Living in Tübingen Means FOOD

So in the past few weeks my language course has begun and Catie and I have been busy learning German for six hours each day. We got placed in the highest of the four language sections, so I'm definitely learning nuances of the language that I've never learned. Learning grammar isn't quite the same without a teacher like my teacher in Regensburg, Sepp, who was a wonderful person and teacher (and brought us chocolate every day), but I'm making do. Our teachers are funny and nice, and the people in our class all seem great. Our class is divided into three hours of Unterricht, in which we leran grammar and vocabulary, and then an hour and a half after lunch that is called Tutorium. This is taught by students at the university, and is mostly a discussion of various themes relavent to life in Germany.

Even with class most of the day, we have found plenty of fun things to do. Right before the class started, Catie and I took a day-trip to Mainz with a fellow Baden-Württemberg-Exchanger, so that we could go to the Gutenberg Museum, which is basically just floors and floors of beautiful old books. The day started off well, with my first Butterbrezel since arriving in Germany! For those of you who don't know, a Butterbrezel is a pretzel, that is cut in half and smeared with butter. It is one of the most delicious things in the entire world, and I have unfortunately (for my waistline) discovered that the cafeteria across from where we have class has these in both pretzel and pretzel-roll form every day.

The cheapest way to get from Tübingen to Mainz is to buy two Länder tickets. Länder tickets in Germany are a way for up to five people to travel anywhere within one state, aka Bundesland, for an entire day for only 26-30 euros in total. This meant that the three of us could get to Mainz and back for twenty euros each, which is much less than the 80 or so it would have cost, even with our Bahncards that give us half off of every train journey. The only downside to Länder tickets, however, is that one can only ride on the regional trains, which tend to move more slowly and take more round-about routes. We've discovered that Tübingen is somewhat out of the way on the train routes, meaning that getting anywhere takes longer on the train than one would expect, so we decided that the four to four and a half hours we would spend each way on the train was worth the better price, when taking the fast trains would still take around three hours (Mainz is only a little more than two hours away by car). Using this ticket, however, meant changing trains at least three times on each trip. Hence we spent a lot of time in train stations. We discovered an amusing stall in Stuttgart where one could buy Lederhosen and Dirndl for both themselves and their children, which seemed out of place. I feel like no German would ever buy these clothes at a train station, as they are expensive and not something you want to fall apart easily, so I guess this stall catered towards rich tourists bringing their kids to Oktoberfest? In Heidelberg we bought plenty of Rittersport to stock up for the rest of the journey.

Mainz itself has a very nice Altstadt, so we walked around and got lunch at a café before going to the museum. I ate what are essentially the German version of ravioli, which are called Maultaschen, and in this case were filled with seasonal vegetables and covered in a creamy/buttery sauce. YUM.

Some photos of the Altstadt in Mainz

Maultaschen:

The museum itself was incredible. I love old books more than almost anything else in the world (except for maybe delicious food), so I had so much fun looking through everything they had on display. You can learn so much from an old book, from the physical aspects such as what it's printed on, how it's printed, and what language it's printed in, to what is being written about and the way these topics are approached.

One of Martin Luther's Publications

Original Gutenberg Bibles

We finished up our day with some delightful coffee and cake at another café, before heading home on our last four hour journey. I had a delicious Johanesbeer cake, with an interesting meringue-type whipped cream topping.

Last weekend there was a Umbrian-Provencal Market, where tradesmen from Tübingen, Aix-en-Provence, France, and Perugia, Italy all came together to share their wares. Apparently these three towns are essentially sister towns. There were stalls full of beautiful jewelry, paintings, and wooden crafts, as well as delicious food and wine. The streets were packed, no matter what time of day you went, and it was really fun to watch the middle-aged inhabitants of Tübingen out and about. Most of the population is comprised of students, and most of the students aren't here yet because the semester doesn't start until October. Thus, seeing the streets packed at night was different from what I've seen so far, and was really pleasant.

