Thursday, June 30, 2005
Did I mention?
My German host at U of Boogie, a law professor, told me that when he traveled in the U.S. a couple of years ago (post 9/11), he told his American hosts that if he went missing for more than 12 hours, would they please make urgent inquiries to federal authorities about whether he was being detained incognito.
So that's the deal. You know how travelers tend to have a heightened perception of local dangers in their travel destinations? "If you go to New York, you'll be mugged or shot on the subway." "If you go to Italy, you'll be kidnapped." "If you take the train from Krakow to Prague, you'll be knocked unconscious with chloroform spray and robbed."
For well-informed Europeans it's, "If you go to the United States, you can be arrested and detained indefinitely in secret." How's that for a perception of the world's leading democracy?
***
So that's the deal. You know how travelers tend to have a heightened perception of local dangers in their travel destinations? "If you go to New York, you'll be mugged or shot on the subway." "If you go to Italy, you'll be kidnapped." "If you take the train from Krakow to Prague, you'll be knocked unconscious with chloroform spray and robbed."
For well-informed Europeans it's, "If you go to the United States, you can be arrested and detained indefinitely in secret." How's that for a perception of the world's leading democracy?
***
They've done it
I wouldn't have thought it possible, but the Bush Administration has managed (for me) to completely debase the word "freedom." (Not the idea -- just the word.) I noticed this when glancing at the cover of today's New York Times, and registering my reaction to the story about the "Freedom Tower" to be built on the World Trade Center site. I thought, "For goodness sakes, did you really have to name it that?"
The meaning of "freedom" in today's Bushrovian politics is "keyword for opportunistic use of the 9/11 tragedy for political gain." It means: "not French." Nice work guys, a real feather in your cap.
I suppose the intended meaning of calling it the "Freedom Tower" is to show that the terrorists' attack on the World Trade Center (1) was an attack on our freedom, and (2) was unsuccessful.
But the irony is that the terrorist attack is not a direct attack on our freedom. In contrast to, say, Hitler's conquests which directly attacked the freedom of the western European liberal democracies, the 9/11 terrorism attacked our freedom indirectly. The mediating mechanism was of course -- as the terrorists surely understood -- the reactions of our leaders: to what extent would our own leaders undermine our freedoms in response to 9/11.
As a defender of freedom, the Bush Administration has been weak. We have the USA PATRIOT Act, thousands of detainees denied our constitutional procedural protections, the voting public manipulated and misled about the war in Iraq, restrictive Keystone-cop security procedures ... The limited extent to which the attack on our freedom has succeeded has resided to a large extent in the Bush Administrations responses.
So I find this "freedom"- naming thing to be all wrong.
***
The meaning of "freedom" in today's Bushrovian politics is "keyword for opportunistic use of the 9/11 tragedy for political gain." It means: "not French." Nice work guys, a real feather in your cap.
I suppose the intended meaning of calling it the "Freedom Tower" is to show that the terrorists' attack on the World Trade Center (1) was an attack on our freedom, and (2) was unsuccessful.
But the irony is that the terrorist attack is not a direct attack on our freedom. In contrast to, say, Hitler's conquests which directly attacked the freedom of the western European liberal democracies, the 9/11 terrorism attacked our freedom indirectly. The mediating mechanism was of course -- as the terrorists surely understood -- the reactions of our leaders: to what extent would our own leaders undermine our freedoms in response to 9/11.
As a defender of freedom, the Bush Administration has been weak. We have the USA PATRIOT Act, thousands of detainees denied our constitutional procedural protections, the voting public manipulated and misled about the war in Iraq, restrictive Keystone-cop security procedures ... The limited extent to which the attack on our freedom has succeeded has resided to a large extent in the Bush Administrations responses.
So I find this "freedom"- naming thing to be all wrong.
***
Airports
--oo000oo--
A surprisingly pretty airport in a major U.S. metropolis. Most excellent fountain.
It’s a commonplace to say that airports are the same all over the world, and broadly speaking they are, but there are fun differences that let you know you’re in another country.
Take Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Do you find big flower seed-and-bulb shops in U.S. airports? You sure don’t, but they’re all over this one. Plus, all the people who work there are Dutch!
In Amsterdam Schiphol, they also have this great feature – public shaming sanctions for tardy travelers. We repeatedly heard this annoucement, from an authoritative female voice in heavily Dutch-accented English:
“Passengers Smith and Jones, for KLM flight 921 to London, you are delaying the flight. Please proceed immediately to the gate or we will afloat your luggage.”How great is that -- the offenders’ luggage to be jettisoned into the North Sea! (I eventually figured out that “afloat” was Dutch-accented English for “off-load,” but still... way cool.)
Krakow airport’s food stand offers an assortment of dishes, and at prices, you wouldn’t find in any U.S. airport. Check out that cold herring salad plate – cost – about $1.
In Poland, the passport control officers carry sidearms, and the female officers’ uniforms entail skirts and pumps with two-inch heels. Talk about your action flick fantasy – chicks in heels with guns! (Sorry, but you can understand my reluctance to try to snap a picture.)
I did take a picture of the arrival and departure monitors, however. I love the word "odlot" for outbound flight.
I'm guessing that "Lot" in Polish means "fly" or "flight" (too lazy to dig out my Polish-English dictionary) -- hence their national airline, "Lot" -- and "od" means "out" or something.
I previously mentioned how, at Krakow International, we waited on a bus on the runway for about 5-10 minutes to take us to the plane. What I didn't mention was that they kindly allow you to keep an eye on your luggage while you wait.
Photo taken from runway bus, Krakow.
**
2100 Steps
So the "dietary guidelines" people at U.S. Dept of HHS tell us that you can get credit for your 30-90 minutes of almost-daily exercise by walking 10,000 steps.* Maybe that's true -- or maybe it's propaganda with HHS shilling for the powerful pedometer industry.
_____
*So what's the deal -- USDA is in charge of the food part of diet, but HHS is in charge of exercise? Or does every federal department have its dietary guidelines?
_____
In any event, I have recently discovered that a round trip walk to my favorite coffee shop, Grandma Moses, is exactly 2100 steps.
Yes, I've come back to coffee again -- take a moment TO GET OVER IT. Okay, ready to go on?
How did I discover that it was exactly 2100 steps? I counted. Actually, I counted one way and multiplied by two.
I think you see where this is going. How am I going to put in the additional 7,900 steps?
I suppose I could make five trips to Grandma Moses every day, but unless I actually get coffee every time, then it's the moral equivalent of just walking around a track. but if I do get five cups of coffee, then I am probably exceeding federally recommended caffeine guidelines. I suppose I could get tea, but that would be the moral equivalent of just walking around a track.
On further reflection, it's not like I'm carried around in a sedan chair when I'm not walking to Grandma Moses. So I'm making up a lot of those steps throughout my day.
Because it's incredibly tedious to count steps -- and so easy to lose your count -- I'm thinking about getting one of those pedometers. My concern is that I'll become an insufferable bore. If you have a pedometer, is it possible to resist telling people how many steps it is from various points A to points B? Like this post?
**
_____
*So what's the deal -- USDA is in charge of the food part of diet, but HHS is in charge of exercise? Or does every federal department have its dietary guidelines?
_____
In any event, I have recently discovered that a round trip walk to my favorite coffee shop, Grandma Moses, is exactly 2100 steps.
Yes, I've come back to coffee again -- take a moment TO GET OVER IT. Okay, ready to go on?
How did I discover that it was exactly 2100 steps? I counted. Actually, I counted one way and multiplied by two.
I think you see where this is going. How am I going to put in the additional 7,900 steps?
I suppose I could make five trips to Grandma Moses every day, but unless I actually get coffee every time, then it's the moral equivalent of just walking around a track. but if I do get five cups of coffee, then I am probably exceeding federally recommended caffeine guidelines. I suppose I could get tea, but that would be the moral equivalent of just walking around a track.
On further reflection, it's not like I'm carried around in a sedan chair when I'm not walking to Grandma Moses. So I'm making up a lot of those steps throughout my day.
Because it's incredibly tedious to count steps -- and so easy to lose your count -- I'm thinking about getting one of those pedometers. My concern is that I'll become an insufferable bore. If you have a pedometer, is it possible to resist telling people how many steps it is from various points A to points B? Like this post?
**
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
What jury would convict a man whose name sounds like a Muppet?
Ten things about Poland
Hey, here's a great idea for a meme: your ten most notable impressions of Poland! Me first:
1. Subtle beauty. Poland is like the midwest of Europe: a “flyover” country whose beauty and interesting qualities are easy to miss, but are there for those who care to look for it. Both Warsaw and Krakow are vibrant cities, in very contrasting ways. Warsaw has big city buzz, a thriving arts scene, urban edge. Krakow is a beautiful medieval city filled with Polish and international students: one part tourist eye candy, one part college town. The Polish countryside, with its rolling pastoral landscapes, is quite lovely. And I didn’t even make it down to the gorgeous Carpathian mountains. (See Nina's pics, here and here.)
2. Food. Travel in Poland is something of a bargain. Food costs about half of what it does in the U.S., and you can eat very well. You can get very good European-style coffee everywhere, and – who’d have thunk it? – Polish chocolate is as good as any I’ve had in Europe. Again, see Nina's pics. (Go here and just scroll and scroll.) (This was my plate, I think.) Sorry to be a broken record, but Nina may be the best food photo-blogger in the world.
3. Getting around. For a tourist, it’s surpisingly easy to get around. In Warsaw and Krakow, most Poles speak some English, and many speak English quite well – though if you ask them, they always modestly claim that they can speak only a little English. Ironically, those who speak the least English seem to be the folks who work the infrastructure – train stations, buses, the post office, even the tourist information booths. (Perhaps because these are public sector jobs?)
4. Transportation. Although the public transportation – buses and streetcars – seemed plentiful, we didn’t make the effort to figure out how to use them because the cities were very walkable and the taxis inexpensive. A few times, it seemed as though the taxi driver was purposely overcharging us, but why fight over what amounted to about a dollar or two?
5. Eyedar issues. I got busted by eyedar many times: The women in Poland, to make a gross generalization, are strikingly good-looking. The men, apparently, not so much. This latter impression was gleaned from two facts. First, B complained about the lack of good scoping. Second, I seemed to be getting checked out by women a lot, which never happens to me back home. Though perhaps I was getting geek-checked due to the camera hanging around my neck.
6. Ambivalence. Maybe Poland’s complex and interesting history of partitioning, being erased from the map and re-established, of shifting borders that now include swaths of former German and Ukrainian territory, of being dragged into communism and then transitioning back into capitalism, has made an impression on the Polish psyche – why shouldn’t it?
I experienced this in the form of a strong impression of Poles’ ambivalence toward foreign tourists. I’m not one of these monied travelers who looks for obsequious smiles and ingratiating service, but I tend to be friendly in day-to-day encounters and to look for the same in return. More often than not, the people I dealt with were brusque and unsmiling. The advice I got that Poles “really appreciate it” when you make an effort to approach them initially with a phrase in Polish (I got good at saying “do you speak English” in Polish) or to thank them with a “dzienkuje” worked maybe a third of the time.
Things were different when we were with Nina. I don’t know whether it was her fluent Polish, or her great personal charm, but we almost invariably got spillover friendliness from people with Nina as our guide. At our hotel in Krakow, where we checked in a day ahead of Nina, the desk clerks gave us a substantial room upgrade the day after we exchanged big hugs with Nina in front of them in the hotel lobby.
7. Getting stared at. Poles – particularly Polish men – are big starers. I’m not talking about now about checking out the eye candy. Just staring. If they think there’s something unusual about you, or if you look different – i.e., like a tourist, or not Polish – Poles seem to think nothing about gawking right at you. Several times, it wasn’t just gawking, it was glaring. You really know you’ve been stared at when you get the evil eye from a 20-something Polish skinhead on a commuter train to the countryside for half an hour straight. If you look at them in the eye, the starer will look away. But it can get uncomfortable.
8. Diversity. Poland doesn't have the history of colonialism that has produced a lot of the ethnic diversity seen in many western European countries. Today, Poland has minimal ethnic diversity. On the Warsaw subway during rush hour, my impression was “never have I been so crammed into a subway car with so many white people.”
9. “Excuse me.” When traveling in a foreign country where I don’t know the language, I think it’s important to learn a few phrases, one of which should always be “excuse me.” It’s inevitable that you will bump into people or have to squeeze past them, and I certainly don’t like being jostled without some sort of slightly apologetic acknowledgment. In Poland, the phrase (pronounced psheh-pra-shem) means “excuse me” in both English senses: “I beg your pardon” and “may I have your attention for a moment?” and is thus a very useful word.
I found it useful in the first sense, but not the second. I was jostled in Poland as much as in New York City, at least once a day. Not a big deal. Never did anyone say excuse me -- not once! -- but to their credit, the Poles are fair about this: no one gave me an angry look for jostling them or gave any indication that I was to say “excuse me” to them.
10. Conclusion: Go to Poland. Okay, so I could have done without the staring and the brusqueness, but come on: would you skip going to New York City because people are rude, the streets are dirty, and it has had high crime rates in the past? Would you miss Paris because many shopkeepers, hotel desk clerks and bus driver will give you lots of attitude? Every place you could visit has some imperfections, but Poland’s minuses are heavily outweighed by its pluses. We had a wonderful eight days there.
And if you possibly can, go to Poland with Nina.
***
Randomly-selected streets, Krakow. [Warning: photos in this
post do not necessarily match the text!]
post do not necessarily match the text!]
1. Subtle beauty. Poland is like the midwest of Europe: a “flyover” country whose beauty and interesting qualities are easy to miss, but are there for those who care to look for it. Both Warsaw and Krakow are vibrant cities, in very contrasting ways. Warsaw has big city buzz, a thriving arts scene, urban edge. Krakow is a beautiful medieval city filled with Polish and international students: one part tourist eye candy, one part college town. The Polish countryside, with its rolling pastoral landscapes, is quite lovely. And I didn’t even make it down to the gorgeous Carpathian mountains. (See Nina's pics, here and here.)
The Vistula River winds through both Krakow (here) and Warsaw.
Neo-classical building facades, Krakow.
2. Food. Travel in Poland is something of a bargain. Food costs about half of what it does in the U.S., and you can eat very well. You can get very good European-style coffee everywhere, and – who’d have thunk it? – Polish chocolate is as good as any I’ve had in Europe. Again, see Nina's pics. (Go here and just scroll and scroll.) (This was my plate, I think.) Sorry to be a broken record, but Nina may be the best food photo-blogger in the world.
3. Getting around. For a tourist, it’s surpisingly easy to get around. In Warsaw and Krakow, most Poles speak some English, and many speak English quite well – though if you ask them, they always modestly claim that they can speak only a little English. Ironically, those who speak the least English seem to be the folks who work the infrastructure – train stations, buses, the post office, even the tourist information booths. (Perhaps because these are public sector jobs?)
Lazienki Park, Warsaw.
4. Transportation. Although the public transportation – buses and streetcars – seemed plentiful, we didn’t make the effort to figure out how to use them because the cities were very walkable and the taxis inexpensive. A few times, it seemed as though the taxi driver was purposely overcharging us, but why fight over what amounted to about a dollar or two?
The Poles painstakingly restored Warsaw's Old Town after its destruction
by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
5. Eyedar issues. I got busted by eyedar many times: The women in Poland, to make a gross generalization, are strikingly good-looking. The men, apparently, not so much. This latter impression was gleaned from two facts. First, B complained about the lack of good scoping. Second, I seemed to be getting checked out by women a lot, which never happens to me back home. Though perhaps I was getting geek-checked due to the camera hanging around my neck.
6. Ambivalence. Maybe Poland’s complex and interesting history of partitioning, being erased from the map and re-established, of shifting borders that now include swaths of former German and Ukrainian territory, of being dragged into communism and then transitioning back into capitalism, has made an impression on the Polish psyche – why shouldn’t it?
I experienced this in the form of a strong impression of Poles’ ambivalence toward foreign tourists. I’m not one of these monied travelers who looks for obsequious smiles and ingratiating service, but I tend to be friendly in day-to-day encounters and to look for the same in return. More often than not, the people I dealt with were brusque and unsmiling. The advice I got that Poles “really appreciate it” when you make an effort to approach them initially with a phrase in Polish (I got good at saying “do you speak English” in Polish) or to thank them with a “dzienkuje” worked maybe a third of the time.
Things were different when we were with Nina. I don’t know whether it was her fluent Polish, or her great personal charm, but we almost invariably got spillover friendliness from people with Nina as our guide. At our hotel in Krakow, where we checked in a day ahead of Nina, the desk clerks gave us a substantial room upgrade the day after we exchanged big hugs with Nina in front of them in the hotel lobby.
Old-world sidewalk cafe across the street from the modish "Coffee Republic," Krakow.
7. Getting stared at. Poles – particularly Polish men – are big starers. I’m not talking about now about checking out the eye candy. Just staring. If they think there’s something unusual about you, or if you look different – i.e., like a tourist, or not Polish – Poles seem to think nothing about gawking right at you. Several times, it wasn’t just gawking, it was glaring. You really know you’ve been stared at when you get the evil eye from a 20-something Polish skinhead on a commuter train to the countryside for half an hour straight. If you look at them in the eye, the starer will look away. But it can get uncomfortable.
8. Diversity. Poland doesn't have the history of colonialism that has produced a lot of the ethnic diversity seen in many western European countries. Today, Poland has minimal ethnic diversity. On the Warsaw subway during rush hour, my impression was “never have I been so crammed into a subway car with so many white people.”
Man selling pistachio nuts, outside Lazienki Park, Warsaw.
9. “Excuse me.” When traveling in a foreign country where I don’t know the language, I think it’s important to learn a few phrases, one of which should always be “excuse me.” It’s inevitable that you will bump into people or have to squeeze past them, and I certainly don’t like being jostled without some sort of slightly apologetic acknowledgment. In Poland, the phrase (pronounced psheh-pra-shem) means “excuse me” in both English senses: “I beg your pardon” and “may I have your attention for a moment?” and is thus a very useful word.
I found it useful in the first sense, but not the second. I was jostled in Poland as much as in New York City, at least once a day. Not a big deal. Never did anyone say excuse me -- not once! -- but to their credit, the Poles are fair about this: no one gave me an angry look for jostling them or gave any indication that I was to say “excuse me” to them.
Krakow doorways.
10. Conclusion: Go to Poland. Okay, so I could have done without the staring and the brusqueness, but come on: would you skip going to New York City because people are rude, the streets are dirty, and it has had high crime rates in the past? Would you miss Paris because many shopkeepers, hotel desk clerks and bus driver will give you lots of attitude? Every place you could visit has some imperfections, but Poland’s minuses are heavily outweighed by its pluses. We had a wonderful eight days there.
And if you possibly can, go to Poland with Nina.
By the way, if you've liked the photo-travel-blogging on these pages, you should know that
Nina continually inspired and challenged me to have my camera with me at all times.
Nina continually inspired and challenged me to have my camera with me at all times.
***
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Do I blog about coffee too much?
If you answer the above question in my comments, please try to come up with something more orignal than, "Maybe, but you clearly have too much time on your hands," or some variant of that. Thanking you in advance.
Let me point out that it took me only about 10 minutes to set up the above photo, featuring the World's Best Iced Coffee (at Grandma Moses). You have to admit the photo is devilishly clever (or is it just another one of those "Amsterdam great ideas"?).
Anyway, it's my blog and I can do what I want. Besides, as some of my blogging colleagues recognize, coffee is an important blogging topic. Take any blog written on occasion on laptops at coffee shops, and you don't have to look far to find a post (particulary a picture post) about coffee.
Left: Nina "latte" Camic has several coffee photos each month. [Photo by Nina.]
Center: Althouse, in characteristic pose with coffee cup. [Sculpture and photo by Moral Turpitude]
Right: Moral Turpitude self portrait: picking her nose or sniffing a tiny demitasse?
Center: Althouse, in characteristic pose with coffee cup. [Sculpture and photo by Moral Turpitude]
Right: Moral Turpitude self portrait: picking her nose or sniffing a tiny demitasse?
Perhaps there's a correlation between coffee-related posts and digital cameras. Coffee is very photogenic.
Maybe us "coffee bloggers" should get together and do a daily coffee blog. Then all my coffee related posts would be diverted there.
***
RETRO UPDATE: Answer: "yes." So said Tonya, in a remarkably pointed pre-response to this post -- written two days ago! I don't know how I missed it.
