Is Germany too civilized?

Thanksgiving is over, I am not going anywhere interesting, and now it's time to write about the mundane stuff that interests a foreigner like me. As familiar as a lot of things are in German culture - Christmas traditions, potato chips, Coca Cola, bad pop music - sometimes I realize how it's a little more civilized than what I am used to. Maybe too much.

In Germany there is universal health care, low unemployment, and shops that are closed on Sundays.  People wait for the light to turn green before crossing the street and might publicly chastise you for riding your bike on the left-side-of-the-rod sidewalk. Busses run on time and the passengers buy tickets even though they are seldom checked.  Sounds good, right? As we live here longer, I keep noticing little things that happen in a highly-organized, law-abiding society that would never work in a lot of places, including my homeland (which is still civilized, if slightly less law-abiding).

Hannover, like many other cities in Germany, has free bookshelves. In addition to the public library system, there are bookshelves out in public areas where passers-by can take a book home, bring it back later, or donate their old books. Here's some info from a 2011 AP article featured in The Guardian :

Associated Press= COLOGNE, Germany (AP) — Take a book, leave a book. In the birthplace of the printing press, public bookshelves are popping up across the nation on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets.
In these free-for-all libraries, people can grab whatever they want to read, and leave behind anything they want for others. There's no need to register, no due date, and you can take or give as many as you want.
"This project is aimed at everyone who likes to read — without regard to age or education. It is open for everybody," Michael Aubermann, one of the organizers of the free book exchange in the city of Cologne, told The Associated Press.
The public book shelves, which are usually financed by donations and cared for by local volunteer groups, have popped up independently of each other in many cities across Germany including Berlin, Hannover and Bonn, and also in suburbs and villages. 

Public bookshelf in Hannover

Cool idea, right? Way to make literacy accessible to everyone. Until somebody steals all the books. Except that doesn't happen. Really. People actually bring the books back or replace them with other titles. Except for my friend Kaska's mom, who is Polish, and took a couple of books home to Poland with the explanation of "at least I will USE them". In the U.S., the books would not always come back, even in a nice neighborhood. They'd turn up at someone's house or a used book store. But in Germany, that's not a problem.

Here's another example: public apple trees. One of the semi-country roads where Brian and I like to ride bikes is lined with apple trees. On weekend mornings in the fall, we would see people drive up to those trees in their cars, pull out their apple picker poles, and help themselves to the apples. The trees were so close to the road that they had to belong to the city. And people were openly picking them, for free. Brian and I were both amazed. "What is this place (this is the dialogue of us talking to ourselves), the land of milk, honey, and applesauce?"

But then maybe it goes too far. I learned in German class last week that in Germany, it is illegal to wash your own car in your driveway or the street. If you do and the police catch you, the fine is 500 euros! These people are serious about not washing your own car. The explanation that my teacher gave, and what I read online (translation = it must be true) is that the soapy, dirty, oily water can get in the gutters and go down into the sewer system. And no one wants that. Except, doesn't that happen when you go to the car wash too? Doesn't that happen when it rains? Is the rest of the world drinking contaminated water because they wash their own cars? Maybe this law a way to ensure that car washes stay in business.

As a foreigner, maybe I have the best of both worlds. I appreciate that busses run on time and you can borrow books off the street (not that I can read any of them, but it's a nice idea). I also know enough to realize that some rules are not really necessary, and that car washing is not the world's major source of water pollution. I do sometimes cross the street on a red light, to the disapproving looks of old ladies waiting on the corner. And next year, maybe I'll get an apple picker.

Turkey recovery

The floors are mopped, the oven's cleaned, the fridge is packed with leftovers. There are empty bottles and a turkey carcass on the balcony, and there's a splatter of wine on the wall. It was a good party. I won't bore you by talking about how chunks of sweet potato stuck to my broom this morning, but I will give you some highlights of our three part extravaganza.

1. Turkey Bowl, Hannover edition - 16 players showed up to the unnamed grassy park full of mole-holes. The Indians wore red and the Pilgrims wore black. Some coaching from the North Americans, some frustration from the Europeans, some running in circles by the Australians... and they got the hang of it and had a good time.  Final results? The Indians won the first game, probably, and the Pilgrims seemed to win the second game but no one is really sure. Here are some photos of the event, which I took in the first half before running (literally) home to put the turkey in the oven.

