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).