Lately we have been quite busy. Felix my oldest host brother is home for a long weekend from his University and we have been trying to see as much as we can while he is here.
The turkeys are growing fast! They are already using a different feeding system to accommodate their growing size and appetites. We don't need to check on them as often anymore either which is a relief for everyone.
Petra took the farm apprentice Finn and I to a town nearby that is next to the Rhine river. The bridge that crosses the river looks like a mini Golden Gate Bridge which was quite funny. The view of the town and river at sunset were amazing.
I cooked a Thanksgiving meal all by myself!! Turkey, stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, and a sweet potato pie. All from scratch. I am rather proud of this accomplishment, I won't hide it.
Here is some irony in it though, I am with a family who has thousands of adult turkeys but we bought a tiny turkey from the store.
Yesterday Felix and I went to Köln which he says is the fourth largest city in Germany. They had a couple great Christmas markets we walked through and a Lindt chocolate museum. But what they are known for is their cathedral. When he told me we were going to see another church I was kind of bummed because I have seen so many and they are all impressive but all the same anymore. This was hardly a church, the term cathedral is much better fitting. It was amazing. And the history was impressive as well. The cathedral is built on the ruins of a church built in 870, in 1164 an archbishop transferred the bones of the three magi ( the three wise men). A golden shrine was built to house such precious relics, it was finished in 1225. It was decided 23 years later that there should be a grand cathedral to keep such a treasure. Construction was constant until 1560 however a building 300 years old needed renovations already and therefore the building is constantly under construction.
Things have been good here in this family and I am sad that I only have a couple more days here, I am excited though that my next family will be my own, although that hasn't really hit me yet. I look forward to my final days in Germany and my travels back to my loved ones!
22,000 baby turkeys, one truck.
The truck was in the afternoon and we had our work cut out for us
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Baby turkeys need a warm environment to survive, around 32 degrees Celsius and so the massive barn that they live in is heated to that. In the morning we needed to clean out the sterilizing fluid from the waterers in the barn and make sure that everything was ready for the turkeys. This was around two hours of moving buckets of water, walking and moving in the hot box, we sweated gallons.
After lunch the turkeys arrived but not as normal. Because of the concern for disease transmission the truck is sprayed down with a sterile spray by the driver. He accidentally sterilized the inside too, with the turkeys inside.
It was just a moist spray but it made for some very wet cold turkeys getting unloaded on a cold November day. Turkeys come in boxes with four sections and we keep the hens and toms separate, each box contains sixty chicks. There were six of us unloading and it took a while.
We unloaded the boxes and set them inside the low fence after all the boxes were laid out the boxes are all opened and then the box is (rather unceremoniously) dumped upside down and removed, this helps all the chicks all adapt at once together.
After the chicks are out, they start eating and drinking almost immediately. But they must be checked on regularly, if they get cold it doesn't take long for them to crowd into a corner and suffocate one another. To check on them, we go into the loud hot barn and walk the pens changing water looking for chicks that are dead or laying on their side ( we flip them back over) and signs of crowding. This check is made every few hours for the first three days.
I have been up to much more than baby turkeys though! We went to a beautiful castle that had an art show inside. The art wasn't really my cup of tea (very abstract...) but we climbed the tower and got a great view of the forests and villages surrounding us. It was sunset and absolutely breathtaking.The castle was renovated in 1997 due to heavy bombing in WWII and when my host mom was a child she used to play in the castle ruins.
This family does some things that are really really similar to what my family does. Such as eats pizza while watching The Voice. Or has wrestling matches in the kitchen. Needless to say I feel extremely at home here which is wonderful after being away for so long. I get to drive here too, which is always a bit scary on the narrow crowded German streets but fun non the less :)
We have been making cookies in the down time as well, grandma (who speaks no English) and I go baking some afternoons, there is quite a bit of charades going on but we get it figured out.
And last but not least we went to the theater (or cinema as they say) and saw The Hunger Games movie. It was in German but that wasn't the biggest adjustment. The ONLY popcorn they sell is kettle corn. So weird, and depressing. I'm adding that to things I miss from the US. The movie was good, between the visual part, common sense, and my limited German, I knew what was happening, mostly.
That's all for now! Looking forward to the next adventures with this family!
I arrived to the Tremohlen family on the evening of the 18th in Kleve after a very long train ride across the entire country. I say entire country because I was close to CZ in the last family and am now 15 minutes from Holland.
My new family:
Peter-host father
Petra-host mother
Felix- brother, at school in Bavaria
Matias- brother 19
Judith- sister 16, spent a semester in New Zealand and speaks awesome English.
Lennart- brother 12
I have yet to meet Felix but everyone else seems very nice.
On my first day I got to ride in the truck to deliver sugar beats to the factory, I couldn't believe they are still harvesting! I also got to ride on the harvester.
