Strolling through Wiesbaden

After leaving the Titanic Exhibition, I took the kids on a walk through Wiesbaden. They ran their hands through the water at the Kochbrunnen....

...which they said was very hot and smelled bad. Here's Emilie showing off some of the healthy minerals in the water.

The kids washed their hands and did sample the water at the Temple.  A German woman took a collapsible cup out of her bag, had her presumably daily intake of hot spring water and chuckled at the Nylund kids' reaction to the taste of it.  Maybe it's the cyanide and arsenic content (no kidding) that gives the water its distinctive flavor.

Why shouldn't bike racks be fun?

The kids chose Subway for lunch. Subway is interesting for a few reasons. One is that they are known to sometimes carry Doritos, which we have never seen anywhere else in Germany -- until just last week when I found one supermarket that carries nacho-flavored ones. Here's another interesting thing. Take a closer look at the menu.

At every Subway we've visited, the menu is in English. I'm assuming there must be German translation somewhere for those people who don't speak English, but it's not displayed on their overhead menu. And this does cause a bit of hesitation when we order our meal.  David will say, "Ich möchte ein....(slipping into American-accented English) 12-inch Teriyaki Chicken sandwich, bitte."  And I always wonder if I should say the English sandwich name with my best German accent.   

No Doritos today, but the kids were very excited to see bottles of root beer in the cooler. We don't find root beer here at all (unless our church is raffling off a case that was bought by someone who has American commissary privileges).

There must be a lot of Americans who come to this Subway to merit the restaurant getting a hold of this elusive beverage. Our German neighbor, Björn, spent a year in Arizona as a exchange student and took a big swig of root beer when someone first offered him a can there. He thought it was going to be a type of actual beer, and so the unexpectedly sweet flavor threw him for a loop. We one day offered him a can (from when Emilie won such a raffle at church) and he told me how terrible that root beer drink was! But he accepted the can, just so he could share this bizarre American root beer with his wife.

James striking a pose with the equally as elusive Dr. Pepper. I have to admit I find Dr. Pepper as bizarre as Björn found the root beer.

One could understandably draw the conclusion that we used to buy root beer, Doritos and Dr. Pepper often in the U.S., miss them terribly and that's why it's such an event when we come across them here.  But that would be wrong.  I never bought Dr. Pepper, rarely bought Doritos and would only buy root beer a few times during the summer.  It's just the novelty of finding something American that we don't usually see here.

It reminds me of how excited we were when we had a visit from my brother Tim our first year here.  He brought along a suitcase loaded with American food, including Kraft mac-n-cheese and many boxes of Poptarts.  The kids were over the moon.  And so the next morning, when I called out, "Who wants Poptarts for breakfast?" I was surprised when no one answered back, "Me, me, me!"  Having so many boxes so readily available in our own house made the desire for Poptarts lessen.  Had we seen Poptarts in a store a week earlier, the kids would have insisted I buy a box and they would have devoured them on the spot.  Having so many boxes in our own cupboard made them no big deal.

You can't pass by a Gummi Bear store without popping in. We were given samples of gummies that looked like mini fried eggs. Each kid was allowed to by a bag of gummies and I bought David a pack of...

...gummi pin-up girls. For the record, there is also gummi muscle men.

We bought so many gummies, we got a free gummi bear bag.

Titanic Exhibition

Today was the first day of Micaela, James and Emilie's two-week long Spring Break.  Rebecca still has Kindergarten, though, so it's the perfect time to do something that Becca wouldn't enjoy so much.  I had heard on the radio last week that there was a Titanic Exhibition in the nearby town of Wiesbaden, we made a point of watching Rose and Jack in Titanic during the weekend to re-familiarize ourselves with the tragic tale and then today we made our way to Wiesbaden.

We exited the underground parking garage right near the exhibit to the lovely view of a circus.

We were a bit surprised to see this tiger pacing around his enclosure.

It took us a while of wondering around to finally find the exhibit, which was underground and we just kept missing the entrance.

This photo outside the exhibit was the last one I could take of us as there was no photography allowed inside. Through the power of the internet, I can show some of the exhibit.

We were each given a Titanic boarding pass

Boarding the exhibit, going back in time to 1912.

I'll assume you already know a lot about the story of the Titanic, so I'll just include information that was news to me.

We got to stroll down a first class hallway.

Large model of the Titanic

Captain Edward J. Smith on the right and First Officer William Murdoch on the left.  The exhibit stressed Murdoch's heroism.  Murdoch's first order after the fateful collision with the iceberg was to close all the water-tight doors, an act which bought the Titanic two hours.  Had the water-tight doors been open, the ship would have sank in 30 minutes.

