Wirklich? Really?: Wer ist der Letzte?

The Berlin Immigration Office: obviously more advanced than Stuttgart.

A couple of months ago one of my German teachers had some anecdotal story about Germans being so patient because they are used to waiting in lines for everything.  While the internet may not bear this theory out, it's pretty clear to me that Germans respect order, and waiting patiently in line for a service is perfectly compatible with that attitude.  And there are so many people here in Germany that there are always lineups - at the post office, at the grocery store, and, of course, at government offices.

The story I heard at my language school was about an advanced system of lining up without even standing in line, an endeavour that requires faith in the system and the honest of your fellow line-standers.  When entering a bank or a ticket counter, you ask who the last person in line is.  Then, having identified the last person, you keep your eye on them in order to know when you are up.  

I hadn't seen this system in action, having waited in establishments that rely on numbered tickets rather than good old fashioned honesty, until last week when I was at the immigration office here in Stuttgart.  There are two ways of seeing someone at the immigration office: either you phone in several times until someone picks up the phone, tell them your issue, and hope that it is deemed relevant enough to have an appointment scheduled, at which time you show up in a hallway full of people and waiting front of a heavy red door equipped with a loudspeaker.  When your name is called, you can go in.  The other option, for non-urgent or generally confusing cases, is sitting in an adjacent room that has a door leading to the same office, only which is equipped with a traffic light instead of a speaker.  When it flashes green, the next person is welcome.  Mostly it just stays discouragingly red.

As you may have guessed from my description of the surroundings - red and brown doors, disembodied voices, built-in chairs - the immigration office is a seriously brutalist building from the 1960s with little in the way of modern amenities.  There are no digital signs and no number-printing machines.  Instead, as I discovered, there is the system of asking, upon entering the room, "Wer ist der Letzte?"

My brief experience with this system pointed out the reasons it doesn't work in modern Germany.  First of all, everybody in the line needs to understand what the question means.  At the immigration office, this was understandably not the case.  Whenever a newcomer asked who the last person was, there was shuffling of feet and some serious glares until finally someone else pointed out who had been the last to enter the room.  While such complete non-responsiveness may have demonstrated an average language competency well below the level required to get most visas, I was surprised by the angry muttering among the askers, who, presumably likewise at the immigration office to immigrate, really didn't have much to get up on their high horse about.  I suppose they could have been part of a secret pre-interview test: if you clam up, you've just signed yourself up for a 6-week integration course, courtesy of the German government. Boo hoo.

And to be fair, it wasn't all a question of language.  Immigrants are nothing if not willing to cash in on the opportunity created by Germans' stubborn faith in their systems. That's why you can get kebab on a Sunday! Sure enough, each time the chime sounded to switch the light from red to green, there was a group ready to jump to their feet should the next person in line momentarily forget their place in the order of things.  

Whether times are a-changing or the system never worked that well after all, the "Wer ist der Letzte?" system doesn't make much sense. Most of us can do numbers - German vocab is a different kettle of fish. And while I realize that a municipal building that caters to foreigners probably sits pretty low on the priority list for taxpayer-funded renovations, we are the ones who need our office to meet the standards of a grocery store meat counter the most.  

image via spiegel.de

Wirklich? Really?: Keine Information, Danke

As seen in the Berlin U-Bahn at a concession stand.  The sign means "No Information - thanks," and it basically sums up the German attitude towards strangers: keep out.   At least they are mostly polite about it.

Der Weihnachtsmarkt

After an impromptu visit to the Munich Marienplatz Christmas market, or Weihnachtsmarkt, I think I can definitively say that the Weihnachtsmarkt in Stuttgart is really the best in southern Germany.  The market spreads out along the downtown core of the city centre, takes up three big squares, is filled with folksily decorated stalls heavy on the fir branches, and has made drinking alcohol at 10 in the morning not only socially acceptable, but seasonally appropriate for women, children, and grandpas of all ages.  As I have visited the Weihnachtsmarkt at 10 in the morning three times this week, I can confirm that thanks to the abundance of Glühwein, a mulled wine Christmas drink served in hideous collectible mugs, the crowd is almost as boisterous on a Monday morning as on a weekend afternoon.  And unlike the Munich Weihnachtsmarkt, which has more than its fair share of plastic Weihnachtmänner (that's Santa to you) and snowmen, the decorating team at Stuttgart really dug deep into their Martha Stewart back catalogue to pull out some fairy tale scenes, including toy trains that chug along the roofs, a giant Three Wise Men Weihnachtspyramide, a carved nativity scene or two, and enough pine cones, berries, and boughs to fill a forest or two.

And, although the amount of Glühwein guzzling that is going on might lead you to believe otherwise, it's not even cold.  There is nary a snow bank in the dioramas of typical German winter scenes that perch atop the stalls.  No snowflakes, plastic or otherwise, dangle from Christmas trees or lampposts.  The middle school kids bringing their recently acquired clarinet skills to the outdoor market in the form of repeated squeaky renditions of O, Christmas Tree steer clear of songs that even mention the word snow, let alone ask for it.  The only place I've seen any representation of snow is on the Weihnachtmarkt's website, where some over-zealous web designer has animated some snow onto an image of Stuttgart's city hall square.  (They've also included the only two standing pre-19th century buildings in the downtown core in their composite image, so the idea that the image represents Stuttgart's reality should be taken with a grain of rock salt.)  It's actually all quite autumnal, if it weren't for the (artificially frozen) outdoor skating rink and the crowds, maniacally intent on purchasing wooden Christmas ornaments.

Aside from the Christmas ornament stalls, at the market you can buy literally everything in the arts-and-crafts gamut of Christmas giving. Knitted booties? Check.  Beeswax candles?  Check.  Aprons embroidered with "Kiss the Cook" in Swabian dialect?  Oh, yeah.  There's even a whole aisle devoted to the kind of gadgets that you might recognize from late night infomercials.  You can also get almost any kind of Swabian food here hot off the grill and straight from the hands of somebody's Oma - from Swabian ravioli, aka Maultaschen, to Alsatian pizza, or Flammkuchen.  Last but not least, for those who really want to know what they're getting for Christmas, the Stuttgarter Weihnachtsmarkt has its own not-so-live webcam in the biggest of the squares.  See for yourself exactly how not snowy it is here.

image via stuttgarter-weihnachtsmarkt.de

Wirklich? Really?: Royalty

Who knew that Europe still was ruled by kings and queens?  And there's not just Kate and William, but who could forget Silvia and Carl Gustaf, Letizia and Filippe, and, last but not least, Mette-Marit and Haakon?  There is a steady stream of royal weddings ready to fill out half the pages of every European-based gossip magazine before they even get around to documenting Christina Aguilera's bad hair days.

And it's not only the affairs of those choice ruling royal houses who somehow escaped the "off-with-their-heads" portion of European history that make the news.   The deposed and otherwise long-forgotten descendants of the royals of Europe have been quietly filing their comings and goings with rag-trade papers as well. According to Frau magazine, the family of the ex-King of Romania gathered to celebrate his 90th birthday last month, among whose guests were the Princesses of Liechtenstein, the crown prince of Yugoslavia, and both the Prince and the Markgraf of Baden.  (That's Baden as in Baden-Württemberg, the modern left-leaning German state of which Stuttgart is the manufacturing centre.)  Whyever did the Emperor of Mexico fail to grace them with his presence?

