The Trans-European Bethel-Wuppertal Thanksgiving Extravaganza

This week I had several friends visiting me for Thanksgiving. The first to arrive was on . . .

TUESDAY:
My friend Brad who is now studying abroad in Derry, Northern Ireland arrived at the Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof. We were able to catch up that night, and I was able to give Brad a little German culture.

WEDNESDAY:
I went to Dusseldorf with Brad. We saw what would have been a sunset on the Rhine, but it was too cloudy. That was really probably about 4:30 or so. (The sun sets earlier here than in Kansas.) We took a little walk along the Rhine, and went into the Altstadt in Dusseldorf. "Alt" means old and "stadt" means city. The Altstadt is a pedestrian zone in the middle of Dusseldof along the Rhine, with lots of narrow stone paved streets that don't intersect at right angles. Right now the streets are packed with booths for the Christmas Market there. During the evening we visited various shops, breweries. We ate at an Asian restaurant, I think it was Thai and Chinese. Brad found an inedible vegetable in his food, but other than that we were satisfied with our food.

THURSDAY (Thanksgiving):
Because I was supposed to have class, I woke up at a little after 7am and left Brad to sleep. When I got to the classroom, a different woman than our normal teacher came in. She told us our teacher was sick, and couldn't come today. She gave us an assignment, and sent us on our way. I went back to my room and slept some more, then at about 10:30 we both got up. Charles, the friend who also visited me near the end of October, showed up that afternoon. At about 6pm we went to Tobias' apartment for a Thanksgiving meal. (Tobias is a native Wuppertaler who did a year at Bethel. He is also the one who picked me up from the train station when I arrived in Wuppertal.) There we met with many other Wuppertalers who were exchange students at Bethel, and several recently graduated or current Bethel students who are now in Germany: Kate (who visited me in Berlin) Bryce (whom I visited for the election), Jon, and Rosie. The meal, which was finally ready at about 9:30pm, consisted of many of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes. Tobias had to special order two whole Turkeys. Kate pulled out the innards herself. Kate also artfully decorated pies. Needless to say, we ate a lot.

Toby, Kate, Turkey

FRIDAY:
Brad and Charles stayed in my room the previous night, and the others stayed at Toby's. I decided not to go to class on Friday. (It would be a free day at Bethel, right?) Instead we slept off the turkey, and at about noon, we went back to Toby's for more. After eating too much again, we decided we would go to Dusseldorf to visit the Christmas market. Rosie and I were invited to some American-German Thanksgiving dinner by some former Bethel-Wuppertal people. We were supposed to meet a couple at the Golden Tulip hotel in Wuppertal at 6:30pm, so Rosie and I would have to leave Dusseldorf early. There was a train from Dusseldorf to Wuppertal that arrived at 6:30. Rosie said the hotel was close by the train station, so I figured we could take that train.

On our way back, the train was late by 5 minutes. and it turned out that Rosie didn't really know exactly where the hotel was. We spent about 15 minutes walking and trying to find it. We finally found it, but there was no sign of the couple we were supposed to meet there. I asked the people at the front desk if they know anything about the meal that was supposed to happen, thinking that we could possibly meet them there. The people at the front desk said that they knew someone was expecting us, but they weren't in the lobby. They called the room of the people we were supposed to meet, but nobody was there. I was fairly frustrated at this point. We weren't able to find them, and I had no cell phone information from the couple. All we could assume is that they had already left to this Thanksgiving celebration. I eventually just left the couple a note with the front desk with my cell phone number, and left. I felt bad. I felt like we had stood these people up who were nice enough to invite us to this meal.

When I got back to my room, I sent the couple a very apologetic e-mail. I also found a phone number that they had sent me in a previous e-mail, and called it. There was no answer, so I am not sure if it was their cell phone. I left another apologetic message there.

Later on that evening the rest of the people came back from Dusseldorf and we went to a bar where Luna, one of the Wuppertal exchange students at Bethel from last year, was working. While we were there, I received a text message from the couple, saying they were sorry they missed us.

