Sometimes things work on the first try

Today we registered our car. I woke up particularly crabby and uptight about the whole thing, because it was unclear that we had all of the necessary forms. Particularly, we were missing the emission inspection form and only had the little sticker for it on the plates. By the time we got out the door, I was pretty sure we didn't have a chance of getting it registered. Also, I knew we had only one day to do it before the previous owner's insurance ran out. If it wasn't finished by May 31, we wouldn't be able to drive it to get the inspection and we would end up with a car we couldn't drive. And, I expected that I would be standing in line on the order of two hours to find all of this out.

The journey to Sinnsheim, which is where our "zulassunsstelle" is located, did little to encourage my confidence that things were going to workout. The website had given us the most direct route rather than sticking to the relatively big roads. So we took a detour off of 45 onto roads not big enough for two cars, in farm fields, with farm equipment and no roadsigns to tell us where we were. Miraculously, we found our way back out to 45 having saved about a kilometer. Then we arrived in a strange town and had some trouble parking. The parking places in the garage were incredibly small. Parking our Accord may be like parking the Suburban at home if the first two days are any indication. Rachel barely squeezed out and I felt bad for not dropping her off at the door like a decent father to be might have.

Then we went inside. Wisely, this place had a triage station where a woman was employed to find out what you needed and check your documents before allowing you to wait. So she looked through everything and said it was fine but that I needed to go back and get the plates off of the car. This took a minute for me to understand because she used a word for the plates I had never heard. I was a little worried at this point because of I had no tools with me...a terrible sin I know.

It took some doing and pulling the car out to get at the front plate, but I finally figured out how the little holders work and that they didn't require tools other than finger nails. Once back inside we waited 45 minutes (sitting, nice!) to be called in to speak with the woman who actually made the regsitration. Then she sent the paper work to the cashier and sent us to a little shop across the street where a man made our license plates for 30 euros. It took him all of 3 minutes to stamp, transfer the color and add the Badem-Wurtemburg decorations to them. Then it was back to the zulassungstelle where the final stickers for the registration were put in place and we shelled out another 30 euros. A total cost of 60 euros was about half what I expected. One of the nice things about this car is that it is new enough to be in the best emissions category and this saves money since the government makes sure to punish drivers of polluting cars at every possible juncture including the title transfer, registration and auto tax.

When we got back outside we realized that the plates were different and we had to look at other cars to see which one went where. Then we were off back to Bammental. Rachel made me admit and now I admit to the internet, the faceless electronic confessor, that I started the morning in a pretty ridiculous fashion and indeed everything is okay. It felt great today to just get in the car when work had me fed up and come home to my wife.

a good old fashion Memorial Day miracle

So our day started out not so great today. The midwife measured my blood pressure and since it was unusually high for the second day in a row she thought I'd better go back to the OB for- you guessed it- another non-stress test! I had already scheduled an appointment with a new OB (we weren't really keen on the old one and he turns out to not be affiliated with the hospital we've chosen) for Wednesday, so we got it moved up so he could see us today. The new doc's office was blissfully cooler and less crowded so we liked it immediately.
Everything was good news- baby looks strong and healthy with good heart tones and the lower number of my BP was 20 points lower than when the midwife measured it! The doctor suspects maybe the cuff she's been using is too small for my chubby arms causing the readings to be falsely high. I've heard quite a bit about this before, but it hadn't occured to me that it could be a problem. Then I got to learn a new lesson about German modesty: the lead up to an internal exam is for the doc to leave the exam room door open and tell you to remove your trousers. You just don't appreciate those flimsy paper robes until they're not there. The doctor also took a culture for Group B Strep, which I didn't really want, but probably isn't a big deal (a positive swab usually means they want you to have IV antibiotic during labor, even though the benefit is questionable).
We were happy with the new doc and the confirmation that everything is still fine with the baby. But I was feeling bad about not taking a stand against a test I didn't want and scared that something similar will happen during the birth (i.e., I will chicken out and not refuse interventions I don't want). Then I got home and the neighbors are having a party with lots of people and a charcoal barbecue- just what I needed to make me homesick for friends, family, and potato salad. Then Trey emailed me to say that on his desk he actually had the last box of our stuff! Now, I know I've jerked everyone around with promises of that last box before- but now Trey has actually seen it and touched it. For all I know he has smelled it and tasted it. Can you believe it?! This means we actually get knives that will cut food and I don't have to write letters to the post office!
I might actually post a picture to prove it got here.

A little bit of everything

Well we have had a pretty quiet Saturday. Scout had to be comforted after someone called her a dork in the comments to her post. I told her that this is a risk you must take if you want to express yourself to the entire internet. Once I agreed to help her put in a reply comment, she felt better.

Then Abby left to return to Ireland for a couple of days before heading back to America and her job working for the Man. Who knows, maybe waiting for her secuity clearance is just a cover and she is investigating the movements of expats in Europe who hate the president...hmmmm.

We took Abby with us this morning to do our shopping chores. We went to two or three butchers, the specialty grocer and the big grocery, plus the bakery. Even after all of that I had to make a special trip for dog food later. (And, yes, I got the right stuff this time.) At the "Gefluegel Spezialitaeten" (bird butcher) we got some nice salami (they have this as well) and looked at some other stuff. They had nice big roasting chickens but the cheapest one was 10 euros. They also had rabbit and apparently will have it once a week. It was extremely expensive at 14.50 euros/kilo. The also have capon, but this is quite expensive too. The place was crowded today with people and what were they buying? Turkey necks. I was in there for 10 minutes and saw three people go out with necks. We did get Scout some dried gizzards. At first these confused her since they are hard like a chew toy and a little like a treat, but she figured it out and she loves them.

At another butcher I got two types of sausages to try out. One was a bratwurst in the style of Thuringia. These are thinner than the ones from Pfalz (like Johnsonvilles), are entirely made of pork and are seasoned with majoram. I also got a couple "Feinbratwurst" which are another type of white veal sausage, but seasoned differently than the weisswurst of previous posts. I cooked them as instructed by the butcher: braise slowly in broth. I did this with a couple of each type. The veal sausages ruptured in a very unappetizing way (imagine the worst possible outcome of microwaving a hotdog), but the Thuringer Brats held up. Both were tasty. I liked the veal sausages better and Rachel liked the Thuringers. I made cheese spaetzel with fried onions to go with it in case they were all repulsive, knowing that the spaetzel could make up for it. Indeed, it was quite tasty.

