I like to joke that I married my husband because the apartment he was assigned at the university in Beijing, where we met, was equipped with hot water, a bathtub, and a refrigerator.  In truth however, I married him because he received care packages from Germany at Christmas.

They were carefully wrapped and thoughtfully chosen collections of chocolate, gingerbread, marzipan, and home baking. His landlady even sent an entire Linzertorte, a cake that fortunately improves with age, through the diplomatic pouch. The first care packages – in the signature yellow cardboard boxes of the German post office - arrived in time for the beginning of Advent or the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6. Another set usually arrived in time for Christmas. Since both his mother and aunt were looking after him from afar, he was already getting double rations. But as soon as he announced that he had met a young lady, the size of the care packages increased. By Easter, they were sending two of everything.

The other Germans on campus were also being spoiled by their families. I remember being in the student dormitory – Building 6 – when Christine from Berlin and Astrid from Hannover opened their care packages and shared the contents with a party of friends gathered for the celebration. Bars of Milka chocolate, Ritter Sport, solid chocolate Santas, jars of Nutella and instant coffee, bags of gummy bears, and even loaves of stollen, or Christmas cake, spilled out of their lovingly wrapped packages to shrieks of delight and hectic gorging. It was 1987 and the selection of food at the cafeteria of our university was dismal in winter. Eggs and tomatoes, fried potato with bits of fatty pork and green pepper, fried aubergine, and the ubiquitous Chinese cabbage topped the menu in winter. Breakfast consisted of steamed dumplings stuffed with either meat or red bean. We weren’t starving, but by December all of us were craving chocolate. Besides, these students – among the first generation of foreign students in China to study Sinology - were paying to live in pretty desperate conditions. Their dorm rooms had poured concrete floors, metal beds, and rickety, ill-fitting casement windows. The washrooms on each floor had cold running water in trough-like sinks and squat toilets. The hallways were dimly lit with bare lightbulbs. Trash was swept to one dark corner of the hallway. The doors to the building were locked at 12:00 p.m. Hot showers could be taken once or twice a week at the public showers.

Into this scene then, imagine the comfort and joy that Swiss chocolate or mother’s baking can bring. Since then I have learned to bake the nutty half-moon biscuits with lemon drizzle that my husband’s mother perfected, and Linzertorte, prepared according to his landlady’s handwritten instructions and complete with a dash of schnaps in the mix,  is now a standard in my recipe canon.

Every year on Hallowe’en I take my son and his friends trick or treating in our neighbourhood. I have to admit, it’s pretty lame. Over the years we have learned who gets Hallowe’en and who doesn’t. Many people are bewildered by children knocking on their doors. Some people give money, and some empty their cupboards of peanuts, pretzels, cookies, and chips. Many don’t even open their doors.  But last year I was truly upset by one old lady. I told the boys to ring at her door because I had once stopped to help her haul heavy sacks of leaves from her garden to the street when I saw her struggling. “And I don’t even know you,” she said sweetly. “Dankeschön!” She was anything but friendly when we rang on Hallowe’en. “I have nothing to do with your pagan rituals,” she said, adding for our information that October 31 happens to be Reformation Day and as such an important church day, even a holiday in Protestant parts of Germany.

For years my thinking was, the Germans have a lot to learn about Hallowe’en. Once a group of boys came around a week early, wanting to try their luck. Some kids don’t even dress up. This year the biggest supermarket in Heidelberg, which has a population of 135,000 and a substantial American presence, did not have a single pumpkin for a Jack O’Lantern in the days before Hallowe’en. And who hands out euros at the door? But now I realize there is simply a deep-seated resentment towards what is considered a commercial opportunity for the retail industry and a strange American tradition that has infiltrated Europe. Hallowe’en is actually being mobbed out of Germany.  The Deutsche Welle calls it a “struggle between religion and party culture”. When I told a considerably younger German friend about the incident with the old lady, she fully agreed and told me her children have to attend church on October 31, are not allowed out in the evening, and the door to the house remains firmly shut to trick or treaters. Our friendship has been slightly frosty since then; I knew she was conservative, but had no idea just how far off the curve she was.

Prior to 9/11, I took the kids trick or treating on one of the American bases in Heidelberg. I prefer a bit of a party on Hallowe’en, especially for the kids. I guess it’s my culture. There are some things you just can’t export.

