wouldn't mama be proud
I just realized that this magical herb I've started putting in everything, of which I've been wondering if I'll be able to buy when I'm back in the States, is actually just basil. And with that realization I figured it was about time I write down something about my eating habits, for all posterity to mull and argue and attack one another's kingdoms over.
The first month I was here (August), I sort of didn't eat anything. There is some quote by Jacky I have written down somewhere about "we keep walking and walking and our pants keep getting looser and looser." That is a horrible version of it, but you can rest assured what she actually said was funny. Then Jacky and I started cooking together, and then by October we got too busy to eat together and so I started making up recipes in my own kitchen. At first basically everything revolved around olive oil and mass amounts of vegetables. This got perfected, and then sometimes an egg or two was introduced. Then I learned the magical grilled-cheese (with chicken and a handsome array of fancy european cheeses) recipe from Jacky, and those two dishes pretty much made up my diet for a few months. But as winter was finally upon us, the price of some key vegetable-dish ingredients skyrocketed and so the past month I've been having to make due. Aubergine (eggplant) and zuccinni are both like three or four euro each right now, so that rules them out. I'm left with a carrots, chinese snap peas, these other green beanish sort of things, potatoes, and onions. There has been a not so good crop of eggs this past month, so that has been sort of ruled out as well. The grilled cheese works now and then as well (I made one upon getting home early this morning), but by the time I got back from winter break I was sort of sick of everything I had been making previously. So, thanks once again to Jacky's tutelage, I have incorporated a new dish into my diet. Its pretty much just more vegetables thrown together, hiding under the guise of being a 'sauce', and then pasta added in. I'm actually finishing up tonight's round of that right now. I am also bringing the old favorite of potatoes-and-onions back, and often I just put some cheese, some chicken breast slices (it is like lunch meat, but it says chicken breast... do we have that at home?), fruit (clementines or apples, generally), and some sort of vegetable (usually uncooked green beans or chinese snap peas) on a plate and call it a meal. All in all it sounds pretty healthy.
During the summer and autumn I was drinking a lot of juice (the favorites still being Mango-Maracuja, and Johannisbeer, which I think is black currant), but that waned for awhile, and now its coming back a bit. Mostly I just try to drink a lot of water (my favorite brand is Volvic, which has pictures on the bottles of what appear to be undernourished African children, so my assumption is that somehow by drinking this moderately priced water I am helping throngs of people south of the equator). When Scott and Mom were here I was able to stock up and buy four cases of water, but I'm already two cases down, so the problem of transporting liters of water with only my bike arises once more.
I have just recently started to try to cut out my chocolate intake. With the holiday season and all I had some lying around. But even besides that, a 69 cent chocolate bar is a good way to make a night of translation seem a little more bearable. And it would always be that I'd eat the whole thing in one sitting, because its there and so good and the kitchen is all the way down the hall... yeah. So now I have eradicted all food from my room, so that I won't just sit here and eat idly. My skin has also been terrible the past couple of months, so I am hoping the lack of chocolate will help on that front as well. I could also talk of continuing jaw/teeth problems/worries, but I'd rather not think about it right now.
Its been a good weekend. By now you should have figured that my weekend is a strange and drawn out creature, extending from Wednesday night to Sunday-ish. I have been a bit more productive this weekend than most, but I am not sure how much that is actually saying. I am planning on meeting with up Colina and some of her friends in Berlin this weekend, so I really need to stay inspired and keep on the work so that I don't come back next Sunday fretting about how I am going to write a term paper in less than a week. About that term paper I would like to detail, in utmost bitterness, the struggle its been just to acquire some books, but instead I think I will leave you with the assurance that the library system here makes absolutely no sense. Within the library, to which library you are supposed to go (I have been to four already, all tucked away on campus or within the city), it doesn't matter. The librarians will all tell you different things, will get upset with you for inadvertendly implying that one of the other libraries is better than the one in which they work, might try to help but all in all just end up making things even more confusing. So finally after a week-long goose chase I am praying that the books Rita and I ordered (ordered!) on Thursday will be in the library tomorrow for us to pick up. My worry is that when you order something on Thursday, you have to pick it up on Friday or Saturday (I think I am correctly assuming that the library was closed today, a Sunday) or else they toss it back into the heap they have in some secret chamber. Then the next issue is if the books will even have enough information pertaining to our paper topics... but I guess thats looking too far ahead. Back to the weekend.
