It's Snowing in Berlin

German Word of the Week

"ACHTUNG: SCHWARZFAHRER"

So read a sign on the side of a bus I saw today. What a great word.

Schwarzfahrer literally means black rider; it is used to refer to a person who rides the train or bus without a ticket.

It's also the subject and title of this clever short film by Pepe Danquart that is set in Berlin and won the Oscar in 1993 for best short film.

The film, I cannot stop myself from adding, only very mildly exaggerates the behavior I discussed yesterday of middle-aged Berlin women on public transportation.

How To Tell If You're German

Rachel sent me a link to a page called "How to tell if you're German". I'd recommend it if you're interested in getting a better idea of the zeitgeist in Deutschland. I can confirm that a lot of the things on the list are true about Berliners, but I have never been outside Berlin, so I can't say if they're true of Germans more generally.

The first item on the list is well chosen. If you're German, "you think it's you're [sic] right to say your opinion. You may also think that others have the same right".

I say it's well chosen because, although you may know that ping-pong, snooker, and Fussball are popular sports in Germany, you may not be aware of the other national pastime, which is telling people their business.

I've mentioned before that Berliners are aware at all times of what you're supposed to be doing, and they have no scruples about telling you if you're not doing it. This sport is particularly popular among the middle-aged, and middle-aged women are absolutely wild about it.

This morning, for instance, I got on the train and started reading a magazine. Before the train had even started, a middle-aged woman got up from her section three seats away and stood in front of me. After a few seconds, when I was starting to get annoyed, I looked up. She was looking straight at me.

I pulled out one earbud. I only caught two words, one German and one English. The German one was leise, which means soft or softly, volume-wise. The other word she used was 'slowly', which I'm assuming you know. I had no idea what she was talking about or why she was interrupting my reading.

Upon reflection it became clear that she was confused about the difference between the words 'softly' and 'slowly'. She thought the English word for leise was 'slowly', when in fact it's 'softly'.

After observing her gestures, I simply asked, "Die Musik?" That seemed to satisfy her because she walked back to her seat, where she was clearly entrenched in a most delicate operation that required complete silence. On a public train.

Still puzzled and annoyed, trying to understand what made this woman think she had the right to demand that I turn down my earbuds from three seats away on the morning train, I arrived at the FU Mensa where I tried to buy some food.

I've already told you about the silly procedures that require standing in line for a card, standing in line to fill the card, standing in line to pick your food, and standing in line to pay for your food with your card. But there's another procedure, that you are supposed to show your student ID when you pay for your food with your card.

I knew that. But what I learned today is that there is a proper way to fold and display your ID. I was doing it the improper way. See, not only must the middle-aged lady who sits on her Arsch all afternoon taking people's money have to see that you have a student ID, she must also see the date on the ID.

I'm not going to get into why there needs to be a special way of folding the ID, it has to do with the placement of the sticker that functions as a transit pass. All you need to know is that I was given a lesson on ID folding by the aforementioned Frau before she'd let me buy my lunch.

I remember when I told a Polish girl I met at one of the International Club's coffee hours that I thought it was ridiculous how they wouldn't let you bring a bag into the library, and she was nonplussed. But they do let you bring in a bag, she said, as long as it's one of the transparent cellophane bags that you can only buy from them. What's the problem?

The fact that she missed the point suggests that Poland has something in common with Germany that neither of them shares with the US. An American is not grateful for being allowed to do things in a particular manner. We want to be able to do things however the hell we damn well please, as long as it doesn't directly hamper anybody else's ability to do likewise. And we think it's rude to tell other people how to behave, unless those people are children. Your own children.

Americans fervently believe everyone's got a right to her opinion, but it is unbecoming for her to have too many opinions about other people's business. And if she does, she should look down on them secretly and with covert self-righteousness, not openly and with a blatant air of authority and entitlement.

So if there are any Berliners listening, especially of the middle-aged female persuasion, hear my feeble plea: Please don't tell me my business. And please, please don't try to speak English to me unless you actually speak English. It's presumptuous and it makes you look foolish, not exclusively but especially when you're trying to tell me my business.

Weihnachstmarkt

Just like in the US, Christmas in Germany starts November 1st and ends in January.

So as of right now, you can go ice skating and tubing (!) in Potsdamer Platz and buy Glühwein and Grog (I haven't tried it yet) in fancy little mugs.





