Goodbyes, again. And Hello

The car is on its way. The house seems bigger with so much less stuff in it. In the last few weeks I said "so long" to friends and family. For some, I've got a feeling I'll see them when I'm next in town - only about six weeks after leaving - and for others it's still hazy.  Offers to host people in Frankfurt have been extended.

My apartment is fine, everything I need and nothing more.  It is also the smallest housing I've had in the foreign service, good practice for when we retire and live at the cabin!  My boss and colleagues seem nice, my only complaints are happily temporary:  1. it is too hot for me to sleep, there's no air conditioning and Terry has ruined me for tolerating heat and 2. the process to get internet in my house is ridiculous. Makes waiting all day for Comcast sound like a walk in the park. So I am writing from the community center/restaurant in the neighborhood for its free wifi. I probably won't have internet for several weeks. Normally not such a big deal, but it is sort of how I can communicate with my family so it sucks.

Mom knows best

A couple of weeks ago we had a very "eh" kind of weekend. We had a lot of chores to do after having neglected the house for several weeks. I had to wake up extra early on Saturday to get the fourth tire put on my car before it ships to Germany (a rant on that coming later, maybe) so the day just couldn't be recovered after that. By Sunday evening the kids were snarling balls of emotions - they sniped at each other, then cried when the sniping got turned around, they whined and complained, and generally acted like two children who had barely left the house all weekend.

So I said "Get your shoes on, we're going into the woods."  Because nature makes people happy. Here's just one of many articles on the subject.

The kids whined and complained, although now their target was me rather than each other. They staunchly insisted they would be grumpy and miserable throughout the walk. I said that's fine, as long as it's outside in nature.

A segment of Rock Creek Park is just about two blocks from us. One grumpypants was already cheering up by the time we hit the corner of our block. The other grumpypants is more focused and dedicated and it took longer.

We discovered a million wild raspberry bushes, with the berries just starting to form (we also found three dark red ones to taste).  We captured fireflies (something I never did as a child, I don't even remembering seeing them up north). We made plans to come back with proper firefly catching jars, with mesh tops so they can breathe. We saw a couple of deer in the woods, until we scared them off. The serious, dedicated grumpypants decided with me that we should try to get into the woods as many evenings as we can after dinner.

Memorial Day

For the first time that I can remember, there were no illnesses or previous commitments, yet we did not spend the long weekend at the cabin.

Sunday we went to Gettysburg - it's only about 1.5 hours from home and I've been wanting to see it - this weekend seemed an appropriate time. On the way we listened to a podcast about the battles, which was useful as I could explain things from the podcast while standing in the battleground.

Gettysburg does this great thing where kids get a Junior Ranger booklet with information about some of the major sights, things to look for, and puzzles and games.  It definitely helped keep them engaged. Walking around downtown Gettysburg itself was also interesting, with all the buildings marked "Civil War" and trying to imagine what the town would have looked like back then.  We played "what wouldn't have been here" - cars, electricity poles/lines, the road itself.

Then on to visit Terry's sister and watch a minor league baseball game in her hometown.  There were a number of rain delays, but the game was never canceled. There were fireworks after the game, which was also fun. In general, it ended up a late night, but the kids surprised us by sleeping late the next day. Wins all around!

The mystery of fresh produce

 

 (stock photo)

Washington DC is a culinary wasteland. Yes there are some pockets of excellent restaurant food, usually food from Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, or somewhere else far from these shores. There may also be good, fresh produce at Whole Foods or the local farmer's market. However, with 5 mouths in this household the days of $15 bunches of asparagus are behind us.

Terry returned from a weekend in PA with four or five full bags of produce. Some of it was local, farmer's market.  The cauliflower he brought home was the best cauliflower I have ever eaten. 24 hours later I am still thinking about it. 

On the other hand, he brought home two plastic quart containers of Driscoll's strawberries, looking exactly like the strawberries I can find in any of the 6 large and medium sized grocery store chains within a 5 mile radius of my home.

I don't know where Driscoll's is, but it probably had to go through DC on its way to Pennsylvania. However, somehow, the freshness, taste and general quality was significantly better than anything I can find in DC. Given the aforementioned overstock of grocery stores in my neck of the woods, this is not a "supermarket desert". It is a quality food desert.

