The Best Friday Ever

Hello everybody!

So I have had pretty much the best two days ever.  Thursday I had a perfect perfect jumping lesson on the crazy mare, and a singing lesson with the new lady.  She's nice, even though she makes me sing old-lady Italian arias from the seventeenth century.  She has probably never seen a musical.

Then yesterday started out with me being so nervous about my test results coming out in the afternoon, I forgot I knew how to steam rice, resulting in a stick, tasteless, highly disgusting rice mush that Host Mom graciously ate with her burnt fish, because she's awesome like that.  Then County Cork wound up spontaneously having time to kill before his 6 PM train to the airport, so I met up with him in the center of town.  About half an hour into coffee and hot chocolate, he said, "Is everything okay?  It seems like you're thinking really hard about something."  I said, "To be completely honest, my giant language test results come out in twenty-three minutes, and I'm panicking.  Do you want to go to the library with me and check out my grades?"  So that's what we did!

Aaaaaaaand...I PASSED!  Not only did I pass, I passed at the highest level (DSH-3) with the third-highest grade out of everybody!  I scored really high on everything, had almost a perfect score on reading comprehension, and failed at grammar miserably, and by miserably, I mean out of 100 points, I got 55.  But I scored so high in everything else, it was kind of okay.  Clearly my grammar is not a shambles, because you require good grammar to complete all the other sections, I'm just terrible at rewriting arbitrary sentences for no reason.  And just in case you don't believe me when I say this test was DAMN MEGA HARD, I did some math:

Out of 224 participants:

11 (including me) scored at a DSH-3 level
44 scored a DSH-2, which is the next highest level and the minimum you need to get into university.
66 scored a DSH-1, which is basically useless.
123 failed.

So when you combine all the fails with all the DSH-1s (which might as well be fails, seeing as they're basically useless), three-quarters of the participants didn't pass.

I'll take your 24,5% success rate, and I will PUNCH IT IN IT'S FACE.

Now on to the spoken part on Wednesday, and then I am done with the godforsaken test, unless I fail the verbal and have to retake everything!  YAY.

Anyway.  After I was done jumping up and down and squeaking over my test results, County Cork and I hit up the castle, which is free on Fridays, and therefore the only way you would catch me in the boring-ass museum.  We ran around like morons, making fun of the people in the portraits, playing with all the interactive children's exhibits, and inciting the ire of the museum staff, who coldly informed us that the museum insurance would not cover the damage we inflicted upon ourselves if we continued to use the floor-protecting slipper shoes they make you wear as a chance at sliding races.

After I put the boy on the train, I met up with Latvian Friend, Czech Girl, and her boyfriend, to barhop in Celle.  Hilarity ensues.  I got made fun of mercilessly because I lose the ability to speak English when I drink.

New favorite song!  This is from James Vincent McMorrow, who a) has a super hero name, and b) is Irish.  Win.

Have a great weekend all!

Bad American Parenting!

I love my host parents, I really do.  They are warm-hearted, kind individuals, who pay for my health insurance, put candy from St. Nikolaus in my hot-pink stripper heels, occasionally let me drive their car, and actually like me.  But, for better of for worse, they've got a parenting style that's very...special.  They have their beliefs that they stick to, they want their child to be raised in a certain way, and they eat organic, all of which is perfectly fine.  But they're also really fond of telling me exactly where my parents fucked up raising me, and how I'm still suffering today from their parenting errors.  And it's so mind-numbingly hilarious, I can't even be offended.  Instead, I just document it. Welcome to my (long overdue) New Occasional Series, Bad American Parenting (BAP)!

Goals: 
--Make you aware of bad parenting practices.
--Demonstrate through example how you can avoid said bad parenting practices.
--Spare your children the horrors my parents inflicted on me, which have scarred me for life and made me virtually incapable of functioning in normal society.  Thanks, Mom and Dad.  Thanks.

Round 1

The scene: Host Mom and I eating lunch together.

