Stuff(ed)

Happy Belated Turkey Day to everyone! I hope you all had fun celebrating and eating yourselves to the point of incapacitation. Congrats Faye and Amber on finding a great place! We can all be thankful that y´all didn´t have to spend your Thanksgiving hiding from that reincarnated witch, Heidrun!

I spent my Thanksgiving day working, naturally, because here it is not a national holiday. I did, however, get to explain the story of Thanksgiving to some Germans, though, so that was kind of fun. In case you´re wondering, most Germans do recognize the holiday, even though they don´t celebrate it (yet, but give commercialization some time..j/k) and might not know the story behind it.

I did have a pretty fun evening. I met some new friends on Wednesday night who invited me over for dinner on Thursday-so though I didn´t have a traditional Thanksgiving, I did have a nice evening getting to know new friends and eating spaghetti. There were five of us altogether-the four roommates, Julia, Romi, Basti, and Daniel, and then me. All of them are students, two go to FSU here in Jena and two go to a different school nearby, but all of them study something called BWL, which is basically business economics.

By the way, when Daniel and I were watching the sauce while the two girls went to pick up their other roommate, he kept tasting it and saying something was missing. I suggested red wine, and he was like, "Really? I´ve never done that before." "You just can´t have sauce without red wine. It´s the key," I explained. I added some red wine and voila, the sauce was a huge hit. I have to give my dad credit for that one-he can make one mean sauce.

Anyhoo, hopefully I´ll get to spend some more time with them in the very short period I have left here. I can´t believe I only have about a month left!

Pictures without a Home

I just posted a couple of pictures I had, but wasn´t sure what to do with to an album. There are only two now, but in the future if I have other pictures that I have no place else to stick I´ll put them in here and then post an update.

Ice skating fun and a little German culture

This weekend I tried to go the the Pink Floyd "Wish You Were Here" show at the planetarium, but it was sold out. All´s well, though, because I bought a ticket for this Friday, and there will be a little party with a band and stuff so in the end it worked out better.

On Sunday I went to Erfurt to go ice skating (this, by the way, I´ve discovered is a very hard word to say if you´re not a native German speaker. Everybody ready? Here we go-´Schlittschuhlaufen´, pronounced shlit-shoo-lau-fen, the ´au´ is pronounced like the ´ou´ in ´mouse´. Say that three times fast. Phew, that was a toughie.). Anyway, there is an indoor ice skating rink named after some famous skater(speed skater, I think, not figure) from Erfurt that I´ve never heard of, who also had a difficult name to pronounce and remember. It was a good time for sure. And it´s also nice that I´m starting to hang out with my fellow Aiesecers more, now that the Jazzmeile is winding down and there aren´t so many fabulous concerts to go to. Afterward, we went to a coffeeshop to warm up a little bit. I tried ginger coffee-mmmm. It was really good, strong coffee sweetened with honey and it had whip cream and ginger powder sprinkled on top. Tasty, to say the least.

Anyhoo, I kind of lied before when I said I haven´t been going to concerts lately, because it just so happens last night I went to one. hehe. It was at a church called Michaelskirche and we saw and heard Mozart´s Requiem. It was very beautiful, the music, the symphony and choir, the church-definitely and all around nice atmosphere.

Check out some pics from my wonderful Sunday!

Gobble Gobble

After a night of learning some latino dance steps and cooling down with a mango margarita at the "el sombrero", I checked my email and...

I received the story below in an email from one of the aiesec listservs. I have no idea about the story´s degree of truth or lack thereof, but I do know that the Turkish translations all check out if that´s worth anything. I am posting it here only because I thought it was pretty interesting. I hope you do, too.

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Talking Turkey: The Story of How the Unofficial Bird of the United States Got Named (by Giancarlo Casale)

How did the turkey get its name? This seemingly harmless question popped into my head one morning as I realized that the holidays were once again upon us. After all, I thought, there's nothing more American than a turkey. Their meat saved the pilgrims from starvation during their first winter in New England. Out of gratitude, if you can call it that, we eat them for Thanksgiving dinner, and again at Christmas, and gobble them up in sandwiches all year long. Every fourth grader can tell you that Benjamin Franklin was particularly fond of the wild turkey, and even campaigned to make it, and not the bald eagle, the national symbol. So how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle East? Was it just a coincidence? I wondered.

The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. "That's funny," he said, "In Portuguese the word for turkey is 'peru.' Same bird, different country." Hmm. With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. "Turkey?" he said. "Well, we call turkeys 'hindi,' which means, you know, from India." India? This was getting weird.

