Back to life

We are finally settled back into life in Hamburg after our trip, and I must say it's nice to be back. I was curious to see how we fared on our first foray back "home." I was afraid I would be so happy to be someplace familiar that I would dread returning to Hamburg where we don't know many people and which we're really only beginning to understand.

It's confusing, I tell you. Hamburg definitely started to feel like home this fall, at least for me. Zoli was on the boat longer than he was continuously in Hamburg, but even he started to settle in...right before we got on an airplane and *poof* were back in a country where we can understand the telemarketers and conversations on the subway, where the stores are open on Sundays and where I can buy real vanilla extract in any grocery store. I was worried that being back in the US would make me miss those things, and how easy everything is when you speak the language and understand how the system works.

On our flights to the states we were given some evidence of how far we've progressed in the few months we've been here. Since we were flying Swiss Air, all the announcements were in German, French and English and it was gratifying to realize how much German we understand now compared with when we left the US in September. We were also mysteriously upgraded to business class for the transatlantic portion of our flight, which made the trip back that much nicer.

The most confusing/amusing part of the trip was when one of the flight attendants decided that French was my preferred language, forcing me to resuscitate my very paltry French. It made my brain hurt.

One of the first things I noticed when we arrived in the US was how loud it was - not that Hamburg is quiet, but it's easy to tune out stray conversations when you only have a slight chance of understanding them. At the baggage claim in Logan I was silently fuming at a group of college students home from their year abroad in Italy because they were having an annoying conversation that I didn't want to hear. (Apparently being upgraded doesn't make me less testy after a long flight.)


As for the rest of our trip, we were lucky to get all the good parts of snow (gorgeousness) with none of the bad parts (travel delays). Given that we stayed in five different places up and down the eastern seaboard and we traveled over 1000 miles while in the US we were very lucky. Every place we visited involved excellent company, delicious food and lots of fun. I had Rouladen and Klöse for the first time at our Christmas Eve dinner (a German in attendance declared it the most traditional German Christmas meal she'd ever had). At other meals we had fabulous Boeuf Bourguignon and lobster hand-carried from Maine, as well as delicious Chinese dumplings, chocolate-dipped peanut butter balls, fondue (made with Appenzeller and Beaufort cheeses)...and I'm sure there's more that I can't remember. All in all it was a great trip.


But ultimately I was very happy, itching even, to come back to Hamburg. I wasn't sure it would feel like we were actually coming home since we were leaving so much that is more familiar, but it did and I was pleased.

Things are a little different now as last week I started in the lab full time, so I don't have as much time to wander around and explore the city or to plan dinner. (Nor do I have as much time to eat breakfast in my pajamas at 10 am while checking my email and reading the news.) We're still getting reacquainted with the two-people-working thing so there hasn't been much in the way of exciting cooking happening. We're back to reliable, easy meals for a little while. Tonight I think I'm going to make this, assuming I can find shrimp (Garnele) somewhere. Tomorrow we're both coming home early to watch the inauguration - we bought some little Wurst that we were instructed to cook in either Grünkohl or Sauerkraut, but only for 10 minutes because they don't have much fat in them (hah!). Who are we to disregard that? Zoli's buying the kale today.