While I thought that the only remaining socialites were the drug-addict great-grandchildren of oil barons and coal magnates, and that the septuagenarian descendants of deposed monarchs were only kept in funny hats by their British cousins in order to be trotted out at ceremonial gatherings, it turns out that the ruling classes of Europe are very much alive and socializing.  Take, for example, the Tiffany ball profiled in the back of Instyle Germany, which boasted a Gräfin, a couple "zu Whatsits", and a "von Wherever".  Those little words mean they're royal, even if they're being coy about whether their great-grandfather was an Erzherzog or a Fürst.

By breaking free from monarchies into democratic rule, it looks like we really did the ruling houses of Europe a solid.  The ex-royals of Europe are still rich enough to do nothing for a living, and even upset that they are not richer.  And, while their officially royal ancestors may have had a country or two to look after in order to keep themselves in gold cutlery and velvet bedding, all today's royals need to manage is an annual charity luncheon. But, with centuries of practice, they know how to keep us pacified. As long as they can keep feeding us a heavy helping of fairytale romances, let them eat wedding cake.

image via novinite.com

Geschmack: Hanselmännchen und Butternikolaus

Yum.

Let me introduce you to my two new best friends, Hanselmännchen and Butternikolaus.  I'm not sure who I like better.  Hansel is a soft sweet bun shaped like a little man with raisin eyes.  Nikolaus, sporting a jaunty white cap, is a butter cookie as big as a plate.  I am also getting to know Butternikolaus's cousin, Quarkteig-Nikolaus, but he has some political views that I am not very keen on.

Sadly, they are here for a limited time only.  These seasonal baked goods are here to celebrate the period between St Martin's Day, which was a little while back (I'm not exactly sure when or why, but there was a goose dinner and excited children involved) and St Nicholas's Day on December 6, at which point they will head back to the North Pole or a candy cane witch's house or wherever seasonal baked goods spend the rest of the season.  What Hansel has to do with either Martin or Nicholas I am not sure, and the ladies at my local bakery seem to think its strange that I have any questions about the fact that they are selling baby-sized man-shaped cakes.  I'm not looking forward to a December without these guys.

Really, these pastries are way too big for a single person, but, due to their anthropomorphic qualities, they are also very difficult to share.  Who wants to draw and quarter St Nick?  There's something a little sad about going back for seconds to a sticky pastry box emptied of everything but a left arm and right leg.

image via chefkoch.de

Word Up: Lebenslauf

der Lebenslauf m resumé, C.V.

I have to admit that I really like this word.  Here the Germans for once resist the temptation to steal a word from another language and make it German by pronouncing it wrong (see: Marketing, Project Manager, Download), and as a result the concept is that much easier to understand.  English speakers should take note.  After all, curriculum vitae has way too many syllables, and CV has too few.  Plus, you may have guessed it was Latin, but did you know it is Latin for "course of life"?  Well, Lebenslauf is German for "course of life." English for "course of life"? Resumé, naturally.  

However, just when you think that you can add this word to your set of flashcards no problem comes the knowledge that a CV in Germany is not like the others.  There are some major differences.

In some ways, a German CV keeps it simple. No fooling around with different templates on Microsoft Word or worrying whether the dates should go to the left or the right.  Two columns, as many pages as necessary.

Don't congratulate yourself on being able to pass off your resumé as the product of any another German just yet.  A CV in Germany also has a photo of a smiling you looking your most friendly, attractive, and ethnically identifiable.  At first this seems a little unfair, but, if you think about it, you're going to be judged based on your appearance and potential effects that appearance will have on the company your are joining at some point in the application process, whether positively or negatively, no matter what the lawyer-approved policies circulating at your workplace liberally state.  And, ultimately, letting somebody know that you favour hockey-themed neckties, do not own a suit jacket, or come from a persecuted ethnic minority early on in the game is really probably best for both parties involved.  

The last thing that sets a German CV apart from your run-of-the-mill resumé is that you sign and date it at the bottom.  Germans really have a love affair with legal documents; the more swearing and signing, the better.  So you have to certify your resumé, hobbies and all, to be the whole truth and nothing but.   To be honest, if you're going to lie about your work experience, you're probably prepared to swear it's the truth on your mother's grave as well.  

Word Up: Der Altweibersommer

der Altweibersommer m Indian summer

Happy to report that a late summer in Germany is called an Old Wives' Summer, and nothing more incendiary than that.
We had been having warm weather for the better part of six months until last weekend.  That being said, the long warm months didn't so much seem like the good fortune of an indian summer as like being stuck in a season on repeat.  Like Groundhog Day, you know, if it had been set in a pleasantly warm summer weekend instead.  Then the weather decided to get cold, rainy, and decidedly unsuited to any of my clothing.  Already, the very first onset of fall has brought out the toques, goose down jackets and 10-foot-long (soccer team) scarves.  This doesn't make sense to me.  If you are wearing all of your winter clothing now in the middle of October, what are you going to do when the temperature actually dips below freezing?  There is nowhere to go but colder!

Geschmack: Amerikaner aka The Black and White Cookie

Germans may not get Seinfeld, but they do get the Black and White Cookie, known here as the Amerikaner. If the Black & White Cookie is all about racial harmony, the Germans are making a pretty clear statement with their baked goods.  It is also widely available in the segregated all black or all white version.

Having first discovered that I could get the Black and White Cookie here, around the corner, in Germany, I took the literal, typical, unfamiliar-immigrant approach and called it the "Schwarz und Weiß Keks."   Nobody let me know I had it all wrong, possibly because they wanted to avoid the 30 seconds of uncontrollable mirth that now happens every time I ask for an Amerikaner.  Each time that word comes out of my mouth it's like I have fulfilled for the bakery staff all of the stereotypes about Americans in that one brief moment of ordering a baked good.  Next time I should add one of the terrible, heavy, thick-as-mud doughnuts they call American-style to my order and the staff can die and go to heaven.  Man, can't we all just get along?  Look to the cookie!

Wirklich? Really?: Jugendschutz

   I really love the Tatort, Germany's answer to CSI.  Sunday evenings from 8:15 the Tatort (literally Crime Scene) runs for an hour and a half, and each week, the series alternates among a nation-wide selection of wackily incongruous departments of city detectives.  This means that every week you come face to face with a different dialect, and, unfortunately, sometimes, the same plot - ideas must be scarce on the ground at this time of the year because I have seen two weeks running of former-alcoholic-detective-faced-with-a-potential-misbegotten-child dilemmas.

