Polter Abend

This week Dave took some time off and we visited the onion festival in Esslingen, a biergarten and the castle in Ludwigsburg, and the local pool. We had dinner at Steffi’s house and the adults stayed up talking and drinking wine around the fire pit until 2:00 in the morning. We had fun.

Perhaps most memorable event of the week was attending our first polter abend. Polter is German for “noisy,” as in poltergheist (“noisy ghost”). Abend is just “evening.” So a polter abend is a noisy evening that celebrates a couple’s upcoming marriage. Our neighbors, Petra and Markus, are getting married this week. So our neighbors Monica and Thomas invited them over for dinner, to secure a spot on their calendar. Then, when the couple drove home from work that night, they were greeted with a huge surprise party in the middle of the street. We had grills and beer kegs lined up on the sidewalk, food tables in the garages, dining tables down the center of the street, kids playing, and lots of fun. I had even made bride and groom hula hoops for the occasion. His was gold, white and black. Hers was gold and white with lace. The couple hooped in the streets and laughed a lot. We all enjoyed good food, conversation, and beer. There was a wasp that liked the beer too. I didn’t see it in my stein and it stung me on the tongue when I took a drink. I had to drink more beer to numb the pain.

But wait, I didn’t tell you why they call it a polter abend. The reason it is so noisy is that, according to German tradition, all of the guests bring old ceramic dishes to smash in the street. Smashing ceramics brings good luck, but glass is forbidden since glass represents happiness and you don’t want to break that. For extra good luck, the couple sweeps up the mess. Then throughout the evening people sneak over and dump out the trash can so they have to do it all over again and gain more good luck. Then someone new shows up with more dishes to break and the couple has to clean again. This went on for hours. It was a riot. We had such a blast.

The kids loved sneaking over to dump out the cans and being destructive without getting into trouble. It was a three band-aid night, but they didn’t care. Luke’s American friend Mimi was there. He announced to me, “Mom, I asked Mimi if she wanted to get married with me and she said yes. Then we can have a party like this too.” I’d better start putting aside some old china.

Be sure to check out our photo album on this page for photos of the polter abend!

Mainau with the Royals and Eigeltingen with the Critters

This weekend we joined friends at the Bodensee. We took a boat to the Island of Minau, which is owned by Swedish royalty. The entire island is an amazing botanical garden with playgrounds, a butterfly house, and restaurants. The kids loved the wasserspielplatz (water playground) that had climbable wooden rafts floating in a shallow pond. We had a ball.

Then that evening we drove to our hotel in Stockach, only to learn that our prepaid reservation was not held for us. They showed us two tiny rooms that they did have available, each with two thin twin beds, and a toilet and tub down the hall for nearly 100 euro. We left, discouraged, intending to go home.

But instead, we stumbled upon a really cool place called Lochmuehle, which is an absolute kids’ paradise. In order to park, we had to wait until an alpaca and a herd of goats cleared the road. For 100 euro in this place we got a two-story apartment with a kitchen. They had a hot tub, swimming pool with slide, and a really cool playground with construction equipment and bumper cars. They offer all sorts of cool activities like carriage rides, a ropes course, paddle boats, zip lines, four-wheelers, and lots more. Animals were everywhere. There was a pig roasting on a spit by the entrance, which didn't seem to bother the living fat pig that made himself at home in the children’s sand box. Sheep rested under bridges. Pigeons fluttered about. Bunnies hopped. Shetland ponies inspected our pockets for treats. We had to watch our step to avoid stinky landmines. It felt like a regular day around my house.

We swam for a while and had dinner in the restaurant to a band that played songs like How Great Thou Art blended with Aloha-oi, all to a Polka beat. While we waited for our food, Luke kept asking me to dance with him. He led me around the dance floor, his crown only reaching as high as my belly button. It was adorable. The food was good too. Claire and I had venison goulash, which is a new favorite for her.

The next day we awoke to a rooster crowing and went down for a huge German breakfast. We ended up staying most of the day there before driving home. We had lunch in the biergarten, which was great except for the flies. It seems they really liked the animals too.

Confessions of a Bunko Virgin

Last week I attended my second bunko night with my German gal pals. I’m sad to report that I am still a bunko virgin, the only one among us. Thirty-six years old and I've never rolled three of a kind on that number round of the game. Sad, truly.

It has nothing to do with the fact that I am the only American in the group. I just don’t have luck with dice. Good thing I’m lucky in love.

I took a hula hoop that I’d made for a white elephant gift. They loved it! It was a big hit. The gals good-naturedly fought over it, which was flattering.

After bunko night my head is always swimming with new German words. I get a headache from trying to understand all of the conversation. I always leave bunko night feeling both elated at my progress and disheartened by how much I have left to learn.

The next day I went on a hospital tour with a group of Americans, most of whom had only recently arrived in the country. We visited four hospitals in the area, which is helpful since in Germany each emergency requires a different type of specialized emergency room. One hospital cares for cuts but not broken bones. Another handles kids but not adults. And so on. It's all very muddling.