Brad had a plan to leave Wuppertal at midnight to get to Frankfurt in time to catch his 7am flight, so it was just Charles and I that slept in my room on Friday night.

SATURDAY:
The remaining visitors met for Breakfast at a place called Pino's. Then we bid Kate farewell at the train station. At this point it was just Bryce, Jon, Toby, Charles, and I. At a loss for something to do, we rode the Schwebebahn (the public suspension rail in Wuppertal) from one side to the other. The rest of the day was pretty laid back with few plans. In the evening I went to Solingen to a going-away party for one of my friends here in Wuppertal. My thought was that I would meet back up with the remaining Bethel people after that party. I got back at about 11:30. The others were still at Toby's. I got on a bus that I thought would take me to where Toby lived, but I was going the wrong direction. I got off after two stops and walked back to the train station. I called Toby, and he said that the people there were ready to go to bed. I spoke a bit with Charles, and he said he would meet me at the train station. Unfortunately, Charles missed the last bus back to the train station, and had to instead wait 45 minutes for the S-Bahn at a small train station near Toby's part of Wuppertal. I wasn't able to know this because Charles has no cell phone, so I waited about an hour for Charles in the train station.

SUNDAY (today):
All the remaining Bethelites left Wuppertal, bringing an end to the Bethel-Wuppertal Thanksgiving Reunion saga.

I also made a soup that didn't taste exactly the same as all the other soups I had made, and it also didn't taste bad! That was mildly exciting. I think the key may have been that I fried the onions and garlic in butter and a little bit of sugar before I added the liquid and the rest of the soup ingredients.


I hope all your Thanksgivings were wonderful as well!
--Austin

The Halfway Week

So, here we are again. Another week gone, and less than a month to go before I see my parents again. I would probably just need to consult my local Newton Kansan to see how many shopping days are left before Christmas. It's gone pretty quickly. If my calculations are correct November 18th was the halfway point of my time here in Germany.

I can tell you Without calculation that the 17th of November was my (21st) birthday. That was on Monday, probably my busiest day of the week. 8:15am-1:30pm I have my tedious German course. Then at 3pm I have a piano lesson, and at 6pm until about 7:30 I have orchestra rehearsal. The highlight of the German course was having happy birthday sung to me in Chinese, Polish, and Turkish, among other languages. On Mondays the International Students Team has established a tradition of meeting at the University bar at 8pm, so that's where I celebrated my birthday. It closes at 11pm, so after that people came to my dorm to celebrate a little more.

On Wednesday, since I didn't have any classes, it was my goal to find and buy a winter coat. I should never shop alone for clothes. It took me forever to, number one, find a place to buy the coat, and, number two, decide on what coat I wanted to buy. I spent essentially the whole afternoon shopping. When I finally found a store that had a lot of wool overcoats, (which was what I was looking for), I spent probably another hour looking at prices and trying on different coats. They were all pretty expensive, so that made it a bit easier to narrow down the field. But still I had a difficult time deciding between the 3 or 4 coats that were in my price range. What made it worse is that there were sales associates there who were asking me if I needed help. I hate that. If I need help I will ask, but I just wanted to search for coats in peace. After they asked me if I need help, I felt like the they were watching me struggle to decided on a coat. They probably watched me try on a coat three times, and wondered why I had spent 40 minutes in the coat department. Eventually I settled on buying the least expensive one, even though there was another one I liked a bit more. It's just a coat.

And I bought it just in time. On Friday we had very strange weather. It was very windy and rainy the whole day. Then, as I was playing my trumpet in a practice on the top floor of building S, I could see the rain turning to snow outside. The first wave of snow melted immediately on the ground, but wave of snow later that afternoon began to stick to the ground. We have been having at least a little bit of snow every day since then. I much prefer the snow to the rain that it would be if it were warmer.

