Ice Mountains on Saginaw Bay

Last weekend we drove to the Bay City Recreational Area to have a look at all of the ice that has been pushed up from Lake Huron onto land. This didn't only happen here, but also in some residential areas where ice was pushed up into houses, through windows and walls. There were some photos in the newspaper of people with ice in their living rooms. We didn't see any of that, but from the shape of these ice mountains, you can imagine how that could happen if your house was very close to the shore.



















Here you can see over the ice mountain out onto the Saginaw Bay. There are more mountains of ice out in the bay.



















The surface of the ice had a neat crazed pattern, and was very glassy.



















Here is some older ice, it looks more white than clear. And you can see the sheets of ice that have been pushed up from the water.



















Here are some more crystally, sparkly, glass ice mountains. When the ice started to fall down like an avalanche, it even sounded like broken glass.

As seen in Bay City, Michigan

Living in a bunny's paradise









These guys are the only thing to make life in Michigan bearable. The bunnies. After noticing bunny tracks in the snow all winter, we weren't surprised to establish that there seems to be a high concentration of bunnies in our neighborhood. We were surprised, however, that these bunnies are not only Eastern Cottontails, as pictured above, but precious dwarf rabbits in black, gray, and white with black spots. In all my previous life in Beaverton, I had only witnessed Eastern Cottontails, and now living on the other side of town, I am seeing precious, multicolored dwarf rabbits in the wild! One of our neighbors even reported that years ago, these rabbits were so abundant that they were hopping around everywhere in the morning when he went to his car to go to work and wouldn't even hop away from people. Could we have found heaven?
The current bunnies do hop away, and seem to only live near vacant houses. I am pretty sure that one of the people on our street thinks we are sizing up the houses on the street to break into them and steal stuff, because we regularly drive and walk down the road to check on the bunnies, stopping in the middle of the street and staring onto property that does not belong to us. That is suspicious in America. You are not normal if you go out and observe precious bunnies in the wild, you are a burglar.
The biggest bunny news today: not only did we see all 5 of the precious buns (the gray one, the two brown ones, the black one and the one with cow spots), we also found baby bunny tracks in the snow on our front step! We had a tiny bunny visitor this morning who hopped right up onto our front step! The prints were very small, but definitely from a bunny, so we are very excited. Our master plan of capturing a baby bunny and taming it will soon be reality.

The Bread

After eating lots of bad bread that tasted of dough conditioners and other assorted additives, and basically had no texture or substance anyway, someone started baking bread. After a few months of experimentation and travels from Gladwin, Michigan, to Windsor, Canada, in search of the perfect flour, here are the results:

germanbread.blogspot.com

Who knew I would marry a passionate baker?

Someone seems to have a new career: modelling

http://www.paradise-sportsonline.com/

Click on that link and you will find one of the websites of one of our neighbor's companies. Anyone recognize the model? The first person to post a comment with the model's correct identity will win a free game of Elefun with me and Wilhelm. Hmm, if this new career will help us pay the bills? When do the royalty checks start rolling in?