2. Food. Lots of it. Lots of people to eat it too. The happy, local, free-running hippie turkey was 6.7 kilos, which is almost 15 lbs. I had to put it in diagonally and its ankle bones still touched the wall of the oven. And it was delicious. So was the turkey that Brian cooked on the grill. So were the 58 side dishes that our guests brought. We managed to fit everyone - cozy but relatively comfortable - into the living room to eat. It felt like a real holiday because there was an obscene amount of food, multiple conversations, too many desserts, a baby to pass around, a happy food coma after dinner and football playing in the other room. True, the guests were not related to me, but they were so excited to be a part of the feast (who thought that sweet potatoes were exotic?) that it felt pretty special.

3. Party. What in our minds would be a separate and distinct part of the evening didn't really turn out that way. We'd planned to put food away by that point, move tables around and turn up the music. None of that really happened. About 15 more people came and the feast continued as they ate the food that was still out from dinner. We did manage to turn up the music and people seemed to have a good time, even if we were all too full to have a crazy, wild party.

And that was Thanksgiving. We are left with enough food for a week and enough wine bottles to last until spring. Now I just need to find some paint to fix that stain on the wall.

Turkey week

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving for most of you. In Hannover, however, tomorrow is Thursday. Never fear, we would not let a year go by without giving thanks, so Brian and I are hosting a three-part Thanksgiving extravaganza on Saturday.

Part one is a flag (American) football game in the spirit of the classic Turkey Bowl. Brian and his high school friends started their Turkey Bowl tradition when they were about 15, and it survives today. The Turkey Bowl - Hannover edition will be slightly different. First of all, most players think that football is a game with 2 goalies and a round ball that you kick around the pitch. I might be able to throw a pass better than some of them (catching might be another story). The game will take place in a park that we found - it has a big grassy area with the added challenge of tons of mole holes. It will be part football game and part obstacle course. Hopefully there won't be any major injuries. But in case there are, as you loyal readers know, I am capable of calling emergency services by dialing 112.

Part two is Thanksgiving dinner. We tried to keep the group manageable, based on the size of our apartment and more importantly the size of our oven. That didn't really work. Our head count for dinner is now at 20. I know, 20 people, 2 bedroom apartment, midget-sized oven? Never fear. Several of our guests have never had a Thanksgiving dinner before, and none of them are related to us, so there are no traditions to uphold and no in-laws to impress. Our guests are of the following nationalities:
10 Americans (including our friends Ed's parents, who are visiting fresh off the plane from California, bringing our Californian total to 4 of 10 Americans. I didn't know they could celebrate Thanksgiving in California - it's too warm.)
6 Germans (including one half Dutch, half German)
2 Australians (Very excited about turkey and sweet potatoes)
2 Englanders
1 Pole

Dishes that people are planning to bring include spring rolls, courgette (I believe that's a zucchini) and Lancashire cheese casserole, and some kind of Polish "salad" including eggs, pickles, and a bucket of mayonnaise. There are also stuffing and mashed potato reinforcements coming.

I've gone to about three different grocery stores to get the stuff I need (you can't find cranberries just anywhere), and am planning a trip to 2 farmers' markets also. One of those market trips is to pick up the turkey. In accordance with our new meat-eating standards, I've ordered a whole, fresh turkey from a local poultry farm where the animals are fed with no antibiotics, raised in open stalls, and slaughtered on-site when they are fully grown. So the happy hippie turkey is running around freely, maybe even as I write this, gobbling its gourmet food, going to the turkey spa for massages, hanging out with its turkey friends, until maybe tomorrow someone will chop its head off and get it ready for our table. That might not be entirely true, but I do know that at least this turkey can walk, because it weighs about 6 kilos (13 lbs or so). If it was bigger than that, it would not fit in the oven. We've also ordered a breast and two legs that Brian will cook on our grill, which is a charcoal Weber proudly assembled in Illinois. If that's not enough, we can always order pizza.

Here are photos of the Hoikkado pumpkins I am cooking in our oven so that I can scoop them out and make pumpkin pie.

There's no Libby's canned pumpkin here. No pre-made crust, and no Crisco either. I feel more pilgrim-like making these things from scratch, though I did have my mom mail over some gravy mix because the last thing I want to do with 20 hungry people crammed in my apartment is worry about flour lumps in my gravy.

Part 3 is the party. We've invited basically everyone we know to come over after dinner for drinks and general merry-making. I have planned very little for this part of the evening - I figure it will just sort of happen.

So enjoy your busy travel day, Americans. And your family turkey dinners. I do miss family holidays. Ours in Hannover might not be traditional but we have plenty to be thankful for, including the fact that we have made enough friends here to create a crowded, happy Thanksgiving gathering here on Saturday.