Later on, First Officer Murdoch was in charge of loading passengers into lifeboats.  On the other side of the ship, only women and children were allowed into the boats and some boats were being lowered to the water below less than half filled.  Murdoch had a different interpretation of the order "women and children only" and if there was room in a boat, men could also step in.  He preferred saving lives than sticking to rigid rules.  More than 80% of all the male passengers that survived owed their lives to William Murdoch.

He was last seen attempting to launch Collapsible Lifeboat A by cutting at the ropes holding the boat to the sinking Titanic with his penknife before a wave washed him into the ocean.  The film Titanic shows Murdoch committing suicide with his gun, and while an officer did do that, it is not believed to have been Murdoch. After film producers refused to take out Murdoch's suicide scene, studio executives later flew to Murdoch's hometown Dalbeattie, Scotland to issue an apology for this depiction to his surviving relatives.

There was a frosted metal iceberg you could touch to get an idea of just how cold that freezing water felt to those poor people that early April morning. I could only manage to hold my hand against it for about 20 seconds and ten minutes later, my hand still ached from that short encounter.

Sweidsh Third Class Passengers Edvard and Gerda Lindell. During the sinking, the couple jumped from the Titanic into the water and managed to get to lifeboat A. However, only Edward managed to get on board the lifeboat while one of the survivors, a Swede named August Wennerström, held Gerda Lindell’s hand for some time. The lifeboat was partially filled with sea water and the cold temperatures exhausted everyone quickly. In the end he could hold on to her hand no longer and had to see her go down. Her husband died on board the lifeboat.

A month later, a lifeboat was discovered drifting, full of water. It was the collapsable Boat A, still containing three dead bodies and on closer inspection....

....a gold wedding ring. It was was taken to New York and identified as Gerda Lindell's ring. The ring must have slipped off her finger as Wennerström struggled to hold on to her hand. I had read the story about the ring a few years ago and seeing it in person was just so sad. In fact, I was finding the whole exhibit just so sad. And our individual English-language audio guides had melanchody musical accompaniment from the film Titanic, which added to the somber mood.

A watch and chain, found on the body of Swedish passenger Carl Asplund, which stopped working at the time of his death. Many of the items on display were recovered from passengers' bodies.

More items from the Titanic. There were a few pieces from the ship itself recovered immediately after the sinking, but the only item on display that was brought up to the surface from the sunken Titanic (rediscovered in 1985) was a large chunk of coal.

I can't allow this short discussion to end without mentioning a few things that have always bothered me about the history of the Titanic.

The first was the folk/camp song that my older brother learned at camp when he was a kid and then sang to me: Titanic (Husbands and Wives) or It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down, written just a few years after the Titanic sank. Do you know it? The chorus is:

It was sad (It was sad), It was sad (It was sad),
It was sad when that great ship went down (to the bottom of the sea),
Husbands and wives and little children lost their lives,
It was sad when that great ship went down.

And because kids will be kids and like to change things up a bit, the last two times the chorus was sung, the lyrics changed to:

Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants,

and then

Counselors and campers, little children lost their pampers,
It was sad when that great ship went down.

I remember, at the tender age of 6 or 7, being so troubled by the image the lyrics conjured up in the mind -- little diaper-less babies floundering around in icy water with their mothers, father, uncles and aunts....until they all died.

And I also recall in the mid-90s visiting the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta where there were advertisements for an upcoming Titanic exhibit. You could even pay for a special tour that included dinner -- the exact meal that was served to the First Class passengers on the last night of the Titanic's voyage. That seemed rather morbid to me. Only 38% of the people on board the Titanic survived. That "experience the Titanic's last meal" special event didn't sit well with me.

But here's the one that really gets my goat. When Micaela was in kindergarten, we went to her school's Fall Festival. There would be plenty of activities, crafts and inflatable fun, including what the flyer stated was "the huge Titanic slide."  I didn't realize it would be an actual slide of a sinking Titanic.

It really turned my stomach, thinking of how people slid down to their deaths, but David told me I was being silly and took pictures of the the kids on it.  It was really large and the highlight of the festival for the crowd.

I felt vindicated, though, when a few years later, someone wrote a letter to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution talking about seeing a Titanic slide at a different festival.  He was in complete disbelief that people thought this was OK and that re-enacting how so many people died should be a source of amusement.

Which brings me back to why I had a problem with it.  There were 2,223 people on board the Titanic when it sank.  Of those, 1,517 died, died in such a tragic way.   That number was brought to life for us at the end of the exhibit.  On the walls were lists of those who died.  Board after board of names, with ages listed, which just broke your heart. One set of names  were Third Class Passengers:

Lefebvre, Mrs. Frances Marie, 40
Lefebvre, Miss Mathilde, 12
Lefebvre, Miss Jeannie, 8
Lefebvre, Master Henri, 5
Lefebvre, Miss Ida, 3

I don't know. Maybe I need to lighten up. But having an inflatable slide memorializing how so many of these people died...I just feel they deserve more respect than that.

