Mythological Creatures in Germany

 

You’re sitting in a bed, in a house, in the middle of a farm in northern Germany. There are two spiders you’ve been watching for days in two separate crevices of your bedroom. You’re afraid to kill them because of the sound they’ll make when you squash them, an ongoing problem, but also because you’re living on a farm and you don’t think you’re supposed to do such things. What if they eat some pest, contribute to the greater good? The last thing you want is to murder the Greater Good.

You have dirt stuck under your fingernails and that makes you feel tough. Yet when you go to bed each night you shut the lights and rush under the covers lest some creature gets you. After telling your host this, she gives you a key to lock the door at night, which is when you realize it’s mostly mythological creatures you’re afraid of and keys won’t keep them out anyway. You’d prefer a unicorn over the bogeyman, but in reality it’s probably just the mice having tea parties in the walls again.

There is a lot of time to think and you’re not sure if you’re running away from something or towards it. Maybe you’re just running, so may as well enjoy the running for its own sake, and you are. Make a note to live in the moment. Page through a found self-help book and stumble upon the fourth Secret to Life: “Live in the moment.” Go figure. Think about how it’s even possible to live in the moment, anyway. Your to-do list rings in your mind and you think you will write it down soon, a list of things to do and pay for when you have access to fast internet again. You should probably book a flight back to America eventually. Ponder whether you really want to go back to America. Think about the unknown abyss of the future. Of all the things everyone else is doing and how you can’t make yourself want them. Of being a vagabond indefinitely. Wonder how long that last paycheck and what’s left of that money you’ve saved since you were 17 for just such an occasion will last. Probably not the rest of your life. Or through the summer. Same difference.

There’s always this problem: When you leave America, you think of all these things you might want to do when you get back, all these people you don’t want to loose in the woodwork and this sense that you need more closure than America has already given you, that bastard. Closure from what, you don’t know. Just closure. You always want things to be completely beat to death before you leave them. You’re not sure how this fares for a country. You think of your friend who asked why you’d ever even consider leaving the Greatest Country in the World for more than an extended holiday? How could you ever fathom never coming back for good? You don’t dislike America, per se, but you want to become an expatriate indefinitely just to oppose that thought whole-heartedly. You do miss pumpkin ale though, quite terribly.

You’re not looking forward to the second bought of reverse culture shock, even if it’s months away. You realized when you went to England that being able to understand all of the language spoken around you is stressful. You want to listen to everything at once, trying to understand all of the people chatting on the bus up Elm Grove, and eventually turn your headphones back on in defeat, exhausted. Make a note not to compare everything to Prague when you get back, but know it’s a losing battle. Hate how obnoxious you’re going to sound. You’ll miss the public transportation, sitting on trains and the trams, the Czech language. All the languages, really. You’ll miss feeling useful on this farm, more useful than you ever felt during your 4 months teaching English. You’ll miss the Friendly Sheep, her especially, looking at you with big eyes when you come to refill the water bucket at night. Her mother forgot her so she likes humans and you like her.

You’ll even miss not knowing what the fuck is going on around you half the time, what with your 30 word approach to each respective language. You think you’re just starting to get a hang of the metric system. You know that minus 8 degrees Celsius is cold and you don’t even need to convert it to Fahrenheit. You know what you weigh in kilos.

You think of a passage you read in Into the Wild yesterday, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” You hate yourself for being such a hipster sometimes, but think that if you call yourself a hipster it negates your hipsterness so you’re probably safe. Whew.

You’re not sure if leaving is easy, but that passage resonated with you somewhere. Goodbyes were always hard for you. Hard to understand. What is an ending and what should it mean? What does it mean to everyone else? You always put them off until last minute, clutching your drink, sipping slowly until it’s warm and flat in the corner of the pub, and then somehow you make your feet move to the train, bus, plane taking you away from those you care about while you sit teary-eyed and confused at the whole debacle, doubting. You could just stay here, you think. You could. But you don’t. You’ve made a habit of crying on public transportation in the last few years, but maybe you’re just on public transportation a lot.