Weekend in Kiel

Sometimes I think that my life has become pretty normal since moving to Germany. There’s a comfortable rhythm to the day-to-day in Hannover that occasionally makes room for a cool vacation. Then it’s back to the usual. And then I find myself hanging out with a bunch of Eastern Europeans at a Cameroonian party in the far north of Germany, and wonder how in the world I got there.

I spent the weekend in Kiel. My Polish friend Kaska lived there before moving to Hannover and wanted to go back for a visit. She invited me along. I don’t think I realized until we got there that it would also be a German language immersion weekend for me; except none of the people that we spent time with are actually German. Kaska used to coordinate programming for international students at the university in Kiel, so a lot of her friends were/are students who worked in that office. We stayed with Sasha and Taras, who are Russian and Ukranian, respectively. The rest of the crew from various former Soviet countries. They all speak to each other in German, usually.  Except for the occasional English break with Kaska, I had to keep up. And I did surprisingly ok. It was a little exhausting and I know I missed out on some jokes, but I generally understood what was going on and didn’t talk too much. When I did, they were really patient with my elementary school vocabulary. It was more consecutive hours of listening and speaking German than I’ve ever had to do before.

Kiel is not an attractive town, but it has a nice personality. That’s what you’d say if it were a person, anyway.  There’s no Old City or beautiful church or castle to look at. But there’s a big working harbor and a lot of seagulls. Kiel is located on the Baltic Sea, near the channel that connects the North and Baltic Seas, and from Kiel you can take a ferry to Oslo, Norway or Gotteburg, Sweden. There is a big shipyard there too, and a lot of crazy cold weather surfers who drive around in VW busses. On Saturday, Kaska, Sasha, Taras, and I went to the beach to walk around. The town we went to is called Kalifornien, which everyone thinks is pretty funny. If they really wanted you to think you were in California, they’d have to spell it right, and make the sun come out, and raise the temperature by about 30 degrees. But it’s good for a laugh anyway. The ocean was so calm there that my first glimpse of the Baltic Sea reminded me more of one of the Great Lakes than of  an ocean.  It has something to do with islands that act as breakwaters and ocean currents and such. Here are a couple of photos (you can always click on them to make them bigger):

Along the harbor in Kiel. Sasha is the tall one, Kaska is the small one, and Taras is the guy.

Then there was the Cameroonian party. Cultural nights are one of the programs sponsored by the international student office where Kaska used to work. We happened to be in town during Cameroonian night. Kaska was a bit like a returning celebrity, but the Cameroonians were definitely the center of attention. They had come to Kiel from universities all over Germany to have a traditional dance performance and fashion show and a play and of course a dance party. I had not been to a college party since, well, college. I know it sounds like I am waaay to old, until you realize that people in Germany go to school for a long, long time. College is basically free and the government even gives you money for your living expenses while you study (more on the German education system coming up in another post).  Kaska has a legendary friend who studied for something like 59 semesters. I don’t think that’s common, but it is impressive. He was not at the party, unfortunately. The Ukranians, the Germans, the Cameroonians, however, were there, all well over 21, dancing in the university cafeteria. And then it was 3am. Funny how these things happen.

Now it's back to laundry, groceries, homework and German class. The normal routine has resumed here. Next weekend, though, I will be celebrating Thanksgiving with some Australians and Germans and a couple of people from California... the real one.

Saint Martin's Day

It turns out that Germans do have a day when kids go from house to house asking for candy. But it's not Halloween, it's St Martin's Day. On Sunday night, we saw kids walking around with paper lanterns on long sticks, lit from the inside by candles (Hannover's firefighters may have been busy that night, too. No, I did not call them).

It was Martinstag, which celebrates the feast day of St. Martin. Traditionally, German children make paper lanterns, light them up, and walk from house to house, singing. The owners of the house are supposed to give them candy. It's a Catholic holiday, but one that the Protestants have adopted too (since they don't have as much fun).
St. Martin was a knight in Roman times, who is famous for cutting his cloak in half in order to share it with a beggar who was cold. The holiday also coincides with harvest time here, so there is a traditional family meal of goose or pork also.

Also happening on November 11th, starting at 11:11am, is carnival. This happens, again, mostly in Catholic towns where people have fun. But Hannover tries a little, and you can find more on Hannover carnival on my friend Kaska's blog.

