Feuerwehr in der Küche

On Wednesday night at about 10:30, while I was working on my translation homework, the fire alarm went off. This is not an uncommon occurrence. About once a month, someone burns their dinner and sets off the alarm. The key to not causing an uproar, is to actually call the fire department and tell them that there is no fire, rather some burned schnitzel. No one knows who burned, their dinner, but it was someone on my floor (but not my kitchen). My kitchen mate Daniella and I waited around for a while, knowing there was no fire, and talked to the firemen as they came up. After assessing that the fire would have to have been burning for a half hour and there was no sign of smoke, they determined that the best thing to do was open the window. Once again I point out that this was not my doing. I know how to cook. Anyway, it was fun to watch the firemen look very confused and shining flashlights at a smokeless beeping alarm. Daniella and I just laughed, then we went downstairs until they turned off the alarm. As we came down with the firemen, Danielle yelled to the people she know “Nicht uns!” (not us!). They laughed a little and life went back to normal as the alarm went off, but it was a fun little adventure.

The Discovery of...Bologna?!

The discovery of…Bologna?

There are a few things that most people take for granted until living in a foreign country.  One of them is going to the bank.  I have learned over the past few months that the word “einzahlen” means to deposit money.  This is very useful if you don’t know how to say things like “I want to put this in my account”.  I still don’t know what the word for bank account is in German, but when I say I want to deposit money and give them my card, they get the idea.  To withdraw, I find it easiest to use the atm (geldautomat-literally money machine).  
Another challenge for the language impaired is grocery shopping.  Now most days at home I forget what it was I went to the grocery store to get.  That is no problem here (I make lists)…here, the problem is that I know what I want and even where it should be, but I have no idea what it’s called.  Milk was my first challenge.  There is in one tiny grocery store, a huge wall of dairy products that I couldn’t identify.  “Milch” is an easy enough word to translate, but what does “fettarme” mean?  I know now that it means low fat.  Ok, that only took me a week to get used to.  So a wall of milk, some low fat, some not, no explaination of what animal it comes from, and oh yes, why is it not refrigerated? Uh…ok, we’ll just go with that one ‘cause the milk is good for the next three months.
Ok, now that we’ve got milk, we move on to meats.  This should be fairly easy.  You can identify most meat.  Well, that is until you are really broke and can only afford lunch meat for sandwiches for the next week.  So on one of my really broke days I was shopping for lunch meat.  I chose the cheapest ones.  One was salami looking and the other was some pinky looking stuff.  “Ham sausage” according to the package.  Turns out, ham sausage is actually bologna.  (Huh…so that’s what’s in bologna.)  Really I should have figured on it being bologna, since it was the cheapest meat in the place.  A little side note, I haven’t particularly cared for bologna (except the pickled kind) since I was about twelve, but I’ve learned to like it again. Meat also comes in a jar.  Having read “The Jungle” recently, I keep my distance from jar meats.  It really does look like cat food in a mustard jar.  Thanks, sometimes my cats won’t even eat that crap.  
An easy buy?  Pizza.  You can always look at the box to know what’s on it.  This was a staple food here for a long time, but I’ve given it up for lent.  Since deciding to give up pizza for lent, I’ve received at least 5 pizza take-out menus in my mail box every week.  They’re torturing me.  Really they are.  One more week…one more week…

Five Days in Barcelona

Mehek and I at Gaudi's Park Guell in Barcelona

Mehek, Dan, Jürgen, Janine and I all went to Barcelona recently. We had a wonderful time enjoying the warm weather and sunshine. We got some nice souvenirs, saw the Mediterranean Sea, and even ate a little seafood.

Day 1, Tuesday:

We took the train from Paderborn to the Dortmund airport, and then we flew to Barcelona. We took a bus from the airport to one of the main town squares and wandered around with our luggage looking for the office to pick up our apartment keys. That was a fun little adventure. After getting the keys, we hiked to our apartment. Yeah, it was really in the ghetto. It was on a dead end street next to a park. With the number of needles and people lying down on the sidewalk in the park at night, we figured that heroin was the recreation of choice in that neighborhood. A great place for tourists. It was, however, only two blocks of the major tourist strip. So that was pretty nice. We abandoned the apartment after a while to get some dinner. There was an Indian restaurant around the corner from our place, so we went there. Since none of us had much Spanish speaking under our belt, Mehek tried something else. She spoke Urdu (Hindi something). She ordered our dinner for us and later when we went shopping most of the souvenir shops were owned by people who also spoke Urdu. Mostly we spoke to them in English, but when ever they would talk amongst themselves, Mehek could understand them. Then she would heckle with them over prices saying that she was Pakistani and that their prices were just too expensive. We got pretty good deals on everything we bought.

Day 2, Wednesday:

We started our “photo tour” with La Cathedral then went to the Arc of Triumph, Sagrada Familia (a new cathedral by Gaudi still not quite finished) and a few other houses, and points of interest. This took most of our day, so afterwards we went back to out apartment for a bit. Janine and I stayed there and Jürgen, Dan and Mehek went out on the strip to see a bit of nightlife. Dan and Mehek ordered sangria at a little café on the strip and when it came it was in a fish bowl sized glass. One for each of them. The also paid 10 euros for them. They were surprised about both the size and the price, so they brought half of it home and Janine tried to drink some, but it wasn’t great sangria, just the cheap stuff they sell to the tourists.

Day 3, Thursday:

We toured the winding road through the Olympic quarter and saw arenas and the old torch and all kinds of Olympic related stuff. It was pretty interesting. Dan and Jürgen decided they wanted to go up one of the mountains (by train) to see an old fortress and we girls decided to go shopping on the pier. After we met up with the guys again we all had dinner at a Tapas bar. We’d done a lot of walking that day, so we decided to stay in for the night. Mehek didn’t feel well anyway.

Day 4, Friday:

This was the day we went to Park Guell. It’s a really cool park all designed by Gaudi. I’ve got some great pictures of it. We spent most of the morning hiking up part of a mountain to get there and then spend a couple of hours enjoying the park. After that we got lunch and climbed the rest of the way (or as far as we could go on foot) to a train which was supposed to take us to the top to see a great view of the city, but the train was closed. At this point, Mehek felt quit sick and she and I went back to the apartment while Dan Jürgen and Janine went to the beach. Mehek laid down then we took a pair of pants (which she’d bought on the pier) back because she grabbed the wrong size. After returning her pants, we asked some guy at a smoothie bar to tell us where to get a good Spanish meal. He pointed us in the right direction and we had a great seafood/paella dinner. We paid quite a bit for it, but most of the places we’d eaten at all week didn’t really give us enough food for a the walking we’d done, so it was nice to be really full with something that actually had substance.

Day 5, Saturday:

Mehek was feeling worse, so all we did was pack up and go to the airport. Nothing much exciting about that, but it was part of the journey.

One week later:

Mehek is still a little sick, but I took her to a doctor yesterday and they gave her some medication and told her to come back on Monday if she’s not well by then. She feels better, but she’s still not healthy. I guess sometimes that’s the price you pay for having a vacation.