I took Scout for a long walk in the forest near our house in the afternoon. I can't get over how few people are up in the forest on a Saturday. The weather wasn't great, but it was plenty good for getting some exercise. On the other hand Thursday was a holiday here and there were huge groups walking in the woods. According to coworkers, these folks come here and really think it is the middle of nowhere. They think that hiking from a hotel in one village to one in another village is a real nature experience! Of those I saw, all carried no more than enough water for a two hour walk and each of them had two high quality hiking sticks. Also each group had a uniform of sorts like they were all part of a club. My coworkers tell me also that these people are a big hazard for drivers because they think they are in the middle of nowhere and don't realize that someone could crest the hill on one of the mountain roads at speeds that would not allow them to get out of the way.

After dinner we are just relaxing. We are settled enough finally that I feel like we can relax for an evening without having to look at a list.

Making an omelet

Tonight I was working on my manuscript for my paper from my graduate work when I heard Rachel in the kitchen working on something. She called into me for some help and I found her standing in front of the fridge staring at the open door. She held in her hand the egg rack which she had detached from the door in an attemtp to find a way to reattach it in a different position, such that we could fit more condiments into the lower door rack. I have to say I fully support this endeavor. More room for condiments is very important, especially considering the low quality of the meat available over here. Before this digresses into another pie hole post, I better get back to the story...

So she is looking for the way to get the rack in a different place and meeting with little success. Just as we recognized that the egg rack is constructed in such way that it can only go in one place, Rachel demonstrated another feature of its construction: the fact that the door panel formed the back of the thing and the eggs were free to escape when it wasn't firmly attached to its position in the door.

The mayhem started when three eggs made a break for it. I managed to catch one of them but two hit the floor. Things escalated when Rachel turned the rack partially upside down with an expression on her face that indicated,"how the hell did that happen?" and the rest of the eggs leapt out toward the floor. They fell like an ibuprofin bottle toward the toilet and soon nine out of ten were smashed on the floor. Rachel, with a serious look, then said, "This is the worst thing that could have happened." To which I replied,"If this is the worst thing that could have happened, we have it pretty good." Afterwords I also thought, "If we don't have any eggs, we don't need the rack and can have all of the condiments we want, I guess I should've let the one go."

(By the way, lest you think that I am calling my wife anything short of brilliant, she had to figure out for me how to extract the proper HTML address for the link above, which you should take a look at if you think that I think I am in anyway smarter than my wife.)

How to get a car in Germany

Today, I finally bought a car. It is a 2001 4-door honda accord. Overall the car is in good shape with 75000 miles on it. I payed 3000 Euro because there is a little bit of body damage. The sellers had a repair estimate with the car so I know what the fix will cost me. They got into a bit of a mess with it. Someone hit it while they were parked at work in early winter. They picked up their daughter at the kinderhaus and jumped in the car to go home at about 6:30. It was already pretty dark out and they didn't notice until the next morning. By then the police would not give them a report because the vehicle had been moved! And, the insurance wouldn't pay for the repair without a report. They were prepared to fight it, but they were preparing for the eminent arrival of their second child and ended up letting it slip through the cracks. In the end they basically knocked more than twice the repair cost of off the vehicle. Since it isn't illegal or dangerous to drive, we can wait until the baby is born and life has settled down to have it repaired.

Now begins the difficult process of getting it registered. First I had to get an insurance card from the insurance agent stating that I had contacted him with the intention to insure the vehicle. Next I have to go to a zulassungsstelle, which is about the equivalent of the DMV. In my case this is in Sinsheim, which is about 30 minutes away. I have to take 7 items with me to have a chance at getting it registered. These include the vehicle title, vehicle licnese, the inspection certificate, the emission certificate, the license plates, the insurance card, my ausweis, my driver's license and preferably a fluent german speaker. If I wasn't going to use the old plates, I would have to go to the license plate shop and get the number, but not the plates, go to the DMV, register it to that plate number and return to the license plate shop for the plates!

I don't know how this can be such a mess over here. On top of everything, I found out that when inspection times come, the standard TUV does not cover the emissions. This is a different inspection that happens at different intervals! Also, my coworkers advised that I allow at least 2 hours to go to the DMV.

Pie hole update

Somehow Rachel managed to write a pretty long post and not include the all important matters of my pie hole. And I thought we were a team.

With Darryl and Katherine visiting we had several new culinary experiences of note. We ate at the farm restaurant near where I work and we had a really good meal. I wanted to have rouladen, but they were out, so I settled for rinderbraten: basically pot roast made with a cut an American would call a steak but a German can't because the beef ain't good enough. The rouladen came with red cabbage cooked with apples. This is one of my all time favorite German dishes and I still haven't managed to have it over here. Darryl said his steak was good even by American standards which was good to hear because the beef is raised right there. Katherine had a stew with cranberries and pears that they seemed to like and Rachel had chicken the way German's prefer it: 1/2 of a chicken, with fries. I have to admit that they do an excellent job roasting the chicken to achieve moist meat with a crispy skin and this dish tends to be on the cheap side.

Katherine was especially fond of maultaschen which are a schwabish dish like ravioli filled with variations on onions, ground meat, parsley and cheese. I like them too, and the cafeteria at work often has them. We visited a small town called Bad Wimpfen that had many old buildings still standing and Katherine had an interesting variation on the maultaschen. The dish consisted of a good size salad with some cured ham and other garnishes. Instead of ravioli, the maultaschen looked to have been rolled into one big maultaschen, boiled, sliced and then the slices were fried crispy and thrown on the salad. Rachel and Darryl ordered the kaese spaetzel that were like really good homemade mac and cheese. I had basic sausages with potato salad.

Darryl and I did some shopping alone one morning at the specialty stores. I got some very soft appenzeller in silver foil that tasted like it had been made with mold like brie. Rachel found it to be extraordinarily stinky. We also visited the poultry butcher and found out that their sausages are mostly homemade including such extravagant things as goose salami. We tried some turkey cured like a ham, sort of like those cured duck breasts I made at christmas.

I have tried a few more of the black beers. They are all quite good and Rachel seems fond of these, at least the one sip she can get right now. I also had a slightly embarrasing beer experience where I ordered a thing on a menu I thought to be a brand of beer I hadn't seen, only to discover that it was a lager with a few squirts of sprite. Even more embarrassing, it was pretty good.

I almost forgot our biggest discovery: mascorpone ice cream. This stuff was excellent. Beside being the richest ice cream I have ever had it was studded with candied strawberries that were so sugar loaded and syrupy that they didn't freeze.

