C is for Cookie, and that rhymes (loosely) with "I'm turning 23."

It seems like the teachers often bring in some sort of cake or treats when it’s their birthday, so for my birthday I thought I should do something too. I still don’t think all of them know who I am, so I figured it would be a good way to remind people I’m around. I wasn’t sure about making, buying, or even carrying enough cake to school for all the teachers. It’s complicated enough to change trains twice and walk 20 minutes to school every day with just a backpack, and I didn’t really want to add to my load by bringing enough cake for 80 people. I mentioned this to Isabel and she suggested baking cookies.

That’s not a bad idea, since you only really see cookies around Christmastime or something like Chips Ahoy, etc. And since my family loves cookies it was just another way to do something "American," I guess.

The idea was to keep it cheap and simple. Cheap it was, simple it was not. Here’s my recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe is halved to be sure it would fit in my mixing bowl.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. *375 F =  190.555555 degrees Celsius. Eyeball 190 on the dial as somewhere between where 170 and 210 are marked.

• ½ C softened butter. 1/2 C = 113.4 grams. Eyeball 113 grams on a cube of butter marked in 50g increments.
• 3/8 C white sugar + 3/8 C packed brown sugar. *brown sugar is impossible to find = substitute with another 3/8 C white sugar.
• 1 egg
• ½ tsp. vanilla extract sugar. *vanilla extract is impossible to find. Google how to substitute vanilla sugar for extract. ½ tsp vanilla extract = 2 tbsp vanilla sugar. Technically, you're supposed to subtract the same amount of regular sugar to make up for the amount you're adding, but really? I'm trying to whip these out.
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda baking powder. *baking soda is impossible to find. Google how to substitute baking powder for soda. ½ tsp soda = 1 ½ tsp powder.
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 1/8 C flour. *first batch flattens out too much in the oven. Increase to 1 ½ C flour.
• 1 C chocolate chips. *chocolate chips are impossible to find. Chop up a Milka bar instead.

1. Using an electric mixer wire whisk, cream butter and sugar until smooth. *Usually, you have an electric beater. But then again, usually you have a kitchen where you don’t hit your head on the ceiling while you do dishes, and your stove isn’t a two-burner hotplate. Substitute with wire whisk and cereal spoon.

2. Add vanilla extract vanilla sugar and egg. Mix until smooth.

3. Add dry ingredients, mix until smooth. *At some point very quickly, the batter will become too stiff for the whisk. Switch to cereal spoon. Alternate arms frequently. Maybe think about working out, you big weenie.

4. Add chocolate chips chopped up Milka bar. Mix until evenly distributed.

5. On a cookie sheet 9x9 cake pan, scoop out spoon-sized balls of dough spaced evenly. You should be able to fit around 12 4 cookies on each pan.

6. Bake for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown.

So. In a normal oven, you could reasonably expect to bake up to 24 cookies at a time. In my little oven, you can clearly only reasonably expect to bake 4 cookies at a time. Each set of cookies took between 11 and 14 minutes to bake, sometimes longer if I looked at them after my timer went off, decided they needed a little longer, sat back down, and then forgot about them.

I think I made around 100 cookies, so that would be 25 x (13 minutes in the oven + 2 minutes to cool) + about 20 minutes to make the first batch of dough = 395 minutes = 6hrs 15min. If you add in the time used when I forgot about the cookies in the oven or was otherwise interrupted, it’s probably closer to 8 hours. 

In gallon-sized baggies, I could fit them with my school stuff into my big backpack, which I usually use for laundry or traveling, and get it all to school. I had just enough time to leave them out on the table where I usually sit in the teachers’ lounge before I had to run off to class. When I got back, a few teachers who sit near me were eyeballing them, wondering what these giant bags of cookies were for. “It’s my birthday so I made cookies do you want one?” Of course they do.

Word spread a little bit, but funnily enough, not even a full bag got eaten. I ended up taking one of the bags along to the teachers vs. 13^th grader soccer match, and after unsuccessfully trying to convince the teachers on the team that they had to eat them, gave them to the 13^th graders. Left the half-eaten bag on the table at school, and brought the last container along with me to my birthday dinner with my friends that night. I still have around 2 dozen cookies I have to eat myself. If I ate them at the rate it took me to cook them, it would take me an hour and a half. And I'd still want to throw up.

Had to leave for my table tennis class at the university, and
the mixing bowl is too large for my fridge.

15 minutes' worth.

That night, I met my teaching assistant friends downtown for dinner and drinks. That was fun. They were properly impressed and sympathetic with my cookie-making efforts. We went to a different brewery for drinks than our usual, just to try something different. We sat outside, which was quite pleasant, but the Kölsch didn't seem to be quite as good. It was nice to have some time to catch up with everybody, since it had been a while. We talked about how little time we have left (7 weeks, actually!) and all the things we still have to do before then. My calendar is full, but I'll tell you more later!

Underwhelmed by Crumpets, Impressed by the Rest

For Easter Break, I went with Isabel to see the UK. We started planning way back in February, so we were really excited to finally head off. Isabel came up the day before and our flight wasn't until late in the evening, so we had a bit of time to be able to hang out and to pack strategically (we decided not to check our bags, and the carry-on restrictions were redonkulous).

