Precision and Order

I saw the “Mary Poppins” musical stage show twice before I left for Europe. So now, I randomly find “Mary Poppins” songs popping into my head while I’m walking around Germany.

One of those songs, “Cherry Tree Lane” with Mr. Banks singing his praises of “precision and order,” fits in Germany in so many ways. While not everything is precise (two late trains in one day for me earlier this week), there’s always some sort of order in Germany.  And Germans can take precision to another level.

Some escalators in Germany change direction based on the flow of traffic.

For example, some of the subway stops in Hannover have these awesome escalators.

They go both ways. So when there’s a hoard of foot traffic leaving the station, the escalator goes up. Traffic stops. Escalator stops. (Saves energy.) Someone then wants to come down into the station and the escalator changes gears and becomes a “down” escalator.  When no one’s around, it stops moving completely.

It’s nifty. It’s efficient. I wish they’d install these in places at home! It makes so much sense!

That’s not the only “precision and order” around. You find it on the German roads, too. Take this rest stop, somewhere between Hamburg and the northeastern island of Ruegen.

Solar panels provide electricity at a rest stop on the Autobahn in northern Germany.

Those are solar panels on the rest stop rooftops. And grass. The only thing missing was toilet paper in the bathrooms.

I guess you can’t have everything.

But Mr. Banks, if you’re looking for precision and order, you might check Germany next time, before waiting for the wind to change and blowing in Mary Poppins.

German or American?

One of the little “games” I like to play when I’m out and about in Germany is called “German or American?”

I may be on a subway, walking down a pathway by a lake or on a busy square.  And I think to myself, “Is that person a native German or are they American?”  Sometimes I have no idea.  But sometimes, it’s obvious.

Take me, for example.  No matter how much I try to blend in, I can’t hide the American accent.  I can try to dress to blend in.  But I somehow still stick out.

Here are some clues:

1) I’m the one wearing the Kelty backpack and Skechers tennis shoes, typically items you’d only see on Americans.  (It seems Wolfskin is the German choice of backpacks here.  I saw a guy with an REI backpack and knew in an instant that he was American.  And I’ve yet to see a Sketchers store in Germany.  Try to go to a store and NOT see Sketchers in the U.S.  Not possible!)

2) I’m the one who orders two ketchup packets (much larger than at home) at the German McDonald’s (where you have to order and pay extra for ketchup).  You can’t have french fries without ketchup.  They’re a vehicle for ketchup consumption!  In some places in the U.S., ketchup is considered a vegetable.  It’s an American necessity!

3) Speaking of vegetables, I’m the one craving them.  Majorly.  I’ve gone from a diet heavy on vegetables and chicken to a one that’s heavy on bread (oh, the bread!) and cured meats and cheeses.  My body is not happy with that.  But the bread is just sooo good!

4) I’m the one walking slowly at the grocery store, fascinated by the different foods and the vast number of cheeses.  Oh, the cheeses!  And the Nutella.  And the different cereals.  The grocery store is a wonderland for me.

5) I’m the one who skips wine or beer at dinner and orders a Coke instead.  (Coke Zero, if I’m lucky.)  Definitely not the German thing to do!

Gummy bears, gummy cherries, gummy cats, gummy vampires, even gummy Smurfs. Germany has them all.

6) I’m the one keeping Haribo in business.  Probably single-handedly.  Gummy bears.  They are my weakness.

7) I’m the one willing to cross the street when there are no cars coming, even if the pedestrian light is red.  Though I try to do this only when other people aren’t around, so I don’t get dirty looks!  Or a ticket!!

8 ) And last, but not least, I am the one who passes you on the street and looks you in the eye and I try my hardest NOT to smile at you.  Don’t smile.  Don’t smile.  Don’t do it!  Fight the urge!  At best, I think I end up with a Mona Lisa-style smirk on my face.  The smile fights to get out.  I’m practically powerless against it.

I can’t help it.  I’m American.

It’s Back to School Sale Time in Germany

This is the time of year kids who love school cherish.  Back-to-school sales.  New clothes.  New backpacks.  New notebooks.  New books.  Everything is new.

For me, it’s not quite back to school.  I needed a little notebook for making some German language notes.  (If you must know, I want to write out some verb conjugations so I can learn them.  Exciting stuff.)

I thought buying a notebook would be easy.  Step one:  Find store with notebooks.  Step two:  Buy notebook.  Piece of cake.

