My trash, your problem?

Here's a cultural question: what do you do about a bunch of trash bags on the sidewalk?

Do you a) pick them up and put them in a bin, dumpster, or receptacle of some kind,
or b) leave them there but call the city to find out why they have not been picked up, then post a sign about your conversation?
What I have learned recently is that if you are American, you choose a. If you are German, you choose b.

Normally, our ultra-complex garbage sorting system requires that we put yellow bags (with plastic and aluminum), and blue bags (with paper) out on the sidewalk on Wednesday nights for Thursday morning pick-up. But since our street has been under construction since October, that system is a little off. The trucks can't get through, and we have been using some dumpsters on the side street that the city put there for us. Once the street was half-finished, though, no one was sure whether pick-up would resume. The first week, several of the neighbors, including us, put our recycling bags out.

This is Sallstrasse. Our place is on the right, by the white car. The Indian restaurant is on the left.
That is not important to this story other than so that you can see just how close it is.

I did learn during this process that our sorted garbage is not necessarily recycled. A lot of it is incinerated to produce energy. There is some special combination of yellow bags, blue bags, and regular trash that produces the highest amount of electricity when it burns. Germany even imports waste from other countries to keep the incinerators going. 

After two days I was tired of looking at our own home-grown trash bags, and carried them all over to the dumpsters myself. This was probably mistake number one. Maybe people thought that the trucks had made it through. Maybe they thought the recycling fairy had come. I don't know what they thought, but I do know that in the last two weeks bags started to pile up on the sidewalk and just sat there. They got rained on, they got kicked, they got in the way of the bike cellar door. They were gross.

I resisted my American impulse to just pick them up again, since I knew that would only prolong the issue. At this point when an American would say "take care of your own damn trash," a German would say, "you pay very high taxes and once the trash is outside of your door, it's the city's problem." I suspected this might be the general attitude, but wasn't sure until I saw the sign posted in our stairwell by Meike, the ultra-organized woman on the first floor who led our fight against the landlady a few months ago.

People down the street did the same thing. Their bags are still out there.

Meike had called the city to complain. The sign she posted included direct quotes from the city employee responsible for such calls, who said things about trash/recycling generally not being picked up from construction zones, and dumpsters being available for this purpose. I could have told you that (though maybe not very eloquently in German). She did get them to agree to pick up the trash, just this once, on Monday morning. Then an even stranger thing happened. Some time between when she posted the sign on Saturday and when I left the house for the first time on Sunday late-morning, the bags disappeared. It would be strange if the city had come by on a Saturday night or Sunday. It would be even stranger if the neighbors had picked up all the bags themselves.

This is a mystery that may never be solved. And it's a cultural divide that may never be bridged. I would be embarrassed if my garbage, recyclable or not, was out on the street for days. If I were German, maybe I would rather pick up the phone than pick up my bags.

Neoprene and the random channel

I have a bad habit. At this time of year, I get the urge to wear spandex and neoprene and make my body do things it doesn't want to do. It's not a fetish or a punishment, it's a triathlon.

Triathlon sounds hard. If I mention this habit, people are either wowed because it sounds difficult or confused as to why I would bother and think I am really weird. Arguably, anyone who's in decent physical shape can finish a sprint triathlon - and there are always a few competitors with beer bellies spilling over their bike shorts.

Nevertheless, I don't talk about it too much. But I am discussing it here with you because a) you can't talk back and ask me a lot of questions and if you give me bewildered looks I can't see them, and b) yesterday, I competed in the Wasserstadt (water city) Triathlon in Limmer.

Limmer is a sort of first-ring suburb on the edge of Hannover. It's known the water city because it is where the Leine River, the Leine Canal, and the Hannover-Linden Stichkanal all intersect. I just looked up the translation for Stichkanal and I got "random channel". Sometimes Google translate is funny. Anyway, beyond Limmer, these canals come together and flow into the Mittelland Canal, which is home to Hannover's main harbor. The Mittelland runs east to west across Germany, connecting major rivers that flow north to south. Hannover's VW plant and Continental Tire factories are located near the canal so they can ship their stuff out via the waterways.

I jumped in the Stichkanal yesterday afternoon (Germans like to sleep in on the weekends) into the water which was 15.8 degrees. It's good that they measure in Celsius because I only have a rough idea of how cold that is. If you told me the water was just 60 degrees Farenheit, I might have dreaded it a little more.

This is the swim course. Don't look for me in this picture; I think it's from last year's race

The race was cool, windy, but at least dry. It has been raining here for at least a week and it feels like November. I can't tell you exactly how I did. There were two divisions for the short course: one for competitors who had a Deutsche Triathlon Union member card, and one for everyone else. If you look me up in the "everyone else" category, I took 3rd of 50 women. If you put them all together, I was 30th of 152 women. (There were around 550 competitors altogether. I am still amazed at how few women do competitive sports in this country). So do I compare myself with the people in my division or with the people who do enough races to make it worth paying 170 euros for the member card? I don't know. I did take extra satisfaction, with my 3 euro one-day license, in passing those people. My muscles tell me this morning that I raced hard and they are not happy with me, so I did something right.

