Loose ends

I finally wrote the Firework post bellow. We've posted a couple of things since then so I though I would tell you, our readers, so that you didn't miss it.

Also I wanted to post this video of what happens when the police escort Nazis through the Anti-Nazi Blockade.

Wanna hear us speak German?

Back in August Jeremi and I took part in a podcasting workshop run by the person who organizes our German Stammtisch on Tuesday nights. It was for people learning German, as an interesting multimedia way of practising language. Some of the episodes that we made (seven altogether) are already available at the site dfuera.podhost.de, but the host only offers 30 Mb free storage per month, so the rest will have to wait. But you guys get a sneak preview!

Each of us worked on at least two episodes, and one of them Jeremi and I did together. Even if you don't understand a word that we're saying, the sound effects might make it worth your while, including Jeremi's tarzan yell. And, as an added bonus, you can watch the cat sleep while listening. Although we could have loaded the audio up to another hosting site and just linked to it, this way we get to try out Blogger's new video hosting service. The lighting's not great, but you can still see her. Stay tuned for an exciting leg movement at around 5:00. (The total length of the audio file is 7:12.)


Also, just a note about the name of the website, which seems a bit awkward. dfuera is short for Deutschland für Anfänger, or Germany for beginners. All the vowels with umlauts can be written with an "e" after them for things like email addresses or urls.

Going to Kahla

First of all, I'm fine but...

Today we spent our time going to the doctor and getting X-rays of my neck because Sunday while we were biking to some friends of ours' place, I sped down a hill and didn't quite make the turn that was at the bottom of it. But I broke my catapult-like fall with my head and neck and now I OK. Really, I'm OK. I had an X-Ray that showed that my 5th vertebra might have a fracture, but after a quick cat-scan they decided that my bones were just malformed. This was all done within a one block radius of our house, which is pretty cool considering that we don't live close to a hospital and that we had to go somewhere else for the X-Rays and cat-scan.

My bike is also quite broken. the fork is bent side ways and my front wheel can't really be called a wheel anymore.


But the rest of the bike might be OK. A very nice couple that lived nearby took my broken bike and stored it at their place so that we could come by and get it later.

As for myself, I got away with a gash and a bruise on my forehead and pretty bad neck pain.


After the initial excitement of the crash and making sure that I wasn't going to die, we decided to go to Kahla (a small town about 20 km) to see our friends, Yulia, Marcel and their 6 month old baby Anna, all the same. We had called them before to tell them what had happened and they had offered to come and get us (by car.)

Also, that morning, Julia had made a beautiful pumpkin pie to bring with us. We made a box for it and bungee-strapped it to Julia's bike rack. Now your thinking "good thing it wasn't on Jeremi's bike because it would have gotten destroyed (and he would have gotten it in the back of the head as his bike was flipping over)", but as we waited for Marcel to come and get us, a gust of wind came and blew Julia's bike of her kickstand and the pie landed half out of its pan on to the sidewalk. Boohoo!

Then Marcel arrived and brought us to Kahla. Since his parents are away on vacation and live in a very nice house just outside of Kahla, he, Yulia and Anna were house-sitting. We were well fed the entire time we were there and had lots of fun. It's also good to mention that all this happened primarily in German. We know Yulia from one of our German classes. She is also learning German since she is originally from Moscow. Marcel however is German but used to work in Russia, so they both speak Russian. They also speak a fair bit of English and Yulia also speaks Hebrew since she live in Israel for 8 years. Anna only speaks a bit of Russian so far and says "Da da" (yes yes in Russian). She and Julia are pretty much on equal footing German-wise and learned very quickly. But me, I'm still a little slow in the German, but it's coming.

Close to where we were was also an old brickworks that had to close after reunification. Marcel, Yulia and some of their friends have bought it since then and now collect and repair old cars, most of which are Trabants. These were to cars made in the former Eastern Germany. They have a couple of Trabants tricked out for rally racing. Later, Marcel was nice enough to drive us back home and call the people who now had my busted bike (we were given their phone number) so that we could pick it up on the way back. We got to ride in an old army style Trabant from the 1960s since it had a trailer hitch. So it turned out to be a great Sunday even though I almost ruined it for everyone. Thanks Yulia and Marcel (and Anna)!

