Why to Get Excited About European Soccer

Normally I couldn’t give a hoot for soccer, or football. Until there is a world or now European Championship. Now I devour the sports’ section of the local papers every day, scrounging for gossip about the players, looking for analysis and predictions about the outcome of future games, opinions about outstanding players and disappointing ones. About new stars and sudden has-beens.  I don’t actually watch all the games because if you have been following this blog you will know that we don’t have a TV. Thus actually watching a game means finagling an invite to a friend’s house or going to a public viewing event and paying two euros to follow on a huge screen.  Luckily we were invited to a friend’s house last week when Germany scored two beautiful goals in the first 25 minutes in a cliffhanger of a match against Portugal that reasserted the German team’s right to hope for more. I do love a hero. And the Germans came up with a couple of heros that night. The Germans, of course, are never the liebling of other nations. We all moan for the Brazilians at the World Cup - they play such acrobatic and quick soccer – while the Germans typically plod forward, set up their combinations, and get on with it.

Soccer is all around. Flags fly from cars and windows – mostly German, but also Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, Croatian. In offices and staffrooms, petty betting takes place. In schools, the children wear the jerseys of their favorite teams. Last week I wrote a note to my son’s fourth grade teacher who had been assigning merciless amounts of homework. I gently reminded her that when my other son was in fourth grade, the class didn’t get homework when the home team played. Even the employees in the production facilities at the Daimler plant in Stuttgart get the evening off on Wednesday when Germany meets Turkey in the semi-final.

At my local Italian grocer’s the conversation was ripe with speculation on Saturday. Domenico – who must be crying a river since last night when Italy was kicked out in a penalty shoot-out by underdog Spain – says there will be trouble in Germany, no matter whether Turkey or Germany emerges the winner. Certainly there will be celebrations. The Turkish form the largest ethnic minority in Germany, and the team’s tremendous success at the EM has been accompanied by an outpouring of pride. The papers warn not to underestimate the Turkish team. And unlike Domenico, some reporters believe that the match could actually lead to better understanding between the Turkish population in Germany, and the Germans. Es bleibt spannend!

Pillow Talk

The first two words of German I learned are telling. Either about the person I am, or the person who taught me the language. Or both. Those words were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny). We were living in China at that time. My husband – and teacher – was a lecturer of German to students at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing. I remember visiting an art exhibition in Beijing with them, and stopping before every painting, I would utter either “schön” or “lustig.” The weird thing was, it worked. No one was the wiser.

Actually I brought two other words to the relationship, but neither was very helpful in communicating on a daily basis. One I had learned as a teenager from the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”. “Blitzkrieg” was not a word that made small talk with Germans easy. My other word – “Oberschenkel” (thigh) might have gotten me further – faster-, but instead my husband and I started small.

He taught me all the parts of the body, one by one, and I repeated them one by one: Augen (eyes ), Nase (nose ), Mund (mouth ), Schulter (shoulders) and so on, down the line. When people ask how I learned German, I tell them “pillow talk”.

Call of the Wild

I have been gathering evidence in my own unscientific and amateurish way that the Germans have a spiritual attachment to their forests, and I believe I have a strong and emotional case for this claim. Yesterday morning I met my girlfriends for our Sunday morning power walk in our local mini forest.  Martina, at the head of the group, greeted the forest with a loud “Hello trees, here we come!” By the time we were on the home stretch an hour later, Doris and Heidi were in a deep discussion about the scents of different trees. “Warm pines,” smiled Heidi with a look of deep satisfaction on her face, ”in southern France.” Doris, who was brought up in the Black Forest, claimed that it has a deep, dark scent, worthy of its name. 

On the weekend, in the company of two of our best and oldest friends, I asked how many poems they could think of off the top of their heads with “der Wald” as a theme. They immediately mentioned Eichendorff and Goethe. And the first time I visited Germany, my hosts took me for a walk in the woods, which was criss-crossed with neat paths. In Canada my husband was always befuddled by the forests. Because there are no foot paths, no signposts. There is a reason we refer to it as “the bush”. Unless they are national or provincial parks, the Canadian forests are wild and forbidding for people on foot who are not equipped to fight mosquitos, underbrush, bears and poison ivy. Not that the German forests are tame, but they are civilized, welcoming, signposted, and open to the public.