Wrong.

It turns out there are a billion types of notebooks in Germany.  (Slight exaggeration.)  And perhaps with the back-to-school sales, the selection is even more broad.  Or at least more noticeable.

There are notebooks with graph paper, notebooks with thick lines, notebooks with a line down the middle, notebooks with music lines, notebooks with wide margins, notebooks for learning letters, blank notebooks and on and on.

A notebook display at a German department store in Hannover.

Each notebook is labeled with a number.  Apparently, the back-to-school lists that German parents get each year have which number of notebook you will need for each class.

Everything is very specific and organized.

But you can’t just pop in and find a good ol’ Mead notebook and be on your way.   It’s not that simple.

All I wanted was a simple, lined notebook.  I got a plethora of choices, but none that fit exactly what I wanted.

After a few minutes of flipping through the notebooks, I finally settled on one with wide lines.  It was larger than I was looking for, but it will have to do.

It was an experience to go notebook shopping in Germany.  And the good thing is, I got it on a back-to-school sale.  🙂

Take Some Raisin Bread

I always meet the most interesting old ladies when I travel by myself.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s because I’m on my own and am not threatening.  Maybe it is my sweet demeanor. 😉

Regardless, it happens.

So yesterday, I was waiting for the bus to go to the zoo.  The older woman next to me was eating raisin bread from a local bakery.  She offered me some in German.

My response was pretty standard for when you are offered food from a stranger at a bus stop, “Nein, nein.  Danke.”

She said to me in German, “Take some.  Take some,” insisting.

I had just eaten lunch, so I wasn’t hungry at all.  I take a coin-sized pinch so I won’t seem rude.

But this woman was like an Italian grandmother.  She said to me in German, “Take more than that!!  It’s good!”

And she ripped off about a quarter of her raisin bread loaf and gave it to me.  It WAS good.

She started to speak to me in German.

I told her in German that I only speak a little bit of German.

I told her I was from Los Angeles.  She was very surprised to find someone from so far away in her Hannover neighborhood.

She told me (in German) she was from Croatia.

She asked why I was here.  I explained (in English, with hand gestures) that I was doing an exchange program for journalists.

She understood.

I told her (back to simple German) I was working at NDR.

She told me (in German) that her son works for a TV station.

Our bus came.  We took our bus ride.  She gave me another piece of raisin bread in the bus.  We then parted ways when I got off at the zoo, “Schoen Tag!”

It seems like such a simple exchange.  But I was proud because 1) I mostly communicated in German, even if it was simple.  And she understood what I was saying!!  And 2) I think it says a lot about the local community when someone is willing to share food with random people at a bus stop.

It’s similar to what happened to me in 2006, on a bridge in Dresden, Germany, when I knew even LESS German.

I was watching the sunset (Sonnenuntergang!) and it was pretty magical in itself.  An old lady comes up to me.  She had to be in her 80s.  She says something in German that I don’t understand.  I tell her I only speak a little bit of German.  So she simplifies.

In the end, it turns out she had grown up near Dresden.  She was there when it was carpet bombed in World War II by the Americans and British.  In our simple German conversation, she said everything was “kaputt,” signaling to the rebuilt city landscape.  And she said that when the Communists came in, the river through town was all polluted.

It was a simple conversation.  Simple, but powerful.

The woman insisted on walking me to my bus stop, to make sure I got on the right bus.  So there I was, a grown woman, being walked to a bus stop by an 80-something year old!

I got back to Berlin and told friends there what had happened.  They told me that it was really rare for a German in that age group from that area to be so open with an American, given everything that had happened there during the war.  (Thousands of innocent people died in that bombing.)

If I hadn’t been traveling alone, I don’t think I would have ever had that conversation and experience.

But I think being open to experiences like that is the important part.  Whether it’s raisin bread or sunsets, you can learn a lot — in any language.

Happy Birthday to… what?!?

I did it.  I’m sorry.  But I had to.  I think it’s embedded in my DNA.  I stopped at a McDonald’s today.  It was there.  I had time.  But never did I expect it to bring a “cultural experience.”

I choose a table in the McCafe section after ordering from the McMenu (really).  I sit my McButt down on the McChair.  And I notice the McParty going on nearby.  A McDonald’s kids’ birthday party!

The McDonald’s worker breaks out a little chocolate cake and uses a green cigarette lighter to light the candles.