The house was built in 1899. Seven rooms, high ceilings, a new kitchen. It had a view of the river and the old bridge in Heidelberg. It sounded perfect for us. I would finally have my own room and the view would inspire great works of literature. As soon as I saw the photos on the estate agent’s website, I wanted an appointment. But why was one room empty? And was that a bed in the living room? And why was the price – 417,000 euros — so low?

If I had known before moving to Germany that I would never live in a four bedroom home with a two-car garage, I might never have been so eager to move here. The housing market and the education system – those are the two items I wish I had researched better. Not really house hunters, my husband and I are that species that estate agents hate - real estate tourists. Ten years ago we bought our current house, which by Canadian or American standards would be considered a cottage, a starter home. It was a Schnäppchen, a bargain, and it was a happy coincidence that we found it.

The house described above turned out to be located on a steep incline on the sunless side of the river, and accessible only by a footbridge that rises high above the railway tracks. One would have a view not of a peaceful river, but of high voltage cables. Imagine moving into that place: Every single chair and every single box of books would have to be carried up the stairs and over the bridge. Not much wonder it is currently rented to students. Location, location, location.

My idea of a nice family home is, for example, my grandmother’s house:

These photographs were taken in 1974, but the house hasn’t changed much since my father grew up there in the 1920s and ’30s with his many siblings when his father, a medical doctor, was one of the local medical practitioners. My brothers and sisters called it the Ice Palace. As my Grandmother aged, she refused to move into a nursing home, but wanted company in her cavernous, lonely house at night. We had our choice of bedrooms, the brass bedroom being our favorite. But in January or February, it was like sleeping in a deep freeze. When my grandmother died, her wake was held in her parlour, a candle glowing in the window.

In my first year in Germany, my husband and I shared a two-room apartment with a friend of his. We had one room and the friend had the other. The only common room was the kitchen. The neighbourhood was attractive, but apartments were hard to come by. It was the early 1990s and German reunification put the squeeze on the housing market, with many “Ossies” also looking. Eventually we had to move out when the landlady’s granddaughter decided to leave her home in the former East Germany and move to Heidelberg. We moved out and around the corner into a furnished apartment, vacated by a woman who entered a nursing home. It was a temporary solution. Her flat was outfitted with plush green carpet, swag curtains, and wood panelling. We bought the Saturday paper early and trawled the ads, hopeful of finding a big, beautiful apartment. Maybe like the ones I had rented in Montreal. Estate agents wanted to see ID when we looked at apartments; hundreds of other hopeful couples lined up to inspect the flats too. It was never clear how the selection was made but I suspect handsome “incentives” were paid. Desperate, and afraid of living in Frau Schlecter’s digs for the rest of my life, we did what any normal young couple where I come from would have done anyway — we decided to buy.

We had saved a bit of money. But estate agents laughed when we revealed our budget to them. We bought the first apartment we saw that we could afford. In hindsight, it was a mistake. Luckily, we were able to sell it when we bought our little blue Scandanavian house:

We also happen to live in one of the most expensive areas of Germany, the Rhein-Main area, an area blessed by a mild climate, early springs, short winters, and favored by well-educated, high-paid professionals who work at any number of companies established here. So cheap four-bedroom homes, even if there were plenty of them, are hard to come by.

Until last year, when I found a house that I would have bought on the spot. If it were not located  janz weit draussen. Cut off from the civilized world in a tiny village with only one bus to-ing and fro-ing to a beaded necklace of similarly cut off villages along the path to the nearest train station, several miles distant. A fabulous house with Mediterranean flair. Four bedrooms, a den, a fireplace, rose trellises in the expansive garden – and the payoff – a walk-in closet in the master bedroom. I am ready to make compromises, like doing without an en suite bath, or a large kitchen, or local transport. The house was located conveniently to my place of work. But my kids said, forget it mom, how are we going to get to school, who is going to drive me to hockey practice, and how are my friends supposed to visit me here? Which quickly put an end to that dream.