Can anyone suss out why on earth this is the case? 

The cabin makes me happy

I recently read an article about how spending time in nature makes people happy (here's not the article I read, but something else on the topic). Even just 5 minutes gives a boost, and hours in the woods has measurable benefits.  We spent about 24 hours at the cabin this weekend.

 Weeds can be pretty too.

 We planted the tree that's right in the center, about 10 years ago. It's a crabapple.

Kids reading in their hammocks.

I passed!

After just about 36 weeks, I took my language exam and passed.  This means the American government feels safe sending me out to Germany to represent my country in their language and not create a international incident through saying something incorrect or inappropriate.

Woo-hoo!
 
Intensive German language training is now a thing of the past for me.  At post there is usually a couple-of-hours-per-week class to continue learning or at least not forget too much of what I now know, and I do plan to take advantage of that.  I also plan to continue listening to Deutschland Funk Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (A German radio program on economics and society, in my mind it's like NPR's All Things Considered) during my morning commute. And American politics is a lot more bearable when I first have to decipher the German so I'll probably still read Der Spiegel sometimes. But I have no homework - none of this is required.

I do, however, have to navigate a veritable mountain of paperwork and logistics to make sure I am ready and permitted to travel. And next week I get to start learning about how to do my job as a consular officer.

It's feeling more real than ever before!

Cake!

Sometime around the pre-election season I had to quit NPR and started listening to podcasts instead. As I got further in German I started listening to news in German. But I usually play a fun podcast during my commute home to make it more bearable.

Today I listened to one all about cake and its relevance in American history. By the time I got home I knew I was making a cake tonight, German review be damned. With my test in just under 2 weeks that is a strong craving indeed.  I mentioned all this to my fabulous au pair, who then whipped up a cake in the 30 minutes between dinner and when she left to bring Zoltan to soccer (I participated too ... I took it out of the oven)

It is delicious.

The Test

Yesterday in class we practiced some strategies for handling certain parts of the test. I hadn't been working on these particular parts of the test in a while. I failed spectacularly. Last night I had my first nightmare about the test:  I was in a play and for some reason had never bothered to learn my lines.  So it comes to opening night and there's no understudy and there's no complete script laying around everywhere but I don't even know when it's my line until I notice nothing else is happening on stage and then I tear around looking for the part of the script that has my lines, or at least some direction of where I am supposed to be and what topics I'm supposed to be discussing.

Very hard to understand where that dream came from, eh?

The good news is I feel very confident in my ability to speak German and carry on my job and my life at post. I listen to German radio [aka, news podcasts] and read German news every day. I discuss and debate various topics and while I make grammatical errors or sometimes start on a sentence that ends up so complex that I lose my way halfway through and need to back up and start over (like if I had tried this sentence in German)  I am overwhelmingly understood.  However, as in so many other things, the worry is not about Life but about the Test.

I have two weeks. And if I don't pass, the world does not come to an end. I simply have to learn German for an additional 4-6 weeks before testing again.

But I have my pride.

So I guess this weekend I will be reviewing harder and more diligently on certain areas than I have been in the recent past.

Way More Fun with German

In addition to spending our days in the classroom slogging through the language, we also have other opportunities to play with German.  Two such opportunities came about last month.

One day we had a field trip to the German Embassy. It was the best morale boost, chatting like normal people with Germans in German. The best part - they understood us! In German!

The second opportunity was a special module put together by one of the teachers for handling Consular work. We held mock consular interviews at mock consular windows (apparently called "counters" = "schalter" in German. Probably a linguistic thowback from the days before bulletproof glass separated us from the visa seekers.)

Mind you, my German is riddled with grammar mistakes and missing vocabulary I have to "paraphrase" around. But it appears to be more or less understandable.

It is a little hard to believe that six months ago I spoke no German at all!

Coddle Pasta

We've coined a new term tonight.  I knew I was making a meal the kids have steadfastly and continually failed to enjoy. So, I pulled out a bunch of the cooked pasta and left it out, untouched by any other ingredients. After the kids tried dinner and, yet again, failed to like it, I let them finish dinner with plain pasta saved from before. The "Coddle Pasta"; meaning the pasta that represents my coddling of the children. Heck yeah!