home here and there

List mode

I made a list and I never make lists. That should probably tell you something. Most weeks are pretty regular weeks so that I have the pick up, drop offs and chores internalized where I don’t need a list. Well, this week I do.

We are going to spend Thanksgiving with our friends again. That means we will be leaving on Saturday. That also means I need to pack for at least half of the family.
My daughter’s birthday is happening during that time as well so I already wrapped up her presents and packed those up. At least one thing done.
I do need to put our CO2 cartridges in the mail and time it, so that the return does not come while we are away.
I do want to cancel the mail but am holding off, because someone still might get sick. Covid has me very paranoid. Most of us had it at least ones. My son had it the first day of the president’s day week last year and on the first day of school after summer break this year. I had it last year on our Vegas trip and we came home early – so that is that. The only holdout is my husband and I should better find some wood to knock on.
Laundry needs to be folded and another load started and finished before we head off.
I do need to book a hotel for one night on the way. Driving takes 9 hours and we do like to take a break in between.
I am still debating if we should get a rental car for our trip to Germany for Christmas. We could take the train but that would also mean that we need to rely on other’s to pick us up and drive us to train stations. With four it may be a tiny bit cheaper to take the train but not a whole lot. The car would be more flexible. I am just not sure yet. During the summer we booked one with AAA but for some reason this time around they are more expensive compared to Costco. Why does it always have to change? That would save me the research.
I do want to get started on Christmas presents. Maybe I get to do some shopping while we stay with out friends? Preferably before Black Friday. I don’t get that day and I don’t think I would buy anything that would give me a good deal on it. In all likelihood I would just end up buying something I don’t need.

I already have the feeling I am forgetting something… See, I really need that list. It is going to live on the dining room table until we close the door behind us on Saturday.

How are you feelings about Black Friday? Do you have any specific deal you are looking forward to?

Baking Christmas

Being German I always feel a deeper responsibility to bake cookies leading up to the holiday season. My mom always made loads of Christmas cookies with us when we were little. One of my all time favorites are Lebkuchen (gingerbread – not necessarily man). Most German recipes ask for Lebkuchen spice which in Germany they will sell you in every supermarket. Because the week in Germany was so busy of course I forgot – sigh. Already last year I experimented with it and made my own. Online you can find them in various spice combinations but the main ingredient is always cinnamon. In my opinion you can’t really go wrong with that.

So here is my recipe for Lebkuchen spice:

35g ground cinnamon
8g ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoons ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons ground cardamom
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground star anise

I almost wanted to start the baking today but a) I am still not feeling that great and b) I also have four loads of laundry waiting to be folded. But here for good measure is my go to recipe for Lebkuchen:

500g honey
250g sugar
1 pinch salt
15g Lebkuchen spice
15g chocolate powder
200g butter
2 eggs
1kg flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda

Technically it is a honey cake dough. First you mix honey, sugar, salt, the Lebkuchen spice and chocolate powder in a cooking pot. The butter is cut up in smaller pieces and added. You warm the mixture up on the stove until the sugar is dissolved. This needs to cool down a bit before you add both eggs and mix them under with a cooking spoon.
The flour, baking powder and baking soda is mixed and then you add the honey mixture. You stir it under until that gets to hard. The dough is kneaded with both hands and when everything is incorporated well you form two flat rounds and wrap them up in foil to store in the fridge for two hours.
The dough is rolled out on a floured surface at ~1/4 inch and then you can cut out your shapes. You can use forms or make your own. One year we cut out house shapes and decorated those.
Baking at 400 degree Fahrenheit takes 10-15 minutes.

For decorating you can basically use whatever you prefer. My recipe uses 200g powdered sugar mixed with very stiff egg white from 1 egg white.

Do you like cinnamon or do you hate it? Do you have a favorite cookie recipe you do over and over again?

Resting day

I am doing NaBloPoMo this month. 30 blog posts in 30 days. Come join me. You can find the full list of participants over on San’s blog here #nablopomo2023

The washing machine is running for the third time today and I am sitting in bed with a nice warm cup of tea. I am tired. It’s not covid apparently but I still don’t like it. Scratchy throat, runny nose and general un-wellness, blah. So I made myself if big batch of hot tea and are waiting for it to get better. If now someone would make me a nice chicken soup I would be well taken care of. That was always mom’s recipe for when we had a cold – tea and soup. It still helps me feel better instantly.

