The Zetzsches in Berlin

2008-07-15T02:18:00.002+02:00

Berlin-by-Number

Number of overnight guests: 54

Total number of nights with out-of-town or out-of-country company: 87

Number of meals cooked for guests: lost count (never counted in the first place!)

Museum tickets: 55

Contemporary art: 3
Expressionism: 5
National gallery: 5
Egyptian: 10
Schatzkammer in Munich: 5
History of Bonn: 5
Story of Berlin: 5
Technik in Flensburg 5
Natural history: 10
Speer's Germania: 2

Concert tickets: 37

SEED: 3
Hip hop festival: 2
Messiah: 5
Piano: 3
RIAS Kammerchor: 2
Jessye Norman: 2
Jazz clubs: 6
Sarah Kaiser: 6
Organ in Dom: 5
Black Seed: 3

Opera tickets: 4

Madame Butterfly: 2
El Turca en Italia: 2

Ballet tickets: 7

Alice in Wonderland: 3
Nutcracker excerpt: 4

Musical tickets: 8

Robin Hood: 3
The King and I: 5

Professional basketball game tickets: 20

AlbaBerlin: all 20!

Street festivals: 8

Open-air markets: 5

Church services: 40-some + one midnight Christmas Eve mass

We encounter the stars

2008-07-05T18:15:00.009+02:00

. . . and I haven't washed my hand since!

We had a wonderful visit from our friends Kevin, Peggy, and Taylor Ladd and Peggy's mom Suzy for several warm days in June, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of Berlin. (Kevin, when I investigated my camera I found no photos to confirm your visit. I know you have some--can you share?)

As we were exploring the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, we noticed a long red carpet snaking into a temporary pavilion advertising the film "Kung Fu Panda," along with television moderators announcing to passersby that Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman would be appearing that evening for the German premier. Jack Black? Dustin Hoffman? The kids' blood pressure went through the roof! Did she really say they'd be here? In two hours?

We went on to visit the Brandenburg Gate, but, well, yes, the kids were a wee bit preoccupied. Jack Black--pant--pant. Dustin Hoffman--pant--pant. Must return to red carpet--pant--pant.

We were back in position at 7:00, the four kids with our camera in front of the microphones and we adults indulgently and modestly back at the railing where the cars would be pulling up. We watched as the black chauffeured cars pulled in and the German celebrities piled out. They posed as the photographers descended, and we looked at each other shrugging, mouthing, Who's that?

Finally the car with Dustin Hoffman drove in and stopped, and dear little Dustin stepped out, put on his suit jacket, and strolled right over to where Peggy and I were standing to shake our hands. What a coupla middle-aged groupies! he was thinking. And, yes, we were thinking, Dustin Hoffman just shook my hand! Dustin Hoffman just shook my hand! Two grown women! How embarrassing!

Meanwhile Jack Black had already popped out of another car with gyrations and contortions and panda roars and was working the crowd on the other side. Together they must have spent a full hour patiently signing autographs and taking pictures with kids leaning out over the railings.

Near the end, Anna managed to lean far enough out on Jost's shoulders to get an autograph from Jack, Hannes shamelessly flattered him into signing a "Kung Fu Panda" fan, and Anna wriggled through to reach Dustin for a signature.

But Taylor scored the highest coup with the photo on Suzy's camera that Jack Black took of Taylor and himself, a photo that I would love to post here when those world travelers get through unpacking!

And what are we left with? A fan and some scraps of paper with illegible scrawls, some cockeyed crowd photos, one precious photo of Taylor with a movie star--and some humility, hopefully, that we too succumbed, for a few moments, to the fleeting pull of the celebrity.

Germany and Euro 2008

2008-07-05T17:53:00.011+02:00

We're Nummer Zwei!

We're Nummer Zwei!

We wrote a bit about Deutschland Fußball Fever in a previous post, but we're sure you'll need an update, given the dearth of television coverage in America for international soccer competitions.

No one can say we fans didn't give it our all. We wore the wigs and the leis. We waved the flags. We screamed ourselves hoarse. We drove honking through the streets of Berlin until the wee morning hours to celebrate our victories (well, we didn't, but many did!). We staggered drunkenly from beer gardens when our team stumbled (again, we didn't, but many did!).

And the team . . . the team played brilliantly, the team played dismally: we just never knew which team would show up. Against Portugal and Poland they were a well-oiled, explosive machine. Against Croatia and Turkey we wondered where they'd gone. And then finally, against Spain, the new European champion, they were simply outplayed.

The disappointment was great, but somewhere we almost lost sight of this important fact: Germany got second place. That's a great achievement! Go Germany!

Anna turns nine

2008-07-05T17:13:00.013+02:00

Zum Geburtstag viel Glück!

Here's Anna's early morning bouquet after her wake-up birthday song

Our "little" Anna celebrated her ninth birthday on June 26th with cousin Hannah and our family here at home, and then again on the 28th with all of us and her two best friends, Jessica and Sarah, at an amazing invention known as a "climbing forest." This was her day:

Sarah, Anna, and Jessica before the big adventure

We rode the elevated train for about an hour to the outskirts of East Berlin to a protected part of the forest called "Climb-Up!" We paid an entrance fee for our six climbers and then they received hard hats, gloves, and climbing harnesses with carabiners and rolly-thingies (I'm sure that's the technical name!) for sliding down zip lines.

The climbers then received a careful introduction into their equipment and how they would safely navigate the courses that had been built high above us among the trees. And then they were off!

Anna and Hannah show their ready stances

What fun! The courses all begin with a ladder that guides the climbers up to a series of platforms, connected by a variety of obstacles that they have to cross to go from tree to tree: hanging logs, nets, suspended stumps, moving ropes, rotating poles, skateboards, and zip lines—all suspended up to 30 feet in the air!

The climbers are connected with their carabiners to guide ropes at all times so there’s no danger of falling, but even so their concentration and focus was extremely high. Each of the courses has a different difficulty level—the perfect place for our group of six ranging in age from eight to eighteen.

Here you can see Lara's altitude on this mid-level-difficulty course . . .

. . . and here in the close-up you can see the concentration!

After two and half hours of climbing the kids were tired but ecstatic—Anna said this was the most fun birthday party she’d ever had!

Happy birthday, big girl!

We love you!

The German flag

2008-06-17T22:47:00.011+02:00

Deutschland, Deutschland

Since the end of World War II, the German flag has been a symbol of ambivalence for most Germans, bringing with it ugly whiffs of nationalism gone terribly wrong during the insanity of the Nazis. It was flown at official buildings, but the thought of hoisting it frivolously on the front porch or during a garden barbecue would have been met by the average German with revulsion and suspicion. The flag and its accompanying patriotism were too closely associated with the deep national disgrace of the Third Reich, and for more than half a century they had not come to terms with it.

But now, unbelievably, this is what we see when we go outside: German flags fluttering from the window of every other car and people walking around adorned in German-flag-themed afro wigs, scarves, and sweat bands. And surprisingly for this land of philosophers and musicians and intellectuals, the catalyst for the sweeping change was soccer.

Two years ago during the World Soccer Cup, Germany spawned a Cinderella soccer team that came from nowhere and knocked out the traditional giants to nearly win the world championship. People who were in Germany during those days say that the country was unified and hopeful and patriotic as they had never seen it before, with people dancing and singing in the streets and smiling and embracing strangers. Not exactly typical German behavior, but liberating nonetheless after decades of collective guilt. What emerged was a newborn patriotism, and a rehabilitation of sorts for the German flag.

The reason for the proliferation of flags again now is the European Soccer Cup, a bit like America's Super Bowl or World Series to the 10^th power. All of Germany—all of Europe—is glued to their televisions when the games are broadcast, and afterward here in Berlin they take to the streets with raucous singing and convoys of honking cars.

As of now, Germany's hopes for a second chance at a title are still alive. And German flags are flying everywhere, proudly.

Anatomy of an apartment

2008-06-02T11:45:00.014+02:00

Them Bones, Them Bones . . .

Neue Kantstraße 3

I have to admit: I have sometimes complained about certain features of this apartment. The wood floors have slivers. The floorboards squeak. The bathroom sink and the washing machine leak. I can't keep the floors clean. The walls and molding desperately need a good paint job. Yada yada yada.

But what wins me back every time are those beautiful bones. Like an aging diva, she's got her wrinkles and extra pounds and leaks, but you just can't ignore her gorgeous bones. Built in 1906 in the heyday of the ritzy Charlottenburg neighborhood, less than a mile from Princess Sophie Charlotte's castle, this was a city apartment for the upper crust, the landed gentry. From here one could easily promenade to the Kurfüstendamm or Savignyplatz to see and be seen. Here was the representative salon for entertaining the society denizens.

