Happy Easter!

Easter in Hanau, Germany 1977

Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Those were the big three family holidays when I was growing up. And just like Christmas, a lot of our Easter traditions come from Germany, so I have warm memories of celebrating Easter as a kid.

Although it's been many years since I dyed an egg or decorated an Easter tree, this year was special because I got to spend the week leading up to Easter with part of my family.

Easter week in Hamburg, Germany 2016

Over the past several days we've explored several museums, went on a few different city tours, enjoyed the explosion of Easter trees outside, and Easter decorations in markets and store displays.

Hunting for Easter eggs in Hanau, 1977

Hunting for criminals in a helicopter simulation
at the Hamburg Polizeimuseum, 2016

This was a typical Easter setup when I was a kid.

Although I don't have an Easter tree, I couldn't resist these beautiful eggs
at the Easter Market last weekend.

It's been fun seeing outdoor decorations for Easter all over Hamburg.

Easter morning arrived with pre-dawn church bells and the lingering scent of traditional Easter Even bonfires.

Sadly, I had to say goodbye to my mother and sister, but I have a lot of great new Hamburg memories and discoveries from this week.

I hope you have an equally wonderful holiday and, like me, are looking forward to the arrival of spring!

The Little Things: BYOE (Bring Your Own Everything)

One thing you notice in different areas is their approach to household amenities. When we moved from Virginia to California, I was shocked that many places didn’t have a washer, dryer, or refrigerator. Now it seems normal.

Yes, our refrigerator is blue,
but it came with the apartment.

When we moved to Hamburg it was obvious that 99.9% of places didn’t have overhead lights. Ok, inconvenient, but our place came with one light for the kitchen and an overhead for each bathroom, so lamps were ok for the other rooms.

It was also understood that you, the tenant, would patch any holes and paint the walls when you left. I guess the deposit we paid is for major damages. Although after talking to other folks about their apartment hunting experiences here, I’m not sure what there would be to wreck...

Sink? Yes.

One visitor asked if the large farmer’s sink in the kitchen came with the apartment. I thought she was joking. Sadly, she was not.

Oven? Yes.

Then I met a woman who said she and her husband were shown places without ovens. Thinking back to our early days in Hamburg, I tried to imagine if we had rented one of these places--a dark, empty apartment with no sink or oven and two freaked-out cats. Ugh.

The clincher was when a couple we had to dinner admired our floor and asked if it was ours. Um, what? 

They had been to more than one place where they were told they would either have to pay for the floor or get their own.

Um, what?

Floor? Yes!

Having installed a hardwood floor before in only one room, I could not imagine installing and reinstalling a floor for an entire apartment every time I moved (or paying someone else to do it), particularly for someplace I didn’t own. 

I guess you can look at it as an investment in stability. Or convenience (like the utilities, which are apparently checked and rate-adjusted just once a year).

But as someone who recently hauled her life stuff over here, the thought of piling appliances and flooring on top of that makes me glad we found the place we did, and hopeful that we don’t have any of these house-hunting adventures anytime in the near future!

Happy Pi Day! (aka The Little Things: Pies & Baking in Germany)

Every year for the past few years I’ve celebrated today's date with a slice of pie. (Usually dessert, although pizza is also good.)

Pi = 3.14 = 3/14 = March 14

Pizza you'll find in abundance, complete with weird and wacky toppings. But it was a bit of a shock to find that local bakeries weren’t brimming with dessert pies. 

Loaves, rolls, tortes, pastries, cakes, cheesecakes, yes. Straight-up pie? No.

A couple of forums online noted the same thing, so I knew I wasn’t crazy. And I’m used to making pies at home, so I thought no big deal, right? Ha. That’s when I got my first lessons in baking in Germany:

Lesson 1: Graham crackers are not universal.

My go-to dessert for dinner parties is chocolate chip pie in a graham cracker crust. With so many people helping us when we first got here, we were booking “thank you” dinners fast and furious once we got settled. But I couldn’t find graham crackers anywhere to make my own crust, and the pre-made crusts I had on hand vanished quickly. Recently I found a recommendation to use Vollkorn cookies or digestive biscuits as a substitute for graham crackers. Can’t wait to try it!

Lesson 2a: Stirred, not sifted.

