Just so

I lived in California where there is so much cultural diversity (esp. in Silicon Valley) that by and large people are very comfortable with things being done in many different ways. Cooking rice like the Mexicans is different from how the Japanese do it or the Italian way, dressing in saris is fine, so are jeans and suits. Some celebrate Christmas, some Hanukkah, some nothing or something else. Indians shake their head when they agree, Westerns nod.

From an environment that is very flexible on those little things I have come to the culture of “just so”. Maybe it is the fact that we live in a small, well-off southern German city or that I have a lot of contact with my parents’ generation right now but “just so” creeps into my life all the time. Things are just done a certain way and that is that. Nobody ever seems to even questions whether there are other, different but equally valid ways of doing stuff.

Is hard to come up with examples for that phenomenon. If it were big things it would be easy, but it is the little things that by themselves are not fit to exemplify it and only in aggregate, observed over time create the complete picture. The List I wrote about in my last post is an example. The whole “they don’t like this” discussion I had over taking geek-boy out of school for a couple of days and the pervasive attitude that things should just stay the same even if they could be improved upon because “this is how we did it” (implied is “why should you have it any better than I did – just shut up and suck it up”).

A little story about that was when geek-boy started school. Instead of getting the supply lists (there seems to be a list theme going here) a few days early on the website or via email we got it on the first day of school, along with several thousand other families with kids in school. The supplies were needed within a few days and naturally all the parents and kids flocked to the stores that day. Now this is not NYC, there aren’t dozens of stores, there is a handful that have all that is needed. The scene in those stores resembled a “Black Friday door buster deal” type situation only that we weren’t going for electronics and sweaters but fountain pens and notebooks.

I run into a neighbor that day and mentioned that scene and how easy it would be to mitigate by just putting up the lists a few days early so there would be more time to shop for stuff. She clearly did not think that this was a good idea, mainly because “this is what I had to do for two kids” (little side snide comment on my being a lazy person for only having one kid).

And then vacations …. It is early December and I hear tons of adverts everywhere to book summer vacation now before everybody else does it in January. Summer vacation? What? It is December, I am not thinking about booking summer vacation until April – and then I think I am early. But this is how it is done here and one better goes along with the program or else all the nice hotels with German speaking staff will be sold out.

I know that I am not being entirely fair here, there are 14,000 students in this city most of which I am sure embrace new technologies and do not overcook cauliflower and serve it with white creme sauces because that is the only way one can serve cauliflower – but still. A little more willingness to open ones mind would sure not hurt.

Tomorrow we are going to an Asian restaurant for my friend’s birthday. They serve sushi there. I love sushi and I just hope it isn’t offered with a creme sauce because “that’s just how food is served here.”

A week in France isn’t a good time to start a diet

Ever being the Californians we decided short notice (absurdly short notice, as in the week before) to take a week off and drive over to the Alsace region of France and easy two-and-a-half hour drive from where we are. There are tons of vacation apartments (gites) in this area but all but three got eliminated on the particular site I was using due to the high-speed wireless internet connection requirement.  ever the Californians ….

So we piled way too much luggage in the car and off we went. It was four of us, my best friend since middle school days joining us as well.

Now, there is much than could be said about France in general and the Alsace in particular but I’ll condense it. First I have to mention that despite three years of French in school (or rather because of it) I have a rather broken relationship with the language. I hated and feared French classes and always skirted an F.  After three years I was able to drop it and it was one of the best days of my school career which wasn’t very distinguished but ended well after French (and Latin) were gone. Anyways, I have never managed to mend my relationship with French always maintaining that I will learn Mandarin or Arabic before I learn French. This time I thought that – maybe – I could learn to understand it and maybe read it. Who knows, three more visits and I will get comfortable with the notion that maybe one day I might be able to say a couple of sentences.

So, this goes to say that I didn’t feel quite as awkward as I thought I would despite the fact that the French must have thought me weird because I kept answering in Spanish, when addressed in French.