Host Mom:  Oh, I nearly forgot!  The kids are getting dental check-ups at the kindergarten soon.
Me:  Wait...dentists go to the schools?  And give the kids their check-ups there?
Host Mom:  Of course.  And doctors do it too, that's where the kids get their vaccines.
Me:  Jesus!  The kids get shots in the school!
Host Mom:  Really not that big a deal, Tina.
Me:  Jesus.  I'm so glad I wasn't a German child, I'm terrified of needles and would have embarrassed myself in front of the whole school running away from the doctor and screaming.  I have legit panic attacks when it comes to all things medical, I get light-headed and can't see and throw up.
Host Mom:  That's because your mother socialized you poorly to the doctor.
Me:  I'm sorry, what?
Host Mom:  Had your mother done a better job of socializing you, that wouldn't happen.
Me:  Are you telling me I suffer from medical-induced panic attacks because I'm not well socialized?
Host Mom:  Yes.
Me:  Well then.


Round 2

The scene:  10 PM, sitting at the table with the host parents and family friends.  I am hungry and want a rice cake.

Me:  *sits down with rice cake smeared with peanut butter*
Family Friend:  Are you pregnant?
Me:  I'm sorry, what?
Family Friend:  Are you pregnant?
Me:  What is that supposed to mean.
Family Friend:  You're eating a rice cake with peanut butter on it.
Host Mom:  Don't worry, it's an American thing, Tina always eats weird things.
Me:  It's just a rice cake?  With peanut butter on it?
Family Friend:  You shouldn't eat at night,
Me:  I ate a slice of bread four hours ago, I'm hungry.
Host Dad:  No, really unhealthy is how the Americans always eat hot food at night.
Me:  For fuck's sake, I ate a slice of bread four hours ago.  I'm hungry.
Host Mom:  That's probably why you always stay up late, because you had hot dinners for so many years.  If your parents had fed you correctly, you wouldn't have this sleeping pattern.
Me:  Are you trying to tell me that my sleep schedule is the result of my parents putting something other than cold bread and cheese on the childhood dinner table?
Host Mom:  Yes.
Tina:  My rice cake and I are going upstairs now.

Round 2.5

The scene:  Same time, next evening.  The host parents have ordered pizza.

Me:  Ya'll realize you're eating a hot dinner, right?


Round 3

The scene:  Eating dinner with the host family

The background information:  On weekends, my host family likes to sit down at the table around 3 PM and drink tea, eat cake, and listen to music, for two hours. Unfortunately, at 3 PM in a German December, it's dark, so they light a candle. Unfortunately, sitting in the dark with only a single candle gives me a headache. Unfortunately, I am 23, American, and, after some forty-five minutes, capable of thinking of about seven million things I'd rather be doing than that.

Host Mom:  Potty training is so stupid.  Why do people do it?  If you just leave the kid long enough, they potty train themselves, but when adults try to do it, it turns the kid into nervous, anxious, wrecks.
Me:  I, along with everyone else I've ever known ever, was potty trained, and I turned out perfectly normal.
Host Dad:  Not really.  You're hyperactive.
Me:  I'm sorry, what?
Host Dad:  You're hyperactive.  You can't sit still with us for long periods of time and just enjoy the comfortable atmosphere.
Me:  ...Are you trying telling me that the reason my life is run at a slightly faster pace than yours has nothing to do with me being American, and everything to do with the fact that I was potty trained?
Host Dad:  Yes.
Me:  Wow.  Just...wow.


To recap:
I hate needles because my mom socialized me poorly.
I stay up late because my parents fed me hot food.
I run my life at a fast pace because my parents potty trained me.

Well, now you know.

Germany: Land where the people come to ridiculous conclusions.  Land where they're better at doing it than even me!

Shoe Fail, Hat Win.

Apparently there's a custom with a lowercase 'c' in Germany where the night of December 5th, you clean your shoes and leave them by the door so that somebody (Santa, Jesus, Hillary Clinton, I'm not clear on this point) can come by and put candy in them.  But I came home from the barn quite late, and wasn't in the mood to clean shoes.  So I decided to be smart about the process, and put out shoes that were already clean, thereby saving me labor, time, and the embarrassment of having sparkling-white Converse sneakers.  Practical thinking?  Check.  Practical shoes? Not so check.

Here's the shoe line-up.  I bet you have NO IDEA which ones are mine.

