Europameisterschaft: Playing (soccer) with Fire

For those of you who are out of earshot of Europe right now and can't hear all the honking cars, we are in the middle of the Euro Cup, known here in Germany as the Europameisterschaft or EM.  For Germans, there is no need to include in the title the details of exactly which "Meisterschaft", or championship, is up for grabs, because when it comes to sports, the answer could only be soccer.  Or, as some prefer to call it, football.  They, of course, mean soccer.

There are several precautions you have to take as a foreigner during Euro Cup fever.  The first one is to pay attention to the colours you are wearing, because all of a sudden everyone is paying particular attention to your fashion choices.  Black pants, red shirt and gold earrings means you are for Germany.  Green backpack, red shorts and white tee means you support Italy.  Red, white, and blue means you could support any one (or all) of the remaining European countries, from Croatia to the Netherlands. Depending on your outfit and the various wins and losses of the day, you will be the victim of honking cars or booing pedestrians at intersections and along sidewalks.

 (Whether it's Germans in particular or Europeans in general, I've discovered that national colours really mean something here.  I mailed a package to Pennsylvania via the increasingly undependable Deutsche Post the other day, and the post office clerk held up a long closing-time line for five minutes as he dug out a pin bearing the state flag of Pennsylvania from the back storage room to prove to me that the glorious flag of the Keystone State and the German postal service share the same colours.  Spooky.  I hope he called the writers for National Treasure III.)

Second rule of thumb: do not attempt to play any sports other than soccer within the designated two week period of Euro Cup competitions.  Carrying a basketball around the city last weekend raised many more eyebrows than almost anything else I could have paraded around with in Germany.  The only other thing I can think of would have landed me in jail.  Anyway, there were honks.  There were stares.  An old man toddling about in a newsboy cap and his Sunday best tried to smack the ball out of my hands as I was walking down the street.  I thought for a moment he might be riffing on this moment in the Germany vs. Netherlands game, made briefly legendary by the internet, where the German coach playfully hit a soccer ball out from under a distracted ball boy's arm.  I quickly came to my senses, however.  Meme would not be in this man's vocabulary.

This opportunity for protest via unpatriotic sport has not been lost on the more anti-social Germans.  I actually saw some of our local punks tossing around a football - yes, that is an American football - outside of my apartment building.  Somewhere in Stuttgart there is an American soldier who will have some serious explaining to do at this week's team practice.  In Europe, American-style footballs do not grow on trees.

Word Up: der Pony

I finally got around to getting my hair cut here in Germany.  This has been difficult to avoid, because I live above a hair salon and have been saying hello to whoever is unlucky enough to have to open the store every morning for the last twelve months or so.  However, I had good reason.  Because, although at home I am used to nodding along as trained professionals advise me that I should lose some length or I need an undercut, I am not yet able to speak hairdresser in German.

However, thankfully, German women's magazines, reinforced by the fact that the best new hot now haircut is a topic of unending interest for their readership, have taught me some of the basic vocabulary. When it comes to learning new languages, there is nothing better than repetition.  Most of it is pretty self-explanatory - inches are translated to centimetres, layers to Schichte, haircut to Haarschnitt.  But, bangs, or a fringe to those of you who dutifully celebrated the Diamond Jubilee last week, are called a Pony.  Of course, we already have a hair-related pony in English - the ponytail.  The Germans have it too, kind of: der Pferdeschwanz, or horse's tail.  This may seem like a harmless difference.  But, when my hairdresser is blabbing on about a schicker Pony and I think he is talking about keeping my hair long enough for a chic ponytail, both of us are going to end up unhappy, because while I am imagining a toller Pfersdeschwanz, he is breaking out the razor to cut some awesome bangs.  Of course, my unhappiness would probably last a lot longer than his.  He would have to endure a night without enough Trinkgeld to buy a (ridiculously expensive German) margarita, but I would be spending months obsessively checking mirrored surfaces, waiting for my hair to grow back out.

Clearly, we all agree that horses have something special going on when it comes to hair.  Whether it's a cute forelock or the long flowing tail, they have a good look. And, to be fair, "bangs" doesn't make much sense as a word to describe hair.  But there has to be a limit - the noble horse can only lend its name to one hairstyle or the other.  German and English will have to duke it out over this one.

image from lesleychou via flickr.com

Lessons learned in Provence

I recently took a week of holiday to enjoy Provence in early spring before the tourists were out and before the weather became seasonable.  We've spent our time pretty solidly in the Germanic-language zones of Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, so crossing the border into France was a treat.  Not to mention that, as Canadians, we spent a good deal of our schooldays memorizing French verb conjugations, and this is the place where, nominally, all that work should have paid off.