Well, my next pie hole post could cover German hospital food. We will see.

various "news"

Not too much is going on with us, but here are a few things:

Guest update Darryl and Katherine headed out to London on Monday morning and Abby arrived Sunday night. Abby stayed only two nights, left this morning, and by now is in Bavaria. She plans to see Munich today and then head on to Salzburg this evening and stay 2 nights there. So, we'll have her back in just a couple days. It's been really nice having some familiar faces around and a chance to do a few more fun things.

Pregnancy update For whatever it's worth (and not much since it seems to me that official due dates just make women and doctors impatient), today is officially week 38. I finally got my bag for the hospital packed. I'm behind on that task according to the pregnancy books, but since the baby shows no signs of vacating its current home, I think I am totally on time with completing this little job. I also did a more thorough sorting of the baby clothes Bridget lent me and have determined that those size tags are sewn on completely at random- some of the "6 month" clothes are much smaller than the "3 month." So I guess we'll just have to see what fits! I'm getting more and more uncomfortable especially when trying to sleep. All my thrashing around inevitably wakes up Trey, but I guess it just gets us ready for the many nights of interrupted sleep in our future. I've been super hungry the last week or so. But now is the time when the baby is gaining around an ounce a day, so I'm hoping that's the reason.

Scout update The flea and tick collar is working! Thanks goodness. Also our landlord said, as we thought, that taking her for potty breaks out in the garden is a-okay. Selection of dog food at the grocery store is slim and expensive for even not-so-good cheap American brands. Aldi's (which we finally visited thanks to Darryl and Katherine and does indeed have some great deals) doesn't carry it, so we're not sure what the best way to feed her is yet. Last week, finally, Trey was the one to screw up at the grocery store by not reading labels and purchased Scout a bag of "Mixer" (called this in German and in English, though I have never seen this product in America). It turns out it's grain and some dried vegetables and is meant to be added to meat scraps or canned dog food to extend it.

Home and garden update An American couple that worked at EMBL and is headed back to the States next week is giving us a bunch of the stuff they can't move with them. That includes small electronics like a TV, DVD player, and printer and some various baby stuff (they have 2 small children). It's so strange that last year we were trying to get rid of lots of our excess stuff and now we're gratefully accepting someone else's.
The garden is still home to a disgusting number of distgustingly sized snails, but the anti-snail pellets our neighbors recommended seem to be doing the trick. Trey bought a second eggplant plant just in case the first one didn't recover from the snail attack. Unfortunately, there was a big rainstorm here last week with high winds and even some hail. It snapped the stem of one of our tomato plants- so sad. All the plants were pretty small so we hadn't even thought about caging/ staking them; guess we better get on that now. Otherwise, the garden's doing well- our green beans our up, the lettuce should be ready to start eating next week or so, and I found and planted some kale seeds. I may still try to put some broccoli in this week, but maybe I'll find something more interesting to fill in the little bit of space that remains in our plot.

back to the blog

Well, as Rachel mentioned, we have guests this week which is a lot of fun. For those of you considering a visit, they have done some good scouting. With the help of my coworkers we are also accumulating quite a list of places off the beaten path that aren't full of bus loads of japanese tourists.

In other news, we bought our last major bolus of furniture and most of it is together. We will be getting our car soon, too. The stress with my work has picked up considerably with some experiments not working well yet and working on a proposal for funding for the future work we want to do here. My boss is pretty understanding about the demands of the baby coming and has pretty realistic expectations though which helps.

Scout is doing well. The only tough things are the ticks and the fact that our downstairs neighbor (not our landlord mind you) won't allow the dog to go down into the yard. Unfortunately, our current guests took Scout down there when I wasn't around and they don't speak German so all they really got from it was that something to do with the dog was "verboten". I am going to have to discuss it with the landlord to make sure we can work something out. Without being able to run her down there before bed, having her will be very difficult since the forest is a 500m walk away. That is fine for once a day trips for exercise but not for a quick bathroom trip.
The garden has also taken off. The snails have feasted on the eggplant. But the others are okay and growing. We should have some lettuce in a couple of weeks. Our neighbors planted and 8'x10' parsley patch. I can't imagine what anyone who doesn't eat tabouli at an astounding rate can do with that much parsley.

Allright, I have to go to the bakery.

good news on our package? nope

Well we finally broke down and bought some silverware that won't bend if used to dispense peanut butter. Why? Because the package we'd hoped contained our last bit of stuff from the states was not at the post office. Apparently after 7 days, they return the package to the sender. The person that runs the guest house (where we intially stayed after our arrival and the address to which all our packages was sent) wasn't there when the package arrived and it took too long for him to finally get the notice that we had a package back to Trey. Arg. However, I'm suspicious that this package wasn't even the one containing our stuff because it was addressed to me and all those original boxes were shipped to Trey. So, who knows? It seems pretty ridiculous that they'll only hold on to an internationally shipped box for 7 days, but a lot of things over here don't make sense to me.

So now I get to start the make an inquiry/ file a claim process at the USPS. Having had experience trying to complete seemingly simple transactions at a regular post office, I can't even imagine how bad this is going to be. I have called once and after an extensive interview with their automated system the woman I finally talked to said she couldn't process an inquiry because her system was done. I asked her then if I should call back tomorrow and she said no, it could be handled today, but her system was down. What does that mean? That just her own computer is locked up and she just needs to press CNTL-ALT-DEL? Why couldn't I just get transferred to another person there? Why didn't I think to ask her that while I was still on the phone?

is the future of our blog doomed?

My goodness, it's been a long time since we posted anything. On Friday, our dog Scout arrived, accompanied by our friends Darryl and Katherine from Ann Arbor. So, we've gotten a little busy. I hate to think what the arrival of the baby will do to our blog. Maybe it will just degenerate to lots of picture posts. We can only hope our little one is as photogenic as his/her cousin Silas.

At any rate, Scout survived transport just fine and seems to like Germany so far. Unfortunately, she has already been victimized twice by ticks! So looks like we will be investigating the methods for flea/tick contol available to us here. Based on the massive inferiority of the antacids and other medications, I am not optimistic.

In people news, we've finally started exploring some of the attractions around here with our guests. Saturday was Heidelberg Castle and Sunday we visited Schvetsingen castle, or more specifically, the surrounding gardens. The gardens were very extensive and pretty amazing- it was as if the prince just built one of everything: English and French gardens, many ponds and streams, a Chinese bridge, faux Roman ruins, a mosque with its own courtyard, and statues and fountains of every sort. I hope Darryl and Katherine are enjoying their time so far- for the benefit of future guests, Katherine does report the bed is very comfy!

More later...I promise.

good news?