The Alsace is beautiful, great for hiking, lovely little towns and villages which – in late October – were only somewhat inundated with tourists; in summer, I am sure they must be quite unbearably flooded.  They have lovely old houses there, many nicely restored, many of the little towns look like right out of a picture book.

We went on lovely hikes in beautiful terrain, not Alpine but still rugged and demanding, with lovely vistas. Old castles and ruins abound and the aforementioned little towns to visit afterwards for a coffee and a petit pain au chocolate.

Despite my broken relationship with French and basically most things French I have always loved French cheeses – and, boy, they are every bit as good as I remembered them. The prices, despite France not being cheap at all, are fantastic. I basically got three to four times as much cheese per dollar as in the US. And: I can get them all, all the good goat cheeses as well as my all-time favorite, the Chaource, which I can hardly even get in the US and if I can find it it’s worth its weight in gold (well almost).

The food in general, is fantastic, the pates, the nice cold cuts, did I mention the cheeses, cakes, chocolate, wine, I could go on. The operative sentence of the week was uttered by my friend, who constantly tries to go on a diet and generally fails before starting in earnest “a week in France is not a good time to start a diet”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Geek-boy was also pretty content with the situation and hiked like a pro, no whining, no complaining and we did serious tours. He, who can never be for more than a few minutes without holding something in his hands (compulsive, ever since he was a tiny little baby) found another endearing French quality. Standing in the middle of a forest trying out a whole bunch of sticks (Geek-boy always has at least two to three sticks in his hands while hiking) he proclaimed “Man, the French have good sticks.”

A good number of these sticks are now under his bed back here at home, a good stick can’t be left behind, we learned that many years ago.

So, in all it was a pleasant week, with good hikes and good food and I might actually be tempted to give France another try in the not so distant future. As to French – not ready to sign up for classes just yet.

 

Lovely little town in the Alsace

One of many cute houses, nicely restored and presented

Half-timbered houses are typical for the area as well as southern Germany and Austria.

All the spices in the world – but for Mexican ones. Sigh!

even as a German I have to admit: good bread

Oh, the cheeses! Just look at all the cheeses!

 

Trying to be a good expat

I am an American citizen, actually a fairly recent American citizen but still and therefore I am an expat here in German, just as much as I was an expat in the US (I am, of course, a German citizen as well). So basically wherever I live I am an expat. Kind of an intriguing idea, actually.

So anyway, while being an American expat living in Germany I am trying to be a good citizen and my opportunity arrived recently in form of a fat old envelope containing my absentee ballots for the November election.

Man, that’s intimidating stuff! It comes with an 80 page (you read that right!) instruction and explanation booklet presenting arguments for and against all the propositions, statements from all of the people who want to be elected and all is very well laid out and all of that but it’s still 80 – eight – zero pages of stuff to read and process.

Now I always tell geek-boy that there are two things I am sure as hell am not namely lazy and dumb and two graduate degrees should be ample prove of that – but this is taxing. Seriously. Here I am sitting on a Saturday evening, dinner in oven awaiting guests trying to figure out the pros and cons of another Indian casino in California that is not, like all the others, on tribal land. Great source of revenue for the state? Huge nuisance to the residents (for sure), dangerous precedent potentially bringing a casino to a neighborhood near us some time soon (don’t worry, says geek-husband, too many Indians in our neighborhood, they don’t gamble)?

And how about that health insurance thingy, more oversight, always a good idea, but then, maybe too much is bad and conflicting agencies trying to do the same thing and getting into each other’s way. Whom can one trust , the nurses association or the California OBGYN society (made that up, any resemblance with real organizations like that is purely a coincidence)?

I think I need to go to the kitchen, the food needs attention and that trumps, for right now, good citizenship. But the clock is ticking and so I better make up my mind, pronto.

