Not exactly Oktoberfest but good enough

Late September always marks the beginning of the annual Oktoberfest in Munich. What many foreigners are unaware of is that several cities in Germany have an autumn festival of their own and which aren’t as heavily crowded and hectic as the more popular Oktoberfest. As someone who isn’t overly enthusiastic about bumping shoulders too many times with drunken people, the Herbstmarkt in Friedberg served as the ideal and laid-back German fall festival experience for me.

Like the Altstadtfest that I previously blogged about, there were fun rides/attractions such as bumper cars, a mini roller-coaster, spinner, and haunted house as well as food booths for crepes, cotton candy, chocolate covered fruits and the like. The one thing that distinguished the Herbstmarkt the most from the Altstadtfest was the Festzelt (Festival Tent). You can find a lot of these in Munich during Oktoberfest.

Typical German Beer/Food tent:

Inside the tent with ornate draping and an entertainment stage in the background:

A band playing traditional German “Pub” melodies:

And, my favorite part of the tent—the rotisseries with chicken and rolled pork. 2nd best chicken ever! (Mom’s garlic roasted chicken comes in 1st place, hehe) It was nice, juicy, and seasoned to near perfection.

Bleh @ Deutschkurs A2 Part 2

Well, it appears that my new Deutschkurs has been combined with another class due to lack of enrollment. What can I say? It’s a lot slower and boring on Monday’s and Tuesday’s when the new teacher is leading the class. Luckily, we still have Ina, our old teacher, teaching on Thursday’s and Friday’s. There are also now 16 of us in the class and the international map has gotten wider. Now, we have a couple of students from South America (Peru, I think), Sri Lanka, India, Bosnia, and one more from Pakistan.

My biggest frustration with the addition of the new students is that we aren’t necessarily on the same level of German. For me, I can’t quite understand how some of them are allowed to be in the A2 course. One of them so far has completely insufficient German and can’t even speak coherently. It’s a bunch of murmurs and mumbling. Even Ina commented about it stating, “We’re not eating and talking with our mouths full.” Harsh, I’m sure to the student who makes no effort to pronounce words correctly but amusing to all of us who completely agree with the teacher.

Furthermore, there are two high school students who speak and understand German almost effortlessly, just with their slight native accents. One of them, who seems rather piss to be in our class, described that he was made to take the class even if he’s been in Germany for 10 years. His only problem seems to be grammar. Of course, we explore grammar in our class but we are also learning new sentence structures, vocabulary, and German culture. I’m sure these are things that he already knows.

It’s the gender language for nouns (das-neutral, die-feminine, der-masculine, die-plural) that is the problem. I mean, do Germans realize that we can easily understand the context of German conversation without paying heed to the absurdity of gender particles. Then there are the cases: Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ, and Genetiv (which we haven’t learned yet) that may or may not transform the “das, die, der” particles to den or dem. Then, if you want to involve some adjectives like “neu” (which means “new”), it can become “neuer”, “neus”, or “neuen” depending on the gender of a noun. There isn’t even a real logic or pattern to some of the case charts. It just is.

Ugh, Mark Twain you were right when you made that speech about the German language. It is a terribly outdated and inefficient language. I even have a German husband who 100% agrees with me about the language’s impracticality… but these are the rules of German and we all know that Germans are quite good at following rules.

Adventure in Kiel/Laboe

Last week, my sister-in-law, Mel, and I made a trip to the north, to Kiel and Laboe. Apparently, it’s a German/Scandinavian/Danish tourist destination unknown to most foreigners outside of Europe. What did I find there? A lot of blonde hair women in H&M. A LOT. And, seagulls, ships, and sand. No really, just a few days before we headed up to Kiel I was looking a graph on a postcard detailing in percentages the number of blondes that live in southern, middle, and northern Germany. According to the graph, the north would be saturated with blondes. Boy, it wasn’t kidding. I was standing in line at the cashiers with Mel when I noticed that the cashiers were blonde, the people in line before us were blonde, and the surrounding customers eyeing chic fashion were blonde. I sort of felt the odd woman out. To add insult to injury (j/k, I love being Asian), Mel was blonde. Sorry I didn’t get photos of these fabulous women. =)

Well, let’s get to some highlights.

1) I have yet to encounter a bad “commoner” hotel in Europe. I say that because most of them provide a continental breakfast buffet that obliterates its American counterparts. And, well, if you feed me, I’m usually quite please with the service.

2) We had to get on the ferry to sail to Laboe. It’s been a while since my last ferry boat ride and it provide for spectactular land and sea scape views including the chance for me to take photo of a massive cruise ship.

3) No towel wars here! Just a bunch of algae, ladybugs, and seagulls. We skipped all the populated area to visit the “nature discovery” area.

