Root Beer

So I miss lots of thing from the States.

One of them is root beer. Luckily, one of Jordan's friends sent him about 4 packages of root beer concentrate, so we're set until we go home. And in cases of emergency, you can buy root beer and cream soda at KaDeWe, but it costs like an arm and a leg. Per can.

Anyway, Jordan and I were invited to a party tonight. We advertised that we would bring root beer, following the nice German tradition of bringing things to parties. Usually, Germans just bring beer to parties, but it goes against our groove.

Unfortunately, Germany protects the safety of the general public by enforcing a country-wide ban on dry ice. Actually, we've received mixed results on our survey about whether you can buy dry ice here; however, even those who insist that "This is Germany. It's civilization. Not Nebraska. Of course we have dry ice." can't give us any leads on where it can be purchased.

Fortunately for root beer connoisseurs, Germany also protects the health of the general public by encouraging them to drink a metallic-tasting carbonated water substance. Hereafter, metal water.

Studies have shown that drinking metal water from birth increases the mathematics aptitude scores of males aged 12-15 years old.

And nothing is as refreshing after a hard game of soccer as stepping off the field, plopping down on the bench, and taking a swig of bubbly metal water.

It's like drinking Sprite. Without the harmful sugars and artificial flavors.

It's like a spoonful of ice cream in liquid form. Except it tastes more like spoon than ice cream.

It's like licking rocks. Except without having to bend down.

And it's an essential ingredient for home-brew root beer in countries where dried ice is banned.

So on the way to the party, I picked up two bottles of metal water at the store. There are three degrees of carbonation in metal water: still, medium, and classic. The most-carbonated is the classic variety. I picked up two bottles of classic and ran to the Sbahn stop just in time to miss the train out... shoot.

Unfortunately, the powers of metal water are helpless when pitted against the punctuality of the German train system.

After dumping a fair amount of sugar into the classic metal water, we added root beer extract, and wondered how to mix the concoction. A helpful German (who didn't drink root beer) helped us by grabbing the bottle, and shaking it. Hm... no longer classic.

I suggested that we only make one bottle of root beer, and leave the other for later. We could make more root beer if people drank the first bottle.

We got mixed reactions from the initial bottle of root beer. Some said it was too sweet. Others said it was not sweet enough. And most agreed that it didn't have enough carbonation. Shoot.

Anyway, we had a fun evening.

When I returned to the kitchen where the drinks were, I had to smile. The Germans hadn't touched half of the root beer. The bottle was still half-full.

However, the Germans had had no problem with drinking the entire other bottle of metal water.

Classic.

Business Plan

I have a new business plan.

It involves free lunch.

This weekend I hosted my first couch surfer. He is from Italy. His name is Alfredo. He is from around Venice, and is a biology teacher.

On Friday night, I was appalled to come home to discover that my roommate had started to prepare our standard fare of cheap noodles for our Italian guest. I was planning on taking him to get some more traditional Berlin currywurst for dinner because we didn't have any decent food at out house besides cheap noodles, cheap sauce, and frozen veggies (which we eat for our moms).

Unfortunately, the thought off feeding an Italian 30-cent pasta wasn't embarrassing for Jordan, and I came home to find him boiling 30 cent noodles to go with the fresh parmasan cheese brought from Italy by Alfredo.

Whatever.

"Do you think the noodles are done?" I asked Alfredo.

"The what?"

"The noodles" I said, pointing to the noodles.

"Oooh. In Italy, we call them 'penne'"

The next morning when I was walking to church with Jordan. He told me he had had almost the same conversation with Alfredo. "We call that 'penne'"

I wondered whether he was trying to teach us the name of the specific type of noodle (which was printed on the bag), or whether they really don't have the word for noodle or pasta in Italian.

Anyway, we ate penne that night while Alfredo shared his passion for baroque opera with us via youtube.