I even had a small fan club. Brian was there of course, and so were our friends Andrew, Katja, and Sankey. It was not a good course for spectators. While we were biking through small towns and running in the woods, there wasn't much to see. They did get a good view of chilly people in wetsuits getting out of the canal, though. Thankfully, neoprene holds in the beer bellies.

My intrepid fans: Sankey, Andrew, Katja

Housewarming

This is the latest chapter in the story about our neighbors. To recap - first the people downstairs complained about noise from our washing machine, then we dropped ashes and tools and a passport on them, then there was a meeting about standing up to the landlord, and we are sure there has been gossip about us along the way. We did get invited to another neighbor party a few weeks ago, which we skipped. There wasn't a great excuse other than we were getting the house ready for Serena's baby shower and that we didn't feel like being in a potentially awkward social situation. It's not that the neighbors are bad people, it's just that when you are the only non-native German speakers in the room you either just talk to each other or the two people there who are comfortable speaking English interrupt their normal socializing to talk to you because you're a novelty.

So when the new neighbors Norbert and Jorg invited us to their housewarming, we kind of had to go. Novelty or not, I didn't want to get a reputation as never associating at all. And luckily, we had another party to go to later. Plus, as the only foreigners in the building, maybe we'd have some solidarity with the only gay people in the building. So we went early with our escape plan ready, and it was ok. I was glad we went early because can handle German-speaking social settings when there are only a few people there. Once there are multiple conversations happening at once, I'm lost.
 I learned that their apartment is way cooler and better decorated than ours, Norbert can pull off a bow-tie, and the apartment opened up because the previous tenant died there. Now I understand why I haven't seen him around.

By the time the people from the third floor who are the target of things falling from our balcony arrived, it was time to go. Multiple conversations were happening and the hallway was full of people. Norbert and Jorg seemed genuinely glad we had come, and we liked them a lot. Did our appearance score us points with the neighbors? Will there be more gossip about us now, or less? Hard to say. If they are all talking at once, I can't understand anyway.

Boss pork chops

We are going to the Bruce Springsteen concert on Tuesday. We also went last year, in Cologne, with Kaska and Thorsten (our Krakow traveling buddies) and our host, their friend Alex.

Alex is a serious Springsteen fan. Maybe devout is a better word. He knows every word to every song and has multiple t-shirts and memorabilia and other stuff that serious fans have. What I learned about Alex when we stayed at his house is that when he likes something he likes it intensely, fiercely and fanatically.

Even though I am nowhere near as big a fan as Alex, or Brian, I still like Springsteen's music and love a good live performance. And, unlike in the U.S., the concerts in German venues don't have an end time. The band doesn't have to stop because of noise ordinances or police issues. In Cologne Bruce played for almost four hours, having a blast on stage the whole time. One of the three German stops on his tour this year is little old Hannover. Not only that, the stadium where Springsteen is playing is in walking distance of our apartment. You can even see it from the balcony.

Getting back to Alex, what I learned when we stayed at his house is that there are three things that he loves intensely, devoutly, passionately. Other than his wife and kids, those things are Hamburg's HSV soccer team, Bruce Springsteen, and, most recently, barbecue. Yes, the art of the grill. He's dived into it and taken classes and read up and tried and tested different methods and marinades and sauces. When Alex first explained this love to us, Brian's Kansas City side perked up (I think he acquired a bit of a twang). He started to talk about rubs and sauce from Gates and Haywards and burnt ends and pulled pork and the differences between Carolina and Kansas City and Texas style barbecue. They had another love in common.

If you put these two things together, what you get is this that Alex has taken a couple of days off work, is traveling to Hannover from Cologne for the Springsteen concert, he's coming over for a pre-Boss barbecue. There will be 6 or 8 other people there too, but Alex was the inspiration for us acquiring some big fat KC style pork chops. Brian made it clear to me a couple of months ago that I had the important job of acquiring said pork chops. This is harder than it sounds. First of all, we are now buying and eating a limited amount of meat, which we know comes from "happy," sustainably raised animals. More importantly, they don't make big pork chops in Germany. There is a lot of pork to be found but the chop is generally no thicker than my finger. Getting a pork chop worthy of sauce imported from KC was going to take some effort.

So last Friday, I went to the weekly farmers' market where I sometimes buy meat from a "happy" butcher, and put my German language skills to the test. I asked to special order chops that were double the normal thickness. I didn't know if it was weird to ask for a special cut of meat, or to put in an order at all.  My habit in potentially awkward German cultural situation like this is to go for cuteness. I smiled and told the butcher lady that we were having a special American barbecue and my husband really wanted to have special thick pork chops like we have back home. It probably didn't sound quite that good in German but I was hoping she'd like my accent and that would score me points. Or maybe she'd just feel sorry for me, which could have the same effect.