Just imagine the maid
opening these spectacular Art Niveau
stained glass double doors and saying,
"Dinner is served, my lady."

Or peeping at your callers
through the beehive keyhole on these locks.
(See the bee buzzing nearby?)

Or glancing out the window to see
what Baron Schmidt and his wife
are eating for dinner tonight
in their dining room across the tree-lined street.

Or waltzing on the polished parquet floors.

Or refreshing yourself with cool water
from the recessed sink in the water closet.

Or walking out through this grand front door
to take your spoiled Berliner Hund for a walkchen.

When you went to give instructions to the cook
for the evening's meal,
you'd admire the Delft tiles imported from Holland
that decorate the kitchen walls.

The cook could always run to the market
through the hidden kitchen door
to the spiral staircase that the servants used.
The old gas lamps are still in their original recessed panels.

Wait a second, how did this picture get in here?
The poor maid's closet-sized bedroom
is now our overpacked storeroom!
Fortunately, she doesn't mind.

What's that rattling? Ah, yes, them bones, them bones, them dry bones . . . them dry Berliner bones!

The rites of spring

2008-05-27T08:19:00.014+02:00

Spargel Zeit

Those of you who don’t like your veggies have permission to skip this posting, because this is all about the green things—or actually, about the white things.

Springtime in Germany is synonymous with white asparagus season. White asparagus is the albino cousin of our green veggie. Called the “royal vegetable” in Germany, it’s grown under earthen mounds so no photosynthesis can take place to turn it green. As soon as the first little white head pokes out of the ground, it’s harvested by night and whisked away to roadside stands and open-air markets around the country.

Actually the first boxes of white asparagus appear in the markets in early April, but those in the know turn up their noses. It’s not German asparagus, you see, but imported from the hothouses of Egypt or Morocco. We wait and we wait until the beginning of May when we see the pale piles with the proud sign: Deutsche Spargel. And then we attack.

White asparagus is chosen for its pure white color and its thick, straight stems. The farmers recommend that you buy one pound for each person who is eating. For our family that makes a good five pounds at six euros a kilo—about $22. No wonder they call it the royal vegetable!

Those fat stems require a lot of preparation work—they all must be peeled and trimmed before steaming for up to 25 minutes.

Here's the maid a-peeling,
and the naked stalks a-steaming

The traditional accompaniments include boiled new potatoes,
Schinken (a bacon-like ham), and either hollandaise sauce or melted butter.

Guten Appetit!

Onkel Holger joined us in our Spargel campaign

Recommended dessert: a good nap.
(The rhubarb cream pie comes later.)

Tourists on the loose

2008-05-20T11:14:00.012+02:00

Downtown, Downtown!

A fringe benefit of having so much company is that we get the opportunity to play tourist again and again in a place that's become our home. And once we leave our comfortable little neighborhood, we're reminded that this really is a city of three and a half million inhabitants. Here are some random "postcard" shots from recent forays into downtown Berlin with friends.

Hannes the gatekeeper, in front of Berlin's central landmark,
the Brandenburger Tor.
The Berlin Wall jagged out from the east
to claim the Brandenburger Gate for East Berlin.
President Reagan stood right about where Hannes is standing here
when he gave his famous 1987 speech:
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

This is one of the astounding skyscrapers
that tower up from Potsdamer Platz,
before World War II the busiest traffic center in Europe.
It was mostly destroyed during World War II,
and then for years during the Cold War it was the no-man's land
or "death strip" behind the Wall, a scene of desolation.
There are still scraps of the Wall left behind,
but definitely no more no-man's land.

Here's a view from inside the Sony Center Tower
at Potsdamer Platz.
We're down below sipping coffee and tea
at Jost's favorite historic watering hole, Cafe Josty!

A corner of the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament.
This building bordered the Wall on the west.
Photos displayed inside show it as a blackened hull
after the bombing of World War II.

This new glass cupola sits atop the old Reichstag
to replace the old conventional cupola destroyed in World War II.
We got up early to avoid the three-hour wait to visit the cupola
and enjoyed a spectacular panoramic view of Berlin.

Not far away is the new and very unusual
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Designed by an American architect, it's an entire city block
of tombstone-like columns on uneven ground.
The ground sinks so low at times that you can feel truly entombed.

Here's another memorial in front of the Reichstag
with the names of the government officials
who were killed during the time of the Nazis.

And finally, the true tourist shot:
Lara, Hannes, and Anna in front of
a remaining grafitti'd chunk of the Berlin Wall.

The family car

2008-05-07T22:47:00.004+02:00

Zoom, zoom, zoom

I'd like to tell you all how grateful we are for this little car. It's an Opel Astra with snazzy Swiss plates that show all the Berliners we're foreigners, a handy identification in city traffic when we need an excuse for being erratic or a little slow on the uptake. The car belongs to Mom and Dad, who have graciously allowed us to use it for our time here. It has given us a level of freedom and mobility that we have loved—with it we've explored all the corners of Germany, transported heavy cases of fizzy mineral water from the beverage mart, and made day trips around the outlying regions of Berlin.

However, the other thing that I love about this car is that it stays parked most of the time. There are long spans of days during which it's not driven at all, when we have to sit down and ponder when we last drove it and where on earth it's parked. That's when I begin to realize the beauty of self-sustaining neighborhoods in a city of this size, and the high quality of life that's imparted when I can walk or ride my bike to find nearly anything my heart desires.

Yesterday Lara and I rode our bikes the three minutes to Wilmersdorfer Straße, our main pedestrian shopping street, to look for presents for Jost's birthday. We found many, many possibilities, but I didn't need to buy anything—I knew I could drop back in tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day before I actually needed to buy anything. For Reedsportians, that's unthinkable!

There's also something so sensory about riding a bike through a city—you can smell the foods being cooked in the restaurants, there's fresh air in your face, you hear snatches of conversations in many languages, and you're a part of the life around you in a way that a car completely seals out. Of course, the other nice thing about riding in Berlin is that it's completely flat, with nary a hill in the city—my kind of bike riding!

My recurring thought right now is how I can recreate some of this car-independence in my life back in Reedsport. The lack of infrastructure, of course, is the biggest problem. We simply are not a self-sustaining community. And Hannes’s suggestion to build a subway may not be completely realistic. But maybe we could build a grocery store somewhere in the uptown area near the hospital—anyone want to donate some land? And then if we could do something about the rain and those hills. . . .

The Uhlenhorst reunion

2008-04-28T10:57:00.012+02:00

A Little Slice of Heaven

We first came to Germany 17 years ago, ten days after our wedding. Jost immediately plunged into his graduate studies and tried to juggle several part-time jobs while we renovated his grandmother’s apartment where we were living and I . . . I hit rock bottom! Those first few months were so hard, adjusting to a new marriage in a new culture and a new language where I had to operate at the effectiveness of a toddler. Except that toddlers are cute, and I was just big and—well, from the looks I got—a little slow.

Conny

It was right about that time that we were introduced to a little Free Evangelical Church that met in a slightly dilapidated townhouse near the shores of the Alster, the beautiful lake in the center of Hamburg. The church was looking for someone to rent an apartment upstairs that had belonged to the former pastor, and we were looking for a church and an apartment—perfect! We went to a service to meet the pastor and we were welcomed warmly. But then the tiny organ at the back of the sanctuary began to play and something started to happen which I gradually realized was meant to be congregational singing, and my terrible homesickness reared its ugly head and I just sat in my chair and wept. It wasn’t exactly the best renter’s recommendation.

Johann

Still, they were gracious (or desperate!) and offered us the apartment nonetheless, and that began a four-year relationship that proved to be overwhelmingly supportive and nourishing for us. Those 40 or so people in that little church truly became our family for those years. When Hannes was born they adopted him as the church baby and I rarely saw him when church people were in the house. We ate and played together, celebrated and cried together. We were an odd assortment of people of all ages and life stages and backgrounds, and we definitely weren’t perfect. But we worked hard at practicing what church was supposed to be.

Astrid

In 1994 the headquarters of the Free Evangelical Church decided that they could no longer keep subsidizing our little congregation, and against our wishes the church was closed and the building where we lived was sold. For us and some others this meant a move to a new neighborhood; for all of us it meant a scattering to different churches.

Jens-Peter

One month ago, though, at the end of the Easter vacation, we all got together again, after 14 years. A few organizers had used our return to Germany as a motivation to call a reunion, and more than 40 people joined together in the fellowship hall of another church in Hamburg to touch base again.

