Friday, June 22, 2012

Saying "Uh..."


Aw! Sorry, but I have to update again.

I'm still here, still trying to get some work done despite this Euro Cup quarter-final game playing next to my head.

It's half-time now, which means they're showing the news – as I mentioned in this post, I'm still floored to be living in a country where it's considered completely normal that this prime-time slot between games should be devoted to the evening news.

And just as cool: Everyone in the café is still paying attention, watching the news and commenting on it. And making fun of some politician (I'm sitting behind the screen, so I can't see who it is) who says "uh..." too much when he talks.

Every time I get really fed up with Germans as a whole, they go and do something awesome like actually care about the news. Or sing adorable German children's songs with their kid in the seat on the back of their bicycle, while waiting at a red light (seen yesterday).

Read Those (Foul-Mouthed) Lips

Heh. Heh heh heh.

Well, it's the evening of the Germany-Greece quarter-final Euro Cup game and once again, due to the increasingly weird work hours I keep, the rest of Germany is watching the game but I'm working.

Sometimes I vaguely keep track of the games by occasionally checking the official website's live feed to confirm what I already know based on when and where fireworks go off in the street. (One evening last week, with two games were going on at the same time, I quickly realized that hearing shouting and firecrackers from every direction meant Germany had scored in their game, while more localized cheering from one group of fans down the street meant Portugal had scored in their own game.)

This time, though, I've accidentally gone one better, and am working from a table in a café that's showing the game. (I actually thought they weren't showing it, but I was already sitting here when they pulled down the big projection screen next to my head, so I just stayed.)

A few minutes into the current game, Germany narrowly missed getting a goal, and I looked up at the screen to see one of the players clearly mouthing, uh, let's say a rather bad word.

That reminded me of a fun article Spiegel Online International (that's their English section) recently ran about a Deaf woman who reads the lips of the players and coaches on the field – the stuff the rest of us can't hear, because it's drowned out by all the cheering in the stadium – and posts what she sees on Twitter, here. (She posts in German, but says she'll offer an English translation after the game.)

Apparently, the German team has gotten wise to her, and coach Joachim Löw now covers his mouth when he yells at his players!

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Book!



 The book is launched!




Code-Switching Kids

Walking down the street this evening in my neighborhood (yes, the same neighborhood I recently described as seemingly populated only by English speakers), I passed two boys of maybe 10 or 11 on bikes. As they went by, one called back to the other, "To the next Kreuzung, okay? To the next Strasse."

(Kreuzung=intersection, Strasse=street)

And I had to smile because those kids – probably the children of Americans, growing up here – already talk like my friends and I sometimes do, mixing the two languages with the knowledge that everyone will understand anyway.

Monday, June 18, 2012

From the Grand Canyon to the Great Wall

Folks, it's official: I'm being published! In a book!

The book in question is called "From the Grand Canyon to the Great Wall" (you can follow that link to see the promotional page) and it's a collection of travel writing, put together by an American guy who decided he liked hearing people's travel stories so much, he wanted to make a book out of them. It looks like this:


What I can't tell you, unfortunately, is much about the book as a whole, since I haven't yet had the chance to read any of the stories but my own... All I know is that it's got 67 stories from 54 authors and apparently covers a broad range of countries and subjects and styles.

What I can tell you is about my story: It's about traveling with my parents, the first time they visited me in Europe after I moved here, to the Netherlands – where my dad had lived for a while when he was a hippie 20-something wandering the world, but he hadn't been back there in nearly 30 years. He actually managed to track down some of his old friends from those days, and we visited them where they still live just outside the tiny Dutch village where they all had a group house back in the day.

I'd wanted for a long time to write something tying together my dad's travel experiences and my own, and the way growing up hearing his travel stories fed my own wanderlust, so this book's submission deadline served as the kick-in-the-pants I needed to finally do so.

It's just one story in one book, but I'm still rather pleased.

