Thursday, October 31, 2013

This Is Halloween, This Is Halloween...

Apparently there are some ways in which I get more American the longer I live abroad, because this year somehow I was really excited for Halloween!

Earlier this week, an American friend invited me to join some other Americans for an evening pumpkin-carving. It was sort of silly how excited I got about it, but it was so much fun! I hadn't made a jack-o-lantern in I don't know how many years.

Perhaps the funniest thing to me: I was in fact able to find a North American-style pumpkin in a grocery store (that's not a given in Germany, where the hokkaido pumpkin rules the roost) but it was clearly being stocked only as a Halloween prop. How do I know? Because it was marketed as a "Kinderhalloween Speisekürbis" ("children's Halloween" pumpkin):

(On the receipt, shortened to just "Kinderkürbis," or "children's pumpkin.")

Second funniest thing: As we were all gathered around the kitchen table, hard at work carving jack-o-lantern faces, a German friend walked in, looked around at all the pumpkins and lamented, "You could have made a soup with that."

...Because Germans' primary association with pumpkins is as the main ingredient in pumpkin soup. I don't blame them, frankly. Pumpkin soup is an integral part of the fall season here, appearing on menus at every café as soon as the air takes on that autumn chill, and it's one of my favorite German foods. For better or worse (worse, if you happen to want to bake pumpkin cookies) canned pumpkin doesn't even exist here. When you want to make a soup, you start by cooking the real thing, a whole pumpkin.

At the moment I don't yet have a picture of all our jack-o-lanterns lined up together and lit up inside (they looked amazing) but here's a shot of my own humble offering, by day:


So, Halloween in Germany.

I don't know if it's that Halloween has just this year reached a saturation point in Germany (it's a 100% American import, not something native to continental Europe) or just that I'm thinking about it more this year (see above re: excitement), but over the past few days I've found myself having the Halloween-in-Germany-is-it-a-good-thing-or-not? conversation a number of times with various people.

I have to say, I really love Halloween. I imagine at this point a lot of people probably associate it mainly with the commercialism thrust at us by candy and costume retailers, but for me as a kid, it wasn't about that.

(Admittedly, my hippie childhood may have played a role here... It was a point of pride for me that I – with parental help – always made my own costume, and wouldn't even have thought of buying one pre-made. And for years, I coordinated trick-or-treating for UNICEF through my temple's Sunday school (because, yes, I was that over-earnest sort of kind!) so it wasn't just about the candy.

Halloween was far more about the costumes, and the excitement of going around the neighborhood all evening with your friends after dark with the houses decorated and lit up; Halloween was pumpkins and apples and the crisp smell of cold air and rustling leaves underfoot – in short, all the things that make autumn so wonderfully autumnal. So when I see little German kids out trick-or-treating, I can't help but be excited for them, because, yay, Halloween is so much fun!

Still, though, why should they celebrate this random, imported American holiday? Who decided (ahem, retailers, ahem...) that suddenly Halloween is a Thing and now everyone in Europe has to participate? Adopting new traditions is fine, of course, but what about when they start erasing a country's own traditions?

In this case, the local holiday on which Halloween is unquestionably encroaching is the lovely St. Martin's Day, also largely a children's holiday, which falls less than two weeks later, on November 11. Little kids make lanterns and form processions through the streets, singing St. Martin's Day songs and I think sometimes getting sweets in return (sound familiar?). It's seriously cute, one of my favorite evenings of the year to be walking around the neighborhood. And there's no question that as Halloween ascends, St. Martin's Day declines, because the kids just did the whole procession-around-the-neighborhood thing not two weeks before. Global homogenization and loss of culture – sad.

On the other hand (I think that's three hands, now), a German colleague in my shared office told me her kids' preschool has deliberately replaced St. Martin's Day (a Catholic holiday, which frankly has no place in a public school anyway, in my own American opinion, but this here is a country that does not yet have a concept of separation of church and state...) with Halloween, because it's a non-specific, neutral holiday everyone can enjoy. Smart.

So, I have no grand conclusion there. Just some musings on the intersection of cultures, especially when one (the US, in this case) is particularly dominant.

On another (fourth) hand, I suppose you could also see it as an evolving tradition coming full circle... So far as I know, Halloween indeed began as Samhain, the Celtic harvest festival marking the start of the winter and the dying of the year – counterpart to Beltane (May Day), celebration of spring and rebirth. As so often happens, the pagan celebration got coopted by the Christian church as All Hallows' Eve (the evening before All Saints' Day), then spread to North America with immigrants there, then became a secular event celebrated by everyone, and now has arrived back in Europe in almost unrecognizable form. Much like Santa Claus and the hanging up of stockings on Christmas, which began as St. Nicholas and the setting out of shoes on St. Nicholas Day, with both traditions now oddly coexisting... but that would be another post!

