Innocence Abroad

How I learned to love socialised medicine (Part Two: Complaints)

2009-09-01T22:59:00.004+02:00

The complaints of those under a foreign system are often more enlightening than praise, so I asked two of my friends from orchestra for their opinions as to the problems of the German health care system. Astrid, who plays the trombone, is a general practitioner; my fellow hornist Annette works for the AOK (Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse--the "regulated" health insurance provider supported by the state as a provider of last resort for those unable to pay for the other "regulated" providers).

Astrid responded that the principle problems were excessive bureaucracy and poor management of limited finances. The primary reason for these problems, she wrote, is that for every one paying member of the "regulated" insurance, there are four people who pay nothing (children, retirees, and the unemployed). As a result, not every possible treatment is paid for, and many treatments or medications have to be paid for out of pocket because more expensive treatments, like for cancer, are paid for entirely by the system. [The only person I know to whom this has happened has a chronic illness and wants to take an experimental drug.] Astrid pointed out that because everyone in the private health insurance system is a paying member, those insurers can pay for nearly every treatment. Moreover, doctors are more and more tightly regulated by the insurance companies as to limit waste. This regulation, naturally, creates paperwork.

Annette, who spends most of her time teaching doctors cost-saving practices, gave a much longer answer to explain the same problem of "too little money in the system." I've translated her answers below, because many of Germany's problems seem to be exactly the same as ours.

The biggest problem of the regulated health insurance is that financial resources are becoming more and more limited. What are the principle causes?

1) People are getting older and older, and the morality rate increases considerably with age, which brings higher expenses in terms of health care with it.

2) More and more people suffer from chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes, for example. This also increases health care expenses.

3) Thanks to new research there are always new medications, some of which are quite expensive. I'm thinking here of chemotherapy drugs, above all. In the meantime it has been legally established that not every price may be set when a new drug is launched. The legislation, however, was formulated so cautiously that new drugs often come on the market in Germany at prices that are much too high, even when considering the cost of research. A classic example is the Gardasil immunization against cervical cancer, which was introduced at considerably lower prices abroad.

4) Some expensive medications were more widely approved (for example, monoclonal antibodies) and have been prescribed more and more often, despite their cost.

5) Last year, considerable savings were achieved by the health insurance plans' renegotiation of certain contracts related to prescription drugs. Nevertheless, prescription drug expenses rose in general. Quantitatively more prescriptions were written and the overpriced drug launches I just mentioned made a significant difference in the budget.

From a macroeconomic perspective: The health care market in the Federal Republic of Germany is subject to powerful government regulation. Supply and demand do not determine prices. Contrary to market forces, the state intervenes in price formation in favor of the health care providers. The services of hospitals, doctor's offices, and rehabilitation clinics are subject to "set prices." For prescription drugs, the range of prices and distribution channels are regulated quite exactly. The health care system is financed by wage-dependent premiums that are independent from the use of care. The system is threatened by a spiral of increasing premiums, increasing costs of employment, decreasing employment and decreasing insurance income, which in turn pushes the premiums upward and limits the usable income of the insured.

Annette's concern here, in other words, is that rising health care costs (created mostly by an aging population) will decrease the ability of Germany to employ all of its people, and in turn, make health care more expensive because fewer people are employed. This is the danger that almost all of Europe'and Japan currently face.

The United States faces the exact same problem without any of the benefits of universal coverage. Americans are routinely trapped in bad jobs because they fear losing their insurance. Americans routinely infect their fellow employees, thus decreasing efficiency, because they can't afford basic health care or taking days off. People die every day in the USA because they haven't had preventative care. Hospitals, like Grady in Atlanta, are frequently threatened with bankruptcy because their emergency rooms are flooded with uninsured patients.
It is absurd that the richest nation in the world refuses to provide such a basic service for its citizens.

DAK, or How I learned to love socialised medicine (Part One)

2009-09-01T08:03:00.001+02:00

Your television tells you that socialised medicine will involve life-threatening waits for specialists, bureaucratic and opaque administration of billing and coverage, and widespread suffering. I ask: how is this different from your health care now?

Rather than waste my breath arguing that corporate health care is already bureaucratic, responsible to no one and generally bad for one's health, or pointing out that nearly all Americans go on national health care already when they turn 65, I'd rather tell you about my new fabulous health insurance from the Deutsche Angestellten-Krankenkasse.

The German health system is probably more similar to what the new American one will be than the Canadian one. As in Obama's proposal, health insurance is mandatory for everyone. Unlike the Canadian or British system, in which everyone is a member of the national health system and then buys additional private insurance, Germans can choose either a "gesetzliche" ("regulated") or private health care provider. You have to earn more than 48600 euro per year to be allowed to choose private insurance, which around 10% of Germans have.