**
Post-Poland Reflection: Meet TINA
The woman who explained TINA was not named Tina, but Magda. “TINA” refers to the triumph of free market capitalism over all other forms of economic-social organization, especially communism. Literally, it stands for the phrase “There Is No Alternative.”
TINA is often smug, sometimes a pragmatic recognition that life is imperfect. One can say of free market capitalism, as Churchill said of democracy, that it is “the worst system of governance except all those other systems which have been tried from time to time.”
It’s interesting to think about TINA in the context of Poland, which is only about 15 years into its transition. Magda herself, a sociologist, was on her way to a symposium called “Anti-TINA.” Poland is apparently part of what seems to be a trend throughout Europe (and I fear the United States) of throwing out babies with the bathwater – of moving continually rightward and dismantling the social welfare safety net in favor of sink or swim laissez faire economics.
Former communist party buildings now festooned with corporate logos...
... and ads for interest rates.
There are strikingly few fat people in Poland, compared to the west (especially here in the U.S.). My new theory is that it’s because there just wasn’t so much junk food and fast food commercially available under communism. That could be about to change.
KFC, Warsaw. McD's, Krakow.
The stores are filled with merchandise now. Is consumer choice an unalloyed good thing? Check out those shoes!
Nina’s sister says that the ubiquitous graffiti in Poland appeared very suddenly as the free market brought widespread availability of spray paint in stores.
Poland had more car makes on their streets than anyplace I've ever been. The U.S. and ever car-manufacturing nation in the world seemed to be represented. More cars, trending bigger. That's the old Fiat "Polska" (serioussly, not making that up) alongside a bigger, newer Audi.
Uh, oh -- an SUV makes its sinister appearance on Krakow's narrow streets.
What is it about free markets and sex? These porn handbills were littering the streets all over Warsaw.
And of course, sex and advertizing go hand in hand. Sex appeal on Polish billboards -- not terribly subtle.
Finally, free market capitalism means boom and bust. Poland is going through a serious economic slump. One sign: the boom led to a Polish version of the "McMansion craze" seen in the U.S., but when the bust came, a lot of homeowners ran out of money to finish their building projects.
These unfinished houses are a common sight in the Polish suburban and rural landscape.
BELOW: Communist era housing. So it's not beautiful, but it's decent and affordable, and there's a humane concept at work: there are parks, shops and, below right, a high school all within the housing complex.
So are there alternatives?
***
Capitalist growing pains, Warsaw. Expensive shoes, resentful graffiti, anti-U.S. sentiment.
TINA is often smug, sometimes a pragmatic recognition that life is imperfect. One can say of free market capitalism, as Churchill said of democracy, that it is “the worst system of governance except all those other systems which have been tried from time to time.”
It’s interesting to think about TINA in the context of Poland, which is only about 15 years into its transition. Magda herself, a sociologist, was on her way to a symposium called “Anti-TINA.” Poland is apparently part of what seems to be a trend throughout Europe (and I fear the United States) of throwing out babies with the bathwater – of moving continually rightward and dismantling the social welfare safety net in favor of sink or swim laissez faire economics.
Former communist party buildings now festooned with corporate logos...
... and ads for interest rates.
There are strikingly few fat people in Poland, compared to the west (especially here in the U.S.). My new theory is that it’s because there just wasn’t so much junk food and fast food commercially available under communism. That could be about to change.
The stores are filled with merchandise now. Is consumer choice an unalloyed good thing? Check out those shoes!
Nina’s sister says that the ubiquitous graffiti in Poland appeared very suddenly as the free market brought widespread availability of spray paint in stores.
Poland had more car makes on their streets than anyplace I've ever been. The U.S. and ever car-manufacturing nation in the world seemed to be represented. More cars, trending bigger. That's the old Fiat "Polska" (serioussly, not making that up) alongside a bigger, newer Audi.
Uh, oh -- an SUV makes its sinister appearance on Krakow's narrow streets.
What is it about free markets and sex? These porn handbills were littering the streets all over Warsaw.
And of course, sex and advertizing go hand in hand. Sex appeal on Polish billboards -- not terribly subtle.
Finally, free market capitalism means boom and bust. Poland is going through a serious economic slump. One sign: the boom led to a Polish version of the "McMansion craze" seen in the U.S., but when the bust came, a lot of homeowners ran out of money to finish their building projects.
These unfinished houses are a common sight in the Polish suburban and rural landscape.
BELOW: Communist era housing. So it's not beautiful, but it's decent and affordable, and there's a humane concept at work: there are parks, shops and, below right, a high school all within the housing complex.
So are there alternatives?
***
Monday, June 27, 2005
My town has the best weeds
"Just Thoughts" is (are?) Blog Of the Week
Did you know that, with nothing more than a simple plastic fork, a pen and a post-it note, you can sculpt a beautiful toy giraffe? Well, maybe you can't, but Janel can. This alone is worth Blog Of the Week™ honors, but Janel's blog Just Thoughts is so much more than sculpture.
Blogging since January, Janel has exactly 100 posts, all of them witty, and she inspires and shames me by consistently managing to say something pointed in very few words. And she has a great eye for simile.
I've chosen these links to her posts quite randomly -- they're all good. She is even funny talking about the weather!
I just wish Janel would post more often. And put in more of her great photo commentaries. One can dream...
**
Blogging since January, Janel has exactly 100 posts, all of them witty, and she inspires and shames me by consistently managing to say something pointed in very few words. And she has a great eye for simile.
Janel (or Janel Rene?), author of Just Thoughts.
I've chosen these links to her posts quite randomly -- they're all good. She is even funny talking about the weather!
I just wish Janel would post more often. And put in more of her great photo commentaries. One can dream...
**
Is my digital camera eliminating my need, and consequently my ability, to "paint the word picture"?
Isn't one of the great things about having a digital camera the ability to make an impromptu visual record of ... well, anything?
And yet there seems to be a down side. Writers who are not visual artists have to "paint the word picture." Radio sportscasters, in contrast to their TV colleagues, have to "paint the word picture." I've always had to paint the word picture.
This morning, for example, while B is out of town on an overnight trip, the dishwasher (a movable model on casters that we roll in front of the sink to operate) left some sludgey residue on our kitchen floor -- a small puddle no larger than a banana. Would that word picture freak B out?
Or would it be better to show her this:
I'm at a loss.
NOTE: The banana didn't fall out of the dishwasher with the sludge. Nor did it just happen to be there. I placed it there for scale.
DIGRESSION: The banana seemed a bit tasteless at first, but turned out quite delicious. I realized that I had not eaten a banana the whole time I was in Europe, and had some exaggerated expectations about how it was supposed to taste. I have to add it to my list of "things I didn’t miss at the time, but really liked getting back to."
**
And yet there seems to be a down side. Writers who are not visual artists have to "paint the word picture." Radio sportscasters, in contrast to their TV colleagues, have to "paint the word picture." I've always had to paint the word picture.
This morning, for example, while B is out of town on an overnight trip, the dishwasher (a movable model on casters that we roll in front of the sink to operate) left some sludgey residue on our kitchen floor -- a small puddle no larger than a banana. Would that word picture freak B out?
Or would it be better to show her this:
I'm at a loss.
NOTE: The banana didn't fall out of the dishwasher with the sludge. Nor did it just happen to be there. I placed it there for scale.
DIGRESSION: The banana seemed a bit tasteless at first, but turned out quite delicious. I realized that I had not eaten a banana the whole time I was in Europe, and had some exaggerated expectations about how it was supposed to taste. I have to add it to my list of "things I didn’t miss at the time, but really liked getting back to."
**
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Incoherent museum-curating, funky use of storage space, or strangely evocative message of peace?
___
Photos taken on June 19, 2005, at the warplane exhibition, Royal Museum of the Army and Military History, Brussels.
***
Photos taken on June 19, 2005, at the warplane exhibition, Royal Museum of the Army and Military History, Brussels.
***
Travel memes
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me authoritatively what a "meme" is. Meanwhile, these:
1. Ice. Actually, on my last day in Amsterdam, I closed my finger in a big heavy door, and badly needed to ice it down. I went to the stoner grocery looking for a bag of frozen peas to use as an ice pack – didn’t find any, but discovered that frozen green beans work just as well.
2. TV (including videos and DVDs). We had a TV in practically every place we stayed, but never watched. Just in the last few days of our trip, B and I did get a TV hankering. It was in Brussels, we were tired, so we did dinner and a movie in the room. It was the best room service meal I’ve ever had in my life (fois gras and bouillabaise), and we got DVDs from the reception desk. But we ended up watching European TV, which is fascinating, even if you don’t understand the language.
3. My cell phone. Yeah, they're super convenient at times, but -- just as I've suspected -- you really don't need them.
4. SUVs. Okay this one’s a cheat. I hate SUVs. They’re aren’t many in Europe, which almost, but not quite, makes up for the cigarette smoke.
5. Driving everywhere. We had a rental car for a good part of the trip, but not always, and not in Poland or Berlin. In Europe, you just walk more – it’s a combination of not having a car, or wanting to deal with having one in a city, not wanting to spring for cabs, and not wanting to figure out the public transportation system every time you need to move. Walking is great. I’m going to try it here.
1. Iced coffee. Does this contradict number 1 above? Not exactly.
2. My bed. Firm yet yielding. High off the floor. Mmmm.
3. Summer mornings in familiar surroundings.
4. American humor. That night in Brussels, after five weeks abroad, when we broke down and watched TV, we finally surfed onto a BBC broadcast of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, International Edition. It was so unbelievably funny that I was emitting my rare, helpless, laugh-til-I-cry high-pitched laugh. Jon, I love you, man! I missed you!
5. Time to read. This was weird. Between sightseeing and travelblogging, I just didn’t have much down time for reading. I didn’t really notice, since there was so much mental stimulation from travel, but still...
1. I can pick fights over the stupidest sh*t. Example: B and I took slightly diverging paths crossing the street, in which she reached the sidewalk by threading between two tightly parked cars, whereas I walked through a large vacant parking space. I said: “Why the hell did you cross over there?”
2. The travelers' perception paradox. Even as I bumbled around not knowing the language or how to get from point A to point B, my sense perceptions seemed sharpened. So I’m not entirely stupid when abroad. Also, little things fascinate me, and I want to comment on everything. Duh, right? What am I going to blog about now that I’m home?
3. Peasant food. I really like mittel-European“peasant” food. I guess it’s in my genes. Potatoes, cabbage, root vegetables, soup from root vegetables, thick bread and meat. Every kind of meat they can throw at me. Well, maybe not blood sausage.
4. Travel style. My favorite way to experience other countries is to form some sort of a routine as a base, and tour around off of that. I think that’s why I made such a big deal over the daily coffee-getting ritual. (That and the fact that I’m really not nice to be with if I haven’t had my coffee.) Having a work-related reason to be in a place – the U of Boogie gig, for instance – and touring around off of that, rather than travel purely as a tourist, was ideal. Sightseeing is cool, but my favorite times, e.g., in Berlin, were when we had pretty much covered the obligatory amount of sightseeing and I was just doing my version of hanging out: wandering in and out of shops, finding my way on public transportation, spending unconscionable amounts of time in coffee houses and cafes, taking pictures of people on bicycles.
5. Getting lost. I'm usually capable of regarding getting lost as an inevitable part of travel, and often even part of the adventure. Though apparently I can get so badly lost in a city that I will come to hate it.
***
Five things I can go without for five weeks
without missing at all
without missing at all
1. Ice. Actually, on my last day in Amsterdam, I closed my finger in a big heavy door, and badly needed to ice it down. I went to the stoner grocery looking for a bag of frozen peas to use as an ice pack – didn’t find any, but discovered that frozen green beans work just as well.
2. TV (including videos and DVDs). We had a TV in practically every place we stayed, but never watched. Just in the last few days of our trip, B and I did get a TV hankering. It was in Brussels, we were tired, so we did dinner and a movie in the room. It was the best room service meal I’ve ever had in my life (fois gras and bouillabaise), and we got DVDs from the reception desk. But we ended up watching European TV, which is fascinating, even if you don’t understand the language.
3. My cell phone. Yeah, they're super convenient at times, but -- just as I've suspected -- you really don't need them.
4. SUVs. Okay this one’s a cheat. I hate SUVs. They’re aren’t many in Europe, which almost, but not quite, makes up for the cigarette smoke.
5. Driving everywhere. We had a rental car for a good part of the trip, but not always, and not in Poland or Berlin. In Europe, you just walk more – it’s a combination of not having a car, or wanting to deal with having one in a city, not wanting to spring for cabs, and not wanting to figure out the public transportation system every time you need to move. Walking is great. I’m going to try it here.
Five things I didn’t miss at the time,
but really liked getting back to
but really liked getting back to
1. Iced coffee. Does this contradict number 1 above? Not exactly.
2. My bed. Firm yet yielding. High off the floor. Mmmm.
3. Summer mornings in familiar surroundings.
4. American humor. That night in Brussels, after five weeks abroad, when we broke down and watched TV, we finally surfed onto a BBC broadcast of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, International Edition. It was so unbelievably funny that I was emitting my rare, helpless, laugh-til-I-cry high-pitched laugh. Jon, I love you, man! I missed you!
5. Time to read. This was weird. Between sightseeing and travelblogging, I just didn’t have much down time for reading. I didn’t really notice, since there was so much mental stimulation from travel, but still...
Five things I’ve learned about myself as a world traveler
1. I can pick fights over the stupidest sh*t. Example: B and I took slightly diverging paths crossing the street, in which she reached the sidewalk by threading between two tightly parked cars, whereas I walked through a large vacant parking space. I said: “Why the hell did you cross over there?”
2. The travelers' perception paradox. Even as I bumbled around not knowing the language or how to get from point A to point B, my sense perceptions seemed sharpened. So I’m not entirely stupid when abroad. Also, little things fascinate me, and I want to comment on everything. Duh, right? What am I going to blog about now that I’m home?
3. Peasant food. I really like mittel-European“peasant” food. I guess it’s in my genes. Potatoes, cabbage, root vegetables, soup from root vegetables, thick bread and meat. Every kind of meat they can throw at me. Well, maybe not blood sausage.
4. Travel style. My favorite way to experience other countries is to form some sort of a routine as a base, and tour around off of that. I think that’s why I made such a big deal over the daily coffee-getting ritual. (That and the fact that I’m really not nice to be with if I haven’t had my coffee.) Having a work-related reason to be in a place – the U of Boogie gig, for instance – and touring around off of that, rather than travel purely as a tourist, was ideal. Sightseeing is cool, but my favorite times, e.g., in Berlin, were when we had pretty much covered the obligatory amount of sightseeing and I was just doing my version of hanging out: wandering in and out of shops, finding my way on public transportation, spending unconscionable amounts of time in coffee houses and cafes, taking pictures of people on bicycles.
5. Getting lost. I'm usually capable of regarding getting lost as an inevitable part of travel, and often even part of the adventure. Though apparently I can get so badly lost in a city that I will come to hate it.
***
Friday, June 24, 2005
Coming home
Which end is up?
I awoke this morning at 5 a.m. My sleep patterns are disturbed by jet lag from yesterday's 24-hour marathon of westbound air travel, yet the dawn was beautiful and its a delicious summer morning in my hometown. I'm sad my trip is over, but the summer is full of promise and I'm euphoric about being home.
Jet lag and time zone change are very disorienting. And my grip on what day and time it is has been badly shaken by this: B and I didn't make phone calls or call in for messages from Europe, assuming, I guess, that anyone who really needed to get in touch would send email. When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from the sister of my friend R: "I have some news about R-- please call. We're at R's apartment. It's Wednesday the 25th."
R was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago. I have known her since 4th grade. She was the first girl to break my heart in high school. She was in remission.
"Wednesday the 25th," of course, was last month. I called R's apartment -- the number was disconnected. I called R's sister's cell phone and got voice mail.
I googled "R--" and found her obituary. She died "of cerebral hemorrhage due to complications from cancer treatment" a few days after I left the country.
So the "world" I left behind last May is now very different.
This morning I walked to Grandma Moses, my favorite coffee shop, and got there just after 6:30, when it's supposed to be open. It was dark and locked, and I wondered if maybe I had set my watch to the wrong time zone.
Then a familiar face, riding up on a bike. A former student. Yes, it's after 6:30 and the place is supposed to be open. We chat: Where can we go at this hour and get both coffee and free internet? I think about it for a minute and rattle off the names of three places.
Then the barista shows up. I sort of know her -- I clap and say "woo! hoo!" and we banter. She doesn't want a lot of people coming in and demanding coffee before she's set the place up for business, but she says we can come in and use the wifi while she gets the coffee going, as long was we lock the door behind us.
It occurs to me that it's so nice to have that kind of rapport after three days of scowling Dutch tourism-jaded waitrons. It occurs to me that I not only speak the local language fluently, but I know my way around well enough to give directions. It occurs to me that I should get a bike. And the iced coffee is delicious.
***
I awoke this morning at 5 a.m. My sleep patterns are disturbed by jet lag from yesterday's 24-hour marathon of westbound air travel, yet the dawn was beautiful and its a delicious summer morning in my hometown. I'm sad my trip is over, but the summer is full of promise and I'm euphoric about being home.
Jet lag and time zone change are very disorienting. And my grip on what day and time it is has been badly shaken by this: B and I didn't make phone calls or call in for messages from Europe, assuming, I guess, that anyone who really needed to get in touch would send email. When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from the sister of my friend R: "I have some news about R-- please call. We're at R's apartment. It's Wednesday the 25th."
R was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago. I have known her since 4th grade. She was the first girl to break my heart in high school. She was in remission.
"Wednesday the 25th," of course, was last month. I called R's apartment -- the number was disconnected. I called R's sister's cell phone and got voice mail.
I googled "R--" and found her obituary. She died "of cerebral hemorrhage due to complications from cancer treatment" a few days after I left the country.
So the "world" I left behind last May is now very different.
This morning I walked to Grandma Moses, my favorite coffee shop, and got there just after 6:30, when it's supposed to be open. It was dark and locked, and I wondered if maybe I had set my watch to the wrong time zone.
Then a familiar face, riding up on a bike. A former student. Yes, it's after 6:30 and the place is supposed to be open. We chat: Where can we go at this hour and get both coffee and free internet? I think about it for a minute and rattle off the names of three places.
Then the barista shows up. I sort of know her -- I clap and say "woo! hoo!" and we banter. She doesn't want a lot of people coming in and demanding coffee before she's set the place up for business, but she says we can come in and use the wifi while she gets the coffee going, as long was we lock the door behind us.
It occurs to me that it's so nice to have that kind of rapport after three days of scowling Dutch tourism-jaded waitrons. It occurs to me that I not only speak the local language fluently, but I know my way around well enough to give directions. It occurs to me that I should get a bike. And the iced coffee is delicious.
***
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Last insightful thoughts before leaving Amsterdam
Some friendly advice regarding retail marketing operations in Europe
Still on a roll in Amsterdam. Hey, local merchants? Listen up. Unless there is a disproportionate number of cat-lovers in Amsterdam, and you plan to do business only with them, then you really need to rethink the whole cat-in-the-display thing.
Okay, so that’s kind of cute, unless you’ve had a lot of experience with finding cat poo in your flower pots. But I’m less convinced about the appeal of this:
Note that the restaurant has had to slash its prices for "new herring" and is still totally empty at about 8 p.m.
Finally, this simply does not work for me – even if that’s only display bread.
Taking a broader look around Europe, it occurs to me that the names of many European products and services would have to be changed for successful sales in the U.S. Remember the story about how the Chevrolet "Nova" had trouble selling in Latin America because "no va" means "no go" or "doesn’t work" in Spanish? I can’t say that I saw anything quite so good here in Europe, but here are a few anyway.
Our grocery store in Boogie, Germany was an outlet of a very successful chain of grocery superstores. It’s name? Toom.
Here is a very popular bottled juice found in Belgium and the Netherlands. If you drink it in the U.S., you are a ___
Easier to market, but with some risk of sending the wrong message: Beligum’s "Hoegaarden Beer." The Hoegaarden coasters looked, at first glance, like Europe’s most dull and artless beer coasters,
but on further inspection, there may be more to them:
What exactly goes on in the Hoegaarden? Check out their "Forbidden Fruit" beer, here.
Finally, Germany’s "Sportlife" chewing gum seems well enough –
– until you check out the ad on the back of the wrapper:
Whuh??? I think "Sportlife" needs to lose that ad on the back. Or, I don’t know, maybe keep it.
**
Still on a roll in Amsterdam. Hey, local merchants? Listen up. Unless there is a disproportionate number of cat-lovers in Amsterdam, and you plan to do business only with them, then you really need to rethink the whole cat-in-the-display thing.
