Fondue, glass pickles, fire bowls, and other German things

During my senior year of high school, I was friends with a German exchange student, AC. After that year, I always thought it would be neat to visit him in Germany. This was a casual wish, though, with Germany on a long list of other places I "wanted" to visit, including Australia, India, and Hawaii. I don't think I ever really thought it would be possible for me to visit him, and I never had a strong sense of why I wanted to go to Germany or what I would even do there.

That was until I moved to Morocco. Now Frankfurt is just a 3 1/2 hour plane ride away (plus a couple of hours in a car). So at the end of December, T and I finally visited my friend AC in Rosbach, Germany. We spent close to a week with him and his wife IC and their two young children MC (boy) and MC (girl).

MC is just about ready to go to bed.

One of the great things about staying with a German family is that we got to learn some details of German culture we may not have been aware of otherwise. For example, because they took us to a New Year's Eve party with several of their friends, I now know that fondue is a fairly common New Year's Eve meal. It also seems that virtually everyone in the entire country sets off fireworks at midnight– a lot of fireworks. And while I thought staying at a New Year's Eve party until 3:00 AM was quite late, when we said good-bye at that time, we were the first ones to leave the party – probably because AC and IC's little girl had refused to be cared for by her grandparents and ended up accompanying us and thus needed to get home at a "reasonable" time. (Don't worry, she slept for a good portion of the party.)

SingStar fun

Another wonderful thing about visiting Germany (for English-speaking people, anyway) is that many Germans, especially those in the younger generations, are very comfortable with English and can easily switch back and forth between it and German. Virtually everyone at the New Year's Eve party knew English. At first, though, people seemed reluctant to speak to us, perhaps because we were strangers and because everyone (I think) is more comfortable speaking in his or her native language. As the night went on, though, more people were kind enough to talk to us. They were surprised to learn that we were not visiting from America, so the topic of how one ends up living in Morocco helped keep up the conversation.

It also helped when my friend AC broke out the PlayStation game SingStar. By the end of the night, even I had come out of my shell, and I was belting out Abba songs with IC as my teammate. Champagne seemed to loosen peoples tongues, and almost everyone was making comments about the game using English for our benefit.




If you haven't figured it out yet, T and I both really like food, so of course that was one of the things we most enjoyed. Bakery bread is cheap and plentiful in Morocco, but it isn't particularly high quality. The bread in Germany was perfect as far as we were concerned – fresh, dark, heavy, and baked with a variety of nuts and grains. And boy, did we eat a lot of it, along with a lot of butter and cheese and (on T's part) meat. He tried a variety of sausages and schnitzel and one meat that looked particularly disgusting to me but that he said was fine – ground raw pork. AC showed him how to eat it by spreading some butter on a piece of bread, then spreading the raw pork on that, and topping it with chopped raw onions and ground black pepper.

On our last night there, we were also introduced to feuerzangenbowle, which I think translates to "Flaming Fire Tongs Punch." This is a special, delicious, and potentially dangerous drink, the creation of which involves three steps:

Step one: Get a mug of mulled wine and top it with sugar cubes.

Step two: Douse the sugar cubes with rum.

Step three: Set it on fire! The burning rum melts the sugar into the mulled wine.

At first, AC and IC told us there was only one rule to making the fire bowl: "more rum." But we quickly discovered there are actually more rules than that, including don't lick the hot spoon, don't dip the flaming spoon into the cup of rum, don't spill the rum, and don't set the table on fire. I ended up breaking half of these rules.

I'll close this blog post with one more note about German culture which also serves as a nice reminder that it's a good idea to be a little skeptical when someone tells us a story about a practice or tradition from a culture with which we are not familiar. We had New Year's Day dinner with AC's parents, and at this time his father told us about something he had just heard on the radio. Apparently, AC's father had just heard for the first time that many Americans believe that Germans have a tradition of hanging a glass pickle on their Christmas trees. This was the first AC's father had ever heard about this. It seems that most Germans have never heard of this alleged tradition. This got me wondering what sorts of things people believe Americans do.

Coming up...more blog posts about the specific places we visited. 

T and me with our gracious host family