Reflections as a Foreigner

Rain?

2008-06-11T21:31:00.002+02:00

Yesterday evening around 7 o'clock I was walking to the grocery store when as I walked past this little kids cafe (side note--we live in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, which has the highest birth rate in all of Europe, and there are more young parents and kids in strollers and on little kid bikes than anywhere I have ever seen...and the businesses are totally geared towards parents, including cafes with playareas for kids while the parents sit around chatting drinking coffee) and this little boy maybe four years old walks out, peers up at the sky--blue, without a cloud to be seen, and the weather is really hot--and declares, "I think it's going to rain tonight!"

"You think?" I ask him. "I don't think so."

"Maybe!" he says, enunciating each syllable of the word slowly and shrugging his shoulders while tipping his head to one side. "Maybe!"

"I guess we'll see," I said, and continuing on my way.

"You never know!" the little boy called out at me down the street. "You just never know!"

Finding Family in Niederaula

2008-05-24T12:04:00.005+02:00

Last week we spent in Marburg. I have a relative who lives not too far from there in Niederaula, a small town in rural Hessen. He met my grandparents back in 1980, and two of my cousins in the 1990s. When he was a little boy in the 1950s, he met my great grandparents when they came to Germany for a visit. Now it was my turn.

Wolfgang and Doris welcomed us into their home and introduced us to all their family. They are so nice, and they were really excited to meet us. I have to admit that I was a little bit nervous to meet them because they were basically just strangers who had met my family years ago. But it turns out that they are in contact with some other people in my family via email.

Wolfgang keeps four giant German hares. When they are full grown, they are about one meter long! They were huge already at six months, and their ears were so long and perky!

Wolfgang drove us through the town where the original man who emigrated to the United States, and from whom both of us are decended, came from. The little village of Bieben is today not much more than a main street with a few side streets. Back in 1856 young Johannes Kranning left Bieben at age eighteen to try his luck in America. He eventually settled near Peru, Indiana, married, and had five children. Five generations and 120 years later, I came into the picture!

Although contact for many years between the families in Germany and the USA had been lost, both families knew that there was family on the other side of the ocean. Then after WWII, my great-grandparents somehow got in touch with the distant relatives and came for a visit. Ever since then, there has been steady contact. It feels very special to be able to continue that.

I met Wolfgang's granddaughter and grandson. Maybe somehow we will keep in touch and contact can continue.

In this picture Wolfgang and I are standing in front of a house in a town near Bieben called Breitenbach, where an aunt of Wolfgang's used to live and in front of which there are pictures of my great-grandparents back in the 1950s.

Zugspitze

2008-04-11T15:40:00.002+02:00

Over Easter vacation Megan and I spent a week in the Bavarian Alps on the border with Austria. We spent two days hiking through the mountains, one day in Innsbruck, and another day in Munich. It was such a nice trip and a beautiful area. We stayed in a small vacation apartment run by a very nice old lady. She even gave us some homemade cake one day!

Well, the area was just so nice that I wanted to post a picture from our trip. This is looking north toward the Zugspitze, the highest point in Germany.

One missed job opportunity

2008-04-11T15:37:00.003+02:00

I ran across an ad the other day while searching through some possible translation job opportunities. I really should have replied. This is what it said:

Basically I am writing personal letters in English to a friend in Germany. The letters are only a few hundred words each and I write clearly. The scope of this particular project is just one letter for the time being. More work might ensue later. I need someone who speaks fluent German and is able to understand the subtleties of personal male-to-female communication! Can pay Escrow if required. Thanks.

On the other hand, maybe it's best that I didn't respond. Who knows what might have come up in those letters!

Shock and Awe

2008-03-04T21:20:00.002+01:00

This afternoon I had a twelfth grade English class. The first time to be with this group, and the regular teacher is out sick. Has been for the past week. So in order to keep the class moving and not have to let it be cancelled, I and two other teachers are sharing teaching duties. Which means no continuity.

