Da Slugs

Anke discovered a slug in the bathroom this morning. It caused quite the uproar at breakfast. I had to send Stefan into take care of it. Now, I don't worry about spiders, worms, the icky green things infesting the roses, etc. But with slugs, especially before coffee, especially within the house - well, it's a no-go.

How something quite as slow as a slug managed to get in to the house is a mystery. Did it climb up the wall, into the window, back down the tile to the floor, taking all night? Did it hop a ride in on the grocery box? We'll never know; that one's history. But there are plenty more outside, waiting, I imagine, to get in and experience wall-to-wall carpeting.

Slugs are called Nacktschnecke in German, which means 'naked snail', but that's the last cute thing about then. Peter says, his teacher says, they eat dandelions, but if that's the case they aren't doing their job in my yard.

To attend to the slugs I bought several slug traps. I've always read that they like beer; according to the locals they are especially fond of the Duesseldorf specialty Alt (old) beer. So these traps we bought are placed in an indentation, filled with beer, and then apparently lure the slugs to a beery end. And they work - when you pick the traps out of the earth to empty the frothy remains, you are sure the find 8-10 juicy specimens nestled beneath. Peter and Anke earn bounties disposing of them for me down the sewer.

Which maybe is how that one got into my bathroom, now that I think of it... Well, I won't be sleeping tonight.

Kirsch Krümmeltorte

Great recipe for you all -

I figure that as a desperate hausfrau that I should feature the occasional distaff item in this blog. I've discovered here that when I have to bake something, anything I pull out of an American cookbook is greeted with rave reviews. I was flattered by this until I realized that mundane items like apple pies and brownies are pretty unknown here - at least in any form you'd recognize*. So I now I know not to kill myself - simple but authentic muffins or chocolate chip cookies will still get me, well, brownie points.

So here is a recipe from my mother-in-law for German Crumb Cake. Keep in mind - use jarred cherries; dark, morello or sour if possible. They are in the canned fruit section. Don't use cherry pie filling! If you can't get exact units, don't worry - this recipe is pretty robust and will survive estimation. If you don't have a springform pan, experiment with well greased Pyrex forms of approximately the same size, removing the cake from the pan by first loosening the sides, then inverting it onto a plate and then re-inverting it.

14 Tbs. Butter (7 oz)
1 cup (7 oz) Sugar
1 Tsp. Vanilla Extract
1 egg
Pinch of salt
3 1/3 cups flour
1 Tbs. baking powder

1 ~25 oz. jar dark cherries.
1 1.3 oz (37 g) packet cook-and-serve vanilla pudding mix

• Whip the butter with a hand-mixer until whipped and creamy (very pale yellow). Mix in the egg.
• Mix all the dry ingredients together.
• Mix dry ingredients into wet until a crumby dough forms. Chill until needed.
• Put the cherries into a pot, reserving some of the juice. Bring the cherries to a simmer. Meanwhile dissolve pudding in the reserved juice, and add mixture to the pot. Cook until juice thickens.
• Press a bit more than 1/2 the dough into a greased Springform (30cm or 11.8"), forming a thin crust up the sides of the pan. Press the dough well into the corners - don't let it remain too thick.
• Pour the cherry mixture into the shell.
• Sprinkle the remaining dough as a streusel over the top of the cherries.
• Bake at 175 degrees, checking starting at 40 minutes. Cook until the top is golden brown - 45-55 minutes.
• Let cool until the pan is touchable, then remove from Springform to wire rack to fully cool.
• Serve warm or cold, unaccompanied or with whipped cream or ice cream. Great with coffee!

The original ingredients, in case you're metric:
200 grams butter
200 grams sugar
1 packet vanilla sugar
1 egg
pinch of salt
500 grams flour
1 packet baking powder (15 g)

1 jar dark cherries
1 packet vanilla pudding (cook and serve)



* If you've ever had real Blackforest ham or apple streudel, you'd know that American versions of German items are just as bad!

More traffic woes

German traffic rules have one big difference compared to the U.S.: in most cases, cars coming in from a side street that the right of way. That means, as you drive along what in the U.S. would be a relatively main street, you have to check at every cross street for oncoming traffic (on your side of the road). It's called Right before Left. There are exceptions to this where posted, but by and large it accomplishes the goal of keeping traffic speed down within the town.

Sometimes it works too well. Here's the scenario:
Car 1 (me) wants to make a left turn.
Car 2 approaches from the opposite direction. Of course Car 1 yields to oncoming traffic.
Car 3 enters the intersection from the side street opposite me. Car 2 yields to Car 3 - it's Right before Left, after all.
Car 2, however, wants to cross the intersection - and so has to yield to Car 1, the oncoming traffic.

So now we have a loop - Car 1 yields to Car 2, who yields to Car 3, who yields to Car 1...

There is a moment of shared discomfort between the drivers until someone waves another through and the deadlock is ended.

