Awesome day and two tips!

Happy Friday!
Can we talk about how quickly this Friday snuck up on us?! I can't believe that it has already been a week since we packed our things to go see my family. Crazy!

However, it has been an awesome day so far! Nick and I were greeted with this!

Kündigungsbestätigung - confirmation of cancelation 

Hoorray!! Remember when I told you about the issues we had getting internet and phone service at our house? Well, all those problems made me switch providers as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it is not as easy to get out of a contract here than it is in the US. It took 4 handwritten letters and a few phone calls, but now, it's done! In Germany, the key is to have things in writing - and hang on to them - forever - and pass them on to your grandchildren. We just love stamped, signed, and approved documents so much.

After these happy news, we decided to take our coffee outside and go for a walk with Lucy. 

We found this guy in front of the city hall in Schöneberg. You may remember the other bear I found on one of my runs the other day. This one wasn't as colorful, but still kinda cool. 

The city hall in Schöneberg is particularly interesting to see, since it was here, where J. F. Kennedy gave his famous speech almost exactly 50 years ago (on June 26, 1963). It is incredible, how much his words ("ich bin ein Berliner") have meant to so many people over the years.

After that, Lucy told us to stop walking around places with fake bears and go to the park.

Coffee for us, water for the fur-ball.

She was too slow to catch the beagle,
so she hid in a hole under a bench. 

On the way home, we walked by another awesome place! 

Germans are quite serious about rules. Especially when it comes to traffic laws, there is no joking around. It's serious business. So don't even think about jay-walking. 

That is why we have little places like this, where kids can learn everything they need to know about all those traffic regulations. You can take those little "cars", or practice riding your bike here to get ready for your bike test.

Yes, we have bike test and every child in German elementary school takes it. I can tell you all about it some other time.

I was going to take a better picture of the traffic-practice-place, but there were people with kids and I didn't want to make them think I am a creepy weirdo. So I hid in the bushes to take this one.

From my previous whining about my knee, you know that I have not been able to run in a week. It's been quite rough. I have had serious running-envy and complained to Nick about it. He is probably just as happy as me when this is over. 

Until then, I have been doing everything I can to treat my knee and (aside from R.I.C.E - rest, ice, compress, elevate) I found two cremes that are helping really well with the sports injuries I've had thus far.

Source

This one is called "doc gel" and it contains ibuprofen and I like it a lot better than taking pills. You just apply it to the injured area and the medication gets absorbed right where it's needed. I had never heard of it before, but the pharmacist recommended it and I am already a fan. 

The other cream, or gel, I use is Arnica gel. In the US, you can definitely get it at CVS. That's where I bought "Arnicare", but there are different brands that make it. 

It is a homeopathic medication and 100% natural. I found that it is really good for minor injuries and swelling. I pulled my achilles tendon a little while ago and used it for the first time then. This stuff is truly wonderful! 

Source

Just so you know, none of the manufacturers has paid or tricked me into saying these nice things about those two items. I am just sharing my personal unprofessional opinion. 

Did you get to run today? 

How do you take care of sports injuries?

Do you have any fun plans for this weekend? 

picture potpourri

Hallihallo!

I know, this is a super late blog post and I have no idea how it happened. I blame it on the warm weather, and the fact that I have to write a paper, and that I just had to try to take pictures of lightnings. For an hour.
Have you ever tried that? Either it is incredibly hard, or I am just the worst photographer in the history of mankind.

But, here are a few pictures of moments in our week so far.

Last weekend, as we walked in the door at my parents' house, my brother Batta (Sebastian) had the best surprise for us! - Not one, but TWO bags filled with the most delicious custom candy collection my taste buds have ever had the pleasure to taste.
Who, you are most certainly thinking, is the wonderful human being who not only carefully selects the best of the best candy, but also GIVE IT AWAY TO SOMEONE ELSE!?

My brother's sweet, sweet girlfriend! Isn't that amazing!!? She is my absolute favorite now.

Look at this.
(I took this picture right in time before the first bag disappeared.)

and this!!

