American Sections in Grocery Stores

Dear Frau or Herr Person in Charge of Stocking the American Section of the Grocery Store,

What can be made with generic Cheese Whiz, Marshmallows and Fluff? I'm waiting because in all honesty, I don't know either and like you, now, I have also been asked that question. As an American (even, a native American* as I have been called) I have no real attachment to any of those items. I have never purchased Cheese Whiz, or any other cheese-like substance that comes from a pressurized can, I say cheese-like because to the best of my knowledge the stuff isn't even real cheese. As for Fluff, my cooking guru says that it can be used in fudge and we suppose that it could also be used as a shortcut in making Rice Crispy Treats. Though in my case, this is a moot point as you don't carry Rice Crispies. Of this threesome marshmallows are the most usable. They can be melted to make Rice Crispy Treats, roasted to make s'mores (if you carried graham crackers) or you could engage in my very favorite marshmallow activity and throw them into the campfire and watch them melt and ooze and grow and sometimes even explode.

As an American, I would suggest that you eliminate the cheese whiz stuff entirely -- it's only redeeming value is in making neat designs in it as it comes out of the can -- and greatly reduce the amount of marshmallows and Fluff. Instead I recommend you start stocking real American foods and by "real" I do not mean anything that is actually made by a German company (I don't care what that cookie company said, those were not real American style chocolate chip cookies). Instead I suggest the following items: chocolate chips, American brown sugar (yes it is different than German brown sugar), low sodium Rice-A-Roni (the San Fransisco treat), canned pumpkin (I recommend Libby's brand), Kraft Cheese and Macaroni (also called Easy Mac), graham crackers, more Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines or Pilsbury cake mixes and frosting jars. I'm certain I can think of more ideas to share with you later.

Finally to any parents with children who want to try American foods, I have the following suggestion. Cook some macaroni noodles, while they are cooking, take a nice orange cheddar cheese, make it into a cheese sauce with milk and butter. Mix the two so that the pasta is completely coated with the gooey cheese sauce mixture. Serve warm. Tell your children it is called macaroni and cheese and that American children love it.

Best regards,

Melissa

* For any non-Americans reading this, "Native American" is the generic term for American Indians. While I am part Native American, the person who referred to me as being native American was referring to the fact that I was born in the U.S. and was rather confused when I tried to explain the American usage of the term.

Success in the Great Molasses Quest

Yes it took visits to at least six grocery stores (more if you count individual branches of the same chain), but perseverance paid off and I can say that I found molasses at the Reform Haus in the Frankfurt Nordwestzentrum (Northwest Center, I find that mildly amusing). The Reform Haus is a health food store (which I think does alternative medicine and bio food as well, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention) where I was also able to find gloriously unsweetened applesauce (which I also haven't been able to find at 'normal' grocery stores). I haven't tried the applesauce yet, but even if I decide I don't like the taste it can be used for baking purposes.

Anyway, back to the molasses. I don't know what it is about molasses that gets it into a health food store, but I am grateful. My next step is to try mixing it with regular white sugar to see if I can get a usable result.

The quest for real American chocolate chip cookies

I decided I wanted to make some chocolate chip cookies, preferably chocolate chip pumpkin cookies, but I was willing to concede that I had no idea whether or not my local stores carried pumpkin puree (so far, they don't). To my American mind, the major ingredients in a basic chocolate chip cookie are, well, basic. Any American grocery store will carry them all, usually with a variety of sizes and brand names to chose from. So far I have found everything but the chocolate chips and brown sugar (though I am still trying to determine which type of available flour is most similar to American all-purpose flour). The lack of chocolate chips is discouraging, but not fatal, as German chocolate is very good and I can always smash or chop up a candy bar in order to get my little chocolate pieces. In fact proper scientific study might require several types of chocolate bars to be sacrificed to this noble cause so that each can be assessed separately. It will mean making more cookies than I originally intended, but these minor inconveniences are part of living in a foreign country. I will report on the results after I solve the brown sugar problems.

