Right on time in Hannover

When you live in Hannover, there are only two places to meet up with people: under the horse tail or at the clock. You could choose somewhere else to meet, but that would be unusual. The idea that everyone in town uses just two meeting spots is one of the reasons that Hannover, despite its big city aspirations, is really a small town.

Unterm Schwanz is the way to say under the tail, which only makes sense if you know you are at the train station looking at this statue:

I wrote about the horse and his rider Ernst August a couple of years ago. Go ahead and read about them if you want, but now I'm going to tell you about the clock.

The Kröpcke clock is on the busiest pedestrian corner in town. It's between the opera house, the train station and the main shopping streets in the city center. The spot is named after a guy named Kröpcke and his cafe, which is still a perfect place to sit outside and watch all the commotion. Mr. Kröpcke opened his cafe in the 1870s, and the city built the clock about ten years later.

Notice the Nazi flags waving on either side of the clock

During the war

While most of Hannover was leveled during World War II and half of its residents lost their homes, the clock survived. It ticked away among the rubble until the 1950s happened. The city planners wanted a modern, progressive city and there was no place for  19th century clock. So they built this one:

It stood until 1977, when Hannover realized that mid-century design wasn't cool anymore. A replica of the original clock was built in its place and is still standing today.

Public clocks are everywhere in Germany. If I had been a watch-wearer before, I would have stopped by now. There are clocks on church steeples, above banks, sometimes just on the street corner as a public service. There's no excuse to be late. In case you are not looking up, somewhere nearby a church bell rings every fifteen minutes. Germans are punctual, and almost everything here runs on time.

People complain about the DeutscheBahn arriving ten minutes behind schedule. Apparently they have never tried Amtrak in the U.S., or the Hershey train in Cuba. I wanted to ride the Hershey train through the sugar cane fields of the old Hershey plantation, but there's no way to know when it will arrive and some days it doesn't show up at all). This is why, as I may have mentioned before, living in Germany doesn't prepare you to live anywhere else in the world. In most places people, and trains and buses, are sometimes late (but hopefully show up on the same day).

I most recently waited at the Kröpcke clock for two people who come from the polar opposite - culturally and almost geographically - of German punctuality. Olga from Colombia and Surama from Cuba are hard-wired for la hora Latina. Latin time runs anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes later than German time. If my Latina friends call at the time we are supposed to meet and say, "I'm on the way," that means they are about to leave the house. Since I'm chronically 5 minutes late (sometimes a little more), they make me look good.


I wonder about the people hanging around the Kröpcke clock. If everyone arrives on time, then nobody in Hannover would stand by the clock for more than 43 seconds. Are they showing up early? Are the friends they plan to meet not German? What's going on?

The friends I was meeting, despite not being German, showed up within the hour. We all laughed about it as the clock ticked away behind us.

From the left: Olga, me and Surama

We bought a TV

Brian and I bought a TV. 

It was a first for me. I think in my whole life I have never actually bought a television. They have been handed down or given as gifts (thanks, Mom) over the years. And since we moved to Hannover, Brian and I have not had one. We haven't gone Amish or anything, we were just using a projector. It seemed like a great idea - hook the computer to a projector and use the white walls to our advantage. But then the projector broke, we hung a nice picture on the wall, and it was time to move on.

Buying an electronic appliance means going to an electronics store. You might think that these places in Germany would be quaint, with fresh bread and a beer stand and lederhosen-wearing salesmen. You are wrong. The big box store is international. And it's my least favorite kind of store. I would rather be Amish and write this blog on a slate with chalk than go to Best Buy at Christmas time.

Check out the length of the word above the TVs. German is hard.

You see, I am not into gadgets. I like them when they work and I like using them to the very minimum of their capabilities. This means I have an automatic communication gap with people who are into gadgets - like anyone who works at an electronic store - even before you consider the language gap. What I do have working in my favor is that I've always been a bit of a nerd magnet. And though they are not wearing lederhosen, the guys working at the big box store are definitely nerdy. Therefore, when buying an electronic device in Germany I pull what I call the double bimbo. I ask the salesman in my heavily accented German, filled with cute grammatical errors, about what a smart TV is, actually. Not only am I a foreigner (hopefully a cute one) but I apparently know nothing about electronics. This means that the nerdy salesman should take pity on me and walk me to the precise point in the precise aisle where the HDMI cables are hanging. It's not an act; it's a survival skill.

I am not helpless with technology; I am just not that interested. I'm also old enough to know that it's faster to just let the interested people help me. My generation learned how to program the VCR and make mix tapes. I can use iTunes and pull off a mail merge. But I have no idea what HDMI stands for.

So we bought the TV. Then we had to get it home. No, Brian did not strap it to his bike and roll it back (though he did that a few weeks ago with an armchair). We took the tram. It reminded me when we bought our grill and took it on the very same tram four years ago.

For that purchase, there was just a lot of pointing involved. A grill does not have any electronic parts so I didn't need to ask any questions. I think the Amish even use them.

My new day job

I have a new job to add to my collection of part-time endeavors. In addition to running Play Global, coaching cross country, helping international school kids apply to college and finishing my Master's, I am now teaching middle school Spanish.

There was a time when I thought a degree from a good liberal arts college would get me places. That was a silly idea. Español has been my ticket to just about every job I've had. There were a couple of social service jobs, an immigration law internship, some translation work and - most interesting - a job at a used car auction. It was the place where old, donated cars got a second chance every Saturday. It was also a destination for people who didn't have much money to buy a car, but were not afraid to fix one. There was a fast-talking auctioneer in a ten gallon hat there, and more cash than I had ever seen. The crumpled 20s and 50s and 100s made my hands grimy. A lot of the buyers spoke only Spanish, and almost none of the staff did. I had no idea what I was doing, but I could at least communicate.

So now, after a couple years of substitute teaching, I am actually... teaching. Preface that by saying I am not a teacher, have never been trained as one, and I know nothing about educational theory or anything that real teachers know. But I can speak Spanish and I show up for work, just like at the car auction. And the kids seem to like me, so I guess it's going ok.

Where will Spanish take me next? It's hard to say. Hopefully nowhere else for right now.  I've got enough to do. I don't know if they even have used car auctions in Germany, and if they do exist there are probably hundreds of laws about them. But if a man in a ten gallon hat shows up to offer me a job, it'll be hard to say no.