Cooking

The christmas markets don't get going until next weekend, I found out today, so I'll write a little about cooking with my host mom here in Germany.

Sometimes on weekends or when I have time I help my host mom cook lunch or whatever she is making. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day in most German families, while breakfast and dinner are usually simple, cold meals consisting of breads and toppings, and salads and vegetables. My host mom is fun to cook with because for some strange reason she has complete faith in my cooking abilities, even with things that I have no clue what to do. Sometimes you cook with someone and one person completely dominates the kitchen and tries to do everything, but my host mom gets stuff ready for me and then says, "Here, you know what to do with this right?" It's pretty fun sometimes. She still does work on other things and tells me what to do when, and what to add and such, so in the end I am like a second set of hands for her. We end up making a pretty solid team sometimes.

This morning, for example, we baked a batch of cupcakes. We didn't use any boxed mix or anything, just eggs, flour, sugar, milk, etc. We made some plain ones, some chocolate chip ones, and a batch of marzipan-ish almond ones. Some were later topped with a sugar glaze and chocolate flakes or sprinkles, and some were powdered with powdered sugar. We ate a good chunk of the total 36 cupcakes during our families usual Sunday coffee, hot chocolate, and cake session, which I have come to really enjoy.

Anyway, expect pictures for the next post, as well as that christmas market information I hinted at.

-Kevin

The next little bump.

I have finally started to talk a little in German with my host mom and people at school. It took a long time, but now that the ball's rolling I think things will go a little faster. Before, when I wasn't talking, my main fear was that I would say the wrong stuff, or I wouldn't know the word, and then I would make a complete fool of myself. That happens, but as it turns out, it's not all that bad, as long as I laugh with them.

Now that I am comfortable enough with my vocabulary and grammar to talk I am running into other problems though. I really didn't think that my American accent would be as much of a problem as it is. I knew it would happen, it has to happen. If I didn't have an American accent, who would have one? All Americans must at some point. Anyway, I figured it would just be one of those things that would be there, and maybe later I would work on getting rid of it a little, but it has turned out to be pretty annoying.

First of all, any time I say something in German to people at school (not teachers, only other kids) they laugh. Some are worse than others (I won't name names, except Patrick). Usually it's just that one word that I get wrong that sets it off, something that seems simple like "ich" which means " I " , it's not pronounced like "itch" or as in "dish" but somewhere in between, and I can't seem to get there. Maybe Germans have a differently shaped mouth and/or throat that helps them belt it out? Back to the point, I mess up one little word, and then one person gets a little grin, and then it turns into a chuckle, and I'm lucky if it stops there. If it continues on to a full laugh, and other people join in, I have no choice but to stop talking a laugh too, even if I don't get it. It can get worse though! The only way it gets past the laughing stage is when it somebody turns around to someone else and says "Oh hey, did you hear Kevin? No? Oh, Kevin, say it again." I'll get more into that later. The laughing doesn't last long at all, and it's all in good humor so there's no problem. It usually doesn't bug me that much but I could live without it.

About the "Oh hey, did you hear Kevin? No? Oh, Kevin, say it again." thing, I think I could make some pretty good money from this. Some times people come up to me and say, "Hey, Kevin, say _______." I've learned that if I say no, it continues to, "Oh, come on, please say _______." At this point if I say no, it can go a few ways. Sometimes they give up, if the word isn't that funny or if nobody is else is there. Sometimes they just keep asking again and again. But sometimes, and this one's the key, someone says, "Hey, come on now, I'll give you 10 cents when you say it." It's hard to turn those offers down.

The words that they want me to say mostly come from two different sources. The first is when I say something and it sounds funny with my American accent, and the person that heard it wants other people to hear it. That kind isn't my favorite, cause I don't like repeating my mistakes when I know I did something wrong. The other kind is when it's a funny word in general, one example is "Syrupartiges Piswasser" (sp?). It means syrup-flavored piss-water if you couldn't see that one, and one guy (I won't name names) uses it to describe Coca-cola. I think I got 10 cents for that one. Another one is "Wanderdunen." If you know what it means, great, if not, don't worry. It's pretty funny. There is another source for these phrases and words, but my German is good enough to mostly avoid it by now, and that's when the words are racy or mean slang, but I don't fall for that trick.

The reality of my accent hit hard the other night when I stopped by McDonalds (which seems to be very popular in Germany). I order two cheeseburgers in my best German ("Zwei Cheeseburgers" for anyone who wants to know). Now, cheeseburger is the same word in German as in English, and "Zwei" is pretty short and simple, but for some reason, the lady behind the counter (she wasn't American/Brittish) said, "For here or to go?" I was pretty shocked, and I did the stupid thing and answered in English. She went on to say, "Is that all, two euros, and thankyou,". I still wonder if my accent was really bad enough on just those two little words that she noticed I wasn't a German speaker and switched into English.

I'm sure it will improve sometime!

-Kevin

A preview from the next post: Christmas markets!

I would have won the bowling match...

If it weren't for that freak high-fiving accident during the first round!

School's back.

I wrote a short blog with pictures, now its time to get down to the news from the first week back to school from fall vacation. This week we got back a couple of tests that we took before the vacation; history, politics, and chemistry. The only one which I actually recieved a grade on was chemistry, and I got a 4. The grading system is 1 through 6, 1 being the best (A+) then 2 is B and so on. The test was difficult, even for a lot of the other people in the class, so I was pretty proud of myself for getting 11.5 points out of 24.

The history test is a whole 'nother thing. Chemistry involves alot of numbers and diagrams, and the elements have similar names (well, some do, Sodium is Natrium, Hydrogen is Wasserstoff). With numbers and pictures, language doesn't really matter, even though learning it is still a problem, but history is words, and only words. On top of that, it was German history, which I don't know much about. The point is, I did bad on the history test. Most people wrote full pages of information for each question, I only hd a couple words scribbled down. For one answer, I simply wrote "Demokratie" (democracy). The funny thing is that the teacher wrote next to it, "Genauer! Was sonst noch?" (More preceise, what else?) Even though he didn't even bother giving me a grade, but he complained about my innaccurate answer.

Maybe now is a good time to mention that German tests are nothing like American tests. Multiple choice questions are only ever seen in math tests, and even then they are few and far between. So far, it seems that for alot of tests you get a couple pieces of paper and a question sheet. This makes things pretty difficult for a non-German speaker to do much of anything on tests, but I do my best.

The politics test was a report we had to write about an internship. About a month ago we went to a job fair type thing and we had to interview somebody at the company where we would like to have an internship. I did my report on Airbus. I managed to scrap together 2 pages of information, and I surprised the teacher when I handed it in. Unfortunatly, she did not grade it, and my homework for next week is to correct the crazy amount of mistakes I had (there were actually 3 whole lines that DIDN'T have mistakes).

Today we took a test in a class, I think I did OK actually, we will see next week when we get it back.

Until next time,
-Kevin

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