addendum

I forgot a few things I wanted to share yesterday.  First things about the kindergarten.  The kids get fresh fruit every day for a snack.  The teachers cut it all up and put them in two bowls overflowing with apples, oranges, and bananas.  They then call all the kids to sit on the floor in a circle and put the bowls in the middle of them.  What commences reminds me very much of what you see at the zoo when the monkeys are fed.  Little hands dig in from every direction and then shove the fruit into their mouths.  The kids end up with juices running down their faces and dirty hands but are really pretty clean.  Another thing that I first experienced at the kindergarten but am realizing it is everywhere, is having to take off your shoes that you wear outside before you go inside.  At the kindergarten I have to put on house shoes, much like Mr. Rogers, every morning, at peoples houses I leave them outside, and even when I went to play volleyball tonight I was supposed to change shoes when I got to the gym. 

I also wanted to tell more about the leftovers that we sometimes eat at dinner.  They are usually left over from lunch, but are sometimes left over from the dinner or lunch on the day before.  This is pretty normal, however, the leftovers are never put away.  They are left out on the counter in the pot they were cooked in, uncovered, and then reheated when its time to eat it again.  I am not trying to be critical here, the food surprisingly still tastes fine and I haven’t gotten sick yet, but I guess this is just something I have never seen before. 

One last thing to add about the city of Zwickau.  It is a really neat city.  Everywhere you look there is history from the 20^th century around and probably even more from before then but I just do not recognize it.  On the sidewalks they have little plaques in front of houses where Jewish people killed in the Holocaust used to live as a kind of remembrance.  The architecture is a mix between the traditional German and the kind used during the GDR under the communists.  There are also still crosswalk lights with the pictures from when the GDR was still around.  It is cool to walk where so much history took place and makes it easier to imagine what it must have been like to live during these times.  So many times I have seen pictures of the Nazis in action, so to speak, however, those were only still frames of a fragment of what happened in real life.  Here I can imagine the Nazis dragging families out of a house, like you would see in a picture, but also everything the might’ve taken place around them as well.  The person driving by in a car slowly, wondering what those people were in trouble for and trying to not draw attention to themselves, or the neighbors down the street walking back from the bakery with bread for dinner, sad to see their longtime acquaintances being taken away, not knowing what is really happening, but scared to ask for fear of incriminating themselves.  I can even imagine the young man standing down the street, who informed the Nazis where the Jews were living, believing the propaganda all around him and thinking he had done the right thing yet still feeling a tinge of guilt as the family is carried away.  Its all so much more real than the pictures when you walk the same streets as the participants of history.