Wednesday, October 31, 2012

This Is Halloween


Awwww, see, this is why I'm working from a café this evening, rather than from home. (Well, aside from the fact that being inside my apartment day in and day out was starting to make me nuts...sometimes freelancing truly isn't all it's cracked up to be.)

Anyway, I'm working at the little Brazilian café just down the street, and all the cute, tiny kids are coming by in their costumes to say "Süßes oder Saures!" (German for trick-or-treat, literally "sweet or sour" – as in, give me something sweet or I'll do something sour to you!)

That was the brilliant idea I had the other night, inspired while working at another neighborhood café:

This year, rather than hiding in my apartment with the lights off because of course I've forgotten yet again to buy candy (not a proper adult yet, really) and here there's no equivalent concept to porch-light-on-means-you-can-ring-the-bell and porch-light-off-means-I'm-not-home-or-out-of-candy, I could park myself in a public place (café) and enjoy seeing all the kids trick-or-treating, without any associated guilt. Score!

Update: Ha ha, and the further benefit of trick-or-treating at a café seems to be that while the kids are getting their candy, the parents can pick up a coffee to keep them going through the night.


Here, have a gratuitous nostalgic Americana picture of farm stand pumpkins, from my recent trip to California:





Halloween Thoughts from a Cat


Happy Halloween! From Henri, the French philosopher cat.


Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Love, Excellence and Greetings


Sometimes it seems Germans spend an awful lot of time worrying about coming across as too "German."

I mean this in a cultural-linguistic way: Germans know they have this reputation for being blunt and brusque, dispensing with the social niceties and "small talk" that Anglophones so value. And since they know that, they also worry about doing it without even meaning to. My English students often ask if they can say this or that in such a way, or if that's too rude and "German."

Then just yesterday, another client of mine (at a design agency, where I do some editing and proofreading when they write in English) related that she'd set up a meeting with an American client, and wrote him that the agreed upon time would be "fine."

The American wrote back, "It's not fine, it's excellent!"

When my client told me this story, I could practically hear her sighing and thinking, Oh, for goodness sake, what cultural expectation have I failed to meet this time?

But she kept her wits about her and wrote him back this explanation: "Fine is 99% of perfect, for Germans."

. . . . .

Then on the other side of the spectrum, there's the odd matter of "Liebe Grüße." This is a common letter closing among friends – more or less translatable as "love," though perhaps not exactly.

"Grüße" are "greetings" and in German you can have endless permutations of them: loving greetings, heartfelt greetings, lovely greetings, sunny greetings or even the always popular "many greetings" ("Viele Grüße"), which are clearly offered in the plural yet of no specified type.

In a business context, you're best off sticking with the standard formula of "mit freundlichen Grüßen" ("with friendly greetings") or, if you feel a little less formal with the person in question, perhaps "beste Grüße" ("best greetings"). (Note to any German readers: Am I right, or is "beste Grüße" in fact just as formal as the good old "MFG"?)

"Liebe Grüße" is the most personal you can go, unless perhaps you delve further into other love-related closings – "Alles Liebe" (more or less "lots of love") or even "hab dich lieb" ("I love you" ... except, this being German, it's not even literally "I love you," just "I have love for you" or "I'm fond of you").

In my mind, because "Liebe Grüße" is more or less equatable with "love" (even if it's not really the same) it's not something I would ever use with business contacts. Yet I now have some clients (young, hip Germans) who I've never even met in person, who end every communication with "Liebe Grüße"!

Yes, Germany, the land where you can spend half an hour trying to draft a work-related email because you know how important it is that it use just the right proper forms of address – or you can spend nearly as long puzzling over why people you've never met are sending you love.

. . . . .

Update: Precisely this topic (the hierarchy of letter closings in German) came up the other night with friends, and when I mentioned how strange it was when people I didn't even know started signing their emails with "Liebe Grüße," one of the Germans decreed: You can write that once you've at least talked to the person on the phone once.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Music: Antony


Current obsession, Antony Hegarty.

And thanks to Amoeba Music in Berkeley, I now own one of his albums – but I'm thinking I should have just gone ahead and gotten them all.

Here's the mesmerizing "Cut the World":


(I'm sure he won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I just think he's incredible.)

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Do You Like German Sparkle Party?


Current favorite Weird Thing (and hey, it's about Germans and comes from Oakland, what a fusion!)

The lyrics go:

I like German sparkle party
Sparkle party, sparkle party
I like German sparkle party
Sparkle party, sparkle party
Very German sparkle party
Sparkle party, sparkle party
German German sparkle party
Sparkle party, sparkle party
Do you like to party party?
Yes I like to party party
Do you like to dancey dance?
Yes I wore my party pants
Party pants, party pants, party pants
(etc.)


And yes, I found this through the marvelous "Scandinavia and the World" webcomic, purveyor of fine and strange things!

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

California: Leaving


Leaving Oakland:


Flew out of San Francisco at night, dazzled by the sprawl of lights all the way around the Bay: Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco, all these places close to my heart.

Flew into Berlin at night again, baffled by the strangeness and familiarity of it, the city's contours, the TV tower rising unmistakeable in the middle of it all.

On the ground again, it felt as if I were returning to a place I'd once lived years ago, its landmarks distantly familiar, instead of coming home to a place I'd left just two weeks before.

It seems as if I spent much of the time in California fielding questions along the line of, So, are you planning to stay in Berlin forever? Are you ever coming back? and not getting any closer to an answer.

Maybe the solution is to extend my flexible work-and-travel model to a sometimes-working-from-the-US-on-extended-stays model, moving up the ideal of a life that encompasses both continents from a theoretical future plan to a current life.

Time to start experimenting again.

Monday, October 1, 2012