My brown sugar problems are slightly more complex than the chocolate chip problem. Yes, I know that German stores have bags of sugar that are labeled "Braun Zucker" however this brown sugar is different than what Americans call brown sugar (a woman who has never been to North America absolutely insisted this could not be the case because if it is called brown sugar it is brown sugar, the point really wasn't worth arguing). However, I knew about this problem before I got to Germany and am prepared to make my own brown sugar, as my cooking guru (a.k.a. Mom) has informed me that American brown sugar is basically a combination of white granulated sugar and molasses. What I didn't consider was that molasses (Melasse) might not be readily available, partially based on the logic that molasses is an ingredient in gingerbread; gingerbread is associated with Christmas and "Hansel and Gretel"*; Germans are known for their skill at celebrating Christmas and their wonderful fairy tales (Märchen, one of my favorite German words) including "Hansel and Gretel;" ergo I really thought molasses would be findable. Sadly, I was wrong and as I type this, I can say that I have looked in four grocery stores and have no molasses. However, I do have a lead...

*Further research indicates that my childhood memories notwithstanding, in "Hansel and Gretel" the witch's house is not always (perhaps not even usually) made of gingerbread, it can also be made of bread, cake, candies, or chocolate.

Mein Deutsch

When talking about the German language in German, which was something we did a lot in my 3 week language course, one of my biggest problems was that I always wanted to say "Deutsche" instead of "Deutsch" and apparently "die Deutsche" ("die" is pronounced "dee") are the German people as a whole, not the German language. I think this problem came about through my confusion about when you put -e on the end of a word (I know the rules, its knowing when they apply that is difficult) and the fact that I had been attempting to read something that I honestly thought was using "Deutsche" for the language.


Right now my German is very limited, but I can usually get by. I have found that I do better with materials aimed at children, including my Disney movies (I am considering getting a few more to add some variety to my viewing choices). I can talk about basic things if others use short sentences and simple words and if it doesn't go on to long. My total German immersion endurance is somewhere between two and four hours (listening) after which my brain rebels and my German skills start going downhill really fast. Where in the spectrum I will be depends on things like how complex the German is, how much of it I can understand immediately v. how much I have to pick together what I think the person means, how tired I am, etc.

The Weather Report

Today I was reminding myself of all the days I rejoiced in not experiencing Wisconsin's heavy snowfalls and freezing temperatures, as today I would gladly have swapped Frankfurt's weather report with Wisconsin's.

I woke up to a slushy white that had me watching where I put my feet and trying to clear of the snow piles falling off tree limbs. And I needed my gloves, something that hasn't happened very often since I arrived in Germany.

The snow continued throughout the morning, blowing sideways past the windows and decided to pick up a bit at lunchtime but go away in the afternoon so that by the time I came home from work, damp roads were the only remnant of the snowy slush.

The Apotheke

If you want to buy just about any medicine in Germany you must go to the Apotheke (Apothecary or Pharmacy) where nearly everything (including eye drops for dry eyes) is located behind the counter, I suppose this is so they can control what you get and decide whether or not you really need it (I know an American who got into an argument with an employee over whether or not he required the medicine he was looking for, drowsiness was one of the side effects and the employee thought he should try something else, he was having trouble sleeping and wanted the medicine to make him drowsy).

My personal experiences with Apothekes have been mercifully brief and much more cordial. My most frusterating experience with one was more of a language barrier issue. I wanted to purchase Band-Aids and the pharmacist didn't recognize the name. We eventually found what I was looking for under the (English language) name plastic adhesives.

General Conference and Church in General in Frankfurt

This is for my LDS friends who asked how we handle General Conference here in Germany. I cannot say definitely how everyone does it, but the schedule for my ward is as follows:

Saturday:
Watch/listen to the Saturday Morning session live at 6pm (10 am Mountain time). You can go to the church building or do this over the Internet.

Sunday:

The Priesthood and General Young Women sessions begin at 11 am (both recordings, only at the church)
The recording of theSaturday Afternoon session at the church at 2pm
The Sunday Morning session live at 6pm.

I don't know what we do about the Sunday Afternoon session. As it starts at 10pm Frankfurt time and ends at midnight, I do not think I will be listening to it live. I did listen to the Saturday morning session live and was very pleased to hear Frankfurt mentioned several times.