Okay, so that’s kind of cute, unless you’ve had a lot of experience with finding cat poo in your flower pots. But I’m less convinced about the appeal of this:
Note that the restaurant has had to slash its prices for "new herring" and is still totally empty at about 8 p.m.
Finally, this simply does not work for me – even if that’s only display bread.
Taking a broader look around Europe, it occurs to me that the names of many European products and services would have to be changed for successful sales in the U.S. Remember the story about how the Chevrolet "Nova" had trouble selling in Latin America because "no va" means "no go" or "doesn’t work" in Spanish? I can’t say that I saw anything quite so good here in Europe, but here are a few anyway.
Our grocery store in Boogie, Germany was an outlet of a very successful chain of grocery superstores. It’s name? Toom.
Here is a very popular bottled juice found in Belgium and the Netherlands. If you drink it in the U.S., you are a ___
Easier to market, but with some risk of sending the wrong message: Beligum’s "Hoegaarden Beer." The Hoegaarden coasters looked, at first glance, like Europe’s most dull and artless beer coasters,
but on further inspection, there may be more to them:
What exactly goes on in the Hoegaarden? Check out their "Forbidden Fruit" beer, here.
Finally, Germany’s "Sportlife" chewing gum seems well enough –
– until you check out the ad on the back of the wrapper:
Whuh??? I think "Sportlife" needs to lose that ad on the back. Or, I don’t know, maybe keep it.
**
Bikes!
Bicycles in Amerstam are everywhere... and they're coming at me.
Amsterdam is more filled with bicycles than any city I’ve ever seen. I’d like to say it’s “bike friendly,” except that that phrase conjures a misleading image of smiling Fisher-Price people smiling and waving at you as they neatly and carefully ride past.
But that’s not how it is. Sure, cyclists in Amsterdam will give you two of those cute “Dzinngg! Dzinnggs!” on their bicycle bell by way of warning, but after that, it’s apparently open season for them to mow you down.
I suppose the profusion of cyclists is good for the environment – much as Lord of the Flies was a great learning experience for boys in a natural setting.
Amsterdammers uniformly go in for the dowdy, sturdy practical city bikes, and ride with a dignified upright posture redolent of black and white newsreel footage.
But don’t let that fool you – those suckers can fly. Crossing the streets you have little to fear from cars or even streetcars in the cobble-stoned canal-strewn central district. But the bicycle buzz around like flies in every direction, silently rushing toward you at high speed and only emitting an audible whoosh (or “dzinngg”) when it’s virtually too late to dodge out of the way. If you step into the street for just a moment – as you often have to do to to go around some obstruction on the very narrow sidewalks – without looking in all directions, you take your life in your hands.
To be fair, Amsterdam bicyclists don’t put much more stock in their own safety than in yours. In my 48 hours in Amsterdam, I probably saw at least a thousand people on bikes. How many bicycle helmets did I see? Exactly one. ONE helmet! On a toddler strapped into the back toddler seat. And that parent is probably viewed by her peers as insanely fixated on safety.
As further consolation, if you are hit by a cyclist in Amsterdam, there's a good chance that the rider will have a cell phone right in his hand -- you can ask him to interrupt his cell-con to call an ambulance.
____
NOTE: Plenty of male bicyclists carried helmetless children and spoke on cell phones -- I just didn't happen to catch them on my camera.
***
Those old upright bikes corner surprising quickly.
Here, a pedestrian darts out of the way.
Here, a pedestrian darts out of the way.
Amsterdam is more filled with bicycles than any city I’ve ever seen. I’d like to say it’s “bike friendly,” except that that phrase conjures a misleading image of smiling Fisher-Price people smiling and waving at you as they neatly and carefully ride past.
Cars routinely work their way behind or around bikes on Amsterdam's narrow streets.
But that’s not how it is. Sure, cyclists in Amsterdam will give you two of those cute “Dzinngg! Dzinnggs!” on their bicycle bell by way of warning, but after that, it’s apparently open season for them to mow you down.
I suppose the profusion of cyclists is good for the environment – much as Lord of the Flies was a great learning experience for boys in a natural setting.
Bikes everywhere you look! Above, in traffic. Below, parked.
Amsterdammers uniformly go in for the dowdy, sturdy practical city bikes, and ride with a dignified upright posture redolent of black and white newsreel footage.
But don’t let that fool you – those suckers can fly. Crossing the streets you have little to fear from cars or even streetcars in the cobble-stoned canal-strewn central district. But the bicycle buzz around like flies in every direction, silently rushing toward you at high speed and only emitting an audible whoosh (or “dzinngg”) when it’s virtually too late to dodge out of the way. If you step into the street for just a moment – as you often have to do to to go around some obstruction on the very narrow sidewalks – without looking in all directions, you take your life in your hands.
To be fair, Amsterdam bicyclists don’t put much more stock in their own safety than in yours. In my 48 hours in Amsterdam, I probably saw at least a thousand people on bikes. How many bicycle helmets did I see? Exactly one. ONE helmet! On a toddler strapped into the back toddler seat. And that parent is probably viewed by her peers as insanely fixated on safety.
Above: You see this bike setup all over town -- infant seat in front, and toddler seat behind.
Below: Look, ma, no helmet!
Below: Look, ma, no helmet!
As further consolation, if you are hit by a cyclist in Amsterdam, there's a good chance that the rider will have a cell phone right in his hand -- you can ask him to interrupt his cell-con to call an ambulance.
Cycling cell-cons. I think the woman below right is actually programming her phone.
NOTE: Plenty of male bicyclists carried helmetless children and spoke on cell phones -- I just didn't happen to catch them on my camera.
***
Amsterdam's culture of "grow your own"
Flowers!
This is a wall of seed packets for sale, at this flower stand:
***
This is a wall of seed packets for sale, at this flower stand:
***
Amsterdam: Great idea #4
Amsterdam: Great idea #3
My new flag
Did I mention that I don’t like second-hand smoke?
Cafe on Spuiplein, Amsterdam.
Great idea #3: I decided today to make this my new flag.
No, this isn’t a slick ad for the Netherlands’ anti-smoking campaign (I don’t know if they have one or not). And, no this isn’t the cover art for a heavy metal album.
Well, for all I know, it is the cover art for a heavy metal album. But who’s the artist?
Who’s the artist?
Answer: Vincent van Gogh!
Yesterday we went to the Van Gogh museum. I’d never known about this painting before – one of his early studies. Cool, huh?
*
Did I mention that I don’t like second-hand smoke?
Cafe on Spuiplein, Amsterdam.
Great idea #3: I decided today to make this my new flag.
No, this isn’t a slick ad for the Netherlands’ anti-smoking campaign (I don’t know if they have one or not). And, no this isn’t the cover art for a heavy metal album.
Well, for all I know, it is the cover art for a heavy metal album. But who’s the artist?
Who’s the artist?
Answer: Vincent van Gogh!
Yesterday we went to the Van Gogh museum. I’d never known about this painting before – one of his early studies. Cool, huh?
*
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Amsterdam: Great idea #2
Amsterdam has been an international merchant city for over four hundred years, so I would have expected the Dutch merchants here to be industrious and clever business people. Why, then, in a city studded with so-called "coffee" houses selling marijuana to patrons for on-premises consumption, there aren't dozens of all-night delis and bakeries at hand?
Here is a is typical situation. This bakery, located right across the alley from a "coffee" shop, closes at 5 p.m. Come on, people, where's your business sense?
My great idea: buy up half a dozen store-fronts within a couple of doors from half a dozen "coffee" shops to sell takeout delicacies 24/7.
***
Here is a is typical situation. This bakery, located right across the alley from a "coffee" shop, closes at 5 p.m. Come on, people, where's your business sense?
My great idea: buy up half a dozen store-fronts within a couple of doors from half a dozen "coffee" shops to sell takeout delicacies 24/7.
***
Amsterdam: I've been getting some really great ideas here
Maybe it's the drinking water here (the guidebooks said it was pretty good), but I've been getting lots of great ideas here in Amsterdam.
Great idea number 1: photo mirror
For nearly five weeks, B and I haven't managed to get a single photo with both of us in it. For some reason, it never occurred to either of us to ask a passerby on the street to take our picture, and I haven't gotten it together yet to figure out how to use the timer.
Today, it occurred to me to pose with B in front of the mirror.
Not a bad shot right? Okay, that's Tim Robbins head on my body. (I'm actually much better looking.) Why didn't I think of this before Amsterdam? It's not like we didn't have a mirror in the other places we stayed.
**
Great idea number 1: photo mirror
For nearly five weeks, B and I haven't managed to get a single photo with both of us in it. For some reason, it never occurred to either of us to ask a passerby on the street to take our picture, and I haven't gotten it together yet to figure out how to use the timer.
Today, it occurred to me to pose with B in front of the mirror.
Not a bad shot right? Okay, that's Tim Robbins head on my body. (I'm actually much better looking.) Why didn't I think of this before Amsterdam? It's not like we didn't have a mirror in the other places we stayed.
**
Amsterdam: If you try hard, you CAN hear Dutch spoken
Tourists and stoners, and tourist-stoners
I’m really enjoying Amsterdam. The central district – with row upon row of 17th-18th century row houses lining the canals – is truly magnificent. And yet I’d describe this core of the city – the part to which tourists confine themselves – as “one giant youth hostel with a smattering of Dutch locals on bicycles added for ambience.”
And those Brit and Aussie tourists! You can barely walk two blocks in this town without hearing some guy saying “fook” or “fawk” and “baggah” (trans: “bugger”). The shopkeepers and other Dutch I interact with greet me in English before I even have the chance to say, “Do you speak English?”, (in English). The nerve!
And the whole stoner thing. B and I walked out of our hotel this morning to find a place for coffee, and she turned and asked the hotel porter standing on the sidewalk:
B: Can you tell us where to find a coffee shop nearby?
PORTER: (A significant look.)
B: A coffee coffee place! (Making tilting cup gesture with her hand.)
We walk a few blocks, and stop to look at our map. In Amsterdam, an unfolded map is taken as a sort of universal distress signal, like flying an upside down flag from the mainmast, or telegraphing an S.O.S. Someone will immediately stop to offer directions. Including English-speaking tourists who have been in town no longer than three days. Three days off the boat, and some American tourist gets all “I’m-just-one-of-the-natives” condescending.
Sure enough an American tourist stops, ignores my attempts to explain that we just figured it out ourselves on the map, and proceeds to give us obviously wrong directions, get confused, and borrow my map to orient himself.
“Amsterdam is totally amazing,” he says. “It’s like a huge clock. The canals go in a.. a ... huge arc, and all the pieces – you’ve got the trams, the buses, and cars, and mopeds, and motorcycles, and people on bikes and pedestrians. All the different kinds of transportation!”
We thank him and hurry on our way – I wish I’d asked him how long he’d been in town – leaving him to experience the wave of his own brilliantly inspiring metaphors. Whoa, dude!
We find a coffee coffee place – it’s called a bakery (in Dutch), whereas a “coffee shop” (in English) I have now learned is in fact nothing more, or less, than a cannabis-hashish den! These differing national notions of coffee! We ask the barista what is the Dutch word for coffee with steamed milk in it. “Oh, you mean a latte,” says the barista, “We call that veer__ [inaudible].”**
She brings the two veer– (pronounced “feer,” by the way)– thingies, turns and starts to deliver my croissant to the wrong table. But she abruptly retracts the plate, bluring out “Whoaah!”
Yes, whoa there, girl! Don’t want to make a mistake with that croissant.
Oh, and there was the dapper gray-haired businessman talking on his cell phone on the narrow stairway this morning, trying to step much too gingerly out of our way while continuing his cell-con, and tipping his thick looseleaf planner out a two story window into an inaccessible courtyard. Whoa, dude!
Is everyone here stoned? Or am I just being paranoid?
______
** CORRECTION: It's called "verkeerd."
***
I’m really enjoying Amsterdam. The central district – with row upon row of 17th-18th century row houses lining the canals – is truly magnificent. And yet I’d describe this core of the city – the part to which tourists confine themselves – as “one giant youth hostel with a smattering of Dutch locals on bicycles added for ambience.”
And those Brit and Aussie tourists! You can barely walk two blocks in this town without hearing some guy saying “fook” or “fawk” and “baggah” (trans: “bugger”). The shopkeepers and other Dutch I interact with greet me in English before I even have the chance to say, “Do you speak English?”, (in English). The nerve!
And the whole stoner thing. B and I walked out of our hotel this morning to find a place for coffee, and she turned and asked the hotel porter standing on the sidewalk:
B: Can you tell us where to find a coffee shop nearby?
PORTER: (A significant look.)
B: A coffee coffee place! (Making tilting cup gesture with her hand.)
We walk a few blocks, and stop to look at our map. In Amsterdam, an unfolded map is taken as a sort of universal distress signal, like flying an upside down flag from the mainmast, or telegraphing an S.O.S. Someone will immediately stop to offer directions. Including English-speaking tourists who have been in town no longer than three days. Three days off the boat, and some American tourist gets all “I’m-just-one-of-the-natives” condescending.
Sure enough an American tourist stops, ignores my attempts to explain that we just figured it out ourselves on the map, and proceeds to give us obviously wrong directions, get confused, and borrow my map to orient himself.
“Amsterdam is totally amazing,” he says. “It’s like a huge clock. The canals go in a.. a ... huge arc, and all the pieces – you’ve got the trams, the buses, and cars, and mopeds, and motorcycles, and people on bikes and pedestrians. All the different kinds of transportation!”
We thank him and hurry on our way – I wish I’d asked him how long he’d been in town – leaving him to experience the wave of his own brilliantly inspiring metaphors. Whoa, dude!
We find a coffee coffee place – it’s called a bakery (in Dutch), whereas a “coffee shop” (in English) I have now learned is in fact nothing more, or less, than a cannabis-hashish den! These differing national notions of coffee! We ask the barista what is the Dutch word for coffee with steamed milk in it. “Oh, you mean a latte,” says the barista, “We call that veer__ [inaudible].”**
She brings the two veer– (pronounced “feer,” by the way)– thingies, turns and starts to deliver my croissant to the wrong table. But she abruptly retracts the plate, bluring out “Whoaah!”
Yes, whoa there, girl! Don’t want to make a mistake with that croissant.
Oh, and there was the dapper gray-haired businessman talking on his cell phone on the narrow stairway this morning, trying to step much too gingerly out of our way while continuing his cell-con, and tipping his thick looseleaf planner out a two story window into an inaccessible courtyard. Whoa, dude!
Is everyone here stoned? Or am I just being paranoid?
______
** CORRECTION: It's called "verkeerd."
***
Monday, June 20, 2005
Last stop: Amsterdam
We dropped off our rental car in Schipole airport in the Netherlands – I was more emotionally attached to that Mercedes than I thought I could be to a car – and took the commuter train into the Central train station to begin our 2-day, 3-night stay in Amsterdam.
Leaving a foreign airport always reminds me of the movie “The Great Escape.” You’ve been trapped with a bunch of (fellow) foreign tourists for several hours in check-in lines, on the plane, at passport control, and at baggage claim. On the commuter train, you recognize some people from the airport and you hear others speaking English, but the percentage of tourists has thinned out (kind of like the scene in the movie where a number of separate escapees are trying to get away on the same train). You know that quickly after you arrive downtown, you’ll be blending into the local populace. Well, not exactly blending in – you stick out like a red, white and blue thumb – but you find yourself suddenly surrounded by Germans, or French, or Germans and Turks, or French, North Africans, people from the middle east – not Americans is the point. (Or if you’re traveling on the continent, not Americans, Brits and Aussies.)
Well, that never happens in Amsterdam. You’re in a crowd of English-speaking tourists at the airport. On the train. On the streetcar to your hotel. Everywhere you go – crowds of Americans, Brits and Aussies.
You all know Amsterdam: jawdropping 17th-century charm, the canals – and a motley world-beat of unwashed 20somethings swirling around you like flies.
The problem with Amsterdam is that it’s a port of entry to Europe – meaning that most of the English-speaking tourists there are either beginning their European adventure (in which case they have yet to molt their ugly American or Brit or Aussie ways) – or they’re wrapping up their tour, in which case they’re tired and cranky and want-it-here-and-want-it- now... like me and B. What I wanted was coffee.
Well, it turns out that Amsterdam has the strangest coffee shops in any of the six countries B and I visited on this trip. We walked into one for a late afternoon cup, and almost nobody was drinking coffee. Never mind “au lait” versus “latte.” I wittily asked the barista (a la Monty Python’s famous “Cheese shop” sketch): “I assume you serve coffee here ... this is a coffee shop!” The barista replied “Yes, we do sell coffee here if that is what you want.” Something about the way he said it made B and me feel kind of funny, so we left. Which was just as well, because it was at least twice as smokey as German, French and Belgian cafes, and there seemed to be a lot of strange-smelling Eurotrash cigarettes.
Tired after a long day’s drive, and having heard that food in Amsterdam is nothing to write home about, we decided just to pick up a few groceries around 7 p.m. and “dine” in our hotel room. The grocery store was a scene, and in describing it, I exaggerate not one jot:
The store was jam packed with shoppers, yet it seemed like there were hardly a half dozen people over 30. Shoppers were jostling and bumping other shoppers and pulling stuff off the shelves like the Dutch were going to institute rationing tomorrow. What’s more, the stuff people were buying was straight out of a Cheech and Chong grocery-shopping-for-the-munchies routine: lots of ready-to-eat food, lots of impulse items, and lots of multiple items, like a guy with five huge, identical chocolate bars. The shelves of the store were half empty, and there were only two individual cans of beer in the whole place. I’ve never before been in a place where I felt like everybody around me was stoned out of his mind.
By the way, the groceries were astonishingly cheap. We bought two ready-made salads, a small loaf of black bread, four crusty bread rolls, liverwurst, salami, eight sushi-sized disks of goat cheese wrapped in prosciutto, a jar of olives, potato salad, two chocolate bars, a package of honey-filled waffle-wafers, and a package of chocolate digestive biscuits. Total cost: 18 euros (about $22).
I realize that a picnic in the hotel room is kind of a lame way to introduce oneself to a new city, but I have to say, the food tasted AMAZING.
**
Leaving a foreign airport always reminds me of the movie “The Great Escape.” You’ve been trapped with a bunch of (fellow) foreign tourists for several hours in check-in lines, on the plane, at passport control, and at baggage claim. On the commuter train, you recognize some people from the airport and you hear others speaking English, but the percentage of tourists has thinned out (kind of like the scene in the movie where a number of separate escapees are trying to get away on the same train). You know that quickly after you arrive downtown, you’ll be blending into the local populace. Well, not exactly blending in – you stick out like a red, white and blue thumb – but you find yourself suddenly surrounded by Germans, or French, or Germans and Turks, or French, North Africans, people from the middle east – not Americans is the point. (Or if you’re traveling on the continent, not Americans, Brits and Aussies.)
Well, that never happens in Amsterdam. You’re in a crowd of English-speaking tourists at the airport. On the train. On the streetcar to your hotel. Everywhere you go – crowds of Americans, Brits and Aussies.
You all know Amsterdam: jawdropping 17th-century charm, the canals – and a motley world-beat of unwashed 20somethings swirling around you like flies.
The problem with Amsterdam is that it’s a port of entry to Europe – meaning that most of the English-speaking tourists there are either beginning their European adventure (in which case they have yet to molt their ugly American or Brit or Aussie ways) – or they’re wrapping up their tour, in which case they’re tired and cranky and want-it-here-and-want-it- now... like me and B. What I wanted was coffee.
Well, it turns out that Amsterdam has the strangest coffee shops in any of the six countries B and I visited on this trip. We walked into one for a late afternoon cup, and almost nobody was drinking coffee. Never mind “au lait” versus “latte.” I wittily asked the barista (a la Monty Python’s famous “Cheese shop” sketch): “I assume you serve coffee here ... this is a coffee shop!” The barista replied “Yes, we do sell coffee here if that is what you want.” Something about the way he said it made B and me feel kind of funny, so we left. Which was just as well, because it was at least twice as smokey as German, French and Belgian cafes, and there seemed to be a lot of strange-smelling Eurotrash cigarettes.
