Still Alive in Germany

Hello faithful readership,

The international cuisine thing was a huge huge huge huge success, better than I ever expected. We hardly even advertised it! And now I'm ready to have another one. I think we'll plan it before Christmas so we can all make some traditional Christmas dishes. I'll be making cookies!! You can see pictures of the event in the More Random Pics of Friends album on Facebook. I made macaroni and cheese, which didn't taste like macaroni and cheese at all, and then mini sandwiches made with eggs, hot sauce, green onions, and cheese. They were delicious!! We all voted on the best food and Viktor won, and he got a nice little cookbook, which is now sitting on MY bookshelf :-) ha ha... his delectable creation was just that, delectable. And tasted good cold... always a plus for things like this!

The next morning I got up eeeaaarly to catch a bus to the train station for the trip w/ the campus Catholic organization to Eisenach. There was an exhibition in the big castle there about St. Elizabeth. Apparently people are REALLY obsessed with this person. I don't believe in the saints, that's not biblical, but these people apparently didn't mind escalating her to such a degree. It was REALLY freaky the stuff they did. Examples include using her flesh to create part of a sculpture which still exists today (the flesh was formed with wood into the head of Jesus on a crucifix sculpture). They also built requilary boxes for her remains, every bit of her remains. I saw a real finger inside a finger-shaped jeweled case. It was grayed and you could see the wrinkles through a little window on the front of the jeweled case. CRAZY. These people worshiped her more than they worshiped God. That was evident by the exhibition. Apparently people still worship her. Kinda makes me angry. People devoted their entire lives to a 24 year old woman, writing books about her, painting murals and paintings, carving grandiose statues of her, erecting churches after her... and thereby left Jesus completely out. Well whatever, that's my soap. Here are the albums from the trip:

Eisenach 1
Eisenach 2

Anyway... I'm continuing this post after almost 2 weeks, it kinda sat in "drafts" for a while, as I was tired and didn't feel like writing...

Mom sent me a package from home with a few very essential items... my "skinny jeans" which now fit (at least they did two weeks ago, but maybe not anymore!!) and *surprise* a CHRISTMAS TREE! It is now sitting on my desk all decorating. I've got lights around my windows, too :-) Viktor and I made cookies and brownies w/ the mixes Mom sent and now, again thanks to Mom, I can enjoy popcorn from my very own microwave. Sweet.

... I got a cold. And I've had it for almost a week. I know the worst is over, but I'm kind of ready to get back into my exercise routine which I have half-way fallen out of. I only got in two days of exercise this week! How sad! I guess that's better than nothing, though, seriously. And here, cold medicine really isn't that cheap!!

On a brighter note, I got a JOB! Yep, that's right, I am now working for the vice president of research here at the university as a translator! My job also includes correcting documents that have been VERY roughly translated. I'm debating on whether I should tell them that native German speakers should only translate from English to GERMAN, not from German to English. It is hard to correct when half the words are wrong in the first place, ya know?! So I'm making $11.07 per hour I spend translating. And it's fun to do and a great way to learn. I guess I'm most excited about how this is going to affect my future career. Not only do I get to write on my resume that I spent almost a year living in Germany absorbing the language, but I'm taking courses on translation AND working as a translator at the same time. So I am hoping this scores me big points when it comes time to get a job sometime in the future. I'm sure it will.

I got a new shower curtain and it is beautiful!! It really shows my age, in a way... 5 years ago the last thing on my Christmas list still wouldn't have been a shower curtain... but here I am, thrilled to have a new one!! Here is a picture:



Viktor and I got slapped w/ a $60 fine each yesterday when we got "caught" without tickets on a regional train... but it really wasn't our fault!! We wanted to buy tickets at the Automat, but because the price of the ticket was under 10E, the machine refused to accept 20 E bills.... which was all we had. And so we were left ticketless and assumed we could just buy them on the train. WRONG... well, first, we hoped that no one would come by and check for tickets, so we wouldn't have to pay at all, but of course, Lumpy the Ticket Man comes along and Viktor asks to buy tickets. Lumpy very rudely replies that we can't. We apparently can only buy tickets from him if we got on the train at a station that does not have automats at all or at a station in which the automats are not working... and it did not matter to him that the machine did not take our money. In short, he COULD have sold us tickets, but he wouldn't, because he's an asshole. So he gave us each a little piece of paper that said we owed 40E ($60) to the Deutsche Bahn. HOWEVER... something rather funny happened in my case: he asked us for IDs so he could put our info in his little computer (that does issue tickets in other circumstances!) and I gave him my driver's license... which turned out to be written in Greek for him, lol, because when I looked at my little paper that held my doom for $60, he had written my name as this: Johanna Caesar Caitlin. That is, Caitlin is my last name, Johanna (my middle name) is my first name, and Caesar (the name of my street back home) is my middle name. LOL. He also incorrectly input my birth date. So the only information he has from me that is correct is my home address, which does not include my room number. And so therefore he has the home address of about 300 other people who are also not named Johanna Caesar. Which means the Deutsche Bahn will unfortunately receive no money from anyone. Viktor isn't going to pay either-- he has decided to write a letter complaining, which you are allowed to do. I gave him a few pointers on how to write a complaint letter (I've written two!)... including finding something to quote from their website. I picked out a line where they had written "German Train Stations -- Experience the Service and Other Amenities Designed to Make Your Trip a Pleasure"... so he is going to quote that and ask where the heck the service was?!?! We have the number (not the name) of the guy who gave us the penalty, and we're going to include that in the letter as well, as he was very rude. Viktor said he didn't understand something the guy had said, and he replied "Yeah, I noticed". I had to sign a slip of paper that apparently certifies the information on the ID was correct, which I did sign for, but then I realized that the information he had copied from the ID was NOT. The way I see it, if the idiot ain't competent enough to write down simple information, I'm not giving him any of my money!!! In some trains you CAN buy tickets, in some trains you can't. And this information does not exist on the website. Anyway, I'm just NOT going to pay!

Here are the new photo albums...
Summer 2007 Non-German Style
A Very German Christmas

I'm leaving on December 20 in the afternoon to go see the cousins in Ingolstadt... Michi and I are going to TRY to go to Dresden in the meantime, but the train tickets are just so expensive. We might just go to Regensburg or Nuernburg instead. The Catholics are trying to get a trip together for Dresden in the summer, anyway, and it was fun going to Eisenach with them, so I might just wait and go with them since it'll probably be cheaper anyway...

Well that's it...! Thanks to all who have faithfully been reading and I miss you all and love you!

Caitlin