Ich bin ein Amerikanerin in Deutschland.

My apologies but this is a very long post...

So before I left Germany the second week of May, our schedule was quite packed.

-I babysat for Ladell and then met up with Ryan and the trainees for drinks one night.

-Ryan and I had a double date in Stuttgart with Cassie and Christian. Cassie is an American from California marrying Christian, a native German. Both work for Bosch. We went to the Schlossgartens, a history museum, a biergarten for lunch and beer of course, and for dessert at a cafe. I had much trouble choosing which delicious cake to order for dessert and Ryan accidentally ordered ice cream with a shot of liquor.
-We saw an old coal engine train come through the Boblingen station. I think it was some kind of tour but it looked pretty out of place.

-The night before my flight, Ryan and I went back to Fruhlingsfest with his coworkers. We sat with 10 native Germans and a couple from Hungary at the Grandls tent and ate chicken and drank beer. This time we were in the middle of the very crowded and loud tent standing on the benches to sing and dance. It was awesome to go with Germans that knew all of the songs and the band there was better than at the other tent.

Then I had two wonderful weeks in Chicago!

Since my return to Germany I do not believe we have had a day of sunshine. We did enjoy a fun weekend in Aachen though despite the poor weather. Saturday morning we drove 3.5 hours North to Aachen to visit Ryan's German friend and previous Bosch coworker Jan. We got to know Jan when he spent six months in Plymouth, MI working in Ryan's group. The drive on the Autobahn was great and would have been shorter if it wasn't for all the construction. The trip can be very short when you are going 225 km/hr or 140 mph!

Aachen is a very old town with rich history on the border of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Today there are three major schools there including the Aachen University, the University of Applied Sciences, and the German Army Technical School. It is a college town with apartments for student housing, restaurants and fast food places, a large number of bars and clubs, and buildings with offices and classrooms. The schools do not really have defined campuses and rather the buildings are distributed throughout the city.

We arrived at his apartment which he shares with his roommate Max who became our tourguide and had a beer before going out for lunch. As we walked to the city center we passed a large amount of "Love Trees". On the first of May, young men cut down small trees, decorate them with colored paper and mount them to the building of the woman they love. They are tied to gutters, pipes, and street lights and left up until the first of June. The role is reversed on leap years when the women do the same for the men.

For lunch they took us to a great restaurant  for schnitzel. I enjoyed a Hawaiian style schnitzel with ham, pineapple, and an interesting cream sauce. I knew that Germans love Hawaiian pizza but German students in Aachen also love Hawaiian schnitzel and Hawaiian doner. Ryan and I noticed the price differences right away. Our check for four schnitzels with fries and four beers was only 30 Euros. In Stuttgart, we spent 30 Euros on three beers and two small entrees when we went out with trainees recently. For dessert Jan took us to the best ice cream shop in Germany. We each had two massive scoops for only two Euros a piece.

Then began our Aachen tour:

-We bought Aachener Printen which is similar to gingerbread except there is not any ginger or molasses in it and it is harder.

-The Aachen Cathedral is very pretty inside.

-Aachen is the "City of Fountains and Monuments"

-The university has a lecture hall that holds over 1,000 students. The new lecture hall is under construction and it will hold over 2,000 students and has numerous video screens to watch the professor lecture.

-Aachen has these "excavation site" exhibits throughout the city center where the ground is replaced by glass so that you can see underground where they found remnants of buildings, stone tools, and bits of brick. The largest site we saw is near a mineral bath.

We also drove to the Dreilandenpunt or the place where Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands intersect. There is a tall viewing tower there where you can see Aachen in Germany, the forest in Belgium, and small towns in the Netherlands. The view was worth the hike up the numerous stairs. To make the spot even more of a tourist destination, there is also a Dreilandenpunt Labyrint or maze. The activities there are definitely geared towards children so we decided to pass. While we were driving to the viewing tower we noticed the bikers. There were hundreds of bikers most likely from all three countries doing an organized ride through the area. It looked like a great time!