Everything feels so profound when you’re leaving. Goodbyes are hard, but leaving is easy, you decide. Leaving places is easy for you, but if there’s one thing you’ll ever regret from your life up ‘til now it’s your inability to leave people when you should have. Like America, everything always needs to be beat to death until nothing interesting enough is left to ask any more questions. You think of how much time you wasted being unnecessarily unhappy since you were 15 and hope you at least learned a lesson this year besides how to conceal your inner-thoughts and desires from yourself. You wonder if you like to travel just because you’re afraid of getting trapped in relationships you don’t know how to get yourself out of. Then again, you also like staring out windows. When you discovered you could stick your head out the train windows in the Czech Republic there was no turning back. You were a dog in a car. Tongue out, smile wide. There’s something about being in trains and buses that makes you feel content. The motion. No matter what you do, you’re being productive. You have a destination and you’re working on getting there. You can sleep the time away, you can twiddle your thumbs. No matter, still going.

You’re inwardly proud of yourself for breaking up with Prague and believe it’s a first step in the right direction. She was a beautiful lover, with castles for eyes, cherubs carved into her skin and a clock delivering both death and the twelve apostles to you on the hour, but you never really paid attention. Cobblestones flowed in every direction, creating a path between you, but you two had some fundamental differences you just couldn’t shake and you were tired of fighting. She was fun, but you wanted to be understood more completely. It was precisely the hardest decision of your life.

Mostly you hope you can transfer your new decision-making methods to the next person you’re with that gives you that familiar wordless anxiety at your core. You know, the one that splits the pros and cons list right in two, ruining any attempt to have things laid out for you in a logical fashion, clear as day. Prague split you right down the center: Sixteen and sixteen. But somehow your fingers typed the letters and your voice led the conversations you needed to move on to the next phase of your life. Maybe you’re really growing up.

You’re not sure about this growing up thing. Not the growing in itself, for you don’t really mind getting older. You noticed your first wrinkle forming and viewed it as a rite of passage more than anything. Since you don’t remember Coming of Age like all the books say you should, this will have to do, won’t it? You’re worried about when the line is drawn between when you can have fun and when you can’t. Not the Sex, Drugs and Rock-n- Roll, like everyone else, though you could always use a bit of all of them, you guess. You don’t want to have to put away your sense of adventure and the absurd, much less pass up a good playground. You don’t ever want to be one of those people who talks about things they can no longer wear, play or do because they are “too old”. You think you won’t really mind the whole being wiser thing, however. You’re sick and tired of losing sleep over these things you’ve yet to experience.

But there you go thinking outside of the moment again. You’re not sure any fully functioning human brain is capable of this. You damn anyone that never dropped you on your head when you were a child, but maybe thinking ahead is not so bad. You always did like making lists…

First HelpX experience in photo form!

The bakehouse and pastures at sunrise.

This is the bird feeder we often watching from the dining room. One morning a pheasant that had been wandering around figured out how to hop up there! Their cat, Tinker, used to watch the birds from his clear cat door. We said he was watching the bird program on TV.

I called this the food museum. Where all the jams, chutneys and wines they made are kept in a cool room!

Where the fruit and veggies from the summer are kept in the freezers and Angelika rummaging for the veggies for our lunch!

My favorite sheep eating hay!

Favorite sheep on the right and the second-friendliest sheep on the left! I like the little patch of white fur on the brown one's head, it's like a little hair-do.

My bedroom in my flat.

My kitchen (that I never used)!

Living area of my flat.

A spinning wheel, with part of the library in the shelves behind it.

The kitchen in the back and more of the living area in front. The ladder leads up to a loft, which for some reason I never ventured into.

The greenhouse (and Angelika).

The brussel sprouts are still green in the garden, albeit frozen. Almost every morning I'd pick some of these greens for the chickens.

Angelika and Axel's house. Notice the thatched roof, pretty neat!

Angelika and Axel in front of the house on my last day before Angelika drove me to Bremerhaven to catch a train to Bonn. Bye Kleinenhain, it was a good trip!

Hay, sheep and yarn...oh my!