Do you have a family recipe for the cold season? I heard a rumor that drinking a warm beer would help, too. It sounds not that pleasant to me honestly but some people say that medicine only helps if it tastes bad.

Talking about tea – San from the in between is mine is hosting the 8th annual Secret SANta Swap 2023. It used to be a mug swap (and it still can be if you like) and coincidentally this my mug from last year. Isn’t it pretty? So if you want to participate hop over there.

No work Friday

I was really glad for this Veteran’s Day Friday. I went back to work yesterday after getting back home Wednesday late afternoon. Everyone was surprised to see me since they were thinking I would only be back Monday. But since I did go back Thursday I did not have a whole lot of time to sort everything away, so I finished that up today.

Before getting started on the sorting I made breakfast for the kids since they had the day off, too. We had pancakes with apples. My husband did have to work today. I also fed my sourdough which was luckily still alive. It’s at that stage where it does not need to be refreshed every week what really helps. After all this I cleaned up the kitchen and took care of the dishes. We don’t have a dishwasher so hand washing it is for me. We have an old kitchen with shallow countertops so it would require some more extensive work to make room for one – I just don’t want to deal with it right now.

Unpacking round one took care of the suitcase contents. I already put away clothing on Wednesday night but the extra sweets and other goodies had find a home, too. Haribo Pico Balla is the family favorite and always has to be brought back. I found some paint brushes that were basically brand new, other small craft supplies, small pliers a pink leather satchel, a sponge, muffin pan liners, an ocarina someone in the household is playing nonstop (I regretted bringing it for a short moment but it’s also very sweet listening to the playing) – it’s really weird what stays behind after all these years. My sister gave us an advent calendar that I took of course. I can’t believe we are so close to december. I found another book that I thought my kids might like. My mother in law bought me a magazine that had some cookie recipes I might try out in the coming weeks and I also ordered a calendar that I may keep or may give away for Christmas.

Since I fed the sourdough I had some extra and decided to bake bread. It was ready just in time for lunch. There is nothing better than the smell (and taste) of bread fresh out of the oven in my opinion.

Unpacking round two involved the unpacking the three boxes I shipped. A former colleague who moved to France recommended ‘Send My Bag’ and since I did not want to deal with the boxes at the airport I gave it a try. DHL picked the boxes up and provided tracking throughout. It actually worked really well. The only downside was that they don’t recommend the service for anything fragile – I guess the pictures already tell you what I shipped. Most things made it but one of the boxes took a beating and some of its contents was broken. I see some mosaic making in my future but I was actually surprised that most of the china made it. The white one with the blue flowers I picked out with my mom and I am seriously sentimental about it (besides having a thing for nice china). Then I had to make room for it somehow and sorted and cleaned out the kitchen cabinets – one more box for a garage sale went into storage. Everything found a place and I vacuumed up the whole kitchen/dining/living room and hopefully got all the little china chips that I did not catch when pulling out the broken pieces. That pretty much filled the rest of the afternoon.

This was my Friday and now it’s almost time for bed. I don’t have specific weekend plans but I am sure we will fill it up with something. Do you usually plan out your weekend or just enjoy not having any plans?

Little small town in Lower Saxony

Last week was bittersweet for me. It was probably the last time I visited my childhood home since my dad will be moving before I can visit again in December. It was not as difficult to say goodbye as I feared. Maybe partly because I have been packing and re-packing my own boxes every time I came for a visit. I don’t have any close friends living there anymore and I am not planning to move back. Maybe the sadness will still come? I don’t know.

I loved growing up there and I am filled with memories. Memories of helping my grandma in the garden and my mom in her pottery studio, learning how to ride a bike and how to roller skate. I remember the tree in our backyard that we climbed with the neighborhood kids, endless games of hide and seek in the house and the garden, family gatherings, Christmas, baking cookies in the kitchen, birthday parties and the first heartache.

I also will remember the town itself. It’s small and when I was growing up everyone knew you, everyone greats each other on the street (and you better did this or your parents will hear about it if you didn’t). It only has about ~2100 people living there, but it has a supermarket, a church, a doctor, an elementary school, bus stops that take you to the next bigger city 13km away, a gas station, a volunteer run fire department, a sports field for soccer (honestly which small town does not in Germany?), tennis courts, a small skate park, a pool, a handcar you can try out and even a small heritage museum where you also can get married (also run by volunteers including my dad for a long time). It also used to have a bakery where you could get fresh rolls even before they officially opened when you went to the back where the oven was. There were summers filled with long pool days and camp from the church youth group, I played first recorder with a small group of other kids which was run by the wife of my music teacher and later trumpet with the brass orchestra from our church.