In the evening, I got my first taste of the German soccer culture. The Champion's League game held in London was between two German teams for the first time, Bayern Munich versus Borussia Dortmund and Jan is a Dortmund fan. We went to a bar over two hours before the game was going to begin to grab seats outside by the extra television sets. All of the bars and clubs in the area were set up with extra seating near mounted flat screen tv's. From the looks of things, many of the tv's came right out of employee's homes and were mounted and strapped down on beer crates. It was very crowded and very cold but I did enjoy the game and the atmosphere. Unfortunately for Jan, Bayern won. Since he was wearing a Dortmund scarf and the crowd was getting rowdy we decided to heat away from the area to a casual bar for one last drink. German soccer fans are pretty intense (and drunk) and I was glad to get away from the chanting, cheering, and fighting on the streets. The bar we found was awesome and very "hipster". There was not a television set in the place and it was full of people that did not care about soccer. I enjoyed a a hot cocoa with Baileys to warm up.

Sunday morning we had breakfast in our hotel, spent some time at Jan's playing kicktipp (a tabletop soccer game similar to foosball), enjoyed doner in Aachen and then headed back to Boblingen.

We stopped at the Burg Eltz on our way home in the rain for a quick viewing of the castle in the valley. We drove through the rolling hills of Northern German countryside with crop fields of rapeseed. The small yellow flowers of the plant gave the hills some color.





Although I had a very early morning today, I could not pass up the opportunity to get out on the bike since I had a shortened day babysitting and the weather was decent. I rode about 25 miles round trip to Herrenberg, the last stop on the S1 train we take from Stuttgart. I came home a very happy person!

On Thursday we drive to Denmark and Sweden!

Nur noch eine Woche...

So the past week has not been too exciting; just another week in Germany.

Thursday evening I gave myself food poisoning on accident by eating moldy raw mushrooms on my salad. I realized it early Friday morning and my body was very upset with me. It made for a rough few hours... I have realized that things just don't keep in the fridge as long here. Grocery shopping only once a week is not practical because the refrigerators are small and the food has less preservatives. We actually go to the store two or even three times a week.

Friday night Ryan and I made it to Fruhlingsfest downtown for a bit just to walk around. The festival is exactly what I hoped it would be. There is a flea market, tons of rides, beer vendors, game booths, fair food, three massive beer tents, a traditional German area, and thousands of happy Germans in trocken (lederhosen and dirndl). We walked around the fair in a mild drizzle, had currywurst and a mushroom dish with bread dumpling, and had a beer on a spinning bar. The round bar was raised on a platform and spinning very slowly so you could enjoy a beer and watch the crowd. The Stuttgarter Hofbrau Festival beer is honestly not that great though. I find it to be a bitter boring ale and will stick to Hefeweizen.

Saturday was a pretty relaxing day of running errands in the rain. In the evening we attempted to party like the local youth. A group of 15 or so trainees got together for drinks at an apartment around 8 pm. Due to the Bulls game that went into double or triple overtime or something, we made it out much later than planned and seven of us boarded a train at midnight to head to Theodor-Huess-Strasse (the bar and club street downtown). Our first stop was a bar called Muttermilch (literal translation is Breast Milk) and it ended up being our only stop. Even though it was members-only night, the bouncer let us in because I tried to speak German, told him with a very disappointed face that we were Americans and because we were all dressed to go out. The drinks weren't horribly overpriced but the bar was packed. Breast Milk was described in my magazine as being a "hang out" bar but on a Saturday night it is the place to drink and dance. We only made it to 2 am and were in bed by 3:30 but it was a fun evening.