This weekend we have an appointment to look at another house. To be continued…

I remember crossing the bridge in my hometown on the last day of school one year, opening my satchel and dropping all the contents into the river. Watching all that loose leaf float down toward the flume and the falls, I watched my cares of the school year float on. Terrible for the environment, but great for my mental health. I didn’t hate school. In fact, I enjoyed school so much that I played school with my sister and her friends during our summer vacation (I was always the teacher). I had a number of teachers who believed in me, and encouraged me by assigning extra work or books to read. One of my favorite teachers was Mrs. Kirkham,  my Grade 7 teacher. Her bearing was majestic, crowned by glossy black hair that she wrapped in an enormous knot on the top of her head. Once my mother came back from a parent-teacher meeting and I pestered her to tell me what the teacher had said about me. My mother, clearly embarrassed, only told me that Mrs Kirkham had made some flattering remarks about me.

I wish my 11-year-old son had a Mrs Kirkham. I wish he had teachers who believed in him, teachers who praised him and encouraged him. Instead, he was sent home for the summer vacation last week with a report card containing the following – roughly translated – remarks from his teacher:

“F. showed interest in most subjects, but was often careless. He was particularly disinterested and unwilling to make an effort in Physical Education. He had troubling concentrating and following the lessons in all subjects except English and Art. He raised his hand only occasionally, but worked well on his own, although at an extrememly slow pace. To some extent he had difficulty getting organized. Not only did he forget his homework and notebooks, but he also slouched in his chair and showed a negative attitude in class. In the first half of the year, he could not be trusted to obey the rules. Moreover, when confronted with his misdemeanors, he was incorrigible, stubborn, and unwilling to show reason. This improved only towards the end of the school year. Towards his classmates, F. was helpful and considerate. In the open discussions with the class he often contributed to solving problems by making good suggestions.”

Uff! Now, haven’t we all learned to give the positive feedback first, and only then the negative? Those words depressed the heck out of me. I knew all that stuff and have a number of e-mails from the teacher to prove it. Why rub it in at the end of the school year? Why can’t teachers be a little kinder? There are Mrs Kirklands here – but where? My little boy has been suffering tough teachers for the past three years. But this was the first year that he had detentions and had to write lines. I think he found it mildly sadistic when the supervising math teacher passed the time by listening to her i-pod, helping herself to a bag of gummy bears and flicking through a magazine. The next time my boy got a detention I asked the teacher if F. could at least use the time sensibly by doing his homework or memorizing a poem. Homework, no; poem, yes. F. and his father chose Goethe’s “Totentanz”  (“Dance of Death”). Now at least he can recite Goethe.

I’ve been doing some on-line research for work. Nothing  special about that, I do it all the time. But this time is different. I’ve been researching at the site of a prominent monthly magazine in preparation for an in-house training with one of their journalists.

Here’s the background: We’ve noticed the need in our corporate publishing team to jazz up the interviews we do with customers, executives, and industry experts. We want sexy stories. But I feel we’ve gotten lazy and tend to read off the same list of questions (“What was the benefit to your business?”) and then print up the results after some slight editing. An interview might sound easy, but it is one of the hardest stories to write well. You need a rapport and trust with the interview partner – which is hard to do if the interview is conducted by phone, as they often are - because you want to draw interesting bits of detail and anecdotes from your guest. When you write up the interview, you want to begin with a startling question, not something that makes it look as if you haven’t done your homework (“Tell us about your business”). Although we scrub the answers and mix up the order of the questions and answers for best results, we felt that our interviews could be improved. And that was a sign to my boss to do something about it. He decided to hire a professional to train the team in interview techniques and in writing up interviews.

The  journalist who was recommended will join us for a full day’s training in October. He writes for a magazine, my boss assured the team, that is famous for its interviews.

That magazine is Playboy.

Playboy has got to be one of the few magazines that I don’t buy. And if I did, I bet the interviews wouldn’t get my full attention. Someone on Facebook recently referred to magazines as the “lemon sorbet of literature,”  but I think they were referring to the light and pretty home, fashion, and celebrity magazines that a lot of us are suckers for.

And that explains why I’ve been doing my online research at playboy.com. I read their 1980 interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.  I read the 1976 interview with Elton John. My further research revealed that 98% of their interviews are conducted with male celebrities, that the women they interview are TV starlets and talk show hosts, and that the photos of these ladies might well be placed in the centerfold. But what are my chances of getting an interview with someone who wants to talk about shows, shades, and shoes? My SAP playmates talk about software, services, and sales.