A street in Tübingen transformed into a forest by the Market 

The Market at Night

Delicious French pockets filled with sweet or savory filling

Artichoke Flowers! 

We bought some of these artichokes (without the flowers of course), and made an incredibly delicious meal that was complemented by these beauties.

As a different sort of incredibly delicious food, Catie and I purchased Eisbechers the other day. An Eisbecher is a large sundae-sized dish of assorted gelato flavors, combined with fruit or chocolate and candy. They are some of the most delicious things one can eat in Germany, and we treated ourselves to them after our horrible day of bureaucracy. Nothing is worse than German bureaucracy, as no office is open later than lunchtime, and Germans seem to adore having you fill out forms and pay fees. Catie and I felt like we were on America's Next Top Model, in the episode where they send them on go-sees. Our entire program was out and about in pairs or small groups, all trying to go to the same locations before the deadline when the last office closed at 11:30. So to reward ourselves for successfully having enrolled in the university and as a citizen of the town, we ate delicious mounds of ice cream. I got a wild berry themed Becher, which is something else I feel is special about Germany. I love the currents and sour cherries that are featured in desserts here, as their tartness means that fewer desserts are overly sweet. The sweet gelato and the tart berries perfectly complemented one another.

Catie's Rocher-Becher (Hazelnut and Chocolate)

My Wildbeeren-Becher (Wildberries)

As part of our language program they take us to two places - one is a little town next to Tübingen called Bebenhausen, and one is the Bodensee. Tomorrow we are going to the Bodensee, and on Tuesday we hiked for about 45 minutes to get to Bebenhausen. There is a beautiful monastery there, which was built in the middle ages. We walked around the monastery, and then went to a café where the woman informed us that we could have our first apple strudel of fall (clearly cafés and dessert is becoming a theme).

The view of Bebenhausen on the path from Tübingen

 Inside the monastery:

Apple strudel at the cafe

The last exciting thing to happen in Germany recently was my birthday! I learned a lot about German birthday traditions, beginning with the fact that birthdays here are a really big deal. My housemate came into my room that morning, having presumably seen my birthday on facebook, and gave me a hug and wished me a happy birthday, while apologizing for not having baked me a cake or something! With my birthday being on a Wednesday and not having been here for that long, I had figured it would be a pretty low-key day, and I just thought it was so sweet that my housemate felt she could have taken time out of her busy schedule to make something for her brand-new housemate's birthday. When I went to class, my teacher came over and gave me a large hug, as well as a set of flowers she had picked from her garden. Two of our tutors later came up to me very excitedly to also hug me and say happy birthday.

With the flowers from my teacher. One of them is a giant four-leaf clover!

After giving me the little bouquet, my teacher gave me some post-it notes as a practical present, and lit a candle that proceeded to burn throughout the class. She also had brought in coffee and tea and treats from a bakery so we could have a mini-party for me and another girl in my class who had her birthday right before the course started. It was so sweet! I was also introduced to another new tradition, which is where the birthday person sits in a chair and everyone says "hoch sollst du leben, hoch sollst du leben, drei mal hoch. eins, zwei, drei...," before two people lift you into the air three times. "Hoch" means high or tall, hence the lifting, and the phrase essentially wishes you a good life and lifts you in the air three times so that you will have three times as "high" a life. It's very sweet, but because my teacher didn't warn my classmates about what they were going to have to do, I was laughing so hard that I looked like I was crying.

