Rothenberg and Mannheim are also cities that are on the aforementioned "list."
Mannheim is nearby and while there, we saw a castle that is being renovated to be a university, and a museum, as well as doing some shopping. It was a nice day in a lovely city.
Rothenberg is where it's at.
This is one of my favorite days since coming to Germany. I absolutely adored Rothenberg. It is one of the oldest cities in Germany, one of the few that has survived all of the wars over time. Actually that isn't exactly true. At the end of World War II, Rothenberg was heavily bombed and much of the city and it's wall were destroyed. In the last 70 years people have been putting time, money and effort into repairing the city structures and the wall of the historic town of Rothenberg.
What is this wall you're talking about Kara? I can hear you asking me now. In ancient times cities often put walls around the city to protect themselves from enemies. We don't see very much of this anymore because much of it is been torn down. Anyway long story short, there is about a 4 km walk along the top of the wall that you can do, and the view and history is amazing to see.
We also toured a crime and punishment Museum which talked about the different crimes and punishments for people over the ages. They made really hard decisions like whether to kill someone by hanging or boiling to death, also choices like what kind of shape of mask should a person wear and for how long. We also got to see different torture devices that were displayed. Most of them looked like something out of the Princess Bride movie -- lots of stretching machines.
Among other things, we spent time looking at a house that was built in the 1200s and touring a Christmas market that is open all year round.
My host mom's uncle owns a bed-and-breakfast as well as restaurants in this town. We ate breakfast lunch and dinner with her family, and for dinner we went to the main restaurant where we ate a delicious meal. I excused myself for a moment and while I was gone, my host mom apparently asked the chef to go light on the horseradish on my meal. He assured her that all Americans love horseradish. Sure enough when I got back from the bathroom and took my first bite, I said, "mmm, I love horseradish!" This became the joke of the night.
It has occurred to me that the things that I find interesting mean not necessarily be as interesting to you as they are to me. For example touring the city, I can't fully explain why that's exciting, it's exciting because I got to see it and it's hard to really convey that emotion so I want to make a post to talk about the daily life things that happen to me.
I slip on the stairs at least a little bit everyday. The stairs in Germany seem to all be in the semicircular pattern probably to save space but when I go booking it down the stairs in my socks I always almost eat it.
The family that I'm staying with has kittens, four of them, they roam around the house destroying houseplants and running into walls they're very cute, but they do keep me up at night.
Being a proud carnivore from America I'm really missing the protein-based diet. We ate a lot of meat at all of our meals in Finland. Now I'm majority of my diet is made up of bread, pasta, vegetables, carbs of pretty much any form. This is not doing kind things to my waistline.
After the first chicken slaughtering -- and they realize that I was not squeamish -- I was promoted. Adding the word eviscerate to my job description, simply put, I now pull guts out of the chickens too.
I am extremely uptight about refrigerating things that need to be refrigerated, the German culture does not share this view. Many foods are put into the "cool room" which is simply the pantry. Foods like pasta, potato salad, regular salad, eggs, sauces, soup, all just sit in the 60 degree pantry. I haven't gotten ill but that doesn't mean I want to take this new habit home either.
People in northern Germany tend to be tall, and people in southern Germany tend to be short. At 5'11" I fit in just fine in northern Germany, but now that I'm getting close to the center of the country, I tower over my host parents by at least 5 inches.
I will never take the prices of things in America for granted again. Life is way more expensive here.
Speaking of expenses, the chicken trailer that this family owns for the laying hens cost €32,000, they own two.
I am all for walking, I think exercise is great, but I don't think I will ever get used to the mentality of parking a car and leaving it for the day while you spend half your time walking from sight to sight and then the mile walk back to the car when you want to go home.
People here don't check the weather! At home I'm a weather addict, the app is on every device I own and I always check it during breakfast, it has been more of an adjustment than I'd like to admit.
The showers often don't have walls or curtains, you can sit down with the house nozzle and try to not make a lake in the bathroom, I'm not very good at that. They also have smaller shower stalls than at home, smaller than anywhere really.
I spent a considerable amount of time separating, peeling, bagging, sorting, and general processing, of potatoes. I'll be a potato pro when I leave.
This tidbit piece has been more fun to write than I thought it would be, I'll have to do more of them!
Apparently there is a list. One of those lists that everyone knows but isn't officially google-able, you know the type right? This list is for must see places in Germany and my hm decided it was high time we start working on the list, or at least what was in driving distance from the house.
First on the list? Frankfurt.