One of the ERs had a television set in the corner, which the guide told us was inspired by the German doctors’ visit to the Patch Barracks clinic. One of the men in the group noted, “Wow, that kind of show ought to relax anyone with an emergency.” We all looked up in time to see naked people engaging in some serious...well, they were getting pretty friendly with each other. Oh, and did I mention we were in the ER for children? Wow. Toto, we are SO not in America anymore.

Anyway, on that tour I started to realize how much German I’ve really learned. I translated lots of signs and words for people. Here, let me give you a quick lesson:

Krankenhouse = “sick house” = hospital
Krankenschwester = “sick sister” = nurse
Kranken wagen = “sick wagon” or ambulance
Krankheit = sickness (sounds like Cronkite, as in Walter)
Gusundheit = health
Antibabypille = birth control pills (logical enough)
Notfall = emergency
Teufel = devil (not really relevant, except that it was the doctor’s last name and I thought it was funny)

Now I am really considering taking German classes at the VHS (volkshochschule) which are like our community education classes in the states. If I commit, it would mean 20 hours a week in a classroom. I would be in classes exactly the same time that Claire would be at the German elementary school. Man, I can’t wait to be able to put a sentence together. Jawohl!

Biergarten Birthday

Luke turned five on July 20. We had a great birthday party for him at Jaegerholz-Sliders Biergarten. Yep. A kids’ party at a bar. But it’s not like you might think. They have a great playground, mini-golf, kegelbahn (like bowling) a soccer goal, and a big grassy area for running and playing. The kids had a ball. The theme was Legos, so we had a Lego table for playing and a table with crayons and Lego pictures to color. One table had face paints and two of my very artistic friends took turns coloring kids. I brought my hula hoops for both adults and children and we played games and hooped our hearts out. Sliders served up chicken tenders, fries, calamari rings, fried mushrooms, mozzarella sticks, nachos, and pitchers of beer for the adults and soda and apfelsaft schorle (carbonated apple juice) for the kids.

I tried to bake three Lego-shaped cakes using loaf pans and muffins for the dots. They flopped. So I switched to marshmallows for the dots, which worked better. But I overcooked the cakes and the icing was too thick. I felt a little betrayed. On the Betty Crocker website it had looked so easy. Come on, Betty! I expect Martha Stewart to make us moms feel inferior, but you are our saving grace! You enable us to whip up last-minute cupcakes for school parties with a box, an egg and a cup of oil and feel like we accomplished something. But not with this recipe. It was tough. Or maybe it was just me. To redeem myself, I also made a carrot cake with a Duncan Hines mix, throwing in some real shaved carrots and pecans to make it seem more homemade. I used cream cheese frosting from a can and sprinkled the top with pecans. I then spelled out LUKE in Legos. It was pretty good. But I was embarrassed when one of my German friends asked for the recipes for the cakes. I said, “Well, they’re secret American recipes from my Aunt Betty and Uncle Duncan.”

The Americans got it and laughed, and I was forced to explain. Talk about embarrassing. I assured them, though, that I had plenty of homemade cake recipes if they wanted something authentic. I don’t really want them to know that most of us American moms are way more like Betty than Martha.

Decisions, Decisions

Yoohoo! Here I am. Did you think I had fallen into the cyberspace abyss? Nearly. I was sucked into the vortex of car buying. Yikes.

It’s a long story, but the short of it is that we decided to downgrade and then to upgrade and then to upgrade again. We were going to buy a 2007 BMW 335i, then a 2008 BMWxi, but then the plant closed for the German summer holidays, so now we are ending up with a 2009 BMW 335xi (4-wheel drive sedan) in Montego Blue with warming Saddle Brown leather seats, xenon headlights, and a bunch of other nerdy stuff that I’m just too girly to remember. Phew. It will be here in September.

This has been some crazy discernment process, let me tell you. First we had to choose between a small commuter car and a family car. With the Galant on its last wheels, we decided to opt for something that could step in and take its place if need be. Then we decided between a BMW and Mercedes, which is a feat considering that here the rivalry between the two is akin to the vicious Ford versus Chevy truck debate between the Texas farm boys of my youth. Then after that we had to decide whether or not we truly deserved a car so nice. That was the biggest hurdle.

All throughout this deciding period I kept thinking about a great quote from Dorothy Alvarez that I swiped from my friend Amber’s Facebook page: “I want a new car. God wants to redeem the universe. Therein lies the problem.”

Was it responsible to buy such an extravagant car when people are hungry in the world?

We wrestled with the question for weeks. We want to save for our kids to go to college. We want to be able to travel home to the States when we want and to travel within Europe while we are here. And we want to be good world citizens and live generously. BUT we also considered that Dave has worked hard for a long time. He has driven the old clunker Galant for 14 years, and he drove his Jeep for nearly as many years before that. He’s 43. Life is short. We don’t waste a lot of money and we are in good shape financially. So why shouldn’t we get the car we really want if we can still live in financial balance?

We already have far too much guilt in our lives. What it finally came down to for us was a realization that it’s not an issue of deserving. Does anyone deserve nice things? We don’t deserve a BMW, but we are blessed to be able to get one. For us it is about gratitude. If we are blessed with something good, we must be grateful. Taking good things for granted, well, that would be something to feel guilty about. After all, if we felt guilty we couldn’t enjoy our new car and then it would truly be wasted. Right?