On Saturday I went to Cologne with some other Americans whom I met here in Wuppertal. First we went up to the top of the Cologne Cathedral, and went walking a little bit downtown. Here are some pictures:

Cologne Cathedral

Inside

A view from the top


A view of the yet-to-open Christmas market

Going back down, featuring: my foot

Not in Cologne, and not on Saturday. This is the view from my room of the snow on Friday. This snow storm happened to include lightning and thunder too.

Well happy Thanksgiving, and eat some ham and turkey for me,
--Austin

Culinary Adventures II: The Main Course

On Wednesdays I have a lecture until 10am. After that I am free. This is one of the reasons I decided to differ from cooking my usual variations on onions-and-garlic-fried-in-pan-plus-potatoes-or-rice-(side-of-apple-and-carrot-sticks). I had time to try to cook something. I spent maybe 20 minutes looking through the Extending the Table cookbook that I had brought from home. I had a few criteria: I wanted something I could serve with rice, I wanted something that didn't have too many fancy ingredients that I wouldn't be able to find in the little grocery store near the dorms, and I wanted to use up the ground beef that I had in my fridge. (Incidentally, an ingredient doesn't have to be very fancy to not be offered in the "Penny Market." For example, almost all spices aren't to be found there.) After thoroughly searching through the cookbook I landed on the elegantly titled: "Skewered Ground Meat," a recipe from Iraq.

This recipe called for:
Ground Beef or Lamb: check.
Onion, finely minced: check.
One Egg: onto grocery list.
Bread crumbs: can do.
Parsley Leaves, finely minced: I didn't think "Penny" had this, so I left it out.
Salt and Pepper to taste: check.
Cinnamon (optional): left out.

This recipe also was to be served with "Brown Rice." This was rice that was supposed to be browned in butter and onions, and then boiled. I added butter to my grocery list, and went to "Penny."

At about 5:30 I began preparing the food. One of my problems, is that I am very poor with timing in the kitchen. First, I started with the brown rice. I melted some butter in a pot, and put the rice and some minced onion in. I had never browned rice before, but nothing really seemed to be happening, so I got started with the meat. I got the ground beef out of the fridge, and when I opened the container an unpleasant smell that I wasn't came out. I just figured it was a raw meat smell, and after I cooked it, it would be OK. So I put the meat in to a bowl (a soup bowl, not a mixing bowl). I then added the onion and egg. It took up almost all the room in the bowl, and was fairly difficult to mix. Then I began to smell a more pleasant odor from the rice. I checked it again, and the rice was actually browning, in fact it was blackening. I quickly tried to rinse the egg/meat mixture off my hands, so I could deal with the now burning rice. I added the water to the rice, and let it boil. It wasn't all black, so I figured I had salvaged it. I went back to mixing the meat. The meat was still very runny with egg. I had forgotten to add the bread crumbs. I again rinsed off my eggy meat hands, got a piece of bread, and crumbled it into the meat. As I mixed the bread crumbs into the meat the consistency got firmer. I made the mixture into about four patties, and put them on a pan, and onto the highest rung on our toaster oven. I turned the oven to one of its two settings: "on." About a minute later, I realized I hadn't salted the patties. I decided my best option was to attempt to throw salt into the oven in hopes that some would land on the patties. I am not really sure how successful this was, but I believe a high estimate is that 10% of the salt actually landed on the patties. It didn't really matter, I was still excited to see how they would turn out.

After about 15 minutes of cooking the patties, they looked done. There's not a light or anything in the oven so it is a little hard to tell. When I took them out, they were very black on the top. That was still OK by me, a little carbon never hurt anybody. The rice at this point had dehydrated a bit, because, through my neglect, I allowed all the water to boil away. Again, the rice wasn't beyond my (fairly low) standards of edibility, so I scraped it out onto a plate, and adorned it with the four blackened patties. Here was the end result:


Despite the beautiful display, the taste left much to desired. The reason I eventually decided to throw it all away was the flavor/taste of the meat. It turned out that the smell from the meat didn't cook out as I had hoped. It was still a fairly prominent flavor in an otherwise flavor lacking meal. I figured that stinky meat might lead to an upset stomach, so I only ate about half a patty before I dumped it all into the trash. Oh well. Error is half of my method of trial and error cooking.

