Deutschland Archives
So we’re working on the next issue of the magazine, which is slated to contain a story on Salem, Mass., an article that was supposed to take a look at the town’s historical wackiness in the context of its current tourism business
(Because of the magazine’s semi-educational focus, we have a history story in each issue. Being a history fan, I think that’s a great idea, but don’t particularly believe the more didactic articles done in previous years fit with the magazine’s style. Instead, I’ve suggested that we move toward stories that look at an aspect of history with some type of modern angle, an idea they’ve seem to like.)
Anyway, for whatever reason, the freelancer we had writing the piece decided he was more interested in doing an article on neo-paganism in Salem — a fact we discovered only when he turned the story in Monday. Oh, and did I mention that the deadline for the entire issue is tomorrow?
Doesn’t sound like that big a deal, perhaps, except for one thing: Oskar’s main distribution point in the United States is through high school German classes — and we figure your typical high school teacher isn’t, for some reason, a big fan of stories about modern day witches. So we’re ending up changing the story, which isn’t that big a deal, but the article worries me for more personal reasons: I’m a bit afraid of messing around with witches.
We descend now into the misty reaches of history …
When I was in college, at a fairly conservative school, I served for two years as editor in chief of the school paper. We had this editorial writer, a woman who I must assume — for the sake of the English language, humanity and my belief in a just God — now has no contact whatsoever with writing. And I don’t just mean writing professionally. I mean this woman shouldn’t be allowed to make out shopping lists and must be required to have friends sign checks for her.
She ended up working for the paper because all students in the journalism program were required to sign up for some sort of practicum; she ended up writing editorials because, you know, there’s only so much room that I could devote to corrections during the time she “wrote” news stories. So we sent her to the editorial section, where we could routinely trash can whatever she excreted that week.
Until the day she got a bug in her bonnet about Halloween, a holiday she decried as evil because of all the nasty witchery associated with it. (I’m guessing some type of childhood trauma associated with being nicknamed Jack o’Lantern or an attempted drown·ing,in an apple-bobbing tub was really responsible for her feelings.) Unfortunately, the week she chose to write up this piece of crap was a week in which everybody else on staff came down with the flu, went out of town or otherwise decided to bugger off, so, with nothing else to fill space, and after massive rewrites, I decided her dreck was marginally better than a chunk of white space.
The paper was published Tuesday. I wander into the newspaper office Wednesday to find the staff clustered around the answering machine, upon which some off-campus caller had left a message in which she claimed to be a witch, berated us for the story and then began screaming. The scream portion lasted a good minute or so.
Now, I know all about the “An ye harm none” and the threefold law and all the other philosophical underpinnings, but it’s still a bit freaky to have somebody screaming on your answering machine, leaving the type of message I associate more with ex-girlfriends than complete strangers.
It didn’t particularly help matters when I checked my mail a few days later and discovered I’d been sent a curse. Really! An honest-to-goodness (eh … would that be the correct phrase?) curse, complete with melted wax, a brown smear that was either dried blood or the remnants of a Hershey’s bar and a badly rhyming stanza that was supposed to result in me getting a broken leg. The worst part was that it wasn’t like I’d done anything. Dang, if they wanted to curse somebody, I would have cheerfully provided contact info for the writer: I’d certainly cursed her enough.
Nothing ended up happening to me — and while I’m not sure what the statue of limitations is on curses, I figure if I was going to break my leg, it would have happened by now — but I’m still not completely comfortable with the idea of pissing off more of the neo-pagan set.
It’s not, now that I think about it, that I’m afraid of another curse; I’m actually worried more about getting strange phone calls. I have enough trouble dealing with normal people calling me up. If some screaming German Wiccan gets my number, I might totally lose it.
After a week or two of sunshine, the weather in Hamburg has turned nasty again (surprise, surprise), allowing me once again play my favorite game. The game doesn’t actually require the sky to open up and dump a load of crap on my head — it just makes it more fun.
Here’s how to play: Find a street with plenty of people on it. Make a note of the street name and then — preferably standing within sight of the street sign — ask people how to find that very street. To make the game more fair, actually write the street name down; that way you know it’s not your own excretable accent that’s making things difficult. Then, keep track of the number of people you have to ask before somebody tells you where you are. The highest number wins — or loses, or something …
OK, I’ve never actually done that. Several times, though, I have been looking for a street — say, Bundes Straße — without realizing that I was already on it. When I ask people how to find the place, nobody knows.
Now, it’s not like I look down upon these poor people for not knowing where the heck they are. I mean, I certainly have no clue, so why should they be expected to? And I’ve had my fair share of people asking me for directions, which is always amusing: some advice for people seeking directions: When you’re trying to find your way somewhere, and the person you’ve asked for help a) doesn’t speak the local language that well and b) has to pull out a map simply to find out where he is, never mind where your destination is, you probably want to flee in horror. Since people have persisted in having me help them find their destination, though, there are probably some poor tourists who are either still wandering the city or, more likely, are now lost in Poland or Denmark.
Even when I am given lines of collimation, things invariable end badly. Part of that is my own lack of directional sense; there have been days when I wake up especially groggy, get up on the wrong side of the bed and end up trying to shower in my closet. Combine that with the fact that exiting subways leaves me totally disorientated — I’ve managed to get turned around upon walking out of New York City subways, and the city’s laid out in a freakin’ grid — and it’s amazing that I can get myself home in the evenings.
Here, tossing in the language thing makes the situation even more fun. My comprehension of German is actually good enough that I can understand and follow basic directions provided in that language. But either I look or sound American enough that most Germans resort to trying to help me in English. I’m convinced that one of the reasons I get lost even after getting directions is that Germans end up mistranslating themselves and tell me right when they really mean left. All I know is that I feel a lot more comfortable, bizarrely, when my guides start spouting rechts oder links; at least then I know that they know what they’re trying to say.
On the other hand (ha! a pun) (kinda), it’s possible that they can’t tell their right from their left. I know people who still have to do that “L” thing — holding up their thumb and forefinger — before saying the Pledge of Allegiance. When I was driving around Ireland last year, I ended up doing that myself every time I pulled into traffic, which did garner me some strange looks from other motorists. It would fit in with the major themes of my life that I somehow keep finding dyslexic people to ask for directions.