Weekend Trip

So we are doing a weekend trip – California style.  As opposed to any self-respecting German who would leave work a little early – which means like 11 am because a regular Friday generally already ends plenty early – we will leave late and arrive late thanks to phone calls with, well, California.  (it is amazing what a change of location does to perspective, in California I used to be annoyed about the world pretty much being shut down by the time I got to my desk and now I am think “why the hell can’t they get up a bit earlier in California on a Friday if they want to speak to the rest of the world, its Friday evening here, hello, Friday evening, weekend, time off!!  Why can’t that 8:30 am conference call be at like 7:30 am?  Isn’t Silicon Valley supposedly always working!!)

King Ludwig’s Princess – oops, Prince castle.
Source: wiki

Its a short drive by US standards, less than 100 miles to a little town close to Fuessen.  Claim to fame: crazy King Ludwig’s fairy tale castle, Neuschwanstein.  The model for every Disney castle there ever was and is to come.  It is an absurd place, beautiful in its overdoneness, with this amazing location just on the border between the foothills and the Alps, archetypical for every little girl’s princess dreams (or at least those who do have princess dreams, I can’t remember any but maybe I am in denial).

I wanted to visit this place, I don’t know why, maybe because it will make me feel more like an American tourist than a local.  Maybe because this is the real deal, copied many times over, but it looks unreal itself.  Who knows, maybe just to get away for the weekend because I know if we stay here there will be cleaning and working and not much fun to be had.  I am determined to have a little fun, once in a while, even if my naive dreams of an easier and simpler life in Germany are all but shattered by now  between early morning calls to APAC and evening calls to California and geek-boy coming home from school so darn early.

Princess castle, here we come!

I am getting my mojo back

German guaca – came out alright

To get my cooking mojo back I made guacamole.  What better to get one’s Californian cooking mojo back than guaca with the possible exception of California roll? (which is a bit ambitious but I did find a source of nori and I brought Wasabi from California – and I found it here – but making the rice just right will be a lot of hassle if I remember correctly)

It came out rather decent, really, and the question was: will the chips be any good? And I am happy to report that they were and the whole thing tasted just fine, in fact, tasted totally California.  To offset this exotic cuisine we had bread dumplings with chanterelle creme sauce and bacon for main course and now I am indecently stuffed and can’t possible write any more.

But the signs are good that the cooking mojo might come back!

 

 

The Art of Cooking

Something really strange is happening: I can’t cook anymore. I mean, I guess I can still cook but it is not easy and natural anymore. Back home in California it has – at times – been hard to think of something to prepare and I remember frantic searches on the Internet and leafing through cook books just to come up with nothing and then ending up preparing pasta. But I also remember times when we needed dinner and nobody had gone shopping and I just opened the fridge and the freezer and grabbed some stuff and came up with a dinner that everybody – including picky “I hate veggies” geek boy liked. In my blissful memory the latter scenario is much more frequent than the former.

Another day another Schnitzel (c) Tina Baumgartner

And now I am stuck in scenario 1 – pasta with meat sauce. It is literally all I can ever come up with, well there is Schnitzel and sandwiches – but sandwiches don’t count as cooking, really. I wreck my brain to think of what I prepared at home in California and I draw a blank. Pasta? Schnitzel? I know there was other stuff, and it wasn’t sushi because we go out for sushi. Maybe it was fajitas, that must be it and fajitas is really not much of an option here, but then fajitas were prepared every other week at best. So what is different, what turned me into this unimaginative non-cook?

I can only speculate. The kitchen is tiny, I mean “bump into each other when turning around” tiny. Just a few minutes ago I felt like yelling at geek-boy to get the hell out of the darn kitchen because between his dad and myself there simply wasn’t enough space for a third person.

I also don’t have the provisions I have in California where I have stuff in the pantry and the freezer, where I actually have a pantry and a freeze which deserve the names.