   But, 8:15 on a Sunday is not a great time to catch a TV show when your weekends are your only chance to escape Stuttgart thanks to cheap weekend train tickets.  Plus, TV shows generally screen at weird quarter-hour intervals here and then last for frustratingly long amounts of time, which means that when a channel tries to schedule a 44 minute American TV show into an hour-and-fifteen minute slot, they have to introduce extra advertisements.  But rather than just have longer advertisements at the intervals clearly indicated by fades-to-black and dramatic cliffhangers, instead German TV programmes have one or two excessively long advertisement periods where you could make dinner, clean your kitchen, and forget that you're even watching TV before the show comes back on, in addition to hiccupy little 30-second breaks to even it all out.  To add insult to injury, and because you might have read War and Peace in your downtime, the broadcaster then replays a minute or so of the action from before the commercial break.
    Anyway, to avoid all that wasted time and catch up on my Tatort, I had the genius idea of watching the on-demand version of the show after it had aired.  But, on the Das Erste site, the public broadcaster responsible for this German gem, what did I find but this message: Aus Jugendschutzgründen stehen Ihnen die Videos jeweils ab 20:00 Uhr bis 6:00 Uhr zur Verfügung, or, to protect young people, the videos are only available after 8PM.  I don't know any kid who can navigate the internet well enough to find the Tatort who goes to bed before 8, but I guess Das Erste knows best.  Heaven forbid a tween should see one of the Kommissars doing something as outlandishly disrespectful as eating Currywurst in the morgue.


image via t-online.de

Word Up: der Lehrstuhl

Lehrstuhl m department chair (academia)

   Because I am in the middle of grad school applications, the recent German class lesson on vocabulary words for university was unusually relevant.  Usually our topics are things like A Hundred Words for Depression or How to Explain Why You Have Been Shoplifting.  Besides the usual combination of thematic and trick questions to expose potentially unacceptable immigrants (How many years do students usually study in your home country?  Is private contact between students and professors appropriate in your homeland?), we learned all the names for the various tiers of hierarchy within a university department, from HiWi (work-study assistant) to Professor (natch).  As you can expect, in Germany there are a lot of different, narrowly defined degrees of seniority.  

   Of particular interest was the title for the position of department chair at a university, Lehrstuhl, which, predictably, almost literally translates (guess what "Stuhl" is in English?)  There is one important difference.  When I asked if we could say, "I am the department chair" as well as "I have the department chair," my instructor seemed to think that was a pretty ridiculous question.  "One cannot be a chair," he smiled.  Too right, I think.

image via amazon.com

Word Up: der Indianer

Indianer(in f) m Red Indian, see also indianische

    Have I mentioned that Germans lack something called political correctness?  Case in point. This definition is straight out of my Pons, one of the standard reference books in Germany, published in 1995.  Remember that whole "Get over it - it's the nineties" thing?  Apparently they didn't do the nineties in Germany.  And I think they missed out on some key civil rights issues of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as well.
    This fearless political incorrectness is not restricted to dusty books - I had the experience of seeing it come to life last weekend at the annual Cannstatter Volksfest parade.  Stuttgart's version of Oktoberfest, the Volksfest draws its psychic inspiration from a big bronze vat, the city Can of the aforementioned Cannstatt, which is escorted to the fairgrounds by the mayor, about a hundred marching bands, an Iggy Pop lookalike and an extremely bored Duke of Württemberg (understandably seeing as I doubt he has any duties other than appearing in floats at parades, and possibly no property other than said float).  Each float gave out candy to the watching kids, or in the case of the agricultural groups, offered samples of their wares.  There was a lot of free beer for a Sunday morning.  There was local wine.  There was sauerkraut.  There were dirndls and lederhosen and even a moustache appreciation club.
    Present among the many cultural groups who also feted the famed Can was a Retro Americana club, complete with a General Lafayette, an Edgar J. Hoover, twenty southern belles, gas station attendants, a few cowboys carrying a Confederate flag, and a small group of furred and feathered men and women who were clearly going for Native American but ended up, for obvious reasons, bearing more of a resemblance to extras at Medieval Times.  To be fair, Germans seem to have no problem with thousands of Americans not to mention American celebrities showing up at Oktoberfest in the stripper-friendly version of Bavarian traditional dress, so maybe what seems like cultural appropriation is only a little friendly tit for tat.
    And it's not the Germans alone who are taking the kind of liberties that would get some major frowns in North America.  I picked up a similarly offending copy of French Elle in Frankfurt (What kind of cosmopolitan multi-lingual Eden is this, a mere two hours from the conservative all-German, all-the-time pretzel-fest that is Stuttgart? Now I know why the train was standing room only.)  Published every week, yet still managing to weigh in at 296 pages (how much can any one person really read about how polka dots are trending right now?), French Elle wants its readers to know that clogs are only to be worn in the presence of other females for fear of ruining the feminine mystique, that for several good-looking French philosophers, being television moderators is an extension of their research rather than a mad grab at fame, and that too many feathers combined in a single outfit can make you look like a "Peau-Rouge." Heaven forbid.



Hermes ad via French Elle

Word Up: das Martinshorn

Martinshorn (n) siren, ambulance siren

The key sound effect that defines European city from American city is the Martinshorn.  That's the emergency siren that you can hear wailing in the background as escaped convicts, maligned heroes, and angry cartoon dogs bust their way through cityscapes that the director promises are not Hollywood sets - nor the mean streets of Toronto.  In Germany, this siren is called the Martinshorn after the original German manufacturer.
We live right by a hospital, so I have become fairly well acquainted with the Martinshorn.  Luckily Germans wouldn't dare be so rude as to have accidents after 8PM, so it has yet to disturb my sleep.  However, even though I hear the Martinshorn drifting through my windows many times a day, a lifetime of BBC dramas and cold war movies has instilled the siren into my head as a sound effect that is shorthand for an across-the-pond "somewhere else." So when I am sitting in my apartment reading or cooking or conjugating German verbs and I hear a Martinshorn, my first instinct is to ask myself who is forcing me to watch Run Lola Run again.
The other thing that the Europeans really have down to an art is its effective use of the Doppler Effect.  Yes, science nerds, that's the one where sound waves whose point of origin is moving towards you hit your ears close together, sounding high pitched and then ringing deeper and lower as the source gets farther away and the sound waves hit farther apart.  Come on guys, these are Ms. Frizzle basics.  North American sirens apparently are on the Doppler Effect bandwagon as well.  But the Europeans seem to really have the hang of the directional benefits of a siren rather than just the ear-splitting-loudness-and-temporary-deafness part, and so the Martinshorn sounds totally different depending on whether it is coming towards you or heading away.  Maybe it didn't help Manni - but as a pedestrian who isn't stuck in a film with a soundtrack like a late nineties rave, I definitely feel a lot safer crossing the street.

Word Up: etw. in den Griff bekommen, or, How Germans have a Handle on Things

der Griff (m) handle, etw. in den Griff bekommen (idiom) to have control of something, to have the hang of something

Everybody knows that the cheapest place to buy toilet paper is Canadian Tire.  That being said, in Toronto, the nearest Canadian Tire to my house was a little over a kilometre away.  To add to the problem, it is impossible to stuff a package of 8 rolls of toilet paper in a normal shopping bag without removing the packaging, and if carrying the package without a bag, I ended up clawing at the plastic while trying to find a comfortable grip, inevitably breaking through the plastic and setting the rolls loose.  Needless to say, I have arrived home from the store with a ripped package of toilet paper and a lost roll or two more than a couple of times.
Enter German innovation. Why bag something that is essentially already in a bag? The addition of a handle is pure genius.  It's good to know that it's not just me who has spent their Saturday chasing rolls of toilet paper down the sidewalk, and it's even better to know that somebody finally found a cure.

Geschmack: Johannisbeere (Currants)

Currants don't exactly sing summer to me.  As someone whose previous experience of the currant family was limited to Ribena concentrate, I was pretty convinced that currants were the grape's ugly cousin complete with multiplied stain-producing side effects.  However, here in Germany escaping currant is not just a matter of skipping out on nasty fruit cakes or passing over the dusty section of juice concentrates at the health food store.  Currants are in everything - stuffed in pastries, baked into cakes like the Linzertorte, boiled down to produce a dead-ringer cranberry-like sauce with meats, and as a fresh garnish with everything from ice cream sundaes to sausage dumplings.  And, of course, they are plentiful throughout the summer at the farmer's market, where they are cheap and somehow the season seems to never end.  