Well, depending on what appears in them tomorrow, I can probably guess who came by.  If I get a bible, it was probably Jesus.  If I get a Democratic presidental nomination, it was probably Hillary.  If the shoes are gone, then the mystery as to whether or not Santa is a drag queen has been solved.    

In other news, sometimes, when I'm bored on the internet, I look at my own stats. Sometimes, I even learn new and amazing things.  Such as that one person has found my blog through a search for "a biography kozzii spikey flower," two with "starbucks storage room," and one particularly amazing individual with the exceedingly eloquent, "german mother fuked and boys," which I daresay sounds like the pope's Google search for free porn.

In other other news, as much as I love my Swedish hat, it's not cutting it for long distance bike-riding, German wind is just too good at diving between the woven Swedish fibers and punching me in the face  So at the Christmas market yesterday I bought a new AMAZING hat, which looks like I skinned a mammoth and put it on my head.  Win.

I'm going to Portugal in a week and a half, and Claire is coming in TWENTY DAYS OH MY GOD I'M SO EXCITED.

New favorite song of the day!  I've kind of been on a Decemberists kick lately, which means I've spent most of today bee-bopping to this:

Me the Apple Juice Whore, and other Hamburg stories

HAMBURG!

Yesterday I took a 3 PM train to Hamburg, to meet up with Marina for the Johannes Strate concert.  But first, it was Christmas market time!  When Marina puts her pictures up, I am stealing them, but suffice to say, it was awesome.  I love love love the German Christmas season, because it has all of the Christmas minus the mass produced Hallmark gadgets imported from Vietnamese sweatshops.  Really, it's something to experience.  If you guys ever get the chance to check out a Christmas market in Germany, DO IT.  I drank hot chocolate, ate a fish sandwich, and argued with drunk guys who kept trying to tell me my Swedish hat isn't totally badass.  Good times!

Then, as we got off the U-Bahn on our way to the venue, we were met with something neither of us had ever encountered before: an entire police force standing at the top of the stairs, checking tickets as you walked out, and fining people for being black Tolkien riders left and right.  As you may remember from this post, Marina, Chris and I got caught without train tickets in Köln, but due to our foreign-ness, we walked (skipped) ashamedly (gaily) away, after we were collectively fined 40 Euros, and not each bitch-slapped individually with the fine.  Since then we have more or less learned our lessons, and I had purchased a ticket for this trip.  Unfortunately, I hadn't purchased enough ticket, and my ticket cost too little for the trip we had taken.  I almost had a heart attack out of principle.  When the guy said "I need your ID and forty euros," I pulled the foreign card like nobody's business, and was all "Oh, man, I tried to buy a ticket, but I misunderstood the machine!  Why am I so stupid!  Why is Fate such a fickle German mistress?  EVERYTHING IS SO HARD BECAUSE I AM FOREIGN AND SAD."  And that's how, instead of charging me forty euros, the police officer took me to the ticket machine and we bought the correct ticket together.

Being a foreigner.  Works every time.

And then it was time for the concert!  Johannes Strate has made a couple of appearances on this blog, mostly as the lead singer of Revolverheld, but now he's got a solo album out.  On top of being a super awesome musician, he also gives out wine to audience members, yells "What the FUCK" in English whenever he has tuning problems, and rocks Swedish hair.  Here, have a picture!

So other than the fact that I am buying his album, the concert was noteworthy because Marina and I were standing behind a mother/daughter tag team who looked like they were raping each other.  Not awkward or anything.

Afterwards, we hit up an Irish pub to get out of the cold and kill time before my 5 AM train back to Celle.  There, we made friends a French airline worker, who was superbly cool and assured me that the French do not hate you if you speak French at them.  In fact, they are highly appreciative.  He makes me want to go back to France, as long as I don't have to leave my french-mocking at the border. 

And then along came Drunk Old Guy (DOG?).  To be completely honest, it was my fault he sat next to us, because I offered him an empty chair at our table while he was standing there looking lost.  And I regretted it instantly, as he went on a slurred tirade about our inestimable beauty and his accounting job.  He looked to be about forty (and I had my fingers crossed he'd ask about our ages, just so I could say seventeen), but he acted like a sad drunk intern watching Apollo 13 blast off without him, and consoling himself later with the leftover fermented rocket fuel.  But I talked to him. Because I wanted an apple juice.  