Then there is all that German food that I am all of a sudden apparently expected by the world to prepare. I go to the store and find “Sauerbraten” spices (Sauerbraten is a special kind of German roast that is marinated in wine and/or vinegar overnight to make it slightly sour. It is eaten with Knoedel). I haven’t made a Sauerbraten in like – ever, literally and since I moved to the US I made Knoedel once. I mean, seriously, Sauerbraten spices?? The flip side is that I can’t find the stuff I need for survival. Today I was trying to find Tapatio – no luck, neither did I get Tajin, my favorite spicy, limey Mexican spice – and soy sauces comes in tiny bottles.

Of course, one can argue that it is possible to cook without Tajin and maybe it is indeed. I am about to find out.

It’s All in the Head

I remember my delight finding s particular German brand of chocolate in a small local grocery store in Sunnyvale.  A couple of flavors of that chocolate were also available widely at TJ’s – but only two or three and not my favorites.

So when I found this little store which sells cheap veggies and the most eclectic mixture of Russian sausages, Breads from Israel, Greek feta and German chocolate (in a German-language wrapper) and is run by Mexicans I was ecstatic – oh the selection!  I bought nougat and various seasonal flavors,  yoghurt, mint – yum.  The chocolate consumption – never really low in our house – increased even more and I needed to dream up all sorts of new hiding places to keep geek-boy out of the stash.

Of course, even there we only had a limited selection and I found myself at times standing in front of the chocolate shelf thinking: “if only they had this-or-that flavor that I so used to like at home! Oh, the good old days!!”

Fast forward to now and imagine my standing in fron of the chocolate shelf in a German supermarket starring at the selection. Of course there are the usual suspect flavors, the milk and dark, and the classics like yoghurt and nougat and a few exotic flavors I have never hear of.  I take in the selection and my eye gets get stuck on the milk-cookie version: milk chocolate layered around a large butter cookie. A perfectly yummy chocolate but never my favorite, for one it is hard to break into small pieces to meter out to geek-boy.  However, this one is available everywhere in California (well Silicon Valley).

So I stand there, starring at that flavor lovingly thinking “Oh, cookie-milk, just like at home.”

I catch the absurdity of this right away, grab a bunch of bars (not milk-cookie) and make a silent vow to myself to a) not let my head play such games on me in the future and b) find a new hiding place to keep the stack from geek-boy.

 

 

 

 

Dreams and Reality

My visions of an easier, simpler life back in old Europe are clashing with reality – majorly.  Part of it is due to the fact that we are still setting up and until the last curtain is hung and there are finally some pictures on the wall this place won’t feel like home, part of it that life in old Europe is just not that easy and simple anymore and part that my expectations where probably – I hate to say it – a bit naive at times.

To start with the last point.  I had visions, grand visions to be honest, of my how I would – from scratch and for cheap, with an overabundance of creative ideas and cunning bargain shopping – furnish this place so it would look lovely, modern, eclectic, comfortable and awe-inspiring while simultaneously spending minimal amounts of expensive Euros on lovely, one of a kind flea market finds.

That’s the vision.  Now, in reality there are hardly any flea markets in August and September and the one I found (and visited) featured way too many small porcelain rabbits, crocheted thingamajigs and toys for 3-year olds to be of any use (well, okay, I bought a 1 Euro pair of shoes for geek-boy and a few baskets but that aint exactly shopping success).  Also, surprise surprised, lovely handwork is hard to do, time consuming and needs tools – these happen to be in my garage in California (band saw, how I miss you!)