These strange men all became fathers together in 1990.
I think they're recreating a photo of their wives at that time
lined up with their pregnant tummies.

We ate together again—Margret brought her famous Schneewittchen Kuchen—and we laughed together and told about our lives. The hordes of little kids that used to storm our apartment and hang on our legs are all grown up and starting families of their own. Hannes is taller than most of the adults who had held him and tossed him in the air. Several of the older members have died; others are dealing with cancer and its aftermath.

Manfred

But like someone said, “This has got to be a little like what heaven will be like!” Amen.

Skiing in Switzerland

2008-04-22T11:03:00.011+02:00

Hannes is airborne!

I ski, you ski, we all ski!

Ahh, the mountains of Switzerland, lightly covered in a new dusting of Easter snow. Blue sky and sunshine. A lake high in the Alps, surrounded by snow, with a gorgeous greenish blue color so improbably Mediterranean that I can’t describe it—can it be cyan? And then—skis?! Yes, they fit into the surroundings, but on my feet?! After 25 years?

It was true. Hannes had persuaded us all (all but Jost) to give it a try. The car was in the shop, so we took the merrily tooting Post Bus from the village of Brienz around the lake and up the narrow switchbacks to the Axalp, the mountain directly across the Brienzersee from Mom and Dad’s Swiss apartment. Here the locals bring their toddlers to learn to ski—changing their diapers and searching for pacifiers between sending them off for daring sweeps down the bunny hill. We felt a little sheepish about our awkwardness as we watched them careening down the slopes—but it’s a lot farther down to those long, ungainly skis when you’re more than two feet tall!

Hannes was a patient teacher after his instruction in the Czech Republic, and I was pleased to find that it’s a bit like riding a bike—it all came back quickly to me, all except for the muscle tone and strong knees I had when I was 20! The girls could probably have benefitted from a more professional instructor—and one who wasn’t related to them—but they got a taste of skiing that Hannes hopes they’ll want to refine in the Cascades next winter.

We participate in the Berlin Half-Marathon

2008-04-21T12:14:00.007+02:00

Lauf! Du schaffst es!

You’ll have to excuse me for feeling a bit tired these days, but we just had the Berlin Half-Marathon two weeks ago and it’s taken me awhile to recover.

There’s something incredibly exhilarating about the atmosphere of 25,000 runners from 86 countries joining together to run through these cobblestoned streets with 150,000 spectators cheering like crazy. Last September we were on hand to watch the world record set in the Berlin Marathon, and it inspired us to be part of this more accessible goal this spring.

Our youngest cheerleader: her sign says "Run"

It started out early on a cool April Sunday with the roller-bladers, followed by the handbikers and wheelchairs. Then came the amazingly divine Kenyans and Ethiopians, and then the remaining 24,000 mortals consigned to run behind the gods. Those mortals like us.

Well, more like us—except that we were standing in our pajamas with cups of cocoa in our hands, cheering them all on from our fifth-floor balcony.

Our view of the marathon

Oh, wait—you didn’t actually think we were down there on the street, sweating and cramping and heaving? Ha! Surely you know us better than that! No, no, no—our apartment was on the running route, so we participated by cheering raucously from above the trees as they all ran past our windows. We had kept our noise makers and signs from the marathon last fall, so we felt quite official.

And once again we were inspired by the determination and sacrifice and pleasure involved in something so completely foreign to us and our cocoa/coffee-drinking bodies!

Jasper the intern

2008-04-21T11:40:00.008+02:00

Let's all hum Pomp & Circumstance, shall we?

As part of the German school system, each 10^th grader in a college-prep school is required to have a two-week internship in a company of his or her choice. Our friend Charlotte interned with the "new music" radio station in Berlin; Mo got a position in Hamburg with AFS, an organization that prepares and sends exchange students. And for the last two weeks we've had our friend Jasper living with us while he participated in a translation internship with Jost.

Each morning they sat at their desks in Jost's office (also known as our bedroom!) and talked about the day's tasks, or Jasper listened to an impromptu lecture on the finer points of translation: localization, the use of technology, and the art of networking. And then they fired up their computers and got to work. Jost had fun having a sidekick for two weeks, and we hope Jasper learned a lot. He's a good listener and was eager and willing to put it all into action. German readers can check out the blog he kept about his internship at http://jasperspraktikum.blogspot.com/.

Here are Jost and Jasper at the graduation ceremony in our living room

We loved having him here with us for fourteen days--especially Hannes, who could temporarily assuage his lifetime regret that we didn't provide him with any natural-born brothers. You're welcome to come back any time, Jasper, and bring your family with you!

Jasper and his twin brother Mo (left) with parents Jan and Ulli

We've been robbed!

2008-04-04T10:52:00.005+02:00

Momma said there’d be days--
I mean weeks--
like this . . .

Hmmm, how to say . . . criminally crummy? lambastingly lousy? repulsively revolting? simply Scheiße?

You be the judge: we rolled back into Berlin late Sunday night after an exhausting week of traveling during Easter vacation to find my laptop computer stolen, our belongings rifled through, the kids’ wallets emptied, all our documents strewn around the office, and a toilet full of unflushed feces. It wasn’t quite the homey atmosphere we’d been anticipating.

The next day an email arrived on Jost’s computer saying that someone had found Lara’s American birth certificate on a street in East Berlin. Jost’s birth certificate remains missing, but they thankfully ignored all our German and American passports, the kids’ Social Security cards, and our other birth certificates.

My laptop, of course, was the nerve center of the family, and I’m sure we’ll never see it again. All the photos we’ve taken this year in Berlin, all my email addresses and correspondence, all my clients’ documents and the hours I still needed to bill, all our snail-mail addresses, all our banking, tax, and credit card information—gone! A good argument for backing up regularly.

BUT, we’re still okay. True, we’re a little shaken up. On Monday morning Hannes said he’d be happy to get on an airplane and fly back to America that same day, but he came home from school on Tuesday cheerful and contented again. It’s been a frustrating experience for Jost to reestablish our office and configure my new laptop—as I write on Thursday we still have no Internet connection, which is a real liability with Internet-dependent jobs like ours. But again, we’re all okay. As Anna wrote in a letter to Grandma and Grandpa, “it’s just another new experience—a city experience!”

P.S. I’d be grateful for help in rebuilding my email address book. Could you please shoot a quick email message to kzetzsche(a)internationalwriters.com? (Remove the (a) and replace it with @, please.) No need to write a note unless you’re feeling especially communicative—but I’d love that, too!

New friendships

2008-03-18T20:35:00.020+01:00

We get by with a little help

from our friends

One of the hardest things about leaving for a year was being separated from our good friends at home. But gradually we’ve made some friendships that are filling our lives with joy and already beginning to make us sad about leaving people behind yet again. Today we’d like to introduce you to some of our new friends . . . .

Anna has bridged the biggest language barrier to speak friendship fluently with her best buddy Jessica, a Polish-Portuguese girl who lives a few blocks away and is in Anna’s class. They love to dance and dress up together and babble away at each other so that I can’t tell who’s talking when.

Lara has a wild and crazy girl group that she hangs out with. Here are Verena (Chilean-German), Sophie (Turkish-German), and Lara (American-German) . . .

and here’s a pensive picture of Nuri (Egyptian-German).

These girls are always up to something and always seem to be having a great time. Right now they’re all applying to be accepted into high schools for their 7th grade years and enjoying their last carefree year of elementary school. (Have I mentioned how multi-cultural the kids' friends are? There's hardly a classmate who has two German parents!)

Hannes’s class at his sports school is very tight knit and he feels close to them all, but his best friend is Niko, a classmate and a basketball teammate. Niko’s parents are Polish, and he dreams of coming to America to play college basketball. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for him because he likes my chocolate chip cookies!

Some of you may recognize the twins, Jasper and Mo, who spent a summer with us in Reedsport several years ago. They’ve come to stay with us several times this year, and Jasper will be coming again soon to do a two-week translation practicum with Jost. They continue to be among Hannes’s best brother buddies.

I had not really thought about making new friends this year—I knew we’d be catching up with old friends and investing in the children’s friendships. So the new friends Jost and I have made have been an unlooked-for and lovely surprise.

First among these were John and Hoi-ling, doctoral students of theology from Hong Kong who have just arrived in Berlin and are helping with the local Chinese church. Their professor was a classmate of Jost’s at the University of Hamburg. They come to our house on Mondays for dinner and German practice and fun fellowship (John does some mean card tricks!).