Trey emailed me from work today to let me know that we have one more package waiting for us at the post office in Boxberg where we used to live. I am very excited to think that this could be or missing box from the states. Just in time for our guests arriving from the U.S., we may once again have silverware not stamped out of aluminum foil. I am afraid to get my hopes up too high, but I will try to maintain a degree of cautious optimism.

notes on grocery shopping

Since Trey promised this post, I suppose I have no choice but to write it. Also, it is one of my few consistent activities at present.

Planning our move, we both figured food shopping and preparation would be somewhat different from home. One of the "So, you're moving to Germany..." books we read discussed how kitchens and refrigerators are smaller, people shop more frequently, fresh ingredients are a big deal, etc. I also figured that, in more typical European fashion, shopping would mean going to a green grocer, a bakery, and a butcher instead of just a plain old grocery store. I anticipated frequent shopping at a number of stores would sometimes feel like a bit of a drag, but would be offset by interesting, high quality products at decent prices. Now, it's possible that I was overly influenced by those travel memoirs/cook books where Americans move to Provence or Tuscany and go on and on about things like "simple, seasonal, locally grown produce, cheeses, and meats." I realized Germany was not the Mediterranean, but one does get the impression that the general philosophy is not the typical American one of having all types of food available, year round, neatly packaged and of mediocre quality. However, my findings here so far are not quite what I was hoping for.

Price
So far, almost everything seems overly expensive. Nice cheeses and sausages/salamis tend to be cheap by US standards, but otherwise, even things like dry pasta seem kind of expensive. This may be partly a consequence of living in a small village. There is an Aldi's not far from here which may be good for "stocking up", but we have yet to explore that. This is partly because stores aren't open at all on Sundays, and only in the mornings on Saturdays. If you work, or need your working spouse as a pack animal, shopping is a little tricky. At any rate, I've tried checking out what other shoppers are buying to see if I'm buying things that are uncommon, but I usually only see yogurt, chocolate, and salami in their baskets. I can't help but feel I should try to get a few more nutrients than those 3 foods would deliver alone.

Separate shops
This actually is very common. Our village has at least 3 stand alone bakeries, plus there are small bakeries housed inside both the larger grocery stores. There are also 3 butchers with 1 specializing in fowl. The bakeries (even the ones that are parts of chains) do live up to expectations- they have nice selections of fresh breads and pastries and at good prices. The only reason we haven't tried more of the breads is that the loaves are enormous and we have trouble finishing them between the two of us- maybe someday I will learn enough German to convince them to sell me half a loaf. The stand alone bakeries also have consistently good coffee (that means espresso or americanos over there, though). We've done less experimenting at the butcher. Prices are the same or higher than the grocery store (yikes!), but most people say the quality is better. There is a lot of pork and sausage. A lot. The cuts are different than in America, too, so it's going to take some experimenting. There is only one green grocer here and price and selection tends to be similar to the grocery store. A co-worker of Trey's said there is a good Saturday market in a nearby village...we'll see. The other separate shop that's very common is a drink store. These occur both stand-alone and within the grocery stores. They are not for hard liquor or wine and tend to have only some beer. The most common products at these stores are bottled water and soda. Most Germans do not seem to consider tap water to be for drinking.

Products available
Some things that are abundant here- yogurt, quark, kefir and other mysterious fermented dairy products; pickled fish; every form of pork imaginable (have I mentioned how much pork there is already?); frozen vegetables, especially various medleys; a very cute and wide assortment of syrups, candies, sugar figurines, and other stuff for decorating cakes

Some things that are very hard to find- tortillas and other Mexican-type food, except, strangely, chili coated tortilla chips, which are everywhere; sweet potatoes or any greens meant for cooking- two of my favorites; much variety in fresh vegetables; brown sugar, baking soda or powder, vanilla extract, and other stuff for MAKING a cake

Spargel
Spargel is the German word for asparagus and has been our first encounter with seasonal foods over here. It's available in the grocery stores, but much more cheaply at random small stands in the street and trucks by the side of the road (kind of like sweet corn vendors in the midwest). Almost all the asparagus is white, but it doesn't seem to be the type we have the states where it is covered so it doesn't turn green- it looks like an entire different variety. Interestingly, the fatter it is, the more expensive it gets. I bought some yesterday and the pencil thin stuff (what I got) was 1.36 Euro/kg and the fattest stuff was well over 10 Euro/kg. I made this for dinner (quite good by the way) and we thought the asparagus was much milder and more tender than even "good" asparagus we've had before. Maybe the fatter spears have more favor and that's why they're preferred?

I am hopeful that as the summer progresses and we get to know the markets a little better, we'll have more luck. We'll let you know.

After a hard Tuesday...

I can sit at my desk and have a beer. That's right, at my desk at my place of employment. It is true that I am a bit disappointed in the German beer that is easily available, but I am not at all disappoiinted in the number of places I could drink it if I wanted to.

Today, three of us were sitting around at 5:15 waiting for various bits of chemistry to finish and we were eating left over pretzels from a talk earlier in the day. We were discussing whether we preferred the pretzels crispier, softer, with or without butter/cheese/mustard when my labmate said the best way was with beer. The other labmate said, "Why not, there is a case (yes a whole CASE) of beer in the cold room. Someone ask Thomas (my boss) if he wants one too."

Now where I used to work, at an esteemed midwestern public institution of higher learning, getting caught in the lab drinking a beer (yes I finished my work while drinking the beer at my bench today) would have landed you in an awful lot of trouble. Even late on a Friday in a faculty member's office the occasional beer or glass of wine meant closing the door and making sure the bottles were well concealed when finished. My labmates/drinking buddies today thought this was hilarious, that we are so ridiculous even about one beer.

At EMBL we also drink at work more formally on Fridays during what is called "The Beer Session". Each unit (Cell Biology, Structural Biology, Develpmental Biology, Gene Expression etc.) has a rotating schedule between the labs in the unit. The labs in the unit take turns throwing a party. Each lab ends up being responsible for the party about three times a year. Since there are at least 7 units, that means 7 parties going on in the building on every Friday afternoon. Usually these include the beer and some pretty substantial food. The last one I went to included pizza, chips, ice cream and cake. I should also mention that this is really quite a hallowed institution at EMBL and it is considered important that we take time to relax a little with coworkers without having to take time away from our private lives to do it.

Af far as the places you can drink a beer over here, it is pretty much anywhere you happen to have one. "Open-intox" as a social taboo and crime, just doesn't exist. I have seen people crack one open walking down the street, in the park and on the bus. I suppose it probably isn't legal to actually drink while driving, but is just fine anywhere else.

