Fact: The grass actually is greener in Hannover. It doesn't snow much and there are no frigid temperatures to kill the grass and turn it brown. In the winter it's just a pleasantly dormant pale green.
Weather and lawn care aside, the whole greener grass saying comes to mind a lot on the days that Brian and I reminisce about life in Minnesota. How much do we trust ourselves to remember the good along with the bad and the mundane? When does happy nostalgia take over?
Let's consider this week's exhibit of greener grass: live music.
Fact: The Twin Cities have a vibrant local music scene. There are a lot of famous bands that come from Minnesota and on any night of the week, you can find good live music at venues large and small.
Hannover seems to have mostly big, expensive concerts in big, expensive stadiums. It's rare to find a bar that just happens to have a band playing that night. It's something we like to complain about.
Of course, when we lived in St. Paul, did we go to a ton of live music shows? Of course not. Or at least not as many as we should have. We took it for granted, like great restaurants and 10,000 lakes and cheese curds.
Maybe the grass really was greener and we were busy mowing the lawn.
On Thursday night, we may have found our answer. We went to Tante Minchen's. That name translates as something like Aunt Mindy's (I kind of made up the Mindy part of the translation, but it fits). Tante Michen's is not much bigger than our apartment. It has a stage at the front and a long bar and dim lighting. There are live bands there a few nights a week, with no cover charge.
"This is the place we have been looking for," Brian said, as we listened to a blues act called Deep Down South.
A word on the blues in Germany: The only reason we gave this band a chance was that the singer is from the U.S. I don't even trust a white man to sing the blues right, much less one from Germany. With great social programs and not a lot of rhythm, how can a German really get the blues? Luckily for us, blues man Greg Copeland is a black guy from the South. This gives him automatic coolness points in Germany. His guitarist is a white German, but he played well and wore sunglasses the whole time, so that was ok.
Other than the waitress and a music fan sitting by the bar, we were easily the youngest members of the audience. We sat next to the only other people who were clapping during the songs and singing along and cheering. That's how we knew that they were Americans too. The woman's name is Sydney Ellis, and she's also a musician. Her husband, with wavy gray hair flowing down his back, is her guitar player. They told us that Germany is a great place for musicians to live, if you can get over how the audiences behave. They sit and listen respectfully, then applaud after each song as if listening to classical music. The last time we saw an American band in concert, the lead singer said into his microphone that it was like "performing in front of a firing squad". I think he spoke fast enough in English that most people didn't understand. They just clapped politely.
So score one for Hannover. Tante Minchen's is a place that could almost fit in if it were in St. Paul. Though it would help a lot if they served cheese curds...
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