Or, of course, there’s the chance that people are just screwing with me. My grandfather used to tell the story of people in New York who would ask somebody for directions and then, just to make sure, go and ask somebody else. This was in the days before New Yorkers became nice and, you know, if you have to ask for directions, you’re just setting yourself up to have people play head games with you.
Even if that’s not true, and it’s entirely my own fault when I get lost, blaming someone else is more fun. If nothing else, cursing my erstwhile pathfinders gives me something to do while trudging through the streets.
Today was interesting. Foregoing my usual editorial duties (after spending yesterday translating a 1,500-word story from German to English, a process about which the less said the better), I actually got to play reporter again, doing interviews for the next issue of my magazine (Which I will be leaving within a very short period of time. Know of any jobs?)
The next Oskars title story is on youth cliques or groups, looking at the various sub-cutures that young people assign themselves to. For the section on bohemian/hippy/artsy-type folk, I was forced today to head down to the hip part of town, sit in the sunshine, drink coffee and chat with people who sport hair of colors not seen in nature. Oh, the pain I undergo for my profession …
So, here’s what I learned today:
All hippies have dogs.
- I think this is true in America as well, but it’s way more evident here, since more Germans have dogs and they bring those dogs frickin’ everywhere. And I do mean everywhere: when I got home yesterday, I found a dog in my bathroom using the toilet. OK, maybe not that level of ubiquity, but close. Hunde ride the subway, wander through shops and traipse in and out of restaurants — many of which stock water dishes for the beasts. There’s few things creepier than having a strange mutt beseech you for handouts when you’re trying to eat. I usually end up giving them a few sips of scotch, just to see what happens.
Back to the hippies — every collection of wacky haired, funky clothed, ganja-smoke-wreathed youths I’ve seen in this country has at least one dog hanging out with them. Where do they get them? How do they feed them? The only thing I can figure, especially after looking at the amount of taxes taken from my last paycheck, is that you get issued a dog when you go on welfare, and the government picks up the feed bill. I tell you, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Red is the new black.
- I think … although I’m not actually sure what that means. I think either brown or blue was the new black last year (the year before? I dunno; it’s not like I’m really trying to keep up on this), which I’d think would mean that red is now the new blue — but somehow that makes even less sense. The only reason I even know the phrase “the new black” is ‘cause I keep on waiting to read that white is the new black, a statement that would no doubt precede somebody declaring that down is the new up — and when that happens, I can go around quoting Douglas Adams and George Orwell, impressing … errr, ok, impressing nobody, really — but it’ll make me happy. And that’s what matters here.
While sitting around watching the hipsters parade by, I saw more red — red socks, red shoes, red jackets, red bags, red pants and shirts — then I’ve ever observed in such a small area at one time. I love when everybody tries to be different by dressing the same.
That style with the skimpy t-shirt and bell-bottoms …
- Works well on some women. Doesn’t on others. My point here: You should figure out which you are before leaving the house. This is a public service announcement. Thank you for your attention.
Uhhh … I’m sure I learned other things today (oh, yeah, I found out that I was using the German word for pencil when I meant pen, a discovery that gave me quite a red face, so at least I fit in with all the other red-wearers), but those are the highlights. So, in closing — and totally non sequitur-ously, Happy Cheeseweasel Day! (Oh, and the guestbook is back up.)
Happy Easter!
Yeah, yeah, I know that Easter was actually a few days ago — but being away from the web on Friday and Monday meant I couldn’t convey my holiday wishes to you in a timely fashion.
And why no web? Because I was off! I was kicking back, enjoying life, sticking it to the man … Err, yeah, something like that.
See, Easter’s a big deal in Germany, with the entire country shutting down for Good Friday and Easter Monday. Coming from the land of separation of church and state, this came as somewhat of a surprise to me; heck, what with the various pressure groups out there, if America started putting religious holidays (other than Christmas) on the calendar, we’d never work — we could have some time off for Passover, followed by a break for Easter, then take a few sick days to recover from welcoming in the new year on NoRuz before diving back in to pagan party mode for the Equinox.
And that’s just spring! A few years ago I made up a list of winter holidays, stopping around the two dozen mark just ‘cause I was bored (and because I didn’t have a website yet, and therefore had no way of showing off my accomplishment. You know, everything I do, I do for all of you out there …).
Of course, getting days off for the holiday doesn’t mean Germans actually celebrate Easter, any more than a Labor Day picnic is an opportunity to … eh, remember whatever it is Labor Day is supposed to commemorate. (Oh, sure, I bet your celebrations include speeches dedicated to the plight of the proletariat and vigorous debate on the pros and cons of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. I’ve always tended to attend the “eat grilled chicken until you throw up”-type of soirees.)
The group that seemed to get the most into the holiday here in German was the West cigarette company, which released a line of collector cigarette packs in a range of pastel colors, each adorned with a Playmate-esque bunny. Yep, that’s what Easter’s all about: soft-core porn and smoking.
If the advertising industry here is anything like it is back home, some other cigarette company is going to try topping that next year, maybe with an ad showing Jesus lounging around the tomb puffing on a coffin nail … “Ah, there’s nothing like a cigarette after resurrection.”
Yes, I am now going to hell.
The other popular way to celebrate the day are the bonfires, an interesting re-grafting of pagan rituals onto Easter, a holiday which began when the church melded Christian traditions with what was a pagan celebration. Of course, most of the people lounging on the beach watching the sparks dance in the evening air seemed like they were going more for the drunken frat party vibe rather than in any type of religious expression, but still, it was kinda cool to see.
So how did you celebrate whatever holiday you celebrate?
I don’t smile.
Well, wait, that’s not true. I do smile. But since I end up looking like a slightly inebriated satyr when doing so, I tend not to break out the big grin just ‘cause a camera’s turned my way.
It’s not an anti-picture thing; I’m not one of those people who make a big deal about being photographed. Doing so has always struck me as a kind of reverse-modesty: if you really don’t want people paying attention to you, just sit down and shut up. Let the shutterbugs take their dang photos and go away; it’s not like the camera is going to steal your soul or anything.
Unless, of course, you’re one of those people who do think that cameras will steal your soul. In that case, feel free to make a stink about it.