I wait in anticipation.  I get to find out what German kids sing around the birthday cake!  This is so exciting!  I can’t wait!

…

The tune begins, with the kids singing very softly, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

WHAT?!?

German kids sing “Happy Birthday” in English?!?  This just seems so wrong!  I had thought for sure there would be some sort of German birthday song.

I’m really curious how this American tradition managed to infiltrate German culture.  I wonder how long they’ve been singing the American song on birthdays?  Did kids of the 1970s sing the same song or was there some German song that fell to the wayside?

So many questions, that I forgot to look at how many McCandles were on the McBirthday cake.

More than Radio

At home in the United States, the concept of public radio is pretty simple:  Provide news and programming that serves the public.  We have newscasts with the day’s news.  We have news features about interesting topics.  We have call-in shows where people can talk about the day’s news.  Some stations have music shows or other programming thrown into the mix.

People line up for tickets Monday morning at NDR in Hannover.

But the concept of public radio is very, very different in Germany.  These are not “news outlets.”  They are cultural institutions.

Take NDR, for example.  It is public radio and TV for northern Germany.  It has its own orchestra (or two!), a big band and a choral group.  It puts on concerts and book readings.  People line up in the mornings to get tickets to the various NDR events.

All of those events air on the public stations.

On top of that, NDR has hour-long radio dramas and documentaries.   I am lucky if I can get five minutes of air time for a story at home, so I’m still floored they can get up to an hour here, if it’s something interesting.

One woman who works at the NDR Kultur bureau in Hannover yesterday was cutting down a reading of a Jane Austen book to fit into its time slot.  Sure, there are “books on tape” at home.  But you’d never hear “books on the radio.”

It’s just such a different concept.

First Day

Last year, I did a 6-week journalism exchange program to Austria.  Sometimes, it was like I had landed in Oz, especially when I went on a crazy adventure to try to find fabric softener in the store.

This time, in Germany, it is also like Oz.  On some sort of mind altering drug.

Not being fluent in the German language has been a huge disadvantage this time around.   And I’ve been placed in a German-only newsroom, which makes it extremely difficult to 1) be able to do anything related to radio news and 2) being able to understand anything beyond basic sentences.  “Der Himmel ist blau.  Ich will aus der Strand fahren.”  (“The sky is blue.  I want to go to the beach.”)

Beyond that, I am lost.  And there is no yellow brick road.  (No wicked witch, either.  I guess I am lucky there.)

My problem with German is that I try to pay attention and grasp the words while the people who are native German speakers seem to talk at super speed.  I manage to latch onto some words.  And by that time, we’ve finally come to the end of the sentence, which is sometimes the verb, which makes sense of the whole sentence.  But the sentence was so long that now I’ve forgotten the rest of the words I caught before the verb — and, oh shoot! — now we’re moving on to the next sentence.

Really, Dorothy had it easy.

Why Can’t They Get Along??

Each time I travel to Germany, I find it interesting what German’s ask about.

The first time I was here was in 2005, after President George W. Bush was re-elected president of the United States.  I was in Germany with a Rotary Club exchange program and we’d been warned that we might get questions about what we thought of the Bush Administration and Iraq.  Much to my surprise, no one wanted to talk about then-President Bush.

Instead, they wanted to talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian actor who’d just been elected as California’s governor.  I was kind of surprised by the German interest in Schwarzenegger because I didn’t think much of it myself.  California had elected an actor as governor before (Ronald Reagan).  It didn’t seem to be a big deal to me.  So the questions caught me off guard.

This time, I wasn’t sure what sorts of questions to expect.

But in the last week, three different Germans have asked me to explain why the United States federal government constantly butts heads based on party and doesn’t seem to be able to get along.  (Anyone think “Kindergarten Cop” should pay a visit to Capitol Hill?  Might be interesting!)

For the record, the German federal government is a coalition system.  After the election, the winning party forms a coalition with smaller parties, so it has enough votes to take control and set the agenda.  In order to do that, each party must compromise.  Perhaps the larger party agrees to push the environmental cause (green energy, etc…) while the smaller party then agrees to go along with the larger party on international issues.

Each party must compromise to gain power.  So each party gets something it wants, but each party also has to agree to something it might not want.  So everyone’s happy.  And everyone’s not happy.  It’s a win-win (or lose-lose) situation.