It also means you can buy Festbier, such as Luckenwalder's lecker Weihnachtstraum (Christmas Dream). (See my online beer gallery for that and many more new varieties. I'm becoming a big fan of something called "Würzig" beer).

Find a few more photos from last week, including more from around Potsdamer Platz, in my photo gallery.

Podcast 6

Get a hot cup of chocolate, nestle down in a cozy chair, and enjoy my latest fireside radio chat.

Das Schloss

Last Saturday I went shopping at a mall in Steglitz called Das Schloss, The Castle.





I stopped and paid 4 euros for a grande caramel macchiato. It felt just like home!



You can see more pictures in my online Web album for Nov. 1-8.

That's where I took the following video. They projected fish onto the ceiling and there was a guy playing a gong.

Entzaubert Podcast 5

Look, no one's going to hire me as the ambassador to Germany, so I might as well tell it like it is.

DIE FANTASTISCHEN VIER - MFG

Want some help learning your German alphabet? Listen to this song while reading the lyrics.

You will, no doubt, recognize only a few of the acronyms, because most of them are unique to Germany.

This song is amusing because the German love for bureaucracy is matched only by their love for two other things: sausage and acronyms.

Mozartpocalypse

By the time the cavemen tried to rape a woman at the U-Bahn station, I was no longer paying much attention.

You see, I thought I was going to see a musical performance of Mozart's Requiem at the Comic Opera on Saturday night. But thanks to a delightful artistic fad called Regietheater, "Director Theater", what I got for my money was actually a theatrical performance that used Mozart's Requiem as background noise.

The idea behind Director Theater seems to be that since everything old-fashioned is dead, irrelevant, insignificant, and useless, the only way to find artistic value in it is by cannibalizing it and using its parts to add an air of respectability to bad plays.

If you're interested in the phenomenon, for which the Comic Opera in Berlin seems to be a sort of ground zero, you can read about it here.

I've also included a video promo for the performance below. Keep your eyes out for the above-mentioned cavemen, the slumber party in the slaughterhouse, the plague comes to the nail salon, death as an old man in a helmet, cape, and Underoos, the angels performing surgery on a man in the chapel, and the mass suicide on Mt. Sinai.

Crocs Cell Phone Shoes

As my friend Elizabeth said, "That is just wrong on so many levels."

Leberkäse

"Liver Cheese" isn't what it sounds like. But it's not particularly good either.

New Podcast

I'm going to try to start posting podcasts every Monday.

Today, the gloves come off about German food, the French, and the metric system.

Something's a little weird about the sound quality this time; I hope it's not too distracting.

Mayonnaise

As most of us learned from John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in Amsterdam they put mayonnaise on french fries.

Evidently, in Berlin they do it too!



For the record, I'm a fan.

Crash!

Last night I went with my friend Hally to a meeting of the International club. It was in Kreuzberg, yet another one of the super-hip areas in Berlin, at a place called Crash!





There I made an ass of myself speaking bad German and failing to control my "dome sweat".

Speaking a foreign language is like playing a board game in which the rules are so complex that you can never make a *single* move without violating them and no one wins in the end.

Speaking a foreign language is like trying to run underwater.

Speaking a foreign language is like being the person who is so uncoordinated that he is always picked last for dodgeball and then being expected to do a gymnastics floor routine at the Olympics.

Speaking a foreign language is like going to the drug store for fifteen embarrassing cures and having the cashier do a price check on each one of them.

Speaking a foreign language is like failing a sobriety test.

Speaking a foreign language is like being retarded, except that you know you're retarded.

Speaking a foreign language is like being asked at the last minute to teach a class on quantum physics when all you know about physics is what you learned from watching Nova.

Speaking a foreign language is like when you're walking down the street and someone else is coming towards you and when you try to avoid them, you both move in the same direction so you're still on a collision course, then you both switch to the opposite side, then you both switch back, then finally you both almost bump into each other. It's like that process sustained for weeks.

Oh, and living in a foreign country is like it would be if you woke up one day and all the holidays you care about, including birthdays, didn't exist anymore. And instead of those holidays, there were holidays that deliberately excluded you.

Happy Halloween!

Festival of Lights

For the past two weeks Berlin has been putting on its “Festival of Lights” (that’s what the Germans call it). They’ve been projecting the slogan “be Berlin” on the Brandenburg Gate. And really, what could be more Berlin than an English slogan?

Without a tripod it’s really hard to capture night photos, so I only got a few.