Later on I went to town with Petra and Matias and we saw the new university in town and the old town center with the famous swan castle. I also learned that Anne of Cleve's (queen of England for a while) was from Kleve, which is pretty neat!
One last note worthy fact is that the Tremohlen family are turkey farmers and they currently have 9,000 adult turkeys and will be getting 22,000 chicks in sometime tomorrow. And Thanksgiving is only a week away... :)
You may have noticed that I haven't blogged in awhile, I promise it is not because I didn't want to or didn't have anything to say, it is because I couldn't.
You see, I had been staying with a family that chooses to live alternatively. This means no internet, not television, no microwave, the mom has no cell phone and the children have no video games. This was an interesting lifestyle adjustment. I could use internet for email at a friend's place but I couldn't be there long enough to do much else. So I apologize to anyone who expected me to update this in the last month.
Due to the nature of this stay I am going to post the whole 19 days in one blog post, so deep breath, get ready.... Go!
In the moments directly following my exit of the train in Doberlug-Kirchhain I discovered that my host mom (Beate) and three siblings (Helena-11, Richard-9, and Karoline-7) spoke almost no English. And the father (Roger) was gone for a business trip. I knew at this point I was in for a crash course in learning German for the next few days. Since it was getting late we went home and ate dinner, I showered and went to sleep.
This family loves wine. Roger came home and he has taken it upon himself to teach me about wine. We dink some almost every night, sometimes a couple bottles! I'll be a qualified wine snob when I get home :).
Roger is an electrical engineer and he deals with technology all day at work which is part of why they choose to have none at home. Beate is a stay at home mom and a great cook, you must be when you have no microwave!
It is clear in families after the first week if there was a mass cleaning before I came or if it always looks as clean as it is.
*that was not meant to sound snobby -- at my home, we are the type to do a mass cleaning before guests.
This home was not cleaned especially for me, it was clear that Beate was just an extremely clean person, long story short, we cleaned a lot.
Every Monday Beate has an English class in a town about half an hour away which I got to attend with her. It was fun to talk and learn with all the people in the class, I really enjoyed it. After class, we would go grocery shopping, get lunch and do what ever we needed to in town before going back.
Since I am Lutheren, we went and visited Wittenburg where Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis on the church doors and began the Reformation. Sadly the church buildings were mostly under renovations for the 2017 500 year anniversary but we did get to see the doors, the Luther museum, and a really cool tree garden where Lutheren churches from all over the world could plant a tree representing their church. While in Wittenburg we had sushi for lunch, I was shocked at how much I missed it! I don't even eat it much at home.
Another town that we went to was Berlin. I LOVE BERLIN. We took a hop on hop off tour around the city stopping to see statues and monuments, the wall, a museum and so much more. I loved how the city looked and felt and how the people were. Beate was the one who went with me and she was terrified most of the time which is sad, but according to Roger it was character building.
F60 is a massive machine that was used to removing the top layers of sand and sediment from coal beds for mining. It has been retired not but it is now used for tours and is accessible to the public as the largest movable piece of equipment, in the world. The F60 machine is near the town where Beate and I go to English class. To give you an idea it is 100 meters longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall and it is around 75 meters tall at the highest point.
There is a celebration called Saint Martin's day in Germany that was participated in on November 11 and the children and towns people walk around town with paper lanterns singing songs and then go to a church service followed by a party after. The celebration symbolizes Saint Martin riding his horse through the country and finding a man that would surely freeze to death in the night without help. Saint Martin took and cut his cloak in half and saving the man from dying.
I think I covered the high points of this visit, it is hard to write when you have lost the initial excitement of the event. I may update this one but for now I think it is a good outline.
As I may have mentioned before this family sells chickens to restraunts all over Germany, being the social people my host parents are they are friends with some of the restauraunt owners and we were invited to the daylight savings meal at a French restauraunt.
It was really cool so see how the chickens that I helped feed and slaughter were eventually consumed. The restauraunt served a menu that was filled with normal foods prepared in very strange ways such as a stroganoff that was deconstructed and an ice cream dessert that included candied potatoes, it was all very strange but good, I'm all about new experiences right? The food was wonderful, the company was better, much wine was consumed and I remembered to turn back my clock. I'd call that a good night!
The last day was spent in another town on "The List" -- Heidelberg!
I was so excited to see this town and castle because it is the one that everyone talked about, and it was wonderful, really wonderful. We went on a guided tour (in English woot woot!) and learned about the history of the building and those that inhabited it. Including the three times it was destroyed. The town was beautiful and there were many shops specializing in odd things. I found a chocolate shop that made chocolate dessert noodles, weird right?
On the way home we stopped at a Halloween store where Konner got the needed parts for his costume, this was hard since I have grown to really like this family leaving right before an event like their Halloween party was hard.
The final evening was spent sipping wine and playing card games. I really enjoyed staying with this family and was sad to leave it!