Weisswurst update

Well I thought the foodies out there might want to hear the official line on the traditional south German weisswurst. I told my labmate that we tried these and didn' t think they were so great. He asked what we did to them and I told him they were boiled so we browned them a little in a pan to heat them through. He laughed hysterically and compared this to boiling a steak. Apparently, the appropriate way to cook them is boiled in broth. They should also be served with pretzels and lots of sweet mustard, not with potatoes and broccoli as we had them. Rachel says I can do anything I want to them and she won't eat them again.

Plant a little garden, eat a lot peaches

We planted our garden today. We got off to a little bit of a rough start, arriving at the garden store before they opened and having to wait around. Once we got inside I was able to effectively question a guy about whether or not we should go ahead with tomatoes and peppers this weekend. Apparently, everyone is very comfortable with the weather holding up and was therefore planting the members of the nightshade family.

Here is Rachel planting lettuce. They sell little leaf lettuce seedlings here, so we got a dozen made up of 4 varieties. Hopefully some of them will work out and if they all do then we get to have mixed greens. We also planted 4 tomatoes, 2 peppers, 2 summer squash, an eggplant and 2 short rows of green beans. We left a row for some cooking greens, one of Rachel's favorites, but haven't yet seen any seeds for kale, chard or spinach. We decide against cucumbers as I didn't want to have to come up with something for them to climb.

Fertilizer was a little less straighforward to find. We finally realized that most folks get the kind you mix in water and sprinkle on. The garden store sells this in bulk, so we got a little sack, guessing at the most middle of the road stuff since we don't know the dirt here. We also have some compost. Those two brown bins behind Rachel are for alternating years so we had some pretty good stuff from last year to put under each planting. It looked like good compost except that it might have been more than 10% earth worms by weight.

Now we wait and see what we get. We have had conflicting reports on the success of tomoatoes here. Our landlord says that most years they had more than they could eat, but our midwife says that summers can be so rainy that they are ruined in some years. Lettuce I guess does really well for the first half of the summer. Our rhubarb is settling in, but not really growing. It doesn't much matter since we have realized that every neighbor has a huge mess of it.

Food Notes: Pie Hole II

This weekend we tried some new foods including one of the foods that is considered to be an emblem of the region: weisswurst. These are small white sausages that contain pork and veal. They are very finely ground with a consistency like a slightly mushy hot dog. A friend from Hanover in the north told me before my departure,"The problem is that EMBL is in the wrong part of Germany where they eat those little sausages." I think he also said that he was happy for me but had to tell me,"The people who live down there are idiots."

As far as the sausages, I liked the flavor but found the consistency a little off-putting. Rachel didn't like anything about them.

I also tried some new beers. I got my hands on a maerzen that was still lingering on the store shelves. This was from the previously mentioned Schwaben company in Stuttgart and while still a lager, was much more interesting than the ubiquitous pilsner. Traditionally, a maerzen is the same beer as an oktoberfest, with the single difference that they leave the maerzen to lager all summer to make it into the oktoberfest. I have no idea if this brewery or any other still does this, but the beer I had was very similar to an oktoberfest, but not as dry. It was amber and lacked the "clean bitterness" of a pilsner.

I also had a real koelsh, brewed in koln just like it should be. It was very different than the brewpub koelsh I had had in the states. Traditionally, this isn't really a lager and it can have some wheat in the recipe. This one tasted like a watered down pilsner. It was very dry and quite bitter with none of the ale like flavors I have had in stateside-koelsch. I have read that the popularity of pilsner has caused some breweries to adjust recipes in such a way so as to make them a little bit more like a pilsner. Perhaps this is part of what is happening to a koelsch. Also, it is sometimes the case that what goes in the bottle for shelf sale is not what is sold on tap or at the brewery. Perhaps this is the way to find a better koelsch. Or maybe all I know is what the books say and this is how it has always been. In that case I don't think I need to have another one...and I bought a six pack...d'oh.

We have adopted a favorite kebap place on the other end of main street from here. They have three major legs up on the other kebap places here. First the bread is excellent. Instead of pita this guy uses another type of bread that is a little thicker with more crumb and then he puts in it in a press to get it really crispy like a kebap panini. Second, he puts soft sheeps milk cheese on there which ends up warm. Think warm chevre for comparison. And finally, a big kebap is almost more than even I can eat alone and with fries is a meal for both of us for 6 Euro. As I mentioned before, a kebap with all of the fixings is pretty balanced in terms of protein and vegetables.

Our very nice downstair neighbor gave us a couple of slices of cake today. They were very unusual to the american palate. One looked like cheese cake with mandarin oranges. It reminded me of something I had had at work which was made with quark rather than american style cream cheese. This one was okay. The second was quite weird. It had a cake bottom called a fruchtboden which is intended for topping with fresh fruit and cream. Instead, though, it had a jello mold in it that I think was raspberry, perhaps with almond flavoring. For those of you on the inside, it was reminiscent of the raspberry jello with ice cream stirred in. (If you are on the outside, count yourself lucky...it means we still care about your opinion enough not to serve you this dish. And, once you've had it, you do look forward to having it again.)

I really like these neighbors despite the odd cakes. They can't speak a word of English and have been very good to us. We basically won't need to buy eggs as one of them has a brother with chickens and they won't let us pay for the eggs and they are quite fresh. Also, our apartment used to be occupied by their daughter and son-in-law who own the building. They have divorced and moved away and now rent to us. So instead of sharing a house and garden with family they now share with strangers from America. I wished my German were a bit better so I could speed the process of getting to not be strangers. But, so far so good. They even watered our droopy rhubarb for us.

You should all keep your eyes open for an upcoming post from Rachel on the struggles of grocery shopping.

Update Post-more furniture

Well, we had a busy day today. I went in to work for a bit and then met Rachel at the doctor. He wants to keep monitoring her and the baby, but at intervals I think are reasonable, if more than we had hoped. His general demeanor today made me feel like we can expect the minor complications thus far to remain minor.

After seeing the doctor, we went down to IKEA for a final large bolus of furniture. Our plan was to rent one of their little trucks to bring it to Bammental rather than waiting for the delivery on Monday, but there were no trucks to be had. The cost difference wasn't much. I had hoped though to get it all put together this weekend, and now this will have to wait.

We ended up getting: a bed (in addition to the one I bought on Ebay), 2 dressers, 2 chairs, 3 night stands, curtains to seperate one of the rooms and all of the hardware, a coat rack for the wall, some more dishes and some more towels. There were a bunch of odds and ends too. Oh, and also a big rug for the living room. I am proud to say that Rachel ran out of tolerance for shopping before I did.