Fireworks

Last Friday we went to Gera (50 km from Jena) to see some Fireworks. Germany was hosting a Firework competition there. We're not sure if there were more than two participants but we were there to see the Chinese display. The German display was the next night. The pictures I took don't show it but it was pretty impressive and went on for quite a while.





Julia especially like the ones in the picture above.
These many roman candles made a cool weaving pattern of smoke through the sky that was illuminated by the following explosions.

With us were another Julia (in German it's pronounced Yulia), Jans and Huilin, friends from Julia's work. The show was at 10 o'clock at the airport which was about 30mins out of town by bus. The last train back to Jena was at 11:30 so it would have been cutting close to try to get back on time. Jans and Huilin decided that they were going to try and made it. However, Julia, Julia and me decided to stay until the next train which was at 4:30 the following morning and enjoy the festivities. Soon after, we saw some fire breathers:


There were two of them. One of them looked like he had done this many times before but his apprentice look very cautious and almost nervous. You can really feel the heat coming from those flames even at a distance.

Since this took place at an airport their was a whole lot of room. There were two stages with live bands playing at either end and stalls selling beer, cocktails, food and glow-in-the-dark thingies in between. They also have these alcoholic fruit drinks kept in giant glasses as seen below:



So we eat and drank a little and stayed there as long as we could since we had to wait for the 4:30 train. There were also bonfires of mostly old furniture were stayed warm until the staff came to politely tell us that they were cleaning up.

We went back to town and tried to find a bar that was still open. After asking many people and going to many bars we finally found one that was open until 4. Then we went back to the train station, waited some more and I fell asleep.

Bonne Fête!!

It was also my grandmother's birthday yesterday (14 Sept). Hope you had a day with lots of shopping. Love you! Bonne fête Grammy!!

Happy Birthday Baba!!!

Today is my Baba's 88th birthday. Happy birthday, Baba! I'm sorry we're not there to celebrate with you (and to eat all the holubtsi that you're making), but we're looking forward to your visit in November!

And since we don't have a more recent picture, here's one from when she and my mom and dad were visiting us last October, at our Thanksgiving supper with Scott and Erika and their kids.

Fest der Völker

Last weekend was the so-called Fest der Voelker in Jena, which is a big neonazi celebration for right-wing extremists from around Europe, organized by Germany's NPD party. Yup, there's actually a national political party here which does that sort of thing. There's some effort to outlaw the party, but outlawing opinions is never an easy (or good) thing to do in a democratic society.

There was a big counter-demonstration of course, which was attended by a lot of people from my institute (including us). There was actually some controversy at work about the use of the internal email list for political purposes (despite the fact that people regularly use it to advertise apartments for lease and parties, without complaint).

There were two marches organized, one leaving from downtown at 9:00 and one leaving from Lobeda (south of the city) at 8:45. We were with this large group heading out from the centre of the city:We walked through the city, past the train station (at the right):
where there was already quite a sizable police presence...
And we made our way to the park on the east side of the Saale river, just across the road from the area where the nazis had a permit to have their party from 12:00-7:00. We got there around 10:00, and there were some speeches and some music, and then the crowds dispersed into three separate sit-ins. Flyers were distributed along the way in three different colours, and there were three different coloured flags to lead the groups to three different roads which were to be blocked with peaceful protesters sitting on the ground. (This couldn't be officially endorsed by the organizers, so they were saying funny things like: "I don't know where everyone is going - perhaps it has something to do with the coloured papers everyone seems to have? I don't know anything about that. Perhaps if you read it, you'll know more than me.") And though it was not "officially" okay, even the mayor was taking part, along with lots of families with kids and elderly people (mostly women).

Though not actually showing people sitting here, this was an attempt to block an intersection:
The original three blockades worked pretty well, but of course there are always different routes. As the day went on, groups were rallied to block the various bridges, to keep the nazis gathered at the bus station from making it to the party. Eventually most of them made it through, with police escort, but events were much delayed. (Due in part to the lack of a generator as well...)

The number of police officers around was truly staggering. And with several different varieties of uniforms as well. Here's a group hanging out by the streetcar tracks (all the streetcars on these tracks were cancelled that day, as the tracks ran between the two demonstrations):
And there were some lighter aspects to the demonstration too, like this group of clowns, who played ring around the rosie with cops in the middle...