I have to admit Playboy’s hacks are good. Here’s an example of what I mean about beginning an interview with a startling question:

PLAYBOY: Judging by the title of your latest book—Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea—we know your liquor of choice. Why is vodka a superior form of alcohol?
CHELSEA HANDLER:Vodka is great because it doesn’t have an odor. If you drink rum or tequila, your breath will have a very distinct alcohol smell. I was looking for something a little more subtle because I don’t like to smell like a prostitute in the morning. Not that I’m worried about offending anybody. I’m usually alone when I wake up. You can’t fit two people into a bathtub. Yeah, that’s right, I’m a class act all the way. Klassy with a capital k.

PLAYBOY: You sound like our kind of girl.
CHELSEA HANDLER: I drink often and I drink frequently…

I hope that our trainer is creative because I don’t believe that we have ever mentioned alcohol or sex or nudity in our corporate publishing channels. And our interviewees are always fully clothed in the photos. But maybe I am being unfair. Maybe the interview techniques are the same. And who knows? Maybe this could be my chance to move into the world of entertainment journalism.

I had the right skill set to land my first job in Germany: I knew how to sew. In two languages. The job was advertised in the weekly national paper Die Zeit. The publishing company Verlag Aenne Burda in Offenburg was looking for a translator. I bought a new black skirt and sweater for the interview, studied my sewing terminology (“yoke” and “darts”) with the help of my PONS German-English dictionary, and took a train to Offenburg for my interview. I worked in a team of young women, one or two each from countries all over Europe: Italy, France, Sweden, and Holland. We were the “Auslandsredaktion” and were housed in an old building, separate from the company headquarters. We didn’t have any contact with the editors of the magazine, which, when I think about it, was crazy. We were an all-female team with a male supervisor who spoke no foreign languages and had no apparent editorial, fashion, or home-sewing skills. I’m just saying, he might have been a good manager despite these shortcomings. It was 1991. The team translated all the editorial copy for company’s portfolio of magazines including the monthly Burda Moden and quarterly and now defunct Burda International. When I worked there Burda Moden featured a homemaker’s mixture of home-sewing, fashion, food, and domestic pleasantries.  The centerpiece of the magazine always has been the built-in sewing patterns. Everything from Bavarian dirndls to First Communion dresses to golf skirts.  Just last month, the magazine was relaunched with a fresh new look and feel, and a new editor-in-chief. I even started buying it again! Check out their website.

It was the perfect job for me at that time.  I wanted to work for a known name. Wanted to enter the workforce quickly. After all, it was only a year after I had settled in Heidelberg and my German was not very good at the time.

Later I would commute from Heidelberg to Offenburg, a train trip of some 90 minutes one way. As soon as my Probezeit was up, I asked what other opportunities there were in the company for someone like myself. Unfortunately there were none, I was told. Fortunately, I was soon pregnant with my first child.

When I tried to get a job at SAP two years later – they too were advertising for native speaking translators – I couldn’t convince them that the skills I had acquired would serve me well as a technical translator. That was my first missed attempt at getting hired at SAP. Another would follow before they finally took me.

I was listening to SWR2 on a Sunday morning recently and was delighted to discover that their subject was one that the media often ignores but which i adore: sewing. It is one outcome of the economic crisis: consumers are tired of same old same old Kleenex clothes that are disposed of after a couple of washings.  In the U.K. sales of sewing machine are up. In Germany homesewing courses are booked solid and at the ethnic markets in Berlin people are snapping up fabrics for 50 cents a meter.

My mother would smile. No, laugh. Even when she travels, she is never without needle and thread. She spent the month of March in Victoria, British Columbia and before she left she told me that she had packed a large board to use as a work surface for her quilting projects (“I just lay it on the luggage rack.”)  My mother was always economical. She made diapers for her many babies from the cotton sacks in which 50 pound bags of flour were delivered. We wore “Pure Canadian Wheat”  on our bottoms. She also made most of our outer clothing as well. Some of the best items that I remember were the birdcage bathing suit that she made for me and the “paper” dresses that she made for my younger sister and me. Not Kleenex dresses, these were made from a brightly printed papery cotton. We didn’t go to pre-school or kindergarten or daycare – we were homeschooled in making dolls clothes.  

