Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

My mom sent me a link to this article in the Arizona Republic. It came from an e-mail I sent the journalist regarding debate immigration in the US. Cool.

There was even a response by someone who kind of missed the point, but I guess having grand parents who immigrated is not quite the same as being an immigrant.

American overseas knows what it’s like to be an immigrant

May. 25, 2006 12:00 AM

Ugh… what a long day. We can’t manage to do anything that requires us to get off the couch, so that means I can post something, but you’ll have to wait for photos; their on my camera, and that is somewhere away from the couch.

So, the first of this week’s events was picking up Bartholomew from the VW dealer on Monday afternoon. That was great. We doubled the value of the car (practically) when we filled up with gas. Strangely, the dealer would bargain with us over a few things, but he was dead set against giving us a full tank of gas. As it was raining and cold, we drove around a bit, went to Walhalla (actually, we drove to the parking lot and stayed in the dry car). Then we drove home.

After a fairly sleepless night, we got up at 3:00 to eat a good breakfast before driving to Frankfurt for Matthias green card interview. We discovered that the best time to drive on the Autobahn is about 4:30 AM. There is no traffic, and it is starting to get a bit light out. Unfortunately, the unending rain was a bit tiresome. The car dealer put some kind of coating on the car so it repelled the rain! We barely had to use the wipers. It was cool.

We got there a bit early and had a breakfast-of-champions at McDonalds to waste a few minutes. We got to the consulate at 6:55 and found a line of about 15 people already standing there. Being my American-entitled self, I suggested we go directly to the info guy and ask if we need to stand in that line. Matthias, however, smiled knowingly having dealt with US immigration buerocracy before. At around 7:20, a man came out and barked some orders at all of us. Matthias remembered his lovely personality from his last visit to the consulate. Anyway, we made it through three visits to different windows giving bits of information and money to people before speaking to the consular. The consular was fabulous! He was mellow and very clear. We had a bit of a complexity to sort out with our upcoming trip to the US, but he clarified our status, and it looks like the green card shouldn’t be a problem to sort out once we send in one more document.

CHRISTELE - maybe you don’t want to read the next paragraph

Matthias needed to get poked and prodded at the medical exam for about an hour after that. He was complaining about his ‘wound’ (where they drew blood) when the woman sitting next to us said something like “that’s nothing, I had 12 needles in my arm when I delivered my baby!” I told Matthias never to complain about pain in front of a new mom; she will ALWAYS beat you when it comes to pain stories.

All in all, it went really well. Matthias and I made a great team in organizing this. He took care of the car stuff, and I organized the green card stuff. It was a stressful day but interesting. I even drove most of the way home (after passing out for the first 30 minutes of the return trip). We practiced a bit with the manual transmission once we got in Regensburg. The car is VERY forgiving when it comes to my little mistakes once in a while, so I feel comfortable driving it. I might need to take a couple of more trips with Matthias at my side to feel comfortable taking the car on my own; he’s a great, calm coach.

I’ll stop rambling now…. I keep doing that. I must be excited or something.

I haven’t posted anything lately on my little health/body experiments so I thought I’d give an update.

Actually, I guess the whole beer drinking thing was a bit of an experiment, but not very professional admittedly. We went to the gym the following day and did a couple of rounds of sauna. The sauna becomes a profoundly sweaty experience the day after drinking a bunch of beer!

Anyway, I did another experiment yesterday. I thought it might be a good idea to have a little bit of color in my skin before going to Phoenix and CA and getting bombarded with sunlight. So I went to the sun bed at the gym. I asked the lady at the front counter what she recommends for me with my pale skin (she was quite tan, so maybe I picked the wrong person to ask). She suggested the minimum time of 10 minutes. So, I laid there for ten minutes. Matthias said I shouldn’t need to turn over because it should hit me from all sides. The bed blows a breeze on you to keep you from getting hot, so I didn’t feel anything. A little later, It looked like I had been at the beach all day! Actually, it looks like I had been at the beach all day and had forgotten to reapply my sunscreen. I looked like this after a day of falling asleep on a beach on Santa Cruz Island in 2004. The front of me looks pink, my sides are white, and the back has just a bit of color…. I guess I should have rotated. That may have evened things out a bit. What was amazing is that my hair is actually blonder! My hair reacts pretty quickly to UV exposure, but it generally takes a few days in the sun for it to start turning. That convinced me how dangerous these things are. If I lay on the beach, I feel the infrared heat and it helps me remember that I am in the UV light, and I get out of the UV periodically or at least put on sunscreen. In the sun bed, it feels harmless, but the UV light is MUCH stronger than the sunlight.