24 January 2010

Lazy Sunday. I did the morning routine and ate breakfast with Angelika and Axel. Axel told me a story at breakfast about a neighbor who brought over some eggs her mother duck was sitting on before being killed by a fox the night before, not sure what to do to save them. To solve this problem, Axel put the eggs under one of his mother hens who took them as her own and didn’t seem too concerned when she hatched ducklings instead of chicks. The only time Mama Hen became upset, he explained, was when the wee ducklings took off for a swim in the pond he made for them, leaving Mama high and dry, without the proper equipment for extended floating. The ducks spent their duckling-hood at the farm, but eventually they heard a flock of ducks flying overhead and flew up to join their own kind, never to return. Poor Mama Hen, but what a good story. I’ll probably have collected a good number of barnyard animal stories by the time I leave, so whoever spends time with me next may have to shut me up about them.

After breakfast I got to climb up the massive piles of hay bales (from their own hay) in the eaves of the sheep barn to throw down the bales from the very top to Angelika for the sheep. This was sort of like a big kid playground for me and I’m pretty sure I’d be content climbing around the hay for at least a couple hours, but eventually the sheep came back in, having caught on to my field day in their food supply, so we had to close up lest they eat their next couple weeks’ meals in advance.

Climbing to get hay bales in the eaves, it's higher than it looks!

After that we mostly lounged around. Angelika copied my recipe for vegan pumpkin bread and I tore up an old Czech book I found on the streets of Prague to make stationary and envelopes, wrote some more letters and prepared a package to be sent home so I can lighten my load a bit.

25 January 2010

Finished washing all of the terracotta pots that will be used for burying next to the summer tomato plants so that the water can get right to their roots! After dinner we mulled some of the apple wine with spices and their apple juice and drank it while Angelika showed me pictures from the past several years of the farm in all different seasons. Finally got to see the picture of the little ram with splints.

The little ram with splints on his front two legs (a picture of a picture)!

26 January 2010

Finished Borderliners by Peter Høeg and started The Woman who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle. I’ll never look at time the same way again after Borderliners, but it was a very good book. After dinner Axel taught me how to spin yarn with some of their sheeps’ wool and a spindle made from two small even branches cut and from one of their hazelnut bushes. Basically you make an “X” with the small brances, wrap some ready-made yarn with an unfinished edge around it, fasten it in place with a toothpick or needle and spin it while feeding in more rough yarn while also pulling it so that it’s about the same thickness. Sort of tricky at first, but once I got the hang of it I had a lot of fun and my yarn so far is looking pretty good! Next…the spinning wheel!

Axel showing Angelika how to spin yarn.

She was a bit skeptical.

No sheep were harmed in the process, even if this picture looks rather questionable.

Spinning!

27 January 2010
Last full day here! Saaaaad. Went into Bremdervörde with Angelika and mailed a package of some of my stuff back to the American version of myself. Also sent some letters, spent way too many euros for that because one was too big and one was too small. Ah well. Made more hummus. Re-filled chickens’ food barrel. I cut the tip of my thumb and some of my nail off while trying to divide the last piece of pumpkin bread evenly between the three of us with one of their really sharp knives. Bled all over myself, teared up and then as soon as I got a band-aid on myself the cat, Tinker, immediately threw up. I'm just happy I didn't too, exciting night! If anyone asks, I'll make up a more bad-ass story. Like that I got mauled by a sheep in the thumb. Or something.

January 19th-22nd in Kleinenhain, during which I eat a lot.

I skipped a day, I know.

19 January 2010

Usual chores: feeding animals, cleaning terracotta pots, fetching firewood. As a dessert for lunch we made Bratapfel—apples stuffed with dark chocolate and marzipan and baked until soft and then covered in cream (or soy cream in my case)—and for tea Axel made apple cake, which was sort of like apple pizza (soft crust with apples and cinnamon on top). Delicious. Angelika and Axel have been amazingly supportive with me being vegan, which I appreciate immensely. I expected to have to be a bit vegetarian for most of my time doing HelpX, but they’ve bought me soy cream, soymilk and tofu and have gone out of their way to leave bacon or other such things out of recipes for me. I specifically looked for farms that were okay with vegetarian helpers, but I understand asking people to cook vegan for me is a lot to ask when I’m staying at their homes for 2+ weeks, so in my e-mails I offered to either provide some of my own food or eat vegetarian when need be, but no need yet!