Yes, the candy always has a spot between us.
Nick and I are the best candy sharing team you will ever meet.
(And yes, pink and gray is an awesome combination for socks.) 

I don't know if you heard about it, but Germany has been flooded. 

I am not joking. There have been major rain falls, which caused some of the biggest rivers to completely overflow and dikes to soak and break. Thousands of people have lost their homes. We are extremely thankful that no one in my family is directly effected. Nonetheless, it's been devastating just to see all the pictures on the news of those, who have lost everything they ever owned.

When Nick and I went on our trip home last weekend, we crossed the Elbe river by Magdeburg and I have never seen anything like it. Huge trees were covered in water and just their tips looked out. 

People tried to come up with all sorts of plans to stop the water from running, spending night and day filling sand bags.

When one of the dikes broke at a length of 90meters, leaking 300.000liters/second, someone came up with the idea to sink carriage boats (those long boats without engines that are just being pushed to transport goods) to stop the water. And that's what they did!

Have you ever seen anything like this?!

Speaking of weather, Lucy was not a fan of summer arriving in Germany. It was hot here over the past few days and she couldn't creep on the neighbors. It ruined her week.

"I hate summer."

"This is not fair!"

 You may already know that I just LOVE this (mid morning, early afternoon, late night) snack. I am not exaggerating when I say that you will see this being eaten in our house at least 10 times a week.

Yoghurt with Müsli. 

 Today, Nick and I tried a new candy. It wouldn't be right to always just mention Haribo on this blog. We have another terrific gummy candy brand: "Katjes".
This one is the new "Katjes Mango" kind. It is really good and I would definitely recommend it to a friend.

"Treats?"
(and yes, I think the picture is a little weird. Who eats mango like that?!)

You should eat it like this! 

  To make Lucy happy, I took her to the park last night. She was so excited, it was just as hard taking a picture with her as it is to capture a lighting.

Look over here!

"Over here!"

Close enough!

"I'm going to the PARK!"

It was hot at the park!

 Now, we are sitting in our warm apartment and are so excited about the thunderstorm outside. The smell of rain after a hot summer day is priceless.

Hopefully, in two days, I can get back into my running shoes... That would make this already beautiful week just perfect.



What are your happy moments of this week? Did you do anything fun?

Have you ever had mango gummy candy?

What is your favorite smell? - fresh cut grass, and rain.

Obama interferes with my sleep and Quark!

I have been here for a month now and I can honestly say that I do not miss waking up to the sounds of the highway 80yards away from our house. I also don't miss hearing the screaming high school kids hanging out at the store across the street, or waking up to 120F and 98% humidity.

I love to sleep and there just can't be anything disturbing my lala land.

Unicorns and sparkly things

Imagine my surprise when this morning, it was not only hot, but there were also helicopters circling above our house! It was rude, let me tell you!

There is nothing wrong with this picture in Baltimore, where you should expect dying from a heat stroke at 7am, or being caught by a spotlight of a helicopter any given second. But in Berlin, this is wrong. So wrong.

Then it quickly dawned to me. Mr President is paying us a visit and the entire city is in Alarmbereitschaft ("high alert", I just really like the German word much better, because it expresses "being ready to be alarmed" all in one word).

I had big plans to take my bike to where he is giving his speech, but it is hot here today - and I just saw a picture of the lines of people, waiting to get some water while waiting in the sun. I decided to stay on the couch, watch the whole party on TV, and have myself a few "Flutschfinger"-popsicles (still, you can't know what this means in English).

Yes, I have to bite the finger off first thing. That's how you have to eat it. It's the law. 

All I have to say to this visit is: Holy crap, Angela Merkel must be sweating in her thick crochet blazer. Give that woman some ice cream!

"Barack, speak faster! I am DYING here!"

Lets talk about important things now.

A few days ago, I gave you a list of things essentially important items you have to have if you want to survive in either the German land or the American land.

There are a few things that deserve extra attention (aka a post that is only shared with the President of the United States).