On that issue, I’m curious about how the soul-stealing thing works with digital cameras. I figure photocopying a normal picture doesn’t duplicate the soul, but as the music and movie people are fond of reminding us in their DMCA-loving way, digital technology lets us make perfect duplicates. Does that mean that copying a digital pictures gives you additional copies of a person’s soul? And if I play around with the image in Photoshop, am I, say, giving your soul a nifty little watercolor effect? And if I save the picture at a lower file resolution, am I left with a slightly degraded soul?
I seem to have wandered away from my original point (such as it was).
The in-house newsletter of Gruner + Jahr is doing an article on Oskar’s, the magazine your diligent scribe is toiling away on (for the next few weeks. Then I’m looking for a job. Know of any?) They sent a photographer to take a picture of the staff, and I swear, if the guy had told me to smile one more time, I was going to see exactly how far a telephoto lens could be inserted into the human body.
It didn’t seem to help matters when, the fifth time he implored us all to grin, I responded that I was smiling. He told me to smile more.
Why, exactly, do we want to see smirking mugs in every photo we come across? Sure, I enjoy working here, but it’s not like I walk around the place with the displayed teeth of a feces-consumer. (And where the heck did that phrase come from? Of all the people you’d think wouldn’t be grinning …) Couldn’t they just take a candid shot? or even a posed shot with whatever expressions we normally wear? If I felt like smiling, you know, I’d frickin’ already be doing so.
So you’re on warning. If, for whatever bizarre reason, you happen to be taking my picture anytime soon, just take the thing and go away, OK? Because from now on, photographers will get to chose between a) whatever expression is already on my face and b) whatever my favorite obscene gesture is that day.
Or maybe I’ll just start telling people that I think cameras actually are soul-stealing devices and I refuse to let them take what little bit of a soul I have left. With just a modicum of thought, I bet I could come up with a really cool rant on the topic.
‘Cause having people think you’re a raving loon is a great way to get ahead in life.
So did you vote for your worker council representative today? If so, can you tell me who to pick? ‘Cause I have no freakin’ clue.
Oh, that’s right — you don’t have worker councils back there in the States. I know this because I was harangued about this fact for 10 minutes by one of the candidates for the position here. (OK, I know that everybody who reads this thing doesn’t live in America. Just go with me here.)
German companies are required by law (I’m sure there’s some information about this on the web, but, really, do you care?) to have councils of workers — hence the name “workers council” — who serve as a sort of union representative, mediating between the worker bees and the queens. The candidates for positions on the council have been parading in and out of my office for the past few days, handing me flyers and asking for my vote.
Now, I’m no expert on politics or anything, but I figure you’re doing a pretty poor job of campaigning when you don’t realize at any point during your get-out-the-vote spiel that you’re delivering it to someone who doesn’t really speak your language.
My understanding of German is actually pretty good, enabling me to figure out what the candidates are saying and respond (“ja,” say I, while trying to project some sort of “I am not the voter you seek”-type vibe) in an more-or-less appropriate fashion. But I have some sort of mental buffer space: After about three minutes of listening to German, the buffer overloads and I end up smiling and nodding randomly.
I’ve only had one candidate who’s actually noticed this, forcing me to fess up to the fact that a) I’m American; and b) as a short-term employee I can’t vote. The others simply tromped in, shoved badly-designed pamphlets at me, nattered for a bit and left. I’m not actually complaining about that, mind you: The one guy who did strike up a longer conversation felt that a helpful campaigning tactic would be to explain why employers in the United States are all evil and must be destroyed. Now, I’ve have individual bosses who I’d cheerfully coat with honey and stake over a fire ant nest, but everybody? That just seems to be taking it too far.
I wonder when the next election is and if they have any campaign finance guidelines. If I’m around, I think I’ll run for a position; all I need to do is accumulate a batch of soft money, run some cool television spots and dazzle the workers with proper campaign rhetoric — I’d end up running the place.
Bwahahaha!
So what do you want to do tonight, Tim?
The same thing we do every night: Try and take over the German publishing industry!
It does have a ring to it, nein?
My leg looks like a chunk of raw meat that a particularly sadistic chef with a loathing of animal products — a vegan Emeril with a hangover, if you will — took a tenderizer too.
But, dang, was it fun getting it in that shape.
A few years ago, I started hanging around with some lunatics who feel the epitome of a good time can be experienced by wearing several pounds of metal while holding a road sign in one hand and a broomstick in the other and having some other lunatic club you around. Oddly enough, I think they’re right: It didn’t take long for me to become a full-fledged SCA member, complete with sword, shield and funky lookin’ clothing.
When I moved to the East Kingdom from Trimaris … eh, to New York from Florida, I was able to attend a few fighter practices, but, for the most part, I haven’t gotten a chance to have somebody smack me around for almost two years. (Well, there is that one place down on the Reeperban — but the cover charge is kinda steep …) So when I moved to Hamburg and discovered a group here, I was quick to jump aboard. This weekend, several of us headed to Heidelberg, where I got to experience my first SCA-Europe event.
Getting ready for the weekend had its own interesting moments. I hadn’t brought any of my armor with me, mainly because I couldn’t quite picture the scene at the airport: “Why, yes, Mr. Security Agent, that is a rather large mace — but, look, it still fits nicely into my carry-on bag!” While I don’t mind being beaten about the head and shoulders with large sticks, I prefer to be wearing a helmet and standing on a field while it happens, not curled up in a fetal position in an airport security office.
Instead, I somehow talked my sister into lugging my helmet across several time zones when she came to visit, badgered other lunatics in Hamburg into lending me some of their stuff and ended up cadging even more equipment from none other than His Royal Highness, the king of Drachenwald. (Hey, I thought it was cool — nobody’s saying you have to be impressed.)
That left one piece of equipment that, well, you really can’t borrow: a cup. Between years of karate training and my time in the SCA, I’ve grown quite aware of the importance of sticking a piece of hard plastic down your pants when you’re in the presence of people bent on whacking you with something. In fact, just for safety’s sake, I sometimes wear a cup just during normal times. It’s amazing how much more freely one can shoot off one’s mouth when so equipped.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought this vital piece of gear along with me, so I was forced to comb through the wilds of German commerce in search of one. (Like I hadn’t had my fill of that …) Again unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to look up the German word for “groin protection.”