Wietzen is pretty much right between Hannover and Bremen but the next better known big city is Hamburg. So it is northern Germany. The dialect you may hear spoken there is low German. I can understand it when my dad speaks it with friends but I can’t speak it myself. My kids on the other hand will not know what their grandpa is talking about. There are certain words very different from the German you learn in school and they can even be different from town to town. My grandpa said that when the British soldiers came through at the end of World War II it was easier to communicate with them in low German because some words are similar.

So without further ado, here are a couple of pictures of my hometown before I fall asleep.

From above

Today was my travel day again with a pretty short connection in Munich so not much time to write. I spend the flight making progress on my latest knitting project (a scarf for my dad since he put the last one in the washing machine) while watching movies, reading and sleeping. I was very lucky today and had the whole three seats to myself. It made the whole flight so much more relaxing.

I took some pictures flying into SFO and hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed the view.

What we inherit

The picture is misleading. I don’t mean to say I inherited the contents of all the shelfs (I could have since the contents mostly will be cleared out by the time my dad moves out). What I want to talk about is a different thought of inheritance.

My husband always complains that I don’t express myself clearly enough and assume a lot of knowledge. So here is a conversation I had with my dad today:

“Dad, where is the painters tape.”
My dad replies: “It’s on the shelf in the basement.”

Above are mostly all the shelves in the basement. I found it, but I think I understand now what my husband is talking about.

Do you have habits you picked up from your parents?

Expat turned Immigrant

This is going to hopefully answer another set of questions I received:
I’d love to know more about how you feel about living in the States. Why did you decide to stay here instead of going back to Germany? What surprises you about living here? Are you ever planning on moving back to Europe?

On a trail in Tilden Park — Walk in Berkley’s Tilden Park in 2005

I guess I should start all the way back in 2005 when we first moved here. Back then it was pretty common to do a postdoc in the US if someone wants to work in academia (my husband). We came here with every intention to leave again and go back “home” to Germany or at least Europe after those 3-5 years that mentioned postdoc work was complete (is it ever though?). Never in my life would I have thought I would move to the US one day. I got on my first flight in my late 20s and the farthest away from home I moved was in the next bigger city (Hannover) which is only an hour away from my hometown.

It so happened that my husband was offered a really great opportunity where he did his postdoc that was not that easy to beat – and so it happened that we stayed longer than the 5 years planned. I still considered myself an expatriate – a person who lives outside their native country – and I still thought we would move back eventually. We had our kids in 2008 and 2011, they started daycare, preschool, school and before we knew it they are half grown. I had a really rough time in stretches because I don’t like living so far away from family but I also knew that if we moved back just because I pushed really hard and my husband would take a job he would not be happy with just to make me happy that would not go well either. So far it was just all coincident that we stayed (at least in my thinking). In 2018 we decided to move to a bigger house and ended up talking to a realtor to also look at houses to buy. That also made us talk about how we imagined our life to go in the next couple of years/decades to come. I think that was the point when the realization set in that we were here to stay and it helped me to settle this in my mind, too. So stepping into our very own house we became immigrants I guess – people who come to live permanently in a foreign country. Yes, it is a better career for my husband but also for me the work I am doing at the University offers better pay and more appreciation I could ever expect in Germany. After having visas and then green-cards all these years we applied first to keep our German citizenship and then also applied for the US citizenship. We were able to vote in the 2020 election for the first time and it felt so good to have a say in what happens in the country we call home now, too. I am still not ruling out that we move back at some point or back to Europe in general but I think we will stay for sure until the kids finish high school. They know German but they only know Germany from our summer visits and it would be hard on them now. You can have a really good life in Germany but we also have a really good life here. We are fortunate enough that we have good salaries, good retirement through our jobs and health insurance.