I was really excited to see Frankfurt because it's the town you hear about all the important people flying into, I mean come on, the Denver airport has two flights a day going to this magical place, it's got to be awesome right?! And it did live up to the hype for the most part. We toured a huge, I mean MASSIVE church and the city hall building that Kennedy gave one of his last speeches in. The best part though was the observation tower we went in. It was an addition to the highest building in the town and we went up like 80 floors or something crazy like that. At the top was the most varied view I have every seen. It had buildings, houses, churches, a huge airport (hello Denver flights!!), and then sprawling farmland beginning at the edges of it all.
We had as good a day as you could ask for until we tried to leave during rush hour and it took us almost twice as long to get back as it did to get there, you can't have it all though, right?
On a side note, Germans seem to have completely embraced the idea of GPS in their cars and phones, short of going to the grocery store they use it for everything even when it is clearly telling them to go in the wrong direction we still follow the GPS. Maybe it's because it's in German and I don't understand what it's saying, but the generic female voice on the GPS now sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me.
Sunday morning was slow and easy, the afternoon however was a different story.
We were told we were visiting a castle and a rock thing.
As with all castles, there were tons of stairs. We saw some amazing views and some great history. Pictures pending.
The "rock thing" is a geographical anomaly of many rocks and boulders that make a wide large trail up a steep hill. Naturally the goal was to climb it.
As some of you may know, my fat to muscle ratio has been seriously adjusted since I left home. That in mind, this hill liked to have killed me. I was red faced and dying for a while. When it was done, I was glad we came but there were certainly some parts in the middle that I wasn't thrilled about.
On Monday, we butchered chickens. 85 to be exact. Out the door by 7:00 am and cutting by 7:30. My job was butt fat remover and yoga instructor, I positioned legs and wings.
The rest of the day was spent putting straw in bunks and cleaning pens. By the time we quit, I was ready for bed!
- Today disaster struck. The apprentice didn't shut one of the chicken coops and a fox killed 85 laying hens last night. I haven't seen the scene yet but I've seen what it looks like when 10 chickens die, I can only imagine the mess 85 would make.
I got to the Biblis train station at about 15:00 on Saturday the eleventh, just as planned and my new mom Dagmar Ochsenschlager met me.
This family is made up of:
Dagmar- mom
Siggy - dad
Tassilo - brother
Connor- exchange student from Canada
They live in a small town of about a thousand people and run a farm and a bed and breakfast. The farm produces chickens for meat and eggs, 15 types of potatoes, turkeys, guineas, pigs, cows, soy beans, sugar beets, corn, and wheat. Most of it gets sold in their farm store by the house.
There is sooo much going on here. I'm sure it will be a good family for me to stay with and learn from.
Dinner the first night was bbq, roasting marshmallows, and cherry beer punch. Good food and good company, I'm off to a great start!
My last week was a marathon of work experience.
First with Sigret, she is a teacher at a school in a nearby town where she teaches cooking. In her class we make the food that they sell at the snack kiosk and any special meals for meetings. I also attended an English class for higher level students and was really impressed, Manifest Destiny, really? Even Americans don't spend much time on that!
Then on Tuesday I went to work with Pia who is a waitress and helper at a country club/bed and breakfast thing where we prepared tables and rooms and food and served and just ran around doing everything. Her job is exhausting.
On Wednesday, I went with Sigret again. Same stuff, different menu. Haha.
Thursday I helped with cows, cleaned stalls and made my taco dinner. I have resigned myself to the idea that it will never be as good as taco Tuesday with the Pynonnen family.
Friday, Marten and I went to Hamburg and saw everything we could in one day: a submarine tour, a port tour, the miniature wunderland, the dungeon, the red light district of Hamburg, and finally, the coast of the river so I could get some German sand incase I don't make it to the ocean here.
That night I packed and said my goodbyes to everyone and left in the morning at 8:00am for my next family!
I want you all to know that I had way more written about Hamburg, but then the computer deleted my draft, and I'm getting cranky with the Kindle and decided it was best to summarize and not chuck my Kindle at a wall. Google the dungeon and miniature wunderland because they were awesome.
After three days with Marten in Gotting, I rode with one of his friends and fellow IFYE Charlotte to the German IFYE meeting near Hannover. The meeting was a great three days of tours, meeting people and exploring Germany. The only downside was that most everything said to us was in German, so there was quite a bit that I didn't get. Still, I got to see a monastery, the birthplace of Wilhelm Bush, a 500 cow dairy, and tour small towns along the way.
What I enjoyed most about the conference was getting to meet all the past IFYE participants and hear how the experience is something that they still feel so passionate about.