That reared its head this afternoon. The head teacher asked me to give them an assignment from a workbook to do in class. This I did, but it turned out to be much too easy for them. Unfortunately, that was the only material I really had with me. There was some grumbling going on over on the right side of the classroom. Not a whole lot of concentration going on. Even some snide, under the breath comments about how this was entirely below them (probably true, but still, it could be said in a more friendly way). So I had to get things under control.

There seemed only one way out. Overwhelming use of English. Shock and awe.

They'll have to concentrate to be able to keep up. But any break on my part is just an invitation for a side conversation to break out.

So I decided to open with politics. Making use of as many "big" words as possible, I dove right in....

I carried the day.

A Park Bench Lesson

2008-02-28T10:51:00.002+01:00

So there we were last Saturday afternoon, sitting on a bench in the park drinking coffee, enjoying the February sun, comfortably engaged in one of humanity's favorite pastimes: complaining.

It's easy to fall prey to.

"Here we are in Berlin, Megan," I said, "guests in Germany for an entire year, asked to come here to help teach their young people how to talk English. And what's the problem? We're paid a grant of just 700 euros a month, assigned a job in a school for twelve hours a week with no responsibility. And our visas won't allow us to even do any work to earn anything more. As a matter of fact, they even say we're not supposed to study at the university, although many assistant teachers don't seem to have taken that directive to heart."

"It's sort of like the annoying little thing that gets in the way of all the nothing you can afford to do," Megan nodded.

"We could be back in the US making money, putting something away for retirement right now, living in our own apartment, but instead we're over here confined in a rigid German system that permits us little economic incentive. It's a job with too little time, too little responsibility, and above all, too little money. I saw a posting for an internship here that pays 1800 Euros a month. 600 Euros goes to taxes, 600 go to provided housing, and you keep 600 each month for the rest of your expenses. That seems like a much better deal than what we've got here."

"And on top of all this, the good folks in the German immigration office wouldn't even grant an extra week at the end of the grant period before our visas expire," Megan added. "Your grant ends on June 30, but you are also always paid at the end of the month, so your last payment is also on June 30. But flights home cost hundreds of dollars less on Jund 29, so we're leaving before your last payment. Somehow we have to deal with that. If we could just have an extra seven days or so one our visas, there would be no problem."

"Sometimes Germans just really get on my nerves," I said. "Just open up a little bit, be a little bit more flexible and considerate," I said, swallowing the last of my coffee.

We both looked out into the park at all the people lit up by sunlight filtering through the trees overhead. A long sigh escaped from my chest. I looked over to my left to see a man coming our way, stopping at the neighboring bench to bend down and offer its inhabitants, another young couple, some chocolate from a box. Now he's heading to our bench next.

"Would you like some chocolate?" he asked with a friendly smile, extending a small box towards us.

"Just because?" I asked.

"Just because! Enjoy!"

With a 'Thank you' Megan and I each took a piece. "It's my second favorite kind of chocolate!" Megan exclaimed.

After the man had left and was heading for the next bench, Megan laughed. "Here we are, complaining about Germany and the people who live here, and look what happens! Maybe someone is trying to tell us something!"

"You're right, Megan," I admitted. "We've met lots of good people here, seen some amazing things and had unique experiences here. Let's always keep that in mind when we're not exactly satisfied."

And with that, we stood up and strolled off into that bright February afternoon.

The Supermarket

2008-02-23T20:45:00.004+01:00

Well, it's been a while. But recent events nearly force me to write about an entirely German experience: going to the supermarket.

If you thought that Germans maintain a civil society, you're right. Unless they're grocery shopping. Then anything goes. The past couple times I was at the grocery store, events happened that I can no longer keep bottled up! Sharing is cleansing.

Browsing the shelves at the local Berlin supermarket, I pause at the chips. Corn chips, a (expensive) rarity in a country an ocean away from their origin. I already have guacamole at home. Now just some chips to go with them. But should I get them here? I know they're cheaper at another store. But guacamole will go bad, and mine is already opened, and tomorrow is Sunday: supermarkets closed. It's now or nev--...Monday. Well, just how big is this bag of chips? Looks can be deceiving. I move closer to the chips, abandonding my position on the opposite side of the aisle, where I had been standing at an appropriate distance so that others could pass by if they wished.