The people lifting Sinead had a little more warning

After our celebration in class, I spent the rest of my birthday wandering around with some friends in the beautiful late-summer day that had appeared. The weather here is chillier than in the U.S., so every morning when we get up it's around 45 degrees or so. By midday it's often in the 50s or  60s, but it got up to 70 for my birthday. I grabbed a drink and then dinner with my friend Sinead, before Catie met us and we went to this incredibly cool cocktail bar, named one of the best 100 in Germany. It was in a really interesting old building, that had clearly been converted from some old, high-ceilinged workplace - we guessed maybe it used to be a brewery or winery. They have a sixty page cocktail menu, many of which were invented by the bartenders there. So all in all, a pretty good birthday! Had it not been a Wednesday I might have gone out dancing or something, but this was a pretty perfect way to spend the night. Plus, there will be plenty of time for dancing - Catie and I got home at 5am last Saturday night, so clearly there's no shortage of Erasmus fun times already.

The Cocktail Bar:

 Birthday Drinks! 

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever

As a sophomore in college, my friend Allison introduced me to the very best chocolate chip cookies I had ever had. As a junior in college, I was in the middle of making those cookies, when I realized I only had one teaspoon of vanilla extract, rather than the two the recipe called for. What to do? Add a teaspoon of almond extract! And hence, these cookies were born. With just a hint of almond flavor, these cookies maintain the chocolate chip cookie taste, while causing everyone to ask just what that thing is that makes them stand out from every other chocolate chip cookie they've had. The texture is exactly what a chocolate chip cookie should be - crisp on the outside but chewy on the inside. These cookies also have the rare attribute of being as good, if not better, once they've cooled. If stored in an airtight container, they can last for many days without losing their chewiness. As my friend once put it, these are exactly the cookies you dream of your mother making.

Ingredients:

2 cups, 2 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

12 tablespoons unsalted butter (melted and cooled until warm)

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon almond extract

1 to 2 cups chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Combine the dry ingredients (flour, salt, and baking soda) in a medium bowl. In a large bowl add the melted butter and the white and brown sugar, and mix well. Add the egg and egg yolk, and mix well again. Add both extracts, and mix for a final time.

Add 1/3 dry ingredients to the wet, stirring until completely combined. Continue with the rest of the dry ingredients, in two more sections. Once the dry ingredients are thoroughly mixed into the wet, add the chocolate chips. Roll into small balls and bake for 8-10 minutes. These cookies are done once cracks begin to appear on their surface, so watch them carefully. If you take them out right as these cracks appear, they will have the perfect consistency. Don't worry if they don't seem fully done, they will finish cooking while they cool.

Cool on the sheet for 3-5 minutes, before transferring to a cooling rack.

Makes about 3 dozen cookies.

To make these cookies as traditional chocolate chip cookies, simply replace the teaspoon of almond extract with a second teaspoon of vanilla extract. They will still most likely be the best chocolate chip cookies you have ever had.

I made these last night for an international dinner in Germany, where each person was supposed to bring something from their homeland. While they did not turn out quite as perfectly as they usually do (conversions are a nightmare), I made five dozen cookies and every one was gone.

Crème Fraîche Bars

For my first baking adventure in Germany I decided to look for something simple. I didn't know my oven yet, nor did I want to have to spend a lot of money on baking pans and utensils for my pathetically bare kitchen. I got two German baking books out of the public library, because I already have a few in the United States and didn't want to buy more that I would then have to bring home. I highly recommend this if you are living in a new place for a lengthly, but possibly not permanent, period of time. I know that there are a million recipes online, and I use them constantly myself, but there's something I do love about a recipe book. Especially for European recipes, as I don't know much about the European cooking/baking blog community. Something to discover, I guess!

Anyway, I found these bars listed as "einfach" in my Dr. Oetker "Grund Backbuch," or Basic Baking Book, meaning that they should be "easy." The other book that I got out of the library (Das Grosse GU Familien Backbuch, or The Large GU Family Bakebook) is similarly helpful, as it has two tables of contents. The first tells you what type of dessert is contained in each chapter, and the second is divided into categories such as "when it should go especially quickly," "when it should be especially cheap," and "when it should be easy to transport." How helpful! It also lists what fruits are in season when, and whether it is particularly important to bake with that fruit when it is fresh, rather than frozen. On top of each recipe it also helpfully tells you how quickly it bakes, how much time it takes to prepare, and how pricey it is - so useful! As is probably clear, I'm pretty obsessed with these two books.