Me: Ehh, sprechen Sie Englisch?
Clerk: A little
Me: Do you have athletic protectors?
Clerk: Like for rollerblading?
Me: No, I mean for the lower part of your body. (I wave my hands around below my waist.)
Clerk: Ah, yes, knee protection.
Me: No, no — I mean a cup. (I make a cup with my hands.)
Clerk: Oh, you mean for elbows.
Me: No, I mean this: (grabs crotch in what basically amounts to a universal sign of not-good thoughts)
Clerk: Unverschämt ausländisch Dumbkopf! (punches me in stomach and stalks off.)
After three or four rounds of that, I ended up finding a cup. It was good timing, because the punches were landing lower each time.
Although I was happy to have it, the cup didn’t see much action this weekend, since most of my opponents chose to confine their blows to one particular section of my left leg — hence the hamburger effect. Nevertheless, I did win three bouts, fighting for the honor of my lady in a pretty good fashion. It was worth the occasional bruise.
And, heck, I should stop limping sometime before the next event. Maybe next time, though, I’ll ask the other fighters to aim for the groin, since I have protection there. Yeah, that’s a good idea …
Somebody has to do something about the weather here. After going through my full share of German bureaucracy, I’m probably not the best person, but somebody should take on the task.
I wander out to the street yesterday to be greeted by a beautiful spring morning. The birds were chirping, the … uh … fish were … eh … singing (?), the other animals were doing whatever the other animals do when its springtime. (I’m living in a city, dang it — and the animals here are different from back home. I don’t have the time to find out what they’re up to. (Oh, and though I’ve found out this might not be true, I’ve been told that squirrels don’t live in Germany. I haven’t been able to find out if they disappeared in some strange varient of the Pied Piper tale, or if there’s a Germany equivalent of St. Patrick who had it in for bushy tailed rodents.))
Today we’re back to weather-courtesy-of-Noah, a steady, drizzly, downpourish-type rain that simply will not let up. I’m beginning to get worried, since I don’t even know what the German word for “ark” is.
It’s not really the water that bother me, though. Hamburg’s a port city (founding member of the Hanseatic League, you know) (you did not), so I came here expecting some wetness. The inability of the German weather gods to make up their minds, though, that’s irritating. This place has the most changeable weather I’ve ever seen.
I got my first glimpse of that when I got off the plane here in December. While walking to the hostel I was staying at for the first few days, I trudged through rain, snow, sleet and hail, as well as various permutations of precipitation. Once I got to the place, I started handing out letters to random people, figuring I must be a contestant on some sort of U.S. Postal Service-themed reality show.
Since then, I’ve lived through hail storms pounding out of clear blue sky, temperatures that rise and drop like bungee-cord-afficionados and rain showers that appear and disappear at will.
The only good think about the local weather patterns is they’ve clued me in to a new way of measuring the cold: using my glasses. My eyeglasses make a strange clicking or cracking noise when they get cold, with the time between going outside and hearing the noise enabling me to figure out exactly what the temperature is. Sure, I could look at a thermometer, but they’re all in Centigrade: Graphing elapsed-glass-clicking time is much easier than trying to convert to Fahrenheit.
Of course, cracking sounds coming from eyeglasses isn’t the most soothing sound one can hear. No doubt the next snow storm that descends upon me will result in a much more hideous crackling sound, followed by my glasses making a spectacle of themselves as they split into component parts.
When I end up not only wandering around in rotten weather but also blind, than I’ll really have something to complain about.
The perfect pair of red shoes are out there. Or at least they by Sun-Pin better be …
(That’s a little former-religion-editor pun for you. I’d explain it, but I think it’d be more fun for you to go to Google or something.)
My sister, Susan, is in Germany for a week, the reason I’ve neglected updating in favor of having relatives make snarky comments on my behalf. The first few days of the week were spent in Berlin before we returned to Hamburg and its environs, allowing us to see a decent amount of the country.
The overriding concern throughout the trip, though: finding the perfect pair of red shoes.
Our conversation during the U-Bahn ride back to my apartment from the airport should have been my first clue. We were discussing what type of things she hoped to do on her first trip to Europe, and, as well as listing a bunch of historical stuff, Sue mentioned that she had heard about the joys of shopping here and figured to hit a few stores. Sounds fun, said I, never dreaming of what to expect.
Let me say this: I never knew there were so many different shoes in the world.
Apparently the cool European style shoes haven’t made it to the United States yet, so the trip is an excuse to seek shodding that can only be found here. Working on a budget, though, is making the search more difficult than my preferred method of shopping: i.e., walk into store, gaze in a somewhat befuddled fashion at the stuff being offered, point and say, “ehhh, I’ll take that one?” And the fact that I don’t really know where the cool European stores actually are has probably added some time to the process.
On the other hand, the fact that Susan is actually looking for a particular style of footwear somehow makes the experience much more bearable. While I’m not anti-shopping, it mislikes me to wander from store to store in search of some ineffable something, roaming the harshly lit aisle in hope that a piece of merchandise lurches out at you. (OK, actually, that’d be pretty cool. I’d be much more into shopping if, even just occasionally, the products attacked shoppers. Somebody should look into implementing that.) Since we’re in pursuit of a red (but not too red), shiny (but not excessively shiny) sneakers (but not actually sneakers — just more casual than shoe shoes), it’s easy enough to look around a store, say “piffle” if they have nothing that fits the description, and move on.
Plus, we did get to go to some pretty funky shops in Berlin, which I actually enjoyed, and Susan was good about wandering around by herself on a day I had to work, so I haven’t have to undergo the entire process.
So far, though, despite our best efforts, the shoes have failed to materialize and I’m beginning to get depressed. I’m feeling like some type of Stone Age hunter who led his tribe to the hot new mastadoon hunting grounds only to find that the beasts are all in hiding (hey, you try coming up with some type of mental picture that makes you feel like you’re doing something manly and important while holding your sister’s purse and idly examining a pair of high heels. It’s not easy.)
But the shoes are out there. After days of wandering through stores, I’m beginning to hear them calling to me — perhaps from the next aisle, perhaps from a store a few blocks away. But they are somewhere. And they will be found.