On the way back we stopped and had the best Whopper I have ever had. I have to say these things are a lot better when they aren't one of the things you eat on your weekly 600 mile round trip to see your wife. They are a little expensive though compared to in the states and also compared to the other quick food available here like kabop. They are also considerably less nutritious than kabop which is reasonably balanced in protein and vegetables and doesn't seem too greasy.

After that we treked home on the train feeling sorry for our carless selves. It seems like I can get this dented Honda at a good price if I want it, but it means more waiting. I have a reliable if somewhat tardy ride to work but it would be nice to just jump in the car sometimes and go pick something up. On Monday I get all of the details on this Accord and then I can make a real decision and get on with it.

At work things are moving pretty fast. I am talking with my boss everyday about longer term project ideas in addition to the shorter ones we have going. I will be writing an application to try to get a foundation to pay my salary. In the application I will propose the work I will be doing while being paid by them and it will include many of these ideas. After the last year of things moving at a snail's pace on an old project it is nice to have daily progress with all of these new ideas.

Okay, that is enough for now. Rachel has instructed me to return to the baseball post and work on it until I convince myself to hate baseball. I better get started, I need to be finished before the game starts at 3 am local time.

Hear the roar

I am really excited about the Tigers good start. It has been a long time for them. When they fired Trammel and hired the new manager, I kind of wanted them to fail. Trammel was the all-star shortstop on the team that won the series in 1984 when I was 9 and I couldn't help but feeling he deserved one more season. But the players are the same as last year and I have my favorites. I am also hoping eveyday that Bonds wrecks a joint or something and can't get to Ruth, but it seems like he will. He might be doing it as I type for all I know.

I have a hard time explaining how I can care about sports at all. I think the salaries are out of control for grown men who play a game. I think ticket prices are out of the reach of the everyday Joe. I think the behavior of many of the players (knocking over camera men and spitting on umps) is totally out of control. (I mean come on, you make millions of dollars to PLAY a GAME. Nothing should be able to make you so mad you need to assault or spit on anyone. Just write a nasty note on a fifty and give that to them instead and then in the off season do something to stop genocide.) But, I still find sports to be one of the best diversions for relaxing and still being interested in something. It is a great distraction, but maybe it gets a bit overused.

As far as Bonds and the steroids, I can't even nail down what I find so upsetting. I think it is really all part of the same problem with the entertainment product which is modern athletics. We just expect ever greater feats of heroics from these people we hold up as super human. The homerun derby has just become a ridiculous spectacle in my opinion and exemplifies this interest in watching "feats" rather than a game. This year, I want to see the "Major League Bunt Challenge" at the all star game. Or a new contest called "Hit the Cut-Off Man".

Late at night, when I can't find something better to worry about, I sometimes think that fast food and sports are our bread and circuses. We can't afford to go the park, but it comes in to our homes cheap and easy and rather than doing something we get fat watching someone else do something. Lamenting the death of a race car driver is a lot easier than considering what happened in Dafur last night or what our president is doing but not telling us about. If the Roman's could have played Gladiator on a play station, would they have circled the drain faster?

I realized, writing the last paragraph, that the other thing that gets to me about Bonds and some of the others is that they have so much and have to have more. When their skills tail off in their late 30s they turn to chemicals, not to retirement, and that pushes them into the record books. They can't consider themselves lucky to have financially secured themselves and their families for life by playing a game until age 35 or 36. If you look at salaries of guys like Kaline or Maris, they never made anywhere near what guys do today (even adjusted for inflation). Other guys toiled in the negro leagues and had to fight for the chance to play. Ted Williams gave up seasons in his prime to return to the military to fly over Korea. Hank Aaron hired a body guard because of racist death threats when he approached Ruth's record. Now Bonds is stretching fly balls into home runs on barely functional knees, cursing at reporters, lying to grand juries and treating fans badly as he has done for years. Aaron is an upstanding member of his community and used his fame, personal wealth, and non-athletic ability to revitalize poor parts of Atlanta. You can call me sentimental, but I would rather see him get to keep his spot at the top of the list, even if it is just so I can feel like some small thing is fair.

I sometimes wish that I lived in a town with a minor league team, preferably class A or rookie ball. I could watch guys really striving and go to a game for a reasonable amount of money and know the two other guys who cared about this team. But when only two guys care, there is no one to broadcast it on the internet so you can watch it in a country that hardly knows the game. So I will write the update post I was supposed to work on tonight while I wait for my over paid Tigers try to put it to the Twins.

Anonymity

For those of you that don't know, scientific literature is evaluated for publication by a process called "peer review". This means that when you submit your work for publication in a journal and the editor deems it worthy of space on their esteemed pages, the next step is letting other members of your scientific community have a look and evaluate the work. There is no way that an editor can possibly evaluate the scientific quality of the work on their own. Even a good editor with scientific training can at best weed out the stuff that is inappropriate for the journal because no one has training broad enough and deep enough for the job. Hence the need for peer review.

The peer review process is somewhat anonymous. Usually the authors identify 5-7 members of their field they feel might be good choices when they submit the work and the editor picks a couple, usually based on availability. Often they pick one from the list and another of their choosing, maybe someone who reviewed a recent manuscript on another related topic. The authors never get to know who evaluates their work, but the reviewers usually see the manuscript with author's names intact. So the process is a bit lopsided from the get go.

Last year some of my work was reviewed for a journal. The reviewers (two in this case) suggested that we needed to do some extra work to convince them of our conclusions. We did this work at great expense in time and grief to our little family since I had to remain in Ann Arbor while Rachel lived in Indiana. We worked up a new manuscript and resubmitted the work to the same journal. The editor saw fit to send it back out for review and we finally received the review today. Needless to say, if it were good news, there would have been no such preamble as the one above. We got rejected and not in a very nice way.

We received only one review, supposedly from the only one of the orignal two who had time to have another look. He agreed that we had met all of his previous concerns but continued to raise new ones that he felt made it impossible to recommend that the editor publish our work. This is considered to be a really nasty thing for a reviewer to do to someone as it leaves you aiming for a moving target. And, as you can see, the reviewer has tremendous power. Of his concerns (numbered 1-7) 1-4 were already addressed in the actual manuscript that the reviewer had on hand to read. If something needed more detail he simply should have asked for it in a revised copy prior to publication, but he said it was entirely missing and the editor didn't bother to look for herself. 5 and 6 were suggestions for further work unrelated to 1-4. Each of them is a thesis length project of tremendous technical difficulty that would do nothing to futher verify our conclusions. And, 7, my personal favorite, is the reviewer's musings on the philosophical failings of our work.