Here, have a last picture of my jack-o-lantern, in the dark on my desk at work:

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

A Canoe Is Not a Canoe

I am baffled and amazed.

This weekend I went with a French colleague and a couple German friends of his for a bit of a wander in a patch of woods at the edge of Berlin called the Tegeler Forst (and it really is a proper bit of actual woods, where you get entirely away from all signs of urban life, yet without even living the city limits – Berlin is fantastic that way, full of massive parks and actual woods) and I learned something that stunned my language brain...

Namely, that when a German says "Kanu" (a word which you would forgive me for assuming was, you know, exactly what it sounds like, the German spelling of "canoe") they may well mean not a canoe, but a kayak.

What??

Yes, yes, said the German I was talking to. A canoe is called a "Kanadier" (as in, "Canadian"). A "Kanu" can be either a canoe or a kayak, it's kind of a general term.

Well, then what do you say for a kayak? I asked.

Oh, a kayak is a "Kayak"...well, or a "Paddelboot"... though that could be general too, for anything that's propelled with a paddle...

"Paddelboot"?? But that should be a paddleboat, you know, the kind you pedal with your feet.

By this point we were both confused, getting more and more turned around the more we tried to pin these words down. Because apparently, Germany adopts North American boat types – and then reapplies their names at random.

So here, for my own peace of mind, is a list!

Kanadier = canoe
Kayak (oder Paddelboot) = kayak
Kanu = general for both canoe and kayak
Tretboot = paddleboat


Thanks, Germany, that's not complicated or anything...


(Then, while trying to determine which German words were specific to one type of boat and which were general terms, we also had a good laugh about the word "muskelbetrieben" – literally "muscle-powered" – as a way to distinguish non-motorized boats from motorized ones. Apparently the others had been canoeing (...or Canadian-ing...?) in the Spreewald region, southeast of Berlin, and seen a sign that labeled a particular waterway as being only for "muscle-powered" craft.)


I have plenty more thoughts, actually, about English words that get adopted into German but acquire a slightly transmogrified meaning along the way, but that'll be another post...

Monday, October 28, 2013

Slapping the Brakeman

This...this is why plugging text into an online translator is just never going to be the same as giving it to an actual human.

I actually have nothing against translation websites – they're a great resource for getting at least a rough sense of something that's written in a language you don't speak at all. Often I'll plug a bit of text I want to understand from French or Russian or even Latin into Google Translate, just to get an idea of what it's even about.

But for actual, comprehensible news? Yeah, not so much.

Today I was translating a breaking news story for Spiegel Online; often on these things, it's helpful to me to search online for other occurrences of certain key phrases (or at least, my guess as to the English equivalent to certain key phrases in the German) so I can read up on the subject and be better informed when I then write/translate about it in English.

This news story was so new, though, that for a couple of the phrases, the only hits I got were for the original (German-language) Spiegel article itself – as well as an automated translation version of the article into English. (I could tell it was translated by a computer, rather than a human, because the first sentence began, "Chancellor Merkel presents itself...")

Such translations aren't much for the conveyance of actual news, but they can make for fun reading. My favorite here was the translation of the sentence, "Merkel schlug sich auf die Seite der Bremser."

"Schlagen" alone is a verb that means "to hit," but the whole phrase "sich auf die Seite von X schlagen" means "to side with X," while "Bremser" in this case means people who put on the brakes ("die Bremsen") about something – as opposed to people who literally have the job of applying brakes to a vehicle. So I translated the sentence as, "Merkel joined those putting on the brakes."

In the automated translation, though, it came out as, "Merkel slapped the side of the brakeman."

...And then I was sitting there in the office chortling out loud, because I was picturing German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a train, slapping the brakeman in his side as he works.


(If you're now curious, the final version of the article in English is here. You won't find that sentence quite as I described it above; in the final version the editors changed it slightly, to "Merkel also joined those applying the brakes.")

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Government Down

Once again, the webcomic "Scandinavia and the World" cuts right to the chase, and all in cute bobble-headed cartoons:

"Government Down"

(Europe: "Please get up. We have things to do." America: "I don't care! Things are stupid!")

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Briefly Highway 1

If it seems like I disappeared for a bit... I went to California for a close friend's wedding (I was a bridesmaid! I never in my life expected to be a bridesmaid!) That was all pretty crazy and full-on (but wonderful, of course), so afterwards I went away for a couple days alone, to a hostel by a little lighthouse just off Highway 1, on the dramatic California coast north of Half Moon Bay.

It was awesome. Here's an album with pictures:

Hwy 1