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