And this group of people, who were doing something satirical with chants and marching to satirize Hitler Youth. Their armbands aren't really swastikas, though it looks like it from this distance. (It's actually illegal to wear a swastika in Germany.) They're actually pictures of apples, and one of their chants translated to something like "What should the German youth drink?" "Apple juice, apple juice"... (Something may or may not have been lost in translation there.)
And after all this political heaviness, perhaps you'd like to see the cat hanging out with her new best friend, paper bag. And in the background you can see the vacuum cleaner that Jeremi saved from Sperrmuell last night, which conveniently came with a note saying "funktioniert noch" (still works), and a plastic bag full of vacuum bags tied on.

fabulous food

We haven't posted much of our cooking lately, but that's not because we haven't been eating well! This past week was Japanese-themed (some pictures of this follow), and the week before was a Mexican extravaganza. We only took one picture of these dishes unfortunately, but it really was the best of the whole week - bean enchiladas with salsa verde.

Now when people cook things from scratch that can mean many different things - for some it's only that it didn't come out of the freezer, or maybe they didn't use a powdered mix for the sauce (as is rampant in Germany). However this dish was really from scratch. Okay, not the salsa verde, but only because tomatillos are even harder to come by here than the sauce itself (which we picked up when we were in Switzerland, and still haven't found here in Jena).

While we are able to buy some tortillas here, I've only done it once, and they were sufficiently nasty to discourage me from ever doing it again. They cost something like three euros for a pack of 10 small ones, and they had a best before date that was four months in the future. And they weren't even refridgerated, let alone frozen. I'm not even sure they were real food.

And so we looked in the Joy of Cooking, and Jeremi decided that he could make flour tortillas from scratch. (Corn tortillas are out of the question, as I don't think there's any masa harina in our Bundesland at least.) And the refried beans he also cooked from dried, and seasoned himself. This was based roughly on a recipe from Brandy, which used sweet potatoes as well, but since they cost 4 euros a kilo here, he adapted it with onions and peppers.

And not only that, but it was completely prepared and already in the oven the moment I walked in the door. I'm a very lucky girl. And here you can view a bit of the deliciousness, with apple pie filling being prepared in the background, as we wanted to bring a North American-style "pie" to our English Stammtisch to illustrate the difference between pies and cakes. (This distinction isn't really made in German.)
Now jumping ahead to Japanese week, here you see (at right) a pan full of beef roll-ups around green onions (negi maki), a pot full of miso soup (at the left), and pot of mixed vegetable seasoned with mirin and rice vinegar. Delicious!
And then our really indulgent meal from last week, vegetable tempura. Much easier than I'd expected, and it really tasted divine. Okay, so anything deep-fried is delicious, but it was really good. We dipped them in leftover sauce from our cold soba noodle night (which didn't get photographed, unfortunately.)
Here's a close-up of the greasiness. Right there in the middle is a piece of breaded, deep-fried broccoli. We'd never even tasted deep-fried broccoli before - it was great. (We also had onions, carrots, sweet potatoes, and cauliflower.)
And finally, Jeremi made a great Japanese-style vegetable curry. I'd never made one from scratch before, but I'd made it using those blocks of curry mix you can get at asian stores. From scratch it's not so hard either, but did involve browning a whole lot of onions and thickening it with a roux. We got the recipe here, which is a great site for Japanese recipes, especially as it's written by someone living in Switzerland, who understands the trouble finding ingredients sometimes.

Here Jeremi is singing an ode to curry with the salt-shaker microphone. (Not true! I'm eating the salt shaker - Jeremi.)

Jeremi on the job hunt

Last week Jeremi applied for his first job since getting here. This was a fair bit of work for both of us, as we decided after asking around a bit that it would be better to send the cover letter in German, even if the CV was in English. We also tried to "Germanize" the CV a bit, by changing the chronological order the way they do it here (oldest to most recent), and adding a birthdate and a photo. They also usually include family situation (i.e. single, married, how many kids) on CVs here, but it's not considered obligatory, unlike the date of birth. People here think it's hysterical that it's technically against the law in Canada to ask these sorts of questions when hiring people.