I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is "Ethiopian bird," while in Greek it is "gallapoula" or "French girl." The Persians, meanwhile, call them "buchalamun" which means, appropriately enough, "chameleon."

In Italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is "tacchino" which, my Italian relatives assured me, means nothing but the bird. "But," they added, "it reminds us of something else. In Italy we call corn, which as everybody knows comes from America, 'grano turco,' or 'Turkish grain.'" So here we were back to Turkey again! And as if things weren\'t already confusing enough, a further consultation with my Turkish informant revealed that the Turks call corn "misir" which is also their word for Egypt!

By this point, things were clearly getting out of hand. But I persevered nonetheless, and just as I was about to give up hope, a pattern finally seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. In French, it turns out, the word for turkey is "dinde," meaning "from India," just like in Turkish. The words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in India, so I called up my high school friend's wife, who is from an old Bengali family, and popped her the question.
"Oh," she said, "We don't have turkeys in India. They come from America. Everybody knows that."
"Yes," I insisted, "but what do you call them?"
"Well, we don't have them!" she said. She wasn't being very helpful. Still, I persisted:
"Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American movie translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What would they say?"
"Well...I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, 'turkey.' Like I said, we don't have them."

So there I was, at a dead end. I began to realize only too late that I had unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the capacity of my own limited resources. Obviously I needed serious professional assistance. So the next morning I scheduled an appointment with Prof. Sinasi Tekin of Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be Professor Tekin.

As I walked into his office on the following Tuesday, I knew I would not be disappointed. Prof. Tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my vexing Turkish mystery.

I introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a dose of Prof. Tekin's erudition. "You see," he said, "In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a çulluk. It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a 'Turkey bird' or simply a 'turkey.' Then, when the English came to America, they mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them 'turkey" also.

But other peoples weren't so easily fooled. They knew that these new birds came from America, and so they called them things like 'India birds,' 'Peruvian birds,' or 'Ethiopian birds.'

You see, 'India,' 'Peru' and 'Ethiopia' were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name 'America' to catch on. "Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier."

Prof. Tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. I did my best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk. Deep down, however, I was ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving dinner without reservation.

Now if I could just figure out why they call those little teeny dogs
Chihuahuas....

Map of Germany

Here is a map of Germany. I underlined Jena with a green line so you can easily identify it. I know I should have posted this a long time ago, but better late than never! Anyway, the internet is busting at the seams with information, y´all could´ve found your own darn map if you wanted one so badly!

One Intense Weekend

Hellloooo!

Before I start rambling on about my weekend, I want to first give some mad props to a couple people-mainly my family. First, my mom, who somehow manages to send me more cards, letters, and packages, than I thought the postman could carry. Not to mention photos of all you guys, too, which in addition to being a wonderful little present also make up most of what little decoration I have in my room. Thanks mom! Second my aunts-auntie rob and clare for sending me letters and auntie johnnie for sending me goofy little smily faces wearing lederhosen and scarfing down beer and bratwurst. Thirdly, my bros definitely earn an "A" in participation points. Thanks for posting comments regularly and making me feel like this thing is more like a dialog, which is what I was hoping would happen. You have to admit, I have been doing a pretty good job of "keeping in touch", eh? You´ve probably heard more about me than you did in all my years at IU combined!

Okay, now to get on with the story of my weekend. Nothing too wild n´ crazy, but it was pretty intense. This was the first weekend of the Planspiel. That name should sound familiar to you, because it is what I am trying to set up this whole web conference thing for. This was the first one to happen since I´ve been here, and they will continue to happen periodically throughout the semester. I don´t really want to get into all of the details, but I will say that it is a business game that is packed into 1 1/2 days split into 3 financial "periods" of trying (just to name a few) to communicate and negotiate in different languages, adjust product capacity, price, and quality, and come up with a marketing campaign for a joint-venture company. Whew.

At the end I got a little certificate saying I completed the course, though. Woohoo! This is normal here. The students receive a Schein, kind of like a mini-certificate, at the end of every class they take. So, I was a student for 2 days at FSU (Friedrich Schiller University).

Oh, and many of you I know are curious what my plans are for Thanksgiving. Well, first it is known here by most people, but as you´d probably guess not celebrated that much. My roommate´s birthday also happens to be at the end of November, right around Thanksgiving, and I think we want to plan a surprise party. Maybe we can cook a giant turkey, too. We´ll just have to see. Either way, keep me in your thoughts, because I know you won´t have any room in your hearts seeing as how your bellies will be vying for whatever extra space they can find.

