Frankfurt: Pirate Politics

March 2012
The Pirate Party in Frankfurt wanted you to know they "understood Frankfurt" by putting cute kittens on their posters. Yes, they're a legitimate political party in Germany and no, I have no idea who their marketing director is.

Stereotypes: Germans Love Pickles

I don't know if I posted this before, but this would be a 5,600 gram can of pickles in our office kitchen. That coffee pot it is sitting next to is an eight cup coffee pot...

Frankfurt: City Art

I forgot this post this earlier, but coming full circle I saw this man set himself up in one of the city fountains my first weekend in Frankfurt (October 2011) and my last weekend in Frankfurt (May 2012). His furniture and decorations were different every time, too. When I asked if he had a schedule, an exhibit, or a website, he just smiled and serenely said "no".

Kaya!

Birthday gift to myself, Kaya Yaner stand-up with my friend Sebastian.
January 29, 2012

USA! USA! USA!

My Asian bubble tea in Germany (it's like they know):

Flea Market

The weekly Frankfurt Flea Market, where you can get anything. No, really, anything.

Working in Frankfurt

My work commute!

Before the start of spring, there were mornings when I was out of the house at sunrise...sucks for me most of the time but some mornings are just beautiful.

Fall and winter on my streetcar tracks...

The view from the 25th floor in the fog...

The view without the fog...

The view in the snow...

Frankfurt at Night

Views of the factories are much more interesting at night...

Frankfurt Botanic Gardens

Frankfurt has a university biology program that runs a botanic garden, which anyone can visit for free. My friend T and I went to check it out and came again later for a free "mushroom hunting" seminar. The garden is huge and their free seminars are taught by professors at the local university. I highly recommend it if you're ever in Frankfurt during the spring, summer or early fall (it closes in winter).

 

 

 

I'm a gangsta'

So, as previously mentioned, I had my wisdom teeth pulled. Some people are blessed with no swelling and others are...well, not. Like me. Those others wake up the next day looking like a chipmunk that fell off the Jenny Craig bandwagon.

I had to go to the dentist today for a follow up examination, which meant taking public transportation for an hour while looking like those hamsters from those car commercials. To top off my amazing look, a blood vessel in my eye had ruptured a day before and I had dark circles under my eyes from not sleeping a whole lot. Before leaving the house, I put up my sweater hoodie. When I looked in the mirror, it appeared to hide my swollen face and as long as I looked down or straight ahead, my left eye looked almost totally normal. So I was fine, right? Wrong!

20 minutes into the trip I noticed people who choose not to sit next to me or give me quick, worried looks. I mean, I know I look bad, but I'm trying to keep it on the DL here people! But then I saw my reflection and realized what all the hub bub was about. By putting on my hoodie and avoiding eye contact, I had transformed myself into a hoodlum. I looked like I'd been in a fight because my left eye was bloody and the sweater hid the fact that my whole face was evenly swollen. Instead, I looked like one half was swollen (probably from a fight) and the dark circles looked like residual black eyes. Then I was avoiding eye contact and probably acting a little shady in my attempt to not freak people out. So for probably the first and only time in my life, people not only noticed me on the street, they were legitimately scared. Hah! I'm a gangsta'!


Then I took the hoodie off. No sense in adding needless extra stress to people's lives so early in the morning.

Intercultural Exchange

I got all four of my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday and had been telling everyone about the appointment for the past two weeks. I figured that the more people that knew about it, the more pressure I would have to actually follow through. This was something I've been putting off for ten years (yes, you read that right) and in an ideal situation I would just "oversleep" and rescheduled the appointment for ten past never. Well long story short, I look like a chipmunk now (and no, there will be no pictures!), but it's done.


What I found so interesting, though, was the responses from different people to my upcoming ordeal. I will make the same statement I always do: the following is a generalization! Not every single person responded exactly the same way, just the vast majority...

The Americans I told came out with, "That sucks, but don't worry, it's never as bad as they say" and then regaled me with stories of miraculous, painless recoveries. Germans on the other hand, immediately started talking about some nightmare situation regarding broken jaws and stitches gone wrong. I was beginning to wonder if all Germans knew the exact same person who had this gory operation and all Americans knew the exact same person who bounded out of the operation room and immediately had pizza and hamburgers for dinner.