John and Hoi-ling invited us to a party at their church for the Chinese New Year. They had mentioned that there was a family of American missionaries working with their church, but when I walked in I was introduced to this man . . .

. . . Chuck "Chuckles" Rentz, my freshman college buddy from Seattle Pacific University 25 years ago! I think that’s the very definition of serendipity—or a divine appointment for renewing old friendships. We’ve had fun spending time with Chuck and his wife Jenny and their four children.

Each Wednesday since shortly before Christmas we’ve been going to a Bible study with a wonderful group of folks, all at least ten years younger and much cooler than Jost and me, but still they've welcomed and loved us! We eat together, sing together, study together, and have a great time. Here’s one of them, Sarah Kaiser, a jazz vocalist who comes over to play cards with us regularly.

And here’s Anna with the newest Bible study addition, baby Noah.

We feel so grateful for all these new (and old) friends who have filled our lives here with unexpected warmth and fun and fellowship.

The Saturday market

2008-03-08T23:16:00.023+01:00

Let's take a walk!

This morning we strolled down from our house to the Saturday farmers’ market, one of our favorite weekend outings. Jost's photos will provide you with some impressions of our neighborhood as we walked to the market:

Here’s a first curious shot of his new shoes,

an odd pair of rectangular leather loafers

made by a venerable old German shoemaking company.

How will you all recognize him without his clogs?

Our street is lined with an amazing variety of small shops. Here are just a few. (Please remember that this is the real almost-downtown gritty city we live in as you join us!)

A Russian bookstore

An old mom-and-pop corset and underwear store
(well, actually I don't know whether they sell corsets for pop, too,
but you know what I mean!)

The neighborhood brothel
(“You come as a stranger, you go as a friend”)

Probably twenty hair-cutting salons with intriguing advertisements

The Lebanese (!) jeweler and his assistant.
He gives out cans of juice with pineapple chunks in it whenever we stop by.

Thai massage

Big Pimp Hotdogs??
(unfortunately I'm not making this up!)

African art

And finally the Saturday market,
a small village of canvas-covered stands huddling in the church square

There’s a wonderful assortment of almost every imaginable fruit and vegetable. Here Anna and I are filling up with a week’s worth of veggies from this Turkish stand.

Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes—a different kind for every different purpose

My favorites are the flower stands. The Germans really know how to make gorgeous bouquets. Here the salesman scolded us for not coming six hours earlier to get an adequate picture when the flowers weren’t nearly gone.

As we walked we sampled the strawberries from Morocco (3 boxes for 2 euro!), the fresh garden carrots, and some really yummy homemade Turkish delight.

But the best part was setting the table when we got home: homemade Dubai pesto, crusty bread, a couple of new kinds of wurst, and fresh garlic olives. And of course more of those delicious strawberries and carrots.

Treasure hunting

2008-03-02T17:28:00.015+01:00

Way back during our Christmas vacation, we visited old Hamburg friends Judith and Til and their daughter Lupine in the beautiful city of Munich in southern Germany. We packed a lot of sightseeing into two very cold sub-zero days:

Anna and Lupine navigating
the crowded downtown pedestrian mall

. . . ice skating on the frozen moat of a castle built in 1385, eating at an ur-typical Bavarian restaurant (massive slabs of meat with canned peas and powdered potatoes), and admiring the famous Rathaus (the city hall) and the cathedral that were completely destroyed along with most of downtown Munich during the war and then rebuilt down to the last detail.

The Rathaus

The kids were especially impressed with our visit to the Schatzkammer, the treasury created in the 16^th century to house the jewels and treasures of the Bavarian royal families. Lara was our photographer during the tour of crowns, necklaces, scepters and balls, and jewel-encrusted toiletry cases.

A delicate queen's crown

Jost was so impressed by the visible weight and majesty of this king's crown.
These heavy things must have caused headaches!

And neck-aches!

Anna was so impressed with the jewels in Munich that she went back to Berlin and got her ears pierced!

Now she carries around her own treasury in those beautiful little ears!

The Wild Boar Hunt

2008-02-25T16:36:00.005+01:00

Yesterday we went wild boar hunting.

Well, we need to be truthful here: Yesterday we went for a walk in the Grunewald, a huge coniferous forest that begins in our general neighborhood and stretches eleven square miles to the south and west. Like everything in Berlin, it’s filled with history: It contains the Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), one of the highest points in Berlin, built out of the rubble of 400,000 buildings carried out of the city after World War II. Under the Teufelsberg lies a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was so sturdy that covering it with debris turned out to be easier.

What made it especially interesting for the Zetzsche family yesterday, however, was the possibility of a wild boar sighting. Berlin is known as the one of the world’s greenest capitals, and as such has recently also become the resurgent wild boar’s playground. Apparently there are about 8,000 wild boars that make their home within the Berlin city limits year-round, and another 2,000 move in during the spring to have their litters in the many green pockets throughout the city.

Hmmm. This isn’t actually reassuring when you hear these beasts described by hunters as being among “the most dangerous of quarry,” “the size of a motorbike and with much the same acceleration,” and “able to rip up and kill dogs with no effort.” Maybe that’s why all dogs have to be leashed in the springtime when they walk with their owners through the Grunewald.

The Grunewald itself is an eerie place in the late winter. For those Pacific Northwesters familiar with the wet deep green of a forest of firs, you have to think brown: brown bare trees, a brown thick carpet of decaying leaves, brown paths of churned-up dirt. Not a green shoot in sight. To me it seemed, well, very brown. But Jost soaked it up, showing us the birch bark that could be burned even when everything else is wet, and Hannes speculated on the best den possibilities for the female boars (sows?). Anna stayed close to me and held my hand.

We didn’t see any, of course. And I left the camera in the car, of course. Leaving you to imagine those brown beasts lurking in the brown forest among the brown leaves.

The Berlin International Film Festival

2008-02-15T08:52:00.013+01:00

Star Gazing

Living here in the capital of a cultural mecca, we get a little blasé about the stream of celebrities that hang out in Berlin. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were here with little whatshername for most of August, Robert Redford pops up now and again, Matt Damon and Clint Eastwood sightings are common, Will Smith was here last month for his movie premiere, and local favorites Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie just bought a loft apartment for their family in the heart of the city. Media are calling Berlin the “new New York,” with an exploding cultural life and a grittiness and lack of paparazzi that’s appealing to artists and the Hollywood crowd.

This week it’s getting a little crazy again during the Berlinale, Berlin’s international film festival. The Rolling Stones kicked off the week with Martin Scorsese to plug their new documentary, and today Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Natalie Portman, and Madonna were busy kissing cheeks, giving interviews, and walking the red carpet.

For Jost and me it’s intensified a problem that we’ve had since we arrived—we just can’t leave the house without being mistaken for Brad and Angelina.

Yes, here it is again—ambushed by the paparazzi.

Brad's--I mean Jost’s patience is wearing thin.

Please don’t hate us for being beautiful!

Hannes learns to ski

2008-02-10T19:42:00.000+01:00

Just Call Me Hannes Zetzsch-ski

This is me on my first time down the slopes (LOL)

I just got back from the Czech Republic where my class spent almost a week learning to ski. We went to a ski resort called Spindleruv, near the borders of Germany, Czech Republic, and Poland, in the Karkonosze mountain range, called the Giant Mountains in English. It was a little more than seven hours by bus from Berlin, through most of eastern Germany.

The Giant Mountains

Most of the kids already knew how to ski because the class went skiing together last year also. Some of them are already unnaturally good because they’ve been skiing since they were two years old. Not me! When we started skiing we were divided into two groups: the know-hows and the losers (I’m a loser!). Our teacher had hired two ski instructors, a Czech man and woman who spoke no German, and the woman stayed with the beginners. She taught us in English, so I was the interpreter for our group.

I quickly learned that the hardest thing about skiing is getting on the ski lift! I’m not sure whether they have this kind of lift in America, but you sit on a disc hanging from a tow line above and your skis stay on the ground the whole time. On the first two days I had some really amazingly grand splats trying to get on the lift, but by the third day I looked like a pro (I think). The skiing itself was a lot of fun. I decided that keeping your balance is not that hard, but keeping control of the speed can cause problems.

This wasn't actually our ski lift, but it's the same kind

Altogether we skied three days. On the first and third days we skied at a small slope, but on the second day we skied at a large resort with a lot more slopes. While I was there I went on a slope that was classified red, the second hardest type of European piste. I spent a bit of time on my rear, but I made it down—and quickly! On the morning of the third and final day of skiing, we rented some sleds and went down a four-kilometer luge run. That was really fun, but it was also the activity that caused the most injuries—a broken thumb and various running-into-tree accidents. Fortunately I remained more or less unscathed.

