Almost Forgot!

Since we have literally no days off downrange, I spent this last weekend lazing around the hotel and around Mannheim. Saturday, I went to the Synagogue again (and it was a crowd the size one would expect of a Central/Eastern European Shul). There was just one family with like five little kids that was really cute, but aside from that it was mostly older Russians (since the majority of German Jews came to Germany following the breakup of the Soviet Union). I brought my friend Devin with me to Synagogue and it a unique experience for him.

Afterward we spent some time walking around Mannheim and seeing the famous water tower and the park surrounding it. We got back to the hotel at like 2 and I jumped in the pool because it got hot in the last week I was in Germany and because we had a pool.

This is the water-tower. I can't imagine they still use it.

Very nice. Miss you already, Mannheim!

Then we did something awesome. We made arrangements in this little bier-gaarten/restaurant called the alte-fass (means old-spigot) to go to this event they'd been advertising with fliers on the tables. It was an all-you-can-eat salad bar and barbecue! Man it was awesome!

The chef at work.

All day Sunday I lazed. Not only because of the no-days-off downrange thing, but because Sunday is still very much a Sabbath for Germany. Most restaurants and shops are closed. So I did mostly nothing and then we went to Ali's this little Turkish place near the tram stop for dinner.

Farewell Sandhofen!

Goodbye Germany: A Guide to Sending Josh Kramer Things Through the US Postal Service

After three weeks in Germany it looks as though I'll be deploying on Monday. I have my itinerary, orders, and all of the documentation/immunization I'll need for my six months "downrange". My itinerary includes flying Turkish Airways to Istanbul, then Turkish Airways again to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. From there I will be hitching a car ride to the Manas NATO base outside of Bishkek. There I'll wait for a spot on a flight to my FOB (Forward Operating Base). I'll also be picking up my kevlar vest and helmet there. 

From what I've heard the Kevlar is the reason we even go to Manas at all, and that for most people, their kevlar gear gathers dust underneath beds or in lockers, but thems the rules. We've got to pick it up in Kyrgyzstan - besides, afterwards I can say I've been to Kyrgyzstan!

Should you care to mail anything to me downrange - please do so. The address can be found below.

Kandahar Education Center
Attn: CTC, Joshua Kramer
APO, AE 09355

It costs the same to send something to Kandahar as it does to send something from anywhere in the US to New York! So it's really reasonable! I'm also told that it takes a relatively short time for mail to get there, but much longer to get back. Also, spend the extra dollar or so and make it priority - apparently the difference is really noticeable in terms of arrival time. Mail breaks up the monotony over there so PLEASE feel free to send me stuff (letters, packages, anything at all).

It's a balmy 120 degrees in Kandahar this time of year and they're not quite over the hump of the summer heat yet (good thing my six months didn't start in May or something, then I'd melt).

I wanted to create an Indiana Jones-esque montage of my plane flying from Frankfurt to Istanbul to Bishkek to Kandahar with a little red dotted line trailing behind the map that my plane is super-imposed over, but apparently that takes some sort of skill. So just pretend I did it.

Grover Goes to School

My apologies for the self-centered nature of this blog post. Hey, check out this picture I took with my camera from the plane as it was leaving Cleveland a few weeks ago:

Pretty excellent quality considering the altitude and the window...

I suppose I should face the fact that I'll be away from home for a long time. The longest I've ever been away before this expedition was just three and a half months (my semester in Israel). It's exciting to be going, and the night before I left for Germany I was looking over my parents scrapbook from their big long Israel experience and it was over a dollar a minute to call home in 1980! Now with skype being dirt-cheap and email and everything it is a whole lot easier.

Exhibit A: Grover Goes to School with Mom and Ilana. Every year in late-summer, my mom reads to the Kramer kids from this lesson-teaching tome. Such favorite lines as "I hate baloney!" and "Two new friends in one day?!?!" will forever live on in Kramer lore. We jokingly were saying that we would read it before I left and last night I remembered while on skype with home. So we did it via skype. The hilarious results can be found below.

I hate baloney!

We were having a little too much fun

My favorite game!

Great book.

Thanks for indulging me.

The Little Things

When there have been no blog posts on this page, it's not as though I'm doing nothing waiting around for something to write about. Things are still happening, none of them are important enough by themselves to write a full post about. Here's a few of the little things that go on around here.

Sandhofen is the name of our little suburb north of Mannheim. It's a collection of about 30 blocks with a tram line that connects us to downtown Mannheim, and farm or factory in every other direction (and the military base). If you check out the webpage for our little enclave you'd see that there's not much there. In those 30 blocks, there's our hotel with a Mcdonalds/gas station across the street, a couple of mini marts and like 10 restaurants, 4 or so of which are Italian.

