Celiac disease is very common — it’s estimated 1 in 100 people have it — but celiac is also under-diagnosed or mis-diagnosed easily because of its wide array of potential symptoms (or even lack thereof). I came across this article the other day, which got me thinking about the nature of celiac disease and my particular experience with it. The basic part is that I’m living with celiac and it’s not an issue. Am I sad I can’t eat bread? No. Am I sad I can’t eat pasta? I actually love the texture of rice, potato, and corn pastas, especially this rice spaghetti with spinach I found. Delicious. Despite that, do I wish I didn’t have to deal with it? Yes, actually, I wish I didn’t have to deal with it. But I have it, so I deal with it. It’s as simple as that.

I was diagnosed in May 2009 the week after returning from my honeymoon. That was after almost six months of actively seeking an answer from my primary care physician and the gastroenterologist she sent me to see. My discussion with my primary care physician was an off-handed comment made to her in October, when I was in the office suffering from a sinus infection. “I’ve been having some discomfort,” I finally told her. My now-husband, then-fiancé had effectively badgered me into mentioning it to her after nine months of self-medicated lazy solutions that yielded no discernable results and changes in the way I felt.

“For how long?”

“Um. Well, I first noticed it once I moved to New York, after college. So, ah, late 2007, early 2008 maybe. But I assumed it had something to do with my change in diet and lifestyle — the college to grown-up transition. But even in college, I ate healthy foods, worked out regularly. So my routine isn’t that drastically different.”

She talked to me about it. My primary care physician is a lovely, brilliant woman who will listen to my hypochondriac blathering and diagnose me in a snap. She’s a teaching doctor and her office is filled with med students and interns who I’ve witnessed taking notes and asking teacher/student questions while I’m in the room. It’s hilarious. This also means that the questions my doctor asks are ones I never expect and they always seem to lead her directly to the exact answer. Teachers. She said, “You know? I bet it’s IBS. It usually is in a young woman. But I’ve got a friend and he’ll know for sure. I’ll refer you.”

So I went to see her gastroenterologist friend — another teaching doctor affiliated with the same medical school (at NYU). The gastroenterologist ran some tests, did the basic exam, and frowned. My symptoms were not nail-on-the-head anything. “It could be IBS. It probably is.” He frowned, running down the list of notes he’d sketched during my exam. “But maybe not. Let’s monitor this.” He gave me a few over-the-counter treatment options to use regularly for a few weeks. “If that doesn’t work, it will rule a few things out. Call me and make another appointment if that happens.” Naturally, I called and made an appointment four or five weeks later (again, prompted by my over-protective man; I was content to keep complaining and self-medicating). By now, it was February 2009. When my gastroenterologist said that he wanted to take a closer look and run some more complicated tests, I scheduled them for after the wedding, in mid-March. I was too busy to worry about how I was feeling with the wedding to plan.

At the post-wedding appointment in mid-March, I was examined like Katie Couric was, famously, on The Today Show a few years ago. I got to watch myself get examined on a TV screen and I felt kind of ridiculous. I’m too young for this, I kept thinking. But my teaching doctor gastroenterologist lectured me as he examined, and I got to learn far more about the colon than I’d ever known before. The biology geek in me who had once entertained the idea of med school sat there fascinated while the hysterical hypochondriac in me was silently hyperventilating. At the end of that, I was told my colon was filled with very healthy tissue and I most certainly did not have colon cancer. Oh, gee, I thought, colon cancer had been on the table? Really?

I couldn’t schedule a follow-up until May — the office is always booked — and honestly after that, I needed a few weeks’ respite from the gastroenterologist’s office. So it wasn’t colon cancer. It was, as my primary care physician had said months ago, probably just IBS. So I had them draw enough blood to supply an army of vampires for the full battery of tests and made the next appointment.

I didn’t get back in to see the results of the March test until May. My gastroenterologist sat down with me on the Tuesday after I’d returned from our all-you-can-eat Royal Caribbean honeymoon vacation. I was feeling horrible, but I only vaguely mentioned that. He pointed to numbers on my chart, ones that came back with my very complicated blood work he’d sent off the last time I was in the office. “Your numbers say you may have celiac disease,” he said.

I stared at him. Celiac disease, I thought. Like what Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View has. (No really: that was my first association.) “Oh,” I said aloud. “Really.” My brain didn’t actually process this. My mouth just worked.

“Yes,” he said. My gastroenterologist is a brilliant, scholarly doctor — a teaching doctor. He always speaks in a combination of lecture-speak and an “I assume you already know X and Y, so I’ll begin with Z so we don’t waste time,” kind of manner. He said, “But we can’t know for certain unless we go in and have a look.” Oh, did I know about the going-in-and-having-a-look preference of my teaching doctor doctor. Not that I disagreed — I was an obsessive devotee of ER reruns on TNT for years, so I understood why — but I think in that moment my brain was grappling to find some levity. Not that I was panicking. I just wasn’t actually processing the data correctly. Agreeing with the good doctor was just easier. “I think it’s essential we find out for certain as soon as possible because if this is the cause, there is an easy way for you to start feeling better immediately. How’s tomorrow?” I booked the procedure for the next morning.