Quark!
(sometimes called "Magerquark" or "Speisequark")

Since I came to the U.S., I have been very concerned about the fact that this major food item is missing in the beautiful country on the other side the ocean. How do people survive without it? I just don't know.

What is it? You may ask.
It is a milk product that you can get with less (Magerquark) or more (Sahnequark) fat. It has a consistency that is much more solid than yoghurt, but softer than cream cheese. This is how I would classify it, too: It's somewhere between a cheese and a yoghurt - and we call it "quark".

Coming from Germany, there are many many things we create with quark and it is beyond me, how you can make those without having access to this fluffy, tart, milk product.

The first thing that came to my mind is cheese cake (Käsekuchen). I still remember the day Nick told me that cheese cake was made with cream cheese. It was traumatizing. I felt violated.

Source

Therefore, I made it my mission to find quark. If you have a "Wegmans" store near you, you probably know, if they don't have something, they will order it for you. So I asked them to order quark for me. But what I got from them was the wrong kind! Tragic.

This picture comes from

The quark they sell is "Sahnequark", which is much creamier and not good for making the cheese cake that I wanted to make. However, if you ever happen to buy it, please don't throw it out! Instead, put it on toast (or fresh baked bread) and top it off with jam or honey. Trust me. You will never want to eat anything else.

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Then something amazing happened. Greek Yoghurt happened.
It is the closest you will get to quark when you are not in Germany. It is not quite 100% like it, but I would give it a 91.7%.

Of course, now you will say: So, you make Käsekuchen with quark. Does that mean, I can make it with greek yoghurt?
The answer is: Yes, and don't wait another minute to do exactly that!

I have made it plenty of times while living in the U.S. and it turned out really, really similar to the German Käsekuchen made with quark.

To completely make your day, I am now sharing the Käsekuchen recipe with you.

Where I found this

I promise that it is the best cheese cake you will ever eat. It will change your whole perspective on the world of cheese cakes and it's filled with healthy greek yoghurt! You can basically eat the entire cake and it will be good for you! :o)

I had planned to make this recipe and take pictures during the process, but then I realized that I don't have a scale. Yes, that's how much I suck at planning.

But I am putting in pictures that will show you what it looks like if proper adults make this cake.

First, you need to pull up a converter on your phone or laptop. Maybe you have a fancy kitchen scale that will let you choose between grams and ml and oz, then you are already good to go.
(I am putting all the ingredients in bold, so that you don't get lost in this ridiculously long post.)

You want to mix:
175g flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
65g sugar
1 tablespoon of water or milk
2 egg yolks (keep the egg whites in a separate bowl) 
100g of softened butter

Yes, hand held mixers are in fact very popular in Germany.

After you mixed all these things together, you knit it with your hands and form it into a ball.

Just like this person does it.

Then divide the dough, take 2/3 of it and cover the bottom of a greased spring form. Then you take the remaining third and put it on the side of the pan, creating a 1-1.5 inch rim.

Take a fork and poke your dough in the pan a few times before baking it  at 160 Celsius for 10 minutes.

I speak from experience when I tell you that burning this cake is incredibly easy! So you may want to keep an eye on it to prevent it from turning dark. You want a golden-ish color. Not a charcoal-ish one.

Take the pre-baked bottom out of the oven and set it aside (leaving it in the pan) to let it cool off a bit.
Reduce the heat of the oven to 140 Celsius.

Now you get to mix the creamy part!

2 packs of vanilla pudding powder (in the international section of many stores, they sell the "Dr Oetker Vanilla Pudding powder", if you don't find it, take any other kind that normally needs half a liter (500ml) of milk per pack and is unsweetened)

Where I found this picture.

140g sugar
500ml milk 


Just cook the pudding as you would normally do, but only with 500ml of milk for both packs and 140g of sugar (instead of what the package tells you).

Then you add: 750g of quark (or, if you can't get quark, greek yoghurt)

Mix the quark into the warm pudding mass.
I only take a spoon or a whisk for this, not an electrical mixer.

After this, you are almost done! (- To speed this up, you can take a big spoon and just eat the pudding mass straight from the pot. If you have guests, give them cookies.)