Finally, beautiful weather

This weekend we finally have gotten a break from the miserably cold, gray winter weather that we have been having. Yesterday and today it was at least 42 degrees Fahrenheit (around 6 Celsius) and sunny, finally allowing us to go outside and do some walking. We decided to go to the park in Midland where there's a funny bridge called the Tridge and a couple of rivers that come together, as well as the Pere Marquette Rail Trail, an old railroad track that has been removed and converted into a bike and pedestrian path. The Rail Trail goes along the Titabawassee River for a while, which made us reminisce of walking along the Elbe Radweg with one big difference: on such a beautiful winter day in Dresden, you'd hardly be able to move on the path it would be so full of people. Yesterday, a large percentage of the people we saw in the park were Germans. We identified them based on the sensible winter clothing the children had on (especially the Kenny hats) and their fashionable shoes. When we got closer, we confirmed their nationality by hearing them speak actual German. Today we didn't spot any Germans, but didn't spot many other people out enjoying the beautiful weather, either. Why not? People do appreciate the nice weather, lots of people are talking about how beautiful it is outside, but very few are actually taking advantage of it. It's not only this way in the winter either, it was like that in the summer here as well. Pedestrian areas seem spooky, like ghost towns, there are shops, but no customers in sight. It seems like a lot of people here only really partake in outdoor activities (winter or summer) as a reason to drink lots of alcohol. Plenty of people go boating or canoeing or camping or fishing or paddling here, at least they call it that, but it has less to do with getting exercise or seeing the landscape than it has to do with sitting around and drinking lots. Maybe more people would go outside in the winter in Michigan if mulled wine were being sold along the Rail Trail. But I do recall being so happy going to Germany and just seeing people outside walking, because that is something you just don't see here. So this difference isn't new, I guess I must have just forgotten about it. If you are walking here, either you have a dog who forces you outside or your car is broken down or you're too poor to have a car. People just don't walk or move for fun or as a mode of transport here.

"wer für alles offen ist, muss sich fragen lassen, ob er noch ganz dicht ist"

All the stuff I'm missing

We've been feeling like we are badly integrated in the USA, much like the headlines in the German newspapers are writing about the Turkish people in Germany lately. We download German news shows to watch, read the German news on the computer, and I am constantly checking what's up in Dresden. We are resisting integration here, we refuse to go ice fishing on the river, eat American bread or watch television. We don't even speak English in the home! Here's something else I have missed, the new cupola in the castle in Dresden. I'll just have to add that to my list of things to see when we visit.

















What can I say, that looks really great! This is the part of the castle that I can only remember being reconstructed in the 8 years that I have known Dresden. Apparently, they'll still be working on finishing it until 2013. But I won't delay my visit until then.

Other things I plan to see and do:
-go eat at the Neustädter Diechl
-go to Kalaschnikow Galerie
-go to Bagel's
-go to Cafe Pott
-walk past Förstereistr. 13 and Alaunstr. 17
-have a Softeis if it's open
-go to Panama and visit the bunnies
-ring Hohlfeld's doorbell and imagine his face turning bright red
-go to the Chicsaal
-of course visit my friends (that should really be first on the list)
-go past the Schwalbennest and remember nearly being run over there, and better yet, remember my revenge
...

Where's the Lebensfreude?

This is something that I am missing here. Not only from myself, but from others as well. Lebensfreude is something like lust for life, or zest for life or pleasure of life. It just doesn't seem like many people around here are radiating this, sie strahlen keine Lebensfreude aus, as you would say in German. What's wrong here? Why do the people I know here who have jobs they like and spouses they love and everything they need not have this? I was just looking at some pictures from Germany, and in most pictures, I was reminded of people who were just radiating this sort of satisfaction there. Even if they weren't rich or necessarily in the greatest relationship or whatever. Then I wondered "And here? Who do I know here who shows this kind of excitement for life?" And I can't think of one. Maybe one of the teachers I had a coffee with this afternoon, but she's the only one who pops into my head right off the bat. Why? What's wrong? Obama, can you help us get our excitement for life back? That's the change I need. But I think I'll need to take care of this one myself, I don't think any president can fix this problem.

