Lac D’Annecy

Yesterday we returned from a week in France, and three weeks from today we will be on the beach in Sardinia, Italy.  We are definitely taking full advantage of living in central Europe.  France was broken up into two parts, so we will break the blog into two parts as well.  This blog will be focused on the first three nights in the French Alps, and I’ll leave it to Noah to write about our time in Paris.

The trip started with us waiting for the train to the airport at 7am.  With two minutes until the train arrives, Noah realizes he didn’t have his passport.  Oops.  He runs off to catch the bus back to the apartment, and says he will be back for the next train (20 minutes later) no matter what.  I am waiting on the platform with the luggage and the next train arrives in 1 minute and still no Noah.  I look up and see him running towards me.  He was able to catch a bus back home, but the return bus(es) never showed up!  They are supposed to come every 5 minutes, but with rush hour sometimes they get delayed.  In his determination to make the next train, he ran the 0.7 mile/1.1 km from our apartment to the station in less than 7 minutes.  Poor guy…. but he made it!

After starting the trip off on not the best foot, we make it to Paris on time.  Oh, and it turns out since we are traveling within the continental EU, no one even checked our passports (our residence cards were enough).  But we stick by his decision to run home – you should always carry your passport on travels!  At least this made us feel better.

After a 4 hour train ride in first class, we arrive in Annecy around 9:30pm, exhausted from an entire day of traveling and ready for sleep.  Good thing we are in a small alpine town, right?  Wrong.  We entered a world of 15-22 year olds partying to loud music in the streets, and of course the drum line is right outside our hotel window.  Naturally.  I am not sure when it ended, but it was definitely after midnight.  What can we say, we were hopeful it would end then… but nope.  What did we get ourselves into?  The next day we found out there was a music festival, and the town IS in fact a quiet alpine town.

We woke up and headed to the market to pick up breakfast/lunch.  After eating too many chocolate pains… I mean pain au chocolates… we pick up our cheese, fresh baguette, and fruit, and head to the lake.  We really realized how much German we know when we tried to communicate our orders.  You don’t get too far in a place where we never heard another native English speaker, and all we knew in French is please, thank you, yes, no, 1,2,3,4.  So it involved a lot of gestures and their broken English.  When we arrive at the lake, we spot the paddleboats and immediately knew what we would be doing that afternoon.  And these are nice paddleboats – they even had front and back decks to hang out in!

Noah was happy…

We paddled out a bit to ‘park’ (just stop paddling) the boat and enjoy our lunch. Immediately after stopping, a little duck friend showed up at the back of our boat.  After watching him work hard for our attention, I faked throwing a piece of bread.  The poor little guy flew after the non-bread, and when he realized I tricked him he let us know how unhappy he was.  He started squawking at us, and I felt like a giant jerk.  When we were done eating, I threw the leftover bread to him to make it up to him.  

When we packed up our lunch to sunbathe on the deck, our bird friend knew quickly lunch was over and took off for the next paddleboat.  Smart little bird.  We spent the next hour lounging in the sun, and later I learned I missed a spot with the sunscreen and burned the area around my armpit.  Lovely.

When we were ready to head back, we cruised across the lake my favorite way – with Noah paddling and me lounging.  Thanks love!

We spent the afternoon walking along the canals in the town – think San Antonio River Walk but clear waters and 10x more gorgeous (not that I am slamming the River Walk!).

The next day – Noah’s birthday!!!!! - we spent at a beach on the lake, watching old ladies with leather skin sunbathe in oil topless.  I didn’t take any photos, but go check out a dark brown leather couch that is at least 40 years old, and that was what it looked like.  Instead, I will share a pretty photo of the lake view.