As many of you know, I am a bit of a pessimist and have considered every possible failing in my work which I, of course, know best. This reviewer rejected us without even hitting one of the things on my top ten list! Needless to say, the review seemed a bit contrived and perhaps simply intended to obstruct publication. But, this is within the reviewer's power. And, such behavior doesn't affect his reputation because I don't know who he is. Normally, more than one review is used to prevent a single unreasonable reviewer from causing a problem like this. Most times you do get back some constructive criticism and usually what the reviewer asks you to do in revision improves the paper.

This brings me to the final tidbit in this story. The editor noted in her comments that the paper had been passed along to another "expert in our field" to evaluate. The editor noted that this reviewer recommended against publication as well, but gave no reason, nor did we get a review explaining any of this guy's opinions. Again, this is highly irregular for a comment like this to be passed along without a complete review in the reviewers own words. I have to defend my opinions in the paper, but those preventing publication can anonymously float just beyond my ability to identify them.

The editor was quite firm with my coauthor today that there is no room to argue. We asserted in return that we are not arguing with the decision but are concerned that the mechanism by which work is evaluated is severely broken. This may be especially true with this journal, as there are many stories of irregularities here.

Some questions and answers:
Why does anyone want to publish in this journal? It is prestigious. Getting a paper in a high impact journal says to someone in another or related field that you are doing good shit, or are a good bullshitter. Either way you are likely to be able to bring funding into a department and that is what is most important when looking for a faculty position.

Does its prestigiousness contribute to this problem? Probably.

Do reviewers sometimes personally benefit from preventing another person's publication from getting into print? Absolutely. It will take us about 6 weeks to get through review again. If this guy or a buddy were trying to get something through first, this much time would be enough to "scoop" us. Being first is important. I think this is unlikely in our case. More likely is that this reviewer has published something in this field and our data will reduce the probability that his preferred model is correct.

Can you sometimes guess who the reviewer is from the review? Yes, very often.

Can I in this case? Mmmm...not really. I can only say who it isn't.

What do I do now? Resubmit it to a different journal. We have clearly handled all of the serious criticism and now we have to hope we don't hit this reviewer again. Getting in to a good journal should be no problem, getting into the top 3-4 is always takes some luck. A hostile reviewer, overloaded editor or one whose scientific background is in a different area could all sink a paper at these places. As you drop down to slightly lower impact but good journals the odds of reasonable reviews and publication process go up considerably.

Are there any good reviewers? Yes, most take the job seriously and most editors do as well as it is damaging to a journal's reputation to have poor work get in and the editor can't do it alone. Good reviewers will recuse themselves if they see that there is a conflict of interest if they review the work.

Does this make me want to leave academics? Yup.

assorted kind of boring stuff

So, my ear infection was confirmed yesterday at the doctor's office. You'd think after having oh, 156 such infections in my life I would've recognized that old feeling, but I was thrown off by the sinus congestion aspect. Ah well. He prescribed some ear drops, which seem to be working and happily most likely will have zero effect on the baby and won't cause any other systemic nastiness the way an oral antibiotic might. The only terrible thing about ear drops is that they go, you know, in your ear. Worse, they are stored in the fridge! Eeew.

In other oh-so fascinating medical developments, our midwife reported yesterday that the baby was head down and likely staying that way (yeah!). However, my blood pressure was creeping toward a scary level and she wanted to come back and check it again today. Yes, the midwife actually comes to our house for the exams- pretty cool, huh? So part of last night was spent mildly freaking out about the potential pre-eclampsia or need for hospitalization the high BP might indicate. Rather an over-reaction to one high reading I know, but what the hey? Luckily my genius husband convinced me to just take a walk (good for blood pressure) and get an ice cream cone (good for mental instability). As of today, though, my reading was back down and more normal and the midwife offered some various suggestions for keeping it in check (as opposed to the more typical medical suggestions of more tests, drugs, or nothing).

Not much else going on, except that I still haven't learned my lesson about reading food labels over here more carefully. There's this fruit and nut chocolate bar I love that's been very elusive but we managed to find in the grocery store earlier this week. So, when I went back yesterday I grabbed another one. When I got home, opened the package, and broke off a few squares, though, there was this overwhelming alcohol smell. Turns out there was rum in the chocolate! Trey was making fun of me for not noticing this on the label- to make matters worse the German word for rum is, um, "rum." But honestly, how would I even know to check for such a thing? The picture on the package only shows fruits and nuts with no indication that there's going to be rum in there crapping up a perfectly good piece of candy. Should I be checking to make sure the dry spaghetti isn't coated with cinnamon sugar? Or that the chunky peanut butter doesn't actually contain peas? Jeez.

beer hole, bierloch

As many of you know, my pie hole moonlights as my beer hole. I wanted to put up a post on some of the interesting beer findings so far over here in the (supposed) great land of beer.

My first impression was certainly dissappointment. It was very clear that what most Germans prefer is a pils or pilsner and that most of the pilsners only differ in very subtle ways. Good ones are all the things a Pilsner should be: dry and hoppy. But, they are remarkably similar to one another and that seems to be how they want it. I had a really interesting Pilsner on my visit that had a little residual sweetness left in the finished product. On my return I asked the person I enjoyed that beer with what it was and he told me that the brewery went out of business right after my visit.

The wheat beers are quite good, but like the pilsners are remarkebly similar to one another. The first pubs I visited tended to have a very limited selection with only one pilsner and one wheat beer to choose from on tap and then maybe two more in bottles. The first grocery stores had larger selections but still had mostly plain old pilsner and plain old wheat beer, just more name brands.

Altbier and Koelsch (I seperate these for the sticklers) are very hard to find on a store shelf. They are still found in their "hometowns" (Cologne and Dusseldorf) but Germans in general will choose other beers over these unless they are from the hometown.

My coworkers found out about my interest in beer and started asking questions about Pilsner as they knew nothing of its origins. They couldn't believe it when I told them that Pilsner was one of the world's newest popular styles and that it originated in Pilzen. One even looked it up on Wikipedia to check my facts. Pilsner is so ubiquitous here that he thought it must be quite old and probably of German origin. (We side stepped the argument over whether Bohemia should really be a part of Germany.) Another coworker insisted that English beer was "ale" and German beer was proper "beer". This stirred up quite a lot of posturing about how the English were "piss drinkers", but once that blew over a couple of them were more interested in the details of the yeast and how it seperates ales and lagers. Many of them were quite surprised to find out that wheat beers are actually ales and they new nothing of the meaning of the verb "to lager".