I first ventured into red currant eating as a result of making Rote Grütze, a tart northern German dessert that involves boiling down red fruits including the currant to make a jelly that is then served with vanilla sauce.  Thanks to a high rate of irresistibility, only half of raspberries and strawberries purchased for prepared desserts ever make it through the washing phase to the bowl.  Likewise, faced with a box of corn-pop-sized currants, with tiny thread-like little stems to be plucked from each one, I soon discovered that the more I ate, the fewer I had to stem.  While the first couple result in the sour-faced, knee jerk reaction of "why did I eat that?" and "that was definitely not a raspberry," after thus absent-mindedly munching through half a box of currants, it's safe to say that your taste is fully formed.

Pictured we have white currants, possibly the best possible currant - sweet, fresh and absolutely non-staining, should you be prone to that sort of accident.

Wirklich? Really?: White? Or Whiter?

There are some things that are weird about living in an ethnohomogenous culture, or at least a nation that sees itself as ethnohomogenous, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This is from a German women's magazine and if you could read the small print on the right hand side of the page (don't bother trying because my camera doesn't have the resolution), you would see that this photo series is demonstrating makeup techniques on two skin tones.  The girl on the left is for all the ladies with light skin.   The girl on the right has the dark skin.  Which is crazy, because girl number two is barely showing a tan.
I'm not saying that when a North American magazine shows a blonde, a Latina and an African-American girl as the three "looks" of the Americas, they're really doing much better by the in-betweens and the little-bit-of-fusion girls. And a quick look at Elle Canada's Beauty section likewise shows a lot of pale faces.  It's just that white or whiter is definitely, undeniably, absolutely not an accurate representation of what Germany looks like today, and it's pretty disheartening that anyone would think it's okay to not even provide the barest minimum of glossy-magazine lip service to Germany's diversity.
Image from Für Sie

Word Up: die Schultüte

die Schultüte f school cone [cardboard cone filled with treats or small presents]


    You know that point in July where television stations start advertising school supplies and all the newspapers are bursting with bright primary-coloured flyers promising back-to-school sales?  As a kid, it feels like you're barely out of school and already everybody's revving up to put you back in.  Well, here in Germany, they have taken the spoonful-of-sugar philosophy to heart.  So alongside window displays with cartoon-scrawled backpacks and virgin sets of coloured pencils, there are rows of the raw materials for making Schultüte.
  At first glance, the huge stacks of bristol board cones to be found among the school supplies make it seem like the Germans, as part of their commitment to preserving traditional culture and all things old-timey (and postcard-perfect), are preparing to stock up on dunce caps for the school season.  Worry not, Charlie Brown.  Instead, these caps are going to be tipped upside down like an ice cream cone and lovingly filled with pencils, notebooks, and a whole lot of candy, dolled up with ribbons, bows and scrapbooking accessories and doled out by parents on the very first day of primary school.  Sorry, that means you're out of luck, Grade Twos.
To me, this seems like a pretty sweet deal.  There is nothing I would have love more on my first day of school than Gobstoppers and Popeye Sticks.  Instead, I distinctly remember rice pudding and raisins.  On the other hand, I'm sure teachers of Grade One must require some special training day to learn how to deal with kids suffering not only from the emotional strain of being forced to learn the alphabet but also experiencing some major sugar fallout.  Luckily, school in Germany only lasts 4 hours - from 9AM to 1PM - so at least teachers get the satisfaction of handing back still-twitching six-year-olds to their parents before the sugar rush has completely worn off.

Word Up: der Migrationshintergrund

Migrationshintergrund m immigrant heritage.  A person with at least one parent who is not of German heritage has a Migrationshintergrund

 I think it says a lot about German culture and value systems that there is a word to describe the cultural identity of a child for whom one parent is a first-generation German, and it's not just straight up "German."
Strange but true, Germans are really at home with casual racism.  People with Migrationshintergrund are painted with a broad brush in one direction: backward.  A number of Germans I have met - highly-educated, liberal, organic-food-growing and caftan-wearing Germans - seem to have gleaned all of their knowledge of  Turks or Egyptians or South Asians from colourized National Geographic photo editorials circa 1960.  Having read the accompanying descriptions of natives, habits and habitats, penned by whatever minor noble made the trek through the Sahara or Siam, they then stored up this information for future cross-cultural encounters and deemed themselves culturally sensitive.  On a tour of one of Germany's many castles, our tour guide tried to bond with a woman who looked vaguely Southeast Asian over Bollywood movies.  Yesterday my German teacher asked one of the Turkish students at what age Turkish women are expected to marry.  She's a biochemist, by the way, and she said 35.  That was not the answer the teacher was looking for.
When we first started watching TV here in Germany, there were ads for a day of international programming that one of the TV channels dubbed Tolerance Day.  Maybe it was a translation thing (marketing departments, put away your German-English dictionaries!), but to me shelling out cash for an ad campaign about tolerance is like patting yourself on the back for supporting "separate but equal" education or popping the champagne cork for universal male suffrage.  Diversity is not just agreeing to acknowledge that other cultural groups exist within your country, for better or for worse, especially when most people quietly err on the side of worse.  
But, please, Germany, stop assuming that all immigrants were living on the set of Aladdin before they showed up in your sparkling metropolises.  Germans, of all people, should be able to recognize that there are extremes within any culture, although maybe they know only too well how the zeal of the few can hypnotize the many.  Sure, without stereotypes, people seem a lot less orderly, but Germans should think about how nice their vacations to the US would be if waitresses stopped asking if their lederhosen is in the wash.

Image via disneybilder.com

Wirklich? Really?: Milka White and Rice

European brands have replaced both their R&D and their marketing departments with the idiomatic English dictionary.

Word Up: die Wohnung

die Wohnung f apartment, flat

   Apartment hunting in Germany is a different kettle of fish.  First of all, rental ads are written in cryptic acronyms that distill - down to the minimum number of letters - descriptions of how many rooms the apartment has (including bathrooms and kitchen), whether it's in a roof or not (chances are it is - our roof is three stories tall), and if you'll have to bring your own refrigerator.  Hiring a real estate agent to find you a rental and paying them through the nose to do so is pretty common (finally, that scene in Knocked Up where Seth Rogen uses Remax to find a bachelor pad makes sense - it all took place in Germany).  Deposits are insane - we dropped double our monthly rent as a security deposit plus first month in order to rent our place. Also, people are often expected to fit their own kitchen with everything from cabinets to stove - oh yeah, and including the kitchen sink.
    This state of affairs makes for really weird real estate reality TV shows.  Not that they are the best of TV in the first place, but I have enjoyed a good few hours of Property Virgins in my time - there's no better way to spend time that should be used to clean up your basement apartment than critiquing a stranger's impeccably decorated Arts and Crafts beachfront home with 2 bath.  From what I determined from German TV, there in this country there is also no such thing as staging, also known as prettying up an apartment for prospective buyers and any nationally syndicated television program that could possibly be posing as a buyer (If you watched Property Virgins, you'd have this vocab down pat.  That's why it's called The Learning Channel).  So, if you sit down to watch something like Vox's Mieten Wohnen Kaufen (Rent Live Own), you are essentially gearing up for 45 minutes of guided tours around empty, echoing white rooms.  The bathroom is whatever room has a toilet. The kitchen is the one with tile.
   The other thing about German real estate is that all the houses look the same.  For example, it's hard to tell if the stucco house we live in is 400 or 20 years old, or to tell the difference between our neighbourhood and one of the many "quaintly charming" towns Lonely Planet slavers over.  Basically the ideal German home is something that looks like a child's drawing - triangle roof, rectangular body, way too many little windows.  If you're rich, the drawing gets bigger.  There are no suburban Italianate villas or Tudor-style cottages, and rising from the building sites that can somehow still be found in downtown Stuttgart are even more of the same stucco monoliths.  Thus, when you are confronted with a half hour in the life of someone deciding between three essentially interchangeable white-walled apartments in three identical pastel-coloured stucco houses, the idea of real estate television really starts to fall apart at the seams.

