Wild Hats, Tacos, and Berry Pie
Friday night Ginesa, a Cobber alumni, came to visit me in Jena for a few days before heading off to a Fulbright Seminar in Berlin. Being as we are two crazy Cobbers in a foreign city, we took the opportunity to fulfill our dreams of styling ourselves a bit as Audrey Hepburn. After buying our crazy blue and white striped classy beach hats from C&A, a store here in Germany, we proceeded to mosey around Jena looking for photo opportunities with our hats…as well as getting marvelous looks from those walking past us. We managed to find Hanfried, a statue of Johann Friedrich von Sachsen in one of the Markts here, a gigantic ice cream cone, a bench to catch some rays (even though it was cloudy) and the main university building on campus - not to mention stopping by one of the malls and having a small photoshoot of “different faces in crazy hats” along the way.
When the wind picked up and our hats were having trouble staying on our heads, we headed to Tegut (grocery store) to buy some ingredients to make homemade tacos and berry pie since we were craving Chipotle and Perkins. As neither restaurant can be found here in Germany, we decided to make our own - or at least attempt to. 
At Tegut, we found the tortillas to be quite more expensive than in the States, and Ginesa said she knew how, so as she mixed up the tortilla batter and fried them in a pan, I cooked the meat using eine Menge (a lot) of spices as they are not as scharf (hot) as the ones back home.
After cutting veggies, we went to work on our next creation: the PIE!! In Tegut, we weren’t able to find a pie crust, so we compromised and bought pastry dough that we had to press together to create the perfect crust. Neither of us had ever made a pie without the help of our moms, but thought ‘how hard could it be?!’ We thawed a bunch of frozen fruit (most of the way) and added the mixture along with gelatin and sugar to the crust. Oops! We forgot to put the crust in the oven before adding the not-so-thawed fruit (i.e. mistake #2). Getting creative, we made a lattuce crust top so even if the pie didn’t taste good, it would look pretty!
We invited two of my roommates to join us for a crash course on how to eat tacos and what a pie is - very hard to explain without making one as they don’t have such a thing here. The tacos turned out marvelous and hat gut geschmeckt (tasted great). One of my roommates made the comment that “spicy food is healthy”, which sent the table into laughter. Then came the dessert…We pulled the pie out of the oven and tried to explain the Unterschied (difference) between cakes and pies, saying how pies have a flaky crust with fruit filling normally as we but into our “pie”. Somehow the dough had not exactly gotten completely cooked and the filling was no longer really gelatin, but rather soup. The roommates just looked at us, saying the “pie” was too sweet, though Ginesa and I found it a bit tart. Oh, the different cultural tastes: literally! Overall, we were given lots of compliments and were not banned from the kitchen: a good sign if you ask me! Perhaps later we will try again and improve our pie-making skills??!
Greetings from Jena on all,
Heather and Ginesa