Mom sewed on a heavy, but rather dainty black Singer sewing machine that she got when she married in 1945. My sisters and I all learned to sew by hand, and then on this machine. I had it with me at university in Montréal, by which time Mom had bought a new one for herself. I sewed long, narrow, six panel skirts from a Vogue pattern, one in black velvet with pin prick dots, godets flaring at the hem. Or another in fine Italian wool with kick pleats. My favorite fabric store was a tiny boutique called Au Long Metrage in Outremont. But sometimes my girlfriend Robin, another sewing fanatic, and I would enter the bargain basement of Fabricland in search of two-for-one offers on patterns.

My sister and I spent entire summers competing for the use of the Singer, she whipping up Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, or stuffed toys. She once even cut up a vintage beaver skin coat to make a jacket. We made pinafore tops, wrap skirts, and apron dresses. It was the 70’s. The nearest fabric store was in the next village, 11 miles away. Sometimes we biked the distance just to buy fabric for new skirts or dresses with our babysitting money.

When my sisters and I graduated from university, we each received not a car or a trip to Europe, but a sewing machine. Actually, not quite. I got a loan to travel to China where a teaching job awaited me. I bought my first sewing machine there, a treadle machine. That was all that Beijing’s finest markets had in the late 1980’s. I laid out and cut my Chinese silks on the long tables in the reading room of the university library after hours. And when we came to Germany, I got the machine I have now – a Pfaff brand. It was important to me then that my new machine have a buttonhole function. Until then, I had been making them by hand.

When it came time to learn German, I found easy ways – by reading sewing instructions. But that is a topic for the next post!

Finally. I have finally found the explanation for why I am incurably messy. It’s not genetic. It’s just because neatness, or Ordentlichkeit, is not one of my strengths. Makes me a bad match for a place like Deutschland then, where Ordnung muss sein, where the street is swept every Saturday, but never on Sundays or holidays. Where rules reign. In fact it might expain why I continue to be an observer, and not a fully fledged, card-carrying member of the society. I am just not ordnungsliebend. I discovered this Makel, this fleck on my character by doing a study of my strengths and talents. Focus, discipline – these are missing from my Strengths Finder results. And these traits would help a messy person.

Instead my strengths say a lot about why I love to read, write, talk, socialize etc. So here they are, my personal results of the Strengths Finder 2.0 survey, sponsored with thanks by SAP, the outcome of an online questionnaire that asks things like do you prefer to spend time with children or adults?:

• Ideation
• Input
• Activator
• Command
• Woo

My colleagues responded with mirth to the last one. Woo. What is that? The book by the same name as the survey and companion guide to the online test tells us that Woo stands for Winning Others Over. The meaning of the other themes is only really explained by the accompanying text. So buy the book, by #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath and discover your own strengths. I recommend it. It will give you a lift. Our entire team at SAP received copies of the book and did the test. It caused a ripple of excitement in the heady stress of our daily tasks. The idea is not to focus on what you can’t do, but what you do well. And then to team up with people who have complementary skills. Luckily there are two project managers on the team who have Focus and Discipline who have always provided structure to my Ideation and Input. I did find however, that many of my German colleagues found the test a load of crock. Nothing wissenschaftlich about it. In fact, the online reviews at Amazon’s German site give the book’s English version five stars, but only three and a half to the German version. This tells you more about the people reviewing than the book itself.

On the last day of school before the summer break my son celebrated by inviting his best friend to a backyard bonfire in which they reduced their notebooks from fourth grade to a pile of grey ash. After months of teeth gnashing, headaches, stomach aches, and hours spent procrastinating on homework, my son had finally completed perhaps the most difficult and important year in the German education system. Emotionally trying for parents, teachers, and pupils alike, the fourth grade is when ten year olds are stamped and streamed for their further education. My son made the grade and was promoted to Gymnasium. His first day in his new upper school is tomorrow. “Don’t even talk about it!” he says.