The problem with baking in Germany

Two of my biggest challenges in Germany are food shopping and baking. Now that I think about it, the two are related. Over the last two years, I have gotten by with meal cooking, but baking has been more of a problem.

Take, for instance, baking that perennial American favorite, chocolate chip cookies. My first month here, I decided to bake some and went to the store, shopping list translated (something I would forget to do periodically and it was a problem -- particularly in the spice aisle). I thought I was all prepared. As has happened often since we moved here, it ended up being more difficult than I anticipated. It was a little while before I was able to bake some cookies. And there was a learning curve (i.e. burned cookies) working with my metric convection oven.

I found the following items with no problem: flour, sugar, salt, butter, vanilla and eggs. When I did some research on-line (there are several threads about baking chocolate chip cookies in Europe on ex-pat websites), there were long discussions about which type of flour was best, whether or not you need to add extra salt to the batter (most butter here is unsalted) and if the vanilla here (bourbon vanilla) is OK to use (it is).

But the other ingredients were a bit of a challenge: You can find chocolate chips, but they are sold in tiny packages and to buy the equivalent of 2 cups, you'd be paying around $12.00. I found that chopping up a block of semi-sweet chocolate worked OK and some kind people have brought or sent me chocolate chips from the U.S. or from the commissary. Baking soda is another thing you have to have sent to you or brought to you from the commissary (along with Cream of Tartar). But the biggest challenge at first was the brown sugar. I could find no brown sugar in any stores. They have brown granulated sugar, but no moist brown sugar.

I did some research and found out that it's actually easy to make your own brown sugar. Just mix granulated sugar with molasses. OK, so I just had to find molasses. Scoured several stores but came up empty-handed.

I did some more research and found out that you can only find molasses here in health food stores and what they carry is a thick type called blackstrap. Further research showed that I would need to add some honey to the mixture to make an American-type of brown sugar. I finally gathered the molasses, sugar and honey, but was so frustrated and intimidated by then, that I gave up for a while.

And then my big discovery. I had read on-line where some Chinese grocery stores carry brown sugar. There was a little Asian grocery store right at the big Super-Walmart-ish type of store I go to once a week and I made a point of checking it out.

And there on a shelf was some dark brown sugar. What a find! As I made my way through the little store, I found other things I had not yet located elsewhere -- red pepper flakes, fresh cilantro and green chilies. I was a happy lady.

I was able to make chocolate cookies that turned out fairly well. Onto the next challenge.

David's birthday was two weeks ago and it passed by quietly with no celebration. We had had visitors the week before and sick children for almost a whole week straight the following week. I was determined to make his favorite lemon cheesecake today. Last year when I made it, a friend had brought the ingredients for me from the U.S. This year, I'd be on my own.

I went shopping for the ingredients and found butter, cream cheese, vanilla, and sugar just fine.

Here's what was tricky: Evaporated milk (I got a less-fat condensed milk), lemon jello (didn't realize when I bought it and as I was preparing the cheesecake that the jello here is unsweetened and I should have added less gelatin and more sugar), graham crackers (no graham crackers here, but found an animal cracker type of cookie that worked OK).

Oh, and there's the extra challenge of following an American recipe here where you need to convert everything to metric or vice versa. I use my food scale constantly.

In the end, the kids liked the cheesecake, but David and I were less impressed. The consistency wasn't as fluffy as it should have been and it had virtually no flavor, even though I added some lemon juice for good measure. David was a good sport, but didn't declare it "A triumph, my dear, a triumph!" (Quote from the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol) as he has been known to do in the past.

The water in Liederbach is so hard....

.....How hard is it?

It's so hard that you always have to filter your water before putting it in your coffee maker, there's always hard water buildup around your faucets and...

...the insides of your 2½-year old washing machine calcifies and stops working.

Our washing machine started malfunctioning last week -- running for 10 minutes and then shutting itself off and fiddling with the circuit breakers as well. All evidence pointed to an electrical problem.

Thank goodness a repairman was able to come within a few days. And the problem ended up being not an electrical one, but a water one. He explained to David that the water here is so hard, we should have been putting a special chemical into the washer with every load. That was news to us. We had never heard that before. David checked at work and no one there had ever heard of such a thing.

Our landlord happened to stop by that afternoon and told me that there is a gallon-size water softener in the basement that must need to be replaced. We'll still need to filter our water for coffee and use special cleaners to get rid of the hard-water buildup around the faucets, but the washing machine should be OK from now on.