If you'd like to order the book (either physical or e-book), it goes on sale tomorrow! (And I think it's not too late today to sign up for the mailing list and get 10% off.) Just go to the book's webpage. Or if you just want to be happy for me in a non-monetary way, I'm fine with that too!

Bonus picture of the subjects of my story – my dad and two of his friends he reunited with in the Netherlands:


Sunday, June 17, 2012

2012 Blues

Once again, the talented Roland Satterwhite, from his most recent solo concert at Shakespeare and Sons bookshop in Berlin:

2012 Blues

(Look for me and my friends in the front row!)

Thursday, June 14, 2012

What (One Australian) Knows about Germans

Well, posting this is not particularly original of me, because I saw it through other expat Berlin friends, and apparently ALL expat Berlin folks have been posting and blogging and tweeting this, but it fits so well with the things I write here, that I'm gonna do it anyway:

Check out "What I Know about Germans" at the Berlin expats' blog "überlin" – an Australian lists 78 things that are true about Germans, and she's pretty dead-on!

I was going to list a few of my favorites here as an example, but gave up when I realized that just my very favorites off the list still ended up being numbers 22, 23, 28, 29, 32, 36, 37, 40, 41, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54, 56, 59, 65, 74 and 78...

Read it and see!

England, by Others

It's still going to be a while before I write/post/collate-pictures/etc. more about the recent, wonderful hiking trip in England (not to mention pictures from Spain before that...and Senegal before that...) but I just found out my two hiking partners also posted a bit with some gorgeous pictures, and Kat writes a hilarious blow-by-blow description:

Kat's blog, "Kat in Englandshire" – at the moment, you have to go back a page of posts to get to the part about the hike. Probably my favorite line comes in Day 2 (Cleator to Ennerdale): "And then we got lost due to overseeing a minor detail - a left/right incident."

Maike's blog, "Maike in der neuen Welt" (but mostly written in English) – at the moment her pictures from our hike in the Lake District are lower down on the first page of posts.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

EM Oyoyoy


Oy oy oy.

It's one of those evenings when almost the entire country is out at bars and restaurants watching a European Cup game (this one is Germany against the Netherlands! it's a big deal!) but I'm at home, finishing up some work.

And I'm not kidding, I can tell when Germany scores a goal because that's when firecrackers go off in the streets.

When I heard a second round of firecrackers, I went and checked one of those live blog thingies where they update whenever something happens in the game, and sure enough, the score is now 2-0 for Germany at halftime.

I'm almost tempted to take my work and my laptop out to some bar where I could watch the second half of the game together with some hopefully-not-too-crazy German fans... But then I'd have to fight my way back home through the fireworks.


(Why this is titled "EM": short for Europameisterschaft in German, so that's how I tend to think of it even in English.)

(Also, I just looked it up and apparently I'm wrong to even call this the European Cup in English, because the European Cup is what they get when they win the Champions League, which is also a European competition, but of the usual city clubs rather than the national teams, while this particular competition is properly called the European Championship... Like I said, European men are playing soccer, again.)

EM Fever


Please consider these clues:

The rare sight of Germans flying German flags?

Wide-screen TVs set up in front of every restaurant and café?

Hard-boiled eggs for sale at the grocery store, their shells dyed...wait for it...black and white so that they resemble miniature soccer balls (seriously??)


Clearly it must be time for...

the European Cup!


I admit, I haven't managed to get particularly excited about this one. The World Cup is always exciting, and the last European Cup four years ago was fun, because Switzerland and Austria hosted, so we got to more or less pretend it was happening here.

This time around, though, I can't help thinking, yeah, so, European men are playing soccer...again.

Still, it's kind of fun to watch an entire country go gaga (someone told me electronics stores' TV sales go through the roof just before every World Cup and European Cup) and there's something bizarre but amusing about walking through the neighborhood at 8 p.m. on a week night and hearing the evening news blaring from every direction, because 8 p.m. is in between the early evening game and the late evening game, so all the restaurants have their sidewalk seating open and their TVs going.

Yes, you read that right, and there's another thing to like about Germany: What do they show during that prime time viewing slot between two games of this wildly popular sport? Overpriced advertising? No – the evening news.

