The Country I Come From

Well, internet, we are still out here hammering away. We are just going in so many directions that we hardly have had time for anything lately. Tomorrow it is off to Dresden, for a conference I have been prepping for for the last several weeks. This has led to our personal worst month of blogging in the history of the blog. But, coming up this fall, we have a nice run of trips planned, and continued Ellis chronicling, so keep coming back.

On another note, I was proud to see a judge in a midwestern state affirm the right of everyone to get married and have the legal protections (and obligations) that come with being a legally recognized family. Call the judge an activist if you want, or say such change shouldn't come through the courts, but I just don't see how we can continue to deny this simple civil right to so many.

another german zoo

Ellis and I visited the Heidelberg Zoo with some friends and were pleasantly surprised to find it nicely sized (plenty of animals but small enough to not overwhelm tiny visitors) and very green. Even with a snack break, it only took about two hours to see the whole zoo. Ellis is still classifying most large animals as "dog" and so produced a "woof woof" sound upon viewing both the zebras and donkeys. Looks like it's time to devote some serious study time to his animal books. The primates were some of Ellis's favorites. We watched a gorilla pair and their 8 month old baby for a long time before moving on to the chimpanzees. The chimps come up very close to the glass and managed to startle Ellis a couple times, though he was fascinated by their eating, swinging on branches, and playing. Instead of having a petting zoo, there was one area in the zoo where pygmy goats just roam around free.

The goat set-up was kind of weird, but Ellis was more interested in them this time than last time:

The goats naturally recognize that kids often have, and more important, drop, bits of food. Thus babies and their strollers are easy marks: Ellis tried to make an escape with his stroller: No such luck! Even pygmy goats are faster than a toddler: "Stay away from here goats!"

I almost forgot

I forgot to tell the other part of the bowling story: our car experienced discrimination in the amount of 15 Euros.

We parked on the street in an area that was limited to two hour parking until 5 pm. We parked at 5:08 pm. My French coworker's wife parked their Renault behind me in the same place about 45 minutes later and we both got parking tickets. Now, in Germany, when you park in a time limited but no-pay slot, you are supposed to have a little cardboard clock in your car that you set to the time you arrived and then leave on the dash in view of the police. If you don't put the clock up, you are immediately in violation of the law and you get a ticket for illegal parking--and that is fine. But, when I parked, it was no longer a time limited spot because it was past 5 pm. So, at first I thought that maybe if it is within two hours after the time that it becomes no-time-limit parking then you have to put the clock to indicate that. But, my French coworker ran back to get something out of the car and noticed the tickets, just shortly after they were written. He noticed a couple of interesting things: first we were parked in front of the office of the parking police- legally parked-but right where they could hunt us out the back door of their sweet cushie public office and also run our plate numbers if they wanted. More importantly, he took note of the cars parked around us: 2 Audis, a VW and 2 Mercedes (what is the plural of Mercedes, anyway?). None had their little clocks on the dash and none of them had tickets.

My coworkers were divided on what probably had happened. Some agreed that we were treated unfairly, others suggested we had done something else wrong, which seems unlikely since it happened to two of us and my coworker's wife is fluent in German and wouldn't have made some silly mistake by not reading the sign correctly. Further I had a fluent German in my car when I parked and he looked at the sign. They did agree that we did not need to use the clock if the sign said that time-limited parking ended at 5.

I don't see how this was a legitimate ticketable offense, but I don't see myself fighting it either. The language and the time it would take aren't worth 15 Euros. My coworker doesn't care because his plates are French and while that car is legal here indefinitely, the pipes aren't connected and the French government won't pursue him. I doubt they ran the plates and saw that they weren't owned by Germans. Probably, they just were too lazy to walk 10 feet to ticket a nice Audi. Considering what the Germans think of my Honda (and Renault), I can believe they probably thought we they were letting off easy.

Of Donkeys and Turkeys

Yesterday we had our twice yearly laboratory outing which included American-style bowling and an Indian supper. The Indian food was quite good, but terribly expensive compared to what I would have expected to spend on such a meal in any college town in America. My lamb tikka masala was good though.

I say the bowling was American-style because there is a separate type of bowling here that seems to be popular with older men, much like Bocci is popular with certain elderly demographics. Unlike most Americans of my generation, European kids didn't grow up with bowling as a birthday party or Friday family-night outing, so for many this was their first or second time. We had done this as a lab one other time when I first got here, and I had forgotten that I was the only one who knew how to keep score. So, I ended up managing two score tables for 10 bowlers split over two lanes. Finally my boss and our lab technician decided they wanted to learn the finer points and pitched in. Someone managed three strikes in a row and I explained that this was called a "turkey". My boss took to this and announced when someone had managed three 9's in a row that this would now be known as a "triple donkey".

Pre-French Toast

We are having a perfectly wonderful November over here. I mean August. And, it isn't wonderful, it feels like late October. I think the gray wetness has us both a little blue these days. It is downright dank. One unfortunate consequence of this is that the blackberries are in one of three states: perfect, rotten or stone like. I suspect that the perfect phase lasts only seconds before they become rotten. Keeping Ellis supplied has gotten even harder. And, today, when offered some berries he grabbed my wrist to move my hand up to his mouth as though I were one large human like spoon.