I called the requisite worried family members, who by now were all apprised of my quest for an answer, and they were as interested by my half diagnosis as I was. They wished me well and admitted they hoped I didn’t have it. I wasn’t so certain by that point. That night, I hit the internet. All I’d ever known about celiac disease before then had been approximately as much as I knew about, say, pneumonia or kidney stones. I knew what it was, theoretically what the causes and symptoms were, and what it meant for me only in the vaguest of terms. The internet — as you can go look if you Google “celiac disease” provided an inordinate amount of information. But I didn’t look at it too seriously. It was only a half-diagnosis, after all.

The next day, the husband came with — I needed to be sedated, so by law I needed to be escorted from the office; I felt very special. The moment I entered the examination room, the doctor began explaining by saying, “You’ll know it’s celiac the moment you wake up from the sedation because I’ll know the moment I’m in there. Have a seat.”

The thing about having a teaching doctor, I’ve realized, is if you remind them enough of one of their students, they tend to treat you like a student rather than a patient. That was how I’d felt all along — as if rather than reassuring me the patient, he was teaching me the student. It’s comforting for someone who’s spent more of her life as a student than not.

They sedated me. (Which, by the way, is so incredibly freaky. Falling asleep without the falling part, just the sleeping.) The next time I blinked, I looked around the room to see everyone cleaning up. “You have celiac,” the doctor announced. He seemed pleased, as if he’d found the missing piece of that 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle tucked under the sofa. “I’m so happy because it’s so treatable. You’ll start seeing a change immediately.”

He sat with the husband and I and explained in the most basic terms what celiac was — which I already knew — and what that had meant for my small intestine. He even showed me images he’d printed of my small intestine and the deteriorative damage it had suffered due to my ingesting gluten. (Those images worked like the images of the cancerous lungs they show to kids to keep them from smoking. Holy goats, I didn’t want anything to do with gluten after that.) My specific (and unusual) set of symptoms was what led to the confusion regarding my lengthy diagnosis process. He said roughly 2% of people with celiac exhibit the symptoms I had, which was why it took them so long to rule out other things and pin this one down. The husband, my man whose favorite foods involve pretzels, brioche rolls, Italian hoagies, and fascinating pizzas, was a little horrified. No more wheat, rye, or barley? But that meant no more beer! I smiled in his direction. The marriage was two months old and this was the first big test. How would he handle it? (Remarkably generously, as it turned out.)

I, meanwhile, sat there in the gastroenterologist’s office, blinking as my brain processed this. “I’ve always preferred a salad to a sandwich,” I said. “I like fruit. I hate cupcakes.”

I found I used that explanation a lot over the next days and weeks. People came up to me and gave me their condolences about my “disease” and how they were so sad I wouldn’t be able to eat bread ever again. The older the person, the stranger and more sympathetically depressing the reaction. It was as if I’d told them I’d been diagnosed with one of those life-threatening illnesses with a 98% survival rate. They approached me with a sympathetic apology and overwhelming good cheer half the time. Even my lady doctor startled when I told him. “Oh, really? I’m so sorry. That’s so unfortunate.” I had to resist the urge to snap, “No one has died! Stop grieving over the loss of my intestine’s ability to endure the presence of the gluten protein!” Instead, I said lightly, “I’ve always liked salads.”

The biggest thing for me over the past nine months hasn’t been coping with the loss of foods I can’t eat. When I said I wasn’t a big sandwich person, I meant it. I love sushi and Thai (hold the soy sauce unless it’s gluten-free, though) and I really do love salads. What gets to me is the prevalence of wheat-based foods. The nutritionist I consulted summed it up perfectly: America is a wheat-based society. Whereas China, India, and Japan (and other nations) are largely rice-based societies, Americans go to wheat (and to a lesser extent, corn, which I can eat) for everything. That means wheat products and flour made from wheat are cheap. Thus, wheat flour is often the go-to flour in pretty much every sense in this country. (Wikipedia says, “In the culinary sense, flour is a powder made of cereal grains, other seeds, or roots.” Flour is often synonymous in our culture with “wheat flour,” wherein lies most people’s confusion.) Flour doesn’t only have to come from wheat, though. You can find flours made from rice, corn, bean, quinoa, arrowroot, tapioca and a ton of variations of other starches. But if a recipe of something as innocuous as gravy calls for flour, the chef is going to add wheat flour. It’s just how things go. (There’s also the gluten protein itself, which has some fascinating culinary science applications — i.e. it’s the gluten that gives New York pizza crust its doughy, throw-able springy texture — but that’s another story for a culinary-science-inspired entry.)