Hmm, this bag of chips is actually much smaller than it looks. I think I will just wait til Monday. As I am setting the bag back on the shelf, a woman approaches from the left side, brushes against me, and silently reaches in front of me with her right hand to grab a bag of barbeque chips on my right. !!! A thought flashes through my head. I'll just follow her until she stops to pick something up off the shelf, then I'll run up and grab something on the other side of her! But not today.

There's only one checkout line open when I'm ready to go. So, I line up behind the folks in front of me. There must already by five or six in line, and I'm well behind the "aisle" at the check-out line, sort of floating out in that nebulous space behind the registers. But there's already six or seven people lined up behind me now, too.

Suddenly there's another associate at the neighboring register. She calls, "I can help you over here!" I start to slide over to the next aisle when out of the corner of my eye I catch movement. Eyes wide with adrenaline, mouth gasping for oxygen, a woman TWO PLACES IN LINE BEHIND ME is crouched low over her cart and careening for the first place in the newly opened line. I never saw a cart swing around like that! Before anyone even had the chance to gasp, she was at the front of the line, the next three customers in line behind her filing up right after her. Move over, Andretti! Watch out, Jeff Gordon! Now we know how Michael Shumacher reached the top of the Formula One world!

At the orientation session last fall, we were told that Germans have a special way of "queing," as the Brits put it. I guess I've seen it. Some things, I think, I'll just never get used to.

Postage

2007-12-21T22:28:00.000+01:00

I think it's time to admit that Germany actually is not the best country in the world. Case in point: postage rates. I keep feeling that I am getting ripped off every time I put something in the mail here. Today, I went to the post office with a few letters to send to the United States and one letter to send to a location in Germany.

It costs 1.70 Euros ($2.44 American) to send a normal letter from Germany to the United States. On the other hand, a letter from the USA to Germany costs 90 cents. I just don't understand it, I have to admit. It seems like the costs involved in shipping a letter across the Atlantic would be the same regardless of the direction it travels, considering that both the US Postal service and the Deutsche Post handle the letter in their respective countries. It's not like a disgruntled American postal worker is actually putting that letter from mom in my mailbox in Berlin. And it's not like some chic German letter carrier is taking that Christmas card all the way to Grandpa's mailbox in Indiana. So why is it so much more expensive going west? Maybe it has something to do with fighting the rotation of the Earth.

Then there was my four page letter to Hamburg, Germany. I thought I actually already had enough postage on it when I got the post office. There was a stamp for 55 cents on the envelope, which is the standard rate (already high, considering this is equal to about 79 cents American). The envelope had too many pieces of paper in it though, apparently, and I had to put another 35 cents on it. I guess four sheets of paper is more that a standard letter should have?

Now this raises an interesting question. Why does it cost nearly half as much to deliver a letter inside the entire enormous United States as it costs to deliver a letter in a country the size of Montana?

Teeth

2007-11-15T10:55:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was in a class of 10th graders. After splitting the class in half between me and the regular teacher, I had a group in the back of the room. I was trying to get them to talk about different forms of Media in English as an introduction to a new unit. There were pictures of people in the movies, reading books and magazines, listening to the radio, at a ballet, at an art museum, and the like that were supposed to spark some conversation. But the students weren't really interested in it. Instead, it seemed like they had all gotten together before class and schemed how to change the subject, because all of a sudden, after I asked a question about the media, I hear one of the girls ask,

"We have a question for you."

"OK." We? This is some kind of plot.

"How come your teeth are so white?"

Crap. Why do 10th graders get distracted so easily? Are they talking about this among themselves when I'm not around? Only one thing to say: "I brush twice a day."

"You don't use whitening strips?"

"Nope. Just two times a day brushing."

I guess that is behind me now. You just never know what these students are going to say....