Tired after a long day’s drive, and having heard that food in Amsterdam is nothing to write home about, we decided just to pick up a few groceries around 7 p.m. and “dine” in our hotel room. The grocery store was a scene, and in describing it, I exaggerate not one jot:
The store was jam packed with shoppers, yet it seemed like there were hardly a half dozen people over 30. Shoppers were jostling and bumping other shoppers and pulling stuff off the shelves like the Dutch were going to institute rationing tomorrow. What’s more, the stuff people were buying was straight out of a Cheech and Chong grocery-shopping-for-the-munchies routine: lots of ready-to-eat food, lots of impulse items, and lots of multiple items, like a guy with five huge, identical chocolate bars. The shelves of the store were half empty, and there were only two individual cans of beer in the whole place. I’ve never before been in a place where I felt like everybody around me was stoned out of his mind.
By the way, the groceries were astonishingly cheap. We bought two ready-made salads, a small loaf of black bread, four crusty bread rolls, liverwurst, salami, eight sushi-sized disks of goat cheese wrapped in prosciutto, a jar of olives, potato salad, two chocolate bars, a package of honey-filled waffle-wafers, and a package of chocolate digestive biscuits. Total cost: 18 euros (about $22).
I realize that a picnic in the hotel room is kind of a lame way to introduce oneself to a new city, but I have to say, the food tasted AMAZING.
**
Coffee culture
__
In Boston, a regular “coffee” has lots of half-and-half and sugar. In New York, if you say you want cream for your coffee at a take out-place, they’ll insist on adding it themselves to prevent undue customer usage, but then pour in so much that your coffee turns off-white. But if you ask for cream in a New York diner, you get a juice glass at least half full of half-and-half.
You’ve read about these things right here in CM. I’ve always thought of myself as a careful observer of coffee culture and have always tried to teach myself to speak the local coffee dialect wherever I go. On former trips to Europe, I’ve made it a point to know how to order coffee correctly before even learning how to say “toilet.”
But on this trip to Europe, while I certainly talked about coffee, I’ve glossed over coffee dialect. Maybe I was too busy obsessing about cultural differences in internet access. Or maybe I spent too much time in Starbucks, which has developed its own coffee lingua franca: Walk into any Starbucks, anywhere in the world, say “grande decaf soy latte” and you are guaranteed to be understood.
The word “decaf” itself is a problem. The importance of caffeine-free coffee has not yet been fully understood in Europe (where some places won't have it and a few will still give you the equivalent of Sanka). In some parts of Germany, you have to ask for “kaffeine frei” (which sounds something like “coffay-een fry”) while in other parts it’s “entkaffeiniert.” In almost no parts of Germany were my pronunciations of these words understood.
My failure to brush up on coffee speak was driven home to me here in Belgium, where I ordered a "café au lait," only to be given black coffee with a small packet of butter on the saucer. Actually, the butter turned out to be coffee creamer, but that's not the point: the point is that I thought I had surely ordered a big, milky cup of coffee with foam on top – which, as I recall, is café au lait in France. To get that in Brussels, you have to ask for “café russe” – Russian coffee, bizarrely enough. Whereas, I believe that in France, a black coffee with a small drop of butter on the side – er, milk – is a “café creme.”
The Russians, although they too serve hot beverages – tea – in a glass, traditionally do so with a metal glass holder with a handle. The Germans, you will recall, just give you a hot glass. The way to get steamed milk in your coffee in Germany is to ask for "kaffe latte" – in some places. Outside the more sophisticated cities and towns, that was a good way to get a blank stare. But ordering kaffee latte also usually (not always) guarantees you get your coffee in a glass.
Milch kaffee is a safer bet in Germany – I think it’s the German's version of café au lait (French, not Belgian), meaning literally “milk coffee” – and it always comes in a cup, usually with milk already put in and a bit of foam on top. But I found I was not always understood when asking for "milch kaffee" because of unpredictable (to me) regional variations in how Germans pronounce “ch” – sometimes a soft “sch-” and sometimes a semi-hard cross between the Hebrew “ch-” (the hocking sound) and a whistle originating in the back of the throat. This is a lot to think about before you’ve had your first cup of coffee.
In France, you often have no choice but to get your early morning coffee in a bar. Yes, it’s called a café, but by 8 a.m. it’s already filled with cigarette smoke, and you walk up to the bar and ask a large, burly man standing in front of a wall of liquor bottles for your café au lait, or café creme, or whatever. He then goes to the complex looking espresso machine and makes you a fabulous cup of coffee.
I think French mixology schools must teach how to make coffee. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you need a special license certifying that you've received such training if you want to make legal retail cups of coffee in France. Gives an added meaning to the concept of “barista,” doesn’t it?
*
In Boston, a regular “coffee” has lots of half-and-half and sugar. In New York, if you say you want cream for your coffee at a take out-place, they’ll insist on adding it themselves to prevent undue customer usage, but then pour in so much that your coffee turns off-white. But if you ask for cream in a New York diner, you get a juice glass at least half full of half-and-half.
You’ve read about these things right here in CM. I’ve always thought of myself as a careful observer of coffee culture and have always tried to teach myself to speak the local coffee dialect wherever I go. On former trips to Europe, I’ve made it a point to know how to order coffee correctly before even learning how to say “toilet.”
But on this trip to Europe, while I certainly talked about coffee, I’ve glossed over coffee dialect. Maybe I was too busy obsessing about cultural differences in internet access. Or maybe I spent too much time in Starbucks, which has developed its own coffee lingua franca: Walk into any Starbucks, anywhere in the world, say “grande decaf soy latte” and you are guaranteed to be understood.
The word “decaf” itself is a problem. The importance of caffeine-free coffee has not yet been fully understood in Europe (where some places won't have it and a few will still give you the equivalent of Sanka). In some parts of Germany, you have to ask for “kaffeine frei” (which sounds something like “coffay-een fry”) while in other parts it’s “entkaffeiniert.” In almost no parts of Germany were my pronunciations of these words understood.
My failure to brush up on coffee speak was driven home to me here in Belgium, where I ordered a "café au lait," only to be given black coffee with a small packet of butter on the saucer. Actually, the butter turned out to be coffee creamer, but that's not the point: the point is that I thought I had surely ordered a big, milky cup of coffee with foam on top – which, as I recall, is café au lait in France. To get that in Brussels, you have to ask for “café russe” – Russian coffee, bizarrely enough. Whereas, I believe that in France, a black coffee with a small drop of butter on the side – er, milk – is a “café creme.”
The Russians, although they too serve hot beverages – tea – in a glass, traditionally do so with a metal glass holder with a handle. The Germans, you will recall, just give you a hot glass. The way to get steamed milk in your coffee in Germany is to ask for "kaffe latte" – in some places. Outside the more sophisticated cities and towns, that was a good way to get a blank stare. But ordering kaffee latte also usually (not always) guarantees you get your coffee in a glass.
Milch kaffee is a safer bet in Germany – I think it’s the German's version of café au lait (French, not Belgian), meaning literally “milk coffee” – and it always comes in a cup, usually with milk already put in and a bit of foam on top. But I found I was not always understood when asking for "milch kaffee" because of unpredictable (to me) regional variations in how Germans pronounce “ch” – sometimes a soft “sch-” and sometimes a semi-hard cross between the Hebrew “ch-” (the hocking sound) and a whistle originating in the back of the throat. This is a lot to think about before you’ve had your first cup of coffee.
In France, you often have no choice but to get your early morning coffee in a bar. Yes, it’s called a café, but by 8 a.m. it’s already filled with cigarette smoke, and you walk up to the bar and ask a large, burly man standing in front of a wall of liquor bottles for your café au lait, or café creme, or whatever. He then goes to the complex looking espresso machine and makes you a fabulous cup of coffee.
I think French mixology schools must teach how to make coffee. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you need a special license certifying that you've received such training if you want to make legal retail cups of coffee in France. Gives an added meaning to the concept of “barista,” doesn’t it?
*
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Reflections on my travels: the three best food bons mots
My five-plus weeks abroad is winding down to the last few days. Tomorrow we head to Amsterdam for a two-day, three-night stay, flying home Thursday.
Having been abroad for over a month, and thinking deeply about my home, the loved ones I will be seeing soon again, and all that junk, it is a time for reflection. And a time for sharing.
Here, for instance, I will share with you the three very best things that were said over food between B and me.
1. "I want to get naked and roll around in this."
This was B commenting on the very nice cheese board offered to us at the end of our fancy dinner in Thionville, France. In the U.S., you never hear anyone say, as you're stuffing yourself with meat in heavy, delicious sauces, "save room for cheese!" But we did, and unable to choose among the seven delectable cheeses displayed on the cart in front of us, we tried one of each.
2. "Now we're finally getting somewhere."
Said by B about a piece of chocolate-cherry cake in Berlin. I always thought Germany was supposed to be the land of cake. If there was one big disappointment I had on this really great time abroad, it was the dessert baking in Germany. Maybe I didn't hit the right regions, but I found that in a given town all the bakeries would offer the same assortment of bready sweet rolls, cheesecake and squares weighted down with heavy fruit suspended in stuff like jello. But for the sausages, roasted pork shanks and fabulous chocolate bars, I might have lost weight!
I think I said something incredibly funny in response to B, but it came out indistinct because my mouth was full of chocolate cherry cake.
3. "One more hair and I'll have to stop eating this."
Said by me, just this evening, at our restaurant in Brussels. They have a bit of an issue around cleanliness in this otherwise charming town. (I'll explain later.) I'd found the second one when this comment came out.
**
Having been abroad for over a month, and thinking deeply about my home, the loved ones I will be seeing soon again, and all that junk, it is a time for reflection. And a time for sharing.
Here, for instance, I will share with you the three very best things that were said over food between B and me.
1. "I want to get naked and roll around in this."
This was B commenting on the very nice cheese board offered to us at the end of our fancy dinner in Thionville, France. In the U.S., you never hear anyone say, as you're stuffing yourself with meat in heavy, delicious sauces, "save room for cheese!" But we did, and unable to choose among the seven delectable cheeses displayed on the cart in front of us, we tried one of each.
2. "Now we're finally getting somewhere."
Said by B about a piece of chocolate-cherry cake in Berlin. I always thought Germany was supposed to be the land of cake. If there was one big disappointment I had on this really great time abroad, it was the dessert baking in Germany. Maybe I didn't hit the right regions, but I found that in a given town all the bakeries would offer the same assortment of bready sweet rolls, cheesecake and squares weighted down with heavy fruit suspended in stuff like jello. But for the sausages, roasted pork shanks and fabulous chocolate bars, I might have lost weight!
I think I said something incredibly funny in response to B, but it came out indistinct because my mouth was full of chocolate cherry cake.
3. "One more hair and I'll have to stop eating this."
Said by me, just this evening, at our restaurant in Brussels. They have a bit of an issue around cleanliness in this otherwise charming town. (I'll explain later.) I'd found the second one when this comment came out.
**
Auf wiedersehen Deutschland, bonjours Belgique!
Yesterday we said goodbye to Germany, and headed across the border into Belgium, for a two-night stay in Brussels. Once again, I felt a flood of emotion at being able to speak French. But what emotion?
Was it relief? Joy? The sheer seductiveness of the French language? Actually, I think it was a feeling of mastery. My mastery over the beautiful but elusive French language was clearly established in this, one of my first conversations in Brussels:
[Translated from the French:]
***
Was it relief? Joy? The sheer seductiveness of the French language? Actually, I think it was a feeling of mastery. My mastery over the beautiful but elusive French language was clearly established in this, one of my first conversations in Brussels:
[Translated from the French:]
ME: The check, please!Magnificent indeed.
WAITER: (various French words) .... sandwich .... (more French words). Five euro fifty, please.
ME: (Holding up € 50 bill, the only Euro cash I have on me.) One can to change the?
WAITER: Yes, it goes. Have you fifty cents?
ME: I believe. (Rummaging through pockets to produce a fifty euro cent coin.) Voila!
WAITER: Ah. Magnificent!
***
Friday, June 17, 2005
Zigaretten?
___
Europeans are prodigious smokers. This includes my new friends the Germans. Yes, I realize this is not a news flash. Everywhere you go, people are smoking, or have recently smoked. The sidewalk, the bus stop, the cafe (both indoor and outdoor seating), the train platform, the bathroom. The only public place you can go in the United States to simulate this pervasive atmosphere of cigarette fug is a casino.
In Europe, they don't just smoke lots of cigarettes. They seem to smoke the hell out of each cigarette. They take powerful drags and emit massive, streaming, voluptuous clouds of smoke. Supposedly smoking is on the decline here in Germany, due to public information campaigns, but that decline hasn't reached the stage where it is noticeable to my fragile American anti-smoking sensibilities.
In the U.S., cigarette machines are like 1964 Chevys: they still exist, either in ramshackle backwater settings or else in antique shows. But in Germany, cigarette machines are about as commonplace as telephone booths.
Here's a weird thing. I kind of like the aesthetics of cigarette machines.
That's right. I've always thought they were cool (or Kool), ever since I was a cigarette-hating little kid. Part of it is the display of rows of cigarette labels. One of the ways that cigarette companies reveal that they are satan's handmaidens is their genius for packaging cigarettes. The neat little packages with -- let's face it -- beautifully designed labels are so attractive that they make you want to smoke just to be able to handle the packs.
And frankly, can you name 20 machines more alluring than glowing rows of backlit cigarette labels? I'm not sure that I can -- which makes this model of cigarette machine one of the top 20 most alluring machines.
Seems to hold the promise of a night of excitement there in tobaccoland.
These designs make me think of a piano keyboard.
Anyway, come on over to Europe despite the cigarette smoke. After a while you get used to it.
Actually, you don't.
**
Is this the cutest little thing you've ever heard?
In Germany, a cell phone is called a "handy." Check it out here.
Here's a cigarette machine selling some kind of pay as you go cell phone service.
I think it's so darn cute! What do you say -- shall we start this slang in the U.S.? It'll screw up the cell phone marketing people, at least for a while...
****
Here's a cigarette machine selling some kind of pay as you go cell phone service.
I think it's so darn cute! What do you say -- shall we start this slang in the U.S.? It'll screw up the cell phone marketing people, at least for a while...
****
Spargel!
~~~
"Spargel" is German for asparagus. For six weeks in May and June, it’s the "spargel time." The Germans regard white asparagus as a delicacy, and during spargel season, the markets are filled with mounds of white asparagus. Restaurant menus commonly have an entire page devoted to white asparagus dishes – main courses built entirely around asparagus, sometimes consisting only of a huge plate of white asparagus. Who would have thought that in this nation of fatty sausages, you could walk into a restaurant and see several diners parked in front of a huge plate of white asparagus, without even a side of meat?
Wednesday morning market, in the town of Boogie, Germany.
I've never been a great asparagus fan, and I've shied away from the spargel dishes. But at a dinner party last night, the main course was spargel. When cooked right -- and this was -- the asparagus is tender but not mushy, it melts in your mouth, and tastes buttery. Sort of amazing -- I can see the attraction.
Spargel season ends next week. Let's enjoy it while it lasts:
Spargel, spargel, spargel!
Okay, so this is not spargel, but is it not the biggest honkin' pile of cherries you've ever seen?
***
Blog of the Week: Marginal Utility
With father's day coming up, what could be more appropriate than selecting blogger-Dad Tom Bozzo and his Marginal Utility blog for long-overdue Blog Of the Week honors?
Blogger and child: Left, Baby Bozzo. Right, Tom Bozzo. Or is it the other way around? I'd call that a family resemblance. Photos courtesy of Marginal Utility.
Marginal Utility has been providing incisive analysis on economics and politics for nearly ten months. He provides some of the best arguments and talking points on what is wrong with the Bush Social Security privatization plan. He writes with wit and flair, and is insanely knowledgeable about car makes and models. (I for one plan to consult him before I buy my next car.) And he gives you the inside scoop on important political decisions affecting his home town of Madison, Wisconsin.
This is a blog that should be getting lots more traffic. Happy father's day, TB!
*
Blogger and child: Left, Baby Bozzo. Right, Tom Bozzo. Or is it the other way around? I'd call that a family resemblance. Photos courtesy of Marginal Utility.
Marginal Utility has been providing incisive analysis on economics and politics for nearly ten months. He provides some of the best arguments and talking points on what is wrong with the Bush Social Security privatization plan. He writes with wit and flair, and is insanely knowledgeable about car makes and models. (I for one plan to consult him before I buy my next car.) And he gives you the inside scoop on important political decisions affecting his home town of Madison, Wisconsin.
This is a blog that should be getting lots more traffic. Happy father's day, TB!
*
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Ampelmann
How many ironies in the change of a traffic light?
[Part II of IV on reunified Germany]
Meet “Ampelmann.” (English translation: “Traffic Light Man.”) Designed in 1961 by an East German “traffic psychologist” named Karl Peglau, Ampelmann may have been one of the first, if not the first, pictographic pedestrian crossing symbols. Peglau wanted a symbol that would be readily understood, particularly by children.
With his broad-brimmed, flat-topped hat and vigorous stride, the green Ampelmann is cute and cartoonish. Compare the relatively bland west German version and the generic stick figure used as the pan-European default.
Above: West (left) and East (right) German "traffic light mans" on the streets.
Below: textbook comparisons.
In 1994, after reunification, West German engineers began pulling down all the Ampelmanns and replaced them with the boring West German version. Though the decision was based on the outdated electronics of the GDR’s traffic signals rather than aesthetics, the move quickly came to symbolize the overarching flaw in the reunification process – its tendency to heedlessly discard the good with the bad from East German society.
A sort of cult protest movement coalesced around Ampelmann. The figure has been restored at many Berlin intersections and here and there elsewhere in Germany.
Naturally, Germany having a free-market economy, the protest quickly morphed into a merchandizing fad.
Above: The main Ampelmann Shop, at Hackesher Hof, one of three in Berlin.
Below: Some (not all) of the Ampelmann swag, arranged in our hotel room.
As you can see (1) they have an extensive product line and (2) B and I went a little crazy in the store. I would like to tell you that profits from Ampelmann merchandizing go to some worthy political cause to benefit unemployed East Germans, but as far as I know they don’t. Cute little guy though, huh?
As if there weren’t ironies galore already in the Ampelmann story, I must observe that the red “stop” Ampelmann looks disturbingly Christlike, and on the black knit ski cap it looks like a cult symbol.
**
[Part II of IV on reunified Germany]
Ampelman, signaling "don't walk," on Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin. This street
was designed to be the great Stalinist boulevard, extending
east of Alexanderplatz (and was formerly called "Josef Stalin Allee").
was designed to be the great Stalinist boulevard, extending
east of Alexanderplatz (and was formerly called "Josef Stalin Allee").
Meet “Ampelmann.” (English translation: “Traffic Light Man.”) Designed in 1961 by an East German “traffic psychologist” named Karl Peglau, Ampelmann may have been one of the first, if not the first, pictographic pedestrian crossing symbols. Peglau wanted a symbol that would be readily understood, particularly by children.
With his broad-brimmed, flat-topped hat and vigorous stride, the green Ampelmann is cute and cartoonish. Compare the relatively bland west German version and the generic stick figure used as the pan-European default.
Above: West (left) and East (right) German "traffic light mans" on the streets.
Below: textbook comparisons.
In 1994, after reunification, West German engineers began pulling down all the Ampelmanns and replaced them with the boring West German version. Though the decision was based on the outdated electronics of the GDR’s traffic signals rather than aesthetics, the move quickly came to symbolize the overarching flaw in the reunification process – its tendency to heedlessly discard the good with the bad from East German society.
A sort of cult protest movement coalesced around Ampelmann. The figure has been restored at many Berlin intersections and here and there elsewhere in Germany.
Naturally, Germany having a free-market economy, the protest quickly morphed into a merchandizing fad.
Above: The main Ampelmann Shop, at Hackesher Hof, one of three in Berlin.
Below: Some (not all) of the Ampelmann swag, arranged in our hotel room.
As you can see (1) they have an extensive product line and (2) B and I went a little crazy in the store. I would like to tell you that profits from Ampelmann merchandizing go to some worthy political cause to benefit unemployed East Germans, but as far as I know they don’t. Cute little guy though, huh?
As if there weren’t ironies galore already in the Ampelmann story, I must observe that the red “stop” Ampelmann looks disturbingly Christlike, and on the black knit ski cap it looks like a cult symbol.
**
Bananas: a tale of two Germanys
Part I of IV on reunified Germany
Our host Liane grew up in a small village in East Germany. She’s 30 years old now, so she was about 14-15 when Germany was reunified. Like (I gather) most Eastern Europeans who lived under communism, she has stories about the scarcity of consumer goods.
She particularly remembers bananas. The German Democratic Republic (“GDR” – East Germany) would import bananas only from Cuba, and they were a rare and cherished treat. Twice a year, s shipment of bananas would arrive in the local grocery store, and people would line up for hours to get their banana ration – one per family member.
