Mystery Solved!

The good stuff.

I might have mentioned it in passing in a previous post or two, but I have fallen in love with plain yogurt. Nearly every hostel or pension offers it as a choice for breakfast, usually served with granola, but sometimes with corn flakes or other crunchy cereal which adds such a nice texture.

Back in New York, I often have vanilla yogurt topped with granola and fruit for breakfast, but it never tastes like this. Here, I want to lick the bowl clean.

"Why is it so much better?" I asked Katrin.

"Because our yogurt has fat, and all American yogurts have no fat, and so they taste like water."

She would know. She worked as an au pair in New Jersey for a year. And then I thought about yogurts in the States, and yes, it is true, almost all of them claim to fat-free or almost fat-free.

"Also, American yogurt has many ingredients in it. Ours just have milk." I inspected the German yogurt carton this morning at breakfast. 3.5% fatty milk. Nothing else in there. It's a lot of fat, but it's totally worth it. I might have to do an inspection back home to see if they actually have full-fat yogurt, and if they do, I may never go back again.

Oh, and you know how I thought it was weird that that woman left her baby outside of Starbucks? This is completely normal behavior, according to Katrin.

"I don't know why Americans are so afraid of having their kids be kidnapped," she said. If a baby is sleeping, why disturb him/her? Here, leaving a sleeping child outside in the stoller outside or in a parked car (where you can see them) is acceptable.

We even watched it happen on TV, where they left a child in a car for a few minutes, and Katrin goes, "See?!"

Tonight we caught a re-run of Germany's most famous television program called Tatort. I learned about Tatort back in Poland when Philipp dramatically demonstrated the opening sequence for me. He would use his hands in vogue-like fashion to block his face and reveal his eyes, humming the music the whole time. It was so funny watching him do this that I made him repeat it a few times. But the other Germans knew what he was mimicking without explanation. I wish I could show you Philipp's version, but here, you can watch the original yourself.


Tatort's opening sequence.

Tatort has been on air for 37 years, new episodes every Sunday night at 8:15--right after the news, which apparently every German watches everyday at 8. My Lonely Planet guide says that you should never call someone at 8 because of the news, and Katri n says this is totally true. The show is commercial free and runs for 90 minutes.

Tatort is a drama that follows investigation police teams in 15 cities of Germany (kind of like CSI) and every week is a different city. Some cities' police teams are more liked by the German viewing audience than others.

We watched an old episode from the 1990's of the investigation team from Bremen. I watched most of it alone, so this is what happened.

There was a woman with really long red nails, and she cried over a picture of a girl. And then she had sex with this guy on a train, and then they had sex again in a hotel room. And then this girl with blonde hair, a sex-phone operator, got shot, and she had a child who was now being taken care of this girl with brown hair. Some guy who owns a flower shop came to visit the girl with the brown hair and he touched her boob, but they played bad music, so I don't think it was a good thing. And then the woman with the red lipstick later kissed the flower shop guy, so she was bad, too.

The main cop of the show was a woman who had blonde bangs who sometimes wore scrunchies in her hair, and she was into this journalist and they took a bath together. (Total female nudity on television, by the way, and when Katrin came to join me and translated some, I found out there was also cursing). The scrunchie cop and her partner walked around and asked a lot of people questions about the sex-phone operator, and scrunchie cop was also was friends with the woman with the really long red nails. And then it got really confusing with a video-tape and some s&m scenes and the cop's boss was involved.

Long story short, it appears that the woman with the really long red nails steals the child being taken care of by the girl with brown hair (and Germans aren't worried about their kids being stolen!!?). Scrunchie cop finds them at the graveyard, where red nail woman is mourning over the death of her real child--remember the picture of the girl in the beginning?--and the cop takes the child away and then the woman with the really long red nails shoots herself with a pistol.

It was pretty intense. Now imagine how intense if would be if I actually knew what they were saying?


Feeble attempts to buy a winter hat.



Auf Wiedersehen, Tubingen! Hope to see you again soon, Katrin!

Reconsidering Sundays.

Fruitcake, German style.


As a traveler, Europe on Sunday is the absolute worst. All the shops are closed, the restaurants and streets dead, the only places open are church and the bars. Often times I feel like I spend most Sundays waiting for Mondays, so then I can witness the place I am visiting come back to life from the dead.

But today I had the opportunity to spend Sunday not as a tourist, but as a resident of Tubingen. And spending it with Katrin, the hostess with the mostest, it was lovely.

First, having my own room was clutch. I had the best sleep that I have had in days, sleeping in until almost ten. For the past few months, I have been sleeping in my sleeping bag, but here, I have a thick comforter (just like home!) that makes me so warm and cozy. I didn't want to get up.

When I was in the shower, Katrin went to the bakery to pick up some fresh bread for our breakfast. Now, to me, that sums up Euro and small town all in one. I made scrambled eggs. Katrin laid out an assortment of cheeses, butters and marmalade on the table, along with this German fruit cake called Christstollin normally served at Christmastime that she saw at the bakery and thought I should try (do you see how thoughtful she is?). We ate leisurely until we were full, and I wonder: Why have Americans not caught on with this fresh bread thing? Why do we think bread that comes in a bag is acceptable when fresh bread tastes so much better?

