Not so recent pictures

Finally I spent the time to upload pictures from my camera. I hadn't uploaded any pictures in a long time so these are a bit random. Most of it is food and drinks from our recent holidays.

 I FOUND A PALE ALE IN GERMANY!!! LIMITED TIME ONLY. It wasn't that great of a pale ale by comparison to some stuff in the US, but it had the right flavor and was perfect with the Thanksgiving dinner.

I went to a different grocery store and was pleasantly surprised with the new selection! I didn't like the 2 in the middle very much, too light and wheaty and Bavarian. The ones on the sides were good, especially the one on the right. Grevensteiner is now my new fav

Here is a glimpse of our Thanksgiving dinner. We had chicken instead of turkey, and it rocked! Brining is the only way to my meat-heart.

And for dessert we tried to emulate my favorite breakfast from Mom, the cream cheese cherry tarts. These got a little out of hand...hah! Seriously though they were gigantic and exploded everywhere.

For Erika's birthday we went to the Christmas market and ate bratwurst

And Langos! Can even see the steam (think fried bread with herbally sour cream on top)

Obligatory selfie

And dessert at home. I tried making French silk pie but it didn't turn out quite right. Not having quite the same ingredients as back home was the culprit of the mediocre dessert. I ended up eating most of it. We had just gotten back from the Christmas market and my camera lens had fogged up too.

For our anniversary we went to an American steak house and got a buffet of ribs and wings and other goodies. Food was awesome and never ending and I really like this picture except for the stupid Confederate flag in the background.  Some things just don't mean the same...

A WBS Joke

I want to start off this post with a joke: What do you get, when you put a Ghanaian man, in a sushi restaurant kitchen, in the middle of Germany?

A: A lot of strange looks.

Maybe you don't get the joke, but that's okay, it's because you don't know my classmate and friend, Anderson. He is from Ghana and recently started working sushi restaurant to make some money on the side of classes. I heard he was doing pretty well there and I asked him how he got a job in a sushi restaurant, and how he likes it. He told me that it's okay, but he gets a lot of strange looks. Which could be expected I guess, considering sushi and Africa do not usually meet, even less so in Erfurt, Germany.  But we should know better by now, there are so many immigrants working all over the world, and working in a kitchen for low wages is probably one of the most common occupations for migrant workers. It's just how The Spice is a Thai restaurant with a fully Mexican kitchen staff in central Iowa. It's not going to be reversing anytime soon either, just gotta get used to it.
I found Anderson's situation and his comments about his job quite funny. He is pretty stoic though, it won't get under his skin.

I think that's such a great thing about this school. For all the difficulties of international students, the language barriers, adjusting to different cultures, work ethics, and trouble of sharing quality jokes with each other, there is a completely different style of comedy that pops up every now and then that really is quite funny. It's a bit challenging to describe what kind of humor it is; it's kind of a surprise response, mixed with realistic-irony and a bit of humility. I think the Anderson case is a perfect example. He knows his situation, that he is doubly an outsider (an outsider squared?). But that is what allows him to see himself from another position, that he is twice removed from expectation.

That is probably the best and simplest example I can think of. But there are tidbits of this comedy everywhere. Perhaps another example came from a classroom example, where our professor told asked us to imagine we just became prime minister of Rwanda, shortly after the violence in 1996 wound down. He picked on a classmate from Jordan/UAE to answer the question and the response surprised me: "I would build more prisons". And right next to me, another classmate from Egypt muttered to me "That is such a typical Arab response". To that I had to laugh. There wasn't malice in either persons' comments, it wasn't religiously charged or anything, it was just a self-deprecating recognition of a character flaw.