Luckily, that wasn't the only thing of interest that happened this week. On Friday, I went to a 90s party. I hope that doesn't make any of my medium-aged readers feel too old. Unfortunately, I hadn't packed any of the clothes I wore in the 90s, so I borrowed a cap, and wore it backwards. It was fun, but I have to say that I wasn't highly aware of fashion in the 90s. Mostly I wore what my mother bought for me. In my first years in elementary school, I didn't like the way jeans felt in the crotch, so I wore sweats that my mom bought at Alco. Unfortunately, they tended to get holes in the crotch fairly quickly and fairly suddenly which was cause for at least one embarrassing P.E. session. Later on, I can remember wanting the snap up "swishy pants," and wanting some "Lee Pipes" jeans, when I got over the jeans-crotch problem. But that was about the extent of what I could remember about my nineties fashion choices.

Yesterday my friends Pedro, Manuel, and I went to Dusseldorf and had a very German evening. We visited three different breweries to try their "Alt Bier," which is the style of beer brewed only in Dusseldorf. We ate at a German food at a kind of German-style greasy spoon. It was a good evening.

Til next week.
--Austin

US continues on; Austin still in Germany.

The biggest happening this week was for sure not in Germany, but it was closely observed around the world.

I happened to be observing it from Giessen, where Bryce Schmidt, a friend of mine from Bethel, is doing Intermenno work. I set off for Giessen after my German course on Tuesday. First I had to catch a train to Hagen. The ticket from Hagen to Giessen was cheaper, and I can go to Hagen for free on my student pass. (The ticket was not so cheap however. At 55 euro, it still hit the pocket book pretty hard.) To Hagen was maybe a 30 minute train ride. On arriving in Hagen, I switched trains to Siegen. The train I boarded must have been a fairly new train. Along with a toilet every couple of compartments, it had a nice LED display in the front of each compartment showing in rotation the date and time, final destination, and next stop. To get myself into an American mood, I listened to Sujan Stevens's Illinois and Michigan albums on the way. My next train change was in Siegen. From there, I took a train to Giessen.

Bryce had offered to "pick us up" at the train station in Giessen. That would have consisted of him walking to the train station, finding you, and walking back with you to his apartment. I figured I would save him a trip, and just follow the directions he gave us, The directions weren't that difficult to follow; Giessen is more like Kansas--flat with streets intersecting primaraly at right angles. I had carefully noted the directions and final address from the google map link Bryce had sent us. I left the Giessen trainstation, and confidently followed the directions to where Bryce's apartment was supposed to be. Bryce said it should be easy to find, because it is the only apartment building in Giessen that says "Jesus Lebt" on it. When I got to the address that I had so carefully noted, there was no "Jesus Lebt" on the building. I figured that it must not be as apparent as Bryce has said. After a bit of searching around the building, I couldn't find any way to ring the apartments in the building. I went around back, where there was some kind of entrance that looked private. I couldn't see another place to enter the apartment, so I tried the handle. It was locked. I was beginning to think this wasn't the right building. It was, however, the correct address. I decided I would keep walking and looking for the allusive, but evidently apparent, "Jesus Lebt." I walked until the next major intersection with no success in finding Jesus. I thought I would walk back the other direction on the other side of the street. Maybe "Jesus Lebt" was a little too high for me to see on the same side of the street.

That ended up being the case. I found the "Jesus Lebt" building at an address a bit before the address that I had written down. The door was freshly refinished, and therefore propped open. I let myself in, but I wasn't exactly sure where I could find Bryce. Names weren't on the doorbells, so I asked a couple of young German women who were leaving the apartment if they knew an American named Bryce Schmidt who lived in the building. They asked if it was the one who was always speaking English, and I told them it probably was. They pointed me to the first floor. I rang the doorbell, and Bryce answered. (I eventually asked Bryce why the address was wrong on his directions. He told me that he was trying to line up the little green arrow on the google map with where his apartment actually was.)