After breakfast, we took the bus to an even smaller town called Bibnhausin with only three or four streets, where we visited this beautiful old cloister and former residence of one of the old kings of the area. The sky was blue, and it felt warmer than it has in weeks, and so we took a walk throughout town and then hiked our way back to Tubingen, talking about everything the entire way. I feel like I never run out of conversation with Katrin. You would think that two people who live completely different lives would run out of things to say, but we just keep going and going and going.

In the middle of our hike, we stopped in a café for cake and hot chocolate. The place was low-key, the waiters were apathetic, but the food was delicious and we took our time and suddenly, we realized we spent the whole afternoon there, doing nothing but enjoying each other's company. Both of us felt a little sleepy, but it wasn't from strenuous activity but out of doing nothing. Shouldn't that be what Sundays are all about?

For dinner, we went to an authentic Swabian restaurant (which is the name of the region that Tubingen is in) where I tried maultaschen, otherwise known as German ravioli. The pasta is filled with meat and vegetables and it is said on the olden days, Swabians made this dish so they could hide the meat from God and eat it during Lent and on Fridays. I washed this down with some German wine served in a glass cup (Danielle--you are right. It is pretty good.)

You would think Katrin and I would be sick of each other by now, but we went out for a drink at a student bar and talked for a while then we went home and had some tea and babushkas and talked some more.

I am reconsidering how I feel about Sundays. Maybe having one day of the week where the stores are closed and the streets are quiet is not the end of the world. Because then you can't shop or run your errands, and you are forced to relax. You can stay home, curl up with a book, go on a walk, spend time with a friend. As Katrin commented, you do nothing until you are bored of doing nothing. And that doesn't sound bad at all. Because by the time you have enough, then it's Monday again.


Me at the Cloister.



A very dark Katrin at the Cloister.



Midday dessert. I had a rustic tart made with really small plums.

Pure Perfection

The perfect place to be.

For the next few days, I am staying with Katrin, one of the Germans from Polish class, in a town in the southwestern part of Germany called Tubingen.

Katrin is such a good egg. She is a person who is impossible to dislike. Since I have last seen her, she has emailed me ideas for my upcoming visit. She sends me recommendations of places I should go. She was the person who told me about the German transit strike. She gives the impression as if I am always somewhere in her thoughts.

Meeting her on a connecting train to Tubingen (she was coming back home from visiting her boyfriend who lives five hours away), it was like reconnecting with an old friend. It's like time never passed. She possesses a certain ease and comfort that makes me feel like I have known her for years. I could talk with her for hours and never get bored.

Katrin is actually not from Tubingen. There is the place where she was born, the place she lived as a child, the place her parents live now. Tubingen is a big university town, and she is here to research and write her Ph D. If you want to know what it is about, you will have to ask her. It is way above my head. She's really smart. And a better Polish student than me. Not only does she take classes once a week, but in her bathroom is a map of Poland and a sheet of Polish grammar that she can review while on the seat. I tried to review it myself, but it too was way above my head.

I've told you that I love a small town, and Tubingen is close to everything I imagine a small town should look like. With a population of 83,000, it is not really all that tiny. But everything about it just oozes small in just the right ways. There are historical buildings, cobblestone winding streets, quaint shops, people milling about. It's the type of place where on a Saturday shopping, you would bump into all of your friends.

I asked Katrin if she thinks she will live here after her studies, and she says no.

"I need some darkness in life," she explained. Here, everyone has their perfect life in their perfect home, with their perfect university job, where their kids go to school with other kids who live equally perfect lives. It is too much of a bubble. I had to admit it was surreal walking around this place. I had previously questioned if towns like this existed anywhere except in my imagination, and now I know, they do! They do!

A huge fan of Polish Ham, Katrin knew just the place to take me in town: a café for some German cake. We both had the marzipan which was just the right combination of crème, fruits and cake with just a light touch of alcohol.

Her apartment is huge by New York standards, and as she tells me, by the average student's standards living here. She probably has the best view of the city right from her bedroom, where you can see trees and the river and town skyline. She lives with another girl and they are down one roommate, so I even have my own room. I considered putting a sign on the door, saying "Yvonne's Room" but it seemed a little dorky. "Keep Out" a little rude. It was just fun having my own room again.

Speaking of dorky, in Munich, I went to this store that sold all kinds of chocolate to get something for Katrin as a thank you gift and came across this awesome advent calendar made by Lindt in the shape of a Russian doll. But what really sold me was that they claimed that inside the box were chocolates of "mini babushkas."

I almost got the calendar for her but the thing was probably as big as my torso and I was afraid she would wouldn't find mini babushkas as awesome as I did, so I went for the more conservative box of chocolates. But then we were in the supermarket, buying some salmon for dinner, and we not only saw the advent calendar, but mini-babushkas sold separately. We had no choice but to get the minis. They were really good--just hollow milk chocolate--but we considered writing a letter to the company to suggest that they have smaller versions of the mini babushkas inside the mini babushkas. Now that would be something special

Tubingen is nearly perfect, and in terms of a host, so is Katrin. She cooks me dinner. She feeds me wine and cake and chocolate. She lets me do my laundry in her washing machine and dryer (dryers are actually not common in Germany). She gives me warm socks and blankets and asks me every five seconds if I need anything else. She was really tired from staying up late the night before, but despite that, she talked with me until 11 at night to amuse me.

How can you not like Katrin? It's impossible.


Katrin in Marktplatz.


The mini babushkas