Live in Germany but Vacation in Italy

My friend and colleague C. over at Bei Rot Stehen (Stop at the Red Light) writes about foreigners in Germany, usually asking them for their opinions of the Germans and their strange habits. He has a cute series called 7 + 1. In it, he asks foreigners in Germany to list seven things they like about the country and to name one thing they miss about their own country. I like his approach. He deliberately avoids the trap of asking people what they dislike. That would get repetitive and therefore dull. Adding what you miss about your country gives people the opportunity to get sentimental and show pride.

Here is my list of seven things I like about Germany (translated for you):

1. The proximity to France.
2. The proximity to Italy.
3. That chocolate is a food staple.
4. The precision of the language.
5. That my employer gives me a company car and that I now drive a super sexy Audi A5, triggering envious looks from men in my neighbourhood.
6. Müsli and whole grain bread from our local bakery.
7. That the newspapers print long essays and opinion pieces.

And one thing I miss about Canada:

1. Maple syrup in five liter containers.

What do you like about Germany? And what do you miss about your home country?

“Love, Love I Have Hung Our Cave with Roses”*

In honor of St. Valentine’s Day, I decided to write a note today about perhaps my most memorable February 14 ever.

To do so, I have to go back in time. I grew up in a small town in the Ottawa  Valley, situated about 50 kilometers south of Canada’s capital city. My family was well established in Almonte. My father and his many brothers and sisters were born there in a big square stone house where my grandfather had established his medical practice.

Almonte is blessed with water. A river runs through it and the town features two sets of dramatic falls. It has good feng shui. My father would have referred instead to the genus loci, the spirit of the place.

In the late 1960s and 70s, Almonte started to attract a number of artists, draft dodgers, and people seeking a simple country life. They bought farmhouses, stone mills, one-room schoolhouses, and farm properties. They were wood workers, sculptors, teachers, stained glass artists, bakers, and Buddhists.

One of the people attracted to Almonte was also attracted to me. Or I to him. A carpenter, he bought up a rundown house in town and renovated it room by room by himself. I fondly remember a Valentine’s Day when he and I and many other artists crowded into the home of the couple who were living in the former schoolhouse in the country, for an evening of erotic and love poetry. It was grand. The women dressed up in red and black velvet dresses at a time before secondhand was called vintage, when it was born of necessity rather than coolness. (Jean, our hostess, eventually developed a thriving business in vintage clothing). We took turns reading Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Walt Whitman. Some guests read their own verse. It was a tradition I have long wanted to revive. Perhaps next year.

What are your favorite love or erotic poems?

*Sylvia Plath, Nick and the Candlestick

Teach Your Children Well

At the age of 12 my son has yet to master the English language. He has never been much of a reader, despite our best efforts to introduce him to the joys of literature. Both his father and I are graduates of literature programs, so perhaps it is just his way of showing how different he is. Plus he is growing up in a bilingual environment and his English teachers, despite their best efforts, are not native speakers.

Over the years I have collected notes he has written because they were too adorable to throw away. Together, they document his progress in English. You’ll best appreciate the humor if you know a bit of German. The best one, written when he was about six or seven, read:

Is dis jours?

Translation: Is this yours?

In August, he spent ten days with his boy scout troupe in Slovakia. It was his first camping and hiking trip ever. He is not especially fit or especially tough. Before he left, I tucked a note into his provisions, saying how proud we were that he was going on this trip, all by himself, away from the family for the first time ever, on his own, hiking for miles a day, enduring rain and discomfort and generally undergoing untold hardship. In a postcard he sent to us during the trip, he refers to this note in a postscript.

Today weare staiing at a nice river. Yesterday was a star clear night but it raind quiet a bit to. I washed twice already. The water was ice cold thow. Im rasining the toblerone to one piece aday (mostly for the cold evenings). We had some kafda some sort of Slowakian cake. I miss you a lot.

PS: I found your Note (quiet touching).