You can imagine my heartbreak when I saw how limited my choices were. It was spring which should have meant Marzen, Bocks, Maibock and Doppelbock, but there wasn't any in the stores.
Since we moved to our new village this week things have improved some with the much better grocery stores and probably also with the progresison of spring. Some bocks and doppelbocks have popped up and there is more access to other styles in the store. I have had a very good plain old bock beer, something you have to search a bit for in the states and I had the same brewer's doppelbock today. I also have had a proper dark Munich style lager that was excellent. All of these were products of the Andechser cloister. Check out the brewing monks if you feel like it. After checking out the website, this might be a place worth a visit.

The most unusual so far, though, was a real Schwarz or Black beer. Michael Jackson (the beer one) listed this as one of the styles to reappear from behind the iron curtain. It is the eastern answer to dark Munich. The one I had was nothing like the black beers I had in the states. It was very complex like a porter but much less filling and cleaner tasting. It is brewed from a pretty low gravity (see the site above) which also contributes to how easy it goes down. The one I had was made nearby in Stuttgart by the Schwabinbraeurei. This brewery had a Maerzen that I am looking forward to next year, or maybe still this year if I can find it.

The one thing I cannot complain about is the price. The last 0.5 liter bottle of Paulaner anything I had in the states was over $2.50. Here it is 0.75 Euro for a single half-liter. None of the beers I list above were more than 1 Euro for a half liter with the exception of the black beer. It was a splurge at 1.05 Euro. Beer is consistently cheaper than coke in restaurants and pubs.

I will try some more and let you know.

I am not deaf; I just don't speak your language

You hear comedians talk about seeing an American yelling something at a foreigner who can't understand him very well as though the problem was that Chinese people are all hard of hearing. I had my first such experience today, where a German yelled at me, while trying to tell me how one buys paint over here. For the sake of comparison, I also had a perfectly reasonable conversation with a woman at the garden store as to when one should plant tomatos in this part of the world and we got along just fine in a similar context.

At the garden store, I asked the woman, in German, if she spoke English. Generally, when I do this, if the person responds in German rather than immediatly switiching, I usually give it a go in German. Even if they say they can speak a little or will try, I figure if they don't drop into English, I should try it for the sake of my own German and because I am the stranger here. So this woman said she would try, but in German, and seemed a little shakey, so I proceeded in German with my questions:
Me: When, should one plant tomatos here?
Her: That is not English???
Me: I know, but I can speak some German.
Her: After the last of the frosts. She had a word in front of frost that I thought was "holy". Maybe the last frost is called the "holy frost" because of easter, I don't know.
Me: And when is that?
Her: May 12th if you know the weather will be good for a few days. Otherwise the 15th is always safe.
Me: And how long will you have small tomato plants?
Her: At least until the middle of June.
Me: Okay, that works, thank you.
Her: Your German is just fine.
Me: Thanks, but it depends on who I talk with and what we talk about.

Then I went to the home improvement store and immediately had the evidence backing up my last comment in the last conversation. We walked over to the next village with the idea that if we bought too much at the home store we would hop on the train to get back. By time we got there it was 3:40 and they close at 4:00 and we had a long list. So we split up and grabbed a few things. I successfully asked a customer service person for an item:
Me: Do you have the thing that I put on an American thing to fit into the European socket. Yes, I know the word for socket.
Her: Oh, of course. Let me show you.
We walk over there.
Her: We only have sets for all over the world. Usually we have individuals.
Me: Okay, thank you.

After two successes, I was feeling confident.
Then we tried to sort out the paint situation with a different guy who seemed to be of a rougher sort than the previous clerk and spoke a lot of dialect:
3:50
Me: I need paint for inside for one room, that isn't too expensive.
Him: How big a room?
Me: 30 sq. meters.
Him: You will have to get enough for 50 meters.
Me: Okay
Him: Well this is a middle quality paint, at a reasonable price. The cheaper paint from this firm is also good enough. This is just plain white, like snow. Not colored, white. It will do a 50 meter room.
3:52
Me: Okay, but can you make the color for me?
Him: No, we only do that for paint and it is too close to closing time for me to do it for you anyway. Do you understand? The paint I (some words I didn't understand) is different and too expensive. (Lots of stuff I didn't understand.)
3:53
Me: So, how do I make color with this? I can see by his face that he doesn't understand.
How do I give the white paint another color?
Now he starts to get annoyed. This information was probably contained in one of the segments of the conversation I didn't catch above. He takes me over to another aisle behind the paint and shows me that you buy the tint yourself. He rattles off a lot of German I don't get about mixing ratios and other stuff. I nod.
3:54
At this point, Rachel and I had a look at the paint and the tint and picked some out. Rachel had already collected all of the necessary stuff for the painting. But I needed something to stir the paint. This got me to the edge of my German and the store guy to the absolute edge of his patience.
Me: So, I have everything and I understand. Now can I buy something to ummm...upset the paint. I said this while making a stirring motion.
Him: Yes.
Me: Where?
3:56
Him: That is downstairs. You will need (a whole bunch of words I didn't understand.)
Me: Where?
3:57 Now he is annoyed and starts to yell.
Him: DOWNSTAIRS He does a little dance to indicate walking downstairs or possibly that I am a monkey or should act like a monkey or maybe it was a rain dance for paint stirrers. My point is that the communicative value was low. In retrospect, I should have just done the dance along with him as though that was the expectation.
Him: Then RIGHT and RIGHT
So I walked away.

So we went downstairs and discovered that this wasn't a stiring stick but one of those things that goes in a drill, which makes sense if you are mixing your own. Those words I couldn't catch were probably related to the need for the drill. And, then we gave up on painting this weekend since it was 3:59 and paint guy was also the helper for the tool area. I couldn't see buying a power tool from this guy, especially under time pressure.

I think there are just some people who are patient and are willing to spend the time to try to communicate with you and then others just won't. Even in English, a store clerk being an ass is frustrating, but in a foreign country you have to really count on that person's willingness to be helpful and also to be a good communicator through the barrier. Our downstairs neighbor for instance is very friendly and patient, but says far less to me than I say to her because she spends too much time looking for a simple way to say it for my benefit. She is patient but not a very good communicator. Or at least not efficient.

Anyway, I hope I never yelled at a non-english speaker. It is a pretty rotten feeling, but in two months here it has only happened once, so it certainly isn't the norm.