For more church related information, the building that I attend church in contains 3 wards - two German speaking and one English speaking. I attend the English speaking ward which is part of an English speaking stake, primarily for embassy employees and members of the military and their families (the word military is in our stake's name) but open to whomever.

Another cool thing about the Church in Frankfurt is that the church building is on the same plot of land as the Church's European headquarters, which means a fair number of my fellow ward members are employed by the church in various capacities and we have lots of senior missionary couples in our ward. I have been told that our congregation is also a semi-frequent stopping point for visiting General Authorities. I have not yet experienced that, but can say that having lots of Church employees in the ward has resulted in some of the most fascinating Sunday School lessons I have ever attended.

On site seeing last weekend

Yes, I finally did some real site seeing with some new friends. Didn't make it to the Goethe Museum, but we did check out the Frankfurt Cathedral which is absolutely beautiful inside, you can't see much of the outside right now because it is being renovated. What I did get to see were some post-WWII pictures that showed the cathedral standing alone amongst rubble and bombed out buildings.

We then went to the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, which I didn't really care for as my opinions of what makes good art and the museum directors' opinions are very different.

The final site I"m going to mention is the Main Tower. Very tall and with a great view of the city. Rather than explain I will show:




The Main River. In the second picture you can see the Frankfurt Cathedral coming up from its scaffolding near the center. On the bottom center you can see St. Pauls Kirche which was the birthplace of democracy in Germany back in 1848 (that particular democracy ended in 1849).

The tower in this picture is a TV antenna in the north of Frankfurt, I was disappointed that that was all it was because I think it looks pretty neat.



A picture of the Zeil, Frankfurt's main shopping district. The large building on the center of the left hand side is Galleria Kaufhof, a rather large department store. The top floor has a cafeteria style restaurant that serves a diabetic cake with an absolutely wonderful strawberry topping.

The street where I had my German lessons, 8 hours a day, five days a week in the top floor of the white building near the center of the photo. Goethe's birthplace is on the diagonal running street behind it.

Random old tower

One of the things that I like about living in Frankfurt is stuff like this:




Random cool old buildings, in this case located in a children's playground not terribly far from where I live.

My apartment

I am in my new permanent apartment. I have to paint it but it did come with a small stove, oven and a kitchen sink (the refrigerator goes where the chair is) but I have to provide that myself, still better and much less expensive than outfitting an entire kitchen, which I have been told includes being forced to pay someone approximately 1,000 euros to install it).












One of the really cool things about it is that it comes with a nice sized balcony that I plan to turn into a summer time sitting area with a little container garden.

Rejoining the 21st Century

Yes, only five weeks and two visits by company technicians after signing the contract with Vodafone I am enjoying the luxury of having internet and telephone service in my home. I do not know why this took so long or what the purpose of the second technicians visit was (besides the fact that after his visit yesterday I had phone and internet service) but I am grateful it did not take the four months that another expat waited back in 2007.

Overall I am pleased with my telecom package, which comes to just under 30 euros a month and includes DSL and unlimited calls to U.S. land lines (and to land lines in 12 or 13 other countries, but to be perfectly honest, I can't imagine myself calling the Vatican any time in the near future). The U.S. calls was an extra 5 euros and after I asked about it the salesman tried to pitch another package that would have added a bunch of other countries (mostly in Africa and Asia if I recall correctly) for something like 14 euros a month but I don't know anyone in those countries either (the salesman assured me that if this changes I can upgrade my telecom package whenever I wish).

Goethe Museum

Okay, so I only got to the cafe and the gift shop (where I didn't even buy anything), but it was fun. Right now I'm in a three week intensive language course where we go out for lunch each day and practice small talk. Today we went to a small cafe around the corner from Goethe's birthplace (the Tortolloni was excellent) and since we had time, browsed the gift shop. The gift shop had some neat stuff in it, lots of old fashioned pens and ink wells along with some of the more typical gift shop merchandise. I plan to check out the rest of the museum some Saturday after I am settled into my new (permanent) apartment.