To make my bars, the first thing I needed was something that I've needed for a long time - a way to measure in grams rather than american cups. Because I'm only here for a year, I don't want to invest in a food scale, so I found a very handy device at Kaufland that lets you measure flour, sugar, oil, cocoa, and liquid by reading the correct scale on the side.

Using this device it was pretty easy to make these delicious bars. I'll give the recipe below, with some of my own photos. The translation is my own, so I apologize if it's a little awkward.

*One more note is that there are certain baking items available in Germany that are complicated to translate into American recipes. I encountered these problems first when trying to make German recipes at home. This recipe calls for a package of vanilla-sugar, which can be substituted for by adding a little more sugar and a little vanilla extract. It also calls for a package of baking powder, which is 15 grams, and a package of lemon zest, which is 6 grams of zest, but that includes some lemon aroma and the kind of sugar used in preserving fruits. I would just add the zest of a small lemon and a pinch of sugar, but you can experiment depending on how much lemon flavor you like. Apparently Germans prefer to use these little packages rather than measuring out the substance themselves, something which became a problem when I attempted to make The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever. That recipe calls for baking soda, which is not often used for anything other than household tasks, and used to be sold only in pharmacies. After some googling, I discovered that this packet called "Natron" was actually baking soda, and so was able to (mostly) successfully make the cookies.

 

I digress, however. Without further ado:

Crème Fraîche Becherkuchen

Ingredients:

450g Crème Fraîche

125g Butter

300g Sugar

1 Package Vanilla-Sugar

300g Flour

1 Package Baking Powder
1 Package Fine Lemon Zest
3 Eggs
100g sliced almonds
50g Semi-Sweet Baking Chocolate
1 tsp Oil

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

For the coating, put 150g of Crème Fraîche in a small pot, with the butter, 150g of sugar, and the vanilla sugar. Turn the burner to low heat, and melt these ingredients together. When all is combined, remove the pot from the heat.

For the dough, sift the flour and the backing powder, and mix them with the remaining sugar and the lemon zest. Add the eggs and the remaining Crème Fraîche. Mix well, until the ingredients are thoroughly combined. Pour the dough into a greased pan, 30 x 40 cm, and smooth the top. Put this into the oven for 10 minutes.

Take the dough out of the oven, and smooth the coating over it. Sprinkle the almonds on top, and put back in the oven for another 15 minutes.

Remove and let cool. When cool, melt the chocolate with the oil, and sprinkle it over the almonds. Let cool until the chocolate is hardened, and then enjoy!

Explorations

So after having been in Tübingen for almost a week, I feel I've had time to explore most of the city. There are still plenty of places I haven't been, but without a language course or anything to do during the day, Catie and I have done a lot of exploring. Our neighborhood is really nice, and about a ten minute walk from the city center. Just up our road a little way is a small tributary of the Neckar, that is shallow and slow-moving. People picnic there and wade in the rocky riverbed, and it's already a favorite place for me to go and read.

When you walk into town from where I live, the first thing you encounter is the Neckar river and the Neckarbrücke. People punt along the river, and there are various kinds of boats you can rent. We saw someone setting up food in one of the boats, and learned that you can have a romantic, candlelit dinner, while being punted down the river. How perfect! Here are some photos of the Neckar:

This island park runs between the two sides of the Neckar 

Catie and I also walked up to the castle, once on purpose and once accidentally. The view up there is really nice, and as the castle houses the classical archaeology department, Catie was exceptionally happy. There is also a place for archery practice in the back, which I think is great. Tübingen really keeps its medieval traditions alive. There are many fraternities here, none of which are like fraternities in the U.S. They are much more like secret societies, and they have their own, castle-like buildings, and date from the middle ages. My housemate spent a wild night in one of their buildings, with a shirtless professor and crates of beer. Many of them seem to involve activities like fencing and archery, keeping alive this idea of a medieval university. You can see some of their buildings marked with crossed swords or the like.