Der Waschsalon

2007-10-08T20:22:00.000+02:00

I've never had such a good time doing my laundry.

Megan and I don't have a washing machine in our apartment, so we have to go down the street to a laundromat. There are two laundromats, actually, that are almost right next to one another. All during September I went to the second one I came to, that is a little bit farther away. It looked a little bit nicer inside...white, clean, and spacious. But today Megan was with me, and when we walked past the first laundromat, she stopped me and asked why we weren't going in.

"Because I always go to the one down the street," I said. "Plus, I don't know how much it costs at this place because they don't have a sign out front."

Pretty soon I had been convinced that it was foolish to walk farther down the street to a different laundromat when there was a perfectly good laundromat right here, if the prices were exactly the same. So we went inside to see how much it cost.

We were confronted with mayhem. People were everywhere. The tiny little washing machines that are so ubiquitous in Germany all looked full, spinning away at their little loads of laundry. I managed to spot the machine where you put in your money, and saw that a load of laundry cost the same as it did down the street. 2.50 Euros. But what to do? I looked around, lost.

Suddenly a German voice cuts through the noise, asking, "Can I help you?"

I turned to see the source. I short little man was approaching, cutting through the crowd. Sporting a brown houndstooth blazer and matching pants, complete with a matching hat, red sideburns, and silk scarf around his neck, this charachter only let me think of one thing. This man was a leprechaun. The leprechaun smiled at me.

It was a somewhat useless question. Megan and I were each carrying a big bag full of laundry slung over our shoulders. We had just walked into a laundromat. This thought, combined with my utter shock at being greeted by a leprechaun, left me nearly speechless. In German, it was even more difficult to form a coherent reply. I said the only word that came to me in that moment: "Waschen?"

"Of course!" the leprechaun said. "You can put half your laundry in this machine here, and the other half in that machine there! 50-50!"

I had a lot of laundry with me. And German laundry machines are tiny. "Do you really think that it will all fit?" I asked.

"Sure, of course!" he said. "Or you can wait a few minutes until this big machine here is finished, and put it all in there!"

So that's what we did. The leprechaun had an adjoining room to the laundry room where he had a little cafe going, and you can sit in there and surf the internet or drink coffee and soda. Megan had her German homework with her, so we sat down and got to work on it.

It was, for the most part, a pleasant wait. The best part was the music. It was all from the 70s and 80s. There seemed to be a theme going on. A leprechaun owns a laundromat built in the 70s with orange washing machines and period music playing in the background.

While we were waiting to put our laundry in and after we had started the laundry, the leprechaun bustled here and there, greeting new customers walking in, serving coffee at the bar, showing people how to work the machines. He never hesitated to remind people that there was something to drink available, "at very good price, at very good price!"

Many of the customers didn't speak German. The leprechaun was trying to communicate in English with them, but it usually came out something like this. Everything the leprechaun says is quick, short, usually partial sentences, and is immediately followed by three short laughs.

One American woman is about to leave the store with her glass Pepsi bottle still half full:
Leprechaun: "Nehmen Sie die Flasche nicht mit! Sie ist Pfand! Recycle! HaHaHa!"
Overwhelmed American: "What? The bottle is for recycling?"
Leprechaun: "Ja, ja, recycle! Sie sollen die Flasche erstmal austrinken! HaHaHa!"

He makes motions to indicate that she should drink the rest of the bottle. The poor woman quickly drinks up the rest of the soda. I think she was a little bit scared of him. I think she would rather have just left the bottle half full, sitting on the table at the laundromat.

An American man is trying to figure out how to put the money into the machine to start his laundry.

Man: "How does this work?"
Leprechaun: "Einfach Münzen einwerfen und Machine wählen!" HaHaHa!
Man: "Uh, OK. Will it give me money back?"
Leprechaun: "Nein! Die nimmt alles! HaHaHa!" The Leprechaun looks at me and winks.
Man: "It won't give me money back?"
Leprechaun: "No! No money back! HaHaHa!" He looks at me and winks, then slaps the American on the back.
Man: Look of complete exhasperation.

