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.