What I especially appreciate is his direct translation of compound nouns: “Sternklare Himmel” becomes “star clear night.” The “eiskaltes” water in the river is “ice-cold”. He speaks like that too, in not-quite-right-English. You can practically hear him translating as he goes along. You will notice too that punctuation is not his forte. Nor can he get used to the fact that we don’t capitalize our nouns in English (but forgets to capitalize Toblerone). Or that the “w” in English doesn’t make the “v” sound as it does in German.

Are your children bilingual? Can they spell? Tell me. I want to hear your stories too.

How I Mastered the German Language

When I first met my husband, I knew only two words of his language. One was “Blitzkrieg,” which all North Americans of my generation learned by watching reruns of Hogan’s Heros. The second word – ironically – was “Oberschenkel” (thigh), which was all that stuck from my efforts to teach myself German as a teenager. Our verbal interaction was limited at the beginning of our relationship, so it didn’t matter that my vocabulary was so small. Our lips and tongues were busy with other activities that did not require language.

We were living in China when we met. Once we went to an art exhibition with my husband’s students, Chinese students who were in Beijing to study German. By that time my vocabulary had doubled and I had another two words to impress my audience with. They were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny, amusing). I managed to use one of these words to describe each of the paintings we saw in that exhibition.

In 1988 China’s first Goethe Institute opened on the university campus where we lived. I enrolled immediately in Grundstufe I and excelled at my classes, jumping ahead in our lessons and learning all the answers auswendig, off by heart. My classmates were young Chinese professionals, whose employers, companies like Siemens and BASF, paid for their language training.

By the time we moved to Germany, I thought I was fluent. Until I realized there was a whole local lingo for the variety of breakfast rolls and breads at the local bakery. Until an old woman in our neighborhood looked at me suspiciously after I didn’t understand her, saying “Sie sind nicht ganz deutsch, oder?”

It was at that point that I started to ask all of our friends, many of whom had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, to speak German and German only with me. That year I had to pass the PNDS - Prüfung zum Nachweis der deutschen Sprache, the first  hurdle in the university acceptance process. It was tough. I had no idea how a language could have cases like nominativ, dativ and so on. The spelling was tortuous. My husband insisted then and will insist now that German is spelled exactly as it is spoken. Except they like the letter K so much they even put it in their Kaffee. A linguist tried to teach me when to use the Umlaut by inserting a pencil into his mouth and demonstrating that when a word has an Umlaut, the lips eject the pencil from the mouth. It’s all about the mouth in the end.

I still associate certain words with certain people. For example, our friend Michael N., who used the word “grossartig” (great, brilliant) in combination with a great guffaw; or Udo, who came from southern Germany and used the diminutive “Mädel” for girl, of which he always had several about.

Recently at work I had the opportunity to do a TV interview in German and while watching the replay, thought Scheiße, my mastery of the language had declined. I’ve decided to make more of an effort by reading German literature and not just the gossip and lifestyle magazines; by listening to books on tape rather than just radio; by speaking German to my husband instead of conducting conversations in a mish mash of English and German. Could this be another new beginning?

New Beginnings: Personal Trainer

During our move, I came across an old pair of Levi’s with a 28-inch waist. I wiggled them up over my hips, but there was a lot of stuff happening in the middle that prevented me from doing up the fly. My 40′s have been about that thickening middle.

My lackadaisical efforts at yoga, combined with power walks through the woods with my girlfriends on Sunday mornings had been keeping my weight below a certain number, but I didn’t look good in anything that wasn’t egg-shaped. Speaking of eggs, whenever I baked a pan of double chocolate brownies with walnuts, it was nearly impossible not to help myself. I live in a household with men and boys who want carbs and calories.

On my last birthday I decided to take action and find a personal trainer. I have always hated fitness studios and felt I needed to work with someone who would be more objective than I was, someone who would be tough with me.

I have gained eight kilos since joining SAP.  (I am well within the average – an unoffical source at my company revealed that employees gain a kilo per year, probably thanks to the free lunch, but also the sedentary desk jobs). At one point I was using a new form of contraception and I swear, within seconds of its subcutaneous insertion in my upper arm, I gained five kilos. (My gynecologist warned me I would gain weight, but I thought I was immune to excess pounds). In the end I had it removed because weight gain was just one of the unpleasant side effects it caused. Another was a diminished libido. What is the point of birth control if you don’t put it to the test? But I digress.