Thuringer Wald

Hey everybody! I just wanted to share with you guys something I just found out. The first weekend in December, I am going to go on a little weekend retreat in the Thuringer Wald! I included the exact description I received about the weekend festivities so the English is not perfect, but you can get the idea. I´m really excited to see a real German Weihnachtsmarkt after having gone so many times to the Kristkindlmarkt in Chicago. I hear that to really see the best one you have to go to Nürmberg, but Dresden is also supposed to have a pretty cool one, too. Heck, I´ll be happy just with the one in Jena.

Here is the information I received about the weekend:
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And what will we do? Good question, because it depends a lot on the weather. Hopefully we got snow and go snowtubing or just walk through a winter-wonderland. Playing, talking, eating, drinking and just having fun. The cottage is situated in Neuhaus am Rennweg, my hometown and it is around 1 km away from other houses and perhaps 10m away from the forrest. Each Saturday, some cover-bands are playing famous rock songs in the Kulturhaus and maybe we can spent some hours there, too. The last day, Sunday, we got to leave the cottage at least around noon. We will visit the famous christmas ball market in Lauscha. I believe you haven’t heard much about Lauscha but it is wellknown for its glass-artcraft: beautiful christmasballs and figures. I arranged that we can visit the museum and other buildings for free. Also, there will be a beautiful glass-princess (I know her and perhaps we can make a picture with her) and the christmas market.
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And here are a couple of pictures I received-

of the cabins:



and the town of Lauscha:



(Hopefully it will look as snow-covered as this when we go)

Announcement: Anonymous Comments

I just changed the setting on my blog to allow anonymous comments. This means that you don´t need to register with blogger.com to post a comment on my blog. I did this to encourage anyone and everyone to let me know you didn´t forget about me and you check my blog every now and then, and to keep me posted with the haps wherever y´all are, too! Let the comments flow from those fingertips! Oh, and though you can post anonymous comments, it is nice to know who´s posting and easier to respond-so if you could post your name, initials, whatever, it´d be much appreciated.

Winter Has Come to Jena

Today is the first snow we´ve had-yaaaayyy! And it has been snowing aaalll day. It´s pretty, though.

Pro-Snow. It doesn´t necessarily have to be here in Jena, but I am appreciating it which is why I put it down. But, and this brings me to...

Con-Since it is only the first snow, and everyone says that when it snows here it normally doesn´t stay for very long anyway, it´s not sticking. Pretty in the air, but turns everything just plain wet when it finally settles.

Pro-I´ve come to the realization that Germans put seeds in everything. I happen to like it. You can also write this one down in your notebooks as another big difference. There are seeds in bread (sunflower, pumpkin, and lord knows what other kinds), yogurt (I think the stuff I saw was made out of corn or something), salad (I had one today that had garbanzo beans, I think, and these other beans that i think were the seed for those fat, crunchy-when-raw sprouts used in asian food-water sprouts or something like that, instead of the yucky, skinny bean sprouts), sauces, and well that´s all I can think of right now, but that´s still a lot.

Con-The Simpsons still isn´t funny. And I watched the past 2 "new episodes", which for me were not new because I had already seen them. I think that the new episodes here are a little behind because they have to translate them, so the new season here is a little behind the new season in the states. And it comes on Saturday evenings instead of Sundays!

Crazy Story Time with Tante LB

Back in my day we used to walk to school with no shoes on in the middle of winter. It was so cold we would take turns carrying each other on our backs so we wouldn´t get frostbite on our feet and have to have them amputated. We didn´t have modern medicine back then. The only doctor we knew was our grandmother who´d treat everything with a shot of whiskey and a good story...

Story #1: I went to listen in on James´ lecture the Thursday after the election results. Afterward, I stuck around for a few minutes to talk with James´ girlfriend who happened to also come and listen that day, and when I left the room I noticed that two of the students were standing at the end of the hall looking like they were waiting for something. As I walked down the hallway, I noticed that as I approached them they made eye contact. As I got closer they approached me and began to introduce themselves. I thought, "Oh geez, I´m going to have face a barrage of questions about American culture, beliefs, and politics." After the girls introduced themselves, one of them began her question-"Here it comes," I thought. "Where do you buy cheddar cheese?" she asks. Now, this caught me so off-guard that I could only respond with, "huh, uh, what?" It turns out she had spent some time in the states studying and fell in love with cheddar cheese, but here in Jena it´s relatively hard to find. I just laughed out loud at this situation. I told her I´d look around, and tell her if I had any luck. I haven´t had any luck, by the way, not even at the Walmart. I know you can find it at one place in Weimar, but I think that´s the nearest location. Sheesh.

