Café Hilde: Good Atmosphere and Music

More reasons Café Hilde is my favorite café in Berlin: the music they have playing is, at least half the time, my very favorite singers – and the rest of the time it's really good too.

Right now, it's been Jeff Buckley (his cover of "A Satisfied Mind," an amazing version that I first discovered here at Hilde, in fact) followed by Antony (the upbeat "Kiss My Name"). If I stay here long enough, I know they'll hit Leonard Cohen, the Swell Season, any number of other favorites...

Ooh, now Paul Simon.

Post-Election Day

An American Election Day rather quickly becomes Election Night over here, thanks to the six-hour time difference, and I'd made plans to meet a bunch of expat friends for the evening at an election-watching party hosted by the Democrats Abroad. The party itself was lackluster, but it was nice to be around friends to share the election-related anxiety.

We hung out in the lobby (pictured above) rather than the main auditorium, where one friend went in and reported back that they were showing some kind of boring slideshow of facts – "But I already know who I'm voting for!" she said – that was being watched by a bunch of rapt presumably-Germans, who sighed in annoyance when she had to pass in front of them to get her coat.

(Pictured: The auditorium, and I don't know what those guys on the stage are doing...)

There must have been about two journalists for every non-journalist at this event, and as a result people kept trying to interview each other... I watched as one young journalist interviewed two of my friends (one of whom is also a journalist). "Why do you think there are so many Democrats here?" the journalist asked, and we all looked at her blankly because the party was hosted by the Democrats Abroad.

The frustrating thing was that I had to leave before anything actually happened – state-by-state results come in between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. here, and there was no way I could afford to pull an all-nighter: I'd promised to be on-call for Spiegel Online International all the next day, translating election-related articles as they came in.

(Pictured: Discovery that my necklace more or less matched Obama's campaign symbol – which was also the stamp on our hands at the entrance to the event.)

So I made my way home early-ish, and only a couple states had been called when I went to bed for a scant 2 or 3 hours of sleep...and woke up to the headlines that the election had been called for Obama!

I had about five seconds to be slightly sad I hadn't been there to experience the results coming in and hear the final call, before I had to dash out of the house (I'd set my alarm, but woke up late to find something had gone wrong with it, which was alarming...heh, pun) to meet friends for breakfast – we'd agreed to convene again at 7 a.m. to see the last results and celebrate and/or commiserate.

As it happened, our timing was just right to watch Obama's acceptance speech. (When I talked with a friend in the U.S. much later that day, she found it funny that she'd watched the speech just before finally going to bed, and I'd watched it over breakfast.)

We were only able to get a German TV station, unfortunately, so it was a matter of straining to hear Obama under the overdubbed simultaneous translation. (Or, in my case, listening to both at once and comparing, impressed by the general quality of the translation but also amused by a few small mistakes and omissions.)

Here we are, listening to Obama from Berlin:

Then straight into a long workday, where I helped with turning around election-related articles as quickly as possible after the German authors filed, to get them up on the English-language site.

And yes, I appreciate the irony, that I was translating about an American election from German back into English. The thing is, the pieces are by Spiegel's (German) correspondents who are covering the event from the field, then filing their stories back to Germany. Then we translate them to give you, the English-speaking readership, the German perspective on the election!

For once in this situation (where I've been involved in a bunch of articles at once) I actually thought to take a screenshot of the page, so here you go. Of the four election-related articles that made up the top of the page yesterday, I translated or helped partially translate three:

And then I crashed into bed and slept.

Election Day

Election Day. Well, Election Night by now, over here.

I woke up today already feeling anxious. Even though the polls hadn't even opened yet in the US. (I voted by absentee ballot weeks ago.) I've only grown more anxious as the day has gone on.

Tonight is election-watching at the Democrats Abroad party (state-by-state polling results come in between midnight and 7 a.m. Central European Time, unfortunately).

All over Germany, people are crossing their fingers for Obama. Well, actually they're pressing their thumbs down for him – the German equivalent – but it's the same idea.

I read an article today that outlined how the rest of the world would vote if they could vote in American elections (overwhelmingly Democratic, obviously). There's sure an argument for that, that the rest of the world should somehow get to vote for the president of the United States. After all, it affects all of us.

Sorry, do I sound gloomy enough yet?

I'm anxious.

Let's all press down our thumbs.

Pictures: Normandy

And now Normandy... Frances, an English-friend-who-lives-Belgium, invited the same crowd from the silly Swiss ski weekend to her parents' vacation apartment in Courseulles-sur-Mer, a lovely little town right on the sea in Normandy, where we indulged in incredible French food and enjoyed the stormy, dramatic Atlantic.

(Ironically but perhaps unsurprisingly, at the same time Hurricane Sandy was devastating the east coast of the US on the other side of the Atlantic, though here it just caused dramatic winds and lovely waves. ...Okay, now I feel bad about having enjoyed it at all.)

Anyway, here is lovely gourmet Normandy:

Normandie Gourmandie

Pictures: Paris

Hello there, back to the present now, to give you a small album of pictures from one-day-and-one-half-day in Paris... I was meeting friends for a weekend in a little town on the sea in Normandy and decided to take the night train between Berlin and Paris, which worked out fabulously. And gave me a day and a half to explore the city, with an emphasis on neighborhoods rather than big sights (I'd been to Paris once before) and on checking out the city's famous Velib bike borrowing system. (Which, incidentally, was the subject of the very first translation I ever did for Spiegel. The bike program is five years old, and so is my tenure as a freelance translator. Wow.)

Here's Paris, a bit gray and rainy, but still fun:

Paris Paris

Pictures: Spain (Madrid, Cádiz, Sevilla)

Well, this is just getting completely out of chronological order, but at the moment what I've got on hand is an album (finally) of my trip to Spain back in...April. I know, I know. I haven't sorted my pictures from Senegal in January either!

Friend A. and I went to visit friend K. (yes, they're delightfully anonymous!) for a week in April; we spent a few days checking out some of the more alternative sides of Madrid, then traveled to the old port city of Cádiz in Andalucía, with one brief afternoon in Sevilla.

I'll let the pictures do the talking. Here you go!

Madrid, Cádiz, Sevilla

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.

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.

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.)