Three Weekends of Travel: Part III - There Were Three Jolly Fishermen

So begins the camp song that I especially liked for the chorus about Amsterdam. Being able to say "Amster- Amster- Dam Dam Dam" was my favorite part of the song, as I think it was/is for most groups between the age of 12 and 15. Now, at 23, I finally got to visit the place where these three jolly fishermen should have gone to instead of Jericho.

My friend and fellow English assistant Christine convinced me to go with her, since we'd both never gone before. I figured it would be a good chance to go somewhere outside of Germany and she knew somebody local, so it worked out well. People always talk about it like it's one of those "must-see" places, so it must be worth it, right? Right.

Apparently I'm the worst at preparing for weather this spring. I even do more checking the forecasts than I have ever done before and still get it terribly wrong. I swear the forecast was for sun and maybe a bit of light rain, so I was trying to pack as light as possible for a three-day trip. Since I thought it was going to be nice, I only brought a pair of shorts, a light sweatshirt, and enough t-shirts to get home. I even packed the sunscreen to prevent a repeat of my first disaster.

The weather was nice on Saturday when we arrived, but Sunday morning was cold and rainy. Not like a little rainy, but a legitimate full-on rainy day. Lucky me and my non-waterproof hoodie, shorts, and shoes with more holes than a salad strainer. Since the walking tour we had planned on taking on Saturday (good weather) was full, we had to postpone until Sunday (not-so-good weather). So. A three hour outdoor walking tour, for which I was already wet just by walking to the meeting point from our hostel. We broke down and bought cheap umbrellas from a souvenir shop on the corner, which was genius. I only hated myself a little bit for being from Seattle and having to buy an umbrella to make it through the day. But my feet were soaked and cold and I had a camera to keep dry.

The tour was really great though! We walked all over Amsterdam and learned lots of interesting tidbits about the city and some of the famous people who lived there. Other places we visited during the weekend included the Anne Frank House and the Historical Museum of Amsterdam.

Didn't realize I was about to jump into a puddle.

Breakfast. With ice cream.

It's made out of sand! I thought it was breathing at first.

There was a beach soccer tournament in the big square.
We got to see a few minutes of Germany vs. Holland.

A barge whose only purpose in life is to store bikes.
So awesome.

 Christine's friend took us to a really cool restaurant called Moeders, which translates to  "Mothers'," if I remember correctly. The walls are covered with pictures of people's moms, which you can bring with you and leave after you eat, and they'll put them on the wall or on the windowsills, wherever there is space. By that I mean you can leave pictures, not your mom.

Each dish and piece of cutlery is different from the rest, so everyone at your table gets a little different look for their meal. The story is that when the restaurant opened, they asked everybody to bring their own dishes. If they left them for the restaurant, they got a free meal. It's a pretty neat idea, and the place is really popular. The food is great!

More pictures of mothers at Moeders.

Statue of Anne Frank around the corner
from where she lived with her family in hiding.

Now I've only got two more weekends left and I'm on my way home! I can't believe it. But that's going to be another post. I have one more trip planned in a week and a half. Stay tuned...

Three Weekends of Travel: Part II

Rostock. 7 hours northeast of Cologne by train, just inland from the East Sea. It's an old Hanseatic City that still has chunks of the old city wall standing, and you can even walk along a part of it. There's all kinds of old historic buildings, and one of the coolest looking churches I think I've seen here. You can tell it was built by sea traders somehow, because it's huge and looks like it could be used for a trading center or something.

My train ride took me back through Bremen and into Hamburg, where I had to transfer to a regional train for the last leg up to Rostock. Apparently it's a very popular tourist destination on weekends and holidays because all the seats were full and most of the entryways were packed too. I ended up standing for 2 1/2 hours with a loud and energetic soccer team.

Three Weekends of Travel: Part I

When May rolled around, I suddenly realized that I had several places still on my checklist that I needed to get to, so I scraped together the rest of my paycheck for the month and bought my tickets. Three weekends in a row, covering quite a bit of the northern area of Germany and a bit west to Amsterdam.

My first trip was a twofer - two days in Hannover to catch Enercity Swinging Hannover, a jazz festival, and two days in Bremen.

The jazz festival was held in the plaza of the city hall. The stage was small, just enough to hold a big band and about chest-height to the audience. I arrived before it started, although I was a few minutes late according to the agenda posted on their website. I was only beat out for a front-row standing spot by a large group of retirees with lawn chairs who set up right at the fencing in front of the stage.
The lineup of performers was quite varied, from a ridiculously talented accordionist from New Orleans to the New York Voices, or from a British funk/R&B/acid jazz group to an actual Big Band from Hannover.