In some senses, it’s also hard because I grew up being able to eat gluten, so I am conscious of what I’m missing. If I have a craving for a Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie (which is, cough, distinctive), or an Oreo, I can’t eat it. I’m a texture person, rather than a taste person, so it’s the smooth softness of a classic Madeleine cookie I miss, the chewy crustiness of good New York pizza crust, the bready, soft New York bagel. (Okay, living in New York, home of the best bread in America, doesn’t help, although to its credit, New York is also an amazingly celiac-friendly city.) But it’s not debilitating. I feel bad when I can’t eat food someone has made for a potluck. I hate having to explain the fact that I can’t eat certain things to confused waiters in loud restaurants when I ask if a certain dish has any hidden flour in it (and yes, I take a risk when going to restaurants, but I’m not so affected I can’t trust the kitchens of my neighborhood haunts). Most restaurants in New York I’ve encountered are surprisingly accommodating, friendly, and the waiters are actually knowledgeable. I’ve been told tableside whether or not certain sauces contain flour by waiters who tell me they get the question more often than I’d probably expect. It makes it easier to deal with when I don’t feel so alone, when I have friends who are willing to accommodate me and others who shrug and say, “I’m not a big pasta person anyway.”

Having celiac isn’t like having a peanut allergy, it’s not like being allergic to bell peppers. I’ve explained it to very small children by calling it an allergy — that’s a keyword they know from the cradle, apparently — though when asked to elaborate I do admit it’s “like” an allergy, but it’s not really one. At restaurants I used to say I couldn’t eat bread, which led waiters to look at me as if I was some Atkins Diet fanatic. I quickly turned that into “I’m allergic to wheat,” which is now basically, “I can’t eat wheat, rye, or barley.” (That seems to be easiest at restaurants, rather than having to explain the definition of celiac to a stranger.) For practical purposes, it’s more like being vegetarian or vegan, though with an identifiable medical effect if I “cheat.” And like vegetarianism or veganism, it is,  in my experience, generally recognized. Out of the hundreds of people I’ve had to explain my condition to, only one has actually frowned and said, “I’ve never heard of that.” The overwhelming response of late is, “Really? I know someone with celiac.” When I hear that, I smile.

One in a hundred, I keep thinking. It’s not so bad, as “conditions” go. It’s forced the husband and I to cook more, get more creative, become newly addicted to Food Network. I’ve perfected a fantastic gluten-free scone recipe. (Cranberry walnut is the current favorite variety.) Maybe one day I’ll perfect a gluten-free imitation Milano or Oreo recipe. Sigh. I’ll keep working on it.

Before I meet my friends for brunch, though, I’ve lots to do, including hopefully hitting up the gym for a bit — preventative measures, you understand — and cleaning this apartment, or perhaps attempting to clean it. It’s so filled with boxes and moved things it’s becoming progressively harder to function, but it’s Tuesday — we move Saturday. It’s fast approaching! I look around and think, “Clean? BAH.” But the neat freak trapped inside of me is silently moaning. A little. Though packing and labeling boxes does appease her. (She’d prefer I color-code the labels on the boxes by room — kitchen, living room, bedroom, closet — but she can’t have it all!)

On Friday my mother and I are taking a trip to IKEA — IKEA, the store of dreams! Or the Place Where Grown-Up Dreams of Cheap Furnishings Become Reality. I am inordinately happy about going to IKEA. Bryan knows that I have a… shall we call it an obsession with IKEA? I love functional and simple, and that is all of IKEA. Everything there is both functional and simple — sometimes a little crazily European while also being simple and functional, too, which is fun. I am a big lover of all things European, especially design, so IKEA is even more exciting for that. I never thought, growing up, that I’d ever find a store more exhilarating to be in than a toy store like Toys ‘R’ Us, but I have, and it is filled with furnishings. That to me is more evidence of the fact that I’ve grown up than other things in my life. (I still play video games and wear T-shirts with funny slogans and seriously enjoy Cartoon Network.) Going to IKEA to furnish our first [real] apartment as a married couple — and being giddily enthusiastic about it? Yeah, that’s pretty grown up on the scale of things. (Is there a scale of things somewhere?) I don’t know whether this is a good development, or a really frightening one…

And yet despite this, I drink coffee every day. I need to. It’s a terrible habit but I have such difficulty staying awake… but that also might be due to the lack of fresh fruits in my diet or something. I need to eat more oranges and apples and have more Vitamin C…

The wonderful Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN also says that more than 2 cups of coffee daily can reduce your life expectancy by 1.5 to 2 years. Scary, eh?

Back to the purpose of this entry. Enviga claims as much caffeine as the average cup of coffee. And only 5 calories. It’s admittedly tasty. They have peach flavored green tea! Mm! I would never consider obediently drinking multiple cans a day, but to have one can, on occasion, instead of a cup of coffee — that’s no worse than what I already do. But ultimately, I do need to get out of the habit of coffee — or at least get out of the habit of more than one cup in a day.