I'll keep the play-by-play to a minimum, so instead of a long narrative, I'll just write a little bit about each stop on the grand tour.

On the road

Even though today is only the second full day here in the UK it somehow feels as though i have been here for longer. I think it's because we have spent so much time in transit. We spent four hours today on the train from London to Edinburgh and while that wasn't much work for us, I still feel a bit tired. I think staying in high-occupancy hostel rooms also makes a difference. It will be nice to have two nights here in Edinburgh, to be able to settle down and leave some stuff in a locker while we explore.

While we were out wandering the streets today, we happened upon a tartan weaving place, which was pretty touristy, with lots of kitschy doodads, but in the basement they had a few real automatic looms set up actually making cloth. It was pretty cool. I found the Ferguson/Fergusson tartan and coat of arms, which was kind of neat. The clan motto is "sweeter through difficulty" or something similar, depending on the translation.

A few things I've noticed about Scotland:
The Scottish accent is much nicer. Somehow it seems friendlier, maybe more musical?
There is something about Edinburgh that just feels like Scotland. I can't really describe it. Maybe it's the field under Edinburgh Castle covered in daffodils. Maybe it's all the tartan in every storefront window. Whatever it is, Edinburgh is a wonderful city with a great Scottish flavor and lot to offer, without feeling overwhelmingly touristy.
Single-malt whiskey is serious business here. Today I saw a bottle worth £10,000. Tonight I am enjoying something much cheaper, but still quite delicious: Dalwhinnie. The description:

"from the Highland region. 15-year old gentle, delicate malt from the wild and windswept Highlands. Subtle, smooth, delicately smoky malt with a heathery honey finish."

It does not disappoint.

We are planning on hiking up to Arthur's Seat in the morning, which promises to be a few hours of good hiking and magnificent views over the city and castle, providing the weather cooperates.

Room with a view

I started fooling around with time lapse photography and I took this out of my bathroom window. My computer and camera are just starting to be friends so there are a few jumps which will hopefully be ironed out next time I try this. Enjoy!

March

Almost caught up!

March has been reasonably uneventful. I had time to take in my first film here in Germany, which was great. It wasn't a hard movie to understand, since it was the Oscar-winning silent film The Artist, and the few words there were appeared on-screen as the caption thingys for the important dialog. I especially enjoyed the film because a friend of mine from high school worked as an office staffer for it. Besides that, it was a really good movie.

But the big thing for the month was the Fulbright conference in Berlin, which ended last Thursday. It was an incredible chance to meet Fulbrighters from all over Europe. I met an opera singer studying Bulgarian opera, a pianist studying in Paris, a musicologist studying 8th century Gregorian chant in Germany, and a few study grantees from around Germany. I met one guy in particular who grew up in Renton (about 45 minutes or so from Enumclaw), studied and will go back for a master's at Washington State University, and currently lives in Bonn (about 45 minutes from Cologne)! That was a funny coincidence.

It was also a really nice chance to catch up with ETAers I hadn't seen since orientation in September. In a way it was my first chance to really meet a lot of them, since I was kind of overwhelmed by everything that comes with moving to a new country the first time around.

There were lots of panels and speeches, we met several important people from Berlin, the German Fulbright Kommission, and I even got a chance to chat with the vice-chair of the Fulbright Scholarship Board in D.C. We heard about the history of the program in Germany, which as of this year has been here for 60 years, and about the vision J. William Fulbright had when he created it. There were musical performances interspersed, and a fantastic "music gala" of all the music Fulbrighters who were at the concert! If you want, ask me about the unbelievable tuba performance. I've never seen anything like it.

I think the thing I came away with the most was the reminder that this year I have here is such a great opportunity to learn and grow, and to have a hand in shaping people's perception of America and to get students to enjoy learning English. I also got a few ideas for the classroom or my English club I want to try, and was relieved to hear that some of the things that didn't go as I expected this year aren't isolated to just me.

I'll also say this: Fulbright really knows how to throw a great conference. We had a great hotel in a nice area of Berlin, right on Alexanderplatz and about a 5 to 10 minute train ride to all the major areas of the city. While we didn't have much time during the day to do any serious sightseeing, we did have a few hours here and there to run over the Ritter Sport store and museum or to just walk around.

Meters of chocolate!

I'm about 170 bars tall.

Karneval weekend - February 16-21

I'm not as good at keeping up with my blog as I thought I would be. Sorry.

Anywho, Karneval was over a month ago. But man, that was quite the weekend.

Karneval is actually referred to around here as a fifth season. You have Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Karneval. It gets kicked of on November 11th and then dials down through Advent season until mid to late January, when things start ramping up again. I started seeing business people in suits and stick-on tattoos of Cologne's coat of arms on their cheeks, strange wigs and costumes on the trains, and an auto dealer on my commute was turned into a party venue of sorts right around the turn of the month. The official Karneval weekend was February 16th-21st, as a kickoff for the beginning of Lent. It's much bigger than Halloween here. Everyone, and I really do mean everyone, gets into the spirit. Cologne is pretty much the epicenter of Karneval celebrations and is probably the most famous place in Germany that celebrates it.

Paris

February has been a good month for me. I've had some great weekends that included time with people from Whitworth also living in Europe, and some time spent with other English assistants outside of our normal "business" meetings or the people I normally see.