It’s funny: hearing a story that reflects a stereotype from the past seems quaint to the point of straining credulity – like the additional fact Liane mentioned that there was only one telephone in her village when she was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Yet the stereotype comes from an underlying reality. Liane lived that reality, and her storytelling was matter-of-fact: she was clearly not exaggerating or trying to impress us. So – one banana, two times a year.
East Germans rushed headlong into reunification at the first opportunity. But the West German polity and economic powers-that-be completely dominated the process. East German institutions were swept away: many skilled East German employees were simply laid off and replaced by Westerners with purportedly superior credentials; the West German school system was imposed throughout the country; seemingly vested property rights of GDR citizens were brushed aside in favor of 50-year-old restitution claims by former owners who had long ago fled to the west. While West Germany has failed to deliver on the expected investment in infrastructure in the former GDR, West German corporations have happily extracted profits and resources from the East. East Germans earn significantly lower wages and have significantly higher unemployment than West Germans. Disgruntled East Germans express the view that the reunification was less a coming together of two halves than a conquest of the East by the West.
Obviously, the premise of reunification meant the dismantling of the communist regime, but there was an apparently heedless rush to throw out the good with the bad from GDR society. The GDR had a number of progressive laws and egalitarian social institutions -- it was apparently more progressive on women's rights than West Germany, for example -- which might have functioned well, perhaps on a state or local level, and created the kind of “labotories for social experimentation” for which the U.S. system of federalism is sometimes celebrated. Reunification ran roughshod over them.
Yet who can blame the East Germans for rushing into the embrace of their Western siblings? Could you or I so readily resist the lure of bananas and all the free-market promise wrapped in their symbolic yellow skin?
***
Our host Liane grew up in a small village in East Germany. She’s 30 years old now, so she was about 14-15 when Germany was reunified. Like (I gather) most Eastern Europeans who lived under communism, she has stories about the scarcity of consumer goods.
She particularly remembers bananas. The German Democratic Republic (“GDR” – East Germany) would import bananas only from Cuba, and they were a rare and cherished treat. Twice a year, s shipment of bananas would arrive in the local grocery store, and people would line up for hours to get their banana ration – one per family member.
It’s funny: hearing a story that reflects a stereotype from the past seems quaint to the point of straining credulity – like the additional fact Liane mentioned that there was only one telephone in her village when she was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Yet the stereotype comes from an underlying reality. Liane lived that reality, and her storytelling was matter-of-fact: she was clearly not exaggerating or trying to impress us. So – one banana, two times a year.
East Germans rushed headlong into reunification at the first opportunity. But the West German polity and economic powers-that-be completely dominated the process. East German institutions were swept away: many skilled East German employees were simply laid off and replaced by Westerners with purportedly superior credentials; the West German school system was imposed throughout the country; seemingly vested property rights of GDR citizens were brushed aside in favor of 50-year-old restitution claims by former owners who had long ago fled to the west. While West Germany has failed to deliver on the expected investment in infrastructure in the former GDR, West German corporations have happily extracted profits and resources from the East. East Germans earn significantly lower wages and have significantly higher unemployment than West Germans. Disgruntled East Germans express the view that the reunification was less a coming together of two halves than a conquest of the East by the West.
Obviously, the premise of reunification meant the dismantling of the communist regime, but there was an apparently heedless rush to throw out the good with the bad from GDR society. The GDR had a number of progressive laws and egalitarian social institutions -- it was apparently more progressive on women's rights than West Germany, for example -- which might have functioned well, perhaps on a state or local level, and created the kind of “labotories for social experimentation” for which the U.S. system of federalism is sometimes celebrated. Reunification ran roughshod over them.
Yet who can blame the East Germans for rushing into the embrace of their Western siblings? Could you or I so readily resist the lure of bananas and all the free-market promise wrapped in their symbolic yellow skin?
***
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Bad cop, no donut -- er, cone
On a warm summer afternoon in Cologne, I see two teams of police enter this Italian ice cream establishment in the space of ten minutes.
Here's the second team: "Just a few follow up questions, ma'am."
Yeah, right.
**
Here's the second team: "Just a few follow up questions, ma'am."
Yeah, right.
**
I understand only train station
My friends J and M live in my home town, but earlier this evening (it's now almost 11 p.m. here) B and I met them for beers in Cologne. It's great to be on your own in a strange place, yet it's great to meet up briefly with friends from home when you're traveling abroad. Seeing familiar faces so completely out of their context creates a delightful feeling of a discontinuity in the time-space continuum -- maybe it's the closest I'll ever come to experiencing time travel. So there we were -- J and M broke their train trip with a short stopover in Cologne, and B and I drove into the city from U of Boogie -- quaffing Kolsch bier in the shadow of Cologne's stunning 13th century cathedral.
Some weeks earlier, before we had embarked for Germany, J, an expert in German, had given us the following linguistic advice: If you have time to learn only one German phrase, the best one is:
Why say "I understand only train station" rather than the more straightforward "I don't speak German" or "I do not understand [what you're saying]"? For laughs. J assured us that this phrase would be uproariously funny to virtually any German we encountered and win his or her instant good graces.
J, I'm sorry, but I have to admit, I couldn't quite believe you. Something about this struck me as too quaint, a canard: my skeptical, easily embarassed brain told me that if I whipped out the phrase, I'd get a blank uncomprehending stare or, at best, eye-rolling.
Besides, virtually everyone in Germany speaks enough English that you can conduct your quick tourist transactions with them without using any German phrases beyond my trusty "sprechen zie English?"
Most Germans are charminly modest in responding to this question. They rarely say "yes," when asked if they speak English, but typically say "not very well" or "just a little bit." But almost invariably their English ranges from serviceable to nearly fluent.
Though maybe the charming modesty is tempered with a degree of self-criticism. You get the feeling that Germans are perfectionists when it comes to language, and will not say "Yes, I speak English" unless they do so perfectly.
On a related note, I've repeatedly had the experience when conversing with my German hosts, that they get quite frustrated when they run into a concept they'd like to express but don't know the exact word they're looking for. The natural adaptive strategy in this situation is circumlocution. If you run into a roadblock, you take a different path, using the words you know, to reach the same expressive result. But Germans seem to resist this: they want the right word, will start muttering to themselves in German, then start to ask you for the word they're thinking. I guess Germans just like to stay on the autobahn rather than taking a linguistic detour on back roads.
While our German hosts and friends are putting us to shame with the English speaking ability, B and I go around making speaking English to each other in fake German accents or making bad puns. The word "fahrt" is a tense of "fahren" (to drive) and highway exit ramps are marked "ausfahrt" (drive-out?). B dissolves into a kind of Beavis and Butthead mirth ("It says 'fart'!") over this.
After beers and an early dinner, we walked J and M back to the Cologne train station and said our goodbyes. No more than two minutes after we saw them off, I encountered this sign:
Translation: Understand only train station? Read the PICTURE. [Ad for "Picture" magazine.]
J, I'm sorry I ever doubted you.
***
UPDATE: An anonymous commenter writes: "The literal meaning for Bild is 'picture,' but the ad is for a tabloid daily newspaper, die Bild-Zeitung well known for its right-wing politics. Sort of like the New York Post. I think a free translations for the ad would be: 'Semi-literate? Read the Bild.' "
Some weeks earlier, before we had embarked for Germany, J, an expert in German, had given us the following linguistic advice: If you have time to learn only one German phrase, the best one is:
"Ich verstehe nur banhof."In essence, this phrase means "I don't speak German, just perhaps a few tourist's words." But literally it means "I understand only train station." The Germans are great train travelers, and their train stations are typically fun shopping arcades as well as transportation terminals, so I guess "train station" for Germans has powerful connotations as the culture's tourist mecca.
Why say "I understand only train station" rather than the more straightforward "I don't speak German" or "I do not understand [what you're saying]"? For laughs. J assured us that this phrase would be uproariously funny to virtually any German we encountered and win his or her instant good graces.
J, I'm sorry, but I have to admit, I couldn't quite believe you. Something about this struck me as too quaint, a canard: my skeptical, easily embarassed brain told me that if I whipped out the phrase, I'd get a blank uncomprehending stare or, at best, eye-rolling.
Besides, virtually everyone in Germany speaks enough English that you can conduct your quick tourist transactions with them without using any German phrases beyond my trusty "sprechen zie English?"
Most Germans are charminly modest in responding to this question. They rarely say "yes," when asked if they speak English, but typically say "not very well" or "just a little bit." But almost invariably their English ranges from serviceable to nearly fluent.
Though maybe the charming modesty is tempered with a degree of self-criticism. You get the feeling that Germans are perfectionists when it comes to language, and will not say "Yes, I speak English" unless they do so perfectly.
On a related note, I've repeatedly had the experience when conversing with my German hosts, that they get quite frustrated when they run into a concept they'd like to express but don't know the exact word they're looking for. The natural adaptive strategy in this situation is circumlocution. If you run into a roadblock, you take a different path, using the words you know, to reach the same expressive result. But Germans seem to resist this: they want the right word, will start muttering to themselves in German, then start to ask you for the word they're thinking. I guess Germans just like to stay on the autobahn rather than taking a linguistic detour on back roads.
While our German hosts and friends are putting us to shame with the English speaking ability, B and I go around making speaking English to each other in fake German accents or making bad puns. The word "fahrt" is a tense of "fahren" (to drive) and highway exit ramps are marked "ausfahrt" (drive-out?). B dissolves into a kind of Beavis and Butthead mirth ("It says 'fart'!") over this.
After beers and an early dinner, we walked J and M back to the Cologne train station and said our goodbyes. No more than two minutes after we saw them off, I encountered this sign:
Translation: Understand only train station? Read the PICTURE. [Ad for "Picture" magazine.]
J, I'm sorry I ever doubted you.
***
UPDATE: An anonymous commenter writes: "The literal meaning for Bild is 'picture,' but the ad is for a tabloid daily newspaper, die Bild-Zeitung well known for its right-wing politics. Sort of like the New York Post. I think a free translations for the ad would be: 'Semi-literate? Read the Bild.' "
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
They look just like one of us!
The new German authoritarianism?
Germans are legendary for their authoritarian culture, aren't they? The stereotype is an extremely rule-following people and stern-faced officials gruffly ordering you around and saying things like: "Your identity papers! Schnell, schnell!"
From the moment we set foot in Berlin, B, an inveterate jaywalker, agreed with me that we would not, under any circumstances, run afoul of the German authorities by any potentially scofflaw behavior like jaywalking. We would go as far as a couple of blocks looking for marked crosswalks. (Strangely, we found very few.)
Berlin's delightful and well-functioning public transportation system, consisting of two trains (the wider-guaged, elevated S-Bahn and the narrow-guaged, sometimes underground, sometimes elevated U-Bahn), electric streetcars and buses has a ticketing system that is confusing at first but ultimately easy to use. And rather than putting in a costly electronic turnstyle system popular in U.S. cities and elsewhere, you buy your ticket and just board the vehicle.
But it's not quite an honor system. Undercover transit employees ride around on the trains and buses to spot-check valid tickets. Apparently, if you don't have a proper ticket and are caught, you're escorted off the conveyance and fined to the tune of €40-60. A friend who lives in Berlin assured us that announcements are made in the train stations (in German -- so I missed them) saying something like: "Don't ride without a valid ticket. We're on the train, and we look just like one of you!"
So to a guy like myself, who grew up on a steady diet of World War II movies and history books about the Nazi regime, this should be creepishly redolent of Gestapo tactics, right?
After riding several days without incident, it happened twice in two days. All of a sudden, a very plain looking, middle aged guy in very casual plain clothes is holding a small S-Bahn photo-ID badge cupped in his palm, flashing it in a circle around him and saying "tickets please!" And everybody fishes in pockets, etc. for their ticket.
Here's the second guy. He was fiendishly clever -- he flashed out his badge as soon as the doors closed and the train started moving.
Sure, it's easy for you to pick him out of the crowd now, especially with the bright red arrows pointing at him. But I was totally surprised.
But the weird thing is, it didn't feel Gestapo to me at all. Actually, it was sort of cool. And both of the ticket narcs were friendly and smiley. This one could be your Dutch uncle -- let's take another look:
Sorry about the blurry, cockeyed photo quality -- still working on the
clandestine photography skills.
You get the feeling that if you were caught without a ticket, he'd fine you and then join you to laugh about it over a beer.
I'm here to tell you that the whole German authoritarianism thing has not been my experience at all. Police officers have nodded and smiled. Train conductors -- who in former days, and in other countries (including the U.S. I might add) characteristically take their military-style uniforms as a license to strike ludicrous tyrannical attitudes -- in Germany have been light-hearted and genial.
And jaywalking? According to my U of Boogie host, a professor of criminal law, there's no such thing as illegal jaywalking in Germany. You can cross the street wherever you want.
**
Germans are legendary for their authoritarian culture, aren't they? The stereotype is an extremely rule-following people and stern-faced officials gruffly ordering you around and saying things like: "Your identity papers! Schnell, schnell!"
From the moment we set foot in Berlin, B, an inveterate jaywalker, agreed with me that we would not, under any circumstances, run afoul of the German authorities by any potentially scofflaw behavior like jaywalking. We would go as far as a couple of blocks looking for marked crosswalks. (Strangely, we found very few.)
Berlin's delightful and well-functioning public transportation system, consisting of two trains (the wider-guaged, elevated S-Bahn and the narrow-guaged, sometimes underground, sometimes elevated U-Bahn), electric streetcars and buses has a ticketing system that is confusing at first but ultimately easy to use. And rather than putting in a costly electronic turnstyle system popular in U.S. cities and elsewhere, you buy your ticket and just board the vehicle.
But it's not quite an honor system. Undercover transit employees ride around on the trains and buses to spot-check valid tickets. Apparently, if you don't have a proper ticket and are caught, you're escorted off the conveyance and fined to the tune of €40-60. A friend who lives in Berlin assured us that announcements are made in the train stations (in German -- so I missed them) saying something like: "Don't ride without a valid ticket. We're on the train, and we look just like one of you!"
So to a guy like myself, who grew up on a steady diet of World War II movies and history books about the Nazi regime, this should be creepishly redolent of Gestapo tactics, right?
After riding several days without incident, it happened twice in two days. All of a sudden, a very plain looking, middle aged guy in very casual plain clothes is holding a small S-Bahn photo-ID badge cupped in his palm, flashing it in a circle around him and saying "tickets please!" And everybody fishes in pockets, etc. for their ticket.
Here's the second guy. He was fiendishly clever -- he flashed out his badge as soon as the doors closed and the train started moving.
Sure, it's easy for you to pick him out of the crowd now, especially with the bright red arrows pointing at him. But I was totally surprised.
But the weird thing is, it didn't feel Gestapo to me at all. Actually, it was sort of cool. And both of the ticket narcs were friendly and smiley. This one could be your Dutch uncle -- let's take another look:
Sorry about the blurry, cockeyed photo quality -- still working on the
clandestine photography skills.
You get the feeling that if you were caught without a ticket, he'd fine you and then join you to laugh about it over a beer.
I'm here to tell you that the whole German authoritarianism thing has not been my experience at all. Police officers have nodded and smiled. Train conductors -- who in former days, and in other countries (including the U.S. I might add) characteristically take their military-style uniforms as a license to strike ludicrous tyrannical attitudes -- in Germany have been light-hearted and genial.
And jaywalking? According to my U of Boogie host, a professor of criminal law, there's no such thing as illegal jaywalking in Germany. You can cross the street wherever you want.
**
Monday, June 13, 2005
What is wrong with you people?
How the F*** am I supposed to drink this?
Note: this coffee is hot!!
**
Note: this coffee is hot!!
**
A small town on the Rhine: Co-ed sports
Girl soccer player walking alone.
Here's the rest of her team.
All boys.
***
Here's the rest of her team.
All boys.
***
Kaffee kampf
Where am I now?
Coffee and bakery on Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.
I don’t really like Starbucks. Starbucks lost me, somewhere on its epic journey from cool-concept Seattle-area regional coffee house chain (I lived in Seattle in the late 1980s) to corporate juggernaut whose intergalactic mission will not stop until no one else serves coffee in the entire universe. I actually tell myself that my opposition to Starbucks is a matter of principle.
Being principled is made easy by the fact that I don’t like Starbucks coffee: its exceedingly dark, thick and fruity roast always reminds me that coffee is not so much the “nectar of the wakeful” as it is a burned bean beverage. And I loathe – I loathe – all that tall-means-small-grande-vente crap.
I don’t have a perfect boycott of Starbucks. Back in the U.S., I go there between one and four times per month. You know how it is. Sometimes you’re meeting someone for coffee, and they just have to have their grande decaf vanilla soy latte. Or you pull off the highway for gas on a road trip and desperately want coffee; your choices are McDonald’s, Burger King, the gas station “quik mart” and – whoa! – there’s a Starbucks! Where you gonna go?
So, here in cosmopolitan Berlin, where am I right now? Yeah, you guessed it....
Starbucks, Hackesher Markt, Berlin. Note the tell-tale
cream-colored Mercedes taxi in background.
Here’s my shameful confession. I’ve spent a total of six days in Berlin, and have been in Starbucks, now, .... wait for it ... five times and counting.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit how lame it is to be traveling abroad and whining about how the conveniences of home are hard to find – like internet access for instance. And coffee’s really good in Germany as a rule – not quite up to French standards, where you get a fabulous cup (or bowl) of coffee about 9 times out of 10) – but more often than not you’ll get that strong-but-smooth European roast (when I say “strong-but-smooth” I do not mean Starbucks’ “thick and dank”) with creamy milk foam floating on top and gradually settling into the blend.
But. Here’s the thing. (1) 3 or 4 times out of ten in Germany you’ll get a bad cup of coffee. What’s more, there’s a good chance they’ll put it in a glass. Mmmm, a nice glass of hot coffee. I don’t mean a glass mug with a handle, either. How are you supposed to pick up a hot glass?
(2) Is it just me, or does Starbucks coffee taste better here in Europe? I mean, they are competing for European (not American) coffee tastes.
(3) They have a smoke free environment. This is no small thing. In Europe, usually the only way to escape the inhalation of large quantities of second-hand cigarette smoke is actually to die. This is particularly true when drinking coffee, since as you know coffee and cigarettes go together like – well, like booze and cigarettes. Starbucks is boldly (and cleverly) offering smoke free coffee experience to Europeans, where non-smoking is slowly but surely catching on.
(4) They have wireless internet access.
Capiche? Verstehen?
Moving beyond my own personal kaffee kampf, to the Berlin’s capitalist coffee wars, we find that Starbucks has made powerful inroads. Lots of shops, very busy.
There are two other coffee chains in Berlin – Einstein Kaffee, which I have not yet visited, and Balzac Coffee. I find Balzac interesting for it’s shameless knock-off of Starbucks.
Einstein's, Friedrichstrasse.
From its sign, above, to its logo, ambience and menu signs, below,
Balzac's seems to copy Starbucks, only in brown rather than green.
Balzac even uses the "tall, grande, vente" lingo!
Check out the pastries: which one is Starbucks, and which Balzac?
Answer: Starbucks left, Balzac right.
But one difference for me – and perhaps even for Berliners – makes all the difference: Balzac allows smoking.
In Berlin's ongoing kaffee kampf, Starbucks isn't above a little corporate logo theft of its own. Tchibo is a large German coffee distributor, selling coffee in grocery stores and retail coffee shops like the one below.
Note the logo. It's supposed to be, I think, a coffee bean trailing a swirl of aromatic hot coffee steam. Looks kind of like a spermatazoa, wouldn't you say?
Now note the copy-cat swirl on Starbucks' napkins:
By the way, the photo of Tchibo and Dunkin Donuts at the top of this post was taken from across the street -- at Starbucks!
**
Coffee and bakery on Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.
I don’t really like Starbucks. Starbucks lost me, somewhere on its epic journey from cool-concept Seattle-area regional coffee house chain (I lived in Seattle in the late 1980s) to corporate juggernaut whose intergalactic mission will not stop until no one else serves coffee in the entire universe. I actually tell myself that my opposition to Starbucks is a matter of principle.
Being principled is made easy by the fact that I don’t like Starbucks coffee: its exceedingly dark, thick and fruity roast always reminds me that coffee is not so much the “nectar of the wakeful” as it is a burned bean beverage. And I loathe – I loathe – all that tall-means-small-grande-vente crap.
