Mainz

Tim, Rebecca and I visited the 2,000 year-old city of Mainz today. It was here, during the 15th century, that Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press. Time was short so we didn't get to see an original Gutenberg Bible as we would have liked, but rather contented ourselves with visiting the Mainz Cathedral and Altstadt (Old town).
This Renaissance fountain dates from 1526 and I couldn't resist taking a picture of the cat at the bottom.

The cathedral has a construction starting date of 975.


Below are some ghoulish pieces that caught our eye.



This skeleton helped guard one of the crypts that held, according to our guidebook, "bits of the 22 saints of Mainz."

Beautiful murals painted in the 19th century

In the Altstadt
You cannot escape the influence of America, even in the medieval section of a German city! The text in the center of the concert ad reads: Put your head on my shoulder, Diana, My Way, u.v.a.

Uncle Tim's Visit

My brother Tim was in Amsterdam for business this week, so he flew down to Frankfurt to pay us a visit. It was like Christmas morning when he opened a suitcase packed just for us. Inside were Poptarts, Fruit Roll-ups, Jif peanut butter, Goldfish, brown sugar, chocolate chips, pancake mix, American magazines and Reese's Peanut Butter cups, among other things.

We have found some imported generic mac-n-cheese here, but there's nothing like Kraft original.

Fasching Parade

We went to the nearby town of Hofheim this afternoon to see a Fasching Parade. We have heard that Karneval time "except for Munich's Oktoberfest, is the one time of year when many normally staid Germans loosen up and go a little crazy." There were marching bands, floats and lots of eating and drinking. The people on the floats threw bags of popcorn and candy to the crowd and if you were particularly lucky, they may have even poured you a glass of beer or gluhwein. We shouted the traditional Fasching greeting of "Helau!" to everyone.

We met with some Lufthansa friends from Liederbach who got all dressed up. Our kids didn't want to, but said they will next year.

We saw several Pippi Longstockings.

Note the multitasking with the Lederhosen-clad bass drum player also transporting the beer.

Helau!

This was our favorite band. Their music sounded like skeletons dancing on a windy, creepy night.

Kids pulling the beer wagon

Sailor with a belt of mini bottles of alcohol

A local farmer in search of a wife

More Fasching parade scenes

The Women's Day

It is Fasching in Germany now, or Carnival time. Carnival Thursday is called Wieverfastelovend (The women's day), and men everywhere, beware! This is the day women take control. One way they get to take their revenge on male domination is to cut mens' ties wherever they get hold of them. Men know to wear an old or costume tie to work or risk having a nice tie cut in two. Many men simply go tie-less.

David wore a hideous tie and was disappointed that his tie was still intact at lunch time. In the cafeteria however, the cashier informed him that he was surely going to lose that tie soon and, true to her word, a few minutes later, she cut David's tie in half and gave him a kiss.

Micaela recreates the moment for you all here. Tomorrow is the kids' Fasching party at school and no scary costumes or weapons are allowed. The stores have looked like Halloween for the last month with bright and colorful costumes, but I did notice curiously large displays of fake weapons.

Best Day Ever

James declared today to be the best day we have had yet in Germany. Somehow, we managed to cram more activity into this one day than we have done in the last 4 weeks.

It all began with much-needed haircuts for Micaela and me. Then David and I went to IKEA and picked up a desk, shelves and an office chair to make a scrapbooking station. Setup will need to wait a day, though. What is a few days when I have already waited months?

A little while later, David took Micaela and James to an outdoor skating rink in Frankfurt where James' teacher had arranged an informal get-together for the class. Many of his classmates were there and James at that point declared it the best day yet in Germany. Little did he know that the best was yet to come.

After a short rest, a recycling run and some food shopping, we all went out for an evening of Kegel, or bowling. David had been before, so he was not surprised when we first entered into a restaurant, descended the stairs and then ended up in our own personal bowling lane with a table set up for dinner.

The balls were about 1/2 the size of the American ones and the pins were also much smaller. The 9 pins had strings attached to them and they looked like marionettes when they were picked up and placed upright.