We took the new TGV line from Frankfurt to Marseille.  This is the line that boasts a bunch of brand-new TGV-dedicated stations built outside of city centres.  Although this means that you get a wonderful view of the changing French countryside and its mustard fields and quaint castles and rusted car lots, it also means that you get next to no sense of the cities you are nominally passing through (Dijon? Besançon?).  From the TGV station at Avignon, you have to take a shuttlebus to reach the downtown, making it a very airport-like experience.  However, you also get where you are going very, very quickly without leaving the ground, so I am willing to take a little inconvenience with my comfort.  (Having stood along a tiny local platform in Cassis as a TGV barrelled past, an experience that involved gale force winds, lots of horn-tooting, and being frightened to death, I think that reducing human-high-speed-train contact as much as possible is probably a good idea.)

The seats were very comfortable.  The company was a little weird.  Because this is a completely new route of travel from Germany to France, extra precautions were in effect.  Before we crossed the border into Strasbourg, an extremely friendly German police officer came by and handed out brochures in English, German, and French highlighting the dangers of pickpocketing in France.  Friendly - to a point.  When we insisted on taking the lone English brochure, he could not resist questioning us on our origin, place of residence, and our apparent disregard for the German language.  Six pages of photos basically boiled down to a warning to stay alert and stay safe.  Clearly they expected unsuspecting German pensioners to take the new line to France only to be fleeced of their life savings and Hugo Boss leather goods.  Notably, there was no brochure on the way back for the poor Marseillais headed to the hard streets of Frankfurt.

He probably should have handed out a brochure on surviving crowds of youth, as well, because as I see it that's the weirdest endemic French problem of the moment.  How do they do it?  One moment you are standing in a deserted street in a little French town with lavender window boxes and the next second you are in the middle of a crowd of loud French teenagers hanging onto each other - boy, girl, girl, boy - and laughing along to a story about somebody's sister or sister in law or something.  You don't see packs of teens like this in Germany, swarming hungrily, or if you do, nine times out of ten they're actually French schoolkids trucked into Germany for goodness-knows-what kind of cultural exchange.

Other than that, Provence was beautiful.  We saw flocks of bulls and flamingos in the marshy Camargue, biked to villages perchés on rocky cliffs in the Alpilles, and hiked along the fjord-like calanques outside of the coastal town of Cassis. We ate more than our fill of olives and olive products, cheese, local tomatoes, sweet and savoury pastries, and, uh, more olives.  We dipped a toe in Marseille.  And after months and months of typical German service, those famously obnoxious French waiters seemed refreshingly friendly.

Wirklich? Really?: Der Kuchenbehälter, a Cake Carrier

One thing I've learned at my work is that Germans are really into cake.  Besides the requisite 4PM "Kaffee und Kuchen" tradition about which guidebooks wax eloquent (which of course is a culturally distinct eating ritual that bears no resemblance to the English preference for 4 o'clock tea or North American celebration of anytime donut), a general interest in cake making and eating seems to take up a large part of the German female brain.  And along with this fascination with fondant, leaveners, and cake pops come the requisite accessories.  Behold, the cake carrier.

The cake carrier in Germany does not resemble the colourful retro contraption as seen above.  Nor is it's presence limited to the households of people who had a few margaritas at a garden party in 1982 and accidentally bought into a complete set of orange and green Tupperware that included a devilled egg holder.  The cake carrier of today is usually made of clear, unornamented plastic, either in the shape of a log or a circle.  The handle makes it easy to carry, although Germans must be pretty much obliged to be constantly eating cake in order to justify storing one of these things in a tiny German kitchen.

So, the question goes, which came first, the carrier or the cake?

Whatever the answer, cake is important to Germans, as is the ability to renew the cake supply.  Knowing how to bake is taken as a given at my workplace.  It is assumed that I can whip up all delicacies with vaguely Anglo-American origins, from (Philadelphia) cheese cake with graham crust to hot cross buns to (Starbucks) cake pops. For kids, cake appreciation comes complete with quizzes on the comparative qualities of yeast and sour-cream dough.  Don't think that Betty Crocker or time-saving devices have anything to do with this brand of domesticity.  One coworker was showing off a photo of the cake she is baking for her cousin's wedding - using a highly coveted German-language cookbook that she snapped up in an ebay bidding war for the bargain price of 130 Euros.

And well, okay, maybe it's expected that childcare professionals have a Martha Stewart thumb, but I can attest that even the ladies of high finance can spend a Sunday afternoon or two crafting pralines for their coworkers.  I just don't know if I can ever be thankful for breakroom donut holes ever again.

Word Up: Sim Sala Bim

For working magic tricks like pulling rabbits out of hats and European nations out of debt, Germans say "Sim Sala Bim" instead of "Abracadabra".  I'm not about to tread into this etymological rat's nest complete with Olde English references in order to figure out exactly where and why Northern Europeans tend to one and not the other, so let's just agree that Germans do it different.