Jordan and Erin enjoying the authentic German restaurant in Sandhofen

The crew.

We've recently re-implemented into the CTC training process Tuesday go-kart outings. There's this indoor track with lots of turns nearby and on Tuesdays that happy hour is like $20 or so for 20 minutes of go-karting. It's wayyy faster than American go-karts that are similar in size. I came in second on our last run.

The track

Me and Cheryl preparing to race

I'll beat you next time Raymond!

Speaking of diversions, there are signs around Coleman Barracks (where the training takes place) for a paintball play area and Raymond Wilson, the CTC employee who organizes our go-karting expeditions says that there's paintball on Saturdays... Will be investigating further before the weekend.

Kramer Textilpflege

This past weekend I traveled around Germany seeing some sights.

The rails... they beckon to me.

On Saturday I and four other CTC colleagues went to Worms for the day. It's a small town (pretty much doable from a tourist's perspective in a few hours). Worms is famous for being the site of Martin Luther's trial after having essentially started the protestant movement from the Catholic Church. There are memorials to him all around.

Martin Luther - total badass.

We also saw some extremely large churches around the center of town. One of the two churches was bombed out in WWII and was rebuilt in a really modern style. When we went in to see the church there was an organ concert going on and it was very nice.

Not too many people were there to enjoy it, but it was a good sermon.

Also not too many people there to enjoy the organ concert, but it was really good!

Then we ate thai food in the central square and went to a GREAT ice cream place right next to that organ-concert church. Seriously it was really great ice cream...

My view from the Thai restaurant

Oh, Devin...

Mary and Becca choosing which flavor they want.

After walking along the river a tiny bit (and seeing a statue of an ancestor of the HR professional here at CTC who plundered the people of Worms of their gold so much that to memorialize him they built a statue of him throwing a lot of gold into the river), we walked back to the old town.

You know who might need this gold? The Rhein River...

Finally we saw the couple of Jewish sites in the city. The Synagogue in Worms is the oldest in Europe (because its foundations are so old - in actuality it was rebuilt in the sixties or something). Rashi studied here before moving back to Troyes and they make a big deal about it with the museum. I was surprised to find out that the Synagogue has a regular service (every other Shabbat, according to the docent).

We also stopped by the Jewish cemetery which had graves dating back almost a thousand years.

Part of the Jewish Cemetery. It's surprisingly well preserved, for 1000 years old...

That night me and another CTC trainee went to see Harry Potter 7 part 2 in Mannheim (it was my second time seeing it). As in Israel, there are assigned seats as though you are going to any other theater performance, but there was no intermission. We had to find a special showing in English because dubbing is really popular here. If the roles were reversed, and German/Czech/whatever language television was really in-demand back in the states, I would prefer subtitles. I like to be able to hear how it's meant to sound... but who cares what I think anyway?

Look at this:

You didn't know that the Kramer family has had a dry cleaners in northern Mannheim since 1851???

The following day, me and the same guy I went to HP with (henceforth to be referred to as Jordan) had a whole long day planned out. We left the Hotel at 7 AM, and took almost 4 hours (because local trains are super cheap) to get to Stuttgart where the Mercedes-Benz and Porche Museums are. I liked the Mercedes museum better because it was bigger and had a lot more history and a lot more cars to see. I'm sure my Dad will be jealous when he sees the pictures because he loves antique cars.

Tell him without ME, there wouldn't BE any Paramount Studio!!!

What was really interesting was that the Mercedes Museum didn't gloss over the WWII period as many  similar museums in Germany do. They are very open (and apologetic) about their involvement with the Nazi regime and use of forced labor. I liked that they were up-front about it.

After seeing those two museums we took a train to Ludwigsberg. This is a tiny little town.... with the LARGEST CASTLE IN ALL OF GERMANY!

Note that I'm as far as the courtyard will permit, but the palace still extends outside the edges of the picture.

Holy crap was it big! We didn't go in. A tour of this place could take all day. We just enjoyed the grounds and the courtyard. They were having some sort of festival so that was enough for us.

He's singing "That's Amore". Weird, right?

I was very enthralled.

Then we took a sort of hike/path through this park on the way to a smaller palace with its own private lake and what seemed to be a private chapel.

It seemed like it was out of a movie. A private chapel on an island in a small lake in the woods.

Finally we took the train/tram back to the hotel and arrived after 11pm. It was a long day.

What do I even do all day?

Good question! Every day, I usually wake up between 7:30 and 8 in my tiny little room at the weber hotel here in Mannheim. I'll postpone getting out of bed as long as possible and then go down to breakfast (which is automatically getting paid for so I feel obligated to eat it.).

