Join the team

Dear readers,

I am going to take a break from my usual commentary and tell you a little about what I do when I am not pondering things like fizzy water, mustard udders and automats. Much of my time and energy these days goes into a little nonprofit called Play Global.

It started as the idea of our good friend Tom (Dizzy) Gillespie. A few years later, it has grown into an actual, legitimate organization. The idea is to teach baseball to kids in places where its lessons - respect, teamwork, self-confidence and fun - can make a big difference.

Now take a minute to close your eyes and imagine... wait, don't close your eyes. Keep reading and picture this: 

Kids are running around in a park, they are shouting, laughing. Some are boys and some are girls. They are throwing a ball around. 
Now picture that these children have not met before, they do not live in the same neighborhood, their parents are not friends. They don't even speak the same language at home, and their cultures have been divided for centuries. 
Somehow, as they play together, none of that matters.

This is what Play Global is working on in Israel. Along with the Israel Association of Baseball, we are running a program called Baseball Le'Kulam, or Baseball for All. The simple idea - bring Jewish and Arab kids together in Israel, teach them to play baseball, let them get to know each other. And it works. We had our first clinic in March and I got to see it first hand. Here's my favorite quote from a Jewish girl who participated:

“The Arab kids were not really so different - and they were more normal than most of the kids in my class."

Got 3 minutes? Watch this news clip to learn more (also see Tom looking great on camera):

And all this costs some money. Not a ton of money, but we can't do it for free.
The real reason I am changing topics today is to ask for your help. I'm inviting you to join our team:
https://www.crowdrise.com/baseballinisrael-playglobal/fundraiser/playglobal

I don't ask much of you, other than to bear with me during my ramblings. I don't advertise and I enjoy writing for you without even knowing who most of you are. 
But I am asking to be a part of this project and make a donation. How big or small is up to you. 

Tom and I are running an online campaign to keep Baseball Le'Kulam going for the rest of this year. If we can raise enough, it could carry forward into next year too.

You can donate online. Here is the link one more time:
 https://www.crowdrise.com/baseballinisrael-playglobal/fundraiser/playglobal

If you can donate, or even if you can't,  please share this cause and the link with your friends and contacts. Kids, baseball, respect, peace... causes we can all believe in.

If you want to read a funnier blog post about the same cause, check out the King of Jewish Baseball. 

And thank you, in advance. Now back to our regularly scheduled rambling.

The real Germany - travel guide

We've had a lot of visitors lately. The guest bedroom that usually houses our wet laundry is now housing guests. So after three weekends in a row of showing people around town, I have come up with some instructions on how to have an authentic German experience. Forget lederhosen and oompah bands, and welcome to the real Germany.

1. Ride a bike
Want to get around town like a German? Hop on a bike. Want to get run over by a German? Walk around in the bike lane. It will start with the polite ding of a bell, which then gets more and more insistent as the bike comes closer to you, dumb foreign pedestrian. Then you might get yelled at. For your own safety, please stay on your side of the sidewalk.

At least for Americans, there is a child-like thrill to getting on your bike and riding around with your friends. When you were eight, you rode to the pool or the store. Now, if you are me, you ride... to the pool or the store, or to work or to anywhere else. It's easier than driving a car, faster than taking a bus, and, just like when you were eight, you can drink a beer and get back on the bike without breaking any laws.

Know which part of the sidewalk is for you

2. Visit a Biergarten
It's a beautiful time of year in Germany. The biergartens are open. So come on by - preferrably by bike - and order up a big one. Know that you don't have to specify the kind of beer. It's like in Cheers reruns when Norm shows up and orders beer. That's all you need to do. There might be a menu, but it's not necessary. Sit in the sun while it's out and slurp up those suds. They taste great in the outdoors.

My parents having a true German experience

3. Eat Turkish food
Do you think that Germans only eat potato salad and wiener schnitzel? Wrong. They do eat those things, but not nearly as often as they eat croissants and pizza and especially Turkish food. What I really mean is Döner - the Turkish version of a gyro with rotisserie roasted lamb shaved off and packed into a spongy pita bread with veggies and tzaziki sauce... I'm getting hungry just typing those words. There is a Döner shop on most every corner in cities, and even tucked away in sleepy towns where you'd think no immigrant would go. It's tasty, it's cheap, and it's not nearly as bad for you as a Big Mac and fries. Though you can get fries too, and they are delicious.