Anyway, here are the soccer ball eggs. I did a special reconnaissance mission to the grocery store just to get a picture of them:


Monday, June 11, 2012

The New Native Language

I swear, sometimes walking around my neighborhood in Berlin it seems the only language I hear is English. Everywhere. Even in the grocery store.

Even the Germans (instantly recognizable by their cute but distinctive accent!) are speaking English, because, of course, they're there shopping with an American girlfriend or boyfriend.

This evening I was back at my new favorite quiet-working-on-my-laptop café and didn't realize until the very end that the server I'd been speaking German with all evening was actually...American. D'oh!

(In my defense, Americans generally have an instantly recognizable accent too, and this guy didn't, so there we went, blithely speaking German to each other.)

Friday, June 1, 2012

The Outside Minister

There's a particularly fun brand of "Denglish" (that's "Deutsch" (German) + "English," if you didn't know) that involves translating German words and phrases as literally as you possibly can, to make convoluted, bizarre English that's just barely recognizable if you can sort out what it was originally meant to be in German.

Just imagine a German who doesn't actually know English trying to translate something by working out one word at a time with a dictionary – or simply plug some text into Google Translate.

I'm not sure whether this hyperliteral Denglish is still funny if you don't know German at all, but it generates such gems as

"falling umbrella jumper" for parachute jumper (Fallschirmspringer, where "Schirm" could also be understood as umbrella) or

"far-looking tower" for TV tower ("Fernsehturm," where "Fernsehen" literally means "seeing far"...just as "television" does, if you think about it!) or

"I think I spider"
("Ich glaube, ich spinne" means "I must be nuts" – but "Spinne" could also be understood the noun for spider, rather than the verh for "to be crazy"),

An English student of mine told me she and a friend found a list of these online and, as she said in proper Denglish, "We almost laughed us dead."

So I told her how when Guido Westerwelle first became Germany's foreign minister, people started making fun of his supposedly terrible English by inventing quotes with everything translated hyperliterally. His very name, for example, becomes "Westerwave." As for his job title, foreign minister is "Aussenminister" in German, and generally speaking "aussen" doesn't mean foreign so much as "external" or "outside."

...Thus we have Mr. Westerwave, the Outside Minister.

(That's right, this is what it was! Someone set up this Twitter account dedicated to Denglish-y supposed Westerwelle quotes. The subheading – "I'm always yet the new germany outside minister. No one can reach me the water!" – is Denglish for "I'm still the new German foreign minister. No one can hold a candle to me!")

I just read through some of that Twitter feed and, yes, pretty much laughed me dead...

Countries Nerd Discovers Countries Comic


Now that I've (very) tangentially mentioned Scandinavia in my last post, allow me to segue into telling you about one of my new favorite things:


This is an online comic, drawn by a Danish woman, in which each of the Scandinavian countries (and often other countries too) are personified as cute little bobble-headed figures, dressed in the colors of their respective national flags for easy identification, whose interactions draw on the stereotypes and histories between their countries.

It's awesome. And I've learned a whole lot about Scandinavian and European international relations, even if the artist makes clear she's just playing with the clichés, and not meant to be taken as fact. (For example, in explaining why her comics almost never feature the Faroe Islands: "The thing about the Faroes is that Danes usually forget all about them because they’re small and they don’t hate us quite as much as Greenland.")


As an example, here's one of my all-time favorites: Still a Long Way

Theoretically, as an American I suppose should be insulted, but instead I can't help loving that her cartoon-America is a big, goofy, enthusiastic guy who's trying really hard, but still manages to muddle things up more often that not. Come on, who hasn't ever been asked by a well-meaning American, "Denmark, that's where they speak Dutch, right?"


Also, how much do I LOVE that personified Norway (that nature-loving, sea-faring nation) always walks around happily clutching a fish?


Germany comes up sometimes too, being Denmark's only neighbor to share a land border, so occasionally the reader is treated to a German neurosis or two, as in this one: Evil Flag