Monday, September 29, 2014

Südstadt

Südstadt means 'south city' and it's where we live. This area of the city is known for its elderly population and quiet, family-friendly neighborhoods. We are neither old nor do we have kids, but Brian and I manage to live on the lower-rent edge of Südstadt anyway.

pronunciation tip: the little dots over the u make süd rhyme with rude, dude, or food.

There's not a lot of nightlife in Südstadt. There are some playgrounds, a big farmers' market on Fridays, and a few bars and restaurants. It's not unusual to dodge massive 4 wheel drive strollers or old ladies on slow bicycles as you walk down the street. Südstadt is the part of Hannover with the fewest foreigners, so we really don't belong. That must be why we ended up on the lower-rent end of the neighborhood.

Babies and old people, all in one group!
The weekly market



Südstadt was built around 1900 and, like much of the city,  was heavily damaged during WWII. Two very important buildings still stand. The first is the city library:




The next is the Gluckauf high rise. Gluckauf means something like 'good luck'. It was built in 1930, during the housing shortage between the wars, Was it good luck? I guess it's still standing, so that means something.

You might notice the shirtless man on the grass. He's playing badminton with his girlfriend. Germans like badminton, but do not seem to care for frisbee, which is what I would play. It was not quite warm enough for him to be shirtless.  I didn't mind.

Both the high rise and the library were built in the style of brick expressionism. I know very little about architecture, but I can look things up. So what I've learned is that brick expressionism was developed in Germany and focused on buildings made entirely of brick, with brick ornamentation in the form of patterns, angles, etc. It was popular in the 1920s and early 30s and the Nazis loved it. Architect Karl Elkart designed the library, and he did the Gluckauf building together with another brick expressionist, Fritz Hoeger. They were members of the Nazi party and Elkart was also in the SS. He was in charge of planning the 'Jewish houses', where Jews were forced to live as their homes were confiscated. The Nazi party headquarters were also located in this our part of town, but I think the building is long gone.



Aside from brick expressionism, there are some regular houses still standing too, tall, brightly painted ones that predate the brick buildings:
There's a hair salon in the bottom floor of the yellow buliding. I got my hair cut there mostly because I like the building. I liked the haircut less.
Aside from architecture and markets, what else happens in Südstadt? There's a good Turkish kebab shop and a friendly Indian restaurant. The neighborhood backs up to the city forest and lies alongside the Maschsee lake. It's peaceful and you never have to walk more than 3 blocks to find a bakery. No wonder the old people like it.



Thursday, September 25, 2014

Hop on hop off Hannover

In the next few posts, I am going to give you a little tour around Hannover. Here's a little preview of your hop on hop off trip with me:

Südstadt - families and old people
Linden - hipsters and bums
Nordstadt - immigrants
Calenberger Neustadt - Catholics and Jews
List - yuppies
I might add in a few other places here are there.

I also find it entertaining that the word for district or neighborhood in German is Bezirk.
I hope the following posts don't drive you Bezirk - ha! That's a terrible bilingual pun. I apologize.

Who needs this bus anyway?

Monday, September 22, 2014

What Germans and iguanas have in common

Last week we had a few warm days here in Germany. You could call it Indian Summer even, except there were never any Native Americans here, and the Hannover Indians hockey team doesn't count. With the sun shining and soft summery breezes blowing, you'd think that everyone would pull out their flip flops to enjoy those last, precious, warm days. Not the Germans. They leave the house in scarves and jackets, with a sweater or two underneath. If it gets really toasty, a German might remove one scarf.

German people seem to have a lower inner temperature than the rest of us, like reptiles. An iguana solves this issue by basking in the sun on a rock. A German handles it by wearing a lot of clothes.

I am not the only one who noticed. My Polish friend Kaska, after living in Germany for 17 years, still thinks it's weird. So we decided to take some photos of these crazy Germans, in an anthropological sort of way. Keep in mind it was about 74 degrees Farenheit and we were in summer dresses.

