Family, France and Baden Baden

Don't I have a lovely smile?

I have mentioned the family but I have not really talked about them.  The guy in the middle is Jonas.  He is our wonderful host.  He came to Nancy's school as a foreign exchange student four years ago.  After we figured out when we were going to Spain, she really wanted to visit him....and well here we are!  The girl to the left of him is his sister Leo.  She learned English in school and is a year younger than us.  Next to her is Jonas's mother.  She learned English when she was a student and even though it is sometimes hard for her to understand what we are saying, it is easy for her to communicate with us.  She is a wonderful cook and has been making us traditional German dinners. Behind me is Jonas's father.  He doesn't know any English.  Somehow he watched  the Great Gatsby with us the other night.

Sometimes it is very hard to communicate with the family but a lot of the words sound the same and words on signs are similar.  Usually, I can figure out the general topic of what they are saying without knowing the German.  Also, especially in the case of Jonas's father, there are a lot of hand signals involved.

Last night, Jonas's uncle, cousins and a woman who has a job similar to a nanny, came over to dinner.  The woman had lived in the United States for a year and came right over to us and started chatting with us.  You could barely detect any accent.  After dinner, we showed everyone where we lived some maps and they found it very funny that I come from a town called Hamburg.

Later we watched a movie and then played a game called Mensch ärgere Dich nicht. Translation: Man don't be sorry.  It is a traditional German game and guess what? We have it in the United States! We just callcit Sorry.  There's was a little more simpler but the ideas were the same.  I won!

Today we started our day with some mini golf. It was only one Euro per person. The course was older and simple but fun.  Instead of the fake turf life material, these only had paint.  For all those who know about my athletic ability, more like my lack of...this will surprise you. I somehow won mini golf.

After mini golf, we crossed over to France.  Literally we just crossed a small bridge.  There were no customs, no fees, nothing.  Just a bridge and a sign that said welcome to France.  It was almost as if we were going from New York to Pennsylvania.  There, we went to an outlet city.  It was an outdoor mall full of brand name clothes but it was set up like a town.  Some familiar stores were Puma, Adidas, Lindt, Guess and Nike.  There were a ton of stores that were unfamiliar, too.

We then crossed back into Germany and went to a mall in Baden Baden.  The outside is just two large metal buildings that looked like space ships.  You park on top and then you take a flat escalator down into the mall.  The two buildings were connected underground with a straight hallway of stores.  The only familiar store was HM which is really inexpensive in Germany.

Culture Time:

Radio stations mostly play American music with a few German songs mixed in here and there.  If a person doesn't know English, they focus on the beat and sounds.

American TV shows have voice overs in German and German TV shows have their music in English.

The store Aldi originated in Germany.

Cars are mostly manual.  It is more expensive to buy an automatic car.

Please enjoy this picture of the family dog Rocky at Black Forest... his tongue is too big for his mouth.