Obligatory pause for the “Aww.”

Proceeding:
I’ve had three cups of tea this morning and a cinnamon sugar muffin. I was incidentally composing what I’d blog about that muffin after I took a bite in it, realizing, amusedly, that the muffin was actually cinnamon sugar instead of my intended corn. I love corn muffins for some obscure reason. Maybe it’s because I consider them “food” instead of “snack” or “treat” because of their corn content? Maybe. But anyway I was walking up the stairs from Ginger’s to the Glad and I was thinking, Hey, isn’t it amusing that this muffin is a cinnamon sugar muffin? What are the odds that I would mistakenly purchase this exact kind of muffin instead of a corn muffin? Then I did actually think about the odds. But enough of that pondersome oddity.

Happy Valentine’s Day, all!

I had to title the entry something I’ve been wondering. I love German Swiss cheese, but I’ve no idea if it actually is Swiss cheese, or from Switzerland, or what. It tastes like Jarlsberg Swiss, but it’s not called that. I attempted looking up the words on the label to no avail. Bah! It’s good, though. The bread and cheese here are so good—why do people even bother with McDonald’s? I don’t get it.

Getting on to my day. First off, I hate my camera! With a seething passion! (I had to start off by saying that. Now I may continue.) I went to Nürnberg (Nuremberg) today! It was completely unexpectedly awesome. I was kind of reluctant to go there because you think Nuremberg and you immediately think of Nazis and World War II. As Americans, especially if you ever, ever, ever have seen the History Channel, you can’t think of anything else when you hear of that city. It’s infamous as the site of the famed post-war trials, because the Allied forces thought, in 1945, that it’d be a grand idea to try the biggest war criminals at the site of where the largest Nazi gatherings in all of Europe once took place. Heh.

But as I said, it was completely unexpectedly awesome, and totally not that at all. (At least, we opted not to go to the stadium where most of it all happened, including Hitler’s biggest speeches… Yeah. Unanimous vote to forego that experience.)

Anyway Mary and I sat at Goethe yesterday afternoon and looked at our tourbooks, attempting to figure out which city to visit today. We were in an empty classroom, me with my laptop open, and Ian sitting across the room, tapping away at his own keyboard. “Augsburg is nice,” I said, pointing to the Romantic Road’s largest city, where my Medieval literature professor once taught. It’s supposed to be an incredible Medieval city with a university.

Ian, listening in, suggested Nuremberg instead. “It’s really nice,” he told us, and Mary and I were surprised. We looked at the tourbook and read through some of the city information—castle, check; churches, check; open-air market, check—and I still wasn’t too hot for it, but it seemed the logical place to go, because it was about two hours from München and much more prominent as a tourist location. And, it’s known all over Germany for its Christmas festival, which is supposedly fantastic beyond measure. Okay, I thought. We can see. We walked over to the Haupbahnhof and looked up tickets on the electronic dispenser and discovered we could use the “Schönes-Wochenende” or “Beautiful Weekend” ticket—what we’d used for Salzburg—to get there for 30€, for up to five people. Mary and I were thrilled. Only 15€ each! We bought the ticket for Saturday and went to our respective homes, saying we’d meet at 5:30 to catch the 6:10 train, to arrive in Nürnberg by 9-ish. Not bad.

I got to the Hauptbahnhof at 5:33 and Mary said she’d seen Stephen, the guy from NC Charlotte, the day before, and she had invited him along. Another person to split the ticket with! 10€ each! He came after a short time and we found seats together on the crazy double-decker train. Double-decker trains are seriously the best European thing ever. (Okay, that’s not true, but they’re still really, really cool.) After being seated for a little while, a white-haired man came over and in slow German asked if we were using the Schönes-Wochenende ticket. Mary and Stephen looked at me to see if I’d understood a single word. I’d heard “machen” and “Schönes-Wochenende ticket” so I said, “Ja, wir haben das.” He then asked something none of us caught, so we looked at him helplessly. He then said, “Danke,” and sat down behind us. We exchanged glances with each other, and with him, and he realized we hadn’t understood. “English?” he asked, and we nodded. “You have the Schönes-Wochenende ticket, yes?” We nodded. “Can I be on your ticket?” The ticket is up to five people, but I looked to Mary and Stephen. Neither looked easy about saying no, but we really did not want to say yes either. Mary shrugged and we decided more or less, whatever. Weird. When the ticket guy came about a half-hour later, I didn’t point to him to include him in our ticket, but when he was asked, he pointed to us and the ticket guy nodded and moved on. I immediately wondered how many people bum weekend rides just like that. Weird.

