Berlin Ragbag

Okay, "ragbag" is what I've decided to call posts like these, ones that are a collection of small anecdotes.

I try not to do this too often (because really, who actually wants to read a collection of my disjointed thoughts?) but see, I'm always jotting down these anecdotes that are maybe interesting enough to make note of, but not interesting enough to be an entire post. And I keep jotting and not posting, and fall terribly behind, and it all gets very silly.

So, let's do this, shall we?? Here are the last months' little anecdotes...

• In German, when someone's being silly, you can say, "Hast du einen Clown gefrühstückt?" ("Did you eat a clown for breakfast?")

• Iced coffee. You can't get it in Germany. Oh, you can get ice cream in coffee, which is a rather nice surprise. But even on a hot day, they will only look at you strangely if you ask for your coffee iced. I guess it's because they don't get many of those – hot days – around here.

(A Spanish friend, when he lived in Berlin, would go to a café and explain to the waiter very carefully how to bring his coffee, Spanish-style: "I would like you to bring me an espresso, and I would also like you to bring me a glass, with ice cubes in it." This is so you can add sugar first to the hot espresso, then ice it. Clever, eh?)

• Speaking of ice cream, I'd been vaguely puzzling for a while why video rental places (yes, Germans still go to the store and rent a physical DVD; I guess Netflix hasn't arrived here) always have big signs out front advertising ice cream. Finally, I remembered that in Germany, going to the movies and eating ice cream are two firmly associated actions (much like movies and eating popcorn). I think it's because people used to come around inside the movie theater selling ice cream? Or something? Anybody care to confirm?

(This is a video rental place. It's advertising ice cream.)

• Also, I've talked before about how it's not worth trying to find real bagels here; still, every now and then I just feel like ordering a "bagel" (quotation marks necessary, here) anyway and seeing what happens. I invariably order a bagel with cream cheese, and then wait to see what strange additions it will acquire, for example lettuce leaves or ground black pepper. Most memorably, one time my "bagel with cream cheese" came with cream cheese...and mustard. I walked away delightedly wondering, What exactly about the phrase "bagel with cream cheese" said "mustard" to that woman?

(A café selling "bagels." Or in this case, "bagel's"?)

• And one of my favorite food-related anecdotes: A Northern Irish acquaintance saying, "Do you know how overwhelming it is trying to order breakfast in the United States??" Apparently, there are too many options.

• Just...everything about Berlin's Beer Festival. From the cowboy hat in German flag colors to all the bad cover bands (and a surprisingly not-so-bad cover band, fronted by a young German guy who seemed to deeply believe that he was a 1950s rocker) to the women linedancing to the sausage stand (can't have beer without sausage!) with an automatic combination sausage holder/slicer to the truly impressive level of public urination: my personal best sighting was eight drunk guys all peeing around the same shrubbery.

• Kreislauf. What is it about the German "Kreislauf" (circulation)? People here are forever telling me they have "circulation problems" (and I get worried, because that sounds serious!) but then it turns out all they mean is that it's a hot day and they feel sluggish, or they got a little lightheaded when they stood up just now. Friends have said things like, "Oh, man, my circulation isn't working at all today!" ...Really??

• Germans, like many Europeans, actually allow themselves vacations. Good for them! It makes me smile to walk past a restaurant with a sign on the door announcing that the place is closed for, oh, say, all of January. Or three weeks of July. Because it means that, here, even people who run their own small businesses get to take vacations.

• I was surprised to find out that seemingly every one of my female friends here has "her" tailor she regularly goes to when she needs an article of clothing hemmed, taken in, etc. Maybe this is just a grown-up thing I hadn't gotten around to yet (should I be worried that, since finding this out, I now have a tailor I go to too?), but I think it's also kind of a German thing, because tailors – old-school, individual, self-employed ones operating out of their own little workshops – are still a thriving profession here. It seems like there's a tailor shop on every corner around here.

(Here's one.)

(Here's another.)

• Also everywhere in Germany: bakeries. More and more of them are being taken over by chains, unfortunately, but there are also a whole lot still run by individuals or families, master bakers who come in early to prepare their wares fresh and on-site each morning.

• A lot of bookstores too, it occurs to me. Germany is still doing well at the old-fashioned trades and the family-run shops.

• Overheard: A snippet of conversation, as a German dad explained to his young kid a core principle of the German language: "Wenn man sich länger kennt, kann man sich duzen. Muss nicht." ("When people know each other for a longer time, they can say 'du' [the German informal "you," as opposed to "Sie," which is the formal "you"]. But they don't have to.")

• A random Israeli guy I talked to at the Weinerei mishearing when I told him I'm a "translator" and thinking I said "trendsetter." That's kind of awesome. "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm a trendsetter."

• And then there's the fact that German-speakers actually can't hear the difference between the "eh" sound in "head" and the "ae" sound in "hat," because that distinction doesn't exist in German. Plus, words in German never end in a real "d" sound (it changes to "t") so the two words "head" and "hat" end up sounding identical. Throw in that fact that a short "u" can sound a lot like a short "a" – and you get my students who asked me about that place called "Pizza Head" ...It took me a long time to realize they meant Pizza Hut!

• This was a new experience: As we left a neighborhood bookstore one evening, a friend of mine went to unlock her bike from a nearby bikerack, and immediately a woman standing nearby with her own bike asked hopefully, "Oh, are you leaving that spot?" Just like someone trying to find a spot for their car in a crowded parking lot – I'd just never seen it happen with bikes before.

(Bike parking, Prenzlauer Berg.)

• A new favorite word: "Ferienkommunismus" ("vacation communism," as in, only dabbling in communist principles while on vacation) – used by a friend in describing Fusion, the big, good-hippie-vibe type music festival that takes place each summer in eastern Germany, north of here.