I don’t have a perfect boycott of Starbucks. Back in the U.S., I go there between one and four times per month. You know how it is. Sometimes you’re meeting someone for coffee, and they just have to have their grande decaf vanilla soy latte. Or you pull off the highway for gas on a road trip and desperately want coffee; your choices are McDonald’s, Burger King, the gas station “quik mart” and – whoa! – there’s a Starbucks! Where you gonna go?
So, here in cosmopolitan Berlin, where am I right now? Yeah, you guessed it....
Starbucks, Hackesher Markt, Berlin. Note the tell-tale
cream-colored Mercedes taxi in background.
Here’s my shameful confession. I’ve spent a total of six days in Berlin, and have been in Starbucks, now, .... wait for it ... five times and counting.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit how lame it is to be traveling abroad and whining about how the conveniences of home are hard to find – like internet access for instance. And coffee’s really good in Germany as a rule – not quite up to French standards, where you get a fabulous cup (or bowl) of coffee about 9 times out of 10) – but more often than not you’ll get that strong-but-smooth European roast (when I say “strong-but-smooth” I do not mean Starbucks’ “thick and dank”) with creamy milk foam floating on top and gradually settling into the blend.
But. Here’s the thing. (1) 3 or 4 times out of ten in Germany you’ll get a bad cup of coffee. What’s more, there’s a good chance they’ll put it in a glass. Mmmm, a nice glass of hot coffee. I don’t mean a glass mug with a handle, either. How are you supposed to pick up a hot glass?
(2) Is it just me, or does Starbucks coffee taste better here in Europe? I mean, they are competing for European (not American) coffee tastes.
(3) They have a smoke free environment. This is no small thing. In Europe, usually the only way to escape the inhalation of large quantities of second-hand cigarette smoke is actually to die. This is particularly true when drinking coffee, since as you know coffee and cigarettes go together like – well, like booze and cigarettes. Starbucks is boldly (and cleverly) offering smoke free coffee experience to Europeans, where non-smoking is slowly but surely catching on.
(4) They have wireless internet access.
Capiche? Verstehen?
Moving beyond my own personal kaffee kampf, to the Berlin’s capitalist coffee wars, we find that Starbucks has made powerful inroads. Lots of shops, very busy.
There are two other coffee chains in Berlin – Einstein Kaffee, which I have not yet visited, and Balzac Coffee. I find Balzac interesting for it’s shameless knock-off of Starbucks.
Einstein's, Friedrichstrasse.
From its sign, above, to its logo, ambience and menu signs, below,
Balzac's seems to copy Starbucks, only in brown rather than green.
Balzac even uses the "tall, grande, vente" lingo!
Check out the pastries: which one is Starbucks, and which Balzac?
Answer: Starbucks left, Balzac right.
But one difference for me – and perhaps even for Berliners – makes all the difference: Balzac allows smoking.
In Berlin's ongoing kaffee kampf, Starbucks isn't above a little corporate logo theft of its own. Tchibo is a large German coffee distributor, selling coffee in grocery stores and retail coffee shops like the one below.
Note the logo. It's supposed to be, I think, a coffee bean trailing a swirl of aromatic hot coffee steam. Looks kind of like a spermatazoa, wouldn't you say?
Now note the copy-cat swirl on Starbucks' napkins:
By the way, the photo of Tchibo and Dunkin Donuts at the top of this post was taken from across the street -- at Starbucks!
**
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Look what I'm missing
Yesterday morning, we left U of Boogie for a weekend in Berlin. I was reluctant to go, because I would be missing this:
Does this mean German students have "über parties"? Or is it a party for the über-30 crowd? That would be me.
***
Does this mean German students have "über parties"? Or is it a party for the über-30 crowd? That would be me.
***
Knuckles update
Week 2 of teaching in Germany.
(What are "knuckles"? See here and here.)
On Wednesday, I showed the first half of the movie A Civil Action, and then wrapped up for about 20 minutes explaining how the movie dramatically illustrates some key features of the American civil justice system. I went over the time for the end of class by about, maybe, one minute. No knuckles.
Then on Thursday, I showed the second half of A Civil Action, asked a few desultory questions, realized no one was going to say anything, and ended class early. Knuckles!
This suggested two theories: (1) You get knuckles if the students feel you ended class for the day in a timely fashion. (2) You get knuckles every other day. I received knuckles after my first, third and fifth classes, and no knuckles after my second and fourth.
Obviously, the European system of higher education differs from that in the U.S. in many ways, but one is the behavior of students during lectures. In the U.S., if students are bored in a lecture, they will engage, more-or-less covertly, in quiet pursuits such as crossword puzzles, reading for other courses, or – in today’s classrooms with laptops and internet access – solitaire, IMing friends and web-surfing.
Many years ago, I spent a year studying at Cambridge University in England, and was surprised by the scene in the lecture hall at this hallowed institution. The lecturing professors were uniformly terrible – a droning mumble directed down into the podium in monotone, the actual text lacking in literary flair – but the student behavior shocked me: students wandered in and out of the room, in which half the seats were empty, ostentatiously engaged in non-listening behaviors like reading big unfolded newspapers. And they kept up a steady buzz of conversation. It put me in mind of the U.N. General Assembly on a slow day.
There are no laptops or internet access in U of Boogie classrooms, but no clandestine crossword puzzles either: my German students seem to think nothing having conversations while I’m talking. They don’t talk loud, but they don’t whisper either, and if more of these conversations start up, the volume of each conversation seems to increase, as in a progressively busier café. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, but when this happens (and it’s never happened to me in the U.S.) I quickly start to feel like a bad lounge act.
Turns out this is not unusual behavior. I mentioned it to my faculty hosts, who replied, "Hmm. Well German students are different from what you are used to." They told me I should ask the students not to talk. I did that. I also tried silence: I would stop talking until the buzz died away. This worked to a degree, but not always – perhaps they started talking about “why he isn’t saying anything up there.”
Anyway, yesterday we had a great class. No movie, but a highly interactive, participatory analysis of how to present a bank robbery case to a jury. I know it was a great class because no one talked while I was talking. Well, a bit of brief whispered conversations, but I had the impression that people were translating into German for their friends.
It was a big day for knuckles. I broke the class into groups of four and gave them 20 minutes to develop either a direct or a cross examination of a witness to the robbery. They really got into this task, and were reluctant to stop when I tried to call them back to order. I knuckled the table to get their attention. Bad idea: maybe they thought I was applauding their intensive preparations, and my knuckles are still sore two days later. I wish I had a gavel.
Next, two teams of students role-played a short direct and cross examination of the witness, and the role players were knuckled by their classmates as they finished. (I mean knuckles on the table, not noogies on the forehead.) Nice gesture!
Then I concluded with a rousing sum up lecture -- and got knuckles. Second day in a row for knuckles, and the fourth time in six classes.
I’m not sure there’s a pattern. If I had a psychotherapist, he would tell me I shouldn’t care so much about knuckles.
***
(What are "knuckles"? See here and here.)
On Wednesday, I showed the first half of the movie A Civil Action, and then wrapped up for about 20 minutes explaining how the movie dramatically illustrates some key features of the American civil justice system. I went over the time for the end of class by about, maybe, one minute. No knuckles.
Then on Thursday, I showed the second half of A Civil Action, asked a few desultory questions, realized no one was going to say anything, and ended class early. Knuckles!
This suggested two theories: (1) You get knuckles if the students feel you ended class for the day in a timely fashion. (2) You get knuckles every other day. I received knuckles after my first, third and fifth classes, and no knuckles after my second and fourth.
Obviously, the European system of higher education differs from that in the U.S. in many ways, but one is the behavior of students during lectures. In the U.S., if students are bored in a lecture, they will engage, more-or-less covertly, in quiet pursuits such as crossword puzzles, reading for other courses, or – in today’s classrooms with laptops and internet access – solitaire, IMing friends and web-surfing.
Many years ago, I spent a year studying at Cambridge University in England, and was surprised by the scene in the lecture hall at this hallowed institution. The lecturing professors were uniformly terrible – a droning mumble directed down into the podium in monotone, the actual text lacking in literary flair – but the student behavior shocked me: students wandered in and out of the room, in which half the seats were empty, ostentatiously engaged in non-listening behaviors like reading big unfolded newspapers. And they kept up a steady buzz of conversation. It put me in mind of the U.N. General Assembly on a slow day.
There are no laptops or internet access in U of Boogie classrooms, but no clandestine crossword puzzles either: my German students seem to think nothing having conversations while I’m talking. They don’t talk loud, but they don’t whisper either, and if more of these conversations start up, the volume of each conversation seems to increase, as in a progressively busier café. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, but when this happens (and it’s never happened to me in the U.S.) I quickly start to feel like a bad lounge act.
Turns out this is not unusual behavior. I mentioned it to my faculty hosts, who replied, "Hmm. Well German students are different from what you are used to." They told me I should ask the students not to talk. I did that. I also tried silence: I would stop talking until the buzz died away. This worked to a degree, but not always – perhaps they started talking about “why he isn’t saying anything up there.”
Anyway, yesterday we had a great class. No movie, but a highly interactive, participatory analysis of how to present a bank robbery case to a jury. I know it was a great class because no one talked while I was talking. Well, a bit of brief whispered conversations, but I had the impression that people were translating into German for their friends.
It was a big day for knuckles. I broke the class into groups of four and gave them 20 minutes to develop either a direct or a cross examination of a witness to the robbery. They really got into this task, and were reluctant to stop when I tried to call them back to order. I knuckled the table to get their attention. Bad idea: maybe they thought I was applauding their intensive preparations, and my knuckles are still sore two days later. I wish I had a gavel.
Next, two teams of students role-played a short direct and cross examination of the witness, and the role players were knuckled by their classmates as they finished. (I mean knuckles on the table, not noogies on the forehead.) Nice gesture!
Then I concluded with a rousing sum up lecture -- and got knuckles. Second day in a row for knuckles, and the fourth time in six classes.
I’m not sure there’s a pattern. If I had a psychotherapist, he would tell me I shouldn’t care so much about knuckles.
***
Saturday, June 11, 2005
G. D. Luxembourg: City of Evil
It’s beautiful. Don’t go there.
Luxembourg is a small country about the size of Rhode Island, nestled between Belgium and Germany, with one major city, it’s capital, also called Luxembourg. Official name "G.D. Luxembourg," for “Grand Duchy.”
It may be the most beautiful city I have ever seen. I can’t be sure, because I spent most of my time there cursing it ("G.D. Luxembourg" or just "f**king Luxembourg"). Luxembourg is an evil, evil, despicable city.
Luxembourg has every architectural and physical feature you’d want from a charming, old-world city: grand baroque monuments and buildings, broad boulevards, narrow cobblestoned streets with quaint 18th century facades, a river, beautiful bridges, towering brick viaducts, and a huge cliff faced by a medieval wall.
The food was good, the people were nice.
So why is Luxembourg an evil place?
Have you ever been so badly lost while driving that you felt the very streets were involved in a sinister conspiracy to abuse you?
The trouble began when B and I were unceremoniously forced off the autoroute – the country’s main multi-lane divided highway – about ten miles outside the city. There were no warning signs, just a sudden barricade that gave us no choice but to drive off the exit ramp onto an unmarked country road in the middle of woods. No signs were specially placed to mark the apparent detour to the nation’s capital – just a couple of directional signs to obscure small towns like “Boumfucque” or something.
We followed the winding road through gorgeous but ominous woods and small towns for about 20 minutes, choosing random directions at several forks in the road. We had a baguette in the car, and I was seriously considering crushing it and dropping a trail of crumbs in case we needed to find our way back.
Finally, we reached something that looked like an outer suburb – a kind of 20th arrondissement (for those of you familiar with Paris) or Yonkers-type place. But again, no signs pointing to “Centre Ville” or anything helpful like that.
How we got in the city center remains a mystery. But the fun was only about to begin.
Map of Luxembourg City.
For the first fifteen minutes, I swear, there were no street signs. None! Then it seemed like street signs started appearing on the sides of corner buildings rather than signposts. But when I saw signs saying “rue Henri” seemingly on three consecutive side streets, I naturally concluded that in Luxembourg, the sign of the street your on faces you – perpendicular to your direction – kind of like LA.
Okay, this makes a certain amount of sense, except that it soon seemed inescapable that the street signs were faced parallel to the line of traffic.
Then the one-way streets began. Seemingly straightforward routes to our destination – a restaurant called "Brasserie Mousel" – were turned into “can’t get there from here” paradoxes by one way streets. At one point I turned left onto a wide boulevard – for no reason other than to contradict B (with whom I was by now contemplating a six month trial separation), who said to turn right. The four lanes of cars all coming at us on this one way street did not madly honk, but simply went about their business and tried to drive around us like a river flowing around a rock.
In Luxembourg center, streets change names every six blocks or so. Perhaps one could cope with that but for the fact that none of the names seemed to be on our city map. When we would finally find ourselves on a named street listed on the map, with a major landmark for orientation (“okay, we’re on Ave. Franklin Roosevelt with the river on our right, so we must be heading toward the park”), we would, seemingly impossibly, hit landmarks that could only be reached by going in the other direction.
I’m not one to blame my tools when getting lost, but for the first time in my life I had an abiding conviction that our map was just wrong. We were lost near city hall, lost in outrageously picturesque and narrow cobblestoned streets, lost in long outskirt roads.
I’ve found my way around by car or on foot through the skewed streets of Lower Manhattan and the labyrinthine streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Marseilles. I’m pretty good at applying myself to map problems and after two false moves at most, locating my position and direction. I was sure at least six times in Luxembourg City that I had at least figured out where I was (if not how to get where I wanted to go). I was wrong every time.
Luxembourg was conquered by the Germans in World War II, and probably by Napolean and several times throughout European history. I guess the street plan and street signage of the city of Luxembourg have been specifically designed to repel invaders. The idea is that if a foreigner enters the city, he will drive around in a lost stupor until he is dead.
After about ninety minutes of anxiety mounting toward terror, we stumbled onto our restaurant. I have no idea how we did that. It was as if the evil labyrinth that is the soul of the city decided it had had enough fun with us, and just spit us out in the right place.
I’d like to prove how demonically beautiful Luxembourg City is with photos, but I didn’t take any. You have to understand: B and I were fighting for survival; stopping to snap some scenic photos seemed, at the time... well, a bit frivolous.
Perhaps this one will do. It was along the Mousel (aka Mosel) River, right near our restaurant, when we finally stopped the car.
Take my word for it, this is the comparatively ugly part of town.
Don’t go there. I plan never to return to Luxembourg City unless I am leading an invading hoard. I could see going back to Luxembourg for conquest rather than tourism. I would put its traffic administrators to the sword, and then round up ten thousand of its inhabitants, blindfold them, spin them round and round, and then order them to go find the Brasserie Mousel. I might enjoy that.
****
Luxembourg is a small country about the size of Rhode Island, nestled between Belgium and Germany, with one major city, it’s capital, also called Luxembourg. Official name "G.D. Luxembourg," for “Grand Duchy.”
It may be the most beautiful city I have ever seen. I can’t be sure, because I spent most of my time there cursing it ("G.D. Luxembourg" or just "f**king Luxembourg"). Luxembourg is an evil, evil, despicable city.
Luxembourg has every architectural and physical feature you’d want from a charming, old-world city: grand baroque monuments and buildings, broad boulevards, narrow cobblestoned streets with quaint 18th century facades, a river, beautiful bridges, towering brick viaducts, and a huge cliff faced by a medieval wall.
The food was good, the people were nice.
So why is Luxembourg an evil place?
Have you ever been so badly lost while driving that you felt the very streets were involved in a sinister conspiracy to abuse you?
The trouble began when B and I were unceremoniously forced off the autoroute – the country’s main multi-lane divided highway – about ten miles outside the city. There were no warning signs, just a sudden barricade that gave us no choice but to drive off the exit ramp onto an unmarked country road in the middle of woods. No signs were specially placed to mark the apparent detour to the nation’s capital – just a couple of directional signs to obscure small towns like “Boumfucque” or something.
We followed the winding road through gorgeous but ominous woods and small towns for about 20 minutes, choosing random directions at several forks in the road. We had a baguette in the car, and I was seriously considering crushing it and dropping a trail of crumbs in case we needed to find our way back.
Finally, we reached something that looked like an outer suburb – a kind of 20th arrondissement (for those of you familiar with Paris) or Yonkers-type place. But again, no signs pointing to “Centre Ville” or anything helpful like that.
How we got in the city center remains a mystery. But the fun was only about to begin.
Map of Luxembourg City.
For the first fifteen minutes, I swear, there were no street signs. None! Then it seemed like street signs started appearing on the sides of corner buildings rather than signposts. But when I saw signs saying “rue Henri” seemingly on three consecutive side streets, I naturally concluded that in Luxembourg, the sign of the street your on faces you – perpendicular to your direction – kind of like LA.
Okay, this makes a certain amount of sense, except that it soon seemed inescapable that the street signs were faced parallel to the line of traffic.
Then the one-way streets began. Seemingly straightforward routes to our destination – a restaurant called "Brasserie Mousel" – were turned into “can’t get there from here” paradoxes by one way streets. At one point I turned left onto a wide boulevard – for no reason other than to contradict B (with whom I was by now contemplating a six month trial separation), who said to turn right. The four lanes of cars all coming at us on this one way street did not madly honk, but simply went about their business and tried to drive around us like a river flowing around a rock.
In Luxembourg center, streets change names every six blocks or so. Perhaps one could cope with that but for the fact that none of the names seemed to be on our city map. When we would finally find ourselves on a named street listed on the map, with a major landmark for orientation (“okay, we’re on Ave. Franklin Roosevelt with the river on our right, so we must be heading toward the park”), we would, seemingly impossibly, hit landmarks that could only be reached by going in the other direction.
I’m not one to blame my tools when getting lost, but for the first time in my life I had an abiding conviction that our map was just wrong. We were lost near city hall, lost in outrageously picturesque and narrow cobblestoned streets, lost in long outskirt roads.
I’ve found my way around by car or on foot through the skewed streets of Lower Manhattan and the labyrinthine streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Marseilles. I’m pretty good at applying myself to map problems and after two false moves at most, locating my position and direction. I was sure at least six times in Luxembourg City that I had at least figured out where I was (if not how to get where I wanted to go). I was wrong every time.
Luxembourg was conquered by the Germans in World War II, and probably by Napolean and several times throughout European history. I guess the street plan and street signage of the city of Luxembourg have been specifically designed to repel invaders. The idea is that if a foreigner enters the city, he will drive around in a lost stupor until he is dead.
After about ninety minutes of anxiety mounting toward terror, we stumbled onto our restaurant. I have no idea how we did that. It was as if the evil labyrinth that is the soul of the city decided it had had enough fun with us, and just spit us out in the right place.
I’d like to prove how demonically beautiful Luxembourg City is with photos, but I didn’t take any. You have to understand: B and I were fighting for survival; stopping to snap some scenic photos seemed, at the time... well, a bit frivolous.
Perhaps this one will do. It was along the Mousel (aka Mosel) River, right near our restaurant, when we finally stopped the car.
Take my word for it, this is the comparatively ugly part of town.
Don’t go there. I plan never to return to Luxembourg City unless I am leading an invading hoard. I could see going back to Luxembourg for conquest rather than tourism. I would put its traffic administrators to the sword, and then round up ten thousand of its inhabitants, blindfold them, spin them round and round, and then order them to go find the Brasserie Mousel. I might enjoy that.
****
Friday, June 10, 2005
German for Travelers
The other day, B and I were walking down a street in Germany. As we passed a group of people waiting for the bus, we heard one of them sneeze. B speaks as few words of German as I do, yet she blurted out in perfect German:
In German outdoor markets, they put your fruit in these cute, cone-shaped paper bags that say “Esst mehr Früchte, sie erhalten gesund.” I’m going to take a flyer and translate it as “eat more fruit, preserve your health."
**
“Gesundheit!”TANGENTIAL GESUNDHEIT-RELATED TRIVIA: I say this subject to correction by someone who actually knows German, but Gesundheit means “good health.” This seems like such a pleasant and also sensible thing to say to someone who sneezes, in marked contrast to the bizarrely religious and superstitious “bless you” in our language. Germans apparently think a sneeze is a sign of a cold, whereas we English-speakers seem to think a sneeze signifies that Satan is at hand. Quick, call an exorcist!
In German outdoor markets, they put your fruit in these cute, cone-shaped paper bags that say “Esst mehr Früchte, sie erhalten gesund.” I’m going to take a flyer and translate it as “eat more fruit, preserve your health."
**
In search of WW II: the Ardennes Offensive
In December 1944, Hitler ordered a surprise offensive through the Ardennes forest against outnumbered American forces in what had been a quiet sector of the front. The resulting “Battle of the Bulge,” was the largest single land battle in the history of the U.S. Army.