The Train Wreck that Was My First Day in Germany

So I’m finally getting ready to write about my rather exhausting first week in Germany. Since my flight arrived on Sunday, I will start with Monday, my first full day in a foreign country, ever. Yes, before I got on the plane on Saturday I had lived over 2,500 miles from the place where I was born (2,831 miles driving, according to Mapquest) but had never left the United States of America.

So, back to Monday. My first goal was to go to the office where I had to register so that I could receive my residency and work permits in three days’ time, after that I wanted check out my temporary living arrangements, purchase a prepaid cell phone (or Handy as they are called here) and, if there was time, open a German bank account and stop by the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Die Kirche Jesu Christi der Heiligen der Letzten Tage) to meet the Institute Missionaries and anyone else who might be around.

Well, I decided to take the train to the Registration Bureau (Bürgeramt), and I thought I had it figured out between my map of the train system and my map of Frankfurt, until I got to the main train station where I spent the next 40 minutes, trying to buy a train pass and trying to figure out where to go to actually get on the train. The train pass was particularly fun because I wanted to buy a Monatskarte, or monthly pass, from the machine (which of course did not take credit cards). I think this was a reasonable thing to attempt as there was a button labeled Monatskarte. Eventually I gave up and purchased a Tageskarte or day pass which the machine did let me do. Then after I finally got on the right train and finally arrived at the Bürgeramt, I was given a number and told to wait in the upstairs waiting room.

As government waiting rooms go, this one was quite nice and I liked the automated system that showed the last three numbers to be served and which desk number they should go to. I also liked the relatively short wait. At first getting registered was a bit tricky as my German is fairly bad and the (very nice) woman helping me didn’t speak English (note: if anyone ever tells you that all Germans speak English, they don’t know what they are talking about, a large number of Germans speak English but not all). Then I found out that in order to complete the registration, I needed to give them an address of where I was going to be living, something I didn’t have yet as I had been told that registration was my number one priority for as soon as I got to Frankfurt and that all I needed to do was to go there with my passport and the information from my employer. This of course meant that after all my getting lost and trying to figure out how to buy a train ticket I would have to go back and register later.

On the way back to my hotel I purchased a prepaid cell phone, and had some difficulty figuring out how to make the thing work but decided that wasn’t important at present because I needed to get over to my temporary home for my 1 o’clock appointment. Where I found out that there had been some miscommunication concerning my housing arrangements, meaning I might not be able to move in on Tuesday as, I thought had been previously planned. I then promptly got lost.

It started with my decision to walk a little ways rather than try to figure out which trains were going which directions. My map clearly showed where the train line ran and so I decided to follow that road and maybe along the way I would get lucky and find a store that sold an adapter that I could use on my computer as the one I had brought with me was dead.

That wasn’t such a great idea, as I got lost again. I still don’t know how exactly I managed to get lost whilst following a single road, but I did.

I had a brief, bright moment of hope when I saw two LDS missionaries walking down the other side of the street, and I realized if anyone in Frankfurt knew how to get to the church building, it would be them. Then the light changed and they continued on while I waited for the opportunity to cross the busy street between us. At that point I determined the world was mocking me.

Finally with the help of the woman at the British Book Shop, I was able to find the U-Bahn station and get on the right train going the right direction.

At some point during the time I was lost, I passed the 24 hour mark in the total number of hours I had been in Germany in my life.

Life seemed to be going better once I got on the U-5 headed north towards Preungisheim. I wasn’t exactly certain which stop I needed to get off at, but once the train started running above ground I could see the house numbers from my seat and I knew the Church was at Eckenheimer Landstraβe 262-264. So I got off the train when I saw an odd number that was only a little ways down from the two-sixties. Within a few moments of the train leaving I discovered an interesting quirk in German (or at least this Frankfurtian street’s) house numbering system, namely that number 262 isn’t necessarily across the street from or anywhere else near to number 261.

