Quotes from a Pastor

I was at a conference this weekend at my church. I learned a lot of really awesome things and serious things but here is where I share with you the sillier things:

[-] "I look like I'm leading worship by myself, but actually it's me, my guitar, and 2 angels; my personal angel and the worship angel."

[-] "When the Bible says newly born (the German version of 'born again'), it's not like a new car. In the greek it's like a new Jumbo Jet (since they had those at the time)"

[-] "The Holy Spirit is a person, not a slime."

[-] "There are 3 things we never prophesy about. Those are: births, deaths, and marriages."

[-] "Every person is a blessing. For some it's a blessing when they come, and with others it's a blessing to have them leave."

I tagged this as poetry because it's that beautiful.

- peace!

Dog Attack!

So I was walking from the bus stop to church, about a 7 minute stroll in an area more or less deserted on a Sunday morning. Well all of a sudden this very angry dog comes running out of a driveway. Consider that it may have looked roughly like this dog's little brother:

Thus, it was significantly smaller in stature but with comparable ferocity. I didn't have my camera available or I would have whipped it out. I was debating between running off screaming and just laughing at it. I had just read though about a kid who was attacked my wolves and knew the most important thing is DON'T RUN! I figured my situation was similar and decided not to run. His teeth did look rather sharp though and I wasn't gonna tolerate any biting.

So back to the story, he's on the sidewalk between me and where I need to be. He keeps coming closer. I like to keep at least two feet (unit of measurement, not literally) between me and snarling dogs. When he came into that bubble I decided to back up, but he keeps coming. I guess he missed the hint that he was invading my personal space. I warned him (in a very stern voice) that if he attacked I would be left with no choice but to kick him in the jaw. The odds were heavily in my favor in such an occasion. I didn't really want to kick him. I wouldn't really know what to do with a dog that had a broken jaw whimpering on the sidewalk. I didn't think about the fact that the dog speaks German, but nonetheless he seemed to get the message. We circled each other like boxers in the ring until he was no longer blocking my way, and with a few more stern words I was on my way. The hound, utterly intimidated ran back up the driveway from whence it came with it's tail between it's legs. Victory was mine and I didn't have to hurt anybody. I continued on my way to church with a chuckle and little extra adrenaline flowing through my veins. I went on to have a rather marvelous day with lots of food and friends.

Also, have I mentioned I'll be back in Pittsburgh February 28th. If I haven't already outlined my plans between now and then I'll write about them soon. I'll take a look.

peace out,

Hitherto

So there are days in my American Literature and Culture class that I get bored and stare out the window and this is what I see. While on the one hand they are only typical townhouses/apartments that are for the boring people that just want to look like everyone else, there is nonetheless something beautiful in their uniformity. The many layers of repeating architecture, straight lines, and perspective. There was even one day when I saw sunlight splashing across all of this. I shouldn't say splashing because it was so neat and uniforms that it was more as if the sunlight had painted geometric shapes on the city landscape. It was in Osnabrück though and I don't ever expect to see that sun again though so we've settled with this picture.

On another note, we learned something intriguing about the German language today that I found amusing. We have the word "Gentleman" which is "Herr" in German. Make it into anadjective you have "Herrlich" which means "glorious, superb, magnificent." All well and good. Well there is a flip side. "Lady" is "Dame" (where we get the word 'dame'), but when you make that into an adjective you get "dämlich." "Dämlich" is best translated into English as "dopey, dimwitted, goofy, daft." Just to be clear, I don't think women are so, in fact I might even consider women to be "herrlich" but nonetheless I couldn't help but find it amusing. Also the Germans use the phrase "hitherto" relatively frequently and I would like to start using it in English. We'll see what happens.

Fruit Loops

Well, now that I've been here almost 4 months I thought, 'I need some good old American cereal. And look here, there are Kellogg's Fruit Loops. That will do.' So I buy a box and rush home. Talk about a disappointment. Firstly, observe the colors. Saddest most depressing fruit loops I've witnessed. They look more like the wall paper in my grandparents powder room. Secondly, flavor? Fruit? well no, but fruit loops never taste like fruit. It's more of that fruit candy sort of taste. We've learned to recognize apple flavored things even though the taste is totally removed from real apple flavor. Anyway, I expected that fake, delicious, sweet, fruit flavor. Nope. Try Multi-grain cheerio flavor? Excepts some of the multi-grain cheerios are good. Take out the good ones and leave the boring bad ones. That was what this bowl of cereal tasted like. Moral of the story, don't try to be American anywhere except America because you'll be wasting your time.

Musik!

I had a lot of fun with this so I hope you enjoy. I had a classical guitar on hand and that's what happened. Also, I do not recommend to anyone else the use of iMovie for stop motion video.

Galette des Rois

Here it is. Galette is a French tradition that I've gotten to experience three times this week. Throughout the month of January French folk make these cakes and insert one of the little figures pictured on the bottom right. Whoever finds the figure in their piece is the king or queen and gets to make the next Galette at the next gathering. The problem is it may be biased. If I know where the figure is I may deliberately give that piece to a friend. To make sure that never happens, the youngest person crawls under the table where they can't see anything and then announces who should receive each piece. It's amusing because usually the youngest person is about 20 years old since we're all college students.