It was a long, scenic ride in the light of the rising sun. There are a ton of farms in Bayern (Bavaria). Tons. It’s sort of different from traveling between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, let’s say, where there are spots of vast farmland, too, but here, it’s different. The towns—villages, really—look ancient, as if they haven’t changed in decades, perhaps centuries. The white-washed wall and reddish stone roofed buildings are covered with fresh flowers draping from window sills and in every cluster of buildings there is clearly one ancient-looking church spire. It’s so bizarre. No “McDonald’s” signs visible from miles away. No neon lights. Barely any cars. No huge gas stations or eighteen-wheelers parked anywhere. So different.

We finally arrived and decided to take the subway one stop to the center of the Altstadt. Many European cities seem to have an “Altstadt,” or the like, the part of the city that used to be a medieval town clustered around a castle of some kind, usually walled in by water or a thick stone wall. Salzburg was like this, and even Paris to some extent. These were the hubs until perhaps the eighteenth century, when the cities really started to grow and spill out into the surrounding farmland—for some this happened as late as the late nineteenth century—sometimes creating cities as large as München. We took the U-Bahn and got off at Lorenzkirche, St. Lorenz Church, and walked up into the morning air. It was freezing! Somehow it had not warmed up a smidge since sunrise and the three of us in T-shirts (yes, that’s a neu-deutsch word) were frigid. Despite that, the weather was fantastic. Clear blue Bayern skies with a brisk breeze promising a cool and lovely day. (Bayern’s colors are sky blue and white, for their famous skies.) My fantastic Wetter-Glück continues! I was immediately impressed with the absolute gorgeousness of the city I saw around me. The impeccably paved streets (cobbled, of course) and ancient and modern stone buildings mixed together were so unlike what I was expecting—I have no idea what I was in fact expecting—I was suddenly very happy to be in Nürnberg.

We found breakfast at a coffee shop—all coffee shops in Germany are very, very obviously American imports. They’re all in English and are very much Starbucks knock-offs if not Starbucks in actuality—we’ve seen a few of those. Nevertheless the cappuccino hit the spot and we were off in the slightly warmer sunlight, going north (thanks, trusty compass) toward the rest of the main attractions of Nürnberg. Most everything was just starting to open, but as we walked up the broad avenue (dodging some very out-of-place cars) we suddenly walked into a huge market square in front of the Frauenkirche. Just like the market near Marienplatz in München, this market sold everything from fruits, vegetables, beer, wine, and cheese to handmade goods of various types and quality. At the far end of the square was a surprising and unique sight—a tower of carved figures, the symbol of Nürnberg. And the fountains, every block or two, were splendid. Continuing up the street, we found the town hall, or Rathaus, to our right, a intricate and austere building, opposite another church, Selbaldkirche, or St. Sebaldus Church. I was amazed by the intricacy and ancient looking exterior, and going inside, I was absolutely shocked—it had been destroyed in the war. The interior was as perfect-seeming as the outside, but all along the main section of the church were huge black-and-white images of the 1945 bombing of Nürnberg, and the entire main section of the church, including pieces of its two towers, had been destroyed, most of it leveled, the rest a mere shell, in the bombings. Looking around, I admitted the grout looked a little modern, but it looked gothic enough for me to be convinced of its authenticity.

We continued north up the street and found the Nürnberg Stadt Museum, and wandered in, getting our student discount and going up to the top floor to go down, looking at the different stages of Nürnberg. The top floor had a narrated German slideshow (I could understand so much of it!!) and we saw Nürnberg as an Imperial city in the middle ages—it was the sometime home of the Holy Roman Emperor—to high Renaissance center of art and even Reformation-age place of debate and religious reformation. The city had been strongly effected in 1525 and mostly converted in the Reformation, different from most of southern, conservatively Catholic Bavaria. They moved from important building to important building, and we all silently decided to check the places out that we hadn’t seen. Then a picture flashed of a fantastically ornate building with three huge domes, with carvings all along its sides. Mary immediately said, “We should definitely go there!” and then I looked at the city model in front of us on the table, facing the slideshow screen. The highlighted space was—empty. A white square empty of a building. Mary and I were both disappointed. Where had it gone? I looked back at the image on the slideshow projector and strained to understand the German. It had been destroyed in the “Zweite Weltkrieg.” By whom? Axis or Allied? I looked down, at the carefully empty square, and thought—why would it still be empty if that church we saw had been painstakingly rebuilt post-war? Two floors down, I found the answer. It had been a synagogue. I gaped. It had never been rebuilt, and today the space stands as a memorial.

Of course, the gaping continued. The stream of black-and-white images, starting with those taken in the late 19th century, went all the way up to the 1950s. Seeing Nürnberg from 1938 to 1945… wow. Wow. I can’t really describe how—scary—it was. I saw the Rathaus—we’d just passed it!—streaming with Swastika flags, pictures of Hitler at a podium in front of a tremendous crowd…. Even the Marktplatz in front of Frauenkirche with troops marching through it. But the next room was—if possible—worse. It was a scale model of Nürnberg in 1945, post the bombings by the Allied forces. It had been decimated. Decimated. All but one major church—the miraculous 14th century gothic beast of Lorenzkirche—had been nearly crippled. Houses were rubble, everywhere, patches of razed and untouched—though mostly razed. It looked like the television footage of a Midwestern town after a level 5 tornado. The pictures on the walls were just—wow. Sights I’d just passed in the city, in rubble. And we did that to this city. It’s like we’d bombed the German Florence. (If you love Italian history, art, or literature, you definitely can appreciate how much that would hurt the world’s history.)