Road Trip Day 12: Welcome to Crime Scene Inn

*this is not the crowbar I saw today at Crime Scene Inn

As a child, we always had a joke about the motels we would end up staying in. They would likely be cheap, and maybe the door would hit the bed when you opened the door, and the best deals usually had a body outline on the floor they were so shady. This was just a joke, though, at least until today. We booked a hotel (Rodeway Inn) online for our goal today, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Upon finding the hotel immediately in Cheyenne, we joked that something wouldn't work out, because otherwise everything had gone perfectly today. Our timing all day was perfect, we even did some sightseeing and nobody had any major meltdowns on the road. I went in to check in at the hotel, the receptionist wasn't so friendly, but I chalked that up to the cold weather and the fact that we simply aren't in sunny California any more. We noticed that the parking spot in front of our room was a handicapped parking spot, so we decided to check the room quickly to make sure it wasn't full of low light switches and the like. Not to be prejudiced, but we ended up in an accessible room once on this trip, and while all the other rooms had supposedly been remodeled in the hotel, this one had not been. Dirty creepy bathroom, low light switches, fixtures that were half falling off of the wall. Not to mention a funny, hospital like smell. Wanting to avoid that, we had a quick look into the room. Strange, upon opening the door, we couldn't find the light switch, then I immediately noticed that the bed was messed up. Is this a joke, we wondered, this room hasn't been cleaned. Still not finding the light switch (and not thinking to look for a low, wheelchair accessible switch) I then noticed something lying on the floor. Was it a cane in this possibly handicapped accessible room? I stepped closer. No, it was not a cane. IT WAS A CROWBAR. I backed out of the room. Shut the door. Hurried to reception and checked right back out of that place faster than I had checked in, telling the perplexed receptionist about what we had found. I'm glad we didn't find the light switch, because who knows what else we would've found lurking in the dark corners of that room. Creepy. Honestly, I find the whole state of Wyoming creepy. It's just empty and empty and empty. And then this. I can't wait to get out of here. I just wish we were going west, not east. California is fantastic, and I hope I will be moving there soon. But more on that later. So everybody, watch the news, because if there was some kind of heinous crime committed in room 109 of Rodeway Inn in Cheyenne, WY, I was there. But I didn't do it.

Road Trip days 3, 4 and 5

Good morning from Fabulous Las Vegas! After days and days of driving through snow, creepy mountain towns, plains, deserts, more mountains, and yesterday wind, a blizzard, rain, hail and an electrical storm with lightning bigger and brighter than I've ever seen before, we have arrived in Las Vegas. Slightly different than the original plan of driving to Mexico in hopes of arriving somewhere warm, it's still not bad. The Mexico plan was dropped because even Mexico is not warm this time of year. At least the part of Mexico we could've driven to. Here's some of what we've seen:

The Cadillac Ranch outside of Amarillo, Texas. This is on old Route 66, apparently some rancher decided to plant 10 Caddies in his field.

Nothing as far as the eye can see. Pretty much all of Texas and New Mexico.

Here is where vacation finally really began: in the Painted Desert in Arizona, part of Petrified Forest National Park.

Petroglyphs carved into rock over 1000 years ago by native people in the Petrified Forest area.

Lots and lots of Petrified Wood in the Petrified Forest National Park. It was so nice here, because despite rather cool temperatures and heavy wind, we could finally get out of the car, walk around and see something!

This is exactly what we were trying to escape: snow. There was a huge snow storm in Flagstaff, Arizona last night. We considered just stopping there, but after talking to a friendly tow truck driver (who noticed our Michigan license plate and said "Bet you wanted to get away from this!") we continued driving. His tip that the snow would be finished in about 30 miles was correct. We got out of the snow, and into some calmer weather, but crazier things awaited us: a lightning storm, for example, then a torrential downpour, and finally, a bit of hail. But none of that lasted very long and we continued on our way to Las Vegas.

Road Trip!

Thanks to that snow day (#4!) yesterday, we got an early start on our holiday road trip. Goal: California. So far we've driven 1,170 miles in the two days. Yesterday we made it to Springfield, Illinois, and today we have finally arrived in Clinton, Oklahoma. Oklahoma is kind of frightening to me, we wanted to stop and picnic, but it was too cold and I was freaked out by the campground and state park that I found somehow reminiscent of the film Deliverance. We had hoped to make it to Amarillo, Texas today, but that proved to be a bit farther than we could handle. All we've really done the last couple of days is drive, so there's not much to report. The real fun will start in the next couple of days when we get to Arizona, where we plan to see the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, among other things. But until then, we've got a lot of driving to do.

