How to vote from bed

Although we're living abroad, we're still allowed to vote in Canadian elections (at least for the first five years that we're not residing in Canada). Since there was a national election back in October, I faxed away our applications for absentee ballots, which arrived about a week later in the mail. And so on October 5th, I was able to vote from bed for the first time ever.

Here I am, excitedly opening my voting packet.
Inside was a ballot, along with many different sizes of envelope, and detailed instructions as to how I should go about it.
The first step was writing in the full name of the candidate for whom I was voting. Because they use one ballot for all expats, it's not pre-printed with the candidates in your riding, so it's a bit more complicated than the usual "X" Canadians are used to. I was voting for the riding of Victoria, as it was the last place that I'd lived in Canada, while Jeremi was voting for Beauséjour in New Brunswick, as he was living there with his parents last summer. (I'm hiding it because it's a secret ballot.)
After this, the ballot when into the smallest envelope.
This envelope then went into a bigger envelope...

...which finally went into a still larger envelope which could be mailed to Canada.
Seal it all up...
...and I was done! No waiting in line (except to mail it later), and I didn't even have to get out of bed (though I was wearing one of the rather patriotic shirts that Jer's parents sent us shortly after we moved here for the occasion). All in all, it was quite easy. How I love elections, even when they don't turn out they way I'd like.

Last rugby game for a while

Late last September I went along with Jeremi to attend my first ever Jena rugby game, to see Jeremi play. The game was in Berlin, and we got a ride up with another teammate of Jeremi's, and were very entertained on the trip up by the Armenian cartoons his son was watching on the portable DVD player.

Once there, I settled in to watch, trying to get a couple pictures of the game. I was really trying to get a picture of Jeremi's shorts, which were completely ripped up the back so you could see his underwear throughout the game, but without success.
The game wasn't going well for Jena, in fact they ended up losing by thirty-some points, I think. (They're really not one of the stronger teams in the league, but it's still fun to play.) But then disaster struck, and Jeremi injured his back, pretty badly. Here he is writhing on the ground in pain:
The next day he could barely get out of bed, and went to see the doctor. They were pretty sure it was a pulled muscle rather than a disk or skeletal problem, and didn't want to x-ray him, and said it should get a bit better after about five days or so. And lo and behold, after five days he was able to walk again! (At least, he was able to walk further than to the doctor's office and back.) He had massage treatments and "fango" (basically treatment with a hot pad, which may or may not be made with a vulcanic mineral called fango) for several weeks afterward, and after a few months was back to normal. He's even playing rugby again, as of this year!

Hiking around Jena

One Saturday back in September I realized that I'd forgotten the cord and plug for my laptop at the institute, which I'd need to finish something on Sunday. Rather than just riding my bike up there and back, which feels too much like a regular work day, I thought it would be fun to take a hike there, through the hills on the west side of town. I've been on pretty well all those trails before, but they'd since put in all sorts of interpretive signs and activity centres, about animal tracks, really old road construction, stone property markers, and tree species, among other things.

Here you can see a witch's cabin, that's been built by the side of the path. ("Hexe" means witch in German.)
Inside they had a book with some fairy tales, which I read to Jeremi. I'm sure it's designed for families with kids, but it's fun for foreigners to practice their German as well!
Here was a board illustrating various mushroom species that can be found in the area at different times, some of which are edible, and some of which are poisonous, and most of which had rather colourful names.
Then we stopped up at the Haeckelstein, the memorial to Ernst Haeckel, a well-known biologist/ecologist who worked in Jena.
The view from there was lovely, and shows just how high up I have to ride my bike each day. (Okay, so this is a bit higher than the institute, but you can't really see the bottom of the valley from here either.)

Slowly we made our way back to town, meeting up with some friends in the park by the river who were grilling for our friend Matthias's birthday. We didn't have any beer or food with us, so we headed into town to pick some up, so we could come back. On the way we passed by the annual Neugasse festival (which last year featured children playing with matches). This year, there was the usual hippie atmosphere, though the weather wasn't quite as nice as the year before.

We took in a bit of the puppet show on the way... (We actually knew one of the performers, because Jena is that small.)
Then we headed back to the park for some grilling and beer drinking. To keep warm, some people were kicking a soccer ball around, not really even playing, and our friend Raul slipped on the damp grass and fell, much to the amusement of everyone. It really didn't look serious, but when it was still really hurting him an hour or so later, as we were getting ready to head back to the Neugasse to see a concert, he decided to head to the hospital to have it checked out.

