Merry Christmas!
Ben on Christmas day, reading Sherlock Holmes with his new pipe. He is all dressed up for the evening 5 o'clock English Catholic service that we went to with a friend of ours. The German priest had just finished a Vietnamese service and jumped right into an English one. His sermon wavered between why do people need a God that needs them and God's love for people. I think I missed the conclusion. The best part was communion. The priest had only one acolyte to help him pass the wafers and so the two large chalices of wine lay untouched on the altar. Then he realized the wine was still there and gave some to the acolyte before chugging the rest of the two chalices himself. The rest of the service went off quite smoothly, especially for the priest! The Christmas service really was nice and thankfully not like the fire-hazard, painfully overcrowded midnight mass the night before.

Life in Göttingen

Coming out of the Bahnhof, this is what you will see: hundreds of bicycles. Göttingen is a biking town. Here are the Fahrrad Rules.

You should be able to eat while riding, obviously smoke while riding, walk your dog while riding, and sometimes ride while holding an umbrella over your head. Riding with no hands is for grade-schoolers, but you should occasionally do this also while riding as fast as possible just to show up those kids. When you have your own baby or toddler, you have the only three options:

1. Get them their own tiny wooden bicycle (no tricycles, please!)
2. Get a bicycle with a baby seat on the back.
3. Hook a baby buggy to the back of your bicycle and leave your child in it while you run into the Bäckerei.

You always have right-of-way and you may ride with traffic, on the sidewalk, or in the bicycle lane, whichever suites your fancy. If pedestrians happen to be in your path, or heaven forbid walking in the red-painted bicycle lane, simply ring your bell at them a few times to indicate they ought to get the hell out of your way. Neither skirts nor high heels should stop you from riding your Fahrrad, and rain, wind and snow just make your journey more interesting. It is fashionable here to roll up your right pant leg up to the knee (so it doesn't catch in your bicycle chain or get dirty). Keep it rolled up all day long to show everyone you are a cool cyclist. It is only acceptable to retire from cycling when you can no longer walk without a cane.

And just for your viewing pleasure, here is the amazing albino duck Ben spotted in the Leine river (or 3-inch deep creek) near the stift.

Heidelberg

After meeting Jim and Caren in Frankfurt, we all took a train down south to Heidelberg. We explored the ruins of the castle overlooking the city and I skipped around the gardens just happy to be with family again. It is a lot easier to love Germany when you are traveling with loved ones.

We had an adventure taking the Bergbahn (mountain railway) up the Berg for lunch, until our noses discovered that the restaurant was closed while they were fixing the sewer. Lovely view, not-so-nice oder!

Castles

Growing up in the U.S. has bred an enchantment with castles in me. Maybe the fairy tales influenced me, or maybe it is the fascination with the foreign.

But what girl doesn't want to be a princess for a day?

A Giant Wine Cask

We had to get a picture with the Grosses Fass (Big Barrel) at the Heidelberg Castle. This memorable cask is supposed to be the biggest wooden barrel ever filled with wine. It holds over 221,000 litres of wine! Then we tasted some wine (though not from the cask) and Jim bought a couple bottles as souvenirs.

Later in Heidelberg, Ben finally got his litre of beer after months of disappointed searching. Bavaria, in southern Germany, is really where most of the stereotypes come from: Lederhosen, the Loden Hut or Alpine hat, Sauerkraut, and of course, Oktoberfest-sized steins of beer! Bayern (Bavaria) was also incredibly tourist-friendly, as we spoke more English in 5 days there than we had in the previous 3 and a half months in Germany.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber

We visited one of the Romantic Road cities of Germany next. Even though the Christmas market hadn't opened yet, there were plenty of stores to cater to just about any Christmas item you could dream of, especially the Christmas pyramids. The hotel was darling and we spent some of our down time back in the rooms watching a crazy German game show. Ben and I shared a sticky Schneeball filled with pistachio filling while enjoying the architecture of the city, especially the view of this church.

A double portrait:

Ben and I

Arches call out to me just asking to be photographed. This arch is part of the medieval walls and towers surrounding the old city of Rothenburg and made a perfect frame in the late afternoon light. I caught Ben in a thoughtful pose- probably thinking about what he was going to drink with dinner. And I jumped up on the stairs and posed for Ben!

Nürnberg

We stayed in the Space Odyssey-themed Hotel Drei Raben! Ben stands at the front desk in the lobby of the unique hotel. My favorite part was the goose-lamp and fairytale painted on the wall of our room. The Raven shaped cookies on our pillows were a quirky treat, but the neon lights fading in and out at breakfast were a bit strange.

Even better than the Raven cookies was the traditional Nürnberg gingerbread Lebkuchen that we liked too much to bring any home!

The Albrecht Dürer-Haus had a cute audio tour narrated by his wife, telling us all about how Albrecht got into trouble for building a bathroom in his kitchen. We were also able to see how his wood-cut prints were created in his workshop.

