Anna learns a poem

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More coming soon . . .