I remember helping my mom in the kitchen as a kid, using the metal flour sifter to mix dry ingredients or get the flour super fine. It was time-consuming and a bit messy, but I loved it. I was a kid. As an adult, I don’t want to deal with that. So it was a bit distressing to discover that most flour here is not sifted, and that you’re expected to weigh it out rather than measure by volume. Hmm. That seems as likely as me buying a flour sifter for old times’ sake.

 

Lesson 2b: How high can you count?

In addition to having my flour pre-sifted, I was used to buying “all-purpose flour” that took care of my pie, pizza, cookie, and other baking needs. Not so here. Flour has different numerical values for different purposes. Check out the head-spinning details on flour types here. (Now that I know, though, my pizzas are much more successful.)

Lesson 3: Not getting weighed down

After finding the right numbers for my needs but adopting a devil-may-care attitude about weighing my flour (which has worked so far), I soon found myself in a similar predicament with butter. I know, I could look up the conversion, but thankfully I’ve had enough experience with butter to just eye-ball the amount I need/want.

Lesson 4: Mini bits vs. decadent discs

Germans seem to take their chocolate as seriously as their beer. Blocks, bars, figurines—I’ve seen everything except the chocolate chips I’m used to. Eventually I discovered itty bitty mini chips, and Plättchen, dime-sized wafers of really rich chocolate. Although I have to severely adjust the amount I use of either for recipes, experimenting with both has been super sweet.

Lesson 5: Do-it-yourself vanilla

Following a fruitless search through five grocery stores for vanilla extract, I gave up and substituted maple syrup. (This was for fudge*, but now that I know it works, I might use it as a stopgap for some pies.) All of the stores carry vanilla bean pods, but apparently the rest is up to you. So at some point I will need to grab rum or vodka and try my hand making my own vanilla extract.

Now that I’ve got a better handle on some of the baking differences, I’m looking forward to making even more of my favorite pies and sweet things in the future. But if you’re in easy reach of some key lime or French silk goodness today, please have a slice for me!

*Ah, a side note about fudge. I made some and shared it with a bunch of Germans, and they were baffled. Could be the peanut butter, which is also not as big here as in the U.S., but the one vocal fudge fan in the group confirmed that "this milk and sugar thing" is not common here.

Hamburg Firsts and Fun Facts

On Friday I went to the monthly “spouses breakfast” coordinated by Good Game, and afterwards joined some of the other wives for a walk across the city to downtown. Along the way I was explaining the origin of the Hamburg meaning for Dom*, and realized how much I had learned--and continue to learn--about this city.

So I thought I’d share some tidbits with you.

Hamburg was:

• Recently voted Germans’ favorite German city.

• Part of an alliance with the city of Lübeck in 1241, which served as the precursor to the formation of the Hanseatic League in 1356. (Hamburg's full official name is the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.)

• The site of "Operation Gomorrah" in World War II--an air raid campaign that lasted 7 nights and 8 days and destroyed much of the city.

• The city where the Beatles had five residencies to tune up their performing skills. The band recorded their first single in Hamburg two years before their debut LP.

Beatles Platz in Hamburg



• The birthplace of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, composers Johannes Brahms, Carl Reinecke, and Felix Mendelssohn, and German chancellors Angela Merkel and Helmut Schmidt.

The concert hall on Johannes Brahms Platz

Hamburg has:

• A street in its red-light district where women are not allowed to walk unless they're prostitutes.

• The largest outdoor market in Europe.

• Miniatur Wunderland, the largest model railway in the world.

Larger bridges...

• 2400 bridges--more than any other city in the world! 

In fact, that's more bridges than London, Amsterdam, and Venice combined.

On a related note, Hamburg has more canals than Amsterdam and Venice combined.

...smaller bridges...

...so many bridges!

Hamburg is:

• The first city in the world to ban single-use drink pods (e.g., Keurig).

• The origin of the paint designed to discourage public urination.

• Home to the Neuengamme memorial, a former concentration camp used by the Nazis from 1938 to 1945.

• Europe's largest a) railway port, b) import port for coffee, and c) marketplace for raw materials for pharmaceuticals. It's also the largest carpet trading and storage center in the world.

• Home to the Speicherstadt, one of the world's largest and oldest warehouse districts and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

*Oh, and about that history. As early as the 1300s a cathedral in Hamburg was also the site of a periodic carnival, and the two became synonymous. So even when the carnival eventually moved to a different site, Hamburgers associated it with the term for cathedral, which is Dom. The Hamburg Dom comes three times a year and is the largest in northern Germany.