Live and Let Liver

The Halloween party on Wednesday was fun -- I stayed out until past 5 AM and then magically found my way home. I honestly had no idea where I was, so I picked a direction and walked until I saw something I recognized, which fortunately happened quickly and turned out to be about as close to home as I could have hoped. I guess my drunk GPS kicked in. It still took me half an hour, but I'm used to those walks by now. If I hadn't guessed correctly which direction to walk, I could have ended up in France, where French punks might have beaten me with a baguette. Or worse: there's a little "French" bakery chain in Germany called Cro-bag. I think it's supposed to be a mix of croissant and baguette, but it makes me think of cro-mags, ho-bags, and crowbars, all at the same time, none of which I'd want to eat or get attacked by.

Thursday I played some sports with a bunch of the teachers. We played soccer, which was cool since we used Indoor Soccer rules, and I wasn't the worst one there, which is surprising since this is Europe after all. But then we played basketball, and of course I jammed my finger at one point, and it's only now starting to hurt less. Basketball sucks. I had to skip out on volleyball afterwards, which is probably okay since I was completely spent at that point anyway.

On Friday the students had a 4 day weekend, so the teachers spent the morning in different seminars followed by a trip to Frankfurt for the rest of the day. I wouldn't normally want to be in school on a Friday, especially not at 8:30 AM, but I was in the Cooperative Games seminar so we just got to play a bunch of different team-building games and talk about how they could be used in the classroom.

Frankfurt was interesting -- I went on a tour of the Goethe House, most of which I didn't understand but that's okay. After a shopping trip which confirmed that, yes, German women are also from Venus, we all had dinner at a cool, typical Frankfurt restaurant. I mean, this place really prided itself on being typical Frankfurt. So of course I tried what someone told me was typical Frankfurt food: Leberknoedeln. This is what the side-splittingly hilarious pun in the title of this post refers to, because Leberknoedeln are some kind of dumplings made out of liver. Sounds gross, and if you don't like liver or liverwurst or anything, then it would indeed be gross. I actually enjoyed it, especially with the generous portions of mashed potatoes and sauerkraut involved. Together with some Apfelwein (apple wine) and half a schnitzel from another teacher who couldn't finish hers, I really distended my stomach with typical Frankfurt food that evening.