Apple cake!

Other than that, I’ve been reading a lot. While I love the internet, I sure do read, write and sleep much more when I can’t be connected all the time. I finished my last book 2 days ago until I get the ones Lisa mailed to Hannah’s for me, which was Animal Dreams by Barbora Kingsolver. Angelika studied English and has a massive library of English books, so I’ve been drooling over that. I’m almost done with Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and I don’t think I’ve read this voraciously since high school. People should probably take my internet away more often.

20 January 2010

Today Angelika and I made pumpkin-apple jam! Making and preserving jam always seemed like an insurmountable endeavor, but now it appears, well, mountable, and I think I could recreate the process myself. For lunch was a nice stew with 4 types of green and yellow beans and another type of white beans frozen from their garden with smoked tofu and carrot and potatoes from their root cellar. Dessert was applesauce made by Axel. Mm-mmm! Learned the finer difference between the German words for “cake” and “kitchen”. I can now say, “I go into the kitchen” along with, “Would you like some coffee, tea, juice?” I really need to get my hands on a book of German grammar and conjugations so I can realize patterns and pick up the verbs more quickly. Yesterday I made them hummus with some ingredients (Tahini) we picked up, so today Angelika looked up the contents of Zahtar to see if she could recreate it herself and it is sesame seeds, thyme (we both guessed this correctly by smelling it) and crushed zuma. Neither of us had ever heard of zuma before, so probably easier just to buy Zahtar somewhere. I personally carried some along from a field trip I took with Hal to Fairway last summer, which was pretty much the best supermarket ever.

Angelika pureeing the jam in the background. This is sugar with pectin already in it. Magic!

The jams all lined up and vacuum-sealed! Since the jam is so hot, once you sanitize the jars with boiling water they make themselves airtight.

21 January 2010

Made green tomato and onion chutney today with Angelika and preserved it in jars! Soooooo delicious. I also made cashew “cheese” spread for Angelika and Axel because we had some tofu that was about to go off and it was a hit! We used it as a spread, but perhaps it will end up on pizza or in ravioli’s next! I only have a week left here and I’m a bit sad to go! Then again, it’s a whole week. Bought my train ticket to Bonn today to see Hannah!

The green tomatos, still hanging on from the summer!

All the ingredients before cooking.

After simmering for an hour or so (we didn't even blend this!).

22 January 2010

Today we made pumpkin chutney with apricots, apples and pistachios in it and Angelika bottled the apple wine in the workshop that had been fermenting for four or so months, which we tasted at dinner. I think I’m definitely getting a handle on this preserving thing by now. I’ve finally started writing letters, so hopefully I’ll crank a good number of ‘em out before I go back to America in a few months. I got hired back at Bryn Mawr as a Housemaster again this summer, so I’m pretty pumped that there’s some money coming my way again eventually. Now to get hired for a second session somewhere as well so I can hoard enough money to either move to the West coast and/or head back to Europe for another round of this farming and traveling. On my list to visit in the vicinity of Europe still are Bulgaria, Turkey, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Macedonia, etc. I think I want to stay in one place for a year or two before I head out again, but there’s always the chance I’ll change my mind by the end of the summer. Though I’ve realized there are a lot of places I want to visit in America too. Notably Anchorage, New Orleans, Seattle, Portland, Austin, the Grand Canyon and Roswell, so I can see the aliens, of course. I also realized after Krakow that I really want to work in a hostel and would probably be well-suited for it. At least, I think I’m generally pretty good at befriending strangers and herding them in the right direction and would be happy to do it.

The pumpkin chutney before it's done simmering.

And a bonus since I'm talking about food: Here's a picture of their mill in action turning those grains into flour!

Irish folk music jam session in a former train station in Germany!