In the meantime, while waiting on the laundry to finish, I decided I wanted something to drink. I decided on a Fritzkola. It is cola with lemonade flavor. Weird. But it gave me a chance to talk to the leprechaun.

"One cola, please," I said in German.

"Oh! You speak German! And here this whole time I've been trying to speak to you in English! My English is so terrible! HaHaHa!" he responded. Which was a funny thing to say, because when I first walked in, we spoke in German, and he asked me if I was from Holland because of my accent. That's when I also told him that I am an American.

I told him that I was an English teaching assistant at a high school in Berlin. He suggested that I could teach him English, and asked me how much I charge. 12 Euro an hour. The leprechaun decided he didn't have time. Somehow during this discussion we switched from using the formal "Sie" form of address to the informal "du".

I asked him where he grew up, thinking that maybe he grew up in East Germany and therefore didn't have the chance to learn English in school. Nope, he grew up in Cologne. Very much in Western Germany.

"Didn't you learn English in school, then?" I asked him.

"No! HaHaHa! I always slept! HaHaHa!"

When the laundry was done in the washer, he came over and asked if we wanted to dry it, too. I said no, we would hang it out to dry when we got home. Save money.

"Save, save, save! Always save! HaHaHa!" the leprechaun said. "People always come here and want to save! I have people who come here and don't even wash their clothes. They just get them wet! HaHaHa! They don't use detergent!"

"This man here, though, he does his laundry right! HaHaHa!" the leprechaun said, pointing to another customer who was standing by a dryer. "He always dries his laundry too! He's my friend! HaHaHa!"

"Couldn't you just do that at home and save even more?" I said. "Just put them in the bathtub and turn on the water!"

"Aye! You could do that! HaHaHa!" The leprechaun slapped me on the back.

The leprechaun convinced me to "schleunigen" my wet laundry. What is that? I wanted to know.

"The machine spins all very fast! 3000 revolutions per minute! HaHaHa! It will hang dry even faster! HaHaHa!"

When we were getting ready to go and I was putting the last of the laundry in the bag from the Schleuniger, I asked Megan to go pick up her homework off the table so we could leave. She came back carrying a half empty bottle of soda and wore a frightened look on her face. The leprechaun was following her, saying, "Recycle! Pfand, Pfand! Die musst du erst austrinken! HaHaHa!" He asked me how to say 'Pfand' in English.

"Deposit," I said. "There is a deposit on the bottle, and he needs the bottle back in order to get the Pfand back. So he wants us to drink it up before we go."

"Deposit, deposit! HaHaHa!" the leprechaun said.

I'm going back next week.

Lachs vs. Seelachs

2007-10-06T21:51:00.000+02:00

My wife arrived a week ago in Berlin. It has been so nice to be together all this week. Megan just somehow makes everything happier.

So I wanted to have some things ready when she got here that she really likes. One thing I like to do for Megan is cook for her. And one of her favorite meals is salmon cooked with basil pesto spread over the top.

So, last week I am in the grocery store getting the ingredients I would need am I'm looking at the frozen fish. Salmon is called "Lachs" in German. There seem to be several different varieties available. Being on a limited Fulbright budget, I naturally look for the cheapest variety. After a minute's overview of the options, it looks like "Seelachsfilet" is going to be the cheapest kind. 2.99 Euros. Now, you may be saying, where is the salmon? But in German, "See" means sea. So I'm thinking, Seelachs must simply be salmon caught in the ocean, rather than salmon bred on a farm or something.

Today, I was in for a surprise. We pulled the salmon out of the freezer and I opened the box and put the salmon onto a tray to put in the oven. Megan says, that salmon looks pretty gray for salmon. Well, that's what it is though! I answer her. Maybe it'll get pinker in the oven. So in the oven it goes.

Hmmm. 15 minutes later, the fish looks even whiter! I pull it out and put it on our plates. Megan looks pretty suspicious. She hesitates to take the first bite.