4) After a day on the beach we headed back to Kiel with the same ship. We were tired and hungry and where better to go than Pizza Hut! Oh, how I missed you… It satisfied a big craving. The night ended with a nearby Duckstein beer festival. How convenient. More than I wanted to do in an already eventful day.

Makeshift Tamagoyaki

Well, I don’t have a tamagoyaki pan. Nonetheless, I attempted to make it using a Japanese recipe book written in German. And, let me tell you it isn’t easy rolling that big piece of omelette in the pan. Lol. One thing I’m not going to add as I usually do is the recipe for one simple reason: I’m not yet satisfied with its taste. It was good but it could have been better. I have to try out some other recipes and modifications before I come to one I like. Here are some pictures detailing the process. One thing to note, I only used 4 eggs since that was more than enough for my hubby and I. A normal recipe calls for 8-12 eggs and it will be a grand size piece of omelette.

1. Pour only little enough of your egg mixture to thinly cover the pan.

2. Proceed to roll it as best as you can. (I know this looks bad in the beginning. And, trust me, I even had doubts myself that it would turn out right).

3. Use a oil-soaked paper towel to grease the pan and scoot the omelette to the far end of the pan. You’ll want to pour again another thin coating onto the pan and make sure the liquid egg touches the solid egg. You will repeat the rolling process.

4. Tada! (Yeah, I know it looks a little chummy which is why I’ll take out my handy sushi bamboo rolling mat).

5. Use the rolling mat to square edges into the tamagoyaki.

6. Cut the tamagoyaki into nice symmetrical squares (rectangles if you use 8-12 eggs).

7. Mold some sushi rice into the palm of your hand. Note: Mine are a little smaller since the tamagoyaki is only about half its normal restaurant size. Use a strip of seaweed to wrap around it.

8. TADA!!! YAY!

Strange Flavor Ice Creams

Well, I grew up in Japan and therefore, I’ve heard of both green tea and fish ice cream. I didn’t think I’d encounter another weird flavor. Two days ago, my sister-in-law took my hubby, mom-in-law, and me to an ice cream shop a few villages away from Friedberg. I entered the shop and there, I saw it. Popcorn ice cream. I thought to myself. Oh okay, there is bits of popcorn there. I decided to take a chance on it and try it. No, there were no popcorn bits there. The ice cream itself tasted like sweetened popcorn and it was surprisingly delicious. In fact, I think I have a new favorite flavor ice cream. I think some ice cream company ought to feature nothing but totally unique flavors sort of like a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Bean (yes, that’s from Harry Potter) shop.

Transformers 2 and Harry Potter

No, this isn’t a movie review but it is a review of my movie experience in Germany thus far. I first went with Soeren to Hamburg to visit some of his friends who are involved in an open source project together. First off, let me tell you, it’s not easy finding a movie theatre in Germany that plays original versions. Most theatres show German dubbed versions which according to Soeren can be bad. It kind of boggles me how people in Germany are perfectly fine with this. To me, watching a dubbed version of a movie removes much of the actors’ performances. I normally am left disgusted after watching a dubbed film. I’d rather just have subtitles.

In Hamburg, we had made reservations at the Streits movie theatre within the inner city. So, why did I chose to have my movie experience in Hamburg, a city that was some 4-5 hour drive from Friedberg? Well, I read some horror stories from English-speaking reviewers about their experience in a movie theatre 30 minutes away from us in Frankfurt that showed original version films. :(

Moving along, my experience in Streits was a pleasant experience although I can’t say the same for parts of the movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I just thought the first one was better mostly because I didn’t know what to expect and scenes in the second movie were somewhat predictable. The movie theatre also had a chic bar lounge for those waiting for the showrooms to empty out. I also didn’t bother to buy popcorn knowing that they add sugar to it rather than butter and salt. And, I love love love buttery, salted movie popcorn especially when my brother made it for me. He used to work at a AMC theatre in Washington. Free movies and free popcorn, those were the days.

We returned to Friedberg a few days later and my anticipation for the sixth installment of Harry Potter was growing stronger. In fact, it really was the only movie I wanted to watch this summer in theatre. After all, I had read all seven books and watched the previous five movies. My husband did some research and found a theatre in Darmstadt, an hour away from us. I can’t believe we have to travel an hour away just to see this movie in English. The first thing I noticed that was different about the showroom was that the seats were not inclined on steps like the theatre in Hamburg was and like most theatres in America are. To me, this was might have been a very annoying experience if taller people actually sat in front of us. Luckily, no one did. Overall, I had a good time and not just because the movie was good. My experience in the Darmstadt theatre was as pleasant as the one in Hamburg.