Here's the pool

We stayed at a four-star hotel, and we had a great time hanging out in the evenings, swimming in the pool, sweating in the sauna, harassing the waiters at mealtime, and watching movies until the wee morning hours. I didn’t get much sleep this week, but it was sure fun anyway.

Our four- (well, actually three-and-a-half-) star hotel

Now I’ve started trying to persuade my family that a ski vacation in Switzerland would be a perfect activity for Easter vacation!

Report cards

2008-02-05T22:43:00.000+01:00

Neue Kantstraße 3:
"Where the women are strong,
the men are good-looking,
and the children are all above average!"
--borrowed from A Prairie Home Companion

The anticipation was great—after five months of school, the semester was finally coming to an end and report cards were being issued!

The third graders in Anna’s class were excited to be receiving real grades for the first time. This grading period was especially important for Lara’s classmates in the sixth grade, who would also be told which secondary school the teachers were recommending for them: college prep, a trade school, or a school for “laborers.” And Hannes’s classmates at his comprehensive school were nervous about receiving bad grades that would make them go down a level in their courses and prevent them from getting a college prep diploma.

We had made it clear from the beginning that we weren’t too interested in the kids’ grades as long as we could tell that they were working hard, so the report cards were not anxiety-producing for our family. On Friday the kids had a period or two of classes and then the homeroom teachers ceremoniously passed out the Zeugnisse, the diploma-like report cards that the children carefully put into Zeugnis folders containing all their previous report cards.

Anna's expurgated report card
(grades were removed to protect the innocent)

On the German grading scale of 1 to 6, a grade of 3 is probably equivalent to a C+ and a 4 to a C-. Germany doesn’t seem to have been affected by America’s grade inflation, and the teachers didn’t take the language barrier into consideration in their grading of our kids, so we knew we wouldn't have to worry about straight A's. Not surprisingly, they ruined the curve in their English classes, but they had some other nice surprises as well. And Lara came home happily proclaiming, “I’m a college-prep student!”

We took the report cards as evidence that they’d really applied themselves, and we’re tickled pink with the results!

Our family crest

2008-01-28T13:54:00.002+01:00

Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen

(Old German saying meaning
"Peace, Joy, and Pancakes")

This year has given us the opportunity to spend a lot of time together as a family, which is a wonderful gift in today’s busy world . . . except when it isn’t! Bickering, sarcasm, put-downs--do any of these sound familiar to other parents of adolescents? In one of those downward cycles, we decided to adopt a short Bible passage as our family crest. Okay, I admit, I’m using the royal “we” here—I assigned the kids to memorize Colossians 3:12-15.

I love the way the New International Reader’s Version puts it out there plain and pithy:

You are holy and dearly loved. So put on tender mercy and kindness as if they were your clothes. Don’t be proud. Be gentle and patient.
Put up with each other.

Forgive the things you are holding against one another.
Forgive, just as the Lord forgave you.
And over all those good things put on love.
Love holds them all together perfectly as if they were one.

Let the peace that Christ gives rule in your hearts.
As parts of one body, you were appointed to live in peace.
And be thankful.

Aren't those excellent words to live by? We're not there yet. But we're working on it!

Another Top 10 at Halftime

2008-01-20T13:22:00.000+01:00

It’s hard to believe that we’ve actually reached the halfway mark of our time here in Berlin. These months have been so full of new impressions and experiences and adventures that it doesn’t seem possible they’ve passed this quickly. We’ve purchased our return tickets for the 15^th of July, leaving us with five months and three weeks of German time left to enjoy.

As we were thinking about our time here, the kids were musing about what they miss from America. You may guess that not all of us agree on all these items, but here’s a combined list of . . .

Top Ten Things We Miss

10. rain (ha! just kidding)

9. watching the Blazers' incredible season (Go, Brandon Roy!)

8. comfortable furniture

7. root beer

6. American pizza

5. drinking fountains

4. a house with a back yard

3. Oreo and Jasper (our cats)

2. speaking English

1. friends and family

Thoughts on home

2008-01-15T19:52:00.000+01:00

Home is . . . relative

We just returned from a trip to visit friends Esther and Reinhardt at their home in Eckernförde on the Baltic Sea. Late last night, after the kids were in bed and the bags were unpacked, Jost said, "It's strange, but when we come back to this apartment, it actually feels like home."

It's true: this is also home now, one week short of mid-way through our year here. Perhaps we realize it more after traveling so much during this three-week Christmas break—staying with friends in Munich and the Ostsee and in hotels in the Black Forest and Bavaria. Maybe "home" comes from knowing that the floorboards creak in the hallway and either not noticing or intuitively remembering the path of least creakiness. Or from sensing just where the shower faucet will shift from scalding hot to tepid. Or from sinking down onto a familiar mattress and sleeping through the night with the comforting sounds of traffic five stories below. Time and experience have made them familiar, dependable . . . homey.

The big city of Berlin itself doesn't welcome us back, but we're glad to return. The sun is shining brightly, there's a thin sheen of ice over the Lietzensee, and we haven't been rained on in weeks. School began again today, and the kids returned with mixed feelings—eager to see friends, but loath to pick up the fountain pens and dive into textbooks—again, normal!

These are the threads that make up daily life at . . . home.

The big black dots on this map of Germany
represent the different corners of the country
we've explored so far.
(Click on the map to enlarge it if you'd like.)

Happy New Year!

2008-01-05T16:07:00.000+01:00

Prost Neujahr!

If it had been my choice, I’d probably have stayed home wrapped in a blanket with a cup of hot cocoa and a good old black-and-white movie to roll in the new year. But, after all, we are here to take advantage of opportunities, and we’d agreed to meet friends Henni and Hans and their daughter Maria downtown for Silvester, the German New Year’s Eve celebration.

So we bundled up in layers and layers of clothing (why didn’t we pack those long underwear?!) and rode the elevated train the 15 minutes downtown along with crowds of people swigging out of bottles and lighting firecrackers and in various stages of inebriation. I was continuing to have my doubts about the wisdom of our field trip.

Still, we drank hot mulled cider and cocoa at heated outdoor tables at a pub at Hackescher Markt while Hans and Jost and Hannes ran back and forth to put on a firework display from the little park across the street. Firecrackers are only legal on this one day of the year, but the ones they sell are the “real” old-fashioned U.S.-outlawed M-80 type—lots of bang for the euro!

Then we walked with the streaming crowds toward the Brandenburger Tor, the center of the German universe, where the official fireworks display would take place. We decided to take up position on a bridge over the Spree River beside the Reichstag, the German Parliament, and when the fireworks began we popped the corks on the champagne bottles and sparkling cider, sipped out of fluted plastic glasses, and toasted the cold, sparkling new year of 2008.

It turned out that the Reichstag was directly between us and the official fireworks display, which had to be shot low because of the fog, but everywhere we turned amateur pyrotechniacs were blasting off their own celebrations of fireworks so that we felt we were right in the middle of the display.

My camera was in my pocket the whole time,
but it was all too big to capture.
These photos are from the professionals.

Later we wandered through the city center, watching the amazing buildings of downtown Berlin illuminated and transformed by the flashing fireworks and the glowing fog and shadows. It was one of those long continuing moments in time when it all seems not quite real but of penetrating and beautiful intensity.

Anna fell asleep on the train on the way home and walked to the apartment between us with her eyes closed, stumbling over the piles of fireworks detritus and empty bottles on the sidewalks. Perhaps she made the better choice: dreams of glorious fireworks in the sky rather than glass shards and charred Chinese paper on the ground.

Christmas

2007-12-31T12:03:00.002+01:00

Frohe Weihnachten!

Christmas impressions from Germany . . .

A fairytale white Germany,
from Berlin to the Black Forest,
every branch and twig and blade of grass
covered with lacy crystals of ice

Our own tree in Berlin,
decorated with seashells from the Oregon coast
that were collected by my dad and crafted by my mom

Delicious meat fondue on Christmas Eve
with Jost’s father and stepmother,
followed by candle lighting, gift giving,
and a midnight mass in the old stone Catholic church in Bühl
(yes, those are real candles on the tree!)

Sledding on Christmas Day in the snow above the Black Forest

Christmas Day feast:
a delectable roasted goose, Thüringer Kartoffelklöße,
red cabbage, and chestnut stuffing

The Weihnachtsmann marzipan Christmas tort!