Views from the Castle:

One thing I like about Tübingen is that is has a more youthful feel in many ways than Regensburg. I consistently told people thinking about going abroad to Regensburg about how young the city was, with all of the students and nightclubs and cafes. But the feel here in Tübingen is really different. The first thing is the graffiti that is all around the city. I love this, because a lot of it is clever or political, and it really gives a flavor to the city. My favorite is right outside our building, where it says "Organsiert Euch" with an anarchist symbol through the "A." This phrase means something along the lines of "organize yourselves" in English, making the anarchist symbol particularly amusing.

I've also found these few gems:

This is not common in Germany

Cartoon pope

I've also noticed more diversity in Tübingen than in Regensburg. Germany has an incredibly homogeneous population, and has had many issues with immigration in the past few decades along with the rest of Europe. However Regensburg was most certainly the least diverse place I have ever lived, and I'm from a small suburban town in New England. The streets near ours seem to house many Turkish families, which while relatively common in Germany, was not so common in Regensburg. I've really enjoyed seeing more than the white catholics that I encountered in Bavaria, and it adds to the feeling I've gotten of the city in my first week in Tübingen. However, it is still Germany, meaning that there are many racial generalizations. One of my favorite things is how Germans group together all of Asia, commonly having "Asia Markets" or "Asian Food." There is a restaurant in Tübingen called "Asia Bambus," for example. A few of my other favorites:

!!!!

Aside from taking photos in inappropriate places (I found the "Orientalischer Lustfinger" in a bathroom at a bar and then was asked why I had run back out to get my camera to bring it into the bathroom), Catie and I have been eating a lot of delicious food and exploring the city. We've had multiple delicious breakfasts and been getting to know the people on our program.

An incredibly delicious rhubarb cake that cost only 50 cents because it was from the day before

Just part of an incredible breakfast, with many kinds of rolls and müsli and juice and coffee

My German housemate also appeared, and turns out to be great. She cooked dinner with my housemate Mike and myself, and we talked quite a bit about the differences between America and Germany. I've been having that conversation a lot, like last night when Catie and I met these two guys who came up to us when they heard us speaking American English. One is German, and one is Russian but has lived here for 13 years, and both are construction workers who dig holes to test dykes. The Russian spoke no English, so Catie and I spent the night having really interesting conversations with the two of them, all in German. We met up with them again this afternoon when they were done with work, and when their jobs take them back to Tübingen we're going to see them again. I hadn't ever spoken to working-class, non-student, Germans, and so it was really interesting to talk to them. It's fascinating what Germans assume about America. I find that they really can't believe how much we have to pay for, and so while they complain about their taxes, they're then shocked when we say children don't automatically have free health care.  Last night we were trying to explain how it can be too expensive to have children, and the two guys we were with could not truly grasp that the state doesn't provide families with what children need. I've also noticed a pervasive belief in the American dream and the possibility of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Alex, the guy from Russia, was telling me that if you work hard enough in America you can always get farther, and I had a really hard time convincing him that that wasn't always true. He kept saying things like, "if you need more money for your kids you just work more, because in America you just need to work hard to get far." It's hard to explain the complicated politics of such a large country to someone who doesn't really believe you when you say you can drive for six hours and stay within one state.

Tomorrow we are getting up really early to take a day-trip to Mainz. There is a museum of old books there, which I believe may be the closest thing I can imagine to heaven. We're going with one of the people on our program, who is a theology grad student from Yale. He also loves old books, so this should be fun! On Friday I get to meet the little boy that a friend of mine babysat for last year in Tübingen. I'm incredibly excited because she said he was a great kid, and I'm excited to get to play with a toddler. And when I spoke to his father on the phone, he was incredibly nice and helpful. It's crazy, but I feel like I'm actually starting a life here.