My little potato

Maddie & Micah took a school field trip to a farm yesterday. It was quite a significant emotional event for Maddie. She brought back a tiny potato (perhaps 1 inch in diameter) and the smallest carrot that I have ever seen. She was over the moon with her new acquisitions.

She named her potato Kartoffel and drew a face on it. She slept with Kartoffel last night after crying herself to sleep because she realized that her time with Kartoffel is limited. Today, she carried it to school in her pocket.

Footnotes:

(1) I should mention that the field trip to a farm is a quintessentially German school thing to do. The kids have also been to bakeries, the local chocolate factory, etc.

(2) Kartoffel is German for... you guessed it.

Tschibo Aktuell

Some of you have heard me talk about Tschibo, a kiosk found in many grocery stores and a few stand-alone locations. As a business reporter, this place fascinates me. It's like shopping in Managua during and just after communism. In Managua, whatever came off the container ship is what you found in the store. So you might find a store filled with pickles, catsup and (this was my favorite) rainbow-colored cassette holder cubes. Sometimes items seemed coordinated. Sometimes it was random.

So it is with Tschibo. The one thing they always have is their brand of coffee. Everything else is random and up for grabs. And buy it now because it's not going to be there next week.

This week at Tschibo:
-Coffee
-Many items of clothing, mostly purple
- a cordless mouse
-shower heads
-vacuum cleaner

Check back for more Aktuell (update).

Plum update

For those who e-mailed us that we could try giving our plums away... There are large baskets of plums at the information table at church, on the tables at the school cafeteria, in front of shops. And they are too small to fit in a skeet shoot. Other suggestions?

Fall

Fall is a great season for festivals here. They celebrate everything. They celebrate the cows coming from high mountain pastures down to the valleys. They celebrate sheering sheep. The celebrate all locally grown agricultural products.

And it fits in a gloriously reliable format. The (your town here) festival of (your product here) and Beer. Even the wine festivals have beer tents!

We recently got to go with our volksmarching friends to Markgroningen for a Shepherds Run, one of the most charming things I've seen. A huge celebration of everything sheep. At the parade floats passed out sheep-shaped cookies, sheep-shaped chocolates and bits of wool. It's the first time I've ever seen a euphonium player drink beer while marching in the parade.

After the parade, hundreds of people go to the field to watch re-enactments of great shepherding moments in history (don't ask me to explain, there were lots of men in knights' costumes charging through on horseback and shepherds defending their flocks... maybe. Definitely the charging horses though).

They had different shepherd dances--one was a waltz where partners danced around a pole that looked like a gallows except instead of a noose it had a plate with a cup of water on it. As the couples waltzed, one would waltz under the thin plate, lift his partner high in the air to knock off a cup of water. If you hit it, you douse either yourself or your partner. With the right flick of the head, you can send the cup sailing to land on another couple. Cup refilled after every successful hit for the next couple to dance under. And it wasn't just the men lifting the women. Some of those girls hefted their partners pretty high.

The actual shepherd's race is a barefoot race across the mown field. The fastest boy and girl are crowned king and queen for the year.

The only no-show was herding dogs. sigh. Otherwise, another wonderful day for
TeamFordham.

One Year

Feeling sentimental this weekend. It's our one-year mark in Germany.

Some of our accomplishments and lessons so far:
-- Lots of German vocabulary
-- Little German grammar.
-- That it is fun, fun, fun auf der Autobahn (except in Stau because Germans do traffic jams as well as they make cars).
-- You can overdose on castles
-- You can overdose on Schnitzel, but it's harder
--There is no statute of limitations on homesickness
-- The French are nice but they won't speak German, even if you could throw a rock across the border
-- German bread is great, and if you trip, you land on a bakery
-- Making friends is good but hard
-- The parks and the chocolate here are excellent
-- Our mechanic here speaks better English than our mechanic back home, even though it is his third language
-- Roses and lavender are just as beautiful here as they are in Chestnut Hill
-- Care packages have the Midas Touch. They can turn everything, even Cream of Butternut Squash Soup, into gold
-- Kids hike better with a small but steady supply of Gummi Baren
-- If there were a kiosk selling key chains in the darkest center of the Black Forest or the highest alpine peak, my kids would find it

We still wake up and pinch ourselves that we can be here. It was hard for me to leave this summer. I have two new nephews I haven't cuddled yet and family/friends I never want to be this far away from. All the same, it still feels like a roller coaster that we're having a great time riding.

I'm trapped under a pile of plums!!

Help! It's plum season here and trees in the neighborhood are loosing limbs under the weight of the glorious dark purple fruit. We have, so far, been give about 15 pounds of plums. We will soon be eating them sauced, sauteed, baked, and boiled. Send recipes! Quickly!

Recent Pictures

We just finished a lovely (but looong) weekend in Switzerland.

I posted a few action shots of the family. Click here to see them.

Piper will publish a definitive post of recent happenings soon. She's been waiting for pictures from my camera to do that.

I'm back in Frankfurt this week. Next weekend, I plan to sit around the apartment and recover since my travel schedule is pretty out of control this month. No end in sight for a few weeks.