Wirklich? Really?: Hungarian Flavoured Potato Chips

    Let's put aside the fact that this snack company is named "Funny-frisch"  - Funny Fresh - yet another example of branding in English without consulting an English speaker (or a German-English dictionary).  Let's also set aside the fact that their other top seller is peanut-flavoured cheezies.  I think the best way to address their failings is to call bullshit on this so-called "Ungarisch" or Hungarian flavour.
    First of all, it is a dead ringer for BBQ  flavoured potato chips.  I find that slightly unsettling.  What are the common threads between Hungarian cuisine and soul food?  The ingredients give away the answer: liquid smoke flavouring.  I get why you would add the artificially recreated flavour of having burnt the crap out of your meal to simulate barbecue, but Hungarian goulash?  Either this is some kind of commentary on Hungarian cooking in general, or somebody in product development had dinner with a particularly spiteful Hungarian grandmother.

Word Up: Nordic Walking

Nordic Walking nt pole walking, ski walking, fitness walking

    Maybe you've heard of Nordic Walking, the biggest Trendsport in Germany.  Have you seen people strolling through a city park with ski poles?  Have you waited at a train station alongside a group of backpackers with retractable walking sticks?  Have you had your Sunday route impeded by a marathon of people puffing through the streets waving Nordic Walking poles?  No?  I have.  And it's weird. 
   Before I came to Germany, I had seen ski poles in two locations: ski hills and serious mountain hikes.  Here Nordic Walking is such a big hit that Germany is the home of the Nordic Walking World Championships.  Local sports accessory stores (including the curiously named SportScheck) have whole sections devoted to Nordic Walking training accessories. 
    So what's the deal with this sport?  First of all, it's target demographic seems to be the Aquafit set.  Germany has a very large, very visible and very active group of elderly people; almost 1/3 of all Germans are retired.  It's clear - from the adverts featuring grey-haired Nordic Walkers taking back the city to the group of golden-age Nordic Walkers in Goretex who swarmed us on the train to the Black Forest - that elderly people are driving this trend.  And I get it. It's a hit with older and less-than-fit people because it makes walking - the king of low impact, no-way-I'm-going-to-pull-anything exercise - even easier, and also bringing your upper body into the mix.  Your stride and posture are supported by not one, but two canes, and not an ivory handled, tortoiseshell old-lady cane - an ultra-light, super skinny aluminum cane with yellow lightning bolts up the side and the word "Nordic" emblazoned across it.  And we all know Germans, especially older Germans, have a soft spot for all things Nordic. 
   It's also clear that some marketing team is trying to convince Germans that this Nordic Walking thing is an international movement.  After all, it's not called "Nordischer Spazieren."  (It's funny how Germans seem to adore all things English language, except for the people who actually speak it.)  Sure, it may have "originated" in North America as training for cross-country skiers, but I have never seen anybody, let alone anyone in their 60s, trucking along with ski poles on an urban trail in Canada.  Given how mobile and well-represented old people are here in Germany, I think that a little more international exposure for this hip-replacement-friendly sport would be worthwhile.  No one should have to survive on Aquafit alone.

Image via www.nordic-walker-hameln.de

Garmisch-Partenkirchen

 Dear Olympic Committee, Munich wants to try again, and this time it promises there will be no screw ups.  In its bid for the 2018 Winter Games, Munich has teamed up once again with Garmisch-Partenkirchen (a partnership that brought you such memorable events as the 1936 Olympics) with the best intentions of rewriting history, but has made the unfortunate mistake of settling on the slogan the Friendly Games.  As the city museum reminded us, Munich's last shot at redemption, the 1972 Olympics, took a page out of the same PR thesaurus and called itself the Happy Games.  You may remember what happened that time. If not, Steven Spielberg does.
    Poor marketing aside, Garmisch-Partenkirchen was a very nice resort, with a lot more going for it than Munich.  Munich was full of tourists and historic buildings under construction.  Garmisch-Partenkirchen may have had the tourists and outspokenly Anglo-hating Bavarians, but it also had the Alps.  No one would dare cover the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, with one of those cloth awnings that reproduce the original facade of the heavily scaffolded building underneath and claim it was basically the same experience.  We also didn't have to deal with the world's most annoying English speakers turned bicycle tour guides once we headed deep into the Alpine woods.
  Sadly, judging from the treatment we received in one of the guesthouses we stopped at for a drink on our hike up one of the surrounding mountains (which started with a trail hacked through an extremely narrow gorge carved by a very close, very roaring stream), just because we didn't encounter any off-duty tour guides that weekend does not mean that said annoying Anglos have not already made it to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and ruined the reputation of English speakers everywhere.  Even German-speaking English speakers.  We got the slowest service, the wrong drinks, and general non-responsiveness to any and all requests (including to pay).  On the plus side, we got cold drinks on a patio after hiking halfway up a mountain.  Definitely not a complete loss.

Word Up: das Kopfkissen

Kopfkissen (nt) pillow

    I was surprised that I hadn't posted on this before because the difference between German and Anglosphere pillows was an immediate setback to developing a positive relationship with Germany.  Falling into bed after a long day stumbling through another language should have just been a respite, but here it involved yet another cultural learning curve.

   Pillows here are different.  They are soft.  They are fluffy.  They are down-filled.  You can squeeze  round the middle of one with a single fist.  They come in one shape: square; and usually two sizes: 80 by 80 or 40 by 40 cm.  I'm sure this pillow system, like the A paper designation where each paper size is double the last, is very orderly and makes for especially pleasing production diagrams.  However, it's hard to accustom a neck that is used to being supported by a nice thick pillow to what is essentially a mini duvet.  Your head sinks through to the mattress, creating a pillow crater whose downy, quill-y walls envelop your mouth and face.  Tickled noses and sleepless nights ensue.  Sore necks follow.

    And while IKEA may sell the same monochramatic set of strainers, throw rugs, and flat-pack chairs the world around, it does not sell proper rectangular pillows to the German market.  Their one concession is an extra wide, very skinny, borderline tube-like pillow that, doubled-up, bears a passing resemblance to pillow normalcy (and is a perfectly regular 40 x 80 cm, or exactly half of a regular big fat square pillow.  Yes, Germans are precise like that).  Ultimately, the vote on (obnoxious) ex-pat forum Toytown Germany seems to be that people with English-speaking pillow habits should suck up the shipping costs and BYOP - bring your own pillow.  