On a similar note, I was reading about a recent medical report noting that regular tanning can be addictive. By ‘regular’ they mean those people whose skin is so tan that you can’t distinguish their ordinal skin tone. Apparently, the body starts to crave the UV when you expose your self to it often; it produces something that makes you feel happy. The same effect was not observed in infrequent tanners.

The only other thing I am playing with at the moment is a return to the ‘crazy yoga’ (Astanga yoga) practice I used to do in Irvine. I used to do it three times a week at 6:00 with Juris, but after a shattered wrist and some shoulder problems, I stopped doing it. A few weeks ago, I started going into the gym at 7:00 and doing my own version of the practice. There is a room where they have classes at the gym, and it is free until 9:30 on the days I do the practice so I have a lot of time to play. It has the effect of sculpting my body and boasting my cardio vascular strength. I have to pace myself through it or I get a little too enthusiastic and tweak my shoulder. To help protect my shoulders, I am also starting to build up my upper back muscles (on off days) by trying to do pull ups — at the moment, I can’t even pull up half of my body weight, but exercise is a great way to practice patience and avoiding self judgement.

On mornings when I am not doing the crazy routine I am working on my yoga practice (I don’t really use the body-building stuff as part of my practice, but it’s a great way to build the body). I have a few assignments I am finishing up for my teacher training, and I am developing my personal practice. There is a lot more sitting still and breathing in my personal practice than there is in the ‘crazy yoga.’

Whenever I get to the cardio machines (ellipticals, bike, or treadmill), I have been listening to Krishna Das. It is the only music I have found that can keep me from getting bored on the machines. Actually, I kind of over did it last Sunday because I was ‘feeling’ the music a bit too much. For those of you who haven’t heard Krishna Das, he sings devotional Hindu chants. OK, this is normally not my kind of thing (not being Hindu and all), but something about his voice and his music opens my heart and fills me with joy. His music got me through the last months of writing my dissertation. I found that when I played him in my office, I had so much energy to write, and the other scientists stayed away from the weird music so I had some solitude to write. I remember one day even hearing Christele singing “Hari Krishna” as she was doing laundry…. his music is a little contagious.

Matthias has been working out at the gym several times a week too, and he is starting to build up his strength a lot lately. He has been focusing on some special neck exercises from a book called “Treat your own Neck” by Robin MacKenzie. We have both been doing these exercises a few times a day (it only takes about 10 - 15 minutes to do them). We have seen some fabulous results with some neck issues we have. Matthias has even incorporated some deep breathing into the practice (I am so impressed). If you have problems with your neck stemming from postural problems, I highly recommend this book.

Sorry that was so long. I should update more often.

Matthias and I had some of our ‘brilliant’ ideas yesterday. We went to the Dult, which is the Regensburg equivalent to Oktoberfest, but a bit more local. We went with the idea to pick up some souvenirs for friends in the US. However, after not finding anything of much value, we decided to take a break in one of the beer tents. You can imagine a giant tent with a stage at one end and endless rows of long tables. In the middle of the afternoon, the place we pretty empty, and the stage was empty. There was a group of guys in leder Hosen playing some traditional Bavarian music to entertain the few families who stopped in for lunch.

Our major ‘brilliant’ idea at this point was to decide to order a Mass (1 liter) of beer each rather than a pint. (for the German-impaired; “Ein Mass zu viel” = “One Mass too many”). Have you ever seen a movie with the stereotype of Germans drinking beer from huge glasses? That was us.

It just sounded like a good idea at the moment….. Needless to say, we got a bit silly. I cannot hold my beer, and I have NO idea how I managed to drink 2 Masses of beer the night of our wedding. We ordered some awful french fries to help soak up the beer, but they didn’t do a great job, and I had to order a pretzel on the way out of the tent. Again, not one of my better ideas given my problems digesting bread.

We had some brilliant conversations. For example;

Matthias: (pointing at a chicken stand) “That makes me want chicken!”

Tammy: “YOU are a chicken!!”

This continued with a few other food stands: fish, sausage, etc…. at some point, Matthias declared that his kidneys hurt. After I thoroughly poked at his torso to examine the problem, we decided it was from the beer. It was time to go home…not one of our shining moments.

As we sat on the bus on the way home, I laid out a brilliant post in my mind! Fortunately, I fell asleep for 3 hours immediately after I got home. So you get to read the sober version of events. It’s always good to be reminded that it’s a bad thing to drink large quantities of alcohol.

I think this was our way of blowing off steam before an exciting week ahead. Tomorrow, we will pick up our car (we have named him Bartholomew). We will head to bed early that night because we need to get up around 3:15 AM on Tuesday to drive to Frankfurt for Matthias’s green card application interview. Assuming we make it through that OK, we will head back home and sleep. Matthias has a day to finish preparing his presentation for work on Thursday. Then we get two whole days to finish organizing and packing for the much anticipated vacation to Phoenix and California!!! We are soooo ready to go.