The loss of history, the loss of culture was crippling, and my disappointment with the loss of history was at odds with my disgust at the Nazi images. Yet even so, did our side really need to bomb the poor churches? Were there soldier barracks in them or something? Why, why? Here was a city where Martin Luther had lectured, where the first Protestant pastors argued for their right to worship! Where Albrecht Dürer, the famous Renaissance artist and first painter of the self-portrait, lived. Where the Holy Roman Emperor and his queen lived for a time in their palace. A center of art, of literature, of commerce throughout a thousand years of history. This lovely, culturally rich city had been destroyed. It was like seeing the World Trade Center images—but somehow worse. The WTC hurt a lot because there was obviously a tremendous loss of life, but so much of the anger and pain were from the emotional weight of America being attacked on our own territory. Imagining New York or Washington, D. C. decimated by an aerial raid is something more like what this felt like.

You never, ever see this side of the war in America. You see America taking the blame for Hiroshima, but not for this sort of thing, not for Germany, or Austria. We killed, they killed. It’s all war in the end, all painful; no matter the ideals someone gets hurt. While the smoke was still clearing from St. Selban’s, people started rebuilding it, shocked and hurt by the loss of their place of worship; it took until 1960 to finally wipe away the last of the dust. The same was true for München’s Frauenkirche in Marienplatz—it had been half-destroyed, all save the city’s symbol, the “onion” domes, and people immediately started rebuilding it, to prevent history from falling into forgotten ruin. At least war was somewhat fair when it was swords and bows and arrows… At least an entire city couldn’t vanish in a day, then.

War never has just one side, one view. I’m so glad I was here to see some of the other side of it—er, not that side, I mean seeing images of post-war, decimated Germany for the first time. I want to try to wrap my head around the whole of things as they were. It’s part of the whole walking in someone else’s shoes experience—you really can’t say you understand someone until you try that, no matter how much you think you know. And understanding history from all angles is one way to prevent re-experiencing it. Seeing the rubble of Nürnberg—I understand a lot more now, especially more of why Germany took so many decades to rebuild itself, why they take their twentieth century history lessons in schools very, very seriously. When I go to Dachau next Saturday with Goethe, I’ll see another side of it altogether. (Dachau was the site of an infamous concentration camp.) This is the way of a true historian—analyzing all angles to understand the best and truest picture possible. I’m so glad I got to go to Nürnberg, to see all of that, to somehow understand so much more than I did before.

Leaving that museum was somewhat of a relief. So many contradictions in Nürnberg, a city of rich art and architecture, of disputed religion and deadly politics. I suppose a thousand years of history is also a thousand years of constant change and growth, for good and ill, and we Americans are still far too young to see that change in our own cities, in our own people. Perhaps another few hundred years and we’ll have fought through the same changes of leaders and country and people and somehow understand. We were never really sacked and rebuilt by invading armies over centuries of war—well, perhaps southerners in cities wrecked in the Civil War have some idea, some inkling we Yankees lack. I’m not sure. But enough waxing political and all that. I don’t like getting embroiled in politics because, like religion, we’ll never all agree. (Frankly, I think that’s how it ought to be. I happen to like diversity of opinion and belief, provided we don’t go forcing our opinions on others. Getting on, though…)

After that, we went up a tremendous hill toward the Imperial Palace, which was rather expensive to visit. We took a few pictures of the city from the hill then wandered back down, stopping at a restaurant for the classic Nürnberg treat—the Nürnberger. They’re small wurst, the smallest traditional wurst in Germany, and they’re famous for serving them on bread like a sandwich or with plenty of sauerkraut. Mary and I ordered the Nürnberger platter and Stephen the Wienerschnitzel. We ate happily in the sunlight and proceeded on our touring of the city, slowly but steadily. We attempted to see all the major sites—all the interesting ones not requiring expensive admission fees—and finally made our way back to the train in the late afternoon. We all decided, after getting some Eis (ice cream, or the German gelato-like version of it, which is fantastic!) that Goethe really ought to open a Nürnberg site for the Institut. It’s such an interesting city, so large and small all at once, that it’d be quite an interesting place to live in and explore—its history aside, it’s quite modern, too. They have Instituts all over, so why not there? We all agreed Nürnberg had been absolutely nothing like what we’d expected, and we were thrilled to have gone.

