First Week Wrap-Up: Ending with a Bang

 It's been a big first week in Germany! To recap, we flew into Munich last Tuesday afternoon, had a terrific interview and dinner with President Naatjes, slept in a wonderful bed-and-breakfast, went to our first zone conference, drove from Munich to Freiburg, our new city, got introduced at the Institute, moved into our new home for the year, went to our first Ward Council (where every single soul is committed to blessing lives), went to a Youth Game Night activity, and went to our first Sunday at Church (at which there was a convert baptism), attended our first Missionary District Council. 

    Then, almost (it felt to us) like an afterthought, our District Leader said, "Would you like to go with us to the Temple tomorrow?" 

    "Are you kidding? YEAH!!" Both Leesa and I have a history of close misses with the Swiss Temple in the suburb of Bern called Zollikofen. My last zone conference as a missionary was at the chapel right next door (Joseph P. Wirthlin presided, before he was an Apostle), but I didn't have the opportunity to do a Temple ordinance.

    Leesa wanted to visit the Temple at the close of her mission, but she wound up being just a hair too late to do ordinances, so that part of our mission experience escaped us both by inches. That 45-year streak came to an end yesterday, a beautiful Spring day in Switzerland.

    We drove about 90 minutes down to Zollikofen from Freiburg with the sister missionaries in our district, Sister Pérez, a young lady from Mexico who speaks excellent English with a British accent (Her English teacher was British), and Sister Edwards from the great state of Arizona.

    

    Besides doing ordinances, we had the opportunity to renew an old acquaintance. The Temple president, Louis Weidmann, was a missionary who served with us in the Frankfurt mission way back in 1976-77 and later a Church General Authority. I remember him as a man of great personal integrity, coupled with a very natural sense of fun, very down-to-earth.

The zone missionaries met outside the front door:

(Sister Pérez is in front of me, to the right, and Sister Edwards is in the same row, far right)

   

    Upon leaving the Temple, we all had our eyes on scoring some genuine Swiss yogurt. The Swiss do dairy better than anybody, so that goes for cheeses and yogurt, and yet also chocolate. Back in the late '70s, the Swiss had embraced the concept of the supermarket, and two nationwide chains, Migros and Co-op, were the two leaders, and apparently still are. So on our way back to the freeway, we stopped at a small Co-op and loaded up. The clerk accidentally rung us up for extra Lindt chocolate bars. This very nice fellow with wonderful English tried to delete them, but his computer wasn't "Co-op"erating, so chocolate bars for everybody! He felt bad, but I made some lame joke about the "Swiss style of upselling," and laughed it off. Besides, Sisters Pérez and Edwards weren't about to complain when they found themselves with some good chocolate in their hands. We had thought about stopping at a McDonalds on the way home, but they slept pretty much the entire way.

    We offered to buy them dinner to make up for driving straight through back to Freiburg, but they had other things on their minds. We had skipped lunch, so we were really ready for some food. We didn't want to cook, and I had wanted to find a good mid-range Gasthaus (restaurant) with some real German food we remembered from the old days. There was one listed on Yelp just around the corner, so we were hoofing it there when we ran into Elders Albert and Friend, the other two Freiburg missionaries. 

    I asked them if they had eaten (they hadn't), so we invited them along. Turns out this Gasthaus had changed ownership and was closed on Tuesdays, and the news hadn't yet caught up with Yelp. So we traipsed back to our apartment and looked up another place for real. We drove down to it (after calling to make sure they were open), a couple of km away, called the Goldener Anker (Golden Anchor), with a lot of model sailing ships and stuff on the walls), and it was just what I had been looking for.

    Admittedly, German cuisine isn't considered the best on the planet (how many German restaurants do you know of in your area?), but certain things they REALLY do right. The Elders each got a huge plate of Cordon Bleu (thinly-pounded chicken breasts wrapped around ham and Swiss cheese), while Leesa and I each ordered Jägerschnitzel ((YAY-grr-shnitz-ull) Translation: "Hunter's cutlet"), which is thinly-pounded pork cutlet, breaded and deep-fried, with a miraculous mushroom gravy draped all over it, with a side of Spätzle ((SHPETS-luh) thick German pasta) also with the gravy on it, and some terrific green salads with a wonderful dressing I'd never had before. Elder Albert also had potato salad on his plate instead of the Spätzle.

    Portions were HUGE (Leesa saved half her meal for lunch today), but the brethren lived up to their hearty reputation and cleaned their plates like the red-blooded and upstanding missionaries that they are. I know from personal experience that the missionaries don't eat out much, and the stuff they do eat out is pretty fast-foody, and it was nice to give them something a bit better than they're used to.

(This is the half of the meal that Leesa didn't eat, with Elder Friend diligently working on his Cordon Bleu in the background)

    After a bit of a frustrating start to my cooking efforts (I've taken to making a lot of things from scratch, while Germans seem to value easy and quick prepared stuff, judging from what's available in the local grocery stores), I'm starting to find the fundamental ingredients that I want.

    

    For example, I promised to make Chicago-style pizza tomorrow (Wednesday) for the weekly Institute class. These young folks usually buy a prepared pizza dough, which comes in something like those cardboard tubes full of dinner rolls you find in the refrigerator case, then add some sauce, cheese, and some form of pepperoni or ham, and throw it in the oven.

    Nuh-unh, not for me. I brought two 14-inch deep-dish pizza pans all the way from California to show these people what REAL pizza is. One of the more satisfying aspects of my food search is that, after having been told by one of the sisters in the ward that real Italian Sausage would be nearly impossible to find, I looked up a small meat market not far away, and found the perfect sausage: Salciccia. That's an Italian homonym for the Spanish "Salchicha," which of course means "sausage." So out goes the message to all the doubters and nay-sayers: "In your face."

    So, these Institute kids are gonna know what real scratch, yeast-risen pizza dough tastes like, with all the ingredients I had envisioned. I shall conquer!

    ADDENDUM: The following day, after Institute. Conquer, I did. Leesa and I are in charge of feeding about 15 hungry Young Adults after the Institute lesson, so I was just putting the finishing touches on the salad, when the young folks wandered in looking for pizza. They found a stack of paper plates and two extra-large deep-dish, stuffed pizzas, already sliced and ready to go. I was kinda tired, so I forgot to take pictures of the whole thing, and now I'm bummed about that, but suffice it to say that we totally killed. The young ones went nuts. One young man named Viktor said it was the second-best pizza he'd ever eaten. 

"Where was the best?" I asked. 

"Rome." Can't argue with that. 

Let's see what I can come up with for next Wednesday.