Wednesday night I watched Eyes Wide Shut with Droescher and some of his students at Jacky's. Apparently the movie is based off an Austrian play that they had to read for this class, but I got fed up with the movie after awhile so I ended up attempting to make some dinner during the climax. Awhile after that Jacky and I rode into town, only to be shocked to find that no one was out! Luckily we ended up running into Lauren and Scott, who we met up with after some Doener and another chance meeting with another American, Jeremy. So the four of us hung out at Trou for the evening, and it was quite nice because I'd really never gotten a chance to get to know Scott or Lauren. We all got along so famously that we decided to take a train the next night and discover the nightlife of Kassel.
We invited other people to come, but I think because of our previous knowledge of the train time table everyone ended up flaking. With our student ID's we are able to take the moderately or slow-paced trains anywhere in Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony, the state that Goettingen lies in), so going to and from Kassel was free. The only catch was that the trains back to Goettingen stopped running at 10:45pm, and didn't start back up again until 4:30am. But hey, we are going to see the nightlife, I don't end up coming generally much before that on a normal night in Goettingen, no problem. So Jacky and I arrived at the train station a couple of minutes before our 8:15 train was supposed to leave. Unfortunately Scott and Lauren were late, so we had to wait another hour for the train, but it wasn't a big deal. Then we were on the train, on our way, everything was good. Unfortunately the german train system, though efficient and generally on-time, can be a little close-mouthed, so we ended up getting off at the stop before ours. The problem was that none of us had really been paying attention, and as we pulled into a stop, I looked up onto the little electronic message board, and it said Kassel Hbf, Kassel Hauptbahnhof, or central station. I looked outside but because of our position on the train, all of the signs marking the stop at the station weren't visible, and it was dark and hard to see from the brightly lit inside of the train. So we yelped and ran off, just to turn around and realize this was way too small to be a main train station, and so as I furiously pressed the button on the door to open so we could run back on, the train started chugging and pulled away. Luckily we weren't in a rush, and we had been making jokes the whole previous hour about the adventures we were going to have tonight that everyone else would be missing out on just because they were too wimpy to stay up a couple of extra hours.
The stop we were at was Hannover Muenden, which is a tiny little town I've actually been to before, but with the EAP bus, and not with the train, so I had no idea where we were in relation to the town center.We had an hour and a half until the next train going to Kassel came through, and the train station was closed, so the four of us headed into what looked like the direction of town to see if we could find a bar or somewhere warm to sit for a bit. We ended up at a gas station with the most impressive beer selection I've ever witnessed. We all bought a beer and sat around talking until we figured we should hike back up to the train station. We were all laughing about the situation the whole time, and we were able to catch the next train and then situate ourselves in Kassel to find ourselves at Lolita, a neat little bar. Kassel is also a Uni town, apparently, and bigger than Goettingen, but not nearly as pretty, I would say. This was actually my third time to Kassel (once for an EAP thing, the second only to go to the Ikea located there), and my first time at night. We wandered about and hit some bars and so forth for a couple of hours, until we found ourselves at the Irish Pub. Since we have an irish pub in Goettingen, we decided we had to go. As we entered it looked like they were all on their last round, eventhough it wasn't even two yet. So we ordered and were sitting around talking when a waitress comes by to start stacking up the chairs near us. She hears us speaking english and asks where we're from. It ends up she is Irish, and studied in Germany for a year when she was in college. As all of the other patrons are leaving, we all got in conversations with another couple of the workers, one of which ended up taking us to a Uni party. The Kassel Uni party was much like the ones for the uni here (held at the ZHG, the central lecture hall building), but a little trashier, and obviously without the few recognitions of fellow students I can sometimes make. It ended up being a lot of fun, and there was a huge room that basically seemed to me like a high school auditorium. It was set up with a terrible DJ, lots of smoking/drunk people jumping around, and all of the other little things that present Germans as such an inherently nerdy race. Jacky actually ended up running into a guy she met when we went dancing last week at J.T. Keller for "indie music night", who was only in Goettingen visiting a friend, and so that was fun. We eventually rolled out, and with directions from Sebastian (Jackys 'friend') made our way back to the train station. By the time we got there we had missed the 4:30 train, and so we had to wait for the 5:45. Scott went on a noble search for an open food place while Lauren, Jacky and I huddeled on these benches that are surrounded with enough glass to make it looks like it would be a warm box, but in reality just wasn't cutting it. Just before it was getting about the time we should be boarding the train, Scott arrived victorious with greasy Turkish fast food, and after not too long I was content to doze the hour home to Goettingen. On the way to our bikes we ended up running into a couple of Californians who were heading to Prague for the weekend ("Hey! Where are you guys going?" "Ah, we're just getting home..."). The day finally ended as I creeped into bed at 8am.