We first had fun bowling but had to adjust to only getting 1 attempt per turn and then with the pins being thinner, no one was able to knock down more than 8 pins at a time, and even that was a rare event. I grew up in New England doing candlepin bowling, and this was pretty similar.

Watch, Micaela. Watch and learn.

We enjoyed typical German fare for dinner. Here is a kid-sized schnitzel and fries. And no ice in soft drinks here. Schnitzel (usually pork cutlet) is something none of the kids wanted to try when we first moved here, but now they all order it when we go out.

James working on his technique.

Emilie was very discouraged that she had not managed to knock down a single pin during the first hour of play.

Then, finally,writing her score on the scoreboard,and a smile.
One last picture.

Ummm...aren't those illegal?

James had mentioned a few times that kids in his class passed around candy cigarettes to celebrate someone's birthday. With one brand of gum-cigarettes, you could even blow a puff of "smoke" out of the end. I remembered buying candy cigarettes at the store when I was a kid, but since you don't see them around anymore, I figured they must have been banned in the U.S. Well, I checked and even though there were a few attempts to ban them, candy cigarettes are not illegal in the U.S., and with a little bit of extra work, you can find them (even at Amazon.com). I wondered how hard they would be to find in Germany.

So, I couldn't resist. Right at our Real (like a SuperWalmart), there they were.

The ones on the left are chewing gum, though we couldn't make a puff of smoke appear. The ones on the right are chocolate and look like unfiltered cigarettes. James won't be passing these around to his classmates, though. I have heard that his teacher banned these from the classroom.





And I did come across some of the Roast Turkey flavored Pringles that have been on the shelves since Thanksgiving time. We had to try one, just to say we had. "They taste like stuffing!" was the consensus here. I'll stick with salt and vinegar, I think.








In other culinary news, I spent 20 minutes cutting up chunks of chocolate to put into waffle batter last weekend. I was so excited to make my first batch of homemade waffles a few weeks back, until I hit Step #4: Let batter sit for 1 hour. I know better now to start extra early. The waffles were yummy.

Not quite as tasty was my first attempt at baking cookies from scratch here. I tried making peanut butter cookies with a little disc of chocolate in the middle (I haven't found Hershey Kisses, yet) and I used the dry brown sugar that I mentioned early. The cookies were certainly edible, but they were very.....crispy. Not crunchy, mind you, but......crispy. Not crispy on the outside and nice and chewy on the inside. I'll have to fiddle around and see what I can figure out.

Random Observations

I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the time on my digital clock. It read "0:17".

We have been living without any ice in our freezer. Because the water is so hard, ice develops little white spots so when it thaws in your drink, you have little white dots floating around. The kids thought it was gross, so we have gone without.

I had to sign an official document for residency purposes saying that I entered into this marriage of my own free will.

We are starting to develop our own Nylund family in Germany lingo. For instance, because we now have 3 floors (not counting the basement) when the kids would yell for me and I was on the top floor, saying, "I'm upstairs!" wasn't cutting it. They would go on to ask, "Which upstairs?" Now we refer to the parents' floor as "upstairs upstairs" and sometimes, the kitchen is on the "downstairs downstairs" floor, depending on where you are.

TV shows usually don't start on the hour, or half hour. They're more likely to start at times such as 5:25, 4:50, 11:35, or the very popular 8:15pm for hit shows and movies.

The weather is not much of a factor in doing the things you need to do. I have seen elderly women riding bikes to the store at night in freezing rain, people walking their bundled-up little babies in sub-freezing weather and we have been invited to go play at the park several times where the temperature was hovering around the freezing mark. Being most recently from Atlanta, this will take some getting used to.

Many German women do shave their legs and under their arms. There is always an impressive amount of women's electric razors for sale at stores and the idea that German women in general don't shave is an outdated one.

Judging by how noisy our house it, carpet really does muffle noise.




I bought Rebecca a Dora the Explorer video in our little discount grocery store. You can watch it in English, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Gaelic.





With winter here, our wooden floors have gotten more creaky. Of course, the loudest creaky boards are right inside Rebecca's room and right in front of her crib (no joke).