Weinachtsmarkts, Feuerzangbowle, Glühwein…some of the many German traditions I’ve encountered over the past few weeks:

Glühwein
Basically a spicy red wine that is warmed up in a kettle.  Very nice on a cold December evening.  Sometimes you can order it with Amaretto or Rum for an extra kick.  You pay a deposit on the mug, so you can keep it if you wish.

Feuerzangbowle
Another wine-based Christmas beverage.  The feuerzangbowle we made for our apartment party had chunks of lime, orange, and cinnamon floating in a large pot of red wine.  Then, a large cone of sugar is placed over the pot and covered in rum.  The sugar is then ignited and melts into the pot.  Quite fun to prepare, and delicious!

Weinachtmarkts
The english translation is simply "Christmas market."  In Osnabrück we have an especially nice Christmas market which is very popular in northern Germany.  Vendors selling small Christmas gifts, crepes, candy, chocolate, Glühwein, Feuerzangbowle and other treats are all over the place.  The entire market in Osnabrück is decorated with Christmas lights and is right next to the Dom, the largest church in the city.

Weihnachtsfeiere
Christmas parties, where each attendee brings a small wrapped gift (something cheap, often that you have just lying around the house).  The process of exchanging gifts varies, for one party we played a dice game which distributed the presents over 15 minutes or so (sometimes unfairly, haha) and for another party we just picked numbers out of a hat and matched the number with a present.  It can be really fun, the more outrageous the gift the better!

As you can see the Germans really get into Christmas, which is great.  It’s been a fun past couple of weeks. 

This weekend I’ll be in Amsterdam.  Next week will be my next post..

It appears that I recently witnessed a very rare event here in Osnabruck: a snowstorm of more than a couple inches. I was actually in Wolfsburg for most of the day and missed some of the fun, but apparently the power went out several times for up to an hour at a time. Dr. HP Bischof (Our RIT study abroad coordinator) was in his hotel when it happened and he claimed that in eight years of living in Osnabrück he had never experienced a power outage of more than a couple minutes (kind of amusing for someone who has endured several-day power outages back home). Guess that explains why nobody did a damn thing about the snow, either. It’s still everywhere five days afterwards. I can’t say it was bad for everyone, though. Snowmen were everywhere the day after the storm and I had the urge to play in the snow, too. So Kevin and I headed to Heger Tor (where there’s a 15-foot high stone balcony with a 30-foot ramp leading up to it) where I had the brilliant idea of rolling a gigantic snowball down the ramp to collect into a ridiculously huge one at the bottom. Unfortunately one side of the ramp had been shovelled, and when I pushed the behemoth down it rolled to the right, jumped off one of the small stairs and smashed into four pieces on the stone. Bummer.

Thus we have unfinished business. Bring on another snowstorm!

Finally got around to posting my photos from Bremen and Hannover….enjoy!

Well I suppose I should make this a real post…I have seen three different films over the past week due to AEGEE’s European Day of Languages…Friday’s film was L´auberge Espagnol, and by far the greatest of the three films I have seen this week. It revolves around a French student’s time spent in Barcelona as an exhange student, and really hit home for me. The film is mostly comedic yet with fantastic cinematography. I’m not sure if a version exists with English subtitles, but if so I highly recommend it.

I took a train up to Bremen Wed. night with Kevin to catch a UEFA Champion’s League football (I try to avoid the term ‘soccer’) match.  Werder Bremen, the current top team in the German Bundesliga, was playing Udinese Calcio, the weakest of the Italian teams in the Champion’s League.  Werder is notorious for the high rate of goals they both score and allow, so I had anticipated a high-scoring match. 

When emerging from the Hauptbanhof in Bremen the city was quite slick and was drizzling a little bit.  We followed the crowd of hooligans, *ahem* supporters, to the S-bahn (Straßenbahn) which we took the stadium.  A good number of fans were hitting the Beck’s pretty hard the whole way there, and some were donning the empty boxes as headwear.  I would have joined in but I had a rather large presentation the next morning so I declined.  Oh, and as a clarification there’s no public drinking or intoxication laws anywhere in Germany, so you can just roam around and drink your beer as you please.  Quite convenient. 

We reached the stadium right on time with an enormous crowd of hooligans, *ahem* fans.  I decided to buy a beer at the stadium, but realized all they were selling were non-alcoholic varieties, which kinda ticked me off.  However I did understand the motivations behind it, especially in wake of all the incidents plaguing recent Champion’s League matches (players getting injured by flung coins, flares, fire hydrants, etc.)  So Kevin picked up the requisite bratwurst and we took our seats, fairly good ones in the lower tier at one corner of the stadium.  The Italian fans happened to be sitting right across from us, separated by huge barriers, where they chanted and exchanged obscene gestures with us hooligans, err fans, on the other side.

And the whistle blew.  Immediately I was ecstatic to be watching my first world-class football match here in Europe, and was quickly rewarded by a header goal within the first 10 minutes by Werder.  The crowd went wild and sang, errr chanted the Werder theme song.  A few minutes after that we scored on a loose ball in the box and we went into another frenzy.  Pretty much the entire game was like this, and it was awesome.

