Familiezeit

Time with family is always special. Somehow even if you don't really know each other that well and you only share a great-great-great-5x-great-grandfather, knowing people are family makes being with them more special. Last weekend was a great reconnection time for me and mom with all my family here in Deidesheim. It's been about 10 years now since I first visited in 8th grade. Everyone was saying how they couldn't recognize me at all and how much I'd changed and such. Weird because I don't remember much at all, and what I do remember felt like it hadn't changed one bit. I need to break out the old pictures from then and see what people looked like back then. I just don't want to see myself...

Anna and I with our similar Gehhilfe. Next to my shoulder is the crest of Deidesheim with red and blue and two gold stars. Anna is the Funk family member and we are some kind of cousin 5 or 6 times removed. I need to make a chart of everyone...

Willi and I after dinner. Willi is now over 80, but still as young at heart as any 20 year-old. His German is impossible to understand though. More on Pfälzisch later...

Anna and mom pouring over photos from their 1992 trip to the U.S. to visit my grandfather. I barely remember them coming. I vaguely remember reassurances that German was just like English and you can understand it if you listen carefully. SO NOT TRUE.

More family members. I can't keep track of them all. They were all very nice though and I'll figure them out at Christmas probably.

Me, Lydia, and Franz. Lydia is Anna and Willi's daughter and Franz is her husband. I coordinated most everything with them as they are the only easily reachable with internet and we have long connections back with them. Lydia speaks very good English and really helped out
translating (which I have a hard time doing despite being able to understand (most) everything.

As I said, I'm going back for Christmas (or New Years, I have to visit the French family too!) and I'm sure there will be much more about family then!

Im Prinzip...

Generalities ahead!

Germans are very idealistic thinkers. They think about everything as it should be were everything to proceed according to plan and schedule. This kind of thinking causes them to the use the phrase, "Im Prinzip..." or "In principle..." very often. It might be their favorite phrase after Alles klar and Alles in Ordnung. It is not uncommon at all for every few sentences from a German to begin with this phrase. And it lets other Germans know that they are well prepared and thinking logically (Logisch!) with the side benefit of providing insurance for them when something doesn't go according to the plan: Im Prinzip, es sollte geklappt haben. (In principle, it should have worked.)

Zurück in der Aktion

Back in action I am! Sort of.

I'll try to get back into this. It will be a pain at first, but I think it's good.

My latest adventure: visiting the Family home in Deidesheim, a little village near Mannheim. While we were there we visited also Heidelberg and got to see the castle and old town there (we = my mother and I). The town is amazingly pretty and clearly very old. It's also quite touristy, which is a big change from Göttingen. It's very strange to be walking through a German city and to hear American English being spoken by someone other than you. Even here at the institute, I'm the only American in my department, so it would be strange there too. And I mostly listen to Italian, French, or German radio so none there.

Heidelberg is very charming and has a nice main street flanked by alleys and quieter areas. The entire city is in a valley carved out by the Neckar river which flows through the city. The old area is therefore much more condensed than in Göttingen.

The hills surrounding are perches for the rich and famous--mainly university professors and doctors and other professionals I think. There are some very nice looking houses in the forests on the other side of the river from the city and the castle.

The castle courtyard is quite pretty, and most parts have been partially or completely renovated. There were several wells and many fountains throughout the grounds. Because it is below the hills, I suppose they are fed by springs. The entire place was nice, but challenging on crutches.

ACHTUNG! ERSCHRECKENDE BILDER!

So if you don't want to see some really ugly pictures, close the window now.

I'll begin with my face: one stitch on my chin that is pretty much gone now and a spot on my head, also now gone. I heal really quickly, I've decided.

The scariest of them all:

Annnd now for the really fun ones...






My poor foot. This is post-op of course so most of the fun things are actually from people cutting on me. I don't have a pre-op, but it prob wasn't much nicer.


And the kicker.. Literally, I guess. Nasty bruises, stitches, other fun things. It's shiny because of some anti-septic spray, but it kind of makes it look more like a corpse.

And my view. Besides still being swollen like a balloon, my toe looks really stupid. The pin in it apparently keeps it to one side like that. I'm not about to move it either. The pin comes out in 6 weeks, and perhaps it'll go back to normal. Otherwise I'm going to need some special shoes.

Thats all. Scary pictures done.

Wörterspaß

I have a lot of fun things to write about since being in the hospital for a week. I'm never going to get everything put down here. Firstly though, some word fun:

Kucken or gucken (but pronounced like the german final g as somewhere between g like 'goose' and k like the c in 'cake'): 'to look', in the sense of either -look at items- or -wait and see- or -check on-. It is fascinating that I've never really encountered this word until I got here and then I was bombarded with it. I meant to say something about it before, but I could never figure out exactly what was being said because the pronunciation varies a bit and the g-k thing is really hard to get. Also, not really in dictionaries or our books for some reason, but I understand it is a common word, at least in speaking. But then there are somethings books just can't prepare you for.