I just realized a potential up side to the whole craziness of our dangerous neighbors and the activities of the neighborhood in Phoenix this week.

Usually, when I go back to the neighborhood, everyone is reminded of a terrible day in 1980 when they see me. That was the day I was hit by a car (for the first time, sadly) in front of our house. Along with traumatizing my four year old little body and my entire family including the dog, it also traumatized the entire neighborhood. When ever I go back, everyone who sees me reminds me that the day has been burned in their memory. Strangely, no one that I have spoken to remembers the events in the same way, but all of them claim to remember what ‘really’ happened that day. I will never know, myself as my compassionate brain has erased the traumatic aspects of that time from my memory. I only remember people visiting me in the hospital, eating ice cream and having to wear a helmet when I went to watch my brother’s baseball games shortly afterwards.

Anyway, when Matthias and I go back to visit, people will surely be talking about the huge drug raid and the ring leader of a weapons and drug trafficking gang who lived next door to the house! I don’t know if that’s an improvement, but it will be a change.

The Second time I was hit by a car (2001 in Irvine)! I am the one lying in the grass surrounded by people. Photo courtesy Tweed who thought, “That kind of looks like Tammy, but it CAN’T be her” as he drove by me.

We just got a call from my mom, and she read us the following article from the Arizona Republic ( The Holy Crap Article ). You’ll understand the title of the blog, momentarily.

In a nut shell, my brother’s next door neighbor, in the neighborhood where I grew up in Phoenix, is the leader of a self-proclaimed white supremacist organization which has been trafficking methamphetamine and some big-ass weapons!!!! We knew about the raid, which happened a few days ago. My brother kind of laughed it off because Todd, the leader, just seemed like a normal, though racist guy who had a lot of friends that drove motorcycles. Apparently, the bust followed a 14 month investigation…. hopefully Mark and Merri Jo have been behaving themselves. Aside from the general scariness of the whole thing, they mentioned some of the weapons found on the property. In a crappy little shack in the backyard, amongst the sheep and chickens, they found a gun that is designed to shoot down helicopters!! Needless to say, the family is a bit shocked! On the bright side, I guess we had free, unknown policy surveillance to protect the house for the past 14 months.

I asked me mom to send me the article, but my dad wouldn’t let her because he was afraid that they could get in trouble for sending something like that over the internet….. So, instead, I dug up the link.

Just to give you a visual, here is a photo of Matthias throwing a football with my cousin Dave in our backyard. The yard of the crazy people can be seen behind the palm tree on the right. I also added a photo of Mark’s cute doggy Pepper, just for kicks.

And, why not, here is a photo of Matthias and me on the same trip in 2002 in Sedona…

in other words, we bought a car today! Actually, we signed a sales agreement. Being Germany, that means that we need to wait a week to pick up the car (waiting insurance stuff, registration, in the middle of a holiday week, etc). As you can see the photos, we put on our “Sunday Bests” to go car shopping - I looked slightly less Hippy-esc when I took my round yellow sun glasses off. They decided to sell a car to us anyway.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of our soon-to-be-car. We are trying to decide on a name for him (we have decided ‘he’ is a ‘him’). We had two cars named Bethany and Gregory in Irvine, and now we need to name our new baby…. we’ll keep you posted.

After the excitement of buying, we went over to the house of a colleague from Matthias (boy, the German grammar is starting to effect my English). He and his family moved into their new house in January, and it’s finally ready to have a small dinner party. We had a great time. Another colleague was also there with his wife, who is also a physicist.

We spoke German all evening, and it was funny to see Matthias’s face when I would make some of my more terrible German language errors. As the night went on, I got better, and he seemed suffer less. There were three chatty women there, and we were all foreigners (Chinese, Russian, and American). We kind of took over the conversations at different points, and it was fun to hear their stories and jokes.

One of the most incredible parts of the evening was hearing the son of the one couple place the piano. He is 14 years old, and he is incredible! He started teaching himself to play the keyboard a few years ago because he saw someone playing in a movie, and he wanted to make his hands do that. After bugging his parent’s to buy him the keyboard, he quickly progressed. Now (with some good lessons) he is amazing! He played for us several times, and I LOVED just watching him play. I don’t know anything about classical music, but when he played he transformed! It made the hair on my neck stand up. He didn’t play with his hands; he played with his entire being! His body and breath were connected to the music. What a great little yogi!