I was the first to arrive, and Bryce was working on some chili for us to eat. I had been on a train through my normal meal time, so I was glad he had something for us to eat. The other attendees included Charles Schrag, who had visited me in Wuppertal just a week before, Jon Huber, another friend from Bethel doing Intermenno, and Alyssa, who was a friend of the Intermenno folk.

Charles was the last to get there at about 9pm. We all ate Bryce's delicious chili together. Afterward Charles informed us that there was a bar nearby that was showing the election. We thought it would be interesting to see the Germans reaction to the election. After watching some election coverage at Bryce's we set off to find the bar. We ended up getting sidetracked by another party that was at a university building nearby. There were a lot of people standing outside the building, and inside they were displaying election coverage in what looked a bit like a lecture hall. There were a lot of people there, and they cheered every time a state was called for Obama. We stayed for a while, but eventually went back to Bryce's apartment. By this time it was 2 or 3 am, and results were coming in fairly steady. We ate and drank our way through another couple of hours of election coverage, periodically checking on our local races online in commercial breaks. Then at 11pm est or 5am in Germany, the race was called for Obama. The five of us were very happy, and very tired. Next McCain came on and gave an gracious and thoughtful concession speech. We stayed up until Obama came on to address the thousands gathered in Hyde Park. At about 6:30 am, after Obama's speech it was time for bed.

I woke up a lot of times realizing my mouth hanging open on the train ride back to Wuppertal the next afternoon. With greasy unkempt hair, I am sure I was a sight to see, but I was too tired to care. I didn't even bother putting on the change of clothes I had brought with me. One of my trains back was late 20 minutes, because we passed another train that was carrying new cars that had evidently had a serious derailment. But eventually I got back, took a shower, changed my clothes, practiced trumpet, did my homework for Thursday, and went to bed.

Here are a couple of pictures of the night:

LEDs

Chili

Charles and Jon

--Austin

This week has been fairly uneventful. After two months in Germany, one of those in Wuppertal, and 2 weeks of which were regular classes, life has become a little more routine. In some ways it is good. My language skills are good enough to communicate with most people in every-day situations, and I feel comfortable enough with life here, that every day isn't always a new adventure.

A couple interesting things did happen this week.

Last Sunday I got a message online from Charles Schrag, a friend of mine from Bethel. He said he had a couple of days off, and was going to come to Wuppertal. I told him if he needed it, I had a floor he could sleep on. He showed up on Wednesday evening. It was kind of a surprise to me. I thought he was going to meet up first with Tobias Ruhle, a former Bethel-Wuppertal exchange participant, and possibly spend the night with him. But it all worked out fine, I was just glad I was at home at that time to meet him. That night we went to a little bar near the university, and caught up. Charle's German is really pretty good. He has been here for only 3 months, but he can understand a lot, and speak pretty well too. Charles has been here in Germany with Intermenno, a work exchange program, and lives about 3 hours away by train. He was here until yesterday. Mostly we hung out with other internationals in the evenings. I didn't really give him a grand tour or anything. I think he was glad to be able to spend some time with people more his own age.

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from Bettina Hofmann, the coordinator of the Bethel-Wuppertal exchange, and American Studies professor at Wuppertal. She asked me if Rosie and I could say a bit about Bethel for her class. I said I could. That happened on Friday. I left my language course a bit early to go to her lecture at 12:00. Others were there to introduce schools that they had studied abroad at too. I got up and gave a pretty good introduction. (Since it was an Amerikanistik class the presentation was in English, so I kind of had the upper hand.) After the class, I went to go eat in the cafeteria. Since it was already 2pm by then, nobody I knew was there. I sat by myself, and half-way through my meal two students came up to me and told me that my introduction made them want to go to Bethel, and they asked me a little bit more about Bethel. So I hope I was a good representative. Giving tours this summer at the BC admissions office definitely helped. I was glad that some people were interested, even though we are a college of only 500 people in the middle of Kansas. Not what Germans picture when they think of America.

That is my little update for this week.

--Austin

me 'n charles
photo by: me