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.