I had the day off Tuesday so I watched TV, cleaned and started packing my suitcase for next week. The weather was absolute garbage and I was feeling pretty restless so I walked to a gym, one of three gyms I think in Boeblingen. I was prepared to pay the daily fee to use the equipment but the owner with muscular arms the size of my thigh told me that I could have a "taste" and use the gym for free. I thoroughly enjoyed my two hour workout and cherished every moment of sweating out my frustrations. I was intimidated being the only female in the club but successfully figured out how to change the language of the cardio equipment to English. The other challenge was figuring out how much weight to lift on the machines and what to use in regards to free weights because everything was kilograms. Luckily I remembered the conversion for some reason (2.2 lbs in a Kg).

Wednesday was Labour Day or May Day, a German public holiday here so just about everything was closed and Ryan was off work. Unfortunately the family I work for works on an American military base which follows US holidays so I had to watch Ladell all day. My walk to the train station at 6:00 am was absolutely silent. The streets were empty and bakeries closed. However, there was much liveliness on the Boeblingen train platform. There were probably 50 young drunk men in groups still up from the party the night before. When my train passed through the Stadtmitte and Hauptbanhof Station in the city I noticed that the party was still going on there too. There were drunk people passed out everywhere, police patrolling the area, people cheering and yelling, and garbage and beer bottles littering the floor. I had heard that the German youth enjoys going out the night before a public holiday but I guess the evening before May Day is Walpurgisnacht or "Witches Night" and is a whole different kind of party. Young people go around drinking, partying, and playing pranks on their neighbors and even pranks on public property is tolerated. Young men can also erect their May Pole in their girlfriend's yards to propose.

Since all of the trainees with Bosch had off work, we made arrangements to reserve a table at a beer tent at Fruhlingsfest beginning at 2 pm for beer and chicken. I packed my dirndl, changed while Ladell napped, and met up with everyone at 4:30 pm. Most of them were already two Liters of beer in so I had some catching up to do. It was a blast! Pretty much every German and his mother, father, sister, brother, nephew, etc. was at the festival but our tent was not overly crowded. There are three tents total that each seat over a 1,000 or something. There is the Stuttgarter Hofbrau main tent (crazy lightshow and techno music), the chicken tent (more traditional German songs), and another tent which was very crowded with teenagers. I am glad that we were in the chicken tent and thoroughly enjoyed the old German music. Everyone was on the benches dancing, drinking, and laughing. So two Liters of beer in giant German mugs and a half chicken with bread is included in your reservation. The beer was great and the chicken was delicious but definitely not enough food when one is drinking at a rapid rate. Most of us went out of the tent to get snacks at some point. As the clock approached 8:00 pm, the group was dispersing and some of the guys thought it would be a great idea to ride a carnival ride. I was all in and slightly disappointed when they decided to do the swings. Well these are not just normal swings, they are crazy German carnival swings and I thought I was going to die. We went way high and super fast. It was a great view of the fair, definitely worth the four Euros, and gave me a new respect for a swing ride.

So Ryan and I get to have more fun at Fruhlingsfest when we do it all again with his coworkers next Tuesday. I am very excited!

Today is Thursday and it was a pretty simple day. Ryan and I were both excited to have our faucet in the kitchen sink fixed but it is now actually in a worse state of uselessness. Since we have moved in, the faucet dispenses a trickle of ice cold water so we have been boiling water in a kettle from the bathroom to do dishes. The plumber came today, took apart out faucet, and left us with a faucet that dispenses a light mist. Now what are we supposed to do until he orders the new parts which might be in a month. The sink should be in tip-top shape by the time we leave in August.

Side note - I have officially survived nine months without a microwave and three months without a clothes dryer. First world problems are the worst.

For dinner tonight, Ryan and I stopped at our favorite place for Doner Kebab. Since we had a car full of groceries, Ryan parked on the street and I ran in to order our sandwiches to-go. Unfortunately they were out of our favorite sauce but since I told the owner that we come to his restaurant because his sauce is the best in town, he promised me extra sauce next time. He thanked me for the business, complimented me on my German skills, and told me that I was a pretty girl. The Doner was still delicious but the orange sauce makes it superb!