Black leather jackets for Indian Summer

She has daringly removed one layer

The man in khaki

Wouldn't want to take off that suit coat

You'd think that teenage guys would be the first to wear shorts...

Does over-dressing have something to do with the psychology of German culture? Brian has a very strong theory - the Germans remember how their army invaded Russia in 1941 for what was supposed to be a short-term siege. They wore summer uniforms. And look how that turned out. You can't blame Germans for wanting to avoid freezing to death in the future, even on a summery day in Hannover.

Or maybe they really are part iguana.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

I'm a fan

Living on another continent means that there are events that I miss back home. The tradeoff for these past few years of great travels and exploring another culture is that I can't always be with the people I love when something big happens. Today is one of those days. My grandma turned 90 last week and today is her birthday party. Family will be flying in from other states, braving tolls and city traffic, trying to keep their kids' clothes clean long enough to make it to the big event.

I wish I could be there too. But because I can't, and because Gram is one of my greatest and most beloved fans, this post is for her.


My Aunt Linda has asked many people to write up their thoughts about Grandma. They will be read out loud at the party and compiled in a book as well. Here is what I wrote:

Some of the best times I’ve spent with Gram were during the summers. There were a few years when I'd stay with her and Grandpa, just me, for 3 or 4 days. These visits were full of familiar things - spicy gum drops in a bowl, exploring the basement fruit cellar, looking through old photo albums - but also full of things I'd never done before. Once she put my hair in curlers and had me sleep on them. During that warm night in the attic I must have woken up every hour, but for the next two days I had, as Gram put it "a perfect page boy". Then she had to explain to me what a page boy was. We rode bikes to the shopping mall, took the El downtown, and rode the city bus back. As a suburban kid, I found this glamorous and exciting. We went to the apartment building of one of her friends and swam in a pool on the roof. I had been to maybe one or two apartments in my life and in none of them could you swim on top of the building.

While I stayed with Gram, she sang with the radio while washing dishes. She scooped ice cream for me at every opportunity. She told me stories about my mom and my aunts, who despite being grandmothers themselves now, are still called "the girls". She took me to the Elmwood Family Restaurant (the Family) where we drank from red plastic glasses and ordered sandwiches too big to finish.

Those stays were special because I had her all to myself. Shortly after that, I became a busy teenager and Grandpa needed her at home more, so the summer visits ended. But she has made me feel just that special on so many occasions. I know I am not the only one. With all of the people in her life - so many friends, grandkids, nieces and nephews, and others who we are related in ways I can never recall - she has a way to remember just what they've been doing, to give them her full attention, to show how much she cares.

I am sure there could be enough people at this party to fill 3 or 4 restaurants. Gram, you have a huge fan club. I wish I could be there to celebrate with you too, but know that I will always be one of your biggest fans. 



Friday, September 19, 2014

The bobble head question

It's easy to get excited when there's an envelope from DHL in the mailbox. It means I have a package on the way. But when I open it and see a neon green slip of paper inside, I make a noise that's somewhere between a whine and a groan. This is a sound that is reserved for the notice that says I need to pick up my package at the Zollamt, the customs office. If you have been reading this blog long enough, you may remember that I wrote about the Zollamt before. That's when I had to go for the first time and didn't know what to expect. This was my 4th or 5th trip out there, and I still didn't know what to expect.

Why does a package go to the customs office? If it comes directly from a company outside of the EU, it will go there. And you will probably have to pay 19% VAT tax on it. I don't claim to really understand VAT (value added tax). What I know is that it taxes the increase in price added at each stage of the transaction: sale, resale, etc., whereas a sales tax is just paid by the end user.  I am taking an economics class online now and am really glad we are not studying VAT (yet).

Aside from merchandise that you've ordered through an online shopping habit (I'm in recovery),  there are a lot of other things that may end up at the Zollamt. Anything with suspicious content could go there - alcohol, perfume, chemicals, bombs, that sort of thing. And bobble heads, apparently.

To get to the Zollamt I have to ride my bike almost all the way to the airport. I would like to someday ride right up to the terminal, lock up against a pole, and jump on a plane. Maybe there's even a long term bike parking lot there. My only problem would be the luggage; Id have to travel light.