I'll also mention here that today we passed three kids dressed as kings going door to door like people do for halloween except they were asking for charity donations instead of candy, and were pretending to be the 3 wise men who came to visit Jesus after his birth.

Holidays part 2 (Silvestre und das neues Jahr/New Years)

The New Years celebration was a great time all in all. I traveled with siblings Marlene and Jonas, as well as Ruth (girl in the red hat) and Sven (not pictured) first to Hamburg on the 30th. There we are on a boat on the Elbe (note the huge chunks of ice in the water, it's amazing we didn't go down like the Titanic). Our teeth were getting cold in that picture and with the wind over the open water... it didn't turn out the best picture, but it was a cool experience.

From the river we then went through exploring the city and then to the house of Sven's family where we ate good food, played cards, Wii, and spent the night. Next day we drove up to Eutin on the Baltic Sea. It's a super small town with lots of cool people. There is another church in our network there so we went to celebrate the New Year with them. It started with 2 hours of worship followed by fireworks, food, and dancing once 2011 came around. It was weird realizing that for most of you it was only 6pm. Anyways I should mention that all of that was after having a delightful dinner with my host family and about 20 other people.

Turns out the guy hosting is studying mechanical engineering too, only he's about 27. People seem to end up in school at much later ages here. Anyways it was cool to talk to him a little bit about what ME is like in Germany vs. the States.

The next day we visited the Baltic Sea and took a stroll down the icy beach. it was beautiful though. I just don't know how the swans and ducks managed to sit in the cold water =P On our way back we stopped for coffee and waffles which really hit the spot. Then as it got dark we made the 2011 picture you can see with sparklers and long exposure times. We had a lot of fun with that.

Sunday then we went to church there and then out to eat. I included a picture of their menu. Note the names of the Pizzas... I ordered a Pittsburgh Pizza. I asked why it was called that but they didn't know. It had spinach, turkey, and cream cheese? I tasted surprisingly good, just not at all like Pittsburgh.

Finally we traveled back home and got ready to start school the next day which was sad, but we had good memories and more friends to show for it. Notice the sunset picture was taken at about 3:30pm. It's crazy how far North we are (Erik I can't imagine Sweden). It's good to know the days are getting longer. Happy New Year everyone!

Holidays part 1 (Weihnachten/Christmas)

Despite the tremendous amount of time recently available to me the desire to blog vanished over vacation so now it's time to elaborate a bit on what happened with all that free time. So I'll sit here in bed (before midnight I might add), sipping hot milk with honey, and listening to Philipp Poisel who you can check out on Grooveshark for some really laid back German music.

So here’s a recap of my Christmas. We could say it started at about 1pm on Friday the 24th. I began the trek towards the church on the far side of town (small town mind you) with Flugelhorn in hand, Christmas music playing, snow gently falling, and a good dose of optimism in my heart. I decided against the bus because it was nice to just be out in the snow. Upon arriving we practiced for an hour for the service and then just spent time talking and being jovial, drinking tea and the like. We made it to the service, which went off with out a hitch. Some regular worship, along with some Christmas songs and a teaching. After lots of hugs and Merry Christmas’ we all ran off to our houses to celebrate. I went back with the Bösling family who include Charlotte and Lars (pictured below) as well as some more siblings. We got to their house in their big redvan, and then waited up stairs for a bit. When we heard the bell we all ran into the living room only moments after the Christ child had escaped out the open window (they have a lot of open windows here). We just stood there for an awkward few minutes staring at the Christmas tree with lit candles instead of a string of lights. Finally we dove into the presents. I got a scrap book from the 6 friends at church who are roughly my age with a lovely picture of them all on the first page. Their 10 year old, Mirko, got a remote control helicopter which has provided loads of entertainment. We were starving by that point so we sat down to dinner which was Raclette. We pile potatoes, peppers, mushrooms, Raclette cheese, and probably other stuff too on these little metal trays that you put into the Raclette grill (google image search it). Then we cooked little pieces of chicken and shrimp on the top of it. It’s like the dinner table version of roasting hot dogs around a fire. Afterwards we sat in the living room and chatted and had a good time. I learned a lot about the family, the church, and Germany in general. The next day was Christmas, which isn’t quite as significant in Germany as the previous day. I went over the Böslings again around noon to make apple crisp. I didn’t have any measuring cups to work with but it turned out to be delicious anyway, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Desert is after lunch. So it got to be 2:30 and a handful of relatives and roommates etc. made it the Böslings house to partake. We started with the most delicious tomato soup I’ve ever tasted. Then we moved on to the red sauerkraut, potatoes, turkey, gravy and...stuffing cornbread pudge balls? or something like that. Anyways, it was all rather delicious (lecker in german). Once we had made it through the apple crisp and coffee and recovered a bit we went to see Narnia in theatres in 3D, in German... The voice overs they used were pretty convincing with the exception of the snobby cousin Eustace. They definitely gave him a snobby voice but sounded more like a cartoon than a real person. Here’s the trailer in German. Anyways, went back the Böslings and talked lot’s with Mr. and Mrs. and had a great time and more coffee. Sunday the 26th was the final day, it involved venison, lot’s of guitar, small children, and more spending time with people. There it is, that’s Christmas in Germany. New Years post to come soon.