Scott and I feigning excitement over having just gotten off at the wrong train stop. Lauren, Scott, Jacky (taking the picture) and I walking in what we think is the direction of "central" Hann Muenden.
Friday night Jacky, Jennifer and I went to a house party of Jennifer's boyfriend's friend's, where Jacky and I got to feel somewhat uncomfortable until we discovered the snack table, and later, once everyone else had enough to drink that we didn't feel silly being the only two people dancing. It ended up being a fun night, but I was still pretty beat from the night previous, so once Tony showed up, we had another hour of dancing, and then a nice downhill bike ride to home.
This is actually a picture of Droescher taking a picture of Jacky (and her taking one of him), but you get to imagine the experience of me sitting there talking to Droescher just moments before.
Last night was Droescher's Feuerzangenbowle at Kai's 'living room' at the Dorf. You will remember that Feuerzangenbowle is a German holiday drink, so I am not quite sure why there was a party of such a nature in the middle of January, but I wasn't about to start asking questions. The party was for the folks in Droescher's tutorium (he, like Beilein, teaches one for another lecture, but I'm not in that class), but Droescher invited me when we were all hanging out the weekend previous. It was a small but fun affair, though it was weird because I was hanging out with some of the Californians that I rarely see (mostly because I don't have any classes with them), and everyone was speaking english. The Americans normally speak english with one another, but when we're around our german friends we tend not to... but anyhow. After a failed attempt to watch the 1944 classic Die Feuerzangenbowle, Jacky DJed and we all got to dance to good music for a change. The remants of the party wanted to continue the evening at a club downtown, but I was sort of not in the mood for another long night, so I came back home to finish The Two Towers DVD that I've been stretching out over the past couple of days. I ended up still not being able to sleep until five this morning, but at least that was a little less second-smoke to make my hair smell for the next day.
And now, I need to power down and work, so I can be in Berlin on Thursday night with the full intent of a good weekend.
And, uhm, just for kicks, here's a picture of me with the head of the black, naked chocolate Santa Jacky gave me for Christmas.
The first month I was here (August), I sort of didn't eat anything. There is some quote by Jacky I have written down somewhere about "we keep walking and walking and our pants keep getting looser and looser." That is a horrible version of it, but you can rest assured what she actually said was funny. Then Jacky and I started cooking together, and then by October we got too busy to eat together and so I started making up recipes in my own kitchen. At first basically everything revolved around olive oil and mass amounts of vegetables. This got perfected, and then sometimes an egg or two was introduced. Then I learned the magical grilled-cheese (with chicken and a handsome array of fancy european cheeses) recipe from Jacky, and those two dishes pretty much made up my diet for a few months. But as winter was finally upon us, the price of some key vegetable-dish ingredients skyrocketed and so the past month I've been having to make due. Aubergine (eggplant) and zuccinni are both like three or four euro each right now, so that rules them out. I'm left with a carrots, chinese snap peas, these other green beanish sort of things, potatoes, and onions. There has been a not so good crop of eggs this past month, so that has been sort of ruled out as well. The grilled cheese works now and then as well (I made one upon getting home early this morning), but by the time I got back from winter break I was sort of sick of everything I had been making previously. So, thanks once again to Jacky's tutelage, I have incorporated a new dish into my diet. Its pretty much just more vegetables thrown together, hiding under the guise of being a 'sauce', and then pasta added in. I'm actually finishing up tonight's round of that right now. I am also bringing the old favorite of potatoes-and-onions back, and often I just put some cheese, some chicken breast slices (it is like lunch meat, but it says chicken breast... do we have that at home?), fruit (clementines or apples, generally), and some sort of vegetable (usually uncooked green beans or chinese snap peas) on a plate and call it a meal. All in all it sounds pretty healthy.