If you decide to finish baking the cake: Remember the two egg whites? You now add one more egg white to those two and keep the extra yolk in a cup.

Mix the egg whites until they have transformed into a wonderful fluffy white mass (to test if you have beaten it long enough, you can turn your bowl upside down. If it stays in there, it's perfect. No joke!)

Take your whisk or spoon from earlier and gently fold the whipped egg whites into your quark/ greek yoghurt - pudding mass.

This is exactly how it looks when I do it! 

Then you pour the mass into the spring form, on your pre-baked bottom of the cake.

Then take a spoon full of milk, mix it with your remaining egg yolk (the one you put in a cup earlier), and careful brush it on your cheese cake mass.

Now you put the whole thing in the oven, bake it at 140 Celsius for 60 minutes, and find someone to clean the kitchen for you.

I hate to say it, but it's truly worth it to prepare the cake the day before and put it in the fridge over night.

Then, when the next day finally arrived, you have to sing this song while eating your delicious Käsekuchen. Yes, it's written in the same law than the Flutschfinger one.

We did it and what would you do?

Yes. We did it. Everyone, simmer down!

We are now officially living in Berlin. For now.

This morning, Nick and I got up at the crack of dawn at 11am and took the train to city hall, where we waited in a room filled with old people, young people, and crying babies until our number got called.

The lady we talked to tried to be particularly mean to me. She kept asking the strangest questions (e.g. why we don't have kids yet (how is this any of your business, lady?!), why I brought only copies of certain papers and originals of others) and when I answered, she told me that "nobody cares what you have to say, actually". Rude!

I am not joking when I say that as soon as a "Tarzan" ring tone went off in the room, the appointment took a much happier turn. All of the sudden, she was in the greatest mood and even gifted us a map and a "Welcome to Berlin" magazine from 2009.

Now, we just have one more trip to a different office AND have to get my student ID/ train ticket. After that, we are golden. or not. Either one.

As I am still limping around, I was thinking that it would be wonderful to be able to go to a gym to keep the other parts of my body moving.

Source

So I began looking into gym contracts - and that's where you come in!
Do you go to a gym? How often do you use it? Do you find it a helpful place to "fall back on" if you are injured and want to focus on your cross training?
What do you look for in a gym? Are you going to classes (e.g. spinning, barre, pilates...)? Do you use personal training at your gym? Or are you just cross training on your own without going to a gym?

I am a bit overwhelmed by the different contracts the gyms offer. Here, they often only give you the option of buying a yearly membership that automatically extends to 24 months (!) if you don't cancel it within a certain time frame.


I also looked into ways to treat my knee a bit better and found these stretches pretty helpful. They focus in particular on that part of the body that is ruining my running right now. I really like the side stretch and side lift:

Stretches: IT Band

Lean into each stretch for 15 to 20 seconds, then switch sides.

Wall Banger: Stand with your right side about six to 12 inches from a wall. Squat and lean your upper body to the left until your right hip touches the wall. "It stretches the IT band and strengthens the glutes," says Nancy Cummings, Ed.D., assistant professor at Florida Southern College.

Side Stretch: Stand with your left foot crossed in front of your right, and lean your upper body to the left with your hands overhead. Lean as far as you can without bending your knees.

Backward T Stretch: Stand, feet together, facing a wall about six to 12 inches away. Hold your arms to your sides like you're forming a T. Without bending your knees, reach down and back as far as you can with your right hand.

Strength Moves: Hips, Glutes, and Quadriceps

Do independent of running so your muscles aren't fatigued during this program.

Leg Lift: Strong hip abductors help prevent strain of the IT band. "There's less torque on the band because you're decreasing the amount of hip abduction," says sports-medicine specialist Sharon Flynn, M.D. Lie on your side with your elbow on the floor. Lift your upper leg up about a foot and return to the starting position. Do 20 to 30 on each side.

Four-Way Kick: Attach your ankle to a cable machine (or use a resistance band). Face the machine. Kick your leg backward 20 times. Rotate 90 degrees and kick to the side. Repeat in all four directions (when you're facing away from the machine, kick forward). Start with two sets of 20 in each direction on each leg, and work up to three sets of 50 in each direction.