The Zollamt is an ugly building in an industrial park, with bad lighting and linoleum floors. It's home to a closet full of treasures - care packages, exciting imported purchases, birthday gifts, explosive chemicals, that sort of thing. My neon green slip of paper got me a brown cardboard box. The staff at the Zollamt, who look like they want to be anywhere else, make you open the box in front of them. This is so you can't hide your contraband I guess, or so if it explodes you are the only one injured. This is what I found inside.

Thank you, Kay!

The man behind the counter asked me about the thing in the little box. I wanted to explain to him that it's a James Shields bobble head and that the Royals have a real shot at the playoffs for the first time since my husband has been a devoted fan. However, I did not know the word for 'bobble head' in German, if one even exists. So I told him it was a toy. He didn't seem to believe that answer and asked me to unpack the item. The wobbling over sized head of Big Game James almost made him crack a smile. Almost. I was free to go - no VAT required.

My friend Kaska, upon hearing this story, decided that the closest term to bobble head in German is Wackel Dackel. This is a little dachshund statue that you put in the back of your car and it wobbles its head as you drive. Which raises another question - in English we call them Dachshunds, thinking we are saying something in German. But the name in German is Dackel. Dach means roof, so does dachshund mean roof dog? Languages are confusing.


It seems like the more I understand about Germany, the more questions I have. Should someone start importing bobble heads to Germany? Can you leave your bike at the airport? Should I bother trying to understand VAT? What is a dachshund anyway?

The big question, though, is whether the Royals can battle it out to make the playoffs and keep winning to make my husband a very happy fan. Maybe the guy at the Zollamt would even cheer for them too, in a grumpy sort of way.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Pant suits and ravens - German women at work

Angela Merkel is arguably the most powerful woman in the world. You might assume that she is only the most accomplished of a long line of women executives, political leaders and academics. That's not the case. One of my biggest surprises in Germany is that women's equality seems a few decades behind where it should be. It's not an issue of rights; women can do everything that men can do here. It's just that they don't. There is a subtle sexism in German culture. At least I see it that way. Of course I went to a college where one of the most popular majors was Women's and Gender Studies and it was cool not to shave your armpits (I was never that cool).

I found some numbers that explain the issue:
Women make up only 4% of the management in Germany's top companies, according to the statistics.
Of the women who are employed, almost half of them work part-time. And women's wages are 22% lower than men's, a gap that is one of the biggest in Europe, after Austria.

There are efforts to try closing the professional gender gap. Starting in 2016, an affirmative action-style quota willrequire 30% of corporate board members to be female. But progress is slow.

You could blame it on babies. Right now, Germans have fewer babies than anyone else in Europe - 1.3 children per woman - so the government has created incentives to have kids. Moms have the right to year-long paid maternity leaves, the right to return to work part-time after having a baby and a guaranteed job to go back to for up to three years after the baby arrives. Once a woman has children, it's rare for her to keep working full-time. According to the NY Times, "only about 14 percent of German mothers with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 percent of those with two."

Don't get me wrong - I think children are wonderful and families are too. And it's great that in Germany there are policies that make it possible for parents to stay home with their kids. But I also think that there's an inequality here that makes it difficult for a woman to excel, that proverbial glass ceiling, that should have gone away 40 years ago. And the numbers of women in leadership are so small that I think the issue impacts all women, not just those with young children. So don't blame the babies.

What's the cultural, psychological root of the issue? I am not an anthropologist or a psychologist. In fact, I am not an ist of any kind, but I have read about one theory that seems to make sense.. The whole 3rd Reich era made gender roles different in Germany than in other Western countries. There was a 'cult of motherhood' where the Nazis encouraged men to go off to work and fight and women to raise little Aryan babies at home.