Don't be fooled, it's smaller than it looks.

Many different cheeses.

At 8:30 Ladell Heath (the deployment coordinator for CTC) picks up everyone to go to work at Coleman barracks a couple miles away.

Thanks for schlepping us around, Ladell

Work, sweet work...

In case you forget whose fire escape this is.

We spend the morning training in the training room and then go to the DFAC (Dining facility) for lunch which costs $4.25. This includes everything - basically like in a college dining hall.

See our rag-tag bunch of trainees in the training room.

Devin, deciding to get the ice cream for dessert.

So something the DFAC has that I find fascinating is the POW/MIA table. It's constantly set for one on a raised platform and everything on the table is meant to be symbolic of something involved with the experience of being a POW/MIA (Prisoner of war/missing in action). For instance, the slice of lemon on the plate represents the bitterness of their experience, and the salt on the table represents the tears of their loved ones... it's really powerful and a constant reminder that while we are in a peaceful place here in Germany, it's still very much a part of the military.

The caption below the silhouette of the POW says "you are not forgotten"

Some time between 4 and 5pm we leave. I've started going to the gym on base when I can and then walking the little over a mile back to the weber hotel. Home sweet home! In the evenings I spend time in the lobby where we get internet (no internet in the rooms), and find someone also with ctc to go to dinner with. There are a bunch of places that are the standard places to go for us around here. There are Italian, Turkish, and German places all nearby.

And that's basically what I do every day. All of this I wrote while Shakira lounge musak is playing over the hotel lobby speakers.

The hotel lobby.

The Hotel Lobby Soundtrack:

This weekend I think the plan is to take another day trip like we did last weekend.

Hiking in Heidelberg

For Saturday, I and four other trainees from CTC decided to go visit Heidelberg. We met in the morning, took the tram to the Mannheim train station, 15 or so minutes on the train to get to Heidelberg! Can you believe it? Figured out how to take public transportation to the old town. Did that.

Now our goal was to visit the famous Heidelberger Schloss (schloss means castle). The problem was that it was a bit of a hike halfway up a mountain to get to it. 

View of the castle from the old town.

So we hiked it.

The steep hill to get to the top.

We got up there and saw a pretty awesome castle. It was half destroyed in 1620 and several times since then so it's got this cool half-ruins sort of feel to it. The weather was nice, everything was going pretty good. There was a little museum and a great view of the entire city.

After coming back down from the mountain we strolled around the old town for a while and window shopped at all of the little tourist-y vendors around a big church. We found a restaurant and had a late German lunch on the river that goes through Heidelberg,  which is a tributary to the Rhein (which flows through Mannheim, have I mentioned that?).

Since I was going to spend this weekend in Brussels, but then those plans fell through I was able to meet up with my airplane friend, Emily (who was going to be in Heidelberg the whole week). As we check out the pedestrian bridge near our restaurant, I see a large group of student-aged people coming along and then she was right there with that group! So we met up earlier than our original plan. She had said that I should explore the hauprtstrasse and that we would meet up and go on the philosopherweg. I had no idea what any of this meant so I just went to the castle and checked out the bridge.

Emily is a part of this program called RISE. I'm sure it stands for something, but I am sick of Acronyms, so what it is is this program that offers internships to students all over the world studying sciences in the effort to try to get them to move to Germany for to get their Post-Secondary degrees. They were all fun people she was with. Problem was, they all wanted to go up to the castle! I didn't mind going up again, after all, it wasn't that hard. Then I found out what Philosopherweg was. It's a promenade along the opposite bank of the river's mountain called "holy mountain". It has paths all over it that lead to the top. And we were going to hike it...

View from the castle of the bridge where we ran into each other with the holy mountain presiding over the picture. See that little break in the treeline at the top there? That's where we're headed.

The half-liter beer that I had ordered at lunch was already disagreeing with me a bit, but I suppose that was just too darn bad. It wasn't so terribly hard a hike, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it was still a sweaty and tiring mess. At the top there is this ancient guard's tower with some great views of Heidelberg along the way. Then between the two summits of the holy mountain there is a WWII era amphitheater used by the Nazis. It was all an overgrown mess... take a look:

Seig How! ...are we all going to get down from this amphitheater in the mountains!?

Then at the second summit of the holy mountain we saw some ruins of an ancient monastery (probably has something to do with why the mountain is called holy). Between the amphitheater and the guard's tower there is this little mountain-top restaurant/beer gaarten. The group ate there. I had kaesespaetzle (cheese noodles - varying shaped noodles with cheese and onions - it was great!) at Emily's insistent suggestion.

Waldschenke apparently means "gift of the forest" This was supposed to be a candid, but Alex caught on.

