"Bratäpfel"

The original purpose of the Owl's Nest was to share my American experience with my friends in Europe and elsewhere. However, today I would like to talk a little about my European life; namely I would like to present my parents. The man with the hat and the the headphones is my father; he is having breakfast in the early morning of the second Advent sunday. He likes music a lot, and he was my initial guitar teacher, so he wears the headphones a lot, also when he cleans the house, for instance. The lady below is my mother, sitting on her desk. Note the little web cam on top of the monitor: it was used to chat with me over Skype while I was in the United States. Unfortunately my own web cam and also my headset recently broke, so I got to use theirs to chat with my friends back in Chicago. (This web cam has a built-in microphone, so I only need to use my own headphones in order to avoid feedback effects.)
Finally, the bottom picture displays a special treat my mother prepared for me a few weeks ago: Bratäpfel (fried apples). You know all very well that I like to stress on language topics, and here is another one: "braten" means "to fry", and "Apfel" means "apple". As I have mentioned before, all German nouns are capitalized, and we tend to agglutinate them; also if the second part in English is actually an adjectiv. There are virtually no limits for how many nouns can be glued together. One famous example (that is used to impress those who learn German as a foreign language) is Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänsmütze ... Donau = the river Danube, Dampf = steam, Schifffahrt = ship navigation, Kapitän = captain, Mütze = hat. (Note the additional letter s before Kapitän - in some sense it works as the glue between the enclosing parts.)
Oh, but I got carried away a little, so back to the Bratäpfel. There are also two dots on the letter ä, which changes the pronunciation a bit; from close to the u in "but" to close to the a in "many". While the plural is always indicated by a final s in English, there are more than a handful ways to do it in German, not counting combinations. Adding a letter s works for some nouns, changing a vowel a/o/u to ä/ö/ü, respectively, for others. Unfortunately there are no clear rules, so anyone who dares learn German must memorize the plural forms of all the nouns. Really, I prefer eating Bratäpfel than studying their silly German grammar!