4. Have a lazy Sunday
God rested on the seventh day, and so do the Germans. They take Sundays seriously. There are no shops open, very few cars on the road, no reason to get out of your pajamas. Bakeries open from 8-11 so that you can buy Brötchen (rolls) for the obligatory long German breakfast (see #7).  Then it's quiet time, all day long. On Sunday, it's against the law to mow your lawn or blast music. At first it bothered me that I couldn't go to the grocery store or run any errands on a Sunday or start the laundry before 10am (too noisy). Now I am ok with it. Having a day of rest worked out for God, and his laundry is way more important than mine.

5. Keep quiet
Germans are not loud people. Except when they are drunk or watching soccer, or - most often - drunk and watching soccer. It's also good to know that when you, as an American, speak in your normal volume (in Germany that is loud) in English, people can often understand you. Just because you don't know what the Germans are saying doesn't mean they don't catch you commenting on how quiet the bus is or how long that guy's mullet is.

6. Watch football
And by football I mean soccer. If possible, watch it outdoors on a huge TV screen with a few hundred other people. That way you can yell and drink beer together. If possible, wear your team's jersey or scarf and learn the right songs to sing.

Americans often think that soccer is boring and we don't really understand what all the players are supposed to be doing. That is how Europeans feel about baseball. But on game days, it's hard not to get caught up in the excitement, even if you have no clue what's going on.

7. Go to the bakery
Need breakfast? coffee and a newspaper? a quick snack? Go to the bakery. You won't have to look too hard; there's one on almost every corner. You'll need some bakery-specific vocabulary, but pointing and grunting also works. And on the weekends, you will need to throw on some sweat pants and get the rolls before 11. Your rolls are to go with the four different kinds of cheeses, 2-3 deli meats and exactly four spreads on the table. Go ahead, make a butter/gouda/jam/ham/cucumber roll. Then make one slathered in Nutella. And linger over it for an hour or three. It's Sunday, after all.

All you need for an authentic visit to Germany are these 7 tips. And you've got them here, for free.
Take that, Rick Steves. And order yourself a Döner while you're at it.

You dropped a bomb on me

I got evacuated from my house on Tuesday night because of a bomb. Not kidding.

As an American I hear the word 'bomb' and I think about terrorists, homemade explosives, and crazy people blowing stuff up. The bomb found in my neighborhood was nothing like that. It was an American bomb. It had been lying dormant under a school since World War II.

Throughout Germany, they dig up dud Allied bombs every so often. Hannover is no exception. I wrote about this back in 2013 when a bomb was diffused in the Steintor area, forcing 9,000 people to evacuate. On Tuedsay night, 31,000 of us were the displaced people of Hannover. There's always a chance that the bomb will blow up.

Before I go on, here's a very quick recap of WWII bombings here:
There were a lot of them. About a million bombs of various types were dropped on Hannover during the war.

About the bombings:
The city was 90% destroyed during the war and most of what you see today was built or restored later on. The Allies were after Hannover's factories, industrial areas and railways, but residential areas were hit too.

So it's no surprise that a few bombs did not explode and got lost in the rubble. This one - all 550 pounds of it - was unearthed in the construction as an old school building was demolished.

About the evacuation:
At around 4pm the city published a list of streets that had to be evacuated. Everyone was supposed to be out by 8pm and we didn't know when we could return. There was also a very slight chance our house could be blown to bits by the time we got back.

What do you pack in this situation? It's like that hypothetical question of what do you take if your house is burning down. Family photos? Money? Jewelry? Brian and I just took our toothbrushes and passports. If this all went bad we needed to be able to get out of Germany with clean teeth.

About not wanting to be evacuated:
We headed to a friend's house around 6 with serious second thoughts. What if we just stayed? What would happen to us, really? Germans are all about safety and security and control. Maybe we were getting sucked in. Maybe by heading out of the house as ordered meant that we were being controlled. We were just following orders. We did not question authority.

Had Brian and I become Germanized? What was next - never crossing the street on a red light? Wearing a scarf in July? Drinking only fizzy water?

Americans don't evacuate. Americans stand their ground and defend their homes in tornadoes and hurricanes and alien attacks. We don't let anyone push us around and we hold our firearms high! Until they send heat seeking helicopters after us.

Back to the evacuation:
How do you get 31,000 people to get out of their homes? You call, you bang on doors, you block of streets, you stop the trams and buses, and you drive down the street with flashing lights and sirens and a loudspeaker.