We cleaned ourselves up and went to celebrate his birthday with fresh seafood at a nice restaurant on the canal.  We followed it up with a banana-chocolate crepe and an ice cream sundae.  Mmmmm…. I love French food.  We headed back to the lake to take a photo of us dressed up, and I spent a few minutes setting up the camera on a trashcan to get the perfect shot of us in front of the lake.  I hit the shutter, and ran to stand by Noah.  As the camera is counting down, 2 bicyclers start heading down the path and pass us right as the camera went off.  We started laughing, assuming we just spent all that time for a shot of a bicycle, but instead the camera just missed them.  

Our time in Annecy was over.  It was bittersweet – it meant we were leaving this gorgeous place with gorgeous weather, but on the upside we were heading to Paris in the morning to meet Noah’s mom.  Au Revoir Annecy – we probably won’t see you again, but we loved our visit!!  

Saturday night was sure interesting!

We went out with our American friends, Eddie and Laura, to celebrate Noah’s birthday (a week early, since we will be in France for his actual birthday).  We met them at Sausalito’s – a hip Mexican restaurant that has more of a bar feel with all the drink specials. 

Saturday night is also a time you will see many bachelor and bachelorette groups around the city.  You can spot them because they usually are wearing matching shirts.  For the guys, the groom is wearing something embarrassing like a tutu or a diaper, and for the girls, the bride has the typical veil on. 

The four of us settle into our small table in the corner, and as we are waiting for our food the music changes to the James Bond theme song.  Next thing we know, a man in a suit is speed walking across the restaurant to the bachelorette group in the back corner.  We take note, and see he starts to dance.  The though forms in my head that he could be a stripper, but no – this is a public restaurant!  Surely not!

Oh but he was.  And he proceeded to strip down to NOTHING (but he kept a strategically placed towel in front of his you-know-what.  And if you don’t believe me, check out this photo of him taking his applause at the end of the show:

And he got plenty of applause – every female in the place (and Eddie and Noah) was captivated.  And if the photo isn’t enough, here is some actual footage.  Don’t worry – nothing too extreme (I am not posting THAT footage on this blog – trying to keep this PG-13 here).

So Noah got dinner and a show for his (early) birthday!  Oh, and he got churros.  Man I love churros.

Wir Lernen Deutsch!

For Christmas 2010 I bought Julie a ‘German Word of the Day’ calendar, admittedly not one of my finest gifts.  The next week I returned it because it is impossible to keep up with ‘one a day calendars’.  Plus we were not really expecting to move to Germany, so why bother? 

Today’s blog is about our progression in learning German.  It is tough to keep track of how we much we have learned so I figure it would be good to make a written note about our German knowledge in a before/after fashion.

It wasn’t until about May 2011 that the idea of learning German was rekindled, although still not very seriously.  The first word I can remember learning was ‘mitarbeiter’ (meaning co-worker) which we would go around pronouncing ‘meter beater’ when the correct way is ‘mitt arr-biter’.  Not only was the pronunciation wrong but we had no idea that this word was constructed from two other words meaning ‘with’ ‘worker’ (more on this additive process later). 

At my brother’s wedding the next month we were telling our family about our prospects of moving to Germany.  Naturally, people would ask us about our German skills and I will never forget how we could not even count to 20.  Oh yeah, but we still want to move there anyway!  We do, right?!?

In other words, we were absolutely clueless about the world we would be entering in 6 months and about correct tactics to learning a language.  Furthermore, I don’t think we realized how hard it would be to learn a language.  To elaborate, it is not difficult to learn new German words.  The vocabulary is pure engineering and often very intuitive.  One of our favorite examples is the word ‘oberlippenbart’ which is the sum of three words upper+lip+beard or in other words is a moustache!  So the words themselves come fairly easy most of the time.  The only problem is the words get very long because of this additive process (e.g., Kreisverwaltungsreferat = city hall). 