Lateral Step Up with Kick: Stand with your left side next to a step that's eight to 12 inches high. Step up with your left foot, driving the right foot in the air so it's even with your waist. Step back down and repeat. It strengthens the lateral muscle of the quad to help protect the knee, Cummings says. Do two sets of eight to 12 repetitions on each side.

Hip Lift: Balance on your right foot (use a wall for balance). With your left knee bent, drop the left hip and lift it up. "Let the hip drop, and try not to bend the left leg," says Stephen Pribut, D.P.M., a sports podiatrist in Washington, D.C. "You'll feel it in the glutes." Do 15 to 20 times on each side.

Step Down: Stand on a step on your right foot. Lower your left leg toward the floor, making sure the knee of your right leg is centered over your foot. "With the step down, you're putting more focus on the glutes," says Matt Schneider, athletic trainer and physician assistant at the Boulder (Colorado) Center for Sports Medicine. Do two sets of 10 on each.

(By the way, this is taken from an article from 2007. Which makes it two years older than the magazine that we received from the lady at city hall. Yes.)


What are you up to today?

Do random Tarzan ring tones make you happy, too? - Not that I know of. But I found it has that effect on some other Germans. So give it a try if they are ever rude to you. You are welcome.

Did you go for a run? How did it go?

What do you do when people are being rude to you? Do you let them know or just accept the fact? 

losing my mind

Just dropping in to say that all the candy in the world can not make up for the damage that has been done to my soul when dealing with the admissions process. (Maybe it can, but you will have to add ice cream. And cake. And a new pair of running shoes.)

In case you were wondering: no, I have not received my ID or student train ticket yet.

Today, I learned that now the admissions office is not sure anymore about how the filing procedure is actually supposed to go ... and no, I am not kidding you.
But they will get back at me.
I'm sure they will.

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I am going to go to bed now and may or may not eat 4.31 lbs of chocolate.
Good night.

Nick surprised all of us and I have been keeping something from you

Good Morning!

Congratulations to everyone finishing the Ironman in Berlin yesterday! I heard nothing but great things about the race. In case you didn't hear: Ironlady Barbara Riveros finished in 4:16:10 and Ironman Michael Raelert did it in 3:46:56.

Today, it is warm in Berlin, people! Summer has definitely arrived and I am at home, going back and forth between happiness of not having to run in the heat and devastation about my IT band and the fact that I can't run. 

Have you ever had a bad dream of not being able to run and then woken up realizing that this is what's really happening? eeek. It's no fun. 

I have been keeping some news from you. 

On June 3, the registration for the Berlin Half Marathon opened and I signed up for it. It will be my first half marathon and it is quite the feeling to be registered for it! The race is still really far away (on March 30, 2014), but seeing how fast the Marathon was sold out (all 40,000 spots were gone within 3.5 hrs!!), I wanted to make sure that I got in. 

At least, I have enough time until then to work on being able to finish :o)

Even though I am scared that I won't make it, I am so excited to have a race to look forward to! And I don't even have to travel for it. I can just fall out of bed and start running. It will be spectacular. 

Speaking of spectacular: Nick surprised all of us with skills, I have not yet known!

Do you remember the beautiful cherry tree I showed you yesterday?

This one. 

Since my grandpa passed away, every year, thousands of cherries went to waste at the very top of the tree. We were left with whatever we could reach with ladders and various long cherry-picking-utensils. 

Then someone mentioned tree climbing in a different context and before we knew it, my husband had run up the tree. Yes, he ran! There was barely any time to take a picture before he was at the top of it. 

See that branch he is standing on? He just jumped up
on that one and pulled himself up in .2 seconds. Incredible!

We now have access to an endless supply of the most perfect cherries! Happiness. 

Do you have any races coming up?

Would you/ Have you ever sign/ed up for the Ironman?

Do you agree that cherry tree climbing should be part of the Ironman disciplines? - definitely!