Story #2: This is a story I heard from my friend Stefanie today. A while back in one of her classes, all of the students had to memorize a poem to say in front of the class. She had worked really hard on hers, so when it was her turn she delivered a smashing performance. After class, a guy in her class, who was from Africa, walked up to her and said, "Stefanie, you did such a great job! I almost wanted to shout out, ´Heil Hitler!´" (For those of you who don´t know, this would be something COMPLETELY inappropriate to say to a German...unless they were wearing a Nazi flag in plain sight, then it might be okay.) Anyway, She was completely in shock and said she even started crying at this comment. He explained that where he was from they didn´t learn too much about German history, etc., and that he only knew Hitler as a very powerful German man and symbol, so he reasoned it would be a great compliment to a German to say something like, "Heil Hitler." Yikes, talk about cultural awareness.

Knee Deep in Jazzmeile

On Friday I ventured to Erfurt for a little concert with the Terence Ngassa Afro Jazz group. The venue was a little tricky to find, but I somehow managed to find it with relative ease and I was actually kind of early. No matter, I ordered myself a beer, had my pick of the all the seats in the house, and sat back to observe my fellow audience members start to shuffle in. I happened to notice, though, that aside from the very kindly older gentlemen that ran the place, the crowd was also a little bit older, too. This kind of surprised me-I can´t really explain it very well, but I was expecting more younger folks to come out to an afro jazz show. In the end it didn´t matter, the music was sweet and my tablemates were also very friendly. Though I wanted to stick around and talk with the band, I had to head back to the train station to catch the last train that left that evening unless I wanted to sleep on the cold streets that night.

My plan for Saturday was to do more city exploring and see what I could find. I also got a couple tips on record stores around the city and I wanted to see what they had to offer. The weather was downright nasty in the morning. It was raining mostly, but occasionally there would be a drop of slushy-type stuff. The great thing about this place so far, though, is that it doesn´t really stay cold here for very long. We´ll have to see how much that changes in the dead of winter. Anyway, Saturday evening I ate dinner with Conny and we went over to our friend Basti´s house for a game night. We played Tabu (the same game like you´d find in the states), and yes it was really hard for me to play in German but fun nonetheless. Then we played a game called Palermo-this is one of those card games where there are murderers, citizens, and spies/detectives. I´ve played versions of games like it before, so I´m sure a couple of you know what I´m talking about. That was a blast as well. I also found out through perusing Basti and Ralf´s collection of movies that there is a version of Spaceballs dubbed in German...crazy.

Sunday morning Conny and I went to Grunowski for a little breakfast buffet..mmmm, breakfast buffet. And that night I went to a jazz concert here called the 3 Guitars with Larry Coryell, Badi Assad, and John Abercrombie. I liked this a lot more than I thought I would. The woman that played with them added a really interesting element-at one point she played a solo song where she was making sounds with her mouth (like in a lot of African songs), humming, and playing crazy guitar all at the same time! Mainly the whole show was just the acoustics, but occasionally they´d add a little flute-like instrument or the thumb guitar-thing. I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me during the break, and he said that he was surprised to find out I was from the USA because I didn´t have an accent. I brushed this comment off saying that when I speak English, some people think I have an accent because I´m from the North, but this did make me feel like the month and a half I´ve spent here has at least improved my German a little. Woo hoo! I definitely do not sound anything like a native speaker, but we have to think little steps, people.

And now since I´ve just thought of a couple, it´s time for everybody´s favorite thing....More Pros and Cons!

Pro-I like how Germans will greet everyone personally every time they arrive. Okay, maybe not every single solitary time, but pretty darn close. And not just a universal "hello" to everyone when they walk in the room, but a hand shake and/or hug to everyone even if the room is so crowded everyone can barely move and it would just be a whole lot easier to say "hi everybody!" and leave it at that.

Con-I think I´ve been spoiled living in the almost entirely no-smoking-in-public-places Bloomington (with the exception of bars until 2005). Smoking is allowed pretty much anywhere except a few places which don´t include trains. I smell like smoke a lot of the time even though I have successfully remained a non-smoker. Eww.