I would think this is just me, but I've seen it happen twice in the past week and I was in a different position each time. Melanie may remember how in 1998 this rule, then unknown to her, almost caused a low-speed accident but did cause a minor heart attack in my new husband.

Educating Peter

Peter has adjusted to being in school, and has the whole homework thing pretty much down. While he does all right with the reading, it's far from his favorite subject, probably because he actually has to learn something to do it. The teacher (Mrs. Peters) used a phonetic learning program to introduce the kids to reading letter by letter. In fact, if you ask Peter to spell something, he doesn't say the letter names (ay, bee, cee, dee...) but instead just the letter sound (ah, beh, keh, deh...). In this way he seems to be able to read just about any word he comes across, given enough time (German words can be rather long...)

Since German reading isn't his favorite subject, you can imagine how he feels about English reading. But I want to make sure discovers English reading, and not wait until the 3rd grade when they'll start in the school here. After all, while I don't have an plans to move (the last transatlantic move cured me of any wanderlust), who knows where we'll be in 3 years?

I hit upon an idea a few weeks ago - shameless appealing to his mercenary nature. For every page he read outside of homework, a star. Three stars for every English page. The stars could be redeemed for small prizes. The prize list so far is:

• 10 stars: 10 minutes of me reading aloud to him, with no co-reading required on his part
• 50 stars: on ice cream cone at the ice cream shop of his choice
• 250 stars: a trip to the zoo.

I have to admit is did not have the effect I desired: Peter still showed no interest in books.

Peter's teacher was out sick this (short) school week, so there was no homework. I announced Monday afternoon a one-day bonus program: 5 stars per page of English. Now, Peter can do the math, and quickly realized that 10 pages would earn him an ice cream cone. Quicker than you can imagine, the boy had devoured 10 pages in his 'Dinosaur Day' book, and I had to start calcutating what a trip to the Krefeld Zoo was going to run me.

But luckily he couldn't hold on to them. Asterix the Gaul books beckoned, and he quickly spent 10 stars. Now his goal is 100 stars, at which point he wants to invite his little sister for ice cream. Now we're working on the slight differences in the letters - his first instinct is to read 'very' as 'fery' and 'cow' as 'cov'.

Time to start him on the Electric Company!

Memetic Tagging

Warning to the unwary reader: the following entry contains nothing about Germany; it is instead my attempt to keep up with the new thang....

I have apparently be tagged in a 'meme' but esteemed but twisted Middento (who has some of the best kid-raising stories I've ever read...). This is a new thing to me, but you're talking to a relative luddite when it comes to anything more sophisticated than email. These are apparently the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Locate the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

Naturally, as always when encountering a new cultural trend or fact, I turned to Wikipedia to find out what the heck this is. To quote the entry:

'A meme ... consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.'

So back to this new viral cultural infection, which reminds me of concepts developed in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash. With dismay I noted the only books in view were a book of fairy tales and an Asterix adventure comic. Then I remembered a few reference books under the coffee table behind me, among which I found the Amy Sedaris gem 'I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence' (Yes, this does pass as a reference book in my house. Please don't ask for what). Sadly, excepting bullet points, there are 4 sentences on this page, so I'm taking the liberty of moving on to pages 124-5:

'Everyone should have a living will. You can pick one up at the post office for peanuts and it's good because all your belongings will go to someone specific instead of going to a holding area for a few years. If you are grieving, have someone stay at your house while you are at the funeral parlor because crooks will comb the obituaries to see who has died and break into your home to steal things.'

Words for us all to live by.

Now here's the problem: Besides Middento, I only know one blogger: the inlaw over at My Extended Musings. So I guess I'm one the hook for 4 more as they come along. Check back for updates.

Zu Hause, süßer zu Hause (Home, sweet home) - from the outside

German houses have taken some getting used to. Keep in mind I grew up in New England, where the houses which aren't 200 year old clapboard sided gems are all trying to look like they are. Now come to Germany, where the first thing that strikes you about the homes is that all are brick, stone, slate, or stucco-faced. Not a bit of shingling to be found, unless you count the slate shingles on the old houses. Then you notice that all the windows are single panes of glass, not usually broken up into real or faux small panes (as they are at least in the northeast U.S.). If it is nighttime or many people are on vacation, you'll see metal-looking or wooden blinds completely enclosing the exterior of the windows and rendering the house snug as a turtle.

Entering the house, you might notice how thick the wall is around the door. Just how thick are these walls? In the spirit of inquiry I have just measured the wall at the kitchen window to be approx. 15 1/4 inches. Having watched several houses go up in our neighborhood I can tell you why - the house is assembled, lego-like, from large cement bricks (roughly 4 feet high). Then insulation, which is made of either large felt-like or styrofoam-like bricks, around 6-inches thick, is attached to the exterior of the house. Then the final facing (brick or brick-face or stucco) is put on. Older houses might be a bit different in components, but the idea would be the same. I'm told that German houses actually have efficiency standards - the walls much achieve a certain R value (if I remember my thermo correctly) to show that they are not allowing heat to escape. But as a consequence of the building materials, it's easy to spot where new houses are going up in the area, by spotting the cranes poised over them to lift the stones!

