Bremerhaven

(trip to Bremen, con'td).








On Saturday, we went to Bremerhaven. Bremerhaven has a bit of a unique status in Germany. There are sixteen Bundesländer in Germany (states). Three of them are cities: Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen. Bremen does not have a coast, so a long time ago, the ruler of Bremen bought the town of Bremerhaven from the surrounding territories. The two are not connected by land, but belong to one government. It takes about an hour on the train to get to Bremerhaven.

We went to Bremerhaven to visit the Deutsche Auswanderer Haus (German Emigration House). Bremerhaven is sort of the opposite of Ellis Island in New York. A huge amount of the immigrants to the United States from all over Europe went through Bremerhaven on their way to the New World. The museum was incredibly well done. It was designed to let you see what it was like to travel on board a steamer. Each exhibition room was redone to look like different parts of the boat. At the end, you could research any of your ancestors that may have immigrated to the United States. Unfortunately, I didn't know we were going to go to the museum beforehand so I didn't get to look anything up about our family.

Bremen

Last weekend, I traveled to Bremen, in the northwestern corner of Germany, to visit a former rowing coach who is currently living there (and grew up there). The train ride was nice and quiet and uneventful. The train from Ilmenau was late (as usual), but it was okay because I had a twenty minute layover in Neudietendorf. Neudietendorf is a stupid little hole in the wall station, but you often have to transfer at it in order to go somewhere to the west of Thüringen. I caught a regional express train from Neudietendorf to Göttingen, and then took the ICE from Göttingen to Bremen. Apparently the ICE that run on the Munich to Bremen line are the first generation of ICEs, so they’re quite old school. In terms of the actual niceness of the train, the regional express train was much nicer.
Mark (also known as MOK from his initials, Mark Oliver Klages) picked me up at the train station and then we went on a tour of the old city of Bremen after dropping the stuff off at his mother’s house. Bremen is a quite cute little city, full of little tiny narrow alleyways and cute old shops. Most of the buildings along these little alleys are just stores, but some are houses. According to MOK, they are very expensive and ritzy, but the tradeoff is that you have to deal with tourists wandering by all the time.
Bremen is famous for the Bremen Stadtmusikanten – that old legend about the four animals who decide to travel to Bremen in order to earn a living as street musicians. They come to a house along the way and decide to spend the night there. Little do they know, but a band of robbers has made this house their headquarters. The animals (a donkey, a dog, a rooster, and something else) pile on top of each other in order to see in the window. The robbers are so scared of this strange four-headed beast, they run away and never come back. The four Bremer Stadtmusikanten decide they like the house so they just stay there and live there and they never actually make it to Bremen.

First Snow in Ilmenau

Today was officially the first real sticking snow in Ilmenau. There was snow on the ground yesterday morning, but it melted by the time I went to school. Today, we probably got at least four inches and it was fairly blizzard-like at times. In Frauenwald, which is more in the mountains, they got half a meter last night. It is going to be a long winter, especially since last year it apparently didn't snow at all the entire time. One of the things Dave and I were talking about the other day was that it must be a pain to shovel all the sidewalks (since they are mostly cobblestone). It's not. They have little mini-plows that plow the sidewalks. They are nice, except then you have to walk around them in the road.

Last Saturday, we went down to the new ice rink here in Ilmenau (which is beautiful) to watch an Eisstocksport Tournament. Eisstocksport is curling - but it was German curling, meaning no brooms and it's not such a precision sport as the Canadian version. Instead of pushing the stones across the ice, you bowl them. The Ilmenau team was pretty bad. They kept throwing their stones and they would land crookedly and sort of wobble across the ice. Most of the time they didn't even make it into the target zone. Oh well. The stones are different as well. They are smaller and lighter and have interchangeable bottoms. It would be my guess that the different bottoms have different coefficients of friction.

And now I need help from all of my readers out there: I am teaching one of the German social studies classes in two weeks. They are about to start learning about the United States. I have been asked to do a short introduction. One of the questions that the teacher wants me to address is: Why are Americans so proud of their country and of being America? Please write me a comment and tell me what your answer would be. Your own personal opinion, please.

Yesterday it snowed for the first time (for real). It actually snowed a couple of weeks ago, but only a bit. But it snowed just about all day yesterday - big, heavy, wet flakes. Nothing stuck here in Ilmenau, but I can look out at the mountains and see lots of snow. Every once in a while you see a car riding around with six inches of snow on the top, but nothing is really on the ground here still. The woman at the library definitely sounded depressed when she said, "There's going to be five more months of this," to me yesterday while I was checking out some movies.