Since late July I have been getting my butt whupped by a 23-year-old sports management grad with a black belt in karate. I am old enough to be her mother. In fact, her mother is younger than I am. My PT has been teaching kick boxing at a local gym, but has never worked as a PT before. I simply approached her through a friend, who thought we would be a good fit, and my PT agreed. We set realistic goals when we began our sessions and she sets the agenda. She decided to take an interval train approach to our routine, one that would challenge me and tone the problem zones: upper arms, legs, butt, and of course, the ever thickening middle. We meet early mornings to walk, jog, and do weight bearing and resistance band exercises. I finally know what Jane Fonda meant all those years ago when she talked about “feeling the burn.”

There will be no before and after pictures for this experience. But I can already proudly say that our efforts are paying off!

I would be lying if I said that working with a personal trainer has prevented me from blogging. But it has also been good for the soul and what’s good for the soul is good for a writer.

Should I keep you updated on our progress, faithful readers? Has anyone had good (or bad) experience with a personal trainer?

Moving House: A Trashy Story

We moved house in August and as most expats would agree, the worst thing about moving in Germany is what to do with all the stuff you don’t want. Not only are the trash bins not big enough to hold all the junk that inevitably gets pitched in a move, you have to purchase green (for recyclable waste) or red (for real trash) bags at a price of two euros each to hold the excess trash. Then and only then will it be removed by the trash collectors.

That doesn’t account for old clothes, which have to be taken to a clothing bin, or to the Red Cross. And it doesn’t account for unwanted furniture or broken lamps, for which you have to book a date with the trash collectors at least two weeks in advance. Wood must be separated from iron or metal, which is collected separately.

This might explain why suckers like us inherit household goods from the previous tenants just about every time we move. So far, the previous tenants have always been older women. Coincidentally, their surnames all begin with the letter S.

The first time was shortly after reunification, when East Germans were moving west in droves, triggering a housing shortage. As a short-term solution, we moved to a furnished apartment, vacated by an old woman who was invited to enter a care facility. Her books were on the shelves, her pots and pans in the kitchen. Some months later Frau Schl. was back among the living and decided she wanted to move home, forcing us once more to up sticks. By this time, I had discovered personal photos between the pages of one thick volume, photos that were taken at a railway station probably sometime in the late 1930′s or early 1940′s. They showed Hitler surrounded by young women with fawning expressions. We didn’t actually inherit anything from Frau Schl., but it felt as if we did, since we lived amidst her green swag and watched her television for several months.

In 1995 we bought a little house Swedish prefab that had been built by two sisters, Evelyn and Gertrude S. After they died, the relatives took the piano and the mint condition Opel, and hired an “Entrümpler” to perform triage on the remaining contents of the house, taking anything that would fetch a few euros at auction (including an ancient set of kitchen scales) and throwing the rest in a dumpster. I took a few things too – a chaise longue, a butler’s table, antique wooden cutlery trays, a collection of jet buttons, and picture frames, most of which I still have.

This year we bought a big, solid, three storey house with good bones and nice features (including a sauna and a fireplace). I liked the vendor right off the bat. Frau Sch., a tall, attractive 70-something widow who drives a BMW Z3, repeated several times how she and her family enjoyed living in the house (“Wir fühlten uns immer hier wohl“). I figured, if it worked for them, it will work for us. We inherited: a Japanese tea set, five rice bowls, four armchairs, a coffee table, a wardrobe, three lamps and many more items too numerous to mention. I must admit, I donated many of the items too numerous to mention to someone who is going to hawk them at a flea market.

I’ve always been a collector and in preparing for this move, thought it would be cute to archive some of the vintage clothes and collectibles that I cannot emotionally part with. But now I am ready to live a pristine, uncluttered Zen-like lifestyle.