There was also an event inside the I.M. Pei-designed German History Museum of which I got a couple of photos.

Deutschland ist Schön

I recorded a new podcast yesterday about the honor system, public transportation, and speaking German. It's got some fun music clips too.

Terror Cell

I know that title is going to get my blog many visits by the lovely people in the Department of Homeland Security, but it fits, so I’m using it.

You see on Saturday night my friend Elizabeth and I went to this area called Neuköln that was described to us in all seriousness as a “terror cell”. That’s where I took a picture of this arsenal.



I suppose the apparent danger of the trip would have bothered me a lot more if I weren’t dazzled by the prospect of the lecker authentic Turkish food to be found in the nucleus of this terror cell.

Of course my tension was relieved by the genuinely reassuring name of the street on which we sought our restaurant:



We ended up eating at the most authentic looking restaurant we could find, an Egyptian place called Café Barbar Aga.



I didn’t take pictures of the rugs and hookah-smoking men inside because I didn’t want anyone to crash a plane into me. But I did manage to capture this imageless video from inside my coat of the evening’s live entertainment.



Is it just me or does he sound like he’s singing backwards?

It couldn’t have been a very orthodox place, though, because the big screen TV in the corner was playing American music videos.

Need I say how much I thoroughly enjoyed eating Egyptian food in Berlin under the glow of the Dixie Chicks?

Laptop Lock!

So, if you've seen the pictures of the FU Philological library, you know it's a pretty cool place to study.



Unfortunately, due to one of the many weird regulations that form the warp and woof of Berlin life, one can bring neither a coat nor a bag into the library.

Well, that's not true. One can bring a bag made of transparent plastic into the library. Evidently it's a bigger priority to make sure no one steals the precious books than it is to make sure the library is a quiet place for reflection and contemplation. Because cellophane is not quiet.

One of the many problems with this policy of treating every student like a potential book-thief and/or copyright violator is that when all the lockers are used up, one cannot go into the library, even if one just wants to grab a book or sit in one of the many available places to use one's laptop.

But what really bothers me is that, once inside the library, I cannot go anywhere without carrying my laptop in my arms.



As everyone knows, the more time something spends in your hands, the more likely you are to drop it. Unfortunately, as everyone who has ever left all his personal belongings in an unlocked bus station locker in Portland, Oregon knows, the more time something spends out of your hands, the more likely it is to be stolen.

But that is not a problem for me any longer, because this morning I got up and found in my mailbox a laptop lock!



No more carrying around my laptop while I go look for a book or refill my water bottle! Thanks, Dad! I was hoping adding a link to my Amazon Wish List would pay off!

Kaiser Wilhelm's Revenge

You may have noticed on my Twitter status that I've been obsessed with food for the last three days. That's because I've been ravenously hungry.

At first I thought that German Shepherd had turned me into a werewolf. But now I'm starting to think I gave myself food poisoning.

The thing is, my refrigerator is tiny. So when I took a pot of hot bockwurst stew off the stove and put it directly into the fridge, I think I spoiled my prosciutto. At least it tasted funny. Oh, and the hamburger meat I had in the fridge turned gray. I threw that out.

Anyway, without giving you a full medical report, I've been both exhausted and famished for three days. I'm getting better though.

Oh, and did I mention already that on Friday I met a couple more ex-pats and we had fun in Prenzlauer Berg? I've posted the pictures.

That's the first time I've been in one of the many ultra-hip parts of Berlin and it was cool. I hope it will suffice to indicate what a good time I had to say I didn't get home until 5 am.

bis gleich!

Package Station

I've spent a lot of time complaining about Berlin. Here's something cool.

It's called a Packstation.



I know it looks likes like a combination of a phone booth and an ATM, but it's really an automated package repository.

If you're not home to pick up your package, Deutsche Post (which, as far as I can tell, is run by DHL) will put a lovely envelope in your mailbox.



When you have the time, day or night, you may take this envelope to the local grocery store, which is where I found the above package station.

Scan the enclosed bar code at the window.



Then, use your finger to sign the touch screen. Pay no attention to the bad English instructions that tell you to "subscribe with your finger".



"Subscribe" is a transliteration of the German word unterschreiben, which means "sign".

Then one of these little gray windows will open...



...and boom! there's your package.



What's so great about the package station is that you don't have to worry about anyone "going postal" on you, and the thing is never closed. Efficient and convenient. Pay attention, America.