I drove in Germany today!! Surprisingly, it was the first time. Matthias and I decided to go car shopping today. Matthias has been doing some internet shopping for used cars in the area, and today we rented a car to drive to a dealership about 40 km away. We wanted to look at an Audi four door with an automatic. Matthias drove to the dealership as the rental was a stick shift, and we were both hesitant to let me drive because sticks still scare me.

Anyway, the car we were interested in was, literally, sold to the people who got there just before us. It wasn’t a total waste of time because we checked out some Golfs. We test drove a Volks Wagon Golf that had an automatic transmission (to avoid my stick-shift wimpiness - is wimpiness a word?). This time, I got to drive too. Actually, both of us felt like the automatic was so sluggish. I just enjoyed driving though. The test car was too expensive anyway, but we both agreed that we liked the Golf. Once we got back into the rental, we realized that we were driving the same model Golf with a stick. I drove on the way back having renewed my driving confidence with the test drive. Luckily, Matthias is a really calm teacher because he had to remind me of some manual transmission basics. He didn’t even flip out when I would accidentally put it into 5th instead of 3rd. I was excited to finally drive on the Autobahn. In the US, there is the myth about the German autobahn, but it’s just a high way where some people drive REALLY fast. I only drove a maximum of 130 km/hr (87 miles/hr), but I was passed by some crazy drivers.

I was feeling really great about remembering how to drive a stick again, and then we made it back into Regensburg and I was required to actually stop and go. I only stalled once, but considering the pouring rain and the traffic, I think I did pretty well. If we do end up getting a manual, than I think I could adjust. The city driving is tricky, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Once we got back to the city, we were starving so we went to one of our favorite places, L’Osteria. It’s a nice little pizza place where you can have dinner including wine or beer for less than 15 euros for two people! The only time I remembered to take pictures today was in L’Osteria. We had pizza, espresso and Panna Cotta (yum!).

We ended our busy day with a trip to the grocery store where we stocked up on heavy drinks. We have enough juice to last us for a while now. It’s so much easier to shop with a car rather than a bike!

Last night, as Matthias and I watched the first episode of “Lord of the Rings” for the 5th time, I realized that we live in the Shire! Bavaria looks amazingly like the home of the cute little Hobbits. Granted, the Bavarians are, in general, a bit taller than Hobbits, but the traditional outfits are amazingly similar. I think the Hobbits have hairier feet than the Bavarians, but that will require further investigation.

Here are some photos just to prove my observation is not far off:

The Shire Versus a nearby field (minus the rusty barrel)

Gandalph Versus some wooden carving I discovered today

The Stone Bridge in the Shire Versue our Stone Bridge:

And, last but not least, a small group of Hobbits spotted in the Bier Garden this very afternoon!

The weather here is wonderful right now. It is just a bit too cold for a tank top, which, by California standards is too cold, but for German standards, it is perfect! Natasha, Sarah and I went to our favorite coffee shop, Kaminski Cafe, to catch up after Sarah’s trip to the US and Mexico.

Kaminski is our favorite place for numerous reasons. For example, Sarah has no need to order there anymore. When she arrives, they simple bring her a Schokolade Roma. Not to mention, Kaminski has that certain something that makes a place comfortable and quaint. It is tucked away in a little street that is not wide enough for cars, by U.S. standards (though this does stop cars from driving through). I also like the fact that the waitress, Diana, knows my name.

After a stop for coffee, we soaked up the sun for a few minutes in Neuefahr Platz. We are sitting on a new gathering place in the plaza with the city Cathedral in the background. I was a bit sleepy, but Sarah and Natasha look great.

The story about the Neue Farhplatz is actually quite tragic, but the white, marble gathering place was built last year as a memorial. This plaza is the former Jewish neighborhood from the fifteen hundreds. Regensburg was a really prosperous in medieval times, and the Jewish community was a big part of the town’s culture and wealth. There was an old saying, “Your haven’t been to Regensburg if you haven’t heard the bells ring, walked over the stone bridge or met a Jew.” As the town’s riches slowly faded in the 1500s, the non-Jewish town’s people blamed the economic downfall on the Jews. This was a common thing through all of Europe for the past several hundred years. The Jews were given notice to evacuate, and the local farmers helped them escape with their lives. A local artist was so upset with the situation that he entered the synagogue the night before the place was to be destroyed and did some etchings on the walls. During the end of the 1990’s, when Regensburg’s economy was picking up again, the old neighborhood was excavated, but there was no hope in finding the synagogue because it was assumed that the gigantic Christian church in the plaza was on top of the sight (another common custom in Europe for hundreds of years). However, thanks to the etchings of the compassionate artist, the synagogue was discovered a few meters away from the church. Since the late 1990’s there has been a push to build a memorial at the sight of the synagogue. The place where we are sitting in the photos is the footprint of the midieval synagogue.