The terrain on which this battle, the Ardennes forest from the German border, across Luxembourg, to the Meuse river in Belgium, is extremely beautiful.
Belgium and Luxembourg landscapes. Lower right: the Ambleve River.
The most famous episode of the Battle of the Bulge was the fight for Bastogne, a critical transportation junction in which seven roads come together. The 101st U.S. Airborne Division, together with elements of a few other army units, held the town despite being undersupplied and entirely surrounded by the German army for five days.
In this eerily quiet pine woods you can still see the remnants of foxholes where the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, dug in on the perimeter around Bastogne.
After visiting Bastogne, we drove through the picturesque Ambleve Valley, where Kampfgruppe Pieper, a battalion of Tiger tanks spearheading the German advance, was repeatedly foiled in its effort to seize one of the severals bridges across the Ambleve River and were eventually stopped when they ran out of fuel.
A rare surviving Tiger tank, the largest armored vehicle deployed in WWII. Note how these hits on the Tiger's frontal armor (probably from bazooka rounds) made harmless gouges that look like scooping out clay with your finger.
Our rental car superimposed on the Tiger for scale. (No, we didn't drive up the tank's rear end.) This is a mid-sized Mercedes, by the way.
History repeats itself? Our rented Mercedes is unwilling or unable to cross this bridge over the Ambleve. I can't imagine the behemoth Tiger fitting onto this bridge, which probably didn't exist in 1944 anyhow.
Here's the Ambleve River, where it runs alongside the village of Coo. Note the "Friture," or french fry shop, at right:
You know, it's the Belgians, more than the French, who make a big deal of pommes frites (fried potatoes), and Belgians are in fact sometimes referred to as "pommes frites" (like Germans are called "krauts"). We saw fry shops all over Belgium.
The fry thing spills over into Luxembourg. Below: dinner in Luxembourg. That's a huge side of fries (with wine) on that table behind us. Look, it's as big as the bread basket!
The dinner in Luxembourg City was a story deserving a post unto itself. Stay tuned.
**
The terrain on which this battle, the Ardennes forest from the German border, across Luxembourg, to the Meuse river in Belgium, is extremely beautiful.
Belgium and Luxembourg landscapes. Lower right: the Ambleve River.
The most famous episode of the Battle of the Bulge was the fight for Bastogne, a critical transportation junction in which seven roads come together. The 101st U.S. Airborne Division, together with elements of a few other army units, held the town despite being undersupplied and entirely surrounded by the German army for five days.
In this eerily quiet pine woods you can still see the remnants of foxholes where the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, dug in on the perimeter around Bastogne.
After visiting Bastogne, we drove through the picturesque Ambleve Valley, where Kampfgruppe Pieper, a battalion of Tiger tanks spearheading the German advance, was repeatedly foiled in its effort to seize one of the severals bridges across the Ambleve River and were eventually stopped when they ran out of fuel.
A rare surviving Tiger tank, the largest armored vehicle deployed in WWII. Note how these hits on the Tiger's frontal armor (probably from bazooka rounds) made harmless gouges that look like scooping out clay with your finger.
Our rental car superimposed on the Tiger for scale. (No, we didn't drive up the tank's rear end.) This is a mid-sized Mercedes, by the way.
History repeats itself? Our rented Mercedes is unwilling or unable to cross this bridge over the Ambleve. I can't imagine the behemoth Tiger fitting onto this bridge, which probably didn't exist in 1944 anyhow.
Here's the Ambleve River, where it runs alongside the village of Coo. Note the "Friture," or french fry shop, at right:
You know, it's the Belgians, more than the French, who make a big deal of pommes frites (fried potatoes), and Belgians are in fact sometimes referred to as "pommes frites" (like Germans are called "krauts"). We saw fry shops all over Belgium.
The fry thing spills over into Luxembourg. Below: dinner in Luxembourg. That's a huge side of fries (with wine) on that table behind us. Look, it's as big as the bread basket!
The dinner in Luxembourg City was a story deserving a post unto itself. Stay tuned.
**
Return of B-O-W: Jo(e)'s Page
Blog Of the Week is Back!
I know you've missed my Blog Of the Week™ feature despite the fact that not a single one of you has so much as mentioned its four-week hibernation. Well, I'm delighted to tell you: (1) B.O.W. is back and (2) it's Jo(e)'s Page.
Jo(e), a "writer, parent, professor," has been blogging for about six months. She's a wonderful writer, and very thoughtful and thought provoking in her parenting and professing endeavors. What's more, she's a talented photographer. Sometimes I wish she'd post more photos, but maybe her selectivity is itself artful.
Finally, I like the name of her blog, the way the open and closed parens put a hitch in your typing motion as if she's trying to make you stop momentarily and think...
Check out Jo(e)'s Page -- that's right, do it now.
*
I know you've missed my Blog Of the Week™ feature despite the fact that not a single one of you has so much as mentioned its four-week hibernation. Well, I'm delighted to tell you: (1) B.O.W. is back and (2) it's Jo(e)'s Page.
Jo(e), a "writer, parent, professor," has been blogging for about six months. She's a wonderful writer, and very thoughtful and thought provoking in her parenting and professing endeavors. What's more, she's a talented photographer. Sometimes I wish she'd post more photos, but maybe her selectivity is itself artful.
Finally, I like the name of her blog, the way the open and closed parens put a hitch in your typing motion as if she's trying to make you stop momentarily and think...
Check out Jo(e)'s Page -- that's right, do it now.
*
Thursday, June 09, 2005
In search of WWII: Bastogne
On December 22, 1944, in the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans sent an emissary into Bastogne to demand the surrender of the U.S. 101st Airborne division and other army units defending the town. The U.S. forces were entirely surrounded, but rejected the surrender demand and fought on for five days until an armored division from Patton´s Third Army broke the German ring around the city and ended the seige.
Question: What was the famous one-word reply by the U.S. commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, to the German surrender demand?
Visit Bastogne for a hint:
Battle of the Bulge grahpic novel, Tourist Info Office, Bastogne.
Gift shop mannequin, same location.
Advertizement, Bastogne main square.
Cafe, Bastogne main square. Love the apostrophe!
**
Question: What was the famous one-word reply by the U.S. commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, to the German surrender demand?
Visit Bastogne for a hint:
Battle of the Bulge grahpic novel, Tourist Info Office, Bastogne.
Gift shop mannequin, same location.
Advertizement, Bastogne main square.
Cafe, Bastogne main square. Love the apostrophe!
**
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
In search of World War II: the Maginot Line
Scoff if you will, but World War II tourism can take you to some beautiful places. What difference does it make if your reason for driving the back roads through gorgeous European countryside is to find the perfect picnic spot or an old battlefield?
B and I ventured across the border to into the Alsace-Lorraine and established ourselves in the town of Thionville, just south of the France-Luxembourg border. One of the things I love about traveling in Europe is that, with the exception of a handful of ugly and colorless industrial cities, virtually any European town or small city is just so... so European. Though I doubt you’d find Thionville as a recommended stop in many guidebooks, it had charm and grace to augment its convenient location: about half an hour from the Maginot line and only an hour or so to Bastogne in Belgium.
The Maginot Line was the massive defense project undertaken by France in the 1920s and 1930s, a span of state-of-the-art fortifications running along the Franco-German border from the Alps northward to the Ardennes Forest on the edge of the French-Beligian border. The idea of the Maginot Line was to prevent a frontal invasion by Germany directly into France across this traditional historical invasion route; any German invasion would have to go through Belgium, which would give the French army time to mobilize and perhaps meet the German threat outside French soil.
Left: German soldiers in front of entrance to Fort Hackenberg, Maginot Line in 1940.
Right: Tourists in front of Hackenberg entrance, 2005. Many of them are Germans.
Although the Maginot Line came to be seen as the very archetype of the wasteful white elephant defense program, more recent historians have begun to argue persuasively that in fact, the Maginot Line – which was never breached by any assault – fulfilled its purpose, and that the astonishingly rapid German conquest of France stemmed from the latter’s failures in the field, and in military intelligence, rather than from France’s allocation of vast resources into the Maginot Line. What you can see from a visit to the site that the Maginot Line fortresses were so well constructed that they are largely intact today; indeed, they are so sturdy that it is impracticable to dismantle them.
Left: surviving casemates swamped by tourists. Right: gun turrets sprouting
like mushrooms in the French countryside.
The entrance tunnel, typically wet with condensation. Note the welcoming
machine gun (small square at edge of photo to left, enlarged view, right).
We toured Hackenberg, one of several of the surviving Maginot Line forts that is open to the public as a museum. The three hour tour of the underground fortress network, which included a mile underground train ride between outposts, was fascinating... and leaves you with the impression that a three month tour of duty to the Maginot Line for French soldiers in 1939-1940 was at least as arduous and claustrophobic as submarine duty.
The French version of a tour "fuhrer."
The train we rode for a over a mile.
Typical Maginot Line tunnel. The train tracks are typical,
the British motorcycle dude in leather getup is probably not.
Not to get into that whole Mars-Venus thing -- B is knowledgable about and interested
in military history -- but she really did say: "Get a picture of that tile, will you?
I think it'd look good in our kitchen."
**
B and I ventured across the border to into the Alsace-Lorraine and established ourselves in the town of Thionville, just south of the France-Luxembourg border. One of the things I love about traveling in Europe is that, with the exception of a handful of ugly and colorless industrial cities, virtually any European town or small city is just so... so European. Though I doubt you’d find Thionville as a recommended stop in many guidebooks, it had charm and grace to augment its convenient location: about half an hour from the Maginot line and only an hour or so to Bastogne in Belgium.
Thionville shuts down at lunchtime in the traditional French way.
But for some reason, these guys were on the ground working.
Thionville's waterfront on the Moselle River.
Chilly weather kept the outdoor cafe tables empty.
But for some reason, these guys were on the ground working.
Thionville's waterfront on the Moselle River.
Chilly weather kept the outdoor cafe tables empty.
The Maginot Line was the massive defense project undertaken by France in the 1920s and 1930s, a span of state-of-the-art fortifications running along the Franco-German border from the Alps northward to the Ardennes Forest on the edge of the French-Beligian border. The idea of the Maginot Line was to prevent a frontal invasion by Germany directly into France across this traditional historical invasion route; any German invasion would have to go through Belgium, which would give the French army time to mobilize and perhaps meet the German threat outside French soil.
Left: German soldiers in front of entrance to Fort Hackenberg, Maginot Line in 1940.
Right: Tourists in front of Hackenberg entrance, 2005. Many of them are Germans.
Although the Maginot Line came to be seen as the very archetype of the wasteful white elephant defense program, more recent historians have begun to argue persuasively that in fact, the Maginot Line – which was never breached by any assault – fulfilled its purpose, and that the astonishingly rapid German conquest of France stemmed from the latter’s failures in the field, and in military intelligence, rather than from France’s allocation of vast resources into the Maginot Line. What you can see from a visit to the site that the Maginot Line fortresses were so well constructed that they are largely intact today; indeed, they are so sturdy that it is impracticable to dismantle them.
Left: surviving casemates swamped by tourists. Right: gun turrets sprouting
like mushrooms in the French countryside.
The entrance tunnel, typically wet with condensation. Note the welcoming
machine gun (small square at edge of photo to left, enlarged view, right).
We toured Hackenberg, one of several of the surviving Maginot Line forts that is open to the public as a museum. The three hour tour of the underground fortress network, which included a mile underground train ride between outposts, was fascinating... and leaves you with the impression that a three month tour of duty to the Maginot Line for French soldiers in 1939-1940 was at least as arduous and claustrophobic as submarine duty.
The French version of a tour "fuhrer."
The train we rode for a over a mile.
Typical Maginot Line tunnel. The train tracks are typical,
the British motorcycle dude in leather getup is probably not.
Not to get into that whole Mars-Venus thing -- B is knowledgable about and interested
in military history -- but she really did say: "Get a picture of that tile, will you?
I think it'd look good in our kitchen."
**
News from Home: How old are you Mrs. Robinson? You're 81 years old if you're a day... hey, hey hey
Can movie stars successfully lie about their ages, even to the point of having that untruth reported in the "paper of record"?
Anne Bancroft was a great actress, and her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967) made her the quintessential "older woman." If her obituary is to be believed, she was only 35-36 when The Graduate was filmed.
That's certainly not impossible -- as I recall, Mrs. Robinson was supposed to have gotten pregnant with Elaine in her late teens, and Elaine would have been 19 or 20. So perhaps the character in the story was supposed to be 36ish.
But film actors nearly always play younger, not the same age or older roles. Dustin Hoffman was 30 when the graduate was filmed.
Anne Bancroft was a great actress, and her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967) made her the quintessential "older woman." If her obituary is to be believed, she was only 35-36 when The Graduate was filmed.
That's certainly not impossible -- as I recall, Mrs. Robinson was supposed to have gotten pregnant with Elaine in her late teens, and Elaine would have been 19 or 20. So perhaps the character in the story was supposed to be 36ish.
But film actors nearly always play younger, not the same age or older roles. Dustin Hoffman was 30 when the graduate was filmed.
The Graduate: 30 year old Dustin Hoffman with 36 year old Anne Bancroft?
Sort of takes the edge of the story to know that, doesn't it.
Sort of takes the edge of the story to know that, doesn't it.
Well, in the Graduate, she looked early 40s to me, making her at least 78 in my book. (I said 81 in the title of the post only to get the meter right for the lyric.) What's more, I want to think of Mrs. Robinson -- or at least Bancroft playing her -- as a woman in her forties. The world doesn't seem quite right otherwise.
**
**
Vive la difference!
I guess this is how they do these things over here in France.
Left: urinals.
Right: sit-down toilets.
Center: same, with pee on the seats.
*
Left: urinals.
Right: sit-down toilets.
Center: same, with pee on the seats.
*
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Weekend excursion: four countries in three days
Bonjour!
I always thought baguettes were essentially the world’s most delicious white bread, empty calories of crunchy goodness. I couldn’t have been more wrong, according to this document: the baguette wrapper from yesterday’s "pique-nique":
Rough translation: basically, a child of 2 to 6 years should get about half a baguette per day, increasing the dosage to a full baguette for adolescents.
I’m just back from a three-day weekend in and around northeastern France, where my best shot at internet access was when the proprietress at my hotel offered to let me use her computer at the front desk. A kind offer, to be sure, but can you imagine blogging with an impatient French lady standing over your shoulder?
After three weeks of playing the dopey, monoglot American in Poland and Germany, I was delighted by the profusion of serviceable tourist French spoken by my own lips. Okay, perhaps not so impressive to you educated multilingual types, but I’m a guy who would normally spend weeks brushing up my high school French before traveling to France, and even then be hesitant to use it.
This trip was totally spur of the moment – one of the joys of living in EC/EU Europe where crossing national borders has become less of a formality than crossing from Arizona into California. You just see signs welcoming you. And because we were searching for World War II sights in and around the Ardennes Forest, we were actually in four countries – France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany – this weekend.
Anyway, I guess I’d been unconsciously practicing my French in the back of my mind, because I’ve never felt so comfortable getting around in France as now – even though my French kind of sucks.
More on this delightful weekend shortly.
**
I always thought baguettes were essentially the world’s most delicious white bread, empty calories of crunchy goodness. I couldn’t have been more wrong, according to this document: the baguette wrapper from yesterday’s "pique-nique":
Rough translation: basically, a child of 2 to 6 years should get about half a baguette per day, increasing the dosage to a full baguette for adolescents.
I’m just back from a three-day weekend in and around northeastern France, where my best shot at internet access was when the proprietress at my hotel offered to let me use her computer at the front desk. A kind offer, to be sure, but can you imagine blogging with an impatient French lady standing over your shoulder?
After three weeks of playing the dopey, monoglot American in Poland and Germany, I was delighted by the profusion of serviceable tourist French spoken by my own lips. Okay, perhaps not so impressive to you educated multilingual types, but I’m a guy who would normally spend weeks brushing up my high school French before traveling to France, and even then be hesitant to use it.
This trip was totally spur of the moment – one of the joys of living in EC/EU Europe where crossing national borders has become less of a formality than crossing from Arizona into California. You just see signs welcoming you. And because we were searching for World War II sights in and around the Ardennes Forest, we were actually in four countries – France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany – this weekend.
Anyway, I guess I’d been unconsciously practicing my French in the back of my mind, because I’ve never felt so comfortable getting around in France as now – even though my French kind of sucks.
More on this delightful weekend shortly.
**
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Missing signs
It would be really neat if I could speak a little German
One of the charms of traveling abroad is the daily challenge of accomplishing mundane tasks in the face of a language barrier. When folks (or, I should say, "Völker") say things to me in German, sure it's embarrassing to stand there open mouthed and then (as I often do) cobble together some sort of reply consisting of a few words of broken English combined with any foreign words that come to mind. But often as not, these encounters lead to some sort of understanding. Gestures work quite well, particularly when the German person switches into English.
More difficulties arise when the German comes at me, not in spoken form, but in writing: signs, menus and multi-page legal documents.
Signs do not make helpful gestures. Sure, many signs have pictures, but what do you make of this one?
Ordering off a menu in German is very difficult. It's hard enough in France, where I sort of know the language, because French menus never seem to identify menu items using food words. You translate your French menu and come up with things like "steaming pile" or "thinly sliced portion of St. Christopher." I think the Germans do similar things with menus, but I can't read the fine print of my dictionary in their dimly lit restaurants.
To be sure, some restaurants will give you a menu in English. Like this one from earlier tonight:
Sounds more like a googlation.
Appliances? I defy you to try to figure out how to wash you clothes in this machine.
I spent about 20 minutes in front of this thing with my German-English dictionary and still managed to shrink my underwear. And, for good measure, this washing machine ran for about 90 minutes. B and I kept running downstairs to check on it. "What's going on with the wash?" asked B. I replied, "It's finally speulen, but it still has to schleudern after that."
I always tell people, "never sign legal documents without reading them." How about this sample page from my rental agreement for the apartment I'm staying in through U of Boogie?
If anything is broken or missing -- if, say, a "hackbrett" or a "wandwaage" winds up going back to the states in my luggage -- I'm subject to being detained at the airport by German authorities.
Simple groceries are also a challenge. This apple juice, although vacuum sealed, had gone bad -- turned to vinegar -- before we opened it. Yuck.
And what is this -- cream for coffee? Or baby formula?
Advertizing is something a sophisticated person like me should be able to understand, because its images are Jungian symbols directed to the unconscious mind common across western culture. Here, I even understand the slogan -- "This original comes in Rubinesque" or something -- but what the hell are they getting at?
Okay, but some things are clear even to the simplest understanding. This sign appeared on a gate of a castle B and I toured today:
**
One of the charms of traveling abroad is the daily challenge of accomplishing mundane tasks in the face of a language barrier. When folks (or, I should say, "Völker") say things to me in German, sure it's embarrassing to stand there open mouthed and then (as I often do) cobble together some sort of reply consisting of a few words of broken English combined with any foreign words that come to mind. But often as not, these encounters lead to some sort of understanding. Gestures work quite well, particularly when the German person switches into English.
More difficulties arise when the German comes at me, not in spoken form, but in writing: signs, menus and multi-page legal documents.
Signs do not make helpful gestures. Sure, many signs have pictures, but what do you make of this one?
Translation: "Do not run over the Michelin Man."
Ordering off a menu in German is very difficult. It's hard enough in France, where I sort of know the language, because French menus never seem to identify menu items using food words. You translate your French menu and come up with things like "steaming pile" or "thinly sliced portion of St. Christopher." I think the Germans do similar things with menus, but I can't read the fine print of my dictionary in their dimly lit restaurants.
To be sure, some restaurants will give you a menu in English. Like this one from earlier tonight:
Sounds more like a googlation.
Appliances? I defy you to try to figure out how to wash you clothes in this machine.
I spent about 20 minutes in front of this thing with my German-English dictionary and still managed to shrink my underwear. And, for good measure, this washing machine ran for about 90 minutes. B and I kept running downstairs to check on it. "What's going on with the wash?" asked B. I replied, "It's finally speulen, but it still has to schleudern after that."
I always tell people, "never sign legal documents without reading them." How about this sample page from my rental agreement for the apartment I'm staying in through U of Boogie?
Translation: "If cleaning deposit is insufficient to pay for mess
left by tenant, tenant agrees to sign over deed to his house in United States."
This is even better: an inventory of all the items in the apartment!left by tenant, tenant agrees to sign over deed to his house in United States."
