To market, to market, to buy a fat pig

Sitting in the office, pleased as punch, because I finally realized I can use the fleece beanie I bought secondhand as a tea cozy as well.  My tea now stays warm longer. And my hair sometimes smells like Earl Grey. Small victories in a little life...

Finally done with the second installation of the big translation, the one that makes me hate all philosophers and the people who write about them. I have a life again, one filled with time that I'm not quite sure how to fill yet, seeing as I don't "work" outside of work right now. It's strange to wake up and not see a stack of papers in the process of being graded on the coffee table, kitchen table, at the foot of the bed and on the floor next to the sofa. It's strange for the moment to not measure my life in terms of how many inches high the stack of essays sitting next to me is. There is no stack of essays. I imagine an(other) identity crisis will arise soon.

Naturally, I have a proofreading session on one past translation to finish, and the proofs of another book are coming in from someone else, and I should finish them by January, start with a clean slate. We'll see how I do.  But first, I wish to take a breather for a couple of days.

The first part of my breather was taking advantage of the market across the street from me in Erfurt, at Domplatz, which is also the current location for the bulk of the Christmas Market. There's a market Monday through Saturday, unbelievably, in the mornings, and they sell most of the things I need: bacon, butter, sausage.  Oh yeah...vegetables. I try to go there first, spend more money than I should so that I can buy what I think are quasi-sustainable goods, and of course, to go native.

I have always seen a market as an intercultural-competence proving ground, a place that separates the boys from the men. I find myself often still feeling as though someone had strung me upside-down by my toenails over a fire-ant hill and covered me with honey when I am shopping at a market, even in San Francisco. The items are not the ones you find in the supermarket, and tons of people are waiting behind you, impatient, desirous of getting their paws on their goods and getting on about the day's business of being grumpy, or smug, whichever strikes their fancy. Being at a market means knowing what you're doing, at least, that's what it means to me. It means partaking in a practice as old as food itself. It means doing something that should be second nature, but is, alas, no longer. I grew up on military bases with microwave ovens and an African-American culture that (historically justifiably) engenders a wretched fear of trichinosis and a host of other food-borne illnesses. A market was one of the last places we ever went to. If it was hermetically sealed, canned, frozen, dried or nukeable, it was our friend. Otherwise, watch out.  That fresh vegetable might kill you. Don't even think about buying meat at an open-air market. That's what 'other' people do.

But markets are great ways to build up your community network, listen to dialects, see what is popular among the community and the culture in general.  For example, one stall at the Christmas market right now sells only oranges and Christmas wreaths.  What the hell is up with that? Oranges seem to a be a big part of Christmas here. I'll figure out why later.

The markets help me recognize regional differences, such as the preference here in Thuringia for these little round balls of blood sausage. They sort of look like the bombs Wile E. Coyote would order from Acme, blackish softball-sized packets of death, tied up with a string. And it seems there are two types of them, as I found out from the woman in front of me who was asking about the Acme bombs hanging on the wall behind the butcher, a red-faced young man who sort of reminded me of the Shoney's boy, roundy, fat fingers delicately handling slices of Sulze and Leberkäse, as though he'd popped out of the womb with that fork in his hand.  I have fantasies of marrying a butcher one day, but he's definitely not my type...

But you can't get too distracted by such things. You are there to learn, and the best way to learn, in my opinion, is to listen to what other people say, see what they order, how much of it , how they order it, which platitudes they use. Before I picked up on this, I used to walk away from deli counters with 1 pound of head cheese and 3 ounces of cheddar. It was horrible. Then, I figured out that other people might have a better idea of what they're doing, so I decided to start paying attention to them.  It works. Every once in a while I flub it, like Saturday, when I bought Bauchspeck instead of Früstücksspeck.  They are both bacon.  Yay!  But the former comes with a hard rind on one side that does not make for great breakfast food. The latter, named "breakfast bacon," interestingly enough, serves that purpose.  But I didn't have enough time in line to google the difference between the two on my smart phone, so I bought the Bauchspeck. When I got it home, I realized the difference.

And that was okay, because I simply stuffed it into the fresh chicken I picked up from the other stall and roasted it last night. And man, was that good.

But in the time I spent at the market, I learned that here you can order cold cuts by the slice, and I even did it, just to make sure it wasn't some sick joke.  I learned that far too many people in this part of the world love blood sausage. I also learned that it will be a long time before I understand much of the Thuringian accent. But I got an awesome chicken, and I didn't die of food poisoning. It's a win-win situation. And I will have much more to report about "my" market soon enough.

And our time is up.