Houses are smaller here, but also more compact - our house, although approximately 1800 sq. feet, has a footprint of about (my estimate) 550-600 sq. feet. Our old American house would feel sprawling in comparison, although it wasn't really that much bigger, living area-wise. The lot on which the house sits is about 550 sq. meters, or around 5900 sq. feet (about 1/8 acre). The first thing visitors say when they come to visit - 'What a big garden you have!'. This is because, since we're the last house in our row, we have a double-wide lot. Most people's yards around here are exactly as wide as their building - meaning maybe 20 feet wide!

Germans must believe that 'good fences make good neighbors', because the first thing that goes into any new construction is something to delineate the yard, either living (hedge) or not (fence, dead hedge). This is a great thing, really, because a) Germans like to sunbathe b) Germans aren't that far behind America in the obesity race and c) many Germans like very, very brief bathing suits*.


* S. has been Americanized enough to wear a modest pair of trunks.

In the merry, merry, merry month of May

May is the month of neverending holidays in Germany.

Germans have something like 14 official holidays, which makes the average American green with envy. There are two catches, however - if a holiday falls on a weekend, it's gone. There's no "Independence Day, observed" kind of save to preserve the day off. The other catch is, that it feels like half of these holidays fall within May, leaving the rest of the year rather thinly populated.

What's in May? Well, May Day, which is celebrated as Labor Day is in the States. Even without the rather modern overlaying of the labor holiday on it, May 1st would still probably be celebrated here as a rite of spring. There are still Maypole observances here, but perhaps more popular are the Dance into May parties (actually happening April 30th) in tents, sports clubs and bars around the region. Then comes Christ's Ascension, which unfortunately fell on May 1st this year (see the weekend rule above). This is also Germany's unofficial Father's Day, which is celebrated (according to my father-in-law) by father's removing themselves to beer tents set up on the carnival fields on the edge of town.

Next comes Pfingsten, or Pentacost. This turns out to be something of a unofficial start to summer type holiday. It is followed by Pentacost Monday, which is then often followed by a gratuitous day off from school on Tuesday for the kids. Therefore, this weekend is often called "Pentacost Vacation", and 50% of the country tries to get away for the weekend starting at 2pm on the previous Friday. Last weekend, when it occurred, the radio broadcasters weren't even bothering to warn people about backups of less than 10 km (~6 miles).

Finally to round out the month comes Corpus Christi. We haven't reached this one yet, but it's another Thursday holiday, and so Friday is also a school holiday.

Interspersed with all these real holidays are various celebrations - for example, Schutzenfest, celebrating local militias and their deeds in prior centuries; or Kirmes (what American's would call a carnival). Sometimes the local kids get more holidays for these (but not for the poor kids in Moers - they only have 6 days off in May!).

Vegetative Pests

I've been getting pretty grubby this week in the yard. Germans are crazy about gardening; there's some sort of hazy cultural ideal about being close to nature that drives anyone here with a patch of dirt to cultivate, cultivate, cultivate. So I inherited a fairly well landscaped garden, or more specifically a yard encircled by a 6 foot hedge and several foot deep flower beds. My front yard, what isn't tiled over, is made up of a grassy parking space and two further beds.

So the pressure to keep this up drives me out in the yard frequently. Truth be told, I really enjoy working in the yard, but the relative formality of the layout requires me to actually fight with the parts of nature which aren't welcome.

With what am I in conflict?

Weeds: I'm pretty laid back about weeds in the lawn (much to S's chagrin); as long as it is either green or clover, it's ok with me, but dandelions drive me nuts. I have never seen such monster dandelions as I do here; part of me wonders if they actually evolved here, they are so large. They I pursue with a vengence.

Stinging nettle: I always thought this was a made-up plant; I only ever heard of it in fairy tails. But they actually spring up like, well, dandelions, usually along the borders of fences, fields or hedges. Brush them and the skin immediately starts an unbearable burning itch that lasts about 15-30 minutes.

Ivy: I can't believe that people buy this stuff in garden centers here, because I am constantly finding it invading my beds.

Brambles: Another fairy-tale plant (remember the thorn bushes around Sleeping Beauty's castle?), these form 15 foot-high mounds of impenetrable plant whenever they get the chance. The try to sneak into your yard though the hedge. But on the other hand, you can go pick pounds'-worth of blackberries just on what grows in the fields near the house (just wear long pants and closed shoes against the nettles!).

In between these invaders grow my tomatoes, peppers, currants, gooseberries, the occasional neglect-resistant rose bush, and newly added blueberries. If I win, we'll have something to harvest. But I won't be cutting off contact with the farmers' market folks just yet.