Cultural side note: You would think that's forewarning enough, and that anyone who stays does it at their own risk. At least I would think that, but I am not German. When they say mandatory evacuation, they mean mandatory.

So when people don't respond to the calls and the loudspeakers, you send in a helicopter with a thermal-imaging camera. It shows where people are hiding out so that police can come and kick their doors in.

About being a displaced person:
It was fun to joke that Brian and I were refugees from the south side of town. We headed off on our bikes with passports and toothbrushes, not sure what the future would hold. Of course we weren't actually refugees. We went out for dinner and drank red wine and had a nice little sleepover with friends. We didn't even sleep in a tent. But it's not fun to leave your house on short notice because you have to. And when we returned in the morning, everything was back to normal. That's probably the most excitement this town will have for months.

But it made me wonder - what am I doing now just because the authorities tell me to? Are we letting the Germans push us around? Sure, the streets are clean and trains run on time, but that doesn't mean I have to do what I am told. The people who dropped that bomb weren't getting pushed around by anybody.

Today I deliberately crossed the street against the light, just to assert how foreign I am. I pronounced some German words incorrectly, on purpose. And I am currently chugging a large glass of tap water, while this song keeps running through my head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiLrJBHiSzM

On strike

German train drivers were on strike last week, making for the longest rail strike in German history. This is not an old record. The previous longest strike happened last November.

So who was striking and why? There are multiple unions of rail workers in Germany. This strike was led by GDL, the smaller of two train drivers' unions. They want a 5% pay raise, a 37 hour work week (now they work 39) and the right to represent other kinds of rail workers.

The result is that most trains weren't running. Those that were still chugging away were run by non-union drivers, probably sweating out their 38th work hour by Friday afternoon. The strike cost the German economy 100 million euros per day, but the GDL still hasn't gotten what they want. This is the 8th walkout in 10 months of negotiations.

Strangely empty, the Berlin train station during last week's strike

Strikes are common here. We had two train strikes last year.  There was also a Lufthansa pilots' strike a few months ago and two Hannover transit strikes last spring. Public kindergartens have been closed recently because of strikes too. Why do Germans strike so much?
Actually they don't, compared to the French, the Greeks and ... the Canadians?

Americans usually think of a European on strike as Jacques the public employee sipping espresso, smoking cigarettes and collecting a paycheck as he casually holds a picket sign.

"If they just appreciated their five weeks of paid vacation," Joe American might say, while adjusting his baseball cap and sipping a mega-size cola, "they'd know how good they've got it."

But, according to these stats from The Economist (a few years old, but like a French wine, probably still good), our North American neighbors strike most of all. On average, Canadians lose 2.2 work days per year due to walkouts.

I am no expert on labor relations, or socialism, or espresso. I do know, however, that Canada seems to do everything right that America does wrong. They have universal health care, low crime rates and they are really, really nice. So maybe the Canadians, the French and the German train drivers have it figured out.

Maybe we should all go on strike. I think 7 hours of work per day is plenty. Jacques does too.

Automats

Do you want to buy some cigarettes, eggs, candy, bus tickets, bike tires or condoms? There's an automat for that. While Americans are used to getting Coke and cash out of machines, Germans take vending to another level.

Cigarette machines, long ago eliminated in the U.S., are on almost any street corner here. To prevent underage smoking, you have to swipe your national ID card in the machine before you can buy your smokes. Then the machine knows if you are of age, which is 18 (of course, if you are only 13 it's ok. You can just swipe your older brother's ID or your mom's that you stole out of her purse..).

And then there's the condomat. These require no ID. Germans are not squeamish about nakedness (see the FKK post) or about safe sex. There are more cigarette machines than condom machines, but not by many.

This is my favorite one - a condomat next to a candy machine. Even better, they are in a small town, in front of a farm where you can go on a pony ride. Something for everyone.

What if you are out on the bike visiting small-town vending machines and get a flat tire? Never fear. In this cycle-friendly culture, there are also tube automats.  A bike tube is called a Schlauch, so the vending machine has the charming name Schlauchomat.

And finally, the egg machine, or Eierautomat. Put your money in an pull out a half-dozen free range beauties. You can also purchase canned sausages and potatoes (when in season).

Is there something essentially German about the automat? Yes and no. Yes in that it's efficient and logical and requires no waiting. No because it seems like there could be a job for someone there - like operating an egg/condom/cigarette/canned meat kiosk.
Of course, that would make it harder for the neighborhood kids to buy cigarettes.