It was a lazy Sunday on January 17th, and a very snowy one. I think the snow is following me around, plaguing places that haven’t seen this much of the white stuff for over 20 years. Around 2pm Angelika and Axel decided it was worth braving the snow to get to their monthly Irish folk music session. We set out in the van, on snowy roads leading through the country and quaint little towns. After 45 or so minutes of driving we arrived at our destination, Kuz Kulturzentrum im Kleinbanhof, a pub rented out by the town of Osterholz-Scharmbeck, that used to be a train station. Where the waiting room used to be sits several rectangular chairs and tables and in the main room a bar lines one side of the room with 8 or so small tables pushed together to make one big table taking up the center of the room. Along another wall is a big fire-burning oven, where roasted apples stuffed with dark chocolate and marzipan (Bratapfel) are waiting to reach the correct consistency to land happily into our tummies.

I awkwardly find a seat at the now large rectangular table across from Angelika, surrounded on both sides by Axel and a girl named Enya to my right, who is the only other person my age. I am the only native English speaking in the room, so mostly I watch everyone’s gestures and facial expressions in order to understand what’s going on around me. While I may not have understood the exact words used with my still limited German vocabulary, it’s surprising how much you can understand without words. Every once in awhile Axel makes a joke in English to me and Angelika relays to me that the apples are ready, a fact that quickly leads to one appearing in a bowl in front of me. Eventually Enya comments that she heard me speaking English and asks where I’m from. We make small talk before everyone starts playing and I think she’s much braver than I, at 18 or so, to play in a room with so many other talented musicians who’re much older and more experienced than her.

There are many fiddle players, guitarists, a man playing the harp and several people playing different types of flutes and wind instruments. Axel is a fiddle player and Angelika mans a flute and a drum called a bodrán. The jam session begins much more informally than I thought. One person starts playing a tune and others join in at their own pace if they know it. Every once in awhile most people know a song and play it to its completion, but mostly it’s a fading in and out of different songs that’s almost mesmerizing to watch. When there’s a lull, someone starts playing up another song and everyone joins in again.

Axel on the fiddle

Angelika on the flute

Angelika on the bodrán

The informality of it astounds me, but not in a bad way. I expected formations, sheet music and music stands, but instead there were a bunch of people sitting around a table together in this station-cum-pub. Playing as they liked, nibbling on apples, cake and tea, making small talk and jokes between songs. A little girl coloring with crayons bursts out crying with a shout of “Nein!” when her Dad breaks up a puzzle she very-much wanted to stay in one piece, and I laugh to Enya next to me, “She really didn’t want that puzzle broken!” Mostly I’m happy I understood the word “No!” in German. If I’m lucky I’ll speak 5 year-old by the time I leave here.

Here's a video of part of the session I took. It's a bit dark and may cause seasickness, but you get the idea!

I realize as I’m listening that I’ve never been taught to play music for fun. Since age 8 or so my teachers and conductors have separated us into categories of the good ones (1st violin), okay ones (2nd violin, first half) and those just good enough to stay around (the back few stands of 2nd violin). I’ve been either required or strongly encouraged to participate in NYSSMA during most of the beginning years of my musical literacy. There was always talk of music scholarships and how only the best can make it in the music business. Conductors telling us how it’s sight-read or die in the big, bad world: a skill I never quite mastered on any of the instruments I’ve played. While all this is fine and well, I wish someone had just put me in a circle and told me to play! If only some small percentage of us will make it anyway, might as well teach us to have fun! To this day it takes all the courage I can muster to try and play in front of anyone, because I’ve been bred with this idea that if you’re not the best (or at least very, very good), then you shouldn’t even bother and you’re just wasting everyone’s time. I don’t think I realized this is why I’m so shy to play or practice in front of anyone until I was sitting in this circle of people just playing music for the joy of it…because they can.

On the drive home in the dark, we talked about Angelika’s Irish friend, a very accomplished dancer and flute-player, who is also in the three-piece band she’s apart of that travels around for gigs throughout Europe now and then. We also talked about stage fright, those delicious baked apples and the difference between a violin and a fiddle. To put it into perspective, a violin is what I expected with those formations and music stands and a fiddle is what I got.