I wish he had had a teacher like Mrs Murphy, who taught my friend Nina’s boy in Toronto. I have never met Mrs Murphy, but she sounds like a teacher whose mission it is to motivate children, and make their learning experience a positive one. According to Nina, Mrs Murphy gives the children “leadership opportunities” and encourages them to act like leaders. Instead of telling them who the boss is and what the rules are, she gives them responsibility and ownership for their actions. (Sounds like a good corporate program for employees :-) ). She never got mad, but was “disappointed.” And since she took the children on outings and did African drumming sessions with them, it meant something when their teacher was disappointed. As Nina says, “She believed in them.” And they respected her for it.

Nina’s child, previously sick with chronic belly aches, blossomed in Mrs Murphy’s class. “He jumped out of bed every morning like a little squirrel,” Nina says. Mrs Murphy’s approach may sound touchy-feeling, but the point is, she motivated the children. And if there is one thing my son’s fourth grade teacher did right, it was to demotivate the children. She was stingy with praise. She gave homework every day so that the kids often spent at least one if not two hours at repetitive exercises. I appreciate that it is not easy to manage a group of 28 children, but yelling at them if they don’t listen or don’t pay attention can’t be the answer. And it wasn’t, because every day, the children talked and didn’t pay attention, and every day she yelled at them. Rather than promoting leadership, she promoted losership.

A good teacher can contribute so much to shaping a young person’s personality and future. I remember my favorite teachers so well – they were the ones who believed in me. They recognized talent and interests, and drew them out. I hope my son finds a teacher who believes in his brains and recognizes that he wants more than to memorize Latin vocabulary and chemical formulas; a teacher who instills passion, ambition, and independent thinking. But I am afraid that in the German system, most teachers want to plow through the curriculum and have little time to devote to the individuals in their classrooms.

Today I went back to work after three weeks of paid vacation. I can’t complain. I have worked at companies where employees were grudgingly assented two weeks off per year. I get 32 days paid vacation at SAP. It is one of the perks of living in Germany. But. On my last day at work I left the office at 7:00 PM after an 11 hour day, thinking how wrong it felt. At home I dropped my laptop in a corner and didn’t touch in again until this morning when my inbox groaned open to reveal 750 waiting mails, spam and all. I am not bragging. Many other colleagues go on vacation with their Blackberrys and feel obliged to continue to be on call. Colleagues in other geographies.

Instead, my husband and I packed up the Volvo with essential kit for us (including a novel of 1,300 pages for him), loaded up the kids and their even weightier kit and drove across France to northern Spain. Where I was promptly rewarded for the stress of the previous weeks with a raging fever that put me to bed for days. But I wasn’t complaining. I had seen the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. In all its glory. A thing of true beauty:

I had two wonderful – shorter – novels waiting for me (Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes and The Sea, by John Banville) and nothing to do but enjoy the foreignness of Spain. At least once a year I need to get out of Germany. I need to experience a different culture for a longer period of time. Actually my job has taken me on some wonderful trips in the past years – to India and China. Although they are work-related, I still enjoy the people, the food, the sounds, the sites, the shopping. In Spain, it was no different. We were lucky to have a friend, Maria Eugenia, in Cantabria who was our translator, guide, and hostess for two weeks. Maru, as she is known, teaches Greek and Latin in the local school, and directs theatre on her summer vacations. Maru is an intellectual Lolita, who can talk Aristoteles and Lorca, who wears a tiny string bikini at the beach and had a considerable collection of low cut t-shirts that showed her best feature to full advantage. She recommended the following novelists to me, none of which I have ever read: Anita Nair, Rosina Lippi, Natalie Ginzburg, and José Saramago.

My boys were delighted to find a surf school at the beach at St. Vincente de la Barquera. Run by a university educated and multilingual German surfer dude, the school is located directly at the beach, which in turn is located in a national park. No highrise condominiums here. Just VW buses with German licence plates camping illegally in the meagre parking zone. Surfnsoul was lots of fun – highly recommended. My boys will return in glory sometime to ride the waves. The blistering hot beaches are not my scene however. I was the one hovering under a beach umbrella, wearing a hat the size of a wagonwheel and wearing a longsleeve shirt. I can just feel my skin frying like bacon in a pan if I stay too long in the sun. Not so obviously the five topless lovelies stretched out in their full glory at the beach. Not a book or newspaper in sight, these ladies were at the beach for the hard work of turning even nuttier brown. Occasionally one of them would reapply some tanning oil, but they did not talk, swim, eat or even drink. Now they look fantastic. In twenty years?