Word Up: Express Service

   There’s no word for express service in German because the concept doesn’t exist in Germany.  Everything takes forever, from telephone installation to dry cleaning to email replies.  Forget what you’ve heard about Germans being punctual as well: any given service you order probably won’t be ready at the time specified.  This total disregard for punctuality also goes for trains, appointments, and village clock towers.

    Of course, the absence of express service probably contributes a lot to the German quality of living.   If deadlines are flexible, and nobody expects anything to done by tomorrow, let alone yesterday, everybody can just take it a little bit easy.  People can leave work on time.  Shops can close at 6 PM.  TV primetime jumps forward to 8PM.  Nobody stays glued to the TV until 11PM waiting for the results from Dancing with the Stars.  A perfect world.

    But, if you are used to getting your grocery shopping done on a Sunday or have your shoes fixed within the week, it is unbelievably frustrating.  You have to plan ahead.  Even remembering that there is no such thing as a convenience store is a lot harder than you would expect.  It takes a lot of the spontaneity out of something like a Sunday afternoon picnic.  On the other hand, because everything is closed on Sunday except ice cream stands and Greek restaurants, relaxation is almost mandatory.  You can basically guarantee that, rather than catching up on paperwork or working a thankless retail shift, your friends will be available for said picnic - unless they’ve made a date to go hiking in the Schwarzwald or boating on the Bodensee or something equally sporty and carefree.

  

Word Up: die Wohn- und Geschäftesgebäude

Wohn- und Geschäftesgebäude (nt, pl) mixed use building

    O champions of mixed use space, I doubt you have ever been kept up all night by your local Business Improvement Area’s outdoor presentation of Stuttgart’s Got Talent.  (Yes, you can read 24-hour time: the link says the party goes 6:30 PM to 2 AM.) There’s something to be said for zoning laws that keep Nirvana cover bands out of residential courtyards.

Photo courtesy cannstattermusiknacht.de

Schwarzwald

    Before you ask, yes, we tried the Black Forest Cake.  Our day trip to the Schwarzwald, the large region in southwestern Germany that consists of the heavily forested foothills of the Swiss and Austrian Alps, was part of a quest for all things authentically south German, and that included the cake of questionable origin.  Of course, to get off the beaten path took a little extra work. It was a long day trip: the slow trains winding through mountains and tunnels made for a scenic ride on the way there, and a long slog on the way back.  Our train had mostly emptied out by the team we reached our destination, but this was not some untouched backwater.  In the summer the trains are packed with Germans armed with retractable ski poles for Nordic walking and oversized digital cameras.  Luckily, we went on a cool late spring day rather than the height of the tourist season - it would appear the would-be naturists are afraid of a little cloud.

   However, upon disembarking in Triberg with an Indian tour group and a family of indeterminate origins but with at least three languages among them, we realized that the village was already preparing for what must be a considerable tourist deluge.  At the foot of the forested hills, the paved road turned into pressure-cleaned cobblestones,  the clothing and sports stores gave way to restaurants hung with gigantic swinging teddy bear cuckoo clocks and postcard kiosks with canned folk music.  A cashier in a dirndl spoke German with a very thick English accent. 

    But we quickly took off hiking up and away from the collection of World’s Largest Cuckoo Clocks and Germany’s pitifully small highest waterfall (at the foot of which were posted apologies that this year it was not quite up to snuff).  We climbed and climbed through the forest, where the trees, if not quite black, were still dark and tall enough to have strangled out most ground cover, which made it pretty eery compared to the lush leafy green West Coast rainforests I’m used to. 

    At the top of the mountain there were, of course, the traditional hooded Black Forest farmhouses with cubed roofs that reach almost to the ground.  Not so traditionally, almost all of them were covered with solar panels.  Cows, grassy fields, intermittent forests, and finally a lookout tower and a little log cabin snack bar where a group of old men were drinking schnapps and smoking the hell out of some kind of meat.  The word “Vegetarisch” was a totally foreign concept. 

    While from the top of the lookout tower there were sadly no Alps to be seen, we could look down into nearby valleys and towns.  Apparently on a clear day you could even have seen Stuttgart’s famous (?) TV tower, the first all-concrete structure of its type.  Ah, nature.

Word Up: der Nachbar

der Nachbar m. neighbour; (in Nachbarwohnung) next door neighbour also Nachbarin f


   Apparently Germans really trust their neighbours.  As I found out the other day, any package or parcel sent to you via Deutsche Post can also be delivered to your neighbour if you are not home.  Then you get this notice and have to knock on your neighbour's door to get your package back.  (Or spend half an hour trying to figure out which of your neighbours is a major cosmetics company.  Hint: none.)  I didn't think that Germans were particularly neighbourly - let's just say I didn't get any housewarming gifts, and some of our neighbours seem to use the communal areas like the lobby as a dumping ground for weird garbage they don't want to be seen carrying to the dumpster (like, oh, say a box of stained mannequin heads).  Yes, this service means that you can pick up your package outside of postal office hours.  However, it also means that your neighbour could be keeping tabs on your online purchasing habits, or worse yet, just keep your stuff.  Given that we already lost a laundry load's worth of new clothing to a neighbour in Toronto, I'm not exactly thrilled with this prospect.  Plus what if the neighbour holding your package turns out to be mannequin-head guy?  You don't want to knock on that door after daylight hours.
   I'm not sure if the same custom is followed by the BW Post, the  rival postal service that runs in Baden-Württemberg alongside the privatized Deutsche Post.  They have their own stamps and their own postmark, but I have never seen their cargo-bikes on the street (that's the way German mail gets where it's going).  Clearly somebody in South Germany has been reading The Crying of Lot 49.

Word Up: die Biermischgetränke

Biermischgetränke n, pl.  Mixed drinks with beer

Bier-Cola is the kind of mixed drink a frat boy might dream up in the wee hours of the morning to maximize rent party keg profits.  Yet, like Spezi, Mezzo-Mix and Cola-Orange, it has enough demand to be sold as a premix alongside such other beer-mix gems as Radler, which is beer with 7-Up.  Considering how terrible Bier-Cola tastes, I am surprised that this one ever get off the ground.  Even worse, it's not just a single terrible aberration of judgement - every region has their own special pet name for this type of mix, from Diesel to Dirty Water.

Word Up: das Pfand, das Flaschenpfand

Flaschenpfand n, pl. bottle deposit

   The Pfandflaschen system helps keep waste diversion under control in Germany by enticing Germans to lug their empty bottles back to the grocery store to reclaim their deposit.  Jars, aluminum cans, glass, and plastic bottles are not only recyclable, but most of the glass is returned to the food company to be refilled and resold.  And it’s worth it – the Pfand or deposit on one of these bottles can be up to 25 cents.  The Pfand you pay on food containers is calculated separately on your shopping bill, so it’s easy to see that if you don’t return your bottles, you’re throwing away the value of a few sausages or a pretzel or two.

    Only large stores are required to have a Pfand return station, but there are options as to how to recover Pfand. Some stores have machines where you feed your bottles into a drum that spins the container while  scanning for label, weight and size and then finally burps out a credit slip.  Other grocers have real live human sorters who count up your bottles and fling them into their required bins in much less time than it takes the machine to digest all of the bottle’s measurements.  While the machines are pretty efficient, the sorters are way faster.  While each person visiting the sorter depot brings on average a shopping bag worth of bottles, even a sudden wave of hoarder customers with a Mezzo-Mix addiction can be reduced to zero in a minute or two. As long as no do-gooders try to help sort their own returnables - delicately pulling single bottles out of their plastic bags and then blinking bewilderedly at all the cartons, crates, bags and bins while the sorter tries to wrench the containers out of their hands – it’s an easy and efficient way to ensure food containers end up being recycled or reused as food containers, and not thrown into the plastic melting pot to become something less useful.