On Wednesday, I, along with all of the other Fulbrighters in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia got invited to the US consulate in Leipzig. It was sort of silly because we didn't do much - but it was nice to see everyone from our training course and to meet more Fulbrighters in my area. There are quite a few research scholars in Jena and Weimar who I didn't know about. First we had a little mix-and-mingle over tea, coffee and bagels (I haven't had a bagel in forever). Then the consul general for Leipzig, the Cultural Attaché in Berlin and the Public Affairs guy for Leipzig talked to us for a bit about various things. Then we all headed over to the Museum for Contemporary History of the DDR for a nice English tour.

I finally have a fairly consistent work schedule going on, now that we've actually been back in school for a few weeks. Although apparently Germans freak out if they don't see a holiday coming in the future because we are having a random floating holiday weekend on Thanksgiving weekend so that we have four days off. Too bad I didn't know that before - could have made the trip home for Thanksgiving. Oh well.

I am teaching 5th, 6th, and 12th grade classes at the moment. Depending on the teacher, I either get used appropriately or not. I'm giving it another week in order for us to get comfortable first before I push for a little more autonomy for those who don't give me any. One teacher just uses me for reading exercises in her 5th grade classes, but in her 6th grade class she gives me a lot more responsibility. Last week, I talked about class schedules in America for a bit and this week I am supposed to talk about sight-seeing attractions in London. (Because obviously I am British). Oh well. At least I have been to London. The other teachers for 5th and 6th usually just write me a little note about what they are going to cover in class, and then sort of let me cover it in my own way.

Die Zuge fallen aus (and I ran a marathon)

Yesterday, I ran the Dresden Morgenpost Marathon. The weather was terrible. It rained or poured the entire time. The temperature was maybe 40 degrees. I finished with a time of approximately 3:44, but me finishing the marathon was just about the only thing that went right the entire weekend. Let's start at the beginning, with the train trip to Dresden.

Dave and I are cheap, so instead of taking the ICE/IC trains (aka express trains) to Dresden, which would have taken about just under four hours and cost 104 Euro round trip for the both of us, we traveled on a Thüringen Ticket. The Thüringen Ticket allows you to travel on all regional trains in Thüringen, Sachsen, and Sachsen-Anhalt for an entire day for 26 Euro (for both of us). All started out well, until we got to Erfurt. We had a half hour wait until our next train, so I decided to go take some money out of the bank so we would have cash (We only had about 50 Euro with us and had to pay cash for the hostel.) However, my EC-Card (debit card) was declined. Apparently, the bank had frozen my bank account after I added Dave to it on Tuesday until I brought my passport in. So we couldn't get any money out since I didn't have my American debit card and Dave's isn't international.

The train rides to Dresden actually went farely well. We went to the marathon to check in and discovered that I couldn't run with a chip because we didn't have enough cash to pay for one. This is why my time is only approximate. Luckily, they said I could run without one. The next step was to make sure we could buy a ticket to get home from Dresden on Sunday. If the machines wouldn't take credit cards, we were SOL and would have just taken the train back to Ilmenau on Saturday night and abandoned the marathon. Luckily, we found a machine that took credit.

Next order of business, get to the hostel before our check-in window expired. The directions provided by the hostel said, take the S2 to Grenzstraße. Unfortunately, every single S2 had my least favorite German sign: Der Zug fällt aus. AKA the train has been cancelled. This was the time for our first of MANY trips to the DB service points during this trip. After the DB man had a large altercation with an angry German woman, we figured out how to get to Grenzstraße. We get to the hostel, check in, and everything's good. Ah, but now we are hungry since we haven't eaten all day. The disadvantage about this hostel is that it is near NOTHING. We had to go all the way back to Dresden to find somewhere that would take credit cards so we could have something to eat for dinner.

Dave said he would pay for dinner. However, after two of his credit cards and his EC were declined, I ended up having to pay. Luckily they took my card - otherwise we would have been doing dishes for our dinner.

Next morning: marathon. It went as marathons do. I ran a lot. Dave hid from the pouring rain and never saw me until the very end. Afterwards I was cold and took a shower.

Now for the epic odyssey home. We got to the train stop just as the S-Bahn we needed to the main train station left. Unfortunately, since the S2 were STILL all cancelled, we had to wait for a new train, which meant that we missed our first train. Instead, we decided to get on the train to Leipzig. We should have gotten off at Riesa and switched to Chemnitz, but apparently missed that, so we ended up in Leipzig. In Leipzig, we waited for two hours for the next train connection to Ilmenau. Finally the train came, but as we were about to get on, the announcement came: This train has been cancelled for service reasons. We run to the DB service point and get a new printout (second one of the day) for our new connection. This one takes us to Halle where we are supposed to switch to a regional train to Eisenach. Unfortunately, we arrive in Halle to discover that the regional train to Eisenach is also out of service for some reason and we are instead supposed to take a bus to Schkopau and then get on the train to Eisenach. We wait for half an hour for the bus. They only had ordered one bus - for at least 100 people. Luckily a second bus showed up. Otherwise there would have been a small riot of German people. After twenty-five minutes on a bus with three bicycles, a crying baby, and an overcapacity of at least thirty people, they dump us off somewhere in the dark. We can just barely make out the train tracks in the distance. Finally, we are safe on the train. This however, is a regional train, not even a regional express. This means that it stops at EVERY SINGLE STOP. Eventually, after various Verspätungen and other mishaps, we arrive safely in Ilmenau and have an uneventful trip back to Ilmenau.