During the summer and autumn I was drinking a lot of juice (the favorites still being Mango-Maracuja, and Johannisbeer, which I think is black currant), but that waned for awhile, and now its coming back a bit. Mostly I just try to drink a lot of water (my favorite brand is Volvic, which has pictures on the bottles of what appear to be undernourished African children, so my assumption is that somehow by drinking this moderately priced water I am helping throngs of people south of the equator). When Scott and Mom were here I was able to stock up and buy four cases of water, but I'm already two cases down, so the problem of transporting liters of water with only my bike arises once more.
I have just recently started to try to cut out my chocolate intake. With the holiday season and all I had some lying around. But even besides that, a 69 cent chocolate bar is a good way to make a night of translation seem a little more bearable. And it would always be that I'd eat the whole thing in one sitting, because its there and so good and the kitchen is all the way down the hall... yeah. So now I have eradicted all food from my room, so that I won't just sit here and eat idly. My skin has also been terrible the past couple of months, so I am hoping the lack of chocolate will help on that front as well. I could also talk of continuing jaw/teeth problems/worries, but I'd rather not think about it right now.
Its been a good weekend. By now you should have figured that my weekend is a strange and drawn out creature, extending from Wednesday night to Sunday-ish. I have been a bit more productive this weekend than most, but I am not sure how much that is actually saying. I am planning on meeting with up Colina and some of her friends in Berlin this weekend, so I really need to stay inspired and keep on the work so that I don't come back next Sunday fretting about how I am going to write a term paper in less than a week. About that term paper I would like to detail, in utmost bitterness, the struggle its been just to acquire some books, but instead I think I will leave you with the assurance that the library system here makes absolutely no sense. Within the library, to which library you are supposed to go (I have been to four already, all tucked away on campus or within the city), it doesn't matter. The librarians will all tell you different things, will get upset with you for inadvertendly implying that one of the other libraries is better than the one in which they work, might try to help but all in all just end up making things even more confusing. So finally after a week-long goose chase I am praying that the books Rita and I ordered (ordered!) on Thursday will be in the library tomorrow for us to pick up. My worry is that when you order something on Thursday, you have to pick it up on Friday or Saturday (I think I am correctly assuming that the library was closed today, a Sunday) or else they toss it back into the heap they have in some secret chamber. Then the next issue is if the books will even have enough information pertaining to our paper topics... but I guess thats looking too far ahead. Back to the weekend.
Wednesday night I watched Eyes Wide Shut with Droescher and some of his students at Jacky's. Apparently the movie is based off an Austrian play that they had to read for this class, but I got fed up with the movie after awhile so I ended up attempting to make some dinner during the climax. Awhile after that Jacky and I rode into town, only to be shocked to find that no one was out! Luckily we ended up running into Lauren and Scott, who we met up with after some Doener and another chance meeting with another American, Jeremy. So the four of us hung out at Trou for the evening, and it was quite nice because I'd really never gotten a chance to get to know Scott or Lauren. We all got along so famously that we decided to take a train the next night and discover the nightlife of Kassel.
We invited other people to come, but I think because of our previous knowledge of the train time table everyone ended up flaking. With our student ID's we are able to take the moderately or slow-paced trains anywhere in Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony, the state that Goettingen lies in), so going to and from Kassel was free. The only catch was that the trains back to Goettingen stopped running at 10:45pm, and didn't start back up again until 4:30am. But hey, we are going to see the nightlife, I don't end up coming generally much before that on a normal night in Goettingen, no problem. So Jacky and I arrived at the train station a couple of minutes before our 8:15 train was supposed to leave. Unfortunately Scott and Lauren were late, so we had to wait another hour for the train, but it wasn't a big deal. Then we were on the train, on our way, everything was good. Unfortunately the german train system, though efficient and generally on-time, can be a little close-mouthed, so we ended up getting off at the stop before ours. The problem was that none of us had really been paying attention, and as we pulled into a stop, I looked up onto the little electronic message board, and it said Kassel Hbf, Kassel Hauptbahnhof, or central station. I looked outside but because of our position on the train, all of the signs marking the stop at the station weren't visible, and it was dark and hard to see from the brightly lit inside of the train. So we yelped and ran off, just to turn around and realize this was way too small to be a main train station, and so as I furiously pressed the button on the door to open so we could run back on, the train started chugging and pulled away. Luckily we weren't in a rush, and we had been making jokes the whole previous hour about the adventures we were going to have tonight that everyone else would be missing out on just because they were too wimpy to stay up a couple of extra hours.