I had visions of me using mom’s sewing machine to best effect when – really – I should have known so much better.  I just don’t have the patience for sewing projects any more complex than a straight hemline.

admittedly it is a hack job – but functional and done in a flash.
(c) Tina Baumgartner

The latest casualty was my fancy reupholstering project.  Those 60s chair, when sanded, painted and reupholstered in some cute colorful but not overbearing fabric would look marvelous.  Yes they would.  But they don’t.  I have no time for sanding, no place for sanding and nobody I can outsource sanding to, the lovely fabric I brought from California is not sturdy enough and the staples in the staple gun are too big (imagining sitting down on the chair staples sticking in my thighs – yikes).  But I need a chair and I need it by tomorrow morning because I am in violation of personal prime directive #1 which should never be violated: thou shalt not use the dinning table as your makeshift office.  Ever. followed by #2: thou shall prohibit your husband and child the use of the dinning table as their makeshift offices/desks. Always. Under all circumstances. And logical insight #1: thou need to set a good example else husband and son will not comply.

So tonight I brought out the Duct tape (brought from California for adorable DIY, cheap wall improvement project) and glued the stupid boring fabric that I brought from California to reupholster the couch (that project is deader than dead) down.  I mean if the Myth Busters can suspend a car with Duct Tape I can affix some fabric .

The result is a bit embarrassing, actually quite embarrassing, but workable for now – that is unless somebody crawls under the chairs and sees the hack job I did.  What’s saving me, likely, is that guest who end up under the chair are normally no longer in a position to fairly judge the merits of a DIY project.

 

 

Everything is so close

Of course I knew this, sort of, but the reality of it is just really sinking in as we start to actually live here: everything is so close. I noticed it very obviously the other day when I told my son that we are going to go somewhere, I forgot where (presumably the hardware store) by car.  That remark prompted my son to automatically go into his room and pick up three comic book (he suffers from abibliophilia – the fear of running out of reading material – just as much as I do) to get ready for the trip. In California that is entirely rational behavior, most trips take long enough to get through at least one book wand some significantly longer (he is a fast reader – of comics at least).  I stared at him in disbelief.

“why are you taking books?”

“You said we’ll go by car, I always read in the car”

“yes, but we’ll only be driving like 7 minutes.”

“Really????”

old is cute – and often very small
(c) Tina Baumgartner

 

Of course he was right, in his life so far a car trip is likely to be long unless it is to the local Mexican lunch place or Safeway, which is close but who wants to haul 36 cans of Coke home by foot?

The other side of this is also amusing – in a way.

Me: “mom, I a thinking of renting an office across the river.”

My mom: “would you want to go that far every day?  I would look for something closer.”

Me, thinking to myself as saying this out loud would be utterly useless: “Far??? What are you talking about, this is like 10 minutes by bike!  This isn’t even a distance for which we have an expression in California. This isn’t even close there, maybe XXClose or something.”

 

Closeness is the flip side of smallness.  I like the closeness – not so sure about the smallness yet.

 

 

 

Camp

So this morning in the daily local newspaper I found out about a three hour camp that is offered for free for kid’s my son’s age.  Since I am terribly behind on work and painting and finding furniture and about a billion other things I thought “cool, I’ll take him there.”

Fortunately, my little geek only sweats the small stuff but is cool with big changes and has never met a person he did not want to talk to.  So I dropped him off  no problem and picked him up three hours and two painted walls later and was given the whole story about their activities.

Turns out not only where they allowed to shoot nuts at each other with badminton rackets, they were also allowed to climb up trees and to bike around.  Geek-boy was incredulous – none of this would have ever been allowed at his after-school and camp, in fact pretty much everything, including picking up wooden sticks of finger length was considered too dangerous and hence was strictly forbidden. SO he couldn’t believe his luck.”

“Mom, we shot nuts at each other and it really hurt.”

“okay”

“They let us do this”

“oh, okay.”

“the teachers didn’t prohibit it, we just had to stand behind a line to shoot at each other, so we couldn’t stand like right in front of somebody and hit him with one of those nut-thingies.  And we could climb up the trees and make monkey sounds …”

You don’t want to hear the rest, trust me.

He loved it and I am happy for him to be able for once to not have to behave like an angle and not being told that finger-length and width sticks are dangerous weapons.  Nobody got hurt and to the best on my knowledge nobody got sued either.