The real difficulty in learning German, even for natives, is the grammar rules.  Now I know English has its difficulties in grammar but there is absolutely no contest in comparison to German.  For instance, like many other languages, German employs the use of gender for nouns, but in addition to masculine and feminine they also have a neutral and a special case for plural.  Of course, the adjectives and articles must also follow the proper gender.  But to complicate everything even further, the declension for each M, F, N, and P has one of four different endings each depending on the situational usage.  In other words that is 4 x 4 or 16 different ways in which articles, adjectives, and nouns can be used grammatically.  Lost?  Don’t worry. We felt that way and often still do!  Take a look at this oversimplified grammatical chart illustrating the 6 different words for ‘the’.

I’m not complaining though, at least not in this instance. If anything I think it is a real testament to how brilliant the human mind is- how we can learn anything.  Given enough repetition, the most complex language rules become automatic.  I do get a little upset though when I notice a 5 year old grasping German grammar better than I do.  The difficult part about the grammar is that it kills your confidence to use the language.  When you don’t know the grammatically correct way to say something it is easier just to stay silent- which we often do.

For the six months leading up to our move we spent endless hours with Rosetta Stone, library audio tapes, and German dubbed episodes of Gilmore Girls.  We only had the weekends and evenings after work to learn as much as we could.  By the time we arrived we felt pretty comfortable in hotels, restaurants, and shopping etc.  We were kind of in that ignorance stage where you feel like you know everything and we figured we would be fluent in just a few more months.  When your vocabulary is about 100 words deep, learning 10 more new ones feels like a vast improvement.

It didn’t take long though before we fell on our faces (sorry Jules, no pun intended).  I remember once asking to buy a passport instead of a train ticket and Julie saying good morning to someone around 5 p.m.  One of my favorites is when Julie got yelled out for ordering a half-chicken (feminine – “halbe”) instead of a half-chicken (neutral – “halbes”).  Another favorite is when I wanted to say “we are ready to check out of our hotel” but instead I said “we are lost”. 

Things got even more difficult as the real world encroached in on us.  By the time work started I was sitting in training sessions in German!  I sure hope they were not important.  And although it feels very isolating, I am glad that I get to experience so much German communication at work because Julie does not have the same experience.  It gives me the extra motivation and practice to continue improving.

Our skills have progressed significantly since we have been here, albeit slowly.  We have managed to squeeze into and out of some tricky situations with our German knowledge (hospital, locksmith, beer festival, driver's license).  It is pretty remarkable how much we have taught ourselves in just one year’s time.  Technically speaking we are around a 4-5 on a 10 point fluency scale (defined here as A2+ to B1- range).  One day we hope to become fully fluent, and more importantly we hope to always remember what we have already learned.  It is kind of scary to think about all of the Spanish we have forgotten - we can’t let that happen with our German!!

And our dogs have taken up German lessons too!  Thanks to our dog walker they now know the German word for sit/down.  They’re not too keen on the grammar rules though.

Praha, the land of trdelniks

To celebrate our 2^nd wedding anniversary, we ventured out to our first country whose native language is not English or German – the Czech Republic!  However bravery is not needed when visiting Prague (or Praha) – everyone we encountered spoke English (and often German too). 

Prague was a fantastic city to visit.  It is one of our favorite cities we have been to in Europe (including all the cities we visited in our month-long Europe tour after college).  Happily or sadly, depending on your point of view, it looks like many others think the same thing.  It was filled with fellow tourists!  Some are worse than others (it isn’t fun being caught behind a throng of elderly people following a tour guide), but it also made us feel safer and more comfortable knowing most people on the streets were just like us – visitors.

We arrived by a non-stop bus which was fabulous – think coach bus, not public transportation bus.  Surprisingly it is the quickest and cheapest way to Prague from Munich. If you take a train, you will have at least one connection, which makes it the slower option. 

Our first stop was to check out the Old Town square, which was right by our hotel.  Here we saw the Church of Our Lady of Tyn and the Staromestska Radnice – which houses an ancient astronomical clock (the Prague Orloj).  It was first installed in 1410, which makes it the oldest still-working astronomical clock in the WORLD!

We ventured down to the Powder Tower, where I found I am too short to cut it in a Medieval army (there goes my lifelong dream).

