my soapbox. But think about it. I experienced Amtrak while in the US and was happy to have any train at all, but had to laugh comparing it to Germany.

April April!

So, today is April Fool's Day, known as April April in German, and Poisson d'avril (April Fish) in France. ha. Those French...

I can't get over it. Seems so strange. And the tradition is so old they don't really know where it comes from (admittedly, my source is Wikipedia, so if you know better, let me know.) Here are some old French postcards with the "April Fish" theme:
I did get pranked at school by a sixth grader. Very harmless. She just gave me this look and pointed to my shoulder in a way which led me to believe I had a spider on me and freaked out. Of course she then yelled "April April!" Cute.

It's absolutely gorgeous today. Very spring-ish. Lots of birds singing, blooming and budding trees, and I even saw BEES! Is that a sign of warm weather or what?

where the Easter Bunny comes to shop...

Because I will not be here next week, I wish you all a Frohe Ostern in advance and share with you some pictures of beautiful German bakeries (which I always miss most when in my other homeland).

Here is where the Easter Bunny (Osterhase) comes to shop:


signs of Spring while walking through town today:

Kultur, Kultur

Okay, so this weekend has been like Culture-Extreme. Saturday I went to a book reading by a woman who wrote about Simone de Beauvoir, and her book is a biography with quotes and excerpts from de Beauvoir embedded in the text. It was really fascinating and really informative. The author is French but spoke perfect German and was really easy to listen to.

She talked about Simone de Beauvoir's youth, her relationship with Sartre and her book La deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) and its impact on the feminist movement. She also talked about her personal philosophy and emphasis on personal freedom, as well as her later political work, support of legal abortion and, later, communism.

I don't know if this has been in the press at all, but 2008 is the 100th anniversary of her birth, and here there are lots of books coming out in commemoration.

On ne nait pas femme, on le devient.
(One is not born a woman, but becomes one.)



Then, on Saturday night I went to see "Die Fälscher", I think the English title is "The Counterfeiters". It was the Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film. Really, really great. I recommend it.


I have also been able to read a lot this week, I read Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) and Ludwig Harig's Kalahari.

This is totally me (about a guy who "explored the German language down into the fine hairs of its roots, read German books, untangled its hide-and-seek games, deciphered its puzzles of meaning, and in the end no one could sell him an X for a U"):

"Er durchforschte die deutsche Sprache bis in ihre feinsten Wurzelhaare, las deutsche Bücher, entwirrte ihre Versteckspiele, entschlüsselte ihre Bedeutungsrätsel; schließlich konnte ihm keiner mehr ein X für ein U vormachen."


And on Sunday night I went to the musical Jekyll and Hyde in the Saarland Theater. I was a bit skeptical about making a musical out of this story, but it was well done. Also interesting: there were French supertitles above the stage! I kept getting distracted by them, wanting to read the French!

So yes, I have been keeping busy. I never really know where the time goes. I waste a lot of it on the internet. :)

Typisch Türkin?

Thursday night I went to a book reading in the Frauenbibliothek, (women's library). The author is a second-generation Türkin, born in Germany with Turkish parents. For her book "Typisch Türkin?" she interviewed 19 different women of Turkish heritage and wove their voices together on different themes such as "headscarves", "marriage," or "sexuality."

During the reading, the author basically talked about how she wanted to emphasize the "?" in her title, that we should question how we stereotype or picture Turkish women in Germany today, because the group "Turkish women" is so diverse. Some women are extremely independent, goal-oriented, some are more traditional. Some are religious, some are not. Some wear headscarves, some don't, and even among those who do the reasons for wearing the headscarf are multifarious.

More interesting was the discussion that followed. The audience was all female, but varying ages, probably from 20 to 70. Some of the comments were decidedly from a different generation, one not familiar with cultural diversity. This provided for interesting commentaries and questions.

Although there are differences, there are many parallels in the way Americans talk about Mexican immigrants in the United States. Americans and Germans are worried about the way their society is changing. Should they have to speak English/German? What is the best way to integrate them? How much of their culture should they have to give up? Interesting issues.

One thing I think is really important is school. If kids don't get to know kids from other backgrounds in school, where will this kind of mixing and integration happen? How else will they get to know people from other backgrounds as "other kids just like me" and not as "those foreigners"? And the way the German school system is set up does not exactly promote this, as many children from immigrant backgrounds do not end up at the Gymnasium. Not to say that the US is perfect, because I'm sure that a lot of segregation happens just because of geography, areas with more immigrants for example, but it's a start in my opinion.

more British

torch = flashlight

(I guess the Brits never understood electricity or something)

ugh British!

Man, I have a difficult time sometimes because the kids here learn British English. It's just little things, but they add up and are frustrating.

Today, for example, I was walking around checking homework and told a kid that "shortcut" is one word, not two. Then I sit back down and look at their book and sure enough it's two. I checked the Oxford English dictionary and an American English dictionary (and Google, by the way, if you type in "short cut" asks you if you mean "shortcut") and sure enough those Brits separate it out...

Also, am I just weird or is the word "clothes" pronounced the same as close as in "please close the door"? The Germans have such a hard time with the "th" I told them not to worry about that one, and just pronounce it like an "s". But according to the phoenetic spelling in the dictionary I'm wrong. Oh man...like I said, little non-important things but these are some little thoughts that drive me nuts.

By the way, the Brits also say "at the weekend" instead of "on the weekend" and "to get on with somebody" instead of "to get along with somebody." I hope that makes you smile, too.