The train was long and I was thoroughly exhausted by the time I got home. On the way back to the dorm I got some delicious German Swiss cheese (yeah, I’m sure there’s a name for it here, because it’s not actually Swiss cheese…erm…heh) and some crackers, enjoying some fresh cherries from Marienplatz (from a lady selling cherries with a sign that said, “Frauenkirche liebt Kirschen!”—“Kirche” is church and “Kirschen” are cherries). I hopped up on my wide windowsill and ate my strangely awesome dinner and discovered that I can *just* see the “onion” domes of Frauenkirche from my room window. I admitted it was quite worth living with the evil Hausfrau to have that view. Ah, Germany.

Now, of course, for pictures…
Album style
Slideshow style

Enjoy!

Friday was the Hofbrauhaus! (*dances a jig*) Oh. Yes, I do need to tell you about it, I suppose. Yes. The Hofbrauhaus is a fantastically interesting place. But I haven’t actually sat down to write about it yet. *sigh* It’s extremely annoying to not have a desk lamp that works because when it gets dark, the writing can’t continue. We asked the ladies yesterday about fixing our [three] broken desk lamps and they said, in German, that they’d send over a person to “ihrem Zimmer” to fix it. Great. What time? No idea. Great. Anyway, I’ll edit this post when I’ve written!

So last night was the Stammtisch, which as far as I can translate from “Stimme” and “tisch” means something like “people having fun and being loud at a table.” Ha! German is awesome. Well, anyway, this particular activity of Stammtisch was scheduled for a proper Irish pub called Murphy’s at Nikoleiplatz, about five or so blocks east of the Englisher Garten, northeast of the Altstadt (old city). Apparently going to this pub is a weekly Donnerstag (Thursday) ritual, and our Lehrerin (teacher) warned us about it ahead of time. Yesterday morning in German she basically said, “I know tonight there is a Stammtisch, at an Irish pub. This is a Goethe ritual. But what is also a Goethe ritual is not coming to classes the day after because the Stammtisch was so much fun. So please, if you are going, remember we have lessons at 8.30 am Morgen!” She said something close enough to that effect, but with more facial expressions and hand movements.

So in speaking briefly to my colleagues after class, we all agreed to meet at the pub at approximately 21 Uhr. Some said they’d be showing up at 9.30 or so instead of 9, because the crowd is very quiet at 9, and still others decided to commence the pub-crawling during daylight. (These being the amusing boys I spoke of at the Englisher Garten, and others who have become their particular Bier buddies. We’re never invited to their afternoon drinking festivals, probably because we’re female, but we’re all annoyed because they could at least invite us, even if we wouldn’t go anyway. So we insist privately.) The girls all shrugged and said we’d see each other there.

So I went back to my room after hanging out at the Institut on the internet for a while and did some writing. At about 4.30, my roommate came in with her friend Stephanie, from Ohio. I met Stephanie the previous morning briefly, when she and my roommate, Ayse (pronounced Eye-shay or something similar, because I am incapable to speaking Turkish), met on the way to class to do their homework together. They pulled out several bottles from their bags and remarked happily that because Ayse is 18, they were able to buy liquor! I stared at the two of them. “Oh, really? How old are you, Stephanie?” I asked. “Seventeen,” she said distractedly, and she asked me in return. They remarked how interesting alcohol rules are in Germany—it’s perfectly acceptable to walk down the street with a Bier in hand, for instance—though Ayse did say that in Turkey the drinking age is 18, but she’s been drinking wine and such with her family for years. Stephanie, from Ohio, was clearly thrilled that the age for Bier in Germany is 16—and that Ayse could buy them liquor. I looked from their drinks to them and asked Ayse, “So you’re going to ‘pregame’ the pub tonight?”

“What is this, ‘pregame’?” (For the record, I find it very amusing to teach her American slang, because her face is so expressive and when she understands something, her eyes pop open and she says, “Ah! I see this now!”)

Stephanie and I exchanged a glance. Stephanie and I explained to her the somewhat (in my estimation) American concept of drinking before going out, to either save from drinking at the place, or to prepare for more drinking. Stephanie explained she did it with her friends back home, or rather just got together to get drunk with them all the time, and I tried not to look shocked. I supposed she was my sister’s age, about to go to college, and figured, it’s not my place to instruct her in what she ought or ought not to do. (I later discovered she’s about to be a senior in high school!) I decided I’d accompany them on their way to meet a friend then go to the pub, to both play big sister and watch them for my own amusement. Besides… I didn’t think they knew how to get there, anyway. Ah, I heart my map.

We walked up the Sonnenstraße to Karlsplatz, which is between the Haupbahnhof (main train station) and Marienplatz, about a block from our dorm. We waited in the freezing rain for their friend, the “good-looking Mexican guy” from their class, whose name I cannot for the life of me recall. (Probably because they called him “the Mexican guy” more than used his name — was it Fabiano? Maybe.) The girls sipped their Apfel Schnapps and I impassively read my trusty map, watching as the girls fearlessly asked passers by to take our picture (“Entschuldigung! Can you take our picture! Danke!”) Their friend from their introductory German class arrived, carrying a half-empty bottle of wine (I was thoroughly amused) and then I directed us all to the U-Bahn to get to the pub. I was sort of anxious about meeting my own friends, though we’d arrive with plenty of time to spare.