We'd written up a nice cover letter in English and then tried to translate it into the best German we could muster, but of course the nicely constructed phrases had to be broken into little chunks so that the grammar didn't get too complicated. I brought it to a native-speaking colleague to have a look over it, and she very kindly spent about an hour and a half with me rewriting the whole thing so that it sounded better.

But this still left the photo, so last week we had a little photo shoot, with Jeremi trying to look nice and professional. After taking several pictures, here's the one we settled on:
But of course the lighting could have been better, and it's not centred so well, and he's got a touch of red-eye, so I played around in iPhoto and magically transformed it into this:
Now not only is the lighting and colour better, the picture framed more nicely, and the red-eye fixed, but I also managed to get rid of the zit on his forehead and the shiny bits on his cheeks, nose and forehead. I'd hire him, wouldn't you?

That is, unless we sent in the full-body picture by mistake...
(Or maybe they're hire him all the more, but I don't know that I want him doing that sort of a job.)

In other news, we're heading to Niedernhausen this weekend, a town between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, for the wedding party of our friends Jenny and Leo, who we know from Canada. We'll tell you all about it next week.

A darker side of Germany

Last Saturday we woke up to the sound of helicopters. Upon looking outside we found that this wasn't the usual medivac bringing people to and from the hospital, but rather a black surveillance copter hovering just north of where we live. We also saw a lot of people up and down our street, much more than is normal on a Saturday morning. By noon we could hear the chanting of about 1000 people from the city centre, and while eating brunch we had a couple dozen riot police running down our street.

Unlike usual, this was not all due to a rowdy football game. Rather it was because last Friday, August 17th, was the 20th anniversary of Rudolph Hess's death. You know, Hitler's deputy, convicted at Nuremburg to spend the rest of his life in prison, died of apparent suicide at the age of 93 in 1987, that guy. It seems that the far right party in German politics, the NPD, sees fit to organize celebrations on this day. Not celebrations because the guy died, but celebrations of what he stands for. (They tore down the prison where he lived after his death so that it wouldn't become a shrine.)

In other surrounding bundeslands (states) in Germany laws had been passed to make it illegal to hold protests on this day or weekend, but the courts in Gera (in Thüringen, where we live), decided that was a bit too undemocratic, as the official reason for the protest was concern over a law against "incitement of the people". According to Deutsche Welle's English website, this law carries prison time or fines for publicly glorifying or justifying the Nazi terror regime. Germany has remarkably strict laws about this sort of thing, at least by Canadian standards. Among things that are illegal here are denial of the Holocaust, performing Nazi salutes, and printing or selling copies of Mein Kampf. (Not that I want to do these things, but isn't banning ideas a bit, well, fascist?)

So the big deal on the weekend was due to about 300 right-extremist protestors holding a march in Jena Nord, just north of where we live, and there was a counter-demonstration by about 1000 anti-fascists (i.e. normal people) in the centre of town. The police were out in full force, doing their damndest to keep a buffer zone between the two groups. (We happen to live in the buffer zone.)

What's more troubling is that this protest was apparently just a dry run for the "Fest der Völker", or festival of nations/peoples, which is happening September 8th. This is a huge neo-nazi party for like-minded folks from across Europe, and it's happening right here in Jena. The city council is even asking citizens to come out to protest, so that this is not what Jena is known for. It should be interesting. Below are a few images from one of the news sites of the events last Saturday. First off are the right-wing extremists. They've really made an effort to clean up their image from the punk/skinhead look. Unfortunately I can't quite make out the black text on their banner, but the red just says free nationalists, and where they're from.
Next up is a group with a banner reading: National Socialism or Ruin. (Kind of like nazism or bust, I guess.)And here's the last group. Why, they cleaned these young men up so nicely they look almost as squeaky-clean as fascists in the 1930s!
And it really is almost all young men. Mostly young, unemployed men from poor cities in East Germany. And the NPD has come in and set up youth programs (like the Girls and Boys Club, but with less tolerance), and offered something for them to do.

And now for the counter-protest. Many more people, and right in the centre of the city. This sea of people is completely filling a large intersection and a little park where there's a fountain and the patio of an ice cream shop. (I almost called it an Ice Café, before remembering that that's really not what it's called in English.)
And this shot doesn't show the number of people as well, but you do get to see some of the diversity. Notice the women and older people? I guess things aren't that hopeless after all...