In Germany

I live in Germany . --- I’m not here visiting for a few weeks, or on exchange, or working on a co-op term, - I actually live here. Instead of going to see the Dom or Brandenburg Tor I’m mucking corrals and driving tractor --- and I love it.
For those who haven’t heard from me in a while, Veronika and I moved to Germany after she finished her practicum in Vancouver this summer. For those who haven’t heard from me in a really long while, I graduated from engineering in April, and Veronika is my girlfriend. We’re living at her parents’ farm in a small village of about 60 people called Briest. The only things you can buy here are beer and stamps. Fortunately there’s a larger town about 12 km away to buy groceries and so on. Briest is located between Braunschweig and Berlin, near the Elba river (look for Rathenow or Genthin on a map). The farm is a mixed horse ranch and wheat farm. I spend my days doing a variety of things. In the morning I usually do computer work. At the moment I’m running a small website design and computer programming business. I’ll skip over the details though since they would interest only the nerdiest (hi Brady and Wes). The rest of the day I spend working on the farm, plowing fields, training horses, sweeping out the barn, or picking apples.
We eat potatoes every day. Baked potatoes, boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, potato soup, potato salad, potato sausage – ok, well maybe not potato sausage, but we eat a lot of sausage too. Breakfast is rye bread (no potatoes!) with butter and your choice of a whole bunch of cheeses, sausages, and jams. One of my favourites for breakfast is this cheese called quark (which kind of looks like whipping cream gone wrong) with jam on top. Ten o-clock is snack time, lunch is potatoes, three o-clock is coffee and cake, and supper is more bread. One thing that’s tough to get used to is that lunch is the big meal. I’m used to finishing up a day’s work and wolfing down a huge supper, but you have to eat a lot of rye bread to get full (at least I do).
I’m learning how to ride a horse (again) – this time English style. I’ve had three lessons so far and apparently I’m doing pretty well. I have to wear a helmet though. The cool thing is that I’m getting lessons for free from Veronika’s sister. I’ve also started to train some of the horses with Veronika’s help. We basically run them around in a circle using a really long leash so that they get some exercise in, get used to running at a constant pace, and get used to a saddle on their back. With a couple of them we are just starting to transition into putting some weight on the saddle. The horses are awesome. There are about twenty of them here on the farm and some are very big – I can barely see over some of their backs. There are also a couple horses that are better called mules – one actually bit me on the ass today as I was cleaning out its hoof.
It’s ten after nine, or rather 21:10 here, and I’m tired. Everyone else is in bed so I should probably go too – six o-clock comes early. I’ll try to write more soon and get some pictures up, but I left my camera in Cologne, so I have to wait for it to arrive. :(