That mentality stuck around long after the war. Until 1957, women who wanted to work had to get official permission from their husbands. Even today, there's a word for women who leave their children to go to work: Rabenmutter. It's a raven mother, a horrible woman who doesn't love her kids and abandons them. We don't have this kind of an insult in the U.S. The closest thing is 'latch key kid', which no one actually says anymore. It sounded pretty cool when I was a little - being able to come home alone and having my own key.

The funny thing is that I am sitting at home writing this post while my husband is working. That's not the fault of a glass ceiling so much as my fault for being a foreigner. Compared to what most people with my level of language skill are doing, or what training process they have to go through to get a job, I am lucky working part-time at the international school. Otherwise I might be enrolled in a 3 year program training to be an apprentice window washer. If you have seen the windows in my apartment, you'd know that would be unfortunate.

So if your image of the German women has to do with pant suits and political power, you might be a little off base. The German women might have the power to eradicate men peeing while standing up, but so far they haven't broken in to the top levels of the working world. As you can tell, I find this topic interesting and read up on it as I was working on this post. It's a little nerdy, almost something you'd find in a Women's and Gender Studies class, minus the hairy armpits.




From the New York Times, 2011

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The safe questions

I started my new German class last night. It's a conversation class, meaning no grammar exercises and no workbooks. The teacher is an aging hippie who is the first German to ask me, when she read my last name, whether I was related to Joseph McCarthy.

She mentioned that there's an opportunity to ask any questions we have about living in Germany. It being the first day of class, I think we were a little shy and people asked safe questions like "why are all the stores closed on Sundays?". No one asked why Germans become agressive, misguided and unorderly as soon as they get in the swimming pool. And no one asked whether the country's Kindergeld, parent leave and other pro-natal policies will really help the population stop shrinking.

These are questions for another day, or just for my blog. I'll write more about my classmates later - they tend to come and go for the first few days so I am not sure whether the 2 Mongolian women or the guy from Colombia will stick around.  Luckily, I don't think any of them associate me with the Red Scare of the 1950s. Or maybe they do, and were just too shy to ask about it on day one.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Putting the party back in Partei



In music, there is a band called The Band. And in German politics, there is a party called The Party. In German, the word for political party is Partei. It is slightly different than the word for party, (surprise!) Party. Someone in the German language purity tower decided that these two very similar words could not be spelled the same way. I think that means that politics is not allowed to be confused with fun. There is a movement, however, to stir a little laughter back into politics. And they are having so much fun that you could just take them seriously.

The party is just called "Die Partei". The Party's platform is neither right nor left. It's just satire. They were founded by a satirical magazine called Titanic. The American equivalent would be a political party founded by The Onion.

To me, German politics seem to lack drama. There are no animals to represent parties and make for funny political cartoons. They just use colors. All the candidates' campaign posters look more or less the same - with photos of competent looking people in suits with earnest slogans (see my post Election day. It happened. for more). But the oddest part is that parties often form coalitions. Rather than hating their opponents for the dirty, mud-slinging scum bags they must be, these parties join forces and govern together. Right now, the CDU (right-ish) and the SPD (left-ish) are in a coalition. Maybe they still hate each others' guts, but they overcome those feelings to work together in a mature, adult manner. Funny.

Die Partei breaks the mold. Their agenda includes the following:
  • Abolish daylight savings time
  • Construct a wall on the border with Switzerland ("the Swiss have earned it")
  • Cap personal assets at 1 million euros
  • Allow fracking and apply it particularly to overweight environmental minister Peter Altmaier to unleash tremendous amounts of energy inside him
  • Limit pay of executives to 25,000 times that of his/her (who are we kidding, his) worker's pay
  • Initiate a war of agression against Lichtenstein 
  • Put Angela Merkel on trial (there is a sub-committee called MILFs Against Merkel)
  • Rebuild the Berlin Wall
  • Change the voting age to 12-52 years. Anyone older than 52 shouldn't vote.
Thomas Hintner, Generalsekretär
Hi Hintner!
Die Partei also has a youth wing, called the Hintner Jugend (Hintner youth). Hintner is the party's general secretary. The young members of the party have an official greeting: "Hi, Hintner!" I can only imagine them saying this in uniform, with feet together, shoulders back, arms stretched out at an angle, with goofy smiles and fingers waving crazily.

