Skiing in Switzerland...or at least what I can remember

Since I went away to Switzerland this weekend without Heather, she is letting me be her guest blogger and tell you all about it myself.

I'm Karl.

I had the opportunity to ski in the Swiss Alps this weekend with my American co-worker, Greg Weber (as in Weber Grills). We drove down Saturday morning, January 27th. It's about a three hour drive to Grindelwald, Switzerland in the Alps. He rented skis and I rented a snowboard. From there we took a steep train up to the slops.

The view was fantastic! For the view alone the price was worth it. It was breathtaking! Unfortunately, I didn't take my camera up to the slops for fear of damaging it, so I have no pictures to prove it.

Greg and I were looking for simple hills because it has been about 10 years since the last time I laid foot on a ski slop. As best as I can recall, we did a couple of short runs, then, after gaining our confidence, decided to tackle something a little more adventurous. I vaguely remember selecting a slop and snowboarding down parts of it. But the rest of our day...I've had to depend on Greg for what exactly happened.

We decided to go through a more wooded part of the hill and, as we were trying to slow down, some ice caught the edge of my board and I fell backwards onto my lower back and the back of my head. Apparently, I hit my head VERY hard. Hard enough to cause a concussion and slight memory loss. Greg says that as we walked the rest of the way down the hill, he quizzed me on different things to help jog my memory and keep me talking.

"What country are we in?" "Germany."
"What's your birthday?" "May 20th."
"How old are you?" "I'm not sure."
"Are you married?" "Yes."
"Who's your wife?" "Heather. What happened? Did I hit my head?"
"Yeah, you hit your head. What's 4 + 6?" "10."
"What's my name?" "Greg Weber. As in Weber Grills."
"What year is it?" "2006."
"What day is it?" "I don't know. My head really hurts...did I hit it?"
"Yeah, you hit your head. Do you remember going out to dinner last night?" "We went to dinner last night?"

Basically, I had no short term memory. Greg returned our ski equipment and he decided he better drive me back home. First he called Heather.....

Let me jump in here for a moment, and tell you my end of what happened, since Karl really has no recollection of this part of his weekend. I, Heather, got a call from Karl at about 6pm on Saturday. The first thing he said was, "I have amnesia." "You do, huh?" (I'm thinking this is some joke.) "Yeah, I hit my head and I have amnesia." (Now I'm getting alarmed.) "What happened?" "Um...I'm not sure...you better talk to Greg." So Greg told me what happened and that he was planning to take Karl back home right away. I asked to talk to Karl again, but that didn't go very well. "What's the last thing you remember?" "Um...I'll have to think about that." He did not sound like Karl...he sounded very confused. I told them that they should probably go to a doctor right away.

A while later Karl called back..."Hi, it's Karl....Um...I don't remember why I called you." So I asked to talk to Greg. He had some questions about our medical insurance and then they went off to the hospital. Later that night Greg called back with the news that the hospital took some X-rays (which looked OK), put him in intensive care, and wanted to watch him for 24 hours. The doctor would look at him in the morning and decide if he could go home. So I had a stressful night.



It's Karl again....my memory gradually started to come back that night. The nurses woke me up once an hour to shine a light in my eyes and ask me questions like, "Do you know where you are?" and "When's your birthday?" I felt like I was in a police interrogation...but with nice police. The only thing I don't remember now is from about 15 minutes before the accident to about when we called Heather...though I don't remember anything I said to her. I met with the doctor at about 10:00 am and he told me I would be alright and I could leave at 4:00 that afternoon. Which we did.

Before driving home we went out to a lake west of Interlaken where Greg had eaten lunch earlier that day. We sat on the shore and enjoyed the amazing view. Eventually we got back in the car and headed north up to Germany, listening to Weird Al Yankovic on Greg's iPod.

The doctor instructed me not to go to work for a week, and when I was home, not to work on a computer (so I'm dictating this to Heather), to watch as little television as possible, and not read anything too intently. Basically, to let my brain rest. So this is a good week to give us a call (from January 29th to February 5th)!

And I've decided to swear off skiing and snowboarding forever. I don't need it.



View more beautiful Swiss photos here.

Bratwurst 101

This is a Bratwurst.

It is THE fast food of Germany. You can find Bratwurt grills anywhere you can find people. They are especially found in pedestrian zones, Christmas markets, and farmer markets (where I am about to eat mine above at the Freiburg Farmer's Market). They are usually sold at little mobile stands and are eaten on the go or while standing (note my fellow Bratwurst eaters standing behind me).