• And after Fusion this year, someone put together a nice video showing different bits of the festival; I watched it and was tickled to see a shot of the man I think of as the "Kreuzberg bubble guy" – an older gent with a long white beard who I've seen around the Kreuzberg area of Berlin once or twice, always with a big grin and blowing soap bubbles from a child-sized bubble wand.

I happened to mention this to my musician friend Roland, who said, all casual and off-hand, "Oh, yeah, I forwarded that to him. I thought he'd want to see it."

(This video, in fact.)

• More of my own strange interactions with people in shops... My Mondays are a bit odd, as workdays go, with the scheduled part of the day not really getting started until early afternoon but continuing into the very late evening. There's a small bakery I occasionally drop into for a coffee on my way to my afternoon teaching appointment, and for some reason the woman there (this is taking place around 2:30 pm) always wishes me a nice "Feierabend" (end of the work day). The first time this happened, I looked at her in confusion and blurted out, "No, it's only just starting!"

(Only now, writing this, have I realized the probable reason why she assumes it's the end of my workday: This bakery is in the train station of an outlying bit of Berlin, practically a suburb – so pretty much anyone stopping there on their way out of the station is bound to be a commuter, coming back from work in the central part of the city.)

• Also, when I went to mail my absentee ballot to the U.S. for the presidential election, I had to ask for a special €3.45 stamp, because the ballot envelope is so oversized. The woman behind the counter asked if I didn't just want to fold it up and put it in a normal-sized envelope (The stamp for a normal international letter is just €0.75!) but I explained that both the ballot and the envelope stated very explicitly that only the special oversized envelope could be used, since this was election mail. "Ah, die Wahl," she said ("Ah, the election") and then repeated, "Wahlkampf" ("election campaign") with a shake of her head. Because the whole world knows how insane and protracted our elections are.

• Recently it seemed like there was a spate of friends (in the U.S.) posting on Facebook about the everyday occurrence – minor, but grating – of being hassled by guys on the street. Only then did it occur to me: No one ever hassles me here. It's funny, I really hate how people here are so cold in public and ignore each other, but I guess that's the upside: If people are ignoring you, they're also not hassling you.

• A German friend excitedly relating how he saw squirrels in a neighbor's tree! And they were jumping around, and hiding nuts! (Squirrels are a much less common sight in Germany than in the U.S.)

A Dutch friend also got adorably enthusiastic about having seen a skunk! an actual skunk! while she was in the U.S. – I think in Europe they only know skunks from cartoons...

(When they do have squirrels, they're red ones. This sign was in England, not Germany.)

• Working in a café and hearing a man and a woman near me chatting in Spanish; gradually figuring out that she was Spanish but he was German by the fact that he was explaining, and then spelling, the German word "Bauchspeicheldrüse" ("pancreas") to her in Spanish. (I caught "...a part of the body..." before the Spanish lost me again.)

I remember my middle school German class being delighted to learn the word "Bauchspeicheldrüse" (because, really, could you find a more classically German-looking word?) but I never thought until now about what a great example it actually is of a typical German built-from-building-blocks word. Taken at its most literal, Bauch + Speichel + Drüse breaks down into "stomach-saliva (i.e. pancreatic juice) gland."

• I've written before about how people say "zu Ostzeiten" (literally "in east times") as a shorthand for the days when East Germany existed. But I was walking down the street one day, and actually heard someone say, "zu Westzeiten." ...I guess that means the days when West Germany existed?

(Just seems a funny thing to say, because West Germany, i.e. the "Federal Republic of Germany" basically just incorporated East Germany, i.e. the "German Democratic Republic," and the two together kept being the Federal Republic of Germany. So the West never stopped existing.)

• Speaking of which, it's no real secret that practically everyone in East Germany watched West German TV, even though it was technically forbidden. Someone joked recently about how 80% of East Germany would be frantically turning down the volume of their TV sets at 8 pm, when the highly recognizable intro theme music of the West German news started.

• And East/West stereotypes still exist to this day. A Scottish acquaintance (someone my friends and I met on our Scottish hiking trip last year) was passing through Berlin and wrote me to meet up. I told him which tram to take to get to my place in Prenzlauer Berg, and apparently on the way here he was texting friends back in Scotland, saying, "I'm heading into East Germany now! I'll get in touch again if I survive!" Funnily enough, before I even had the chance to come down the street and meet him, he stumbled into an absolute dive of an old East German bar, the grungy sort of place that I've never gone into even though I walk along that street every day...and there he found a TV playing precisely the soccer game he'd wanted to watch, and quickly befriended a bearded, middle-aged English dude who just happened to be there in the bar, who came here decades ago for a short-term job and never left.

• Then on the other side of the equation, an (East German) adult student of mine told me about people she knows, also from the former East Germany, who to this day refuse to drive their cars – instead parking and taking public transportation – if they have to make the trek all the way over to West Berlin.

• A British friend recently pointed out something I'd never noticed about German, but now that I've heard it, I have to admit is undeniably true: When one person says "tschüss!" ("bye!") and a second person answers back "tschüss!" – that second "tschüss!" is always higher pitched. If a third person is involved, I think it gets higher pitched still. Find some Germans saying goodbye to each other; I promise you this phenomenon will occur.

• And one last thing: I invited a German acquaintance to my Chanukah celebration and he accepted the invitation so matter-of-factly that I asked, surprised, "Wait, do you know what Chanukah is?"

"Yeah, sure," he said, "Because I watch Jon Stewart."

"Uh, really? Does Jon Stewart talk about Chanukah that much?"

"Yeah, you know. Whenever it's Chanukah."


If anyone actually read all that, wow, I don't even know what to say. Here, have a bonus Chanukah picture. (First night of Chanukah candles, and my favorite Chanukah children's book.)