Back home in Berlin:
our beautiful 2-euro flea market candelabra gives us
Christmas candlelight throughout the year!

May God richly bless you with his light in this new year!

"In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness,
but the darkness has not understood it."
John 1:4

"Hair" Zetzsche

2007-12-16T18:00:00.000+01:00

Introducing . . . Jost . . . with hair!

Many of you may not know that Jost actually does have a full head of hair trying to grow under that bald pate. Against his will, he's now been nudged into displaying that hair to the world after several people—among them one of Hannes's basketball teammates from Ghana—asked with concern whether Jost was a skinhead.

Apparently, Jost has been wearing a significant part of the neo-Nazi skinhead "uniform" with his bald head and black leather jacket, and in contemporary Germany this is confusing enough to make people wonder about his intentions and political orientation. After asking around among people who are more familiar with the skinhead scene, he decided that this probably isn't an uncommon assumption based on his appearance. So, strongly against his own personal preferences, Jost decided to let his hair grow again.

His family thinks he looks great with all that dark brown hair. What do you all think?

Addendum:

After I’d written this entry, Jost decided he couldn’t stand all that hairy dark brown stuff on his head and shaved it all off again. Sigh! With a bright red scarf, clogs, and a cabby cap he’s hoping to allay any worries about his skinhead status.

A visit to Hamburg

2007-12-11T21:49:00.000+01:00

The Hamburgers' Homecoming

Last weekend we made a quick trip back to Hamburg, the birthplace of three-fifths of our family. Anna and I tried to be patient as Jost, Hannes, and Lara got all teary-eyed at being back in their old stomping ground.

We visited the tiny apartment where we lived when Lara was born, and stood under the gnarled old tree that dropped an apple on her forehead as we carried her inside for the first time. We pointed at the balcony where fat little Hannes used to play in his sand box and call out strange German-American greetings to passersby. Oh, am I happy not to be living in that cramped space anymore with a baby and a toddler!

A gray winter scene outside our last apartment in Hamburg

We played tourist down at the immense harbor with its huge container ships, and ate lunch at an old harbor pub that looked as if Captain Ahab should have been sitting around smoking his pipe with the other whalers in some dark smoky corner.

A view of the harbor

At the Hamburger Dom, a sprawling amusement park that comes to Hamburg twice a year, we rode the Riesenrad (ferris wheel) with Jost’s mother and tried to ignore our frozen noses as we admired the view of the city at night.

Amo Heidi, Anna, and Hannes in his burka on the Riesenrad

And to top it all off, we had a lovely Advent coffee with Jost’s mother, brother, 87-year-old great aunt Tante Ilse, and her daughter Gela, a full family reunion of Jost's maternal side of the family. It was fun to see the children be able to communicate freely with their German relatives for the first time in their lives.

Shopping

2007-12-02T22:39:00.000+01:00

To Market, to Market

Ja, I am a German hausfrau: I market, therefore I am.

Now that the leaves are gone from the trees I can look down from the window beside my desk and see the market across the street where I buy our groceries. Kaiser's is a small store that makes our crowded Safeway in Reedsport look positively cavernous, but there's a wonderful selection of hundreds of cheeses and wursts and a bakery with scrumptious breads and rolls.

I carry a clip on my key chain with a metal, euro-sized ring to activate the shopping cart lock—without it I'm always unsuccessfully rummaging in my pockets for that elusive euro coin. I buy our mayonnaise in tubes, milk in tiny liter cartons, and eggs in cartons of ten (why not a dozen?).

Milk, eggs, and mayo

To buy cheese or wurst or fresh meat I stand in line to order from the ladies behind the gleaming display counters—500 grams of mixed ground pork and beef (the cheapest ground meat) and five pork chops, bitte! I was thrilled to discover relatively cheap boneless frozen chicken breasts here, also, a new addition since my German shopping of ten years ago.

Long lines at the cash register are par for the course, especially on Saturdays because all stores are closed on Sundays. I put my items on the conveyer belt and then lay out my cloth shopping bags in my cart, ready for the race to bag the items and get my wallet ready by the time the cashier is finished. I'm getting better now at recognizing all those little euro coins and cents, but it's taken me awhile. I can't imagine what the transition has been like for old-timers who have handled deutschmarks all their lives.

Now I retrieve my little pseudo-euro from the shopping cart and manhandle my heavy cloth bags back to the apartment. I'm grateful to live so near to the market, but my shopping trips are still limited to what I can carry, and I tend to be at the store every day. It's a daily ritual that I engage in with nearly every other German hausfrau.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T18:21:00.000+01:00

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was,

"thank you,"
that would suffice.
~Meister Eckhart

Our American holiday of Thanksgiving doesn't really fit into the German landscape, and today we are very far away from Thanksgiving-celebrating friends and family, but the attitude of thanksgiving is fully independent of cultures.

We are very grateful . . .

for our family, here around this table and scattered around the world
for our friends, who keep us close even while we're far away
for this home, which allows us to live in shabby chic old-European comfort
for this city that never sleeps and opens our eyes to a world we've never experienced
for this amazing opportunity to dive into another life for a year
for all these and many more blessings from our great God!

Danke!

Winter is here

2007-11-17T15:15:00.000+01:00

Snow in the City!

The view from our balcony

It's mid-November and the first early snowflakes are floating by my fifth-floor window, lilting and dancing and wafting upward again as they meet the heat from the street below. Winter has definitely come to Berlin, earlier than usual but convincingly. The kids have been hoping for snow; now that it's here, Hannes is complaining about the cold: "Can't it snow and be just a little bit warmer?" Those early morning bike rides to school are brutally cold on exposed flesh.Here on the 52^nd parallel, it's already beginning to look like twilight at 3:30 in the afternoon, and by shortly after 4:30 it's deep night, pulling us in on ourselves for long evenings of Phase-10 and Rummy and Taboo games.

But while we were in Bonn last weekend to celebrate Hannah's 18^th birthday, the kids discovered a new antidote for this dark season—ice skating—that turns the biting cold into an excuse for gliding (and falling) on sparkling ice.

Kids on skates

Lara's class trip

2007-11-11T21:37:00.000+01:00

Die Klassenfahrt
by Lara

About a month ago I went on a class trip that lasted for five days. In Germany, classes stay together for several years with the same teacher. One way that they form class togetherness is by going on class trips each year. This year we went to a camp called Werbellinsee, which was right near a large lake. The bus trip there was supposed to take an hour and a half, but the bus driver got lost so it ended up taking over four hours! [So much for those speedy German drivers and autobahns! -Ed.] When we finally got there it was really hot so we all went swimming in the ice-cold lake.

Here's the beach with the icy water

The rooms we stayed in had three bunk beds, a table, and a big wardrobe for our clothes. My roommates were Verena, Nora, Sophie, and Saskia. They’re also my best friends here. We had a lot of fun giving each other chocolate facials and eating lots of candy. [Wait a second--did you eat the facials? -Ed.] We also won the award for the neatest room!

Here I am with Sophie, Saskia, and Verena
(this was actually taken at our house after they had raided
all of Hannes's Reedsport/Blazers stuff!)

During the days we usually went down to the beach and played beach volleyball with all our other classmates. We also went on long hikes, sometimes in the rain. One day we even went on a boat trip on the lake. The only work we had to do was writing about each day in our journals. [And writing letters home! -Ed.]

Beach volleyball!

Fortunately on the trip back we had a different bus driver who knew the way so we got home exactly on time! We had a great time, and I think it would be fun to do this with our class back in Reedsport some time! [Lara will be available for professional tour guiding and class trip planning as early as next summer! -Ed.]

Anna learns a poem

2007-11-03T22:24:00.000+01:00

Der Herbst steht auf der Leiter

We're often asked how the kids are progressing with their German. And the answer is . . . well, it depends on which day we're asked.

Hannes, who had a big head start on the girls, is becoming more and more fluent by the day. After a slower start, Lara is also increasingly beginning to try out her spoken language, and she understands much of what she hears in school. But Anna, who came to Germany speaking and understanding absolutely no German, has spent nearly two long months in school during which she's still understood . . . practically nothing!

However, last week all the children in her class were assigned a poem about fall to memorize. She worked and worked on it, and on Monday she recited it proudly for the class and for her teacher--and got an A+! Oddly, it seems to have been a breakthrough for her general language, as well: she suddenly seems to understand much more and I hear her babbling to herself and trying out new phrases with us in German, too. Success is so sweet!

If you crane your neck to the left and press on the play button below, you might be able to see and hear the maestro recite her poem in person. (She's asleep as I'm posting this, but maybe by tomorrow I'll have filmed her horizontally so you won't get a neck ache as you watch! Who knew?)