The night went on, more beers were had, and at some point, Matthias thought it would be a good idea to try out one of the kiddie cars that they had set up for the street festival. It turns out it wasn't really built for adults. (He ended up on the ground shortly after this was taken.)
Eventually we all ended up back at Matthias's apartment for some more beer and cake. Soon after this we were joined by the group that had gone to the hospital - it turns out his arm was broken after all!

Poor Raul. The cast was only on for a short while, but then they put him in a crazy metal arm brace that allowed for a slight amount of movement in the joint, which was slowly increased over several weeks until he could move his arm properly again. This only went to reinforce his long-held belief that the best way to take part in sports is seated on the couch, with remote in hand. And this wasn't the end of the sporting injuries this fall - read on about Jeremi's rugby exploits!

Bamberg Beer Tour

Back sometime last year Julia bet me that she would lose more weight than me before our wedding. I accepted cause she always says I never want to bet on anything with her. Of course scheming Julia had thought it through and knew that I had to go back to the land of chicken wings and more then one flavour of potato chips (Canada) because of my lack of job and soon ending Visa. So while I tried this new Atkins fad and stuffed my craw with burgers, fries, fish and chips, KFC, chiness buffet (brown stuff only), any description of meats on various sticks, skewers or toothpicks, steaks, nuggets, steak-nuggets, jerky, peperoni sticks, jujubes and Canadian chocolate milk (so much better than the German stuff). Julia during this time, stopped eating altogther, opened a sweatshop (Uniworker Ltd.) and also thought her brain out at her actual work. Julia, merely by luck, won the bet and later told me you were supposed to "avoid" carbs on Atkins.

That last paragraph wasn't all true. I have never been on Atkins nor will I ever be. I just wanted to work the word steak-nuggets into this post. (Also, Julia wants me to mention that she did, in fact, eat. The parts about the sweatshop and the excessive working are true, however.) Moving on, as the loser of our bet, I had to organize a bike trip once we got back to Jena.

So I planned a beer bike tour in and around the lovely city of Bamberg. With the help of this handy database, I was able to pick from almost 300 breweries in the region. Below is the circuit we biked over 2.5 days hitting about 10 breweries 2 Kirchweihs (explained later) and a couple other beer-selling establishments.

First we loaded our bikes on the train from Jena to Bamberg. Once there we had about six kilometers to bike to get to our first beer at the Brauereigasthof-Kaiserdom hotel, which brewed their own beer and where we would be staying that night. After putting our stuff in our room and sampling the hotel products, we left for our first Kirchweih.

A Kirchweih is yearly celebration of the local church's consecration. It also doubles as the town or village fair. It's basically a single beer tent Oktoberfest-esque party. So we rode our bikes to neighbouring Bischberg which was having its Kirchweih that night.

This is the single beer tent.
They were of course selling the Maß (1 litre) of beer as well as rosted chickens, pork hocks, sausage and more. Here I am with a little beer and a Schweinhaxe (pork hock).

Outside there were a couple of kiddie rides and some win-a-prize carnival games. Inside there was a brass Volkmusik band and lots of cheersing.

Here is Susanne also enjoying a pork hock, although she looks more sad than joyful. Maybe the pork hock bit her back.
A trumpeter walking and playing on the table, hard to see here. There were also two more of them, another a couple of tables over.

We also invited a lonely looking guy to join us. We talked with him for a while and somehow the topic turned into 'Why we should only try to communicate in German with aliens'. He was also quite convinced that there was no radio or television in Canada, based on his friend's experience there, despite our denials of this. This ended our nice evening on a rather bad note. Perhaps there was a reason he was all alone at the Kirchweih...

The next day was our first real drink and bike day. We kicked it off in Viereth at the Mainlust brewery where we had a dark beer (I'm not going to remember all of them).

This was snapped for the benefit of Chris (Julia's brother) who loved the giant square umbrellas they often have on the patios and beer gardens here. I thought he would get a kick out of this giant Coca-Cola one on wheels that's being pushed into the street by three guys.

Next, Weiher. This little place actually had 4 different beers to try. In the interest of being able to bike, we got only a quarter liter of each and rotated to try them all. The people at the bar made fun of me for ordering small beers. (Note that this was around noon.)