So while Germans live within this system, they seem to find it hard to grasp how the U.S. system works, dominated by two parties that constantly seem to clash and bicker like school-aged siblings.  (At least based on what the Germans have asked me this week!  I don’t want to loop all Germans into one category.)

I didn’t really have a good explanation for the Germans.  I’m a bit jaded and told them it all traces back to money and power.  If they go against the party, they risk losing support (and money from lobbyists) and might find it harder to get re-elected.  So you end up with two parties that have a hard time budging on either side.  There might be a little compromise, but not much.

But really, that’s not much of an explanation!  How do you explain American politics (which doesn’t make sense even to Americans sometimes) to Germans?  Tough to do!

One Step (or Steckdose) at a Time

With a viewing of Bernd das Brot, the strange, depressed bread puppet that runs in a loop on German and Austrian children’s TV late at night, my German class at the Goethe Institute was over.  Sadly.  I wish I could stay on for the full four-week intensive immersion course, but the Burns Fellowship program only allows for two weeks of language training before we head on to our host media outlets.

Still, two weeks has added a lot to my German language skills.  I learned new vocabulary.  I sorted out the der, die and das of vocabulary already embedded in my brain.  I felt like pounding my head into the desk over the Akkusativ form of words in German, but then I finally “got” it.  I am proud to say I can now use two verbs in a German sentence.  I couldn’t do that before!

When I was walking through a giant appliance, music and household goods store (a chain called Saturn) this afternoon after class, I saw a sign over one of the aisles that drove it all home:  “Steckdosen.”

“What the… (insert expletive of your choice),” you ask?  STECKDOSEN?!?  As in, “the German word for power outlet?”

The thing is, I actually KNEW what it was without having to look at the items in the aisle.  It’s a new feeling.  And it’s a huge step in the world of trying to learn a new language.  One Steckdose at a time.

The Language of Lost

It’s been a little more than a week since I landed in Hamburg, Germany with a loud, out-of-tune rendition of the German national anthem stuck in my head.

I’m here to do the Arthur F. Burns reporting fellowship.  It started with a week of meetings in ungodly hot and humid Washington DC, followed by some bonding time with the other eight Americans and nine Germans at a resort in rural Virginia.  (And THAT included a USA vs Germany volleyball match, which started with very loud and happy renditions of each country’s national anthem.  Thanks German Burns Fellows, for getting that stuck in my head!)

After getting our American butts kicked by the Germans in volleyball (all in good fun!), we were off to our host cities and for many of us Americans, off to intensive German language classes.  My beginning class in Hamburg is filled with people from all over:  Spain, Italy, Scotland, Iraq.  A mosaic of cultures.  All brought together by the quest to learn German.

The program includes field trips (auf Deutsch) to various sites around Hamburg.  This afternoon, we visited the Miniature Wonderland (Miniatur Wunderland auf Deutsch), a giant model train layout in Hamburg.  We’re talking Vegas, the Southwest US, the German Alps, even Hamburg itself all in one place, in detailed miniature form.

I should note here that my German is about the level of a toddler.  Nicht gut.  But at the Miniature Wonderland, a girl about five years old wandered up to me and asked in German if I knew where her mother was.  The girl was nearly in tears.  I’d never seen this girl before.  I have no idea who her mother is or where she was.  But despite the language barrier, it was easy to understand the language of lost.  And that’s what the little girl was.

All of the drills we’ve done in my German class flew out of my head.  What should I say to her?  All I could think about is how scared this little girl was, amid a mass of people who probably seemed to her to be as tall as skyscrapers.  I knew the panicked feeling of losing your mother in the crowd at that age.  I knew the language of lost.

So I told the girl the only German thing that came to mind, “It’s okay.”  (Okay, so it wasn’t German.  “Alles gut” just didn’t seem appropriate.)  Then I told her the second German thing that came to mind, “Kommst du.”  And I put my hand on her shoulder and led her to the front counter of the museum, where a worker who could speak German took over.  (The girl was reunited with her mother after they made an announcement over the speakers in the museum.)

Afterward, I could suddenly remember German again, kicking myself for not asking her, “Wie heisst du?  Was ist ihr Mutter’s Name?”  (Okay, so not perfect German.)  But despite all that, what really hit home was that no matter what language you speak, whether you understand the words or not, we’re really so much alike, when it comes down to the stuff that means the most.  The feelings, the compassion are the same.  We all speak the language of lost.