Apparently it worked because today I went back to the market and picked up five big fat pork chops, somewhere between 2 and 3 fingers thick. There is a bottle of Hayward's in the fridge waiting for the big day. Will the pork chops meet Alex's standards? I'll have to let you know next week.
If Alex is not intensely, fanatically in love with them, he'll have to eat somewhere else.

Thanks

It's a day of sad news in places not far away. A bloody terrorist attack in London, devastation from the Oklahoma tornado, a little boy killed in a St Paul mudslide while looking for fossils. There are people I know well who are sick and stressed out and grieving.

Most of my posts are light and silly and maybe a little bit interesting, but I haven't lost sight of how completely lucky I am. Maybe a better word is blessed. I won't get into the specifics but I know I have a lot of the things you can see and the things you can't. I know that life will get difficult at some point, but now (despite my basic getting-around-in-a-foreign-country challenges) it is happily simple.

I am feeling grateful today, so thanks everybody, for making this blog a meaningful project for me.

Berlin... again

It's May in Germany (and everywhere else in the world, actually), which means that nobody works very hard. We had May 1st off for Labor Day, then the 9th and 10th off for Ascension, and this Monday was the Pentecost holiday. So even though we'd just been out of town, Brian and I decided to go back to one of our favorite cities - Berlin.

We'd been there before but never in warm weather, never along the river, never in a hotel so colorful it was like staying in a box of Froot Loops. When we checked in, they asked if it was ok to put us in a pink and yellow room. I of course said yes.

The lobby

The outside of the hotel Nhow, from the River Spree. The hanging bridge reminds me of the Guthrie Theater in Mpls.

Chunks of the Berlin Wall were decorations on the sidewalk along the hotel patio

Basically, we wandered much of the weekend. On Saturday the weather was gross and grim and appropriate for a long walking quest in search of Karl Marx Allee and other socialist architecture.
Karl Marx Allee was built in the 1950s and early 60s, and originally named Stalinallee. It's remarkable because it was a huge boulevard with fancy "wedding cake style" buildings. Even though these buildings looked luxurious, they were built to house common workers.

On Karl Marx Allee

On Karl Marx Allee

We went back to the Cuban bar where we'd had such a great night in February of 2012. While it wasn't quite the same, I still enjoyed a delicious mojito while Brian bought a Cuban cigar from behind the bar and smoked it in the cellar. We also talked to the bartenders (in Spanish) about baseball and where to go when we visit Cuba. I don't know when that trip will happen, but we are going to go since it's not really illegal from here and since the Castros won't be around forever.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day, and we took the "bridge tour" - a boat ride over the Spree river and the canals around Berlin, going under something like 65 bridges. Sure, it was touristy but we had nowhere else to be except on a boat in the sun for almost four hours. And we were tourists. It also gave us a new perspective on this city where the old and ornate and new and raw and decaying somehow fit together. Grafitti doesn't look ugly there and construction is just part of the landscape.

The Technical Museum, with a "raisin bomber" from the Berlin Airlift

"vote for the minimum wage" mural

I know we will go back to Berlin again at some point. There are a lot of neighborhoods to explore, and a lot of its stories to uncover. Though when we do return, I want to stay in the Froot Loop hotel, and I will probably ask for a green and purple room.

Krakow - Kazimierz

Where can you visit a medieval synagogue, a bar so run-down that it's trendy, and a square full of street food? In Kazimierz, of course.

This part of the city was once its own city, across the river from the rest of Krakow. Eventually the river dried up and was filled in, and Kazimierz became part of Krakow. It was the Jewish district of the city for hundreds of years, and still has almost as many synagogues as central Krakow has churches (meaning, a lot). The Nazis established the Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of Kazimierz, and after the Holocaust the communists didn't pay much attention to it. The neighborhood was mostly vacant, poor and crime-ridden. Many of the scenes from Schindler's List were filmed here in the mid-90s, since no effort or money had gone into updating the neighborhood since the 1940s.
Here are a couple of Kazimierz photos:

These days, Kazimierz is the place to be. If "shabby chic" were an urban planning term rather than a home design fad, this would be it. Edgy, hip, artsy, raw - this is the cool part of town for going out. There are a lot of bars with old photos and mismatched furniture and communist-era posters on the walls. There are shops and galleries and some touristy restaurants with live Klezmer music.

I didn't really know what Klezmer music was until I heard it and realized it's like a soundtrack from a movie scene you've watched but can't quite remember. There is a lot of violin and accordion and, in the case of one band we heard in concert, bongos (though it is highly likely that one band we heard was just a front for some kind of Polish gypsy mafia). Here's a good Klezmer music clip if you are interested.

Kazimierz is where we ended all of our evenings in Krakow. A couple of times they ended with the eating of Zapienkanka, Krakow's most popular street food. It's basically an open-faced sub sandwich, with whatever toppings you order and a bunch of ketchup or mayo or dressing on top.

Credit for information about the history of Kazimierz goes mostly to Kaska Tours, but credit for eating the Zapienkanka in the foreground goes to Brian.