Nearby on the hill, was the castle where Ben helped translate the German/English tour for us and we saw the most spectacular well. When the guide poured a pitcher of water down the well we had to listen for about 10 seconds before we heard any splash. There was even a tiny room built at the bottom of the well with an unknown purpose. Anyone standing in the room would have had their ankles in icy water and probably a death-wish.

Fun Fact:

The well was guarded carefully from gifts of dead animal carcasses that would have poisoned the entire castle.

The best of the Jim and Caren pics!

What better way to celebrate your anniversary than in Germany?!

Jim and Caren snuggling at the Heidelberg castle.

Jim with the statue of the physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, once a professor at the University of Göttingen.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840)

Caren getting lucky with the rod fountain in Nürnberg!

Dear Beth, Dana and John,

Thank you for taking such good care of my old fish. He looks very happy in his new home. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Wish we could have been there.

Sincerely,

Marie


ps: The plants look great too!

I have to work on Thanksgiving. Of course, it is not Thanksgiving here, just a regular old Thursday. But I will know that my family and friends will be spending the day with their loved ones and eating mashed potatoes, turkey and stuffing with gravy and everything else good. All while I will be teaching the future progressive tense in English.

Oh, and all of these geese will be roasted by Thursday.

For Sam and Louis: A picture of brotherly love.

Ben endorses a Danish beer.

Ben has helped me add a few new friends.

Ben is smiling.

Doesn't he look cute?

But why is my baby so happy?

?

?

?

of course

For his birthday, Ben got a harmonica. He has already learned how to play Wilco on it- especially Reservations. Sometimes I am afraid he will pull out a Borat song!

With my new job, we now have a little disposable income. So yesterday we disposed of it on a new guitar. Ben has been serenading me with Wilco and Elliot Smith ever since. I secretly taped some of his first practice session on camera...

Ben practicing with his new instruments:

My New Friends

Making friends in a different country is not easy. Double that when you don't speak the language well. So I have a new hobby of creating tiny turtles and animals out of modeling clay.

More pictures soon.

Here is Ben in front of his (rather ugly) school. Oh, I am so proud of him! His many excuses for buying hoards of books:
1. Recommended reading for class
2. To study the German language
3. Important German author
4. To compare the original with the English translation
5. It's better than buying a guitar

Weekend Retreat
After a week of training in Hamburg to be a teacher for the big-B school, I get home at 9pm Friday night completely exhausted. All I want to do is sleep for the entire weekend.
But I have forgotten about the stift's fall weekend retreat to Hildesheim... So we get up early Saturday morning. There is a neo-nazi rally and a protest against the rally in Göttingen, so the main streets are closed and there is only one entry to the train station open. We make our way through groups of stationed of police guards in order to get to the Bahnhof. (There are about 2,000 people and about 6,000 polizei in Göttingen for the rally/protest.) We are let into the Bahnhof and get on our train. (At every station on the way we see more groups of polizei waiting for a train to Göttingen.)
We get off the train and run to catch the next train. Get off that train wait for a bus. Ride the bus for 15 minutes and get off in the pouring rain. Walk for half an hour (unsure of exactly where we are going) through a dinky cobblestoned village, through the woods and fields and arrive at THIS:

A giant old windmill in the middle of no-where.

Thankfully there was a small dormitory behind the windmill that we actually stayed in. We planned activities for the semester and they played a German version of Mafia called Werewolf (Vair-Volf). The next day we took some pictures and found this lovely view of the church from across the pond. Ben earned himself the nickname "Jelly Belly" for the weekend.

Many buildings in Göttingen have plaques citing famous people who have lived or stayed there, including Benjamin Franklin.

NOTE TO JAY: Some obscurer German thinker that Ben got excited about...

Why Our Arms Were Sore...

On Sunday morning Ben and I brought a two-day-old bread roll to the creek to feed the ducks. They began quacking and calling all of their friends over to fight over the bread pieces.

But one boy duck sat against the far wall and refused to battle amongst the rest of the flock. So Ben and I had a contest to try and throw him a piece of bread. Piece after piece fell short and into the beak of some other greedy duck until all of the bread was gone.

The next day, Ben and I were both massaging our throwing arms.

Prag Pics
Prag ist sehr shön. The view of the castle and cathedral up on the hill is like a fairy-tale. Ben even found the room in the castle where the dwarf princess must have been held captive. (not really)

St. Vit's Cathedral was amazing. How can you beat flying buttresses holding up sky-high ribbed vaults and delicate, yet vibrant, stained glass?

Gothic rules!

To get to the castle and cathedral, Ben lead us from the Old town along the 'Royal Road.' We followed the old winding streets to the Charles Bridge, which was founded over 600 years ago. We trekked up the hill and finally climbed the stairs to the castle!

"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered,

I have fought my way here to the castle..."

Here's the group in Prag, Prague or Praha, as you like it: Me and Ben, Marlis and Ken. Traveling with the couple from Colorado was a hoot. At the Charles Bridge, we even met some members of Ken's church (he is a retired minister) who just happened to be on an Ole alum trip.
UM YA YA!

They have lived in MN. They are high-school sweet hearts. They like to read Harry Potter and Bonhoeffer. Take a close look, because this is a time warp to Ben and Marie in forty years.