The stop we were at was Hannover Muenden, which is a tiny little town I've actually been to before, but with the EAP bus, and not with the train, so I had no idea where we were in relation to the town center.We had an hour and a half until the next train going to Kassel came through, and the train station was closed, so the four of us headed into what looked like the direction of town to see if we could find a bar or somewhere warm to sit for a bit. We ended up at a gas station with the most impressive beer selection I've ever witnessed. We all bought a beer and sat around talking until we figured we should hike back up to the train station. We were all laughing about the situation the whole time, and we were able to catch the next train and then situate ourselves in Kassel to find ourselves at Lolita, a neat little bar. Kassel is also a Uni town, apparently, and bigger than Goettingen, but not nearly as pretty, I would say. This was actually my third time to Kassel (once for an EAP thing, the second only to go to the Ikea located there), and my first time at night. We wandered about and hit some bars and so forth for a couple of hours, until we found ourselves at the Irish Pub. Since we have an irish pub in Goettingen, we decided we had to go. As we entered it looked like they were all on their last round, eventhough it wasn't even two yet. So we ordered and were sitting around talking when a waitress comes by to start stacking up the chairs near us. She hears us speaking english and asks where we're from. It ends up she is Irish, and studied in Germany for a year when she was in college. As all of the other patrons are leaving, we all got in conversations with another couple of the workers, one of which ended up taking us to a Uni party. The Kassel Uni party was much like the ones for the uni here (held at the ZHG, the central lecture hall building), but a little trashier, and obviously without the few recognitions of fellow students I can sometimes make. It ended up being a lot of fun, and there was a huge room that basically seemed to me like a high school auditorium. It was set up with a terrible DJ, lots of smoking/drunk people jumping around, and all of the other little things that present Germans as such an inherently nerdy race. Jacky actually ended up running into a guy she met when we went dancing last week at J.T. Keller for "indie music night", who was only in Goettingen visiting a friend, and so that was fun. We eventually rolled out, and with directions from Sebastian (Jackys 'friend') made our way back to the train station. By the time we got there we had missed the 4:30 train, and so we had to wait for the 5:45. Scott went on a noble search for an open food place while Lauren, Jacky and I huddeled on these benches that are surrounded with enough glass to make it looks like it would be a warm box, but in reality just wasn't cutting it. Just before it was getting about the time we should be boarding the train, Scott arrived victorious with greasy Turkish fast food, and after not too long I was content to doze the hour home to Goettingen. On the way to our bikes we ended up running into a couple of Californians who were heading to Prague for the weekend ("Hey! Where are you guys going?" "Ah, we're just getting home..."). The day finally ended as I creeped into bed at 8am.
Scott and I feigning excitement over having just gotten off at the wrong train stop. Lauren, Scott, Jacky (taking the picture) and I walking in what we think is the direction of "central" Hann Muenden.
This is actually a picture of Droescher taking a picture of Jacky (and her taking one of him), but you get to imagine the experience of me sitting there talking to Droescher just moments before. Last night was Droescher's Feuerzangenbowle at Kai's 'living room' at the Dorf. You will remember that Feuerzangenbowle is a German holiday drink, so I am not quite sure why there was a party of such a nature in the middle of January, but I wasn't about to start asking questions. The party was for the folks in Droescher's tutorium (he, like Beilein, teaches one for another lecture, but I'm not in that class), but Droescher invited me when we were all hanging out the weekend previous. It was a small but fun affair, though it was weird because I was hanging out with some of the Californians that I rarely see (mostly because I don't have any classes with them), and everyone was speaking english. The Americans normally speak english with one another, but when we're around our german friends we tend not to... but anyhow. After a failed attempt to watch the 1944 classic Die Feuerzangenbowle, Jacky DJed and we all got to dance to good music for a change. The remants of the party wanted to continue the evening at a club downtown, but I was sort of not in the mood for another long night, so I came back home to finish The Two Towers DVD that I've been stretching out over the past couple of days. I ended up still not being able to sleep until five this morning, but at least that was a little less second-smoke to make my hair smell for the next day.
And now, I need to power down and work, so I can be in Berlin on Thursday night with the full intent of a good weekend.
And, uhm, just for kicks, here's a picture of me with the head of the black, naked chocolate Santa Jacky gave me for Christmas.
posted by Meredesu at 6:08 PM
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