We drove through Chicago yesterday evening around rush hour and it was full of crazy drivers. This morning we drove through St. Louis and had a nice view of the Gateway Arch from the highway (above).

Probably my favorite gas station of all time, Kum & Go. Spotted multiple times in Oklahoma.

Snow day #3

Amazingly enough, it's a double header: today school is cancelled once again. It stopped snowing in the night, but we have an accumulation of about one foot of snow, which must have made the roads a horrible mess, making transport to and from school too dangerous. I only left the house yesterday to shovel out the driveway and clean off the cars, which is about the only possible form of exercise right now. Well, except for ice skating, but unfortunately, the ice is now covered in snow.

It's true: I can walk out my door, down to the river and ice skate, the river is frozen through. We skated for a couple hours each on Saturday and Sunday, and it was fantastic. I forgot how much I loved to skate. It's been years since I last skated, and I'm not very good at it, but for whatever reason I find it very fun. The reason I probably never skated in Dresden is because I was scared of too many people on the ice. That makes me nervous, because, as previously stated, I am not very good and feel that I can be a danger to myself and others on skates. This is also the reason I don't rollerblade. Ice skating involves ice, meaning that it's cold and one must wear layers of thick winter clothing, providing great padding in case you fall. There's also probably some snow around in case you take a spill, which I did a couple of times, which also pads the fall. And anyway, ice seems softer than concrete to me, which it probably isn't, but I am less scared of ice. Concrete, however, terrifies me, and this is why I refuse to put any form of wheels on my feet, because I know I would fall and do some major damage to myself.

Snow day #2!!

When my alarm went off at 5 this morning, I looked outside to see how things looked. It didn't look like it had snowed as much as had been forecasted, so I hit snooze and started to mentally prepare myself for the day. These last two weeks before Christmas are going to be rough, because I am burned out and the kids are whacky. But then, as I was giving up hope of a snow day, my phone rang. It was my mom. "Could I be so lucky?" I asked myself. And I was! School cancelled! Snow day! Hooray!

Here's the total amount of snow as of a few minutes ago.

In other news, gas is down to $1.42. It just keeps dropping. Incredible.

Snow day!



















I got up on Monday after the four day weekend not really wanting to go to work. But I arose at 5 am, started getting ready, and as soon as I got out of the shower, I heard my phone ringing. Who's calling at 6 in the morning, I wondered. I didn't want to get my hopes up, but all I could think was "Snow day?" It had started snowing the previous evening, and the snow was heavy, but my school rarely closes for snow. But I answered my phone, and it was the bearer of great news on the other end! No school! Snow day! School had been cancelled due to the snow storm, and because it was supposed to continue dumping snow all day on Monday, making it dangerous to transport students to and from school. So I stayed up, had my coffee in peace before the boys woke up, read for a while, and just enjoyed not having to drive 30 minutes in to work and deal with a bunch of silly kids. Aaaah, if only every day were a snow day.








































We had a great snow day, building an igloo and a snow bunny.

























































Above is a sampling of Christmas lights around Beaverton as well. These started going up around Thanksgiving time, and will be up, bright and shiny, until January!

Holy smokes!

Gas is down to $1.56 per gallon! I thought it was at its low yesterday with $1.58, but after I filled up my tank at the station where gas was $1.58, I found that gas was down to $1.56 on the other side of town! Is this a political thing because Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country? This is like the good old days before I moved to Germany and could fill my Escort for under $20! I filled my car for under $20 today! Hooray! All those people with silly gas pump noose stickers on their cars can peel them off now!