We hiked down the mountain (by this time it's getting dark) and made it down to the river. At the bridge we all split up. Took the train to Mannheim myself and got back around midnight.

Emily Hart, Heidelberg's biggest fan. Josh Kramer's legs' worst fan!

Mannheim Jewish Community

Since I was free, I decided to visit the Mannheim Synagogue. I was expecting the experience to mirror my other experiences with Synagogues in Europe. A small, aging congregation of Russians who had moved once the USSR broke up, or the few remnants of pre-WWII communities. I was pleasantly surprised when I found a new building (the website says it was built in 1987, not that I don't trust it, it's just all in German and thought I'd make that distinction), with about 100 worshipers with the average age far below 50! 

The Building

It appears as though I came on a special night. I arrived towards the end of Mincha and was struck by the number of people there were and especially by the number of people under the age of 20 and then also the number of people under the age of 6 all running/crawling around under the seats of parents/grandparents.

It was separate seating for women in the balcony and on the sides, but no mechitzah!

I don't have any fancy clothes here at all, so it felt like I was getting some glares, but that could have just been in my head as many other men my age were dressed in jeans/tshirts with writing on them while I was wearing khakis and a polo.

Before Kabalat Shabbat a girl approached the bima, sang a bit of the shema, and gave a speech. My German isn't so good, but it's not so bad either and I gathered that it was her Bat Mitzvah and that she loved her sister. parents, and grandparents - basically the same as every bat mitzvah speech. She said the final prayer about approaching the ark in the hopes of living a life of mitzvot and such in Hebrew, German, and then Russian. It was very nice.

If that wasn't enough, what I assume was all of the religious school of the synagogue came forward and led Kabalat Shabat with the cantor. That was also very nice. Then the Rabbi came forward and gave a sermon that I could neither hear nor understand, except when he said that hannah's - the bat mitzvah girl's - name was an acronym (like I didn't hear enough of them already!) khet for the challah on shabbat. Nun for the nerot of shabbat. And hay for hashem.

The announcements at the end of the services were made by a woman in German., but then in Hebrew when she addressed the two groups of Israeli students that they were also hosting. So between the Bat mitzvah, the Hebrew school presentation, and the student groups, it may not have been the standard shabbat in Mannheim.

There was a dinner laid out, but I was too afraid that it was only meant for the student groups and the bat mitzvah party, and also that I wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone at the dinner, that I just left. If I make it back and there's a dinner I'll stay next time. Until then, it was a surprisingly sweet experience and not bitter-sweet like the other European Synagogues I've visited.

This is what the dinner set-up looked like... maybe next time!

Military Mindset

Right, so now I'm back in Mannheim. Back to the good ol' Weber hotel (pronounced veber). Today I had my first actual day of training and I understood hardly a word of it. Likely because I didn't go through the regular orientation like everyone else did. I'm supposed to do that another day. 

Let me fill you in on some of the cool things we did at Grafenwoehr, where I got my TSIRT (Theater Specific Individual Readiness Training) Certification so I can go downrange. Most of the training was highly boring. A lot of first aid and IED (Improvised Explosive Device) training that hardly applies to anyone like me who is not allowed to leave the FOB (Forward Operating Base). By the way, did you know there are a lot of ACRONYMs in the army? Yeah, Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of Name Yielding Meanings are extremely common here!
 
We also got a history of the goings on of the conflicts in Afghanistan and the reasons for the way the military is doing things the way they're currently doing them. That was pretty informative and reassuring, just to know that they have a better idea of how to fight the insurgency now than they did before.

That night we stayed at the nicer hotel in the base at Grafenwoehr, and I saw a commercial that really struck me. Imagine a gruff looking cowboy moseying up to a saloon and drawing his six-shooter. He then proceeds to shoot off of the hitching post, a line of energy drinks. Finally large words flash across the screen - "Drop the Energy Drink! Reach for a Water!" with military logos all across the bottom of the screen. Apparently energy drinks are so popular (and unhealthy) that they produce commercials for not drinking them geared for the soldiers. What a concept!

The last thing we did was the MRAP rollover test. The MRAP family of vehicles has replaced the humvee as the primary vehicle used in Afghanistan and everyone going "downrange" has to do this test. Here's a video of the MRAP rollover training.

Here's me with all the gear on, ready to roll-over.

Tonight we went to this little Italian restaurant (owned and run by Italians) around the corner. They didn't seem to be busy and were happy to have us as customers, but they forgot my Tagliatelle Salmone so it came late and they felt bad so we got free house-made limoncello (lemon liqueur). Then we went further around the corner and had gelato. Italian night in Mannheim. 

Salute!