Total travel time Saturday: probably 6.5 hours. (including S-Bahn travel to and from hostel)
Total travel time Sunday: nine and half hours.

Total number of trains Saturday: 11 trains
Total number of trains Sunday: 8 trains and 1 bus
Number of cancelled trains: too many to count

I have now completely lost faith in the German train system However, we did get 16 hours of train ride for only 52 Euro total. How much would it cost in America to go 16 hours on the train? According to the Amtrak website, to travel from New York City to Elkhart Illinois takes 16 hours. It costs $100 per person.

Amerikanische Konversation und Landeskunde

Wednesdays, 17-18:30 pm, Room 1220, Ernst Abbe Zentrum:
Amerikanische Konversation und Landeskunde class taught by Frau Corey and Herr Nacmanie.

I am now officially (with the help of Dave) teaching a university class on American culture and conversation. Our first class was yesterday. Yesterday was get to know you day -- everyone had to tell us one cool thing about themselves. Some selections of cool things:
- I can eat AT LEAST six hamburgers at a time - Ki or Kevin from China
- I like steaks A LOT. ("What kind of steaks?" we ask, "Beef, horse, whale?") I don't care, as long as they're BIG! (as he makes a hand gesture approximately the size of a small table).
- I am a woman. -- Now of course, this one sounds a bit strange, but she qualified it by pointing out that she studies computer science and so she is an oddity in the field. The Technische Universität Ilmenau, like many other technical universities, has a high gender imbalance.

Visitors from Blue Ash, Ohio and other experiences

Two Wednesdays ago was a holiday from school since it was Tag der Deutschen Einheit (aka Day of German Unity or Day of German Unification). It also happened to be the day that visitors from Ilmenau's partner city, Blue Ash, Ohio, came to visit Ilmenau. Because I am the only American in Ilmenau, I got invited along on their morning excursion to help them feel more at home. Guess what the morning excursion was? Free rides down the Ilmenauer Rodelbahn - aka the Ilmenau summer luge track. Normally, each ride costs 1 Euro (which is really not worth it). It was quite fun though. There was also a semi-professional luger who would go down the real track (we only got to go down the recreational track), which was more than twice as long as the section we went down, and he still only took oe second longer to go down than we did. That was sort of embarrassing. One of the male teachers from my school apparently used to be a coach and he was trying to teach me how to steer to go faster. He was completely unsuccessful.

After the luging fun was over, we went to the restaurant at the Rodelbahn and had some real German food. I got to be the official translator for my table. That was amusing, especially since I was sitting at the table with our semi-pro luger and it was sort of getting past my limit of ability to translate. On the bright side, I finally had my very first real Thüringer Kloße. Kloße are these large potato dumpling things (about the size of a large apple) and they have a very fluffy but heavy texture. They definitely need a sauce or gravy or some kind. Everyone else had duck and some kind of duck gravy to put on their Kloße, but I had to make do with the sauce from the mushrooms. The next day in school when I told one of the teachers that I had eaten Kloße with mushrooms, she and the entire class laughed at me. After the main course, the restaurateur came around to ask if we wanted dessert. I said yes of course - when have I ever passed up free dessert? Out comes the dessert and it was an eight inch tall giant puff pastry full of ice cream and whipped cream. It was incredible.

Later in the day, I dragged Emily along to the opening of the new dance center at the new Eishalle. They had two free workshops/classes so I spent four hours of my afternoon learning how to hip-hop and Latin dance, both of which I am absolutely terrible at. Thank god I had at least taken that modern dance class last year in school - because at least I had some idea what was going on.

Since it was also my last night as a single person in Ilmenau, I went out with Rich to a new bar in the area, Cafe Bohne. It was a Wednesday night so no one was there, except for one couple who sat at their table and made out the entire time we were there (approximately two hours). The only time they came up for air was when Rich and I decided to go play a game of Foosball (Kicker auf Deutsch), and they immediately leapt up and challenged us to a game - which we proceeded to lose by a score of 10-2 in about five minutes. It was highly embarrassing. On the bright side, Rich says he has been back there since with other people, and the same couple is there every night doing the same thing - so they probably deserve to win. The last time I played Kicker was probably six years ago. Although we've got one in the apartment so I'll practice up before I go off to Cafe Bohne again.