I hope.
Update: This entry was actually written during the week, while the epic search was still on-going. I’m happy to report that the shoes were eventually found, during an exhaustive wandering of the streets of Hamburg. The shoes in question are indeed rather nifty-looking — but if I ever have to go searching for them again, I will go stark raving mad. You’ve been warned.
Hi. This is Brian Gibbons, Timothy’s brother. Tim’s out of town and off the net today, so he won’t be updating. Figuring you’d be bereft upon logging in and finding nothing new, though, he asked me to post this note so you’d know what’s going on.
Since a) I’m not in Germany and therefore have no interesting tales of them there wacky foreigners and b) I’m a lawyer and can’t be expected to be funny, I’m excused from writing anything. Instead, I’m posting the results of some quizzes (all found on Blogatelle) that Tim took recently, so that we can all mock him when he gets back.
Thanks for stopping by.
What drug would you be? Cocaine [Ed note: It seems that this quiz has already been removed, in the day or so since Tim visited it. A moment of silence for the ephemeralness of web sites.]
Which firearm are you? H&K PSG-1
Which tarot card are you? Strength
What D&D Character are you? Chaotic Good Half-Elf Thief Bard
[And adding in one of my own (with little care whether anyone other than myself finds this amusing; hey, it’s not my web site): What Wheel of Time character are you? Anyone making comment on the fact that the test equated me with the Dark One (…”EVIL with a capital E” …) will be receiving educational visits from my minions…]
Mmmmm … corn ….
I’ve been eating more vegetables recently, mainly as a result of not cooking for myself. Restaurant meals come with salad, cafeteria food almost always includes some sort of veggie, and even German frozen pizzas are topped with corn.
No, don’t leave yet — this has a point.
The strange thing is that I find myself liking them. I’ve never been a particularly picky eater, but my vegetable cravings were pretty much sated with potatoes. Usually in the form of french fries. Or mashed. Mmmm, mashed potatoes … Anyway, I was the guy in college who tried to convince people that Combos could count as vegetables ‘cause they had paprika in ‘em. Hey, it’s green — that should give it points for something.
Just as I got to the point that I look forward to feeding on fodder — a plate of peas Monday, carrots Tuesday, corn yesterday — it’s like I’m channelling the Jolly Green Giant or something — the cafeteria staff decides to play with me, proffering red cabbage and brussel sprouts today. Sure, I like vegetables, but cabbage and sprouts are like the evil minions of the vegetable world: red cabbage looks like the stuff left over when you boil nuclear waste (kids, don’t try that at home) and brussel sprouts are evil little munchkin cabbage-wannabes. Or possibly peas hiding behind a Buffy-style vampire mask.
Either way, they’re bad.
Uhh, now that l look back, I see that I lied: I don’t have a point. I swear I started out with one. Maybe vegetables cause memory loss. Whatever.
Let me just leave you with this: Corn … mmmmm …
Brussel sprouts …. not so much.
I’m not really trying to make this wacky German week — though I am curious to see how many people type the phrase “wacky German” into Google — but once again I’ve been flummoxed by situations that just shouldn’t be that difficult.
I’ve been working at Gruner + Jahr, a German publishing company, for more than two months now. Each morning as I come in, guards at the door check my (as well as everybody else’s) ID. Now, not to perpetuate stereotypes, but the guards are, eh, stereotypical Germans: Same people, every day, I say hi every morning — and when I forgot my ID last week, I still had to call somebody from upstairs to come and fetch me. I figured they were just really bad with faces, but found out that, nope, it’s just the rules; sure, they’ve seen me come in before, but maybe somebody was just impersonating me this time. You can never be too sure …
Today’s bizarreness wasn’t my fault, though. See, I don’t have a standard ID card, which would have my picture and stuff on it: Since I’m just a contract employee, only here for a few months, I have a card that gets me into the cafeteria (another high security area) and, supposedly, the front door. Whatever its actual purpose, the card I have has gotten me entrance for something like 50 consecutive days.
Today, though, the woman at the door decided to hassle me about it. (I’ve been sitting here for something like 10 minutes wondering if it would be in bad taste to use the phrase “ID Nazi.” I figure it would be, so I’ll go with “woman at the door” instead.) So, once again, I’m forced into a pidgin German/English conversation in which I really have little idea about what’s going on. In the end, they let me in, but told me to get a note from my boss.
You know, I wonder if I have any old high school hall passes stashed somewhere …
Sie haben die falsche Zahl. Die Hauptzahl ist Drei Zeiben Null Drei Null.
That’s my German phrase for the week.
For the past few days, I’ve been receiving calls at work from people who are looking for someone else. While my German is good enough to understand them and tell them to call the main number, it’s not really up to snuff in terms of having full-fledged telephone conversations, hence the memorized stock phrase. (And why, by the by, is talking in another language on the telephone so much harder than doing it in person? People who speak German much better than I do have confirmed this. It’s not like I’m lip reading or anything usually.)
Telling them to call the switchboard usually works, though, and if it doesn’t — if, say, my pronounciation is off (not that that ever happens …) — I’ll ask if they speak English and try to carry on from there.
Today’s call, though … well, today’s was weird. The conversation started off the way it usually does: The caller says she looking for somebody else; I told her to call the main number. She repeated her request for the other person; I asked if she spoke English. She said no; I repeated my “call someone else” response in German.
This little routine, for some reason, prompted her to begin speaking very fast, very loud German at me, saying, to the best of my understanding, that it was very important that she speak to the woman she was looking for. My repeated mutterings of “ja, ja — nein, nein” did nothing to stem the tide. When she wore down, I tried again to tell her to call the main number, a task I was somewhat stymied at by the fact that I couldn’t recall if the noun “call” (Aufruf) is the same as the verb “call,” but decided to use it anyway.
I figure I ended up sounding like an illiterate dog. “Aufruf! Aufruf!”
We went back and forth a bit, a conversation that mainly consisted of me saying something in German, her going “uhhh…” and me trying again. After a few minutes — like four! or five! whole minutes! — of multilingual mutterings mixed with periods of silence, the woman suddenly said in English “I think I have the wrong number” and hung up.