Of course, in reality most cases end up in the middle. It sucks, it hurts, but it's relatively uncomplicated and over soon enough. I don't find either approach right or wrong, but it's one of those moments where you realize that you share more with your fellow citizens than you realize. I am not on the same page as all Americans, nor do we always understand each other, but I can't deny that I share certain personality traits with millions of people I've never met simply as a result of being born and raised in America. This doesn't mean I can't integrate successfully into other cultures, it just means I will always have some things about me that are inherently American (or Turkish).

On a side note, the German approach was encapsulated perfectly in the little model train town display at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. There is an adorable model train riding around a cute city, with little people waving out of their apartment windows or sipping coffee in a cafe. And right in the middle of this idyllic setting is a little accident, with a mini-fire truck and paramedics pushing a person in a stretcher towards a mini-ambulance.

Coffee

There is a coffee shop in downtown Frankfurt that I always see with a line out the door whenever I go by. BUT, lines mean waiting and I hate waiting. Plus it's just coffee, right? I could not be more wrong.

I went in a few weeks ago and realized that this store deals in the legal version of crack.

I have never enjoyed a cup of coffee so much, nor been so wired from it. If anyone is looking for some really fantastic coffee (or cocoa) in Frankfurt, it's worth the wait.

Wacker's Cafe
http://www.wackers-kaffee.de/

Playing Crazy

A few weeks ago there was a Japanese culture week in Frankfurt and I went during my lunch break. The school that choreographed the fight scenes in Kill Bill put on an awesome performance, including a Keystone Cops-style skit where two men were chasing each other and fighting over a package. It was absolutely hilarious!

*However* I wasn't with anyone and apparently laughing hysterically in public when your friends aren't around is an invitation to crazy old men. No less than three shriveled, red-faced, white-haired old men stopped really close to me and stared, grinned, and nodded at me during the performance. Note to self: watch comedy shows with at least one other person.

Nuclear Energy

I was woken up by my neighbors this morning to be informed that I should turn my patio lights off. Apparently the other neighbors were complaining that having three lights on for a few days was "making it difficult to leave nuclear energy."

Ahhh Germany.

Chanterelles

Chanterelles are beloved in Germany and when they're in season, the markets are exploding with them. My California upbringing means I love light, simple food, citrus, and wine. So the below recipe was a perfect combo. This is also an excellent substitute for mussels/clams (and easier to clean!).

The picture is from Martha Stewart, the recipe is from Epicurious.com.

Watercress Orange Salad

After failing to keep New Year's Resolutions for more than a few months and then giving up on them altogether for a few years, I've decided I need a new approach to life. We make New Year's resolutions because there are always things in our lives that we feel we could do better, or differently. But trying to keep a resolution for a year is impossible. The time frame is too long and we get bored, or forget, or can't remember why we thought the resolution was important in the first place. So I've decided to start smaller. I am setting goals that I want to achieve in 30 days. At the end of the 30 days I can keep going or I can stop, it doesn't matter. What matters is sticking to something for just a month - a small, manageable period of time.

Which leads me to question of what my first goals should be. After reading Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" (a post on that coming soon!) and working on sustainability within a large company, I have been asking myself a lot of questions about my own activities. How can I work to make a company more sustainable when some of my own activities are not sustainable? How can I continue to eat meat when I know it contributes to climate change, hunger, global pandemics, and human rights abuses? There is always a need to balance what you should do with what you feasibly can do, but if I'm brutally honest with myself, I haven't even been doing a lot of what I could do relatively easily. The arguments about not having enough time or money to make those changes are just arguments - they're not reality. And the arguments that one person can't make a difference is also ridiculous. Ten years ago, asking for a vegetarian meal at a restaurant gave me funny looks. Today, I can open a menu and go straight to the specially-designated "vegetarian entrees". That was because millions of individuals made the decision to become a vegetarian and the markets responded. Now there is a need for consumers to say they want really sustainable products, not just greenwashed marketing, and I intend to be one (of the millions) who makes that demand.

So, my November goals are about changing the way I consume food.