Hannes's subway adventure

2007-10-28T13:25:00.000+01:00

Brawl in the U-Bahn
by Hannes

One of the more exciting points so far of my time in Germany was what happened in the subway three weeks ago . . . . Drum roll, please . . . .

I had just gotten out of school at about 2:00 and was waiting in the subway station right next to our school with my friend Niko. I had my bag with all my basketball stuff, and some Turkish guy just bumped right into my bag. At the time I thought it was an accident, so I kind of looked at him and—as usual—I was smiling. He didn’t like this, so he came over to me and asked me: “Hast du Probleme mit mir?” That means: “Do you have a problem with me?” Then he took out a knife and held it out threateningly. I was scared to death, so I just said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” and started backing away from him. He kept advancing on me, and punched me with a right hook just below my left eye. I’ve never been so scared in my life.

The right hook!

My friend Niko was almost as shocked and terrified as I was, so we went to the other side of the station and hid behind a pole (making sure that we didn’t look at him). Then when the train came we let him get on without us, and we waited five minutes for the next train. A bunch of other friends who had seen what had happened but had not seen that we didn’t get on the train waited for us at the next station and then got on with us. We were all talking about what had happened and none of them had ever seen anything like it.

First-aid at home

I had a huge bruise and bump on my left cheekbone, but it could have been much worse. We didn’t go to the police because we didn’t really have any hope that they would find him again in a city as big as Berlin. But the next day, on the little television that’s always running in the subway train, they had a new video about knives being prohibited on the subway. I’m guessing that maybe they saw what had happened on the surveillance cameras in the subway station.

At first I was very worried about meeting up with that guy again, but as I said, in a city this big, what’s the chance of seeing him again? Now I enjoy riding the subways again, and life is good!

A week in Switzerland

2007-10-21T21:28:00.000+02:00

Sprechen Sie deutschli?

We’ve just returned from a week of vacation in amazing, awesome, spectacular, beautiful, scenic Switzerland. (Was that enough adjectives to make my point?) We stayed in my parents’ apartment in Brienz, the little woodcarving village nestled by the lake of Brienz in a valley in the Berner Oberland region of the Alps.

Looking down on the Brienzersee

We had gorgeous weather except for one afternoon of rain that put a light dusting of snow on the peaks around the lake. Words truly fail to describe how beautiful the scenery is—the soaring snow-capped peaks against the brilliant blue sky, the clear aqua green of the lake, the dark-stained chalets with geraniums tumbling out of window boxes, and fat cows grazing on the steep mountain meadows.

A view from the village of Mürren

For the children this was an exciting exploration of their family roots, because this is the village where my great grandfather Peter Schneiter was born and where Schneiter cousins still live. Hannes was amazed to find the Schneiter family coat of arms carved on the side of a chalet with the other original families of Brienz.

The Schneiter family crest

Mountain village life was a great change of pace from life in the big city, and we were all grateful for the break. Now we're back in Berlin and ready for school and work to start again tomorrow.

Tschüsli!

We've had company!

2007-10-09T19:01:00.000+02:00

Hotel Zetzsche

Aack! Two weeks have passed without a blog posting from the Zetzsches. Surely you’re about to send out a search party?! Jost tells me that the problem with blogs is that people begin to take themselves too seriously, so let me reassure you that I know you’re probably okay with not hearing from us for awhile!

We’re doing well, and today’s post is to tell you that we’ve just come through a nice time of playing host to many people we love! Beginning back in August, just a week after we arrived, we’ve been happily welcoming family and friends in our home here in Berlin.

Jost’s brother Holger visited us for several hot days in August. He was the first to try out the “guest futon” and navigate the adventurous bathroom—and survive! We went on a wonderful boat cruise from Spandau to Potsdam, played in the park near our house, and did lots of fun, touristy things.

Anna and Onkel Holger

Jost’s father Hans-Georg and his wife Annerose were here in early September for a week. Wonderful things happened in our kitchen (Annerose’s a great cook!) and to our apartment (Opa knows his way around a toolbox!) while they were here.

The kids with Annerose

Near the end of September we had double company when Jost’s mother Heidi and my parents Donna and Jerome came to visit at the same time. We celebrated Hannes’s birthday, checked out the Berlin shopping, visited Queen Nefertiti in the Egyptian museum, made Mom's signature Swiss Chäsbrattel, and had a great time together.

Here's a picture Dad took of the beautiful Nefertiti.

Then, to top it all off, our cousin Hannah from Bonn came for five days at the end of September. It felt like the family was complete with our “fourth child” back at the table again. She visited school with Hannes, poked around Berlin with us, cheered on the world-record-setting Berlin Marathon, and went to a contemporary art exhibit and a professional Alba-Berlin basketball game. [Hannah, where are those photos?]

After Jost’s quick trip to a conference in Warsaw, Poland, life has now returned to normal again, though friends from Eckernförde have just called to say they’re coming next week. If you’re thinking of coming, too, do book early—rooms are going fast!

Hannes celebrates a birthday

2007-09-24T16:43:00.000+02:00

Herzlichen Glückwunsch
zum Geburtstag,
Hannes!

Today is Hannes's 14^th birthday, almost back where it all began 14 years ago. He celebrated with candles and his favorite Brötchen early this morning before school and then with German pancakes for lunch after school.

Two sets of grandparents are here to help him celebrate—Jost's mother, Heidi, is here for a visit from Hamburg, and my parents are on their way home from Switzerland via Berlin.

This afternoon we had applesauce cake and presents, and tonight we plan to enjoy the last of the late-summer weather at a sidewalk table at a neighborhood restaurant. What a great way to turn 14!

Hannes reports on school

2007-09-15T13:29:00.001+02:00

Intenseness
by Hannes

My first week of school was intense. The school I'm going to is supposed to be an "elite" sports school. The goal for pretty much everyone is to be training for the Olympics or professional sports. Starting last year, everyone new who's accepted into the school has to specialize in one sport. They have crew (rowing), ice hockey, tennis, table tennis, track, water polo, swimming, basketball, and mostly soccer. No one knows much about basketball here because they're all soccer freaks. When I played soccer in America I was decent, but if I were to play against my classmates here who specialize in soccer it wouldn't even be fair. They'd school me!

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I have two periods each day of basketball practice during the school day. It's really fun and I'm learning a lot. I'm really getting into shape! We've been having professional coaches come in to train us from Alba Berlin, the professional basketball team here in the city. They're very good and work us hard. I'm also going to start going to a club basketball team with some of my teammates from school.

Oh, yeah, there's also my other subjects: math, physics, chemistry, biology, German, English, geography, art, electronics, ethics, and history. It's very hard because everything's happening in a completely different language (duh!), but it's great because school doesn't last as long here. I have between five and seven hours of school each day. Our schedule is different every day. On Mondays and Fridays we actually get out at 1:30. We also don't have very much homework (so far). The students and the teachers rotate classrooms in our school, and there's a different teacher for almost every subject.

(This is a picture of my classmates from last year.
I'm obviously not with them!)

In Germany the high school system is completely different from America. There is the Gymnasium for people who are going to go on to college, and it goes to 13^th grade. The Realschule is for people who are going on for vocational training, and it ends with 10^th grade. And the Hauptschule, the "unemployment track," ends after 9^th grade. Usually these schools are completely separate, but my school is a comprehensive school that combines them all. Every student gets to choose which level of each subject they want to take. Grading is also completely different here. A "1" here is like an "A" in America, and a "6" is the worst you can get and means you automatically have to redo that year.

I could ride my bike all the way to school, but that would take almost 40 minutes, so instead I ride about 5 minutes to a subway station (Bismarckstraße) and then take the subway to my school. I have a "Monatskarte" which costs almost 30 Euro (about $45) and is an unlimited public transportation ticket. It lasts for one month so I can ride anywhere in the city with any kind of public transportation. It takes me a little less than 20 minutes to get to school.

On the 8^th grade basketball team we only have five people training right now. There's Dominique, the best player, Nico, who has a broken finger, and Julius. We also have one girl on the team who's also pretty good but I can't remember her name right now. Then there are seven 7^th graders who we train with. It seems like most of them are little midget point guards. One of my other best friends, Jonathan, is half Romanian and speaks Romanian fluently. He plays tennis. And my other good friend is Max. He plays table tennis.

(Here are some of my teammates in a photo from last year.
Nico is in the middle, Julius is on the far right, and Dominique is in between.)