Now I know why Germans serve beer in the cafeteria …
So the wacky landlord is back in town, creating all sorts of bizzare hassles. You know, it seemed so easy when I moved here: go to housing agency, find place, hand over money, wait a few months and then I’m gone. What I didn’t realize is that the guy I ended up renting from is functionally unemployed or something — when I moved in, he told me he was going to Berlin for a job, which I assumed would last the four-to-five months I was renting the place. Turns out the job lasted two weeks or so, and I guess he just wants help with the rent for the rest of the time.
I moved in around the middle of January, and he left a few days later, only to show up again at the beginning of February. He stayed for a week, living on a couch of a friend in the same apartment building, although he came to his own place to shower, cook and clean clothes — and in the process, ended up breaking the washing machine. (And I’m not, at this point, even going to get into the whole mess that developed from that; suffice it to say that I’m still ticked off about it lo these many weeks later.)
This past Friday, I’m opening the door to leave the place when the doorbell rings, giving me just enough time to begin formulating curses in my head before I see him. For this sojourn in the Hanseatic Harbour, I find out over the weekend, he’s actually moving back into the apartment; he didn’t want to “wear out his welcome” on his friend’s couch. Granted, he’s cutting my rent in half for the week he’ll be here, but, see, if I wanted a friggen’ roommate, I woulda ordered one. And it’s not even a roommate situation, actually: That I could probably handle. It’s more like being a houseguest of somebody I don’t really know, in a place that, despite the fact I’m paying half the rent, is his.
The guy’s leaving next Saturday, he says, but plans on coming back for a week at the end of the month, as well as intermittently during April. He’s gracious enough to let me break the lease at the end of March, if I so desire, meaning I’d have to find another place for about six weeks. So now I have to decide if the irritation of him eating my food and yapping at me every time I sit down to read is high enough for me to actually try moving.
Or I could just kill him in his sleep. There’s always options
My job here at Oskars has hit the point in the pre-publication cycle that I always dread the most. We’re just about done with the issue we’ve been slaving over for the past few weeks and have all the big stuff out of the way.
Now, we’re doing the little — albeit important — stuff: making sure the quotation marks are the correct type (the system has four varients we can chose from), triple-checking names and phone numbers, making sure lines haven’t disappeared from the end of stories, that sort of thing.
Heading up the English side of a German publication has made this a little more interesting than normal; since everybody else on staff in German, I often end up having to make some sort of call on things like punctuation and wording. Since they’re professional journalists as well, though, I have to have good reasons for whatever I come up with — hence surfing the web for half an hour today to prove that the proper abbreviation for microphone is “mic,” not “mike.”
Oh, yeah, it’s a hard life. But you don’t want to hear about the fight I had as to whether full sentences after colons should begin with a capital letter. That got ugly.
OK, so, not so funny today. But, hey, all the commas are in the right place — and if they aren’t, I really don’t want to hear about it.
The Olympics are over, right? No, seriously — I don’t watch that much television here and when I do, it’s not like I can tell when the Games o’ Hercules - Winter Edition are being played. On German television, there’s alway a sports show featuring people skiing. Downhill skiing. Uphill skiing. Cross-country skiing. How to grocery shop wearing skis. Anything.
And that was before the Olympics. I was afraid to turn the TV on once the Games started.
Of course I did, eventually, to find things were even more strange than I thought: I ended up watching the Bronze Medal Women’s Curling match between the Canadian and American teams — and if anybody can give me one shred of a reason as to why German television showed the entirety of the fight for third place between two North American teams in a sport that basically no one understands, I’d greatly appreciate it.
That being said, showing the match might not be as strange as the fact that I watched the thing; it was like I figured, hey, the sport’s incomprehensible anyway, so why not see what it’s like when you can’t understand the announcers either? Very surreal — I would have gone out and got some acid just to take it to the next level of bizareness, ‘cept it was 10:30 on a Thursday night. And I’m not sure where I’d actually get acid. And, of course, I didn’t want to miss the stunning conclusion, in which a frozen wasteland of a country that does nothing other than play wacky winter sports beat the home team.
Uhh, yeah, somebody …
The game itself was actually somewhat compelling, despite the fact that I had no clue as to what was going on — and it wasn’t anywhere near compelling enough for me to, say, go and find the rules. (OK, that’s not true. They’re here. But I’m not going to read them.) I was particularly amused by the “chatter” during the game: Every time a stone was tossed, everybody would start screaming “hurry, hurry!” — and since nobody was allowed to touch the stone (I guess), the only thing that was being encouraged was the stone itself. It was like a whole new level of the screaming-at-the-ball-in-bowling strategy.
I was also amused at the curler’s footware. I’d always assumed they wore skates or something, but nope: the athletes seemed to glide along on one “ice shoe” while pushing off with the other foot, just like kids do when they encounter a patch of ice on the sidewalk. I just kept on waiting for someone to fall.
So I don’t think my exposure to the Sport of Kings (isn’t that what they call curling?) has converted me to a fan. But you know, it’d be really cool to have one of those stones. I could paint a face on it and call it Wilson or Martha or something. It’d be like a pet.
I did a little dance of joy (“Numfar, do the Dance Of Joy!”) upon leaving the barbershop today: I got my hair cut by somebody who spoke English! OK, that might not seem like exclamation point territory to you, but it’s been something like 18 months since I’ve really been able to communicate with the person waving sharp pointy items around my head.
It started when I was living in New York. What’s the point in living in the greatest city on earth, in a burg filled to the brim with immigrants, I figured, if you end up eating at McDonald, shopping at the Gap and getting your hair cut at Joe’s House o’ Hair? So I was predisposed to hunt up something more exotic. Plus, I’m cheap. The combination led me to try out a couple of Russian barbers, vist a Japanese hair stylist and pop in on a couple of peluqueros. Didn’t pay much — plus I had the fun of trying to get across what I wanted done with my hair through sign language. Getting a haircut in Berlin — where the barbers are, I believe, not allowed to speak English — was especially enjoyable, since I know enough German to be dangerous. I’d think I was asking for a bit off the top and some shaping around the ears, but actually be telling the guy, “Ich möchte wie eine kranke Ratte aussehen.”
It doesn’t help that, even in my mother tongue, I really have no idea how to answer the questions barbers ask me.