My Halloween Weekend

First, this title is a little bit misleading seeing as how I really didn´t celebrate Halloween; nonetheless, I had a really fantastic weekend. My plan on Saturday was to walk around the city, my normal routine, and then in the late afternoon go see the Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" multimedia show that was playing at the planetarium. The weather was just plain icky-cloudy, foggy, overcast, and drizzly all mixed into one day. This didn´t stop me though...

First I wandered into this old bookstore that surprisingly had some LP´s, too. Of course I had to look through them all, but most of them were the German equivalent of those old classical records that most people don´t really want-you know, the same ones that every record store has sitting in a crate somewhere. Then there were the crazy American records that found their way there, too. And there was absolutely no order to it all; I saw Gwar, Eddy Grant, and everything in between in one crate. It felt good to get my fingertips all dusty again, though.

After that I went to this coffee place that had a really cool atmosphere-very warm and old. Now I normally don´t drink coffee, but like I said before, it was an icky day and it was nice to just be inside for a short spell and since I was there I thought I´d check out the coffee scene. So I order a normal (or so I thought) coffee with milk in it, but what was given to me was a bowl of coffee with milk. I have never seen a "cup" of coffee like that before! After that unusual beverage/gigantor breakfast, I hit the streets again.

I found a cool little African store. I think it was pretty new and didn´t have that much merchandise, but it was a cool discovery.

Then I started toward the other side of town to check out the planetarium and purchase a ticket for the Pink Floyd showing that night. On my way I found this combination second hand shop that carried hip hop LP´s. It was definitely a great find. The shopkeepers were really nice-one of the guys, Frank, showed me a whole bunch of German hip hop LP´s. It was so hard not to buy stuff, but I´ve told myself I can´t buy LP´s (or at least too many) because they´re so hard to handle when you´re traveling a lot. I asked the girl there (I forgot to ask her name) what the deal was with the hip hop scene here, and coincidentally there happened to be a hip hop show that very night. I really wanted to check out the planetarium thing though, so off we go...

When I went there, though, I found out that all the tickets were sold out for the multimedia show and that sell-outs are common for the weekend shows. D´oh! I even asked about the one playing next weekend, and tickets were already sold out for that one, too! I´m still going to try and see it, but I´ll probably have to go on a weekday.

Anyhoo, it was kind of a blessing in disguise. I went to the club, Kassablanca, to check out the hip hop show. When I got there, there were a couple of dj´s spinning before the main hip hop act who called themselves the Waxolutionists. The dj´s were just okay, but I think I was just really grateful to be hearing music that wasn´t the radio or some songs that I recognized that weren´t Vanilla Ice or California Dreamin´. They played a bunch of stuff and even worked some J5 and stuff in there-for some reason the only song I can remember them playing that y´all would know is "Just to get by", but I know there were a couple of other ones, too. I decided to check out the little upper deck for awhile and I went up there at just the right time, because right when I peaked over the rail the crowd had just formed a circle and some break dancers were starting to show what they were made of. They were really awesome and by this point, I was definitely regretting not bringing my camera. Then came the Waxolutionists...

I really didn´t know anything about this group before they performed except their name, but I was so glad that I went to see them. The setup was 2 dj´s on 3 tables (and they had a couple of other toys, too, but didn´t use them that often), a drum set, keyboard, bass, and 2 mc´s. For one of the songs they even broke out an acoustic guitar and did a song with just that and one mc. I can´t remember (or maybe I never knew) where they´re from, but I think maybe Wien. After the were done with their set, the entire group hung around while all the gear was being packed up and took turns on the tables just playing songs for the still wired crowd. I left when the group left at 4 a.m., but there was still a good amount of peope dancing to what the other dj´s were putting out. I had seen enough, though, and the other dj´s didn´t have quite the appeal they did when I first got there before I saw the Waxolutionists.

Anyway, it was German hip hop I was looking for and it was definitely German hip hop that I got. I´m going to try and find one of their LP´s and break my "No LP" rule and bring it back home-even though I´m not really sure how their studio sound compares to their live performance, but I digress...

On Sunday night I went and saw this movie called the "7 Zwerge" (The Seven Dwarfs). I don´t really know what to say about this film. It was a comedy, that´s for sure, and yes the title is a reference to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", but this movie was definitely for adults. Hmmm, though the movies are completely different it has kind of the same type of humor as the Naked Gun or Police Academy movies-not a deep meaning or anything by far, but I thought it was funny.