And please note: a Bratwurst is NOT a Hot Dog!

The name Bratwurst comes from the old German name Brätwurst..."brät" meant finely chopped meat and "wurst" meaning sausage.

You almost always are served a brötchen (a hard roll) with the wurst and not much else should accompany delicacy...you are often given the option of grilled onions and traditionally you should only put spicy mustard on your wurst, although ketchup is offered as well. (Note the spicy mustard on mine and somewhere in the bread are some grilled onions).

The wurst is often placed inside the roll but I have also seen the bread placed on the side. And the wurst is ALWAYS longer than the bread...and no, as you can see above, you do NOT cut the wurst to fit the bread. The only exception I have seen to this is when you order a Langewurst (long-wurst) which are quite long. Then usually, just before serving, the wurst is cut in half and both pieces are placed in the roll...and the ends still extend beyond the bread.

A variation is Curry-wurst...the wurst is cut into bite-sized pieces and covered in a spicy curry ketchup.

There are red wursts and white wursts (I think I like the white ones better...they have more spices added to them).

They are cooked on a grill or in a pan and eaten immediately when they are hot, toasty, and sooo good!

For our family and friends in Ohio, please visit the annual Bratwurst Festival in Bucyrus, Ohio, August 16-18, 2007!

For our friends here in Germany, please consider visiting the Bratwurst Museum in Thüringer, where the first Bratwurst was made!

Guten Appetit!

Grüße aus...Freiburg!

Karl and I ended 2006 by spending the day in Freiburg. I had already taken a couple of trips to see Freiburg, which is an hour south of us, but Karl had never been. So I took him so he'd stop his whining.

Freiburg is home to a large university (founded in 1457), whose students are apparently very into organic foods (or so says my German instructor who graduated from there). It's a beautiful, old city on the edge of the Black Forest.





We first visited their huge, well-known Farmer's Market surrounding the cathedral. Such amazing-looking food and bread and flowers and handmade pasta and olives and bratwurst....We bought a quarter of a HUGE loaf of rustic bread (and even then it went bad before we could finish it) and had a yummy and very German lunch of bratwurst and then went inside their famous cathedral.





The church was beautiful! It was begun to be built about 1200 and finished in 1513 (after changing the architectural plans to a more "modern" Gothic and financial delays).



For the rest of the afternoon, we walked around the old part of Freiburg, through it's quaint streets and shops. It's a beautiful city!

Heilige Drei Könige

Last Friday, January 5th, I was surprised to wake up and find out it was a holiday...actually, Saturday, January 6th was the holiday, but everyone seemed to be celebrating it a day early....here's what happened...

Karl went off to work as usual around 8 am...I watched a little Knight Rider on TV then got into the shower around 9 am. Shortly after emerging wet from the shower, I thought I heard someone outside our door. Since I was in no way decent to take a peek and since I didn't hear a knock or a ring, I ignored it. Not long after, as I was finishing up my daily primping, I heard some people talking in our building's stairwell. I took a peek out the door and heard our landlord talking to someone...and then the someone started to quote a Bible scripture...and I imagined that it must be Jehovah Witnesses and I was very glad I had been conviently in the shower when they stopped at my door. As I walked back into my apartment I noticed some strange writing in white chalk at the top of my door...what the freak?



As I heard them leave, I took a peek off of our balcony to confirm my suspicions and was very surprised to see instead a group of kids dressed up like kings! What the freak?!



And then I remembered Karl mentioning to me once that there was some German holiday coming up but that since the holiday fell on a Saturday, he sadly would not be gettting any days off of work. Could this have anything to do with a holiday? So I took a gander through the internet, putting all the clues together, until I discovered Drei Heilige Könige Tag = Three Holy Kings Day!

This holiday may be better known in the English-speaking world as Epiphany. It's a Catholic holiday celebrating the day the kings visited the Christ child, bearing their gifts. It has an interesting history which you can read about in this Wikipedia link. Here in Germany, apparently, children dress up as the Magi and then go from door to door to ask for money to donate to needy children. They carry with them chalk that was blessed by a priest. Over the doors of the homes they visit they write 20 + C + B + M + 07. I'm not sure what the 20 means and I'm pretty sure the 07 is the year, but I do know that the letters stand both for the traditional names of the kings (Caspar, Balthasar and Melchoir) and for the latin phrase "Christus mansionem benedicat" which means "may Christ bless this house".

