Looking forward to Bockbierfest in Sacramento…
I’ve really neglected my German-American blog, not having posted anything new for several months, and that is something I want to correct.
Yes I’m the kind of person who gets interested in something and then feels forced to drop that interest due to life events and also a person who feels compelled to go too many ways at once and in the process becomes almost static.
But the only thing new I can think of at this time to go along with my German-American blog is that my wife and I and possibly my oldest daughter and her husband (all of us German-American by heritage) plan to attend the 42nd annual Bockbierfest April 2 and 3 in Sacramento, Ca. put on by the local German-American organization known as Turn Verein, which I understand means gymnastic club. That is a story in and of itself for which I do not recall all of the details even though I read about it in the Sacramento Bee newspaper years ago. That could be a subject of a future blog.
But this plan to attend the Bockbierfest goes along with my resurgence in interest to learn more about my German roots and to learn the German language. If I had studied German as long as I have thought about studying it I’d be fluent by now. But it’s difficult because German is not a language one hears much where I live or in most places in the U.S. even though a major portion of Caucasian American citizens are of German descent.
But an interesting site you can go to on the internet to hear some German conversation is Easy German, YouTube. Just enter that in Google and you will be able to access some pretty good clips of people speaking German on the streets of Germany, complete with English subtitles.
While I don’t see much chance of it now, I hope to go back to Germany one day. My wife and I lived there for about two years when I was in the service back in the late 60s and early 70s.
I’m a big fan of beer, something Germany is world famous for.
I had been carrying around the apparently erroneous info in my head for years that Bock beer was something that came out of the dregs of beer barrels. But upon looking up Bock Beer or Bockbier in the online dictionary I find that it gets its name from a kind of strong beer first brewed in the 14th Century in the northern German town of Einbeck.
When I learn more about this I’ll blog more about it.
Meantime I’m looking forward to the Bockbierfest and brushing up on my German.
You can get info on that bierfest by googling Turn Verein, Sacramento.
P.s.
Don’t depend upon the computer or more specifically Google Translate to learn German. I have received a couple of e-mails from native speakers advising of the pitfalls and the embarrassment that can cause. I thank them.