I agreed to take Alfredo to Potsdam to see the Sans Souci palace on Tuesday, when I didn't have class. So I dragged myself out of bed to meet him at the Suedkreuz train station at 10. We then took the train towards Potsdam. On the way down I caught some English conversation from some passengers. Clutching their map and Germany guide book, they commented on the fact that the houses were smaller as we drove further and further out of Berlin. When they also got out of the train at Potsdam, I knew they were heading to Sans Suci, too.

"Where are you guys from?"

"Oh! You speak English! We're from Maine."

I asked if the older man and woman were heading to San Souci. I told them we were also heading there, and asked if they wanted to come with us. They did.

On the way, I impressed them with what I thought was a very deep knowledge of Maine.

"When I think of Maine, I think of 'Blueberries for Sal' and another book about a child who looses her tooth while looking for clams".

Evidently they get that a lot.

Linda went on to explain that she came from a very small city. The last night, they had gone to a movie screening as part of the Berlinale film festival. She was impressed at how many people fit in the theater, and found out the next day that the theater could hold 2000 people. That was more people than all the people in her little town in Maine. Although she felt safe about leaving her keys in her car and her house unlocked, she said that her little town had a high unemployment rate, and some alcohol and drug problems. She noted that the small town was known for blueberries and intricate balsam Christmas wreathes. Most of the workers in her town were employed in businesses dealing with one of those exports. She made and sold pies.

The man, whose name I forgot, worked as a scientist. I asked if he worked at the Jackson labs. Surprised, he told me that he did. I told him I had worked on a project where we had used some Jackson lab mice. I didn't tell him that we had problems with the experiment because they weren't completely inbred.

We wandered through the Sans Souci park for a while, and I showed them some of my favorite sights, which they probably would have missed if I hadn't been there.



We all had to be back in Berlin at 4, so I showed them the inner city and main cathedral, the Nikolai church, rounding off the tour in a cafe next to the medieval-looking Nauener Tor in the middle of the city. At the cafe, I got a got lemon drink called "hot lemon" and some cake. The apple cake was also super. I think they were all pleased.

At the end of the lunch, I was pleased to observe a heated debate over who would buy me lunch.

In the end, my couch surfer won, but hey, free lunch for 3 hours of walking around in the cold. Not bad.

So, this summer, I'm going to get free lunch a lot. I'll take Jordan down on the train to Potsdam, looking for tourists speaking English. When I hear them I'll be like "Where are you from?". Then I'll impress them with random facts about their state, after which I will show them around Potsdam, ending at a lunch place. Then, with puppydog eyes and a tearjerking starving student story, I'll coerce them into paying for my lunch. Great plan huh?

Super Bowl Monday

This weekend was a pretty hectic one. I spent three days working on a snow creation modeled after the Brandenburg Tor.

Unfortunately, I think I got a cold from several hours of working in the snow without proper snow clothes, which were too heavy to bring from home. So I stayed home from Esther's birthday party on Saturday because of fever/cold/congestion/miserableness. I also still need to finish the details on the Brandenburg Gate.

On Sunday, I got up extra early to catch the bus to church so I could be on time to the early-morning ward choir practice at 8:30. I looked at my cell phone, and it was 8:09 as I left my apartment. According to the bus schedule, the bus came at 12 after, and the walk to the bus stop only takes 2 minutes. Unfortunately, as I was still walking to the street in front of our house, the bus blew by. Shoot. I don't think time follows a linear progression on Sunday mornings.

The fast and testimony meeting was also a little unconventional because a young man was leaving on his mission in two weeks,and was asked to bear his testimony as his departure talk. His mom got up after him, and proceeded to tell the entire audience about how the future missionary had a reading handicap, but was able to improve somewhat by reading the Old Testament.