I am trying to resist the urge to post pictures of dinners here on the blog. Rachel thinks it was silly and I kind of agree. On the other hand, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the things that aren't improving (guitar, beer making while over here, fishing for several years now) and one thing that has improved a lot, and continues to improve, is my ability in the kitchen. So I am trying to remember to mark this, at least for myself. Just recently I have developed a passable pad thai and an excellent tempura batter that I can keep crisp in the oven for a few minutes until the whole batch is fried. Tonight we had two Alton Brown recipes: pea burgers and deep-fried leek rings. I highly recommend both especially to you vegetarians.

It was very hard this week to resist the urge to send a coworker down the garden path when she came to me and asked, "Do you know if I can put air into my tires myself or is it a mechanic job?" I told the truth, but could just as easily have said, "Ohh, that is kind of expensive, I will do it for you for 25 Euros." or, "The tires only come with a certain amount of air and once it is gone you need new." But I didn't. This coworker has had enough bullshit recently. And, I recently read this post by Mrs. Scientist which left me feeling like I should have gone and done it for her.
Another coworker came to me this week and said, "Henry, I have to ask you a question. I have a bet that needs answered. What is the plural of 'sheep'?" My first inclination was to tell her that "sheep" worked the opposite of "goose" and "geese" such that "shoop" would then be the plural of "sheep": "Hey, did you see that sheep run across the road?." "Hey look, here come 12 more shoop." But I never give people a hard time about language because they all speak mine so much better than I speak theirs and English is such a pain in the ass to learn. For instance, "moose", "goose", "loose" and "noose", all rhyme with "juice", but "good" doesn't rhyme with "food". Poor non-native English speakers.

We are also exchanging a lot of colloquial expressions at work lately, back and forth between English and German. I recently learned that adding "like a sow (pig)" means "a whole lot" or "extremely". So "Er geht wie Sau ab" means "he took off really fast" but literally it is, "He goes how a pig away". Use of this verb "abgehen" ("geht ab", above) requires great care as well because without "wie Sau" it applies only to the loss of a pregnancy.
I taught my Swiss coworker the expression, "To put 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack." He liked this quite a lot and said that even though there was no direct equivalent in Swiss German that he knew of, it could be translated straight away without any loss of meaning.
Time to make the French toast.

"Why didn't I know about these before?"

Yesterday I mentioned we would be going to the forest to pick blackberries. There weren't enough ripe ones yet to try and bring home buckets as we had hoped, but there were plenty for Ellis to try as detailed in this pictorial essay.

"Uh, Dad, are you eating something? I didn't know there were things to eat in the forest."

"Ah, yes, I believe I will try one."

"Dad, DAD, I need more of those for my pie hole, STAT."

"Dad, your STAT needs some serious work. But man, these are good."

"No need to go one at a time when they're so small and my mouth is so big."

"Whoa, Dad, I can eat them by myself, go find more."

"Phew, got the last one in there. Did you hear what I said about finding more? Now is the time to work on that STAT."

Unfortunately, after this point, there aren't anymore pictures because both hands of both adults were required to pick enough berries to keep this kid happy. Without exaggerating, I would estimate he ate 80-100 black berries in less than an hour. Toward the end of our walk, I would offer him a handful with 5-7 berries and he would simply lean over and hoover them up with his mouth. By the end of the trip he looked bruised from ear to ear, chin to nose. At about the three-quarter mark he released an unbelievable tyranosaurus belch and I was briefly concerned that we were about to see some of the berries again. But, I was wrong, like many an over eater, he kept his feet and his stomach.

24 Bottles of Bud

Today, I bought a case of Budweiser and I was all prepared to write a post about how the original Czech product got gaffled by the mighty Anheuser-Busch and lost the right to market their beer around the world under its original name. Turns out, the story isn't quite so clear cut, at least not legally, because the Czech company had evolved through different names and ownership at about the same time that the American Budweiser was coming into existence in St. Louis. As a result of the legal wrangling, Budwar Budweiser is called Czeckvar in the U.S. and Canada. The Bohemians did win some of the battles retaining the right to the name in European countries where Anheuser's product is called just "Bud" in France or "Anheuser-Busch B" in Germany where it sits on the shelf being mocked by other beers.

One thing that is clear is that there was a beer style dating to the 13th century named after the town of Budweis in Bohemia and called Budweiser. However, this couldn't have been the modern Czech Budweiser since lager style beers came into existence much later. The Czech Budweiser argues that the name Budweiser is much like Pilsner and is simply the name of a beer style originating in a town and as such is a generic adjective. If Busch had to follow the European rules, they wouldn't be allowed to use that adjective since their beer doesn't match the style or come from that area.

And now a little comparison:
Both are light, lager beers with 5% ABV. Following the German purity law, and lets face it, good sense, Budvar Budweiser is made with four ingredients: water, yeast, malted barely and hops. In this case, Saaz hops are used, the ones that give many Czech beers that little extra sumpin', and in addition appear in out of the way American microbrews, notably Bell's Oberon. Anheuser throws rice into their beer to keep the alcohol up but the flavor down. I am not opposed to adding other grains or even sugars to beers (the Belgians have made this into high cuisine) but when you start with the question "how can we make this beer less..ya' know...well...beery?" and you arrive at "rice" as an answer, you have lost me forever. While BuschBud claims to be the "King of Beers", Budvar claims that their Budweiser is the "Beer of Bohemian Kings". I find this strange reflective coincidence rather charming.