If anything is broken or missing -- if, say, a "hackbrett" or a "wandwaage" winds up going back to the states in my luggage -- I'm subject to being detained at the airport by German authorities.
Simple groceries are also a challenge. This apple juice, although vacuum sealed, had gone bad -- turned to vinegar -- before we opened it. Yuck.
Translation: Apple vinegar.
And what is this -- cream for coffee? Or baby formula?
Advertizing is something a sophisticated person like me should be able to understand, because its images are Jungian symbols directed to the unconscious mind common across western culture. Here, I even understand the slogan -- "This original comes in Rubinesque" or something -- but what the hell are they getting at?
Okay, but some things are clear even to the simplest understanding. This sign appeared on a gate of a castle B and I toured today:
Translation: Entry permitted only with fuhrer!
**
Friday, June 03, 2005
U of B update: Time 2 Party
More knuckles for me
It's Friday at the University of Boogie, it's a beautiful sunny day, and only 24 of my 41 students show up for class. What's going on outside?
U of B was founded in the 17th century in a medieval town. Note, in the far right corner of the photo, the medieval archeological relic being put to good contemporary use as an anchor for the "Time to Party" inflatable arch. Here's a closer look:
This being Germany, serious precautions are taken for serious partying:
Why don't American universities have "catastrophe protection" vans on hand like this?
Meanwhile, in my comparatively safe classroom, the 24 nerds who have shown up are watching the last 30 minutes of another film, The Trial of Bernhard Goetz, a dramatization of the notorious 1984 vigilante subway shooting in New York City. In the 2 hour film, actors play out excerpts from the actual trial transcript.
At the end of the film, I pick 12 of the students to deliberate as a jury. They deadlock, 10-2 in favor of conviction on attempted murder: the Germans don't like citizens carrying guns and taking the law into their own hands. (The real Goetz jury acquitted him.)
After some brief concluding remarks, and my "have a nice weekend," I get it again: the students rap their knuckles on the table for a few seconds.
According to Liane, this does not happen every day -- only when the students wish to convey that they liked the class. Indeed, yesterday, I think they found the first 90 minutes of the Goetz trial a bit grueling, and when I stopped the tape the students pretty much bolted from the room.
So... my new word for kudos: "knuckles"!
**
It's Friday at the University of Boogie, it's a beautiful sunny day, and only 24 of my 41 students show up for class. What's going on outside?
U of B was founded in the 17th century in a medieval town. Note, in the far right corner of the photo, the medieval archeological relic being put to good contemporary use as an anchor for the "Time to Party" inflatable arch. Here's a closer look:
This being Germany, serious precautions are taken for serious partying:
Why don't American universities have "catastrophe protection" vans on hand like this?
Meanwhile, in my comparatively safe classroom, the 24 nerds who have shown up are watching the last 30 minutes of another film, The Trial of Bernhard Goetz, a dramatization of the notorious 1984 vigilante subway shooting in New York City. In the 2 hour film, actors play out excerpts from the actual trial transcript.
At the end of the film, I pick 12 of the students to deliberate as a jury. They deadlock, 10-2 in favor of conviction on attempted murder: the Germans don't like citizens carrying guns and taking the law into their own hands. (The real Goetz jury acquitted him.)
After some brief concluding remarks, and my "have a nice weekend," I get it again: the students rap their knuckles on the table for a few seconds.
According to Liane, this does not happen every day -- only when the students wish to convey that they liked the class. Indeed, yesterday, I think they found the first 90 minutes of the Goetz trial a bit grueling, and when I stopped the tape the students pretty much bolted from the room.
So... my new word for kudos: "knuckles"!
**
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The University of Boogie
I teach the Germans a lesson.
Yesterday was my European teaching debut.
I'm teaching a course to German undergraduates on the United States system of trial by jury. The class was to begin at 12:15, but by the time I arrive at noon, the room seems two-thirds full of students, many eating their lunches.
I plan to show a film today, and my graduate assistant Liane and I carry in a VCR and a projector (she calls it, without irony, a “Beamer”). For some reason, Europe uses a video format that makes American VHS tapes incompatible with European VCRs, so the University has obtained a rather ancient American VCR so visiting faculty like me can show their movies. A friendly, smiling techie named “Volker” connects up a profusion of wires and then explains to me painstakingly, in broken English, how to operate the buttons on the VCR. I want to say, “son, I’ve been operating this machine since before you were born.”
By the way, you may be wondering: "where exactly is he teaching?" Let's just say I'm at the "University of Boogie":
A poster in the student cafeteria outside my classroom. A party school, perhaps?
Liane briefly introduces me to the class. “Professor Madison has been practicing law for 12 years before he is teaching Evidence at his law school in the United States. So he is perfect for teaching this course.” She quickly exits the room, leaving the word "perfect" -- with its unrealistically high expectations -- hanging in the air.
About 40 students are staring at me, waiting. To call the students’ faces “expectant” is a misleading cliche. “Expectant” to me sounds like the expression of a restaurant patron awaiting what he hopes will be a really good meal. The faces of students on the first day of class usually seem to reflect the belief that “actually, there’s a 50% chance that this meal will really suck.”
But this is what I see at the beginning of every class. In fact, the German students look much the same as American students. There are the usual half a dozen guys wearing baseball caps nd looking disaffected. About ten people have T-shirts or sweatshirts bearing English words and phrases. I'm particularly taken with the "Minesota [sic] State University" sweatshirt.
I decide to break the ice with some mild, but affable humor. “I’m afraid I’m really not perfect, but I’ll try my best.”
Okay, not so funny. But it only gets worse from there. In the first 15 minutes, I try several other jokes, and a routine in which I make the entire class stand on the count of three and say "objection." I tell them that they now have half of the skills they need to be trial lawyers in the United States. This, like my other jokes, get titters from no more than 8 people. That doesn't qualify as even a courtesy laugh.
The classroom is the standard public school university classroom – blocky and charmless, with a bright tile floor and cheap formica tables circa 1977. The students seem a bit too big for the tables, adding to the overcrowded feeling of 40 students packed into the room. This will be a difficult room for me to move around in, let alone for the students to move their seats around for the small group discussions and role plays I like to make them do.
My classroom. Note the meager white board in the center for movie projection. The blackboards look so whitewashed that maybe I should use one of them for projection.
I like the thick, squared pieces of chalk, and quickly fill the two green blackboards, only to notice that there is nothing that I would call an eraser. I glance around and discover that there is a big, wet sponge, and I realize that the board had been messily sponged off sometime before my class, leaving dried sponge tracks for me to write on. I try the sponge to write more, but I recall from elementary school that fresh chalk doesn’t adhere well to a wet blackboard and is very similar to trying to write with paste (a substance produced by mixing chalk and water).
Love the chalk. Hate the erasers.
Here’s an oddity. There’s a sink and mirror in the front corner of the room, off to my left, and I think about saying, “You know, if I wanted to, I could stop lecturing right now and go over there and wash my hands.” In the U.S. I might be able to sell this joke, but these German kids will just think I’m totally weird.
I haven’t seen one of these in a classroom since junior high.
Here’s the other oddity. Several groups of German students are talking among themselves while I’m lecturing. This really doesn’t happen in the U.S. What’s the deal? Have I bored them senseless already? Are they translating for their friends with lesser English comprehension? (“What did he say?” “He says that he might stop the lecture and go wash his hands.” “Why would he do that? Does he have dirty hands?”) I talk louder.
I start the film. It’s an old PBS documentary called Inside the Jury Room, possibly the only instance in U.S. history in which a film crew was allowed to film a real jury deliberation. For the first 20 or 25 minutes, I'm satisfied to see that the students seem intently focused on the film. But then the real life jury deliberation starts to get a bit repetitive. The murmering and talking in the classroom start up again. One student leaves the room and returns with a bottle of Coke.
After the film we have about 15-20 minutes of passable class discussion, but at about 1:43, the murmuring picks up volume, and I decide not to fight a battle of wills for the privilege of lecturing a few extra minutes. So I say, “Okay, see you all tomorrow.”
At that point, all the students rap their knuckles on the table for about 10 seconds. After a momentary “whuuh?,” I realize that this is polite applause. I’m not foolish enough to take student applause as a sign of having done well – American students applaud at the end of the course unless you totally sucked all semester – but applause on the first day... that’s a new one. Maybe they were grateful I took the cue to end the class on time. I’ll have to see what they do tomorrow.
***
Yesterday was my European teaching debut.
I'm teaching a course to German undergraduates on the United States system of trial by jury. The class was to begin at 12:15, but by the time I arrive at noon, the room seems two-thirds full of students, many eating their lunches.
I plan to show a film today, and my graduate assistant Liane and I carry in a VCR and a projector (she calls it, without irony, a “Beamer”). For some reason, Europe uses a video format that makes American VHS tapes incompatible with European VCRs, so the University has obtained a rather ancient American VCR so visiting faculty like me can show their movies. A friendly, smiling techie named “Volker” connects up a profusion of wires and then explains to me painstakingly, in broken English, how to operate the buttons on the VCR. I want to say, “son, I’ve been operating this machine since before you were born.”
By the way, you may be wondering: "where exactly is he teaching?" Let's just say I'm at the "University of Boogie":
A poster in the student cafeteria outside my classroom. A party school, perhaps?
Liane briefly introduces me to the class. “Professor Madison has been practicing law for 12 years before he is teaching Evidence at his law school in the United States. So he is perfect for teaching this course.” She quickly exits the room, leaving the word "perfect" -- with its unrealistically high expectations -- hanging in the air.
About 40 students are staring at me, waiting. To call the students’ faces “expectant” is a misleading cliche. “Expectant” to me sounds like the expression of a restaurant patron awaiting what he hopes will be a really good meal. The faces of students on the first day of class usually seem to reflect the belief that “actually, there’s a 50% chance that this meal will really suck.”
But this is what I see at the beginning of every class. In fact, the German students look much the same as American students. There are the usual half a dozen guys wearing baseball caps nd looking disaffected. About ten people have T-shirts or sweatshirts bearing English words and phrases. I'm particularly taken with the "Minesota [sic] State University" sweatshirt.
I decide to break the ice with some mild, but affable humor. “I’m afraid I’m really not perfect, but I’ll try my best.”
Okay, not so funny. But it only gets worse from there. In the first 15 minutes, I try several other jokes, and a routine in which I make the entire class stand on the count of three and say "objection." I tell them that they now have half of the skills they need to be trial lawyers in the United States. This, like my other jokes, get titters from no more than 8 people. That doesn't qualify as even a courtesy laugh.
The classroom is the standard public school university classroom – blocky and charmless, with a bright tile floor and cheap formica tables circa 1977. The students seem a bit too big for the tables, adding to the overcrowded feeling of 40 students packed into the room. This will be a difficult room for me to move around in, let alone for the students to move their seats around for the small group discussions and role plays I like to make them do.
My classroom. Note the meager white board in the center for movie projection. The blackboards look so whitewashed that maybe I should use one of them for projection.
I like the thick, squared pieces of chalk, and quickly fill the two green blackboards, only to notice that there is nothing that I would call an eraser. I glance around and discover that there is a big, wet sponge, and I realize that the board had been messily sponged off sometime before my class, leaving dried sponge tracks for me to write on. I try the sponge to write more, but I recall from elementary school that fresh chalk doesn’t adhere well to a wet blackboard and is very similar to trying to write with paste (a substance produced by mixing chalk and water).
Love the chalk. Hate the erasers.
Here’s an oddity. There’s a sink and mirror in the front corner of the room, off to my left, and I think about saying, “You know, if I wanted to, I could stop lecturing right now and go over there and wash my hands.” In the U.S. I might be able to sell this joke, but these German kids will just think I’m totally weird.
I haven’t seen one of these in a classroom since junior high.
Here’s the other oddity. Several groups of German students are talking among themselves while I’m lecturing. This really doesn’t happen in the U.S. What’s the deal? Have I bored them senseless already? Are they translating for their friends with lesser English comprehension? (“What did he say?” “He says that he might stop the lecture and go wash his hands.” “Why would he do that? Does he have dirty hands?”) I talk louder.
I start the film. It’s an old PBS documentary called Inside the Jury Room, possibly the only instance in U.S. history in which a film crew was allowed to film a real jury deliberation. For the first 20 or 25 minutes, I'm satisfied to see that the students seem intently focused on the film. But then the real life jury deliberation starts to get a bit repetitive. The murmering and talking in the classroom start up again. One student leaves the room and returns with a bottle of Coke.
After the film we have about 15-20 minutes of passable class discussion, but at about 1:43, the murmuring picks up volume, and I decide not to fight a battle of wills for the privilege of lecturing a few extra minutes. So I say, “Okay, see you all tomorrow.”
At that point, all the students rap their knuckles on the table for about 10 seconds. After a momentary “whuuh?,” I realize that this is polite applause. I’m not foolish enough to take student applause as a sign of having done well – American students applaud at the end of the course unless you totally sucked all semester – but applause on the first day... that’s a new one. Maybe they were grateful I took the cue to end the class on time. I’ll have to see what they do tomorrow.
***
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Ich bin ein Berliner!
Translation: “I am a jelly donut!”
– Pres. John F. Kennedy
So said our 35th president, in his famous speech expressing solidarity with the people of Berlin. As a friend of mine observes, Kennedy’s phrase is the linguistic analogue of expressing solidarity with the people of Copenhagen by saying “I am a Danish!”
But if you were to visit Berlin today, you too might feel like a jelly donut. In a good way.
Berlin is an amazing city, one part Paris, one part New York, with a sprinkling of Chicago. Although largely wrecked by World War II and the postwar partition that imposed ugly Soviet-style architecture and decrepitude on half the city, Berlin retains – or has painstakingly restored – a remarkable degree of its old world charm. There are abundant buildings and monuments of 18th and 19th century design, sidewalk cafes as numerous as Paris, picturesque waterways and bridges, out-of-the-way niches with cobblestoned streets, and fascinating trails of courtyards. There are gorgeous overgrown parks and tree-lined streets all over the place.
The city also offers the edginess and buzz of a big, modern city with a major arts scene, impressive ethnic diversity (at least by middle-European standards), and mind-blowing designand architecture. There is new construction everywhere, but also serious preservation and restoration of the old. The scars of the no-man’s land on the East side of the former Berlin wall are all but vanished.
Maybe Berlin sticks out atypically from the rest of Germany, the way people say New York is atypical of the U.S. and Paris atypical of France -- but I like what I see. After reading in my tour books that Germans tend to be polite but businesslike or brusque in transacting with strangers, I was surprised to find Berliners genuinely friendly. The people who sell you stuff across a counter, or who answer your request for directions on the street, seem unphased by foreigners, quite happy to speak English, ready to smile, and not at all intent (as often happens in, say, New York or Paris) on making you feel vulnerable or stupid for not knowing your way around.
There are bike paths everywhere, and people riding their bikes. And an aggressive recycling program, with, for example, 25 cent returns on one liter bottles.
And fabulous public transportation. There are copious streetcars and buses, and separate-but-overlapping underground and elevated trains. I love the elevated train viaducts. Several times a day, you see them go by in the background, a moving snatch of red or red-and-yellow framed by trees or buildings, reminding me of ... well, actually, of the Disneyland Railroad.
Like New York and Paris, Berlin is a 24 hour city. On a recent warm night, B and I strolled down the Unter der Linden from Brandenberg Gate to our hotel after 1 a.m., and the streets were charmingly and comfortably peopled.
The only downside to Berlin so far... well, let me put it this way. I am so not going to be busted by eyedar around here.
As recently as two years ago, I had zero interest in visiting Berlin; a week ago I was eager but anxious about visiting. Yesterday I asked our Berliner friends about the cost of apartments, so I could imagine living here.
***
– Pres. John F. Kennedy
So said our 35th president, in his famous speech expressing solidarity with the people of Berlin. As a friend of mine observes, Kennedy’s phrase is the linguistic analogue of expressing solidarity with the people of Copenhagen by saying “I am a Danish!”
Ein Berliner.
But if you were to visit Berlin today, you too might feel like a jelly donut. In a good way.
Berlin is an amazing city, one part Paris, one part New York, with a sprinkling of Chicago. Although largely wrecked by World War II and the postwar partition that imposed ugly Soviet-style architecture and decrepitude on half the city, Berlin retains – or has painstakingly restored – a remarkable degree of its old world charm. There are abundant buildings and monuments of 18th and 19th century design, sidewalk cafes as numerous as Paris, picturesque waterways and bridges, out-of-the-way niches with cobblestoned streets, and fascinating trails of courtyards. There are gorgeous overgrown parks and tree-lined streets all over the place.
Brandenburg Gate, restored.
Sidewalk cafe, near Hackesher Markt S-Bahn station.
Left: Beer garden in Tiergarten. Right: boats.
Near Alexanderplatz, a cobblestoned enclave with a small village square and one of Berlin’s oldest surviving churches. In the background looms the Russian-built former East German TV tower.
The city also offers the edginess and buzz of a big, modern city with a major arts scene, impressive ethnic diversity (at least by middle-European standards), and mind-blowing designand architecture. There is new construction everywhere, but also serious preservation and restoration of the old. The scars of the no-man’s land on the East side of the former Berlin wall are all but vanished.
Turkish shops in the Kreutzberg district. Berlin has the largest
Turkish population of any city outside Turkey.
Turkish population of any city outside Turkey.
Ubiquitous cranes, here in the background of baroque monumental
buildings of Museum Island (left) and Unter der Linden (right).
buildings of Museum Island (left) and Unter der Linden (right).
Pending restoration: bullet pockmarks can still be seen on some buildings in former
East Berlin. Here, the colonnade surrounding the National Gallery.
East Berlin. Here, the colonnade surrounding the National Gallery.
Maybe Berlin sticks out atypically from the rest of Germany, the way people say New York is atypical of the U.S. and Paris atypical of France -- but I like what I see. After reading in my tour books that Germans tend to be polite but businesslike or brusque in transacting with strangers, I was surprised to find Berliners genuinely friendly. The people who sell you stuff across a counter, or who answer your request for directions on the street, seem unphased by foreigners, quite happy to speak English, ready to smile, and not at all intent (as often happens in, say, New York or Paris) on making you feel vulnerable or stupid for not knowing your way around.
There are bike paths everywhere, and people riding their bikes. And an aggressive recycling program, with, for example, 25 cent returns on one liter bottles.
And fabulous public transportation. There are copious streetcars and buses, and separate-but-overlapping underground and elevated trains. I love the elevated train viaducts. Several times a day, you see them go by in the background, a moving snatch of red or red-and-yellow framed by trees or buildings, reminding me of ... well, actually, of the Disneyland Railroad.
Disneyland Railroad.
The S-Bahn and intercity trains (red) on the upper track, the streetcar (yellow)
on the street level, the U-Bahn (not pictured) below ground.
on the street level, the U-Bahn (not pictured) below ground.
Like New York and Paris, Berlin is a 24 hour city. On a recent warm night, B and I strolled down the Unter der Linden from Brandenberg Gate to our hotel after 1 a.m., and the streets were charmingly and comfortably peopled.
The only downside to Berlin so far... well, let me put it this way. I am so not going to be busted by eyedar around here.
As recently as two years ago, I had zero interest in visiting Berlin; a week ago I was eager but anxious about visiting. Yesterday I asked our Berliner friends about the cost of apartments, so I could imagine living here.
***
Have law, will travel
Yesterday, listening to the car radio in our rented Mercedes, speeding up the autobahn, I caught a snatch of an interview with Kavossy Franklin, an American "basketballmeister" playing pro ball in the German basketball league.
What a cool way to spend time abroad, I fantasized. If only I had some athletic skill, not so good as to make the pros in the U.S., but good enough to play professionally in Europe for a couple of years... how fun would that be?
Hey, wait a minute... I do! Well, sort of. I'm about to teach a three week course to German law students, called "The American Jury Trial System." And I get to teach in English -- indeed, they insist that I do to help expose their students to a foreign language experience.
If I could only get them to form some sort of european league in American law studies, I'd be golden. Amerikanisherechtsmeister Oskar Madison!
**
What a cool way to spend time abroad, I fantasized. If only I had some athletic skill, not so good as to make the pros in the U.S., but good enough to play professionally in Europe for a couple of years... how fun would that be?
Hey, wait a minute... I do! Well, sort of. I'm about to teach a three week course to German law students, called "The American Jury Trial System." And I get to teach in English -- indeed, they insist that I do to help expose their students to a foreign language experience.
If I could only get them to form some sort of european league in American law studies, I'd be golden. Amerikanisherechtsmeister Oskar Madison!
**