Thanks, mom, for not embarrassing me at my farewell:)

I later talked to one of the members in the ward, and she told me "I didn't think it was weird.. Everyone knows he has a reading handicap." I think this highlighted a difference in American and German cultures. In Germany, people have handicaps. They get a special card that says that they are handicapped, that lets them ride the bus for free and get reduced tickets to concerts and stuff. They go to schools for handicapped kids, and fill jobs for handicapped people. My impression of the way things were back home is that even in the most painfully obvious cases of a person being handicapped, every measure is taken to make them not seem handicapped. If a child can't read well, it is never referred to as a "reading handicap" and the child never has a "reading disability". He might have "a hard time reading" or be a "slow reader" but never anything more. Except for extreme cases, children are sent to the regular elementary school, and are incorporated into activities. A child in a wheelchair plays soccer as a goalie for her team. Slow readers are given shorter passages to read aloud in class, and receive extra help with their reading to help them improve. The handicap is rarely verbally acknowledged, although teachers and other students go out of their way to try to make up for the handicap.

I'm sure many people look at this American treatment of handicaps, and find it ridiculous. People shouldn't have a fear of acknowledging the handicap. It shouldn't be treated as a taboo topic. It should be accepted and dealt with.

Anyway...

The second counselor also got up during the meeting and congratulated the young man. He went on his mission during the East Germany times, and told us that his mission started pretty roughly. He told us how he had bought a train ticket to his destination, but was disappointed to arrive at the train station and realize that the train wasn't running that day. He wasn't sure what to do. "There weren't any telephones, and a telegram wouldn't be delivered until the next day." WHAT? This guy must have gone on his mission in the 80s, before the reunification in 1990. And they didn't have any telephones? And still used telegrams? The telephone had been invented for over 100 years! T1 carrier systems were around in the 1960s, which was also when the first email systems showed up. It was yet another time for me to count my blessings for not being raised communist.

That night, we had game night at our apartment, and only 12 people came. It was actually pretty chill.

After game night, I tried to text my dad to ask him if he wanted to skype, but got no response. So I headed with Jordan over to Jessie and Eric's apartment to watch the super bowl. Jessie and Eric are such studs. They are both from Berlin, but had hotdogs and rootbeer and cream soda for the superbowl festivities. Oh. And koolaid. I miss grape koolaid. Jordan and I contributed rice crispy treats. With nutella topping in the shape of a football.

While we were waiting for the game to start, I brought up the telephones in East Germany thing, and they reaffirmed that it was really like that.. each town only had a few telephones. Imagine trying to watch the super bowl per telegram...

"Saints: third and goal on the 4. Stop."

Shortly after midnight, the game started. One station showed the game in English, and another showed the game in German. According to Eric, the German ones probably thought that everyone was watching football for the first time, and spent the whole time explaining the rules. We mostly watched the English one.

There were only a couple of bad things about trying to watch the superbowl here in Germany. First, the classic super bowl advertisements were scrapped. All we got were SportsCenter spots that were really dumb, and an advertisement for a London-based sports attire clothing outlet. And promotion for the Duke/UNC game which will air sometime this next week at 0:00 GMT or 1:00 CET. The second bad thing was that during The Who's half-time performance, there was about a 5 second lag between the visual of him singing and the sound. It was pretty disappointing.

And then there was the classic German twist on the super bowl presentation. We tried to switch to the German airing of the half time show to see if they had the lag problem too, but we were disappointed to find that they were airing a half-hour program from a brain doctor who was commenting on the results of concussions and other head injuries on the brains of football players. It made me smile. Football tackles were shown, and then it would flash to a black-and-white x-ray vision of the skeletons of the football players, and their necks would whiplash wildly, with red lightning bolts that were supposed to represent pain and brain injury.

But, it was good evening. We headed to the train station after the game, and because the train resumed service at 4:26am, we caught the first train of the day home.

Unfortunately, we were awakened the next morning at 8:00 by a manual laborist upstairs, who had been hired to torment the souls of men at ungodly hours with his loud racket. The neighbors are finishing the apartment upstairs so they can rent it out. Right now, the planks on the floor are warped and uneven, so the laborist takes a big spinning grinder about the size of a washing machine, gets it spinning, and grinds down all of the high spots. Of course, nails would hurt his grinder, so he has to stop every couple of minutes to pound nails down. So much for sleeping.

Buy a Dryer

I was over at a friend's house the other night. Actually, it was yesterday night. She lives in the 7th floor of an old "plattenbau" cement block building, in the heart of suburban former Eastern Germany.