November 2011
Month 1, Goals 1-3
1. Go back to being a complete vegetarian (no fish, no poultry, no meat)
2. Buy in-season produce, locally where possible
3. Buy groceries that have at least one of the legitimate "bio" labels

Germany and the European Union together actually have 10+ bio labels, but not all of them have an actual positive impact on environmental or social issues. I did some research and identified six that were not simply exercises in greenwashing and am basing my purchases on them. [For those of you living in the U.S., the "organic", "natural", "cage-free", and "free-range" labels have virtually no meaning whatsoever thanks to the USDA's conflicting mandate to protect consumers AND producers....If you're trying to make more conscious decisions, you'll need to find local third-party verifiers in your individual states. http://www.eco-farm.org/ is a good place to start looking.]

I also found an awesome calendar of seasonal fruits, nuts, and vegetables in Europe that not only identifies what's in season, but labels what is likely to be grown within Europe and what is likely to be imported. I also located two specific farmer's markets in Frankfurt that only include farmers/cheese producers from the state of Hessen. In reality, many of these farmers also purchase goods from other distributors and sell those products, too (for example, there is no way the current abundance of persimmons came from Germany...). I try to counteract that risk by checking the produce I'm interested in against my seasonal, European calendar.

The outcome after two weeks? A whole new repertoire of recipes, a healthier diet, and the knowledge that what I'm eating is sustainable for future generations.The goal timeline is for only 30 days, but it's already become apparent that this change is cheap and easy, so I'll probably stick to it in the long-run, too.

I found the recipe below while looking for something to do with my seasonal and locally-grown watercress. The picture and the recipe come from Food Republic, a treasure trove of recipes from a "Canadimerican" couple living in California (http://foodrepublik.com/).

I also added pumpkin seeds and radishes (also in season!), which complemented the rest of the salad quite well.

By the way, I *love* honey mustard but spend tons of cash testing out sub-par honey mustard dressing at the supermarket. This recipe is amazing and ridiculously simple to make, ending my search for the perfect dressing!

Instant Noodles

The plus side of Instant Noodles is that you can make them in your hotel room and have a meal for 1.25 instead of 10.00.

The down side is not being able to read Asian languages and ending up with their instant rendition of sweet n' spicy sour cabbage shrimp soup. Or something like that.

Frankfurt Pictures

Gewalt im Strassenverkehr

The district in Frankfurt where I stayed was in the middle between the Red Light District and the Financial District, close to the Central Train Station (Hauptbahnhof). It was also the first place in Germany that I witnessed a serious act of aggression, something I don’t really expect from the publicly reserved Germans. As I was leaving my hotel to head back to the Hauptbahnhof, I walked by a street market that was in the process of setting up. The street had been blocked off to cars but a man on a motorcycle, with a woman behind him, had decided the regular transportation laws did not apply to him (as motorcyclists are prone to do…). One of the vendors got into the street and stopped in front of the motorcyclist, telling him that he was not allowed to drive in the street. A yelling fight ensued where the vendor demanded he walk his motorcycle and the motorcyclist demanded that the vendor get out of his way. Suddenly the motorcyclist moved to the side in an attempt to drive around the vendor, and the vendor ran in front of him again. The motorcyclist kept going anyway and ran into the vendor without stopping! He pushed the vendor back several feet with his bike and it was shocking for me that the cyclist would be so willing to hit someone just to avoid pushing his bike the distance of one block. After that the woman got off the bike and the biker went off on his own with the vendor chasing after him and trying to take a picture of his license plate. *Literally* the craziest road rage I’ve ever seen – and I’ve been in and around traffic all over Istanbul and Los Angeles…

Ich mag Zucker soooooo gern...

I traveled to Frankfurt for a couple of days to formalize one of my work stages, and while I was there I had an extra hour of time to walk around the area by my hotel. Around a fountain a small fair had set up with a crepe stand, flavored ice, a carousal, etc. Right as I walked by, two small children had just received their crepes from their father, who was in the process of paying. The older child, a boy, took a bite and then just as he pulled it away from his mouth, “plat!” the crepe fell on the ground. The younger child, a girl, had also taken a bite at this point. When she saw her brother’s crepe fall, she paused a quick moment and then with a mighty “plat!” dropped hers, too. Distracted by the falling of her brother’s crepe, she had failed to pay attention to her own.  The two kids looked at each other and then furtively looked over to their father with intense fear on their faces. When they realized he was still busy with the crepe lady, they hurriedly picked up their crepes, dusted them off and placed them back on their napkins. As their father turned around, the children were happily munching away and watching the carousel horses go round and round as if nothing had happened...