The next day we joined every other tourist in Prague and ventured up to the Prague Castle.  Here is a story of how NOT to be a tourist.  The Prague Castle requires a ticket to enter the buildings, and there are two types: short and long visit (you get access to more buildings with the long visit).  As we waited in the incredibly long line for the one cashier, we read the giant sign that explained the tickets and settled on the short visit.  Let me just mention this is translated into 8 different languages.  The lady in front of us spent a lot of time staring at the ticket explanations, and reading her guidebook.  We assumed she must really be debating the long or short visit, and looking up all the buildings in her book.  When this woman makes it to the sole cashier, we hear her ask for an explanation of the two tickets!!!  I mean, the line is out the door, she HAD to have read that sign 10 times, she read her guidebook the whole time, and she has to take up extra time at the ONE cashier to ask this?  My tip when traveling – please just be aware and courteous to all the other fellow travelers and locals.  This greatly reduces your chance of encountering rudeness.

Ok I am done with my rant.  Back to the castle - it was pretty amazing.  The building with the impressive spires is St. Vitus Cathedral – gorgeous!  We also visited St. George’s Basilica, the residence areas, and the Golden Lane (the last I could have skipped). 

The castle is built on a hill, so it offers some of the best views of the city.  We bothered three different people to take our photo, until we found a couple from Boston that took the winner.  Another tip for travelers – if you are on the picky side of how the background looks in a photo of you and your companions, look for someone with a fancy SLR-style camera.  They typically take better photos than people with point and shoot cameras.  And if you have an SLR, they already know how to work them.

Next marks one of the largest turning points of my life.  May 26^th, 2012 will be marked as the first day I tasted trdelnik – a traditional sweet bread that is popular in the former Czechoslovakia area.  This is the best thing I have ever eaten.  It is basically dough that is wrapped around an iron pole and baked over a fire.  It is then rolled in a cinnamon/nut mixture, and at this place they would fill it with Nutella if you asked.  Oh I asked.  My mouth is watering just thinking about this.

Moving on (for my sake), we headed out on a mission to find the ‘cool wall’ that Noah spotted from the top of Prague Castle.  After wandering the curvy streets for a while, we found it.  It is in the Wallenstein Palace Gardens, and up close it was even ‘cooler’ looking than I expected it to be.  If you look, you can spot a face in the wall.

We ended the night back at the Old Town square for dinner outside.  This was becoming our favorite place to eat.  Great people watching, plenty of café’s with seating outside, and wonderful weather.  We also tried the ”real”/original Budweiser.  Anheuser-Busch copied this beer, and later in a Budweiser trademark dispute, the original Budweiser gave up the North American rights to the name. 

Sunday we planned to visit the Jewish Quarter and check out the Synagogues, but sadly they were all closed for Shavout.  We were really looking forward to the Jewish Cemetery, which looks really cool from photos.  Instead we settled on seeing the outside of the buildings and shopping for Christmas ornaments in the Mother Mary and Santa filled stores (yes, IN the Jewish Quarter – the only place we saw them).

With the day now free, we simply strolled around the city and bought 2 more trdelniks.  The steps at the end of Nerduova street was a great place to sit and eat and people watch. 

We also chose to take a dinner cruise down the Vltava River on our last night.  Noah found a flyer for the Jazz Boat, and it was soon decided this was the cruise to take.  We had a nice table by the window, listened/watched the live jazz band, and ate a three course meal.  It was a great way to end our anniversary weekend. 

Noah woke up early Monday before we left to take some amazing sunrise photos.  He was debating whether or not to do it when we realized that we have sunrise pictures from our honeymoon in Hawaii, and sunrise pictures from our first wedding anniversary in Lake Tahoe.  If he stopped now, it would end a potentially awesome tradition (awesome because I am not the one waking up early – though to my credit I did in Tahoe).  So I will leave you with a few of his best shots.