A lot has happened since my last photo-dump: I went to Bonn for two weeks; stayed with a German family; dug up a ton of weird/cool/random stuff in the Beethoven archive; peered over the shoulder of conductor and editor Jonathan La Mar while he worked with original Beethoven manuscripts; played board games with four German college guys, two of whom were identical twins with the same voices, mannerisms, and facial hair, which was weird (and incidentally I was the Siegerin); hiked for 4.5 hours along a trail high in the hills of Rhineland wine country; attended a DAAD orientation event in Cologne, where I talked so much over the course of 2 days that I now have no voice at all...
...and a lot will happen this week: an important presentation tomorrow that I should be working on at this moment, sitting in on a musicology class in German, my first woodcut class, another DAAD orientation event that I mistakenly wasn't invited to (but I'll show up anyway, they can't stop me!), dinner at the home of my Tandem Sprachpartner, and eventually somewhere in there I'll have to read some of the 1,000 books on my StaBi To-Do-List.
So suffice it to say, I haven't had as much time to devote to this blog as I would like. There may be some mere photo-dumps in the near future.
But today: musings on German culture + life in Berlin.
In general, Germany and the US are quite similar -- first world countries with first world problems, cars on the right side of the road, multicultural neighborhoods, coffee and pizza. If anything, the strongly neighborhood-y feel of Berlin reminds me of Chicago; so whatever cultural differences I've encountered are quite subtle. (Granted, many of the cars are tiny hybrids, the neighborhoods are often Turkish, the coffee costs twice as much, and some pizzas have tuna on them.)
But clearly there are differences: there are things that I consider distinctly German, and things Germans consider distinctly American. Peanut butter, for example.
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| I love how "Mike Mitchell's" is the brand name for all "American"-style products. I picture Mike Mitchell looking like this guy: |
And clearly when you look through the coupon book and encounter things like this, it's obvious that some things are distinctly German.
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This guy is standing in a field drinking whole milk out of a bag. And he can't get enough.
(Is that enough yogurt for that kid?) |
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| Just so you can fully appreciate this baffling haircut. |
Americans definitely eat quite a bit of dairy, but nothing like this. The dairy consumption here is exorbitant. But no wonder: not only are the products higher-quality, but Germans and other Northern Europeans
can digest dairy more easily than most ethnic groups. Note that 60-80% of Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. moi) have lactose intolerance, compared with 15% of Germans. (Then again,
it all has to go somewhere...)
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| The vending machine at the StaBi: potato salad (with ham!) on the top, sausages with mustard in the middle. Somebody forgot their mustard! |
Another major difference I've observed is the widespread embrace of homeopathic or plant-based medicine, accompanied by a pervasive skepticism towards pharmaceuticals. In some ways I can understand this, given that pharmaceutical companies are notoriously corrupted, and especially that the drug selection in Germany is totally lousy and overpriced -- you can't buy "over the counter" medication in a normal drug store, but rather you must visit the Apotheke (yes, the apothecary) to explain your symptoms to a stranger in a lab coat who then chooses a remedy for you. Often there are only a couple options to choose from, neither of which perfectly matches the symptoms. So I can see how people might acquiesce when the Apothekerin pushes some little bottle of plant drops on them, saying "it's really just as effective." And if people want to drink lots of bitter teas instead of taking a Tylenol, who am I to judge...
But I've also heard some grumblings about vaccinations similar to the anti-intellectual nonsense in California. So while I shouldn't be judgmental, I find myself tsk-tsking all the weird teas and essences and homeopathic tablets I encounter everywhere, and to combat an excess of dairy I order Pepto Bismol from Amazon.de (it arrives in 1960s-style packaging from a small town in England). Whether the teas work or not, I feel like the Apotheke is a relic of the Middle Ages.
The biggest cultural difference, though, is what I described before with regard to the grouches at the StaBi. If you break rules here, or don't know the rules, or mess up, or step out of line, or do something even slightly different from what people expect, you'll be faced with instant "schimpfen" (= grumbling, grouching, ranting, bitching, etc.). Many people here -- though fortunately not the family I stayed with in Bonn, which was exceptionally easy-going -- are just plain uptight.
For example: I'm riding a bike on a busy street in Berlin, there's construction to my right and a fat SUV to my left and no more room to ride. So I have no choice but to get off the bike and walk it onto the curb. The woman driving the SUV rants out her window at me for several minutes because I failed to, uh, knock on her window to alert her to my presence. Just imagine for a moment knocking on someone's car window in the US. You might wind up with a couple bullets in your system.
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| Sometimes it's hard to do everything -- or anything -- right in a foreign country. |
And the German response to American friendliness, easiness, warmth in public-service situations? To someone behind a counter smiling at you? "Americans are superficial."
One thing I should mention, though, especially now that I've made this blog public (it was for a time limited to a private readership): I actually genuinely don't mean to essentialize people on here. Even if I do notice some cultural trends, particularly contrasts with the US, I don't want to seem prejudiced -- because I've truthfully had too many terrific experiences with German people to even count, particularly the family I stayed with and my conversation partner in Berlin. But I do notice that crowd behavior tends to be different from individual behavior. So I acknowledge that every grouchy librarian who schimpfs at me in the library might be quite friendly in a different context -- but somehow the German social expectation for privacy, elbow-room, and peace&quiet (Ruhe is a big thing here) creates a chillier atmosphere in public interactions.
But it seems that once you learn the rules and do things correctly, suddenly it becomes a magical place -- or at the very least, a perfectly pleasant place to live.
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| A couple sunsets in my neighborhood: a rare occasion when Wedding looks lovely. |
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| From my balcony. |
My neighborhood (Wedding) is a strange place. Parts of it look like a bit of a dump: long stretches of 24-hour casinos, discount groceries, erotic video stores, shops that are closed up and broken glass. Trash on the sidewalks, bubbly globs of spit everywhere that you have to walk around. And also perfectly friendly, normal families, workers splattered with paint (it's still the Arbeiterbezirk), cultural diversity, artists hauling portfolios or cellos on and off the bus.
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| I encountered a carnival in my neighborhood recently. It was a mix of kids' rides, junk food, flea market, and local stores selling cheap clothes and sun-bleached leather wallets. |
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| Festive... but: |
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| ...this long line of stuffed-animal-claw machines weirded me out. It felt like a kid's version of the casinos so prevalent in Wedding. |
It appears that some people here are living in poverty, while many are doing perfectly fine and are happy to live in this diverse neighborhood. This enigmatic graffiti that recently appeared on my apartment building suggests one of two things: either not everyone here is happy, or someone with spraypaint was trying to be mysterious.
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| "black hole" |
But many parts of Wedding are unexpectedly beautiful:
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| Nature is just around the corner. |
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| The park near my apartment where I go jogging, i.e. flailing about for a pathetically short time. |
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And everyone says Wedding is the next hip spot, full of students and artists. This trip to the Salon Christophori finally convinced me: a warehouse full of pianos features chamber music concerts on historical instruments with world-class performers. You can drink wine available at the back of the room, and at the end you pay a donation into a poster-tube.
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| This is what the "stage" looks like. It's visually a jumbled mess of piano parts, and heads blocking the performers, and music emanates from somewhere... |
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| Pianos stacked on end. |
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| The "backstage" area is located behind a wall of piano stuff. |
There's a certain chic sleekness to other neighborhoods in Berlin -- Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg, for example -- that Wedding lacks. But I'm slowly learning the charms of the neighborhood.
And at this point I have to get work done -- so without concluding this entry, or coming up with anything sufficiently humorous or entertaining, I say: adieux. And photo dump to follow.