One thing that really surprised me is how international it is where we live. Since UC Berkeley and I guess the whole Bay Area attracts so many international students and workers it makes it very diverse and colorful. I have friends from Ukraine, Mexico, Brazil, France, Argentina and my kids went to a daycare run by an American-Japanese family. That is something I would miss would we move back to Germany.
A couple of other things I was surprised about:

Most restaurants closed at 9pm – why so early?
You finish eating and you will get the check right away – sometimes even before that. This really took some getting used to.
Learning English 9 years and then using the language every day are two very different things (subtitles were my friend and it really helped to get used to it).
You always have to add the tax to the prices.
How great the park system is. Besides the National Parks there are so many state parks.

I am pretty sure there are more that I don’t remember right now.

Are we ever moving back to Europe? I honestly don’t know. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. It may depend where the kids end up? When I learned something in all this then it is that you can make plans and than life ends up completely different and not in a bad way at all. We very likely would have a reverse culture shock by now since time did not stand still over in Europe either. I hope that by the time we retire we still have some time to explore the world. A lot of our free time is spend with visiting family and exploring the US a little closer to home during the shorter breaks.

Did you end up in a place close to your family or do you happen to live far away, too? Are you planning to move in the coming years or do you think you will stay put?

Questions answered round 1

I did not get a whole lot of questions but thought I do answer a couple before I turn in for the night. It has been a busy day, with packing and moving things around, lunch with my aunt and uncle what was lovely, making plans which furniture my dad is going to take what things my brother wants to keep and so on.
Picture pretty unrelated but Germany feels like real fall now with falling leaves (and a lot of rain).

So here it goes round one:

Do you keep up with a lot of friends in Germany?
Today I met with a friend I know from high school, but as we were sitting together over dinner we tried to remember when we saw each other last and it was sometime before the pandemic. It was really fun and we had a good evening but in between those visits we only hear from each other occasionally. I have one friend who happens to live in the same town as my parents in-law now, what makes seeing her a lot easier. And she is also the one friend who will get in touch with me and not the other way around. It sometimes is a little exhausting as for most friendships I am the one who reaches out when we are visiting. It does make sense because how should they know when we are in Germany any other way but most also don’t check in with me. It still feels like nothing changed between us in all the time we don’t hear or see each other but we also miss a lot of the day to day things that make up life and change you so sometimes I wonder how well do we really still know us. On the other hand it makes it really interesting because it is a little like meeting a whole new person each time. It gets harder as time passes living so far away, but I think by now I am down to the friends who will stay with me. I am not constantly in touch but I know who I can call on to meet up and they will have time for me. It’s an effort but it’s an effort that is worth it. I probably should re-read this when I am ever in doubt about it.

Did you play any sports growing up?
Growing up I took ballet classes for a year. There was this really popular TV show called “Anna” about a girl who wanted to be a ballerina. Do you want to take a guess why I thought ballet was a good idea?
I also briefly tried jiu-jitsu and table tennis but it did not really stick.

Did you play any instruments?
I played the recorder and recently picked up alto recorder a little. I played piano on and off and even though I enjoy it and still play occasionally it’s just for me as relaxation – I just never was really good. I know a couple of guitar cords. And I also played trumpet in the local church brass orchestra and looking back I liked this best for the community.

Do you know this dish?

Does this look appetizing to you? To me it does not. It really does not look pretty. When my dad told me that my brother asked for Knipp for dinner I was taken a little aback honestly. The last time I had it was maybe 10 years ago. I did not like it when I was a kid and I did not like it 10 years back. But I guess it has grown on me since then (refined taste buds maybe?) even though it still looks like a grayish gooey mess.
Knipp is basically meat with grains, onions, and spices and according to the internet something very specific to Bremen and Lower Saxony in Germany. In the old days they used the leftover meat bits that could not be used for anything else and I am secretly imagining that this might have changed. In our house it is usually served with a very dark bread and pickled cucumbers (sour, not sweet). It was actually very good I thought.

When you buy Knipp at the meat counter you usually are confronted with a very big sausage kind of looking thing (about 10-15cm in diameter) and you can decide how big of a portion you want cut off. All you have to do for prep is fry it in a pan and you are done – so it is a very easy meal.

This is how it looks like when it is almost done. Some people like it gooey, some like it better when it is browned a bit (me please). Is it something my kids would eat? Likely not. It is not a choice for anyone vegetarian or vegan.

This suddenly reminds me: at our elemantary school we had a food challenge a couple of years for international night. We were presented with three interesting food choices of one specific country. I think Knipp would have been an excellent challenge option if Germany ever made it to the challenge.

Do you have an interesting delicacy where you are from?