"I'll take the first bite," I say. I pull off a piece of fish and start chewing. It's not bad. But it doesnt' really seem like salmon.

Megan starts eating and knows that it isn't salmon.

"But that's what the box says!" I tell her. "'Lachs' means 'salmon!' That's what it says on the box!" I take another bite. It definitely isn't salmon. It's white, it's chewier, it's not really flakey enough, and it just doesn't have enough flavor! In fact, it's kind of flavorless.

I'm losing my confidence. "Well, maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they accidentally got the wrong fish in the box," I say. I take another bite. Definitely not salmon. Get the wrong fish in the box? C'mon. I'm losing my confidence. "Maybe I better go get the dictionary. I'll look it up. Maybe I'm out of my mind and Lachs really doesn't mean salmon."

I look up salmon. Lachs. "Well, that's good," I think. "I didn't remember wrong." Then I figure just to be sure, I'll look up Seelachs. Pollack. Pollack? What the heck kind of a fish is that?

American in Berlin

2007-09-26T21:02:00.000+02:00

As an American living in Berlin, I have plenty of opportunities to see my own country from a different perspective. Sometimes those observations are passive. I'd have them if I never spoke to anyone at all:

Why are the cars here all so tiny? Where did the SUVs go?
That's pretty cool that I can live for a year without a car in Germany, and still never worry about getting to where I need to go--whether that's in Berlin or anywhere else in the country--because I can use public transportation.
Whatever happened to ulimited cell phone minutes?
Why do people buy their bread from the bakery instead of the grocery store? Oh, becuase it tastes so much better!
There are four different colored trash bags here! ... Which one do I throw my dirty napkin in?
Where is the non-smoking section in the restaurant?

Other times, those observations are more or less forced upon me. Let me explain.

People in Germany are, generally speaking, much more forward than Americans are. If you're waiting at the bakery in line to purchase something and you don't speak up, you'll never get served. Why? Because everyone else behind you will just cut right in front of you and call out what they want. It's not impolite, it's just how business is transacted. If you ask a silly question in class, your teacher won't hesitate to tell you it's a stupid question.

Which brings me to the next step. I'm in Germany this year as a foreign language assistant. I go to a high school in Berlin every day, where I visit the English classes as an assistent with native language ability. The purpose is to help teach English by improving vocabulary and pronunciation; to be an ambassador of the United States, sharing what it is like to grow up there and go to school there; and maybe to dispell some of the myths about the USA and create a more positive image of the country abroad. There is absolutely no political agenda to my visit in Berlin, however. No one tells me what to say or what to support.

In the classroom setting, the possibility of being surprised is always great. The students are full of questions and want to know more about where I come from. Here are some of my favorite questions that I've been asked, from students ranging from 5th to 13th grade:

"Have you ever met any movie stars?" No, I mean come on, the United States is a huge place! I grew up in Indiana, which is a looong way from Hollywood!
"What is it like in the ghetto?" Well, Indiana is pretty much one big field where I come from. It's about half corn and the other half soybeans. I'm not even close to a ghetto!
"Do you have a car? What kind is it?" I do. It's a red Ford Taurus. A pretty big car by German standards.
"I've heard that every second person in the USA has a gun. Do you have a gun?" No, and I don't ever plan on having one. If you have a gun in you're house in order to protect your family, you're more likely of injuring someone in your family with that gun than you are of preventing a crime in your home.
"Why does the United States still have the death penalty? Do you agree with the death penalty?" No, I don't agree with it, for many different reasons. More than I want to get into right now.
"Why won't the United States join Kyoto?" Oh geez, that's the question we're all asking. We might talk about pollution and global warming, but we won't commit to doing anything about it.

And then, the questions that always come up, in some form or another.

Do you agree with the United States being in Iraq?
Do you like President Bush?
Do you like your government?
Did you vote for President Bush?

Have you ever had similar experiences abroad? How does being in a different country put the United States in a new light for you? Write me back, I invite your responses.