Now you may be thinking...come on, Heather, you lived in German for a year and a half already, didn't you already experience this holiday? Well, please remember that I lived in EAST Germany...as in former Communist country...as in religion and the celebrating of religious holidays was frowned upon (although they managed to still keep Christmas absolutely lovely!). Right now Karl and I are living in a heavily Catholic area where these Cathlolic holidays are widely celebrated. And when I was in eastern Germany 10 years ago holidays like this still really weren't being celebrated. And besides...the east Germans certainly have a few holidays of their own that the rest of Germany wouldn't consider putting on their calendars (just ask me about Herrn Tag...man, was that a horrid day!).

Stammtisch in Oberkirch

Every quarter LuK organizes an activity for the families of their employees who are from other countries and working here temporaraly...like us. I think of these activities as LuK's way of saying, "See! You LIKE living in another culture and learning another languague and being far away from your family!" These activities are called a Stammtisch and Karl and I had our first Stammtisch last month on December 1st.



LuK took us all in a bus down to Oberkirch and up to the Schauenburg ruins. A tour guid met us dressed in medieval costume and took us into the ruins to tell us all about the history of the castle. It was all in German and we understood only half of it...but it was interesting. There had been four families living in Schauenburg, each lived in one of its four towers. The castle was never destoryed from without by an attack. It was destroyed from within, by family bickering. Eventually the four families all left Schauenburg for different areas in Europe. One family stayed in Oberkirch and built a palace in the town.





After our history lesson, everyone got a torch...and I don't mean the British word for a flashlight, I mean a fire-burning torch! It was cool! We walked down the hillside through a vineyard by torchlight until we got back down to Oberkirch and stopped at the palace grounds for warm drinks. We were then led across the street into the restaruant called the Silberner Stern (the Silver Star...click on Silberner Stern at the bottom of this link to see images of the resaurant). It was in this restaurant that the great 17th century German poet, Johann Jacob von Grimmelshausen, would write. The restaurant still had a 17th century feel to it...it was beautiful and the dinner they served was wonderful!





The whole evening was so lovely that we most definitaly could agree that we love living in another culture and learning another languague...just not being so far away from our family! We wish you could have all been there!

Silvester!

Germans call the New Year holiday Silvester. It is so named after Pope Silvester I who died on December 31, 335. Germans celebrate the New Year very loudly...don't we all? As missionaries in Berlin, Karl and I had to go home before dark and go to bed at the usual time and stay off the streets. Of course, it was hard to sleep because all I and my mission companion could hear were very loud fireworks. They never used the colorful kind of fireworks that we could have watched from our windows, just the very loud kind that prevented us from sleeping. And the next morning the streets were dead to the world and it was impossible not to avoid stepping on any kind of fireworks remains.

This Silvester, Karl and I had a quiet evening at home grilling pizzas on the balcony, watching movies, and playing games until just before midnight when we watched the countdown from Berlin on TV. And then the fireworks began...it was both beautiful and terrifying! They were all very loud and very colorful and very close! We watched at first from our third-floor balcony that over looked the street below and farm fields beyond. Someone was setting off fireworks in the street just below us and the fireworks would scream up into the air and explode just about at the level of our balcony! I kept expecting one to blow our faces off! So we went to the window at the other end of the apartment that looked out over the city of Bühl and the Black Forest mountains...the sight was breathtaking! Colored lights were exploding everywhere!! The entire valley and city of Bühl was covered with a blanket of exploding colored lights...near, far, and everyone in between! More fireworks were exploding higher up in the mountains. Karl took the photos below, but really they don't do the spectacle justice!









To us, it actually looked more like this (a photo of some Silvester fireworks in the German city of Zwickau).

Our landlords gave us this large bread loaf in the shape of a pretzel...apparently they are for good luck in the New Year!



We feel hardley deserving of yet more good luck...we've had so much of it this past year! We are amazed at how much we have been blessed. It has been a year of transitions...the past 6 months since Karl's graduation has been especially hectic, we've hardly had a chance to take it all in. We've moved not once, but twice, have said goodbye to dear friends in Michigan and have found new ones in our new home. A year ago we were looking forward to Karl's graduation and wondering where we would be celebrating the New Year in another year...we are still surprised to wake up most days to find that our dream of living in Germany again has come true! We hope 2007 will bring all of you great joy and that you are looking forward to the new year as much as we are!

Christmas in Germany: Part 2

Karl and I had a wonderful Christmas! Our Christmas season began with the celebration of the first Advent Sunday with our German friends, the Küchler family. They showed off their beautiful Christmas decorations...some of which were family heirlooms and very old...and we ate cake, drank a delicious winter fruit tea, and had root beer floats...yes, root bear floats! This family loves all things American, and they are one of the only Europeans I've ever met who actually like root beer. Root beer simply doesn't exist here, but they showed me how they make theirs homemade.