I rang the bell at the door of the building, and waited for my friend to let me in. While I was waiting, a pretty young woman and a older man came to the door. By "pretty" I mean that she was probably a prostitute. The man looked like he could use a good dose of the gospel, and avoided my eye contact, sheepishly looking at the ground as the pretty girl tried to make awkward conversation. "Zis wezzer is normal for you where you come from, or I zink no?" From his silent response, I guessed the man was a foreigner.

I followed the couple into the house stairwell, and headed to the elevator, which only went up to the 6th floor. As I hiked up the last flight of stairs, I realized that the extra climb probably explained why my friend had gotten such a good deal on rent. That, and the fact that because of its proximity to Oranienburger Strasse, the pretty girl I had met downstairs wasn't the only professional of her kind living in the house.


Upon entering my friend's apartment, I took off my shoes and walked through the green-painted entry way with a map of East and West Berlin from 1961 on the wall. The hallway awkwardly ended at the junction of the door to the bathroom next to an alcove for the washing machine, the door to a bedroom, and the doorway to the kitchen. I followed my friend into the kitchen, past the drying rack, where someone had hung their colored wash.

As my friend started preparing a dinner of a fried egg and boiled potatoes with ketchup, I sat down to chat. Well, actually, I cut the potatoes before I sat down. As we chatted, I looked around the small kitchen.

A long wooden shelf on wall to my left held the food of an apparently male roommate. The left half of the shelf was filed with half-consumed bottles of wine, rum, and other assorted exotic beverages. The beer was on the ground in crates next to two TVs. My friend told me the one on the top worked. The bottom one was for replacement parts. On the wall under the shelf, there were three black and white postcards. The first one was a picture of the Dresden inner city before the world wars, exhibiting the Frauenkirche. The second was a tribute to life in Eastern Germany, and had a picture of a fence with the words "Behind the Wall". The third was a tourist postcard from New York.

The wall in front of me had a skinny electric stove next to a skinny, half-sized refrigerator and skinny sink. A shelf above the sink held glasses, cups, and plates used for the consumption of the goods on the other shelf.

My friend suddenly cursed in English. Startled, I stood up. She asked me if I liked my eggs with the yolks popped. I said "Sure." She liked her eggs once over without the yolk popped. "Because they're the hardest to make that way."

My attention drifted to the drying rack which was displaying the damp clothing items of one of the roommates - an embarrassing social side effect of trying to save electricity by not having a dryer. I tried not to stare, but I couldn't help but to notice a week's worth of panties among a towel and some shirts. Ever since I developed a certain sense of underwear "brand loyalty" shortly before I turned 19, I have fallen out of the loop when it comes to underwear styles, so I wasn't sure whether they were guy's or girl's undies that were drying there. And I couldn't really make out the shape because they were folded in half over the drying rack. And, I felt awkward examining the undies of other people, even if they were on display in the kitchen.

However, I did observe that there was block print each pair of undies. I don't really remember any of the sayings on the underwear, but I did notice that they were all different.

This stuck me as very odd. Perhaps it's just because of my aforementioned brand loyalty.

Why would you only have underwear with stuff printed on it? I can only imagine coming out of the shower, going to your underwear drawer, and searching through your collection of underwear until you found the saying that best described your mood.

And I could imagine that it would be devastating if after jumping out of your shower in preparation for the big date, you open your underwear drawer and realize that all of your underwear is dirty except for the last pair that has "I'm Self-Conscious" printed on the back and "Looser" on the front.

I could also maybe understand having one pair of underwear with something dirty printed on it - the result of a white elephant gift exchange during the work Christmas party of 2008.

The thing that I don't get is that except for special circumstances (e.g. hyperpromiscuity), nobody is going to read your underwear besides you.

And then it hit me. I had met one of the two roommates of my friend. He was a rather stickly but sympathetic advertising designer from former East Germany. However, I had not met the other roommate. And I probably never will. But I'm sure she's pretty. And has a good reason for having underwear with printed sayings.

But I don't need to know that.

Please, girl. Please buy a dryer.