By the time I got to the church building I was tired and could feel the blisters on the backs of my heels and ankles and on the bottoms of my toes. The front doors were locked and going along the outside of the building only resulted in seeing walls without doors. This was the point at which I started crying. Fortunately, I was able to get a hold of myself a little and see that there was a door bell. My day started improving from there on as one of the senior missionaries answered the door, showed me how to get to the entrance that the Institute Outreach Center uses.
I was also able to e-mail my parents and get a better idea of what exactly was going on, including determining that the housing situation was really a misunderstanding that was easily cleared up. This really was the point at which life started looking up as a variety of problems began to be sorted out; at minimum I had a place to live and learned where I could buy a Monatskarte. I am still trying to determine whether the fact that everyone I met there has ample reason to think that I am a flaky emotional basket case is a good thing or a bad thing.

German Kezboards

So the standard computer kezboard in Germanz is different from the U.S. standard. Several of the kezs are in different spaces and mz computeräs kezboard has extra kezs for the letters the umlauted a, o, and u. Or Ä Ö and Ü and for the Alt Gr key that works like a reverse shift, for those letter keys that also have other szmbols on them.

I will admit that having the umlauted characters on my work computer is nice, particularly during my woeful attempts to write in German so that I don’t have to copy and paste from the character map and I am getting used to the change, now that I’m done typing like I would on an American keyboard, I’ve only had to correct about three quarters of the letters and symbols that are different, a great improvement over the first time I used a German computer last week.

What I’m having the most difficulty with is the @ and € signs, located under the Q and E keys respectively, especially the @. I suppose I will eventually get accustomed to the “Alt Gr” key, but for right now I’m getting approximately equal results of “ (quotation marks are above the 2) Q (from hitting the shift instead and the correct @ when typing in e-mail addresses for anything. Particularly when I have to type e-mail addresses that I am familiar with since I used to be able to key them in without particularly thinking about which keys my fingers were hitting. I’ll get used to it, hopefully without destroying my ability to type on an American keyboard in the process.

Air India

I’ve been having some internet connection issues that are going to continue to interfere with my ability to post, but here is my promised review of Air India.

I chose to fly to Frankfurt on Air India because it was cheap and I figured I could sleep through most of it as the flight was scheduled to leave Chicago at 7:05 pm and arrive in Frankfurt at 10:05 am, which when you factor in the time difference is a 8 hour nonstop flight.

You might have noticed that I said scheduled. The flight was delayed for nearly three hours, which was annoying partially because if I had known it was going to be delayed for that long I might have spent more time dawdling with my parents before going through security and less time waiting on my own. The break down of the delay was one hour before we boarded and the rest after boarding, for a total of ten hours on the plane.

I will say that the flight attendants and captain were very good about handing out snacks and providing updates as to our status (usually, that we were still delayed but people were working on the problem). However, the whole set up was a little more cramped than I remember my last experience flying, so it was a little difficult to get comfortable. At first I played with the rather nifty touch-screen on the back of my seat, but it locked up before the flight was underway and I was left to realize exactly how crowded my space was as I tried to get at a book in the bag I had stowed underneath the seat in front of me.

Once we got underway, and I was finally able to close the window shade I discovered that most of my fellow passengers intended to stay up for a while longer, even though it was now after 10 pm local time and I was ready to sleep. I woke up not terribly long afterwards to find that dinner was being served and to discover that I don’t care for airplane Indian food. The rice and bread roll were fine, the rest of it was too spicy for traveling. However, since breakfast, served some four or five hours later, was a wonderful croissant with butter and strawberry jam I am going to say that the problem was likely as much to do with my picky eating habits as anything else.

At some point after dinner and the time when I was able to fall asleep (and make the note to remember my ear plugs and eye mask the next time I fly overnight) they finally did dim the lights. The next time I woke up, it was a sunny day in France and time for breakfast. I will also note that the airline gets kudos for frequent offering of various beverages. After breakfast was served they had a cart with what I think was several options for tea and coffee, this didn’t do me any good since I don’t drink either one, but it was still a nice thing for them to do.

The flight was otherwise unremarkable. My personal opinion on Air India is that the in-flight service was good and I would fly them again if they offered the lowest ticket price and a convenient flight time, but that I wouldn’t necessarily pick an Air India flight over another similarly priced ticket.