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon for me to stumble out of a hair-cutting session looking remarkably like a lopsided cueball.
But I never complain. After all, it’s not like they can go back and fix it, right? “Oh, let’s just sweep up some of this hair on the floor. We have some superglue in the back.” And I can’t say much when the scalping is going on, considering that, not only am I blind without my glasses, but I’m loath to tick off the guy with the shears. It’s too easy for barbers to get revenge on persnickety customers.
Today, though, to my shock and amazement, I got a lovely young lass who’d been an exchange student in America for a year, spoke English better than I do and seemed quite able to deal with nothing more than “I’d like it shorter, but not too much shorter.”
Thus, the dance of joy.
I was attacked by a fish today.
Well, not quite — but it was a close call. Not to make this another lunch rant, but I go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat, and almost run into a guy carrying a fish on his plate. Notice the article: He didn’t have a plate of fish. He had a fish. On a plate. Head, tail, fins, mouth and all. Which, as the guy stops short, leaps at me. I swear the thing had hatred in its eyes, and it possibly cursed me under its breath. (I don’t speak fish, only squirrel.)
When I got to the actual food line, trembling slightly from the attack, I was faced with a pot full of buttery water in which a dozen or so aquatic denizens floated. It was like coming back from a long vacation and remembering I hadn’t got anybody to tend the aquarium.
I know Hamburg’s a port and everything, but if I want to see a a shoal of fish looking like they were trying to remember what Mom said about hooks, I’ll go down to the fish market or something. I don’t need it in the cafeteria.
Everything in the cafeteria today scared me.
I eat lunch in the Gruner+Jahr mega-canteen most days, experiencing a mix of traditional German meals and traditional cafeteria slop. Always on the lookout for something new, I’ve chowed my way through a bewildering variety of dishes: a large, white sausage patty topped with a fried egg, a rainbow of cabbage types (white: pretty good; green: not bad; iridescent red: rather scary), scads of uniquely prepared potatoes, meats that came from animals I couldn’t — and didn’t particuarly want to — identify.
Today there was nothing I could identify. On the menu: brown goop covered with white goop, which turned out to be uncased blood sausage and semi-mashed potatoes; some type of noodles covered with vanilla sauce (I actually checked my translation on this one to confirm that, yep, it’s vanilla sauce). a “peasant’s breakfast,” which turned out to be a egg-ham-and-potato hash that came complete with a pickle (!?); and what I thought were onion rings but turned out to be squid rings.
Squid rings. If you’re at work right now, I want you to stand up and say “squid rings,” just to see what type of reaction you get.
The scary thing is, they weren’t actually that bad — and had to be far better than eggs and pickles or blood sausage.
I’m going to go heat up a frozen pizza now.
Germans are insane.
No, wait, I don’t really mean that. German football fans — they’re insane.
I rode the U-Bahn home last night with a gaggle (what is the collective noun for crazed football fans?) of drunken, scarf-wearing, beer-can-hoisting, song-screaming fans, obviously excited over the victory of the St. Pauli team over a club from Munich. At least I think it was a victory; I wasn’t insane enough to actually begin asking the folks how the game went. It might have turned ugly.
Even before the train showed up, I knew what to expect. The train going in the other direction had been jammed with an enthusiasic bunch, who amazingly still found room to wave their scarves around. (Football fans in Germany, and I think the rest of Europe, show their solidarity by wearing multi-colored woolen scarves with their team symbols on it. Seeing just one scarfed individual always looks festive, like it’s some sort of strange Christmas decoration. It loses a bit of the charm when there’s hundreds of ‘em.) There were other clues as well: the empty Jagermeister bottles scattered around the station, the number of security guards loitering about, the stream of people buying beers at the little kiosk.
I’m too American to really get into soccer, despite patient tutoring by various European friends. Nevertheless, when the folks in the subway car I was in started literally rocking the car as they jumped around, I joined in the singing. Yep, that’s me: No. 1 fan.
Go St. Pauli … or whoever it was who won.
The myth of European educational superiority was brought to a crashing halt this weekend, part of which I wiled away by watching a German game show. I was on the verge of some kind of seizure after staring, dumbfounded, while a contestant hemmed and hawed for two minutes and 17 seconds (yes, I timed him) over where the Rennissance started.
And then he got the answer wrong.
Now, c’mon, I’m not expecting much — but when you have a three-question multiple-choice quiz and you end up saying Spain, for goodness sake, that’s when you head off back behind the TV studio and shoot yourself. I turned the show off after the next contestant successfully guessed how many grams are in a pound of butter, but couldn’t figure out who Shuster and Siegel created. Sigh.
Ah, well. In other television news, I discovered that my set can receive multiple languages, enabling me to watch shows not only in German, but also in French and Spanish. Not English. Noooo — though I do get all the dubbed U.S. movie my heart could desire (not, upon reflection, a very large amount.). I do have to admit, though, that, contrary to all expectations, Will Smith can actually be funny. All it takes is to give him the voice of a hyperactive chipmunk on helium. I’m telling you, it made Men in Black a much more entertaining move.
It was a little game I’d play with myself as I got ready for bed each night this past week. Sure, you’re sleeping on the floor — but Snoring Guy isn’t two beds over. So you don’t have to hear his duet with Hacking Cough Girl. Or the background music provided by the Turkish Dance Combo in the nightclub downstairs. Or the percussion section provided by every freakin’ person walking by and hitting my feet, which hung off the too-short mattress.
It never made the floor softer, though.
Finally, though, some three weeks after getting to Hamburg, I got to sleep in a real bed again.
I moved out of the hostel (a domicile complete with the loudest snorer I’ve ever heard and the biggest pot dealer I know this side of .. well, any other pot dealers I know) a week ago, claiming a chunk o’ floor space at the flat I was — allegedly — moving into. Turned out the guy who owned the place wasn’t heading out of town as early as he planned, so I was stuck with a roommate for a few days. And then a few more days. And then, since I thought he was leaving yesterday afternoon and he hung around ‘til 10 p.m., a few more hours. It wasn’t that I minded him being around; it was just that he was insane.
The first night I came home, we sat around talking and he laid out his theory that the CIA had hypnotized the terrorists who flew the planes into the WTC … something to do with starting a war to help the sagging economy. I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that.