I am a little confused about why carnival happens in November AND in February. I get the Mardi Gras/last day before fasting/Lent is about to start carnival. But November? The Germans are obviously not celebrating Armistice day on November 11th, which didn't work out so well for them in the end. As far as I can understand, it's the pre-game for the real carnival season. It's when the people who plan carnival events get together and, as carnival people must like to do, have a parade. What happens after that? They probably go to a bar in their funny hats to drink beer and do their planning, maybe while eating green cabbage and pork. I have no idea whether that's correct but this is Germany, so it's a pretty good guess.

So even though there's not a lot of trick-or-treating in Germany, at least the kids have a chance to horde candy. It just requires singing, crafts, and a little fire safety.

Fire??

I had another German-language adventure Saturday evening. I called the fire department.

When I looked out our living room window at around 5pm, I saw big flames through the window of an otherwise dark apartment across the street. They kept burning for a few minutes and weren't getting any smaller, and it looked like they were too large and too high off the floor to be coming from a fireplace or anything contained. Besides, who would have a huge fireplace in an apartment?

I called Brian over to tell me I was not imaging things, and he, too saw the flames. He said something like "yeah they look big. Do you want to call 112? Maybe you should watch them for a few minutes first." 112 is the emergency phone number, just like 911 in the US. It occurred to me that, since we're the apartment I was looking at is on the top floor, just like ours, I might be the only person who could see the fire. So I waited, and the flames kept burning and leaping. I couldn't tell whether they were getting bigger but they weren't getting smaller. Finally I decided that if my place was potentially on fire, I'd want the neighbors to do something about it. So I called 112.

I explained what was going on and they sent the fire trucks. Because our street is now under construction and half closed, the trucks took over the whole street and people stopped on the sidewalk to watch. There were flashing lights and guys in helmets and stretchers at the ready. I was hoping I wasn't wrong but had a sinking feeling that maybe I had overreacted. They sent a fireman up in the cherry-picker part of the truck to look in the apartment window, and two other guys to go inside the building. Five minutes later, the cherry picker started to come down. One of the firemen on the sidewalk told me that the building was not on fire - it was in fact a fireplace.

Was I embarrassed? Sure, I had made a huge production out of nothing. Sure, I had probably cost the city of Hannover some money, and messed up traffic by bringing the fire trucks that blocked off the street. I was hoping that the firemen would be less angry with me because I am a foreigner. They obviously don't have fireplaces where I come from, right?

But let's focus on the positive - I know that my language skills are good enough to contact emergency services. I am absolutely scared of talking on the phone in German and I overcame my fear in the interest of public safety. Plus, I created some excitement in the neighborhood and gave the firemen something to do. They were probably sitting around the fire department watching soccer on TV. Maybe this means I am becoming better integrated into the community here. I not only use the library and the public swimming pool, I also contact emergency services when needed... or not needed. Who knew a 5th floor apartment would have a huge fireplace halfway up the wall? I, certainly, did not.

The votes are in

The election speech was a bit anti-climactic, but in a good way. On Tuesday we had a little in-class party to celebrate the Muslim holiday (it was called Bayrim in Turkey, but has a few different names) that happened during our fall break. When we have a party in German class it means people bring food and we eat it. I had my brought my always-popular chocolate chip cookies. My teacher, Holger, took a bite and asked it there was marzipan in them. It was so ridiculous I was not offended.

As we ate cake and chips and drank Ibrahim's home made cherry wine, Holger asked me to talk about the elections. I did my best first-grade summary, avoided discussing the electoral college, and generally made sense. The other students in my class like to say things like, "yay, Obama," even though I am pretty sure they don't know anything about him. They don't need to either, but if Polish and Middle Eastern immigrants to Germany could vote in U.S. elections, it would be a landslide.

Non-Americans also have no qualms about asking who you voted for. In the U.S. it's a semi-private issue for anyone who does not slap a bumper sticker on their car. It's like asking whether you dye your hair or how you got that big scar on your face. Most people I have met here just come right out and ask.

My American friend Serena was recently stopped for buying the wrong kind of ticket on the tram. The security guy whose job it is to be mean and bust people without tickets asked her, once he figured out where she was from, "Romney or Obama?". She said "Obama," which must have been the right answer, because he let her go without a fine. If she'd said "Romney," it might have cost her forty euros. Or maybe he was just messing with her.

It's not my first presidential election abroad. I was in Chile in 2000 during Bush - Gore recount. That was more difficult to explain, though I could express myself a lot better in Spanish than I can now in German.

Maybe during the elections here next year, I will ask all the Germans I know who they will be voting for. That's what they deserve for thinking I'd put marzipan in chocolate chip cookies.