There are probably a lot of clever and funny points on the party's agenda that I don't appreciate. That's because I don't understand all the historical/political references and because I don't really get the German sense of humor. There's a stereotype out there that Germans don't have a sense of humor. I don't believe that. I do believe that in a culture where people don't laugh out loud in public (unless they are drunk) and a language with 15 letter words and layers upon layers of connotation, it's hard for anyone else to know what the punch line is.


It's even hard to know if Die Partei is a joke or not. Last year they were certified as a legitimate party. They won 0.2% of seats in the 2013 federal election, and one of Germany's seats in the 2014 European parliament elections. If this trend continues, in about 100 years we might have a Berlin Wall again, or a war against Lichtenstein. It's hard to know what the future holds. But for now, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, they are putting the party back in Partei.


Recruiting some Hintner youth at a Hannover street festival

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Cocoons and current events

It's a little cliché to say that the only news in the papers or on TV is bad news. But I can't help feeling like right now, there are more awful, sad, painful things going on in the world than usual. Syria, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, ebola in West Africa, not to mention violence in Somalia, Libya, St. Louis... and those are just the ones that make headlines. On top of that, a handful of young and healthy people I know are dealing with life-threatening illnesses.

It's enough to make you crawl under the bed and stay there. Unfortunately, our Ikea bed frame is way too low to the ground. I would not fit. The Swedes that design those things think of everything. I can't hide in the closet either. German apartments don't have any. 

Since my efforts at hiding from the world thwarted by European engineering, I have to consider my options. I could disconnect the internet, but that would just be crazy. I could pretend to be an ostrich and stick my head in the sand, but I would find sand in my ears for months. Or I could just keep informed and hope for better times.

I'm working on a craft project now that has nothing to do with world events or genocides or epidemics. But it maybe it's a sign of better things to come.



A certain young friend of ours will be turning one year old in a couple of weeks. Over the summer I was inspired to make her something. I started small, but like its very hungry relative, this caterpillar just grew and grew and grew.

When the time is right or when things get scary, the caterpillar hides in its cocoon, which is much more cozy that sticking your head in the sand. And as every young reader knows, he comes out bolder and brighter than ever, then flies away. Is that cliché? Sure it is. I don't care. I like it anyway.

Yes, there are bad things happening. Is it enough to make you stop reading the news? Almost.
But even ostriches can only put their heads in the sand for so long. I imagine it makes them sneeze after a while.  So I'll keep reading the in case there's some good news to be found (and in order to keep up with my current events expert of a husband). But I might need to take a break from it once in a while, and hide. I wonder if Ikea has some kind of furniture designed for that.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

My latest

School is back in session for the international set in Hannover, which is my excuse for not posting much lately. I am back to work - ten hours a week in my new job as college counselor, subbing a little and coaching cross country twice a week. I started another online class for my Master's program while our nonprofit Play Global is going strong. German class starts up again soon too.

I think if it was possible catch ADD from having tons of little things to do, I would have caught it by now. I guess it's not contagious, though you can't blame me for being easily distracted. Or maybe you can.

So if I start talking to people in my German class about filling out their college applications or fundraising for baseball programs in a room full of 4th graders, I'll know it's time to scale back a little.

Until then, I'll get my blog back on track for you.

About Me

My photo
Thanks for coming to my blog. It started as a way to keep in touch with family and friends, and now has become an ongoing project. I'm an American living in Germany and trying to travel whenever I can. I write about my experiences as an expatriate (the interesting ones and the embarrassing ones), and about my travels. There are some recurring characters in this blog, particularly my husband Brian and several of our friends. The title comes from the idea that living in a foreign country means making a lot of mistakes. So the things you used to do easily you now have to try over and over again. Hopefully, like me, you can laugh at how idiotic it feels. If you have happened upon my blog, then welcome. Knowing that people are reading what I write makes me keep going. Feel free to write comments or suggestions for future posts.