Niagara Falls for Thanksgiving




































Rather than staying in dark, gray, cold Michigan for Thanksgiving, we decided to run to the border and visit Canada, our ultimate goal being Niagara Falls and Toronto. Fortunately the weather was good and we encountered no snow on the way, making the 5.5 hour drive no problem. On the way, we stopped in London, Ontario, a neat little city with a nice downtown with lots of restaurants, cafes, bars and shops. We took a walk there to stretch our legs and enjoyed being in a city again. We also enjoyed some Canadian humor: at construction sites there are signs that say "Danger due to _________" and the workers have to fill in what the danger comes from. Well, on the sign in London it was "Danger due to Ninjas" where they were working on a church. London is also where Labatt beer is brewed, but due to time constraints, we couldn't take a brewery tour. After leaving London, we got a little bit lost, and wound up in Hamilton, actually a bit north of where we wanted to be. After establishing that the people there seemed to be unable to read (maps, at least) we decided to just spend the night there on Thursday because the remaining drive to Niagara Falls was only about another half hour. In Hamilton we also discovered something else that was interesting: beer can only be purchased in Canada (or at least in Ontario) in "Beer Stores", which are actually named "The Beer Store". This only after a trying incident in a supermarket where my German husband attempted to ask for beer, but the supermarket employees couldn't understand his pronunciation of beer. "Bouillon?" they asked. Then he said "Beer! Alcohol!" and they tried to direct him to the wine section. Wine was not what he wanted. Finally, "beer" was understood, and they directed us to "The Beer Store".
On Friday we got up and had a quick drive to Niagara Falls, and were lucky to have not so cold sunny weather. The only drawback of the falls is all that water that they spray! But regardless of getting soaked, it was still nice to get out into the fresh air and walk, and the spray did have a nice side effect: rainbows!























Here's the rainbow created by the sun and all that mist from the falls. In the background is the Rainbow Bridge, which connects Canada and the United States.























All that natural beauty is not without danger: if you feel yourself drawn to the falls like sailors used to be drawn in by the song of the Lorelei, these signs are there to remind of the evil lurking behind that natural splendor.




























We had actually planned to drive on to Toronto on Friday afternoon, but after spending the day walking around the Canadian and American sides of the falls, and noticing that they light the falls in the evening, we decided to spend a little more time and have a look at the falls at night as well. The city of Niagara has been built up like Las Vegas--in the top picture you can see the big flashy hotels, and yes, at least one of those buildings is a casino. In the downtown area there are also all of the tourist traps you find in every major tourist destination these days: Hard Rock Cafe, Rainforest Cafe, Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum, Guiness World of Records Museum and of course lots of restaurants that you can also find in your local mall. And once you leave these tourist areas on either side of the border, all you can find are some sad, run down little towns that look like they've seen better days.

On Friday evening we crossed the border back into Canada after a long wait on Rainbow Bridge and being questioned intensely by a Canadian border guard with a bullet proof vest on. We drove back to Hamilton, where we stayed again due to its convenience and proximity to Toronto. Saturday morning we drove to Toronto. I've never visited Toronto before, but it definitely has the flair of a big city like Chicago or New York with its skyscrapers and shopping areas. We didn't do any touristy stuff there really, we just walked around town and soakedup that big city feeling. We also had a great breakfast at the Sunset Grill--definitely a good choice for all day breakfast if you are very hungry, like friendly service and want a change from the normal fast food fare! This seemed to be a popular destination for the locals, as it had an amazing turnover and was completely full the whole time we were there.























One more thing that gave me a laugh in Toronto: fries poutine. This is something I had heard of before, but couldn't really believe. It's fries smothered in cheese curds and gravy. Delicious? You be the judge. I didn't try it.

Gas: $1.67 per gallon!

In the news

For my German readers: An article in der Zeit about Obama voters in the southern states. This article doesn't reflect my experience in Michigan with the mood surrounding the election, but is an interesting report nonetheless.

And a link to the fake New York Times...haha. Apparently readers were a little slow on the uptake that this was not the real news when they bought this paper.

Gas: $1.88 per gallon!