No coasters here, but a lovely and big beer garden adjacent to a farm. We said hi to the sheeps and chickens afterwards.
Back on the bikes and up a big hill, especially big after two morning beers.
After a couple more hills we found not the brewery we were looking for but a Gasthof that sold the local beer:
Beck Bräu (brew), not Becks.
After a sausage and pretzel (and beer of course), we rode to ...
Schönbrunn. This brewery had the village post thingy out front. Each of the sheilds on each side had the logos of the village's banks, organisations and enterprises.
The Wernsdörfer brewery's sign above the patio out front, and the coaster...
and the mugs. We also had some supper at this place.
We skipped a couple of brewtowns to make sure we didn't get to our next hotel in the dark but we made a last stop at this beer garden in Oberharnsbach, Unterharnsbach or possibly Reundorf. There were no coasters and no names on the mugs that I can see. Maybe Calin or Susanne can comment as to our whereabouts.

Anyway, at some point we also learned that there was a ferry crossing the river that would take about 30 mins off our time to Hirschaid where we would be spending the night. Unfortunately it was getting late and the last ferry left at 7pm so we had to hurry. And we made it just on time for the last crossing. It wasn't a very high-tech ferry but then the river it had to cross was pretty narrow, so it got the gob done. Here's one half of the ferry and the ferryman (who we did pay before he got us to the other side (1€))...
and here is the other half.
It was guided by a rope that went along the rail bridge and propulsed by the ferryman's long pole.
another half hour (to an hour) after that and we were at our hotel in Hirschaid, not a brewery or nearly as quaint, but we had bed and breakfast which was all we needed (especially the bed).

With what motivation we had left we went to their Kirchweih, or Kerwa as they called it there. It was bigger than the one in Bischberg but not as fun. It also had more of a drunken youth feeling compared to drunken town feeling Bischberg had. But it was also nice and we probably didn't get as much out of it because we were tired. Unfortunately, we have no pictures of it because we probably left the camera in the room.

The next day our broken bodies got back on our bikes to keep on drinking. Second day first stop, Geisfeld. This place also had there Kirchweih the night before if I remember correctly and now it was time for the morning-after brunch at Brauerei Krug.
The shield on the wall...
looked exactly like their coasters.
We also stopped for lunch somewhere that didn't make it into any of the pictures, but it was a totally bustling restaurant in a small town, where it seemed the entire population went for lunc after church on Sundays. The bartender there was using a small electric heating element that he could submerge into the beer to warm the beer slightly, I think to make it easier for little old ladies to digest, or something. Julia asked him why, but the answer was in an incredibly strong dialect (and thus not so easy to understand), and we've both forgotten whatever logic we gleaned from it at the time.

Next was Brauerei Knoblach in Schammelsdorf. They had very nice flowers all aroud the brewery.
One of each please.
With the coaster, so I remember where this was.
Next was a very nice backyard beer garben at Brauerei Gasthof Höhn in ehhh...
Memmelsdorf (right).
Complete with a very playful and affectionate local beer garden kitty.


Lots of fun.

Finally it was back to Bamberg to try the Rauchbiere (smoked beers). They were a lot better than the last time we had them with Chris and Karen (see Bamberg post, link above). We had three different ones (at different breweries) and they were all better that the smoked sausage in a mug we had tasted before. That was at Braurei Heller, which I think was the oldest brewery in Bamberg (there's like 15 or something)...
and Ambräusianum, right next door. A somewhat newer-sounding place with their breakthough not "Brauerei " name. Oh wait, the coaster says first brewery-guest-house in Bamberg so maybe I was wrong about the other place. Or maybe the other place was older but not a guest house. Who knows?
The view from the Ambäusianum patio. At the end of that street are stairs that led to a pretty big monastery.
Our last Rauchbier was had at Brauerei zum Spezial just before we got on the train back to Jena.
By the coaster (which is the only true measure of a brewery), this one was brewing before Canada was properly discovered by Europeans (suck it Leif, history doesn't count you).
Even more so finally, we got a beer at a bar in between trains. I don't remember where this was. but as you can see the beer was called Weismaimer and although it didn't fit in with the small Franconian brewery beer we got used to all weekend, beer is still beer.
That being said, all the beers we had were pretty tasty and we would recommend such a tour to anyone... that can hold their own and bike at the same time.
Hooray for beer!