Cultural highlights from Bavaria

We've been staying with Stefan's mom, Helen, in a Dorf outside Munich since June 23. On Sunday, we'll head to Freiburg for the first time to start making living/work/school arrangements.

Despite a temporary setback in the weather--it rained all day today and temps were only in the 50s (oF)--the clouds that we enjoyed when we first arrived in June have lightened up a bit, and warmer temps have paved the way for gigantic prehistoric mosquitoes from Hell. Stefan located one of their breeding sites in Helen's plugged up gutters and eliminated a few hundred from the gene pool of millions. Open a window or a door for half a second and they swarm inside in search of fresh warm blood, eager to bite through socks and long sleeved shirts. Poor Elias won the prize for Most Mosquito-Bitten Torso, with about 75 bites (we counted). Screens might help, but Germans don't do screens, so instead we wave our arms around and swear a lot.

Yesterday we went to the “Moar Alm” (Bavarian for "Maier Alm," which means the Maiers' summer house), a house owned by some of Helen's friends (not Maiers), in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The current owners have traced the house back to 1603, but they think that at this point only the foundation and parts of the first-floor walls are still original. The house has no plumbing or electricity, but it puts every mountain cabin I’ve ever visited to shame. It’s BIG. Alms are where you go in the summer with your herd of cattle, to let them graze. The Alm originally was used for cheese-making--so the basement is pretty amazing--and later a stall was added for calves. Cows still graze in an adjacent field, and every one of them wears a differently tuned bell. The garden is immaculate--the American ideal of a green lawn and flowers must have been inherited from what happens naturally in Bavaria. Most of the mountain is either wooded or used for grazing, and a short walk down the road leads to assorted hiking trails. We saw a total of one mosquito on our attempted hike up one of the peaks.

On the hike we were reminded of the importance of feeding cranky kids. Elias and I drafted a mental postcard in German to his friends back home (translated into English for your reading pleasure): “Dear friends, Greetings from Germany. Today we hiked up a mountain and I hated every step of it. All I wanted to do was sleep, but my stupid parents made me go. Wish you were here, Love, Elias. P.S. I ate a banana and then everything was better.” We were using an outdated map, so we ended up on the wrong trail and never made it to the top. But we got to see woods, meadows, rivulets, and lots of cows.

Right when we were ready to leave the Alm, a rescue helicopter landed at the end of the long driveway, in the middle of the road down the mountain. The mountain rescue team was picking up an injured parasailer. How's that for service? Since we couldn't drive down, we drove uphill instead and had dinner at the Wirt Alm (inn), where the proprietors specialize in Brotzeit. Ahh, Brotizeit. Brotzeit is Germany's most cherished meal; we must speak of it with great respect, or we get in trouble with our in-laws. It consists of evenly sliced, hearty, not quite dry-as-dust German bread, plus Something. For the vegetarian, that means dry bread plus sliced cheese, or dry bread plus sliced tomatoes. The other 20 menu items are for the carnivore: for example, dry bread plus a slice of fried Leberkaese ("liver cheese," which doesn't actually have any liver in it), or dry bread plus sliced wurst and onions in vinegar. In order for dry German bread to taste good, you have to slather it with butter, and the butter here is really tasty, so that’s a bonus. Note that you do NOT get to combine vegetables with proteins; thus if you have Tomatenbrot, you get only tomatoes and dry bread: no cheese allowed. If you’re lucky, when you order a protein Brotzeit, you get a little piece of vegetable to go with the dry bread. This little piece of plant-form appears to be mainly for color, to contrast with the pale cheese or the pale meat. Radishes are especially useful for this purpose: unsliced, they add bright red to a plate; sliced, they add delicate red circles, while their white centers match the rest of the food.

Stefan, who is sitting beside me right now, is defending Brotzeit: "You have to understand, it's the social aspect that's important. You sit together, you've exercised, you have a cold beer. Those are the important things. And it's something you do particularly in Bavaria, and particularly in the mountains. It's hard to get stuff up there. So you get the simple things." The view from the Wirt Alm, of course—mountains, meadows, cows, Alpenglow—was great; you can't get that at home. But I guess what strikes me most about Bavarian restaurants is their remarkable consistency. You'd think if you could lug gallons of beer and wurst up a hill, you could lug some non-white foods up there too, or that one restaurant might lug up a few carrots, say, and another might lug up a few beets. "Yeah," says Stefan, "but what are you going to do with those?"

In the interest of marital harmony, my accurate description of Brotzeit must stop here.

I'm learning lots of useful German by reading Harry Potter auf Deutsch. My favorite word so far: Hochsicherheitsgefangene--24 letters and just one word to say "high security prisoner"! Compare that to English, which takes a measly 20 letters and divides them over an uneconomical three words. I was a little disappointed that German couldn't fit "Verteidigung gegen die dunklen Kuenste" (defense against the dark arts) into one word. Rest assured, I'm also learning words that I've been able to incorporate into daily conversation, such as Efeu (ivy), Flur (hallway), and Zauberstab (magic wand).