It's really cool because when I meet a new person, they always ask, "So you're new here, aren't you?" I say, "Yeah, I'm from America," and all of a sudden they're really interested. They connect Americans with pop stars and other super cool people. (They're right, of course!)

Lara and Anna report on school

2007-09-08T18:56:00.000+02:00

My First Week of School

by Anna

My first week of school was fun and not fun at the same time. It was not fun because I didn't know what to do at all and all the other kids knew exactly what they were doing. I was just kind of sitting there because I didn't understand what the teacher was saying.

It was fun because I made four new friends. Their names are Dana, Ara, Jessica (pronounced Yessica), and Nina. My teacher's name is Frau Drechsler. "Frau" means "Mrs." or "Miss" so her last name is Drechsler. She's very kind, but sometimes she gets frustrated with the rowdy boys in our class. I don't know one boy in my class who's not rowdy!

School in Germany is a lot different from America because all the teachers come into the classroom instead of the kids going into their rooms. The only things we go out of the classroom for are music, P.E. (called "Sport"), and swimming. For swimming we ride a really fancy bus with an upper deck to a swimming pool away from the school.

The name of my school is Lietzensee Schule. It's called Lietzensee Schule because there's a lake right nearby that's called the Lietzensee ("See" means "lake"). We usually walk to school through a churchyard behind our house and it takes about two minutes to get there.

The school building is a big reddish brick building. There are four stories and I’m on the very top floor so I have to walk up four flights of stairs every morning. During the morning we have a snack that we can eat anytime we want. There's a big recess courtyard and all the kids go to recess at the same time, from 1^st grade through 6^th grade. We have recess twice a day. At recess I usually play with Jessica. There's a big soccer field that the boys play soccer on. There are also two places for hopscotch.

We finish school at 1:30 and eat lunch at home. Mommy comes to pick me up. Then I do my homework. I'm working on learning cursive because all of my other classmates learned last year, so if I don't have other homework I practice in my cursive book. We also write with fountain pens, so I'm practicing that, too. Papa says that my handwriting has gotten much better from practicing.

And that's my first week of school!

Tschüs!

Die erste Schulwoche

von Lara

I just finished my first week of school yesterday. It was really hard to keep up with everyone else in my class because I had no idea where to go and what to do. Luckily, a few of the girls from the class helped me and showed me around the school. My main teacher is called Frau Otto, but I only have her for a few classes each day because each period a different teacher comes into the classroom to teach a different subject. Each day I get out of school at a different time, most days at 1:30, but depending on the day it sometimes goes later then that.

The only classes that I understand so far are math and English, so now I have a student teacher who translates everything that I do not understand into English. She will continue to help me until I feel more comfortable in the classroom and have learned more German. My other subjects are natural science, German, religion, music, art, P.E., and history/geography. It seems weird that a public school would teach religion but I really like the teacher so it’s a lot of fun for me.

Half the school was originally made for boys and half for girls. There are two front doors with stone carvings that say "GIRLS" over one and "BOYS" over the other. The school is really different than all our schools in Reedsport because it's over 100 hundred years old but on the inside it has been remodeled and looks really nice.

In all, the first week of school was hard but not too hard that I don't want to go back. The kids are nice and the teachers are helpful which helps a lot!!!

Editor's note: Hannes starts his new school this Monday. Stay tuned next week for his first impressions!

Biking in Berlin

2007-09-01T21:31:00.000+02:00

I love to ride my bicycle, I love to ride my bike,
I love to ride my bicycle, I love to ride it where I like . . .

It’s been an interesting transition again to a life without cars for a small-town car addict like me. The children are becoming adept at deciphering the maps describing public transportation routes and jumping on and off of subways, trams, buses, and trains.

And we’ve become the proud owners of five flea-market bikes in varying stages of age and repair. Hannes and Lara have some hot 15-gear mountain bikes, Anna’s is a three-speed pink and teal beauty, mine is a good sturdy city vehicle, and Jost's--well, Jost's is a piece of junk. Fortunately, Jost is an experienced bike mechanic who’s passing his wisdom down to Hannes, and they’ve become a familiar sight down in the central courtyard of our building with an overturned bike between them.

The bikes have liberated us from the miles we walked during our first two weeks in the city. It’s amazing how effortlessly we can cover those same miles from atop a bike. But it’s also added a new anxiety to my life as I watch my children negotiating the roads with German car drivers. There are fewer bike lanes than we had in Hamburg, and too often we have to share the streets. Anna is still allowed to ride on the sidewalk, but the older kids are consigned to traffic.

Still, there are many beautiful—and safer—places to ride in Berlin. Not far from our apartment is the huge city park in the center of Berlin with miles of broad, pea-gravel paths beneath shade trees and alongside canals and ponds. For several kilometers it borders the city zoo, so as we ride we smell the elephants and see the ostriches and flamingoes on the other side of the fence. We’ve also discovered the “gardens” behind the Charlottenburg Castle near our home, extensive paths that go through amazingly overgrown greenery that makes me feel like I’m riding somewhere along Smith River!

The weather has turned suddenly fall-like in the last few days. Stay tuned to see how bike riding goes as we approach a continental winter!

Top 10 list

2007-08-15T20:52:00.000+02:00

Top Ten Things We Love
about Living in Berlin . . .
by the Zetzsche Kids

10. Escalators. (No, we're not rednecks.)

9. Sightseeing and learning the history.

8. Church bells ringing throughout the day.

7. Castles and churches and beautiful buildings.

6. Concerts - we went to an open air concert with about 15 different bands playing simultaneously on different stages about 100 yards apart along a designated road. It was awesome!

5. Public transportation:
subways, buses, streetcars, taxis, and trains.

4. Shopping! Shopping! Shopping!
3. Riding bikes on bike paths throughout the city.

2. Having a beautiful park and lake (and basketball court and playground)
a block away from our apartment.

1. Food!!! It's all good: Fresh bread and breakfast rolls every morning, curry wurst, Turkish roasted veal in pita bread, German pancakes, and restaurants from every country in the world right in our neighborhood.

Guten Appetit!!!

Arrival

2007-08-11T15:28:00.000+02:00

Ja! Wir sind da!

Yes, we're really here! They tell us it takes us a lifetime to become a Berliner, so we won't be making any claims to that yet, but we are beginning to settle in and find our way around this beautiful city.

After a remarkably easy 24-hour trip with our ten overloaded suitcases and assorted hand luggage, we arrived on the doorstep of Neue Kantstrasse 3 at about noon on Tuesday. Here's Anna posing by the front door of our apartment building, built in grand style in 1906.

The kids get a kick out of pushing the doorbell by our name on this door, speaking through the intercom to our apartment, and being automatically buzzed in.

After passing through a marbled hallway we squeeze into a tiny, rickety elevator built 50 years ago (capacity four persons, but we count Lara and Anna as one!), and rise slowly up five floors to our "penthouse apartment." Here's our entryway. We're learning which of these creaky floorboards to avoid when we have to make nighttime trips to the bathroom!

This is our living room, a wide open space with parquet floors, ceilings that must be 16 feet high, and wonderful double doors with stained glass windows. I wish I could have seen this apartment in its youth. When we first arrived this was being used as the playroom for the actual tenant's four small children. The girls and I had watched HGTV's "FreeStyle" program on the flight from Salt Lake City to New York, so we whirled into rearranging action and came up with this serene space. Now if only we could make that futon more comfortable!

Tada! The girls' bedroom, another large space with two futons, two desks, a wardrobe, and a cute little balcony that looks into the center courtyard. This is a peaceful room for hanging out and catching the cool summer breezes from the garden below.

And Hannes's room, plastered with basketball, baseball, and soccer stars . . . only the drum set is missing!

Lara insists on writing this caption: "The Ugliest Bathroom in the World!" Yes, well, perhaps it's not the ugliest, but it does leave some things to be desired. Surely harvest gold is retro and hip?!?

Anna eating an apple in our kitchen. Our kitchen includes a washing machine, a dishwasher, a relatively large refrigerator with a freezer, a microwave, and a gas range with a non-functioning oven. I've always been afraid of gas appliances, so I feel like I've really accomplished something here by learning to cook on the stovetop!

And that's our new home for a year! We are comfortable here and settling in well. We have a list of things we'd still like to find at a flea market--little things we take for granted like salt and pepper shakers, some glasses that aren't plastic, a ladle for soup--but we feel very blessed.

Bis zum nächsten Mal,

Familie Zetzsche

The Zetzsches Are Moving to Germany

2007-07-21T01:52:00.000+02:00

More coming soon . . .