Among the people I met was Bettina Heineman, the coordinator for my travels and with whom I have been exchanging emails for months. It was so good to finally put a face to her! She gave me my train tickets for traveling to host families, and asked if I know how to ride a train. Before I left America this was a valid question -- she deals with people straight from the U.S. usually -- but not me, no, I consider myself a train riding professional at this point...
The trains in Finland, Estonia, Scotland, France, Italy, and Germany have all been lucky enough to meet me as well as the Paris metro system which is a certainly it's own breed of monster.
Wow I got off track there! The point is I came, I saw, and I survived the German IFYE meeting, and it was super.
My hb Marten is the one responsible for me most of the time, and he likes to have a plan! Originally the plan was to go to Hamburg, then home, then Hannover to Octoberfest. Well I got up nice and early and was ready to go when Marten walks in and says "no today we are going to Holland, do you have your passport?" My other host brother Thorsten needed a part for the tractor from a town called Meppen which is close to the border and we were going to try to see Holland anyway to visit everyone's favorite aunt.
Meppen was the first stop and they were having a market so we wandered through the market on our way to the John Deere store. On an unrelated note, at home we have a couscous guy come is and chop corn with a Claas chopper which is German, it is this big beautiful machine that an American drives. Here they have a John Deere chopper, American, being driven by Germans. I found that all quite funny. ANYWAYS we get the part, the dealerships all look the same on the inside, regardless of if you are in America, Finland or Germany, which is a comforting thought. Off we went to Holland next.
All the houses in Holland look alike. It is the same nice brick house over and over which is nice looking and creepy at the same time. There really isn't much to say about this trip, the aunt and uncle are very nice, they fed us and invited me to come back whenever I want (maybe one day I will need a place to stay in Holland? I thought it was nice of them to say it though). As we were leaving, Marten told me about a firework factory that had blown up in the town about 13 years ago. It blew up blocks of buildings and set fires all over. His aunt and uncle's house was blown up -- they had randomly decided to go swimming on the other side of town when it happened. Life is crazy like that isn't it?
We dropped off the part and tried to go dirndl shopping but being so close to Octoberfest there wasn't much of a selection left. After that we met up with Kim and Bea who we're going to Octoberfest with us and away we went.
Octoberfest was fun, and surprisingly like I had pictured it in my head, large tables with German people in their national dress dancing on them and singing loudly with large, large beers in their hands. The part that I hadn't anticipated was how American the music playing was! It was a German band, mostly in their fifties singing songs like "we will rock you." They played German songs too, but that one really caught me off guard. We stayed until it closed at midnight but we only got there at 10:30 so no rowdy behavior from us!
And when my head hit the pillow that night I was already asleep, We had had a very long day and I was a tired IFYE if there ever was one!
The educational system is a large part of any culture, the structure and effectiveness of it shapes the future generations of a country. While in Finland, I attended quite a bit of primary school because of the ages of my host siblings, but with the Hambruch family, I am going to school after high school ... back to college for me!
The first day was spent with Wilken at the farm school. In Germany, you need to get some further education to be a farmer so they devised a program that allows people who want to farm to apprentice a variety of farms nearby and go to classes once a week for the classroom portion. Wilken has been apprenticing this family since August of this year. I'll be honest, school was a bit rough for me. We sat there for six hours (with breaks) listening to lectures in total German. I did pick up the general topics of character traits needed to be a good farmer -- milk fat ratios, time logging and organization and some feed rationing. But aside from the general concepts, I couldn't tell you what we learned.
After school was done, Wilken drove me to the train station in Celle where I took a train to Gotting where my host brother Martin goes to university.
It just so happened to be Marten's birthday ( I apologize if I ever accidentally spell MartEn as MartIn, my brother's name is Martin and I spent a lot of brain power learning how to spell that right as a small child), so of course we had a small, controlled, social gathering to celebrate. It was a great way to meet everyone and have everyone practice their English and me practice my German.
The next morning I went with Marten to his introduction to physics class where most of the party also showed up. This class was a little easier to follow since numbers are the same in every language it was just the content that I couldn't figure out, as it should be.
There are some things that I regret not documenting more throughout my travels, most of which are bathroom related. It's not what your thinking. The toilets have a different flushing system in every country I go to. I think when I get home I will make a collage with the pictures I can find on Google. Here is what the situation is the apartment here in Germany is like.
Today Marten wants to show me a horse farm for jumping horses and a castle so I am certainly looking forward to all of that.
I'll end with a picture out the apartment window of a college town in Germany!