We also celebrated St. Nikolaus Tag on December 6th. We have actually been celebrating this German holiday ever since we were married...every year we put our shoes out in the hallway and the next morning we fill them full of treats for each other. Here is a photo of my shoes filled with candy, hot chocolate mix and a new bell for my bike.



On the 16th I took Karl to the little French medieval village of Riquewihr that I took his parents to when they were here for Thanksgiving. The village happened to to be having a Christmas market that day so we wandered through the very crowded streets eating yummy French food and enjoying the medieval and Christmas-y atmosphere.



On December 21st my parents and my sister, Susan, arrived from Texas to spend the holiday with us. The next day we went into France and visited Riquewihr and then Strasbourg. The Strasbourg cathedral had their beautiful set of tapestries hanging depicting the story of Mary and Jesus...apparently the cathedral only displays these precious tapestries only at Christmas time. We also explored the Christmas market in the square around the cathedral. It was also fun to watch Susan finally enjoy some of her favorite French foods again (she served a mission for our church in France) and to have her there to translate for us. For once, Karl and I didn't feel like complete morons while visiting France!



The next day we visited Baden-Baden, shopped at the Christmas market and the city's shopping district in Lichentaler Allee and looked for last-minute Christmas gifts.



On Sunday, we celebrated Heilige Abend by going to church and then made a stop in a little town near Bühl called Schwarzach to see their beautiful Romanesque church. For dinner we used our new Raclette set. Raclette cooking originally comes from Switzerland and is basically like a cheese fondue. The more modern sets you can find in Europe have a cooking surface that sits on the table with little trays that can be placed under the cooking surface and everyone cooks meats, vegetables on the table, melting the cheese in the little trays. A fun and tasty way to eat!

Christmas morning, after opening all our presents, we made crepes for breakfast on our new crepe maker. A Keller family tradition has always been to go and see a movie in the theater on Christmas Day. Karl and my favorite movie theater is in Strasbourg, France, mostly because the theater usually shows films in their original language with French subtitles...so we can watch American movies without worrying about understanding all the plot points in the German dubbed movies. (Germans really like to dub over foreign languages.) The only thing we don't like about the Strasbourg theater is that we don't speak a lick of French, so it can sometimes be an adventure buying the tickets for the right movie. So we were excited and relieved to have French-speaking Susan with us this time...buying tickets would be a breeze! Or so we thought... At home we looked up the movie times on the Internet. We decided we wanted to see The Nativity Story. Often the French and German (and other languages as well) will translate the titles of movies much differently from the original title (for example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has been translated into German as Ritter der Kokosnuss = Knight of the Coconut). So Susan found the movie with the French title meaning A Woman Above All Others. She assumed the French were being typical French and focusing the title of the Nativity Story on the Virgin Mary. So off we all went to the movie theater. And Susan flawlessly bought us tickets for A Woman Above All Others, making sure with the ticket lady that the movie would definitely be in the original language, and we all sat down to enjoy our Christmas movie praising Susan's French talents. So imagine our surprise with A Woman Above All Others began and all the characters were modern-day army women speaking Hebrew! And imagine Susan's embarrassment to realize that she had wrongly interpreted the title to be for the Nativity Story! We ended up heading home and watching a DVD instead. So much for going to the movies with someone who can speak French. (We love you, Susan!)

On December 26th we had yet another day of Christmas (remember, Germany celebrates the 25th and 26th as Christmas). We got out of the house and took a drive through the Black Forest...it was beautiful! We made a few stops to enjoy the view and ended up driving to a city called Freudenstadt, which is known for having the largest marketplace in Germany. We walked through the market place (unfortunately, being a holiday, there wasn't much of a shopping opportunity) and visited the city's large Protestant Stadtkirche...a church built in the early 17th century in a unique L-shape, so that men and women would be separated during services. As we continued our drive through the Black Forest, we happened to drive through a little town where the well-known German mineral water Schwarzwald Sprudel is bottled. So we stopped so that Karl, a bigger mineral water fan than I am, could fill up an empty water bottle we happened to have with us. We ended our trip through the forest with a visit to Schauenburg, the ruined castle in Oberkirch.



Unfortunately, all the fun had to end when my parents left for home the next day. We hope you had at least half a nice of a Christmas as we did!

Please enjoy lots of photos from our Christmas adventures here!