Update finally

Braunschweig- Ironically they don’t know what Braunschweiger is.

I’m writing this entry from Braunschweig, so it’ll be uploaded once we get back to Hoyerswerda, or someplace else with a high-speed internet connection.

Once again it’s been a little while since the last entry. We had a few days to waste in Hoyerswerda before coming to Braunschweig, giving some time to recover from the gout attack. We had our party out in the garden on that last weekend in June, and it was pretty much a roaringly drunken good time. It was a lot of work, frying up a roost full of chicken and frying up several jars of pickles, but everyone seemed to like the deep-fried American style food. It’s amazing to me that Germans don’t really fry chicken. And they don’t have hot wings either. And of course, they’ve never heard of fried pickles, though not many people have outside of Lawrence, Kansas. They do have Kentucky Fried Chicken here, but it’s just not all that popular in Germany; KFC doesn’t really fit into the whole scheme of things. Fast food is something on a roll, whether it’s a wiener, schnitzel, herring or a hamburger. You can’t put a chicken leg on a roll. So chicken is sit down food, but KFC isn’t a sit-down kind of place. Germans need a bar that serves fried chicken. And hot wings. Don’t tell Hooters, it’s my idea.
Hooters wouldn’t work in Germany either. First, Germans don’t tip waiters. So the whole concept of scantily clothed girls allowing some drunken guy with wing sauce smeared all over his face to clumsily grope their scantily covered asses for an inordinately huge tip is pretty much out of the question. Second, you see naked titties during prime-time T.V. in commercials, so why go to Hooters and pay twice what you should for seriously crappy wings and the pleasure of seeing titties covered in a t-shirt that would be too small even for a starving Somalian? Third, they don’t have much Meth in Germany, and Meth is the primary cause in the development of Hooters girls. Fourth and finally, Germans have a very weird sense of theme restaurants. I mean, if you say Hooters in Germany, they’d probably be expecting a place at which chicken wings are served up by a waiter dressed like an owl pantomiming the regurgitation of said chicken wings onto your plate. Oh, you want ranch dressing? He’ll squat over your plate and lift his tail feathers to dispense that. Germans like crazy stuff. You all think I’m kidding? There’s a restaurant in Berlin at which they serve wieners in bedpans and beer in urine specimen bottles. That restaurant is the most popular tourist attraction in Berlin. Hmm, maybe my version of Hooters isn’t such a bad idea.
Okay, so the whole point of all of this is that I think Germany is ready for hot wings. They already have the beer. The thing is Germans just don’t fry up that much stuff, so it’s not much of a surprise that they don’t make fried chicken at home. Well, they probably will now.
The party went very well, Oma and Opa brought their friend Irena to the party. Irena is an 80 year old German professor from Ukraine that Oma met during her latest stint at the hospita. Irena loves Anne and me. Oma and Opa brought Anne and me Triominos, because we had such a good time playing it with them during one of our dinners at their garden. I spoke a lot of English with Pe and Axel’s neighbors, Frank and Margarite, who incidentally just got married a few weeks ago. They’re chemists, so we didn’t talk about chemistry at all. We talked about brewing beer and spices I think, I can’t remember much from that day, between the whiskey and the pills. Anyway, Frank and his wife have sheep, BOY sheep, which they keep during spring and summer in the field next to their house. . Their names are Franz and Fritz. The sheep do a very good job at keeping the grass short. In the fall, the sheep become kebobs and chops, yum.
Besides Frank, Margarite, Oma, Opa, Irena, Pe, Axel, Anne and myself, those in attendance at the party were Holm (unfortunately without Sandra, but that’s okay, we understand,) Stefan, Kirsten, Ronnie, Helga, Torsten, Bea, Wenke, Vivi, Vivi’s boyfriend Frank, Marja, and Jenny.

Braunschweig-
I am trying to figure out why no one has ever said anything about Braunschweig before. This is one of the most interesting and friendly cities that I’ve been to in Germany. It’s one of those places that you have to come to in order to experience it, I can’t really write enough to do justice. First, we’re staying here in a guest room at the Georg Eckert institute, where they have a huge textbook library. It’s the cheapest place to stay in Germany and very nice. Second, the people at the institute are actually friendly. I was looking for Anne the other day, and all I did was say her name to a librarian, and the librarian smiled, (yes, the librarian smiled) and she took me up to Anne personally. And she said something about it was nice that Americans would come here or something. Okay, and then I went to Starbucks, and I had to talk to all the people behind the counter for about 20 minutes because I’m American, and they just wanted to talk. People actually wanting to help in stores, people being friendly in restaurants, I even had some old guy wanting to give me a tour of the city yesterday. Everyone is very patient when I try to speak German and are very encouraging. It’s also a very international sort of town; there are lots of people here from all over the world. I guess that would help explain why we had the best Döner in the world here in Braunschweig. Besides the very friendly people, there are all kinds of historical buildings, churches, museums and that sort. Every town in Germany has old buildings and museums. Braunschweig also has to have more statues and fountains per square inch than any city in Europe. Of particular interest is the nice statue of kitty cats, as a tribute to a street in Braunschweig that was the favorite of kitties for centuries.
Fourth of July in Braunschweig wasn’t very interesting, except that it was about 65 degrees and intermittently rainy. I don’t remember many Fourth of Julys at which I wasn’t sweating my butt off and waking up the next morning without blisters and charring on my fingers. Instead, I spent the day walking around town, and Anne came along with me after she finished doing her research for the day. It was Fourth of July, and I was walking around in jeans and a sweatshirt, gotta love Germany.
I’m not sure what the plans are for this weekend. We may be heading to Berlin to stay with Holm for the weekend, or we may be heading straight up to Kiel. We have to be out of here on Friday, so we’ll be definitely going somewhere. The weird thing is that by the time we get to where we’re going, then we’ll know where we were going, so there’s not much of a point of writing what I’m writing right now as I’ll be putting it in the blog once we get to where we’re going and therefore I will have known where we were going when I publish this. See, it’s like I’m pretending I don’t know where we’re going once I’ve published this, but as of right now, while I’m writing this, I don’t know where we’re going. Anyway, Kiel is way up north near Denmark. I will probably head up north to Denmark just so I can say that I’ve been to Denmark. Yeah, just like I’ll head to Poland just to say that I’ve been to Poland. I’ve never been to Poland. Pe and Axel are too afraid that I’ll stop at a red light and the Poles will steal the car. Russian car thieves have to steal 2 cars at a time in Germany, that way they’ll still have a car left when they get through Poland. It’s sort of like East St. Louis, but not as nice, from what I’ve heard.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’m going to head out and see what kind of interesting stuff I can see that I may have missed yesterday. Here’s some GPS coordinates so people can look us up on Google Earth to see where we’ve been.

Braunschweig Rathaus- N 52°15.850’, E 10°31.502’

Braunschweig Mall (has the façade of an old castle as the front, really cool) -
N 52°15.801’, E 10°31.627’

Crazy House (you have to see the pictures)- N 52°15.850’, E 10°31.502’

Georg Eckert Institut (Where we’re staying) - N 52°16.088’, E 10°30.634’

Unfortunately, I forgot the cable to the camera, so everyone is going to have to wait for new photos, sorry about that.