This was coupled with the fact that he chuckled everytime he said my last name, saying it was a “great name.” Then it turned out he thought my name was “Givens.” When I said my name was actually Gibbons, he became even happier, explaining that gibbons are his favorite type of monkey.
I don’t have a favorite type of monkey. I hadn’t known it was required.
He then spent the next week explaining little quirks of the place, such as when the throw rug is dirty, it can be cleaned by shaking it out the window. And when you’re cooking something at a low temperature, you don’t have to turn the oven temperature knob all the way up. Oh, no, I didn’t say these were useful explanations. His elucidation of how to operate the washer included an exegesis on why the spin cycle was marked by a little cyclon figure, but didn’t feature the step in which he put the outflow hose into the sink. (I discovered that when I went to do laundry last night.
But he’s gone now and I have a bed. It’s amazing how comfortable the dang things feel when you haven’t slept on one in a while.
But with the aid of some incredibly helpful people at the company here, I’ve managed to get just about legal, having received my residency permit and temporary work visa this morning. Now I just have to register with the police (yes, I’m libertarian enough to find that appalling; no, I’m not going to try to buck the system.) and set up a bank account — an activity that seems, incredibly, even more complicated than the official stuff.
I got laughed out of one bank when the worker asked to see my contract (!?) and explained that, since it was only short-term, I couldn’t open an account. The other bank was just surprised when I walked in and told them what I wanted to do. “You can’t do that today, sir,” I was told. “You have to make an appointment 10 days in advance.”
So now I’m hard at work as a Redaktor — I hope I get business cards, because I’m pretty sure that title (which translates ad “editor” is the name of the bad aliens in the next Star Trek movie) — a job that so far has consisted of hashing out cover story topics, coming up with article ideas and trying to find freelancers. Next up: figuring out how the coffee machine actually works.
Not surprisingly, pot — stories about it, hints on where to get it, (occasionally) the smell of it — is big at youth hostels, including the one I’m currently calling home. The other night, for example, featured a Canadian stoner holding forth on bong construction techniques: For a guy who seemed amazingly out of his head even whilst sober, he had an astounding grasp of engineering principles. There is something vaguelly disturbing about somebody who measures hits in terms of liters, as he reminisced about his favorite “bong bucket,” featuring a three-liter soda bottle. Then there was the Australian bloke who spent his New Year’s Eve with a group of Italians who had spent two days making the 10-hour trip from Milan to Berlin. In their baggage: quart-bags filled with homegrown green stuff — understandably leading to a longer-than-average trip.
My contribution to the conversation was a mildly humorous encounter on New Year’s Day. I was roaming the city in search of an open Internet cafe, anywhere I could check my long-dormant email. I stuck my head inside a headshop to have the following coversation:
Me: Sprechen Sie Englisch?
Clerk: A little.
Me: Is there an Internet cafe anywhere around here?
Clerk: You want to buy grass?
Me: Uh, no. I wanted the Internet, to surf the Internet. (I mime computer typing.)
Clerk: You want an Internet cafe where you can buy grass?
Me: Is there one around here?
Clerk: No.
Me: Ehh … Danke. Tschuss.
The smell of gunpowder has finally vanished, as a chilling rain (the only sort of rain I’ve encountered in Hamburg) swept clean the skies. Since New Year’s Eve — known as Silvester ‘round these parts — though, the spoor of firecrackers filled the city, as the snap, crackle and pop of explosives helped usher in 2002 some six hours before I’m used to seeing the New Year show up. A traditional German way to usher out the old year and bring in the new, the fireworks brought a sense of the change to all my sense: my ears and mouth filled with the aformentioned burning saltpeter, my ears startled by the boom of an exploding quarterstick, my eyes dazzeled by the lightshow barely glimpsed around downtown building, my sense of touch brought into play with the shock of contact running up my leg when I kick the little thug who just threw a frickin’ fire cracker at me.
You think I’m kidding …
Look, I understand the thrill of fireworks. Though at home I’d be more likely to see them on July 4th rather than Dec. 31st, I know enough pyromaniacs who figure any holiday’s a good reason to blow stuff up. But there’s something a little twisted about looking out the window and seeing somebody a few stories down trying to toss a cherry bomb in after you. And we’re not just talking kids; walking down the Reeperbahn to the club where I welcomed 2002 I saw grown woman tossing firecrackers at cars! Weird. And eerie.
But, for all that, it was a fun night … one of those times when telling people I’m an American seemed to make everyone my friend, when everybody just seemed happy to be celebrating.
Happy New Year, you all.
Once again I’ve let far too long go between updates. But now I’m back — back on the Web, back in Germany, back to having a full-time job. Here’s a quick life update: After finishing up the Burns Fellowship — which allowed me to go to Berlin back in August and work for German newspapers for a few months — I returned home in October, where I squatted in my parent’s attic and held down part-time jobs as a caterer and a box monkey. A few days after celebrating a very Merry Christmas, I caught a plane to Hamburg, where, next week, I’ll start work at Oscar’s, a bi-lingual magazine published by German media empire Gruner+Jahr. They’ve hired me as the editor of the English section. I’ll be laboring at that for the first half of the year or so (it’s a short-term contract), and then most likely heading back to the States — so if you know of any jobs there, let me know.
And, hopefully, I’ll be updating this thing more often …
An interesting note about German cold medicine: instructions only come in one language (uh, that’d be German). So in case you can’t read the little leaflet, and are wondering how much to take, here’s some advice: if you’re trying to take care of blocked sinuses, one pill should probably do you. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in seeing what flying is like, go ahead, take three. It’s bunches of fun.
Remember, Ubik is safe when taken according to directions. (Hey, there’s an allusion that, what, three of you will get …)
Oh, and I gots me a phone now … kinda. I can’t figure out what the number is: the woman who sold it to me said the instructions were in German and English; that turned out to be a foul, pernicious lie. After fooling around with the damn thing I was finally able to make the menus come up in English, but I can’t find anything on it that would tell me what the freakin’ number is.
But at least I can call people.
I think.
Ich habe
Du hast
Er, sie, es hat
Wir haben
Ihr habt
Sie, sie haben