Somehow in the second half we were up 3-nil until, a flurry of "Sheiße!"s later, Udinese tied the game within about 5 minutes.  I couldn’t believe my eyes as the unmarked Calcio forwards pranced around the box and scored easily, again and again.  Luckily Bremen scored the go-ahead goal at around the 70th minute to eventually seal the victory.  It was really an up-and-down game emotionally for the fans, and was really interesting how our temperaments varied through out the match.  One thing was quite evident, though, and that is the passion the Europeans share for their beautiful game.  I had never experienced it before (however I’ve never been to a playoff MLB game either) and it was truly amazing.

Match highlights/recap/Champion’s League info can be found here.

I had originally posted this blog to tell the world of my exploits here in Germany, as well as vent about any old topic. Thus far that’s what I’ve been doing, and have only created a post if I felt I had something to say, or share.

Admittedly, I did have a bit of writer’s block at the beginning (and subsequently didn’t advertise my blog), but has pretty much subsided since. I feel like blog topics come pretty naturally, and this should be good to keep the content interesting. But another unpredicted side effect was its effect on my writing abilities. I always felt I wrote fairly well (well at least back in high school), but recently realized I hadn’t really had to do crap for writing in college and sort of lost my touch. AP credits got me out of all the freshman English classes, which I rejoiced at the time (and don’t regret it). I took a few courses which caused me to have to write essays or whatever, but this was rarely more than once every 10 weeks or so, and not enough to keep the compository skills flowing. This blog has changed all that, as I put quite a bit of effort into the style, content, and choice of words for each and every post.

Yet, it still seems that today’s society is causing communication to become so short and terse that good writing has become sort of a lost art. The pervasiveness of instant messaging clients, quick emails, text messaging, and expensive mobile phones have brought on this tendency, and I think our writing abilities are suffering accordingly.

So one more reason to embrace the self-publishing revolution!

…so much that it deserves it’s own post

Lately I’ve found myself with quite a bit of free time, mostly due to a lack of classes this week. It appears that each class runs about 2 hours a week, in stark contrast to the strict 4 hours/week I’m used to at RIT. Well I’m certainly not complaining, especially since these classes seem like they’ll be pretty damn easy anyway.

However, this post was originally going to be devoted to my entrance in Osnabrück and what has happened since. Well, in short, a lot…

So Tuesday I moved in. My flatmates were very nice and I soon realized that there may be a bit of a language barrier (duh). One of them did speak quite good English so we chatted for awhile, and he pointed out I needed bedsheets. Ah yes, sheets would be nice. So he walked me down to Plus, a small chain grocery store down the street where I proceeded to buy some sheets and a ton of other food. Excellent. And as I’m rounding the freezer section a familiar face appears. Brittany?!! (A friend from RIT who had spent some time in Germany as well beforehand) So we discuss the eccentricities of the Germans and finish up shopping.

Around then I realized I probably wouldn’t have enough cash, since apparently debit/credit doesn’t really exist in most marketplaces. Brittany was kind enough to lend me some cash and we went through the checkout line. Surprise! The cashier yells at me to start bagging groceries so I start throwing them back in the shopping cart. Surprise! They don’t provide the good ol’ shopping bags we’ve gotten so accustomed to. By this time I had a shitload of food and other stuff so I just wheeled the damn thing back to my apartment (there’s a euro deposit to try and prevent this, haha; the next day somebody returned it for me). What fun.

The rest of the week consisted of group leaders taking us around Osnabrück, getting us set up: bank account, health insurance, etc. This was all well and good, I must admit I didn’t know what the hell was going on for most of it. Just about all fo the other foreign students have over a year of German experience, while I have six months with some major gaps in between. That is, their German is good, mine sucks. This has become frustrating, but it’s slowly coming back…

They did organize a few social events as well, a party, pub crawl (which I regret missing to go to a movie), and some other things in the evenings. Somehow they managed to pack things in every day of the week from about 9 am til 12 midnight. By the weekend I was exhausted.

On Saturday we went to Köln (Cologne to you westerners). This was quite fun, and deserves it’s own post (along with my photos).

Having just posted a recent set of images from a weekend of hiking in the Adirondack High Peaks, I couldn’t help but reminisce about the trip.  I’ve found myself being pulled back to the area more and more over the past few years, for reasons becoming more obvious.  The overwhelming serenity and peace I get from being in the middle of the woods carrying everything I need to live on my back is awesome.  Everything becomes incredibly simple, as the only thing you are concerned about are your basic needs: food, water, shelter.  Everything else just falls away.

The inherent beauty of the land, of course, is the main attraction (very evident in my photos).  But the people you meet (depending on what area of the HP you’re in) are also incredible, too.  Where else do you stop, say hi, and have a brief conversation with every person you meet?  There is a hidden, yet very present, commonality between everyone: a love of nature and the serenity that comes with the land.

Even though it probably won’t be for many months, I look forward to my next adventure in the Adirondacks.  Undoubtedly this feeling will well up into a pressing urge by the time I’m back in the states.

Welcome to what is commonly referred to as a blog, in this case my blog.  In lieu of email correspondence, I have set this up to document my travels in Europe (and beyond) to a broader audience.  I expect to post photos galore taken by my new digi (Kodak of course) over the next few months, as well as some older sets of images.  Keep an eye on this, for there will be many developments leading up to my departure from this country.