    Reusable bottles, or bottles with Mehrwegpfand, have much lower deposit amounts than the Einwegpfand on single-use containers returned for recycling.  Wine, beer, and liquor have the lowest Pfand – something like 8 cents per bottle, a pretty low rate that is not surprisingly set by beer brewers themselves, while Einwegpfand is regulated by the government at a pretty high rate.  Yet, despite the smaller deposit, Mehrwegpfand containers like beer bottles have a much better return rate than Einwegpfand like water and pop bottles. And without that refund, water, the most purchased beverage in Germany, ends up being more expensive than beer.  (Stats courtesy my German textbook -  the same textbook also taught me how to ask where to find Guns N Roses cassettes, so I’d guess that its data is circa 1990.)

Image courtesy femalepeople.wordpress.com

Wirklich? Really?: Volluto, My Favourite

I thought this kind of celebrity cash-in was only allowed in Japan.

Frühlingsfest

    While we all know about Octoberfest, apparently Germans can’t stop at one month-long incidence of public drunkenness,  because there is also Frühlingsfest, or Spring Festival which features just as much beer and much better weather.  A particularly large Frühlingsfest is held in Stuttgart about 5 minutes away from my apartment.  Throughout the day you can see girls dressed in dirndls and guys wearing lederhosen wandering out of the S-bahn station in the direction of the massive covered beer tents. 

    Mark had a work event at the beer tent, otherwise I don’t know that I would have gone.  First of all, I don’t have a dirndl.  It’s not an obligatory dress code – girls can also wear lederhosen, preferably short and skintight – but it is the preferred uniform of Frühlingsfest.  I thought that a dirndl would be the kind of thing rented out to couples with obnoxious heritage themed weddings,  like the Canadians who go all out for full Highland regalia.  It turns out that every German – and many visiting Europeans – has some traditional folk clothing tucked away in his or her closet.  You can get fancy velvet and linen embroidered dirndls that lace up with leather from a traditional clothier, you can buy cute cotton little-red-riding hood dirndls at the mall or you can get hot pink and black satin dirndls with miniskirts and fishnet cut-outs from a market stall.  It’s all a matter of taste. 

    The beer tents are massive and humid, with big long communal tables wedged together.  By 5PM on a Wednesday, nobody was sitting down; instead, the crowds of festively dressed teens were standing on the tables, dancing to the live band, and singing the words to every song.  Most songs had actions.  These people really took the whole concept of the YMCA-dance-along to heart.   The real shock was the litres of beer that these sixteen-year-olds were pouring back one after another.  We’re talking a Big Gulp of beer.  And not only could the kids hold them up above their heads and wave them at all the appropriate times in time with the music, but the waitresses could carry five of these extremely heavy, brimming mugs in each hand plus several trays of whole roasted chicken.   After three “prosits” my arm was already tired.  The beer was heavily watered down, but at the rate that it was being consumed,

   Like I said, this was a work outing.   Even after a few litres of beer, our table was the picture of decorum compared to surrounding parties.  We had a visit from a very happy Austrian with very bad balance who had undertaken an inadvisable, dangerous cross-table expedition.  There was some serious table dancing going on among a group of businessmen and women at an adjacent table that had us questioning exactly what kind of professionals they were.   By the end of the night (by which I mean by 10:30), we had learned a lot of the dances to such traditional German folk songs as John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, and had also learned that under no circumstances should you use the bathrooms in a beer tent.   Just another cross-cultural success story.  

Eurovision

    Normally, in Canada, Eurovision just passes me by.  Or rather, the Eurovision of today goes largely unnoticed.  Thanks to Mark's Youtube habit, the winners of Eurovision past occasionally make an appearance in my apartment, which means I could be awakened any given morning by Abba or France Gall or this classic piece of ESL nonsense from Dutch winners Teach In.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Eurovision, it's a song contest kind of like American Idol, except instead of changing it up each week with themes like an Ashley Simpson retrospective or Songs Hillbillies Like, the contestants, who represent the creme de la creme of their European home country, sing the same song week after week for different judges and audiences.  After a series of regional, national, half, semi- and top ten finals, the winner is crowned and the song is exported to America in hopes that it will actually become a hit.
    This year, in Stuttgart, I could probably have skipped the whole Eurovision experience, if I had stopped reading magazines, listening to the radio, going grocery shopping, or watching Germany's version of ET! every day at 17:15.  (okay, I probably could do without the last one).  But, in my local grocery store, there was a large sign warning me that if I did not have enough delectable snacks, my Eurovision party would be a failure.  And this year, the stakes are high in Germany.  Number one: Germany is hosting at least part of the final series of finales in Dusseldorf.  Number two: the reigning Eurovision queen is a German by the name of Lena.  So, watching Eurovision is kind of like a national duty.
   So, in the name of cultural immersion, I watched the half finals on Tuesday.  I sat through 20 musical performances from European countries, quasi-European countries like Turkey, quasi-countries like the city-state of San Marino, and decidedly non-European states like Azerbaijan and Armenia.  How most of them ended up winning the chance to compete beyond their local pub karaoke night is beyond me.  I guess San Marino has an excuse - per capita, how much talent can they really have? (answer: not much).
But, the off-key Mariah Carey yodels, the 2000-era rap-rock, the English lyrics hot off Google Translator - it reminded me more of a high school talent show than an international competition.
   That being said, one group really got it.  The Portuguese entry, La Luta e Alegria, was performed by 6 men and women dressed up as the communist revolutionary version of the Village People, marching on the spot, waving signs in the air, and singing very emphatically about something in Portuguese.  Yes, it was more school play (or Godard movie) than future club hit (here's looking at you Ell & Nikki from Azerbaijan), but at least they didn't try to be Lady Gaga in a cheap wig.  And, even though it probably doesn't have much crossover appeal because it's in Portuguese and sounds like a children's song, at least I didn't have to waste my time trying to figure out what they thought they were saying in English.
Image credit: vorwaerts.de

Wirklich? Really?: Gift with Purchase

    There has got to be some 7-syllable-long compound-word in German for the concept of Gift with Purchase, because it is a big one here.  I was actually a little surprised when I received my first such freebie – a mini-pastry to go along with a sandwich I bought at a bakery chain.  Nice, I thought, but weird.  Not very German.  Isn’t the gift with purchase a decadent American invention?  It seems like something that comes only with the mindset that you don’t know what you really want and you could always use a little more.  Why stop when you have enough?  Buying shoes? Here’s a stuffed animal! Two coffees? Have a keychain!

   Weirder still, the group that really seems to be excited about the Gift with Purchase  is not the department store beauty counter but the pharmacies.  Walk into any drugstore and you will walk out with a package of tissues, a little bag of candies, or a canvas bag with an ad for some sort of medication that it may or may not be prudent to endorse.  Case in point: the little mouth shaped gummies for oral herpes medication.  Do I even want to eat those?