Most whores work for such trivial things like money, drugs, or the temporary fantasy that they are not actually whores.  They get beaten by their pimps, a full Rolodex of STDs, and occasionally stabbed and thrown in the Delaware River.  I work for apple juice.  I was a twenty-minute verbal whore, pretending to be interested in DOG's accounting anecdotes, and acting like Marina had just said something very interesting requiring my attention in order to fend off the ask-out requests, all because I didn't feel like a) getting up to buy the apple juice, or b) buying the apple juice.  I'm sure it was a very interesting conversation we had, but I can't actually say, because while drinking apple juice, I can tune out everything.

At 3 AM we finally made our way over to the train station, where I attempted to get two hours of sleep next to a guy with a broken nose.  By the time I finally got home at 7.30 in the morning, I was operating under a warped sense of reality, brought on by a complete lack of sleep.  In my blurry, confused, and exhausted state, stupid things like trash cans and roadkill turned into meaningful Post-It notes about my life from another world, which required intense, silent stares if I wanted the full moon to reveal to me the super-secret gravestone runes, written in Odin's own hand.  Suffice to say, I more or less collapsed into bed as soon as I got home, to sleep for three wretched hours, and promptly forgot all the secrets of life I'd gotten from the roadkill.   

But then County Cork came over!  We baked pumpkin cookies, which came out delicious, and watched O Brother Where Art Thou.  Friday he heads back to Ireland for a month, and I get my DSH results, which I am superbly unexcited about.

New favorite song of the day!  Courtesy of Shane.  BRITISH THINGS.

I hate German Customs

I hate German Customs.  Not lowercase customs, such as three days of Christmas, cloth shopping bags, and making unmarried forty-year-olds ride donkeys backwards through town.  I hate uppercase Customs, the German Zollamt, that controls packages and makes you pay taxes on them.

I've already run into trouble with German Customs once, when I had to pay 33 dollars in taxes on a package from my mother.  Luckily the guy I dealt with took pity on the fact that I was foreign and unaware of the policy, and only charged me half the tax he should have.  It was still annoying, but at least I learned something very important: you can order ten million dollars worth of sex toys and weaponry, as long as it's domestic, but don't let anyone send you anything from abroad that costs more than 60 dollars.

Except today I got a letter in the mail, that my friend Kim had sent me a (lovely!) necklace, that I had to pay taxes on--despite the value of the necklace on the package being under the limit.  I said the words "fuck," and "Sweden," a lot, hopped on my bike, and pedaled to the office while mentally taking out my hoop earrings and smearing my face with Vaseline.  "Hello," I said politely, "You guys are retarded."  And I explained the situation.  The same nice guy from Round 1 brought my package out of the back, and asked if it was really a gift.  "Yes," I said, "look, she even crossed out the box that says 'Gift.'"  "That doesn't mean anything," he said, "they all do that."  I looked him dead in the eye and said, "...So you're going to make me pay taxes on a gift marked as a gift that is under the gift limit because you don't believe me when I tell you it's a gift?"  We stared at each other for thirty seconds.  Then he said:

"What is your relationship to the sender?"
"We play the ukulele together."
"What's a ukulele?"
"It's like a little guitar."
"Anything else?"
"We met in Indiana."
"Where's Indiana?"
"In America.  We played Margaritaville together."
"What's Margaritaville?"
"A song by Jimmy Buffet."
"Who's Jimmy Buffet?"
"Give me the damn package or I put your face through Jimmy Buffet's guitar."

Then he made me unpack the box so that we could admire the necklace together.  He asked me what the values of the materials it was made with were.  I glared at him.  He started signing forms.

On the plus side, I got the package, I got to yell at people, I didn't pay taxes, and the necklace is beautiful, Kim!  On the down side, if any of you asshats send me sex toys or something embarrassing, and Customs makes me unpack them in front of their all-male staff, I will put your face through Jimmy Buffet's guitar.  SO DON'T GET ANY IDEAS.

Love,
Tina