My Ear Medicine: Glühwein

It is Christmas time in Deutschland and all I want for Christmas is for my ear debacle to be done and over with, dead, crushed up into dust, buried in concrete. The good news is that my ear is healing well and I finally got the last of the gauze taken from my ear Thursday, which has been a great relief to a constant irritant. Showering will be difficult for the next month, as I have to tape up my ear and stuff it with cotton to keep water out of it, which becomes quite time consuming. It is just another one of those little daily battles which annoy rather than actually disrupt.

Everywhere in Germany are these "Christkindlemarkts" which are like out door Christmas markets with a lot of kitsch. While at these Christkindlesmarkts you are never more than 30 feet away from a Glühwein stand. Glühwein is a hot-spiced wine which often has a shot of spiced rum or amaretto which allows for people to endure the December cold and spend lots of time shopping. My program had a voluntary excursion to Augsburg last weekend for the 1st of the month, when the Christkindlesmarkts begin. Augsburg is the second oldest city in Germany, behind Trier, and was home to the powerful Fugger banking family. The Fuggers were close with the Hapsburgs, rulers of Austria for 600 years. The Fuggers established the world's first socialized welfare system there, which they funded entirely. In 1516 they built a small city within a city, capable of housing a couple hundred people. It has it's own walls and gates, which are still closed for it's inhabitants (it is still actively used) at the ringing of ten every night. There are no keys or locks for the apartments, just a lever to open the door and the gates guarding from the outside. Any family could qualify as long as they were very poor, catholic, residents of the City of Augsburg, and without a criminal record.

The Fuggers also contributed a great amount of money when the new Rathaus (city hall) was built in 1620; its Golden Hall which is pictured above, is a beautiful mix of gold and dark hardwoods. While in the Golden Hall we saw musicians practicing, and later there was a some performance that was put on from the windows and balcony of the Rathaus. At 6 all the lights in the Christkindlesmarkt were turned off and the Rathaus was illuminated. The windows were filled with children dressed as angels with curly golden wigs and wings. Then in the main windows were women in more elaborate angel costumes with triumphant wings and golden clothing. On the balcony were the 5 main angels pretending to play large mock instruments as the music was being played inside (organ, horn, harp, etc.). It greatly resembled a coo-coo clock and was a little puzzling. In about ten minutes it was all over and the kitsch shopping resumed.


I saw a statistic here that said the average German will eat something like 18 kilograms of chocolate over the holiday season, which is nearly 40 pounds of chocolate. I believe it, they've got chocolate everywhere here, good chocolate, and pretty cheap too. I think my favorite is Ritter Sport, but mainly because of their slogan: Quadratic. Practical. Good. That's Germany personified as a candy bar. Advent calenders here are also huge, some literally are and have a couple pounds of candy in them. Munich is looking very festive now, and I look forward to visiting the medieval Christkindlesmarkt this week. Last week was St. Niklaustag or Santa Clause Day as I like to call it. My house had a little party and gift exchange, but we played this weird game with dice. All the presents are in the middle and if you roll a certain number you take a present, open a present you already have, or exchange presents with someone. It becomes pretty funny and interesting but starts to drag on. We had nearly 10 liters of Glühwein with a couple of bottles of amaretto for the party, so by the end of the little gift exchange everyone had a lot of the holiday spirit in them and it turned into a pretty debacherous night of international holiday mayhem. The dynamic of so many nationalities interacting with each other at a Christmas party was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. The German guys in the house are funny enough, and of course they break out the accordion and start singing this really boisterous song they always sing about a guy hiking in the mountains. Then the group of girls from the Ukraine, Moldovia, and Georgia (the country) start getting really silly and talking up a storm in their various crazy Slavic languages. The Vietnamese guy who doesn't hang out with the other Asians because they're Chinese starts getting a little nutty and the saucy Spanish girl gets even saucier. Now to make it a good party all you have to do is throw in some Americans, who everyone knows are loud, drunk, obnoxious, wasteful, and "overly friendly" as the Germans describe us.

School continues on as it will. Every time I got to a class at the University I understand a little more, which is encouraging for once. I'm hoping for a white Christmas, just like the kind I've never known; anything is better than the gray muddy weather we've been having. I now have less than two weeks of class left before my break and I'm still trying to figure out what I am going to do with my time.