    I’m not sure about the ins and outs of drug advertising in Germany, but I guess this extra little consumer contact makes sense considering all the itchy-wheezy-sneezy promises found on North American drug packaging are almost invisible  Most drugs, from vitamin supplements to cough lozenges to pain killers, are kept behind the pharmacist’s counter or completely out of sight.  However,  most of this stuff is still over-the-counter – no prescription required, only some patient nodding at the pharmacist’s advice about dosage and usage.  (That being said, being  able neither to putter around the shelves nor to explain myself to the satisfaction of the pharmacist means that I am currently taking my Vitamin B12 in a very expensive and sickly sweet liquid form marketed as an energy drink for health-conscious yuppies.)  

Nuremberg

   I came to Nuremberg with very few expectations.  After all, it was almost completely rebuilt after World War II, when, as one of the projected capitals of the Third Reich, it was accordingly bombed out of existence by the Allies.  However, possibly because tourism had been an important part of the town’s economy since at least the mid-19th century, the rebuilding project was meticulous and the medieval town looks perfectly medieval.  Tourism continues to drive the city’s economy (although the Playmobil factory, featured prominently in the city’s advertising campaign, may be giving the Imperial Castle a run for its money)

     However, as my boyfriend pointed out, the trip to Nuremberg took us from sitting pretty an hour away from France to being about an hour away from the Czech Republic, so even the day-tripping tourists seemed a little exotic.  The elegant old man who was manning the front desk at the Albrecht Dürer House, the former residence of the city’s most famous son (not to be confused with Nuremberg’s most famous adopted son, Hitler), assured us he spoke all languages - German, Russian, English, French, Japanese.  I was a bit skeptical of this claim after his English explanation of whatever he was trying to explain to us in English proved to betotally impossible to understande.  However, the ladies standing behind us were Russians, and they seemed delighted to be spoken to in their native language.  (Problematically, they then expected everyone connected with the Albrecht Durer House to be similarly fluent in Russian, a fact which exasperated the tour guide, the bathroom attendant and the gift shop clerk, who bravely  mustered a few desperate „nyets“. )  They were only the first of a lot of Russians we encountered over the next few days.   Sadly, these poor Russian ladies had made the pilgrimage to the Durer house looking for Albrecht Durer’s masterpieces, which are kept under lock and key in Europe’s most famous museums, not among the reproductions of period furniture  in his former attic.   The way they wandered around muttering the title „Apocalypse“ to each other was more than a little disquieting.

  Aside from the tourists, the city provided pleasant encounters with Easter markets where little old ladies sold Slap-Chop contraptions, easter tree ornaments and fluffy pretzels, beautiful churches boasting well-preserved stained glass missing only a few stray saints thanks to the heavily documented destruction of WWII (Hitler’s most German city misses no opportunity to share around the guilt), and a number of museums that were modern, informative, and interactive but low on actual cool old stuff.  The Imperial Castle was once one of many homes to what the maybe-crazy guide confusingly called the „Holy Roman Empire Project“ (which led me to say that, no, I hadn’t heard of one of the most important political entities of pre-19th century Europe and may have influenced him in telling us not to bother with the mostly empty boring castle tour that he personally led – see, crazy!)  We skipped the tour but took a peek at the fortified five-foot-wide open well,  so deep that the sound of falling water came several seconds after the guide had stopped pouring water into the mouth of the well.  The guide’s best moments were explaining the  sanitation dangers of throwing household pets into a well to the group’s children, enticing them to climb up the stones and stand on chairs to peer into the deep well, a pied-piper-ish flare that resulted in a number of nervous-looking parents. 

    Another highlight was the old Nazi rally grounds, which you may remember from such Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic masterpiece Triumph of the Will (warning: said triumphant will is 100% NSDAP).  There seemed to me to be some understandable conflict about how best to memorialize a space a lot of people probably think would best be forgotton.  On the one hand, the rally grounds has been divided up into soccer fields, the processional Grand Road has been repurposed as part of a motor race track that cuts through much of the property, and the half-built Nazi congress hall is home to an orchestra and, on the weekend we were there, in use as a fairground like any other across the world.  In the late 1960s, the structures were partially demolished by the city before, in the 1970s, they were declared by that same city as some of the best enduring examples of Nazi architecture.  There is, to that end, a half-hearted attempt at security. A guard posted in a Winnebago down in the middle of what is now a soccer field keeps an eagle eye on the podium for any pro-Nazi activity.  I doubt he was equipped to defend the site against visitors engaging in suspiciously zealous arm-raising through any means more threatening than waving his beer angrily.   Now, it looks like the city is worried they maybe did too good a job of de-Nazifying – signs around the grounds contain a plea for funding to restore the podium.  I doubt any charitable foundation is gunning for the chance to sign that cheque. 

 
Photo from volksfest-nuernberg.de

Really? Wirklich?: asiatisch

asiatisch a Asian

   People in Stuttgart go crazy for a chain of pan-Asian (let’s say Chinese-y) take out counter called Hotalo.  Any given lunchtime, the lineup outside its outposts can reach up to sixty people, winding around the transit station or shopping centre.  Heaven forbid you should attempt to breach this line, say to get to one of the lunch counters with a more reasonable 4 or 5 person queue.  Luckily, many Germans have a 1 or 2 hour Mittagspause or lunch break built into their day, so if they want to spend 30 minutes in line for some chicken chowmein that’s been sitting under a heat lamp for several hours, they have all the time in the world do it in.  On a weekend it’s as popular as an ice cream café (and that’s saying a lot – dairy is like a religion here - more later.)

   I’m not sure what Hotalo’s draw is – it doesn’t even have that delectable, greasy, steamy, MSG-laden smell that  could lead a blind man to a food court.  On first contact, I had to muster as much non-threatening, anti-budging body language as possible as I made my way to the front of the line in order to peer through the glass  and figure out what kind of food it was.  The smell, for me, is half the mouth-watering experience.   Although I’m not sure that my familiarity with cheap sushi and late-night Chinatown fried rice make a strong case for me being a connoisseur of pan-Asian delights, I think I can safely say that there is a lot less exposure to and expectations from the whole Chines.e food experience  And considering that the Udo-Snack counter has to supplement its Japanese street food fare with Currywurst and hamburgers, I get the feeling that Stuttgarters are happy to limit their experience with Asian food  to Hotalo for the time being. 

   In fact, so loyal are they to Hotalo that they seem to have no interest in trying to recreate the magic at home.  The bottles pictured above, which you may recognize as soy sauce and sesame oil respectively,  two of the most important ingredients for imitating decent Chinese food,  cost me a total of 5,90 Euros in the international section of the discount superstore Kaufland.  Never mind that soy sauce  is available in about fifteen different brands, viscosities and sodium content at my local No Frills in Toronto, where it is shelved alongside the red wine vinegar and olive oil.   Never mind that, on the other hand, Kaufland gives as much floor space up to salty, fizzy, foreign and local types of bottled water as to produce.  Let’s think about the fact that I spent $9 CDN for half a cup of sesame oil and one cup of soy sauce.  I get more soy sauce free with takeout sushi.  Seriously, the sesame oil is the size of a minibar bottle, and even the airlines have come around to recognize that 100 mL is a miserly size. 

   Sadly, I’m going to have to ration my home-made Chinese food intake.  Luckily, my video store categorizes all of its Japanese anime rentals under the title “Asian Food”, so if I could just learn to like manga, I would have a plentiful substitute.  Or, I guess, there’s always Hotalo.