Situated on a small square a few blocks from the Giselastraße U-Bahn station, Murphy’s Irish Pub was rather un-surreptitiously situated between a café and a few shops. We walked down the flight of steps into the basement room (all Irish pubs are in basements, I have now learned) and saw it was nearly empty. As time went on, the place started to fill and clusters of college-age kids came in, some of whom I’d seen at the Englisher Garten and around the halls. (There are only perhaps 80 or so of us in the classes at any given time, so we tend to see each other around.) I saw a few faces I recognized, including a girl from my dorm, Aurora, from Guatemala, and invited them to sit with the slowly growing Goethe group. Behind them came Mary, my friend from class, who immediately dropped down next to me. On my other side sat Ian, a guy from Oxford, England, who had recognized me from the Englisher Garten as someone who spoke English. Mary and I were delighted that we could talk casually in English (as the conversations seemed clustered around either German, English, or an obscure language between a few individuals, like Turkish or Russian or Spanish).

The menu was surprising. It was entirely in English, and the girl who came to take our order spoke clearly in Irish-accented English, asking, “What’ll it be for you?” I had no idea—my understanding of German beer still limited to “Helles” (light), “Dunkel” (dark), “Weiß” (wheat), and “Pils” (Pilsner)…and even then, I’m not an expert by far. Ian asked me humorously, “Are you even old enough to order a beer legally in America?” I looked at him sourly. He’s twenty and has been drinking in England legally for two years now, and Mary is 21. I ordered a Hacker-Pschorr, a local München brew, Mary ordered a small cider, and Ian ordered a Beck’s. Down the table I saw people ordering mixed drinks (why would you ever, ever do that in Germany? In München, the Bier capital of Germany?!) and a few ordered the Irish/English beers on the menu (which were sooo overpriced compared to the German ones). When I was served, the waitress immediately asked me to pay, as she did everyone, going individually with a calculator and a wallet of bills, collecting everyone’s fees.

As we all sat there and talked, I met more people than I can remember meeting in so short a time, and had some very interesting and diverse conversations. It was amusing how much I spoke like Ian, him being British and all. (Have you ever noticed, for instance, that I use “ought” a bit more than normal Americans? Or “a bit”? Or “loads”? Or, well, lots of things. “Properly” “and such.” Adverbials that are indicative of a British dialect — I swear, it was all those times I read Harry Potter. It’s the Jane Austen in me fighting to escape…) I spoke with Maximiliano, the friendly Italian guy I see everywhere, who knows everyone because he’s so friendly and very, very Italian; I met two new Americans, Mark, from California, who was unsurprisingly very American and Zeb (I think?) an American originally from Phoenix, then Seattle, who now works in München and is learning German on the tab of his company; I met a French guy who is good friends with Maximiliano—their respective nations are meeting for the World Cup final, and they find it a grand joke to run around assuring everyone that they’re such good friends, despite the odds!

The varying levels of German were surprising. There are three “tiers” at Goethe: A, B, and C. Each tier has 4 different levels: 11, 12, 21, 22. I’m in A21 with Mary; my roommate Ayse and Stephanie are in A11; Ian and Aurora are in B21 with Zeb; Mark is between B22 and C11, so he’s teaching himself in the Mediothek. A is for learning the “basics”—grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation. B is for proficiency and practice, and C is pretty much sharpening of the skills through discussions and essays and stuff. A kids can generally speak basic sentences but vastly prefer their mother-tongues; B kids struggle through conversations and hesitate often, but can usually make themselves understood to anyone, and C kids are fairly indistinguishable, for me, from an actual German, besides their often heavy Italian or Chinese accents. (And I keep saying kids when perhaps 10% of the program are working adults whose jobs sent them here to become proficient in German (usually for 2-3 months or longer). Some are based in München so go to their places of work during the afternoons after classes end at 12.45, and some simply work over the internet. It’s all very interesting.

Anyway, we stayed at the bar for quite a while, talking up a storm late into the night. Goethe actually took over the bar to some degree; most of the students started dancing to the American and UK music pumping out of the speakers, shouting at each other in Turkish or Spanish or German over the din. Most of us weren’t so excited about dancing, and because it *was* getting late, and we had classes the next day, a group of us walked the block or two back to the U-Bahn to go in our various directions back home. I went home with Aurora, and the others split up based on direction into small clusters. The U-Bahn runs until about 2 in the morning, but luckily we left early enough (about 1-ish) to be able to catch a subway. I wasn’t too excited about classes, but then again, why else am I here? *Thinks for a second* Oh, right. To experience Germany… er… learn German…