The weather reports I read had called for rain, so I packed an umbrella expecting to get a little wet. Instead, the sun was out all day. Instead of getting wet, I got burnt. But I wasn't willing to give up my prime spot near the front, and as the afternoon wore on the oldies picked up their chairs and left, so I got even closer, although people kept managing to worm their way in front of me.

I spent the evening looking for a store open on a bank holiday that sold aloe and sunscreen. But by then I was tired of standing so I didn't really feel like I was missing out on much. Plus, as a bonus, my hostel (hidden on the top two floors of a swanky-looking hotel) gave me a private double room instead of the 8-person dorm I booked. Instead of having to share a room with drunk people crashing around like blind elephants, I got a room that came with a bath towel, hand towel, and washcloth; my own personal refrigerator, and a cookie on my pillow!

Coolest band ever: Incognito, a British jazz/soul/funk group.
The horn section had choreography!

This guy is being that guy.

The open container laws in Germany make it so that people can drink on the go. Sometimes it's just interesting, like when people convert garden wagons into rolling keg carriers complete with a countertop tap. Sometimes it's entertaining, like the man in the picture above. Sometimes it's uncomfortable, like the time a guy and his girlfriend made out so intensely on the train that they fell on the floor and couldn't get up. And sometimes it's just messy. People bring cases of stuff to events like this jazz festival and leave the empties on the ground when they're finished. It's an interesting transformation, like the opposite of a wave on the beach. A wave of people wash up onto a clean concrete plaza, and when the wave retreats, what's left is broken glass, trampled plastic cups, soggy cardboard boxes, etc.

Thankfully, the city workers are very good at cleaning up quickly. And then you can walk around the city some more and you see other things that are cool.

At the Herrenhaeuser Garten, a really cool garden place.

After Hannover came Bremen, another hour north. The feel of the city is much different. It feels a lot older, more like a "real German city," if that's actually different than just a "normal German city." The market square is like a thousand years old  several hundred years old, and there are lots of things they preserved around the city that make it really interesting.

I didn't get so lucky this time with the hostel. It was actually kind of like the hostel gods were trying to even out my hosteling experience. First of all, the first sign you see for the hostel is on the opposite side of the building from where the real entrance is, so they put up a sign saying to go around the corner. Then of course, the first door you come to is actually the entrance to a private apartment building, but the people who live there were nice enough to put up a handmade sign saying "NOT THE HOSTEL." So you continue down this little side street until you chance to look up at the building and see the much smaller hostel sign above the main entrance, which looks like the back door to a house. Once inside, the receptionist is friendly and helpful, but there's no lock on the door to my 6-bed dorm, and while they say there are lockers, there are only two in the hallway for the entire floor. They're already used.

There was a large contingent of Americans in the hostel; a group of university students from somewhere in Louisiana are here for a three-week "intercultural module," in which their professor takes them to a museum or other activity during the day, and they drink all evening. As I made dinner one night I got a chance to talk with a couple of them as they pregamed the UEFA Champions League soccer match between FC Bayern München and Chelsea. They're actually pretty interesting people, and getting to talk with them made their debates about which order to drink their bottles of alcohol all the more entertaining. While I was eating, two guys finished a bottle of strawberry wine ("aww man, we were supposed to use that as dessert after the vodka!") and most of a fifth of cheap vodka ("I just love 5 Euro Russian vodka!"), which was mixed with orange juice at a roughly 1.5:1 ratio.

Luckily, I wasn't rooming with any of them. After watching an exciting, but finally disappointing soccer match (Chelsea won), I headed upstairs to sleep on my rock-hard mattress.

I was woken up around 4am by what felt like a minor earthquake. Once I was coherent, I realized that one of my roommates had arrived and was snoring. When I say snoring, I really mean something more like his lungs were trying, with some success, to consume his tongue. Every minute or so, just when you're convinced he's stopped breathing, his throat opens just enough to get a gasp of air in, and then it's like the room is a giant balloon and his lungs are the space all the air is trying to escape to. The process literally shakes the whole room. On the second night, the girl against the wall opposite me actually got up to go poke him to try to get him to shift. It didn't make any difference. I slept with half a kleenex in each ear, and my head under my pillow and a sweatshirt, which also didn't do much, seeing as half the problem was the room shaking.

The city itself is awesome though!

Statue of the Bremer Stadtmusikanten,
or the Bremen town musicians,
immortalized by the Brothers Grimm.

Part of the "Schnoorviertel," an old
fisherman's quarter where the street is
about 3 feet across.

Stone-cold gangster

Lucky I decided to leave relatively early in the afternoon. Good ol' reliable Deutsche Bahn ("always on time") pushed my train back by 40, then 45, then 90, and then 160 minutes due to technical problems. The same train service runs once an hour. But because of the backup, the next two trains were so full they were only letting people with seat reservations on. They finally re-designated another train to take the rest of us, so I got on the train about the time I was originally supposed to arrive back in Cologne.

Good times.

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!