The "regulated" insurance is funded by a payroll tax just like Medicare and Medicaid. It differs from those schemes in that "regulated" health care is run by companies, not by the government. The government sets a specific percentage of pay that goes toward health care (15.5%, half being paid by the employee and half by the employer) and sets and monitors standards for care and in some cases, payment of doctors. As a student with no official income, I pay 60 euros per month as the basic fee.

Each company is then free to provide additional services in order to attract customers. Last year, the companies were even allowed to set a price for their services, which was under 15.5% in many cases. The government standardised this payroll tax in a massive health care reform that almost everyone regards as a huge failure, but that's a topic for another day. As for additional services, my insurance gives me money back when I don't go to the doctor, has a point-collection system for healthy behaviours (500 points for doing a yoga course, at 500,000 points you win a bicycle, etc.), and has really excellent customer service. Waiting in phone lines forever to talk to an exploited and overworked Indian call centre employee? Not for me.
Were I able to afford private health care, I'd enjoy benefits like having a single room in hospital (rooms with two beds are more common), coverage of more experimental/more expensive medications and less wait time for specialists.

What have I gotten out of the system so far? A new retainer, designed to prevent me from ruining my teeth and jaw by grinding at night. Cost? Nothing. Cost of my previous American retainer, which actually encouraged jaw muscle strain? $300.
I've been to the doctor a few times for a cold as well. I pay ten euros as a quarterly office fee, and around five euros for most medications. Last time I was sick in America, I doled out well over a hundred for the doctor's visit alone. This while I was paying more for insurance.

Did I have to get a physical to determine if I had any pre-existing conditions? Of course not. Did I have to fill out lengthy and complicated forms to determine if I might become an expensive customer? Nope.
Will I have to get new health insurance because I'm quitting my job to become a student? Would I ever be in danger of losing my health insurance because I lost or changed my job? Were I to get a life-threatening disease that I may have caused through my own behaviour, like HIV or lung cancer, could I be thrown out of my plan?
No, no, and no.

In the next few blog posts, I'll examine the German system in more detail, including complaints by people who know and the system's historical roots, which *astonishingly* have nothing to do with Hitler.

"Auspimpen"

2009-07-14T11:23:00.002+02:00

MTV has done the German language two great wrongs. Following the sucess of "Pimp my ride," Germans have started using "pimp my X" or "X auspimpen" to mean "upgrade." The certain irony around the racial use of "pimp," or even that "pimp" means "to force others into prostitution" is completely absent.
Through similar--albeit unknown--channels has "gangbanger" made its way into German. MTV-German speakers (i.e.., by no means a majority of all Germans) use it to mean something like "manwhore."

It's worth noting that "Pimp my i8910HD," an article about adding mobile phone applications to improve functionality, is responsible for my blogpost.

Unexpected "Leitkultur"

2009-07-12T07:26:00.003+02:00

When Germany realised that it has an immigrant population (something like 30 years after the fact), it also decided that it would be a good idea to let some of them become citizens. In order to do so, a potential German would have to pass a citizenship test, just like in the US and the UK. Putting together the test required the German government to determine what is really "German," which, bordering on nationalism, stirred up a ton of angry shouting about Nazism, thoughtful-but-longwinded radio commentary and automotive arson by leftist groups.

Some conservative politician famously suggested that there is a German "Leitkultur" or "defining culture," which would allow the prohibition of wearing headscarves by teachers and other government employees and lots of other (mostly blatantly racist) nonsense. The term, however, was taken up by a lot of people as the term for what would need to be understood by potential German citizens as German.

I've seen a few versions of the citizenship test, and they're remarkably like the American one in that they only test knowledge about a country but not knowledge about the actual culture. Questions like "What colour is the flag of North Rhine-Westphalia?" or "Which of the following are highland regions?" or "When did the Thirty Years War end?" might all be fine and good for high school students of German, but they don't actually demonstrate knowledge of what Germans are like. I'd like to list here a few things that came to mind that obviously need to be tested on the next version of the citizenship test.

Germans:
love wearing socks with Birkenstock or other leather slip-ons or sandals as slippers inside

often bring these "house shoes" with them to youth hostels

often wear these "house shoes" during trips with "eingetragene Vereine" (registered clubs) to youth hostels

enjoy discussing the inane complexity of German bureaucracy surrounding these registered clubs while on trips to youth hostels

complain about but closely follow obscure rules of order during these club meetings

obsess about eating bread for supper and under no circumstances a second warm meal

fear being in drafts, sitting on cold stones and mold in general as being causes of colds, back pain, kidney infections and death

lack the self-confidence to do new things, but only for insurance reasons

(musicians only) inexplicably all own a series of small green books of horn quartets.

Stamping it real

2009-07-02T07:46:00.001+02:00

A few documents for my university applications needed to be notarised, so I went to the "Bürgerbüro" (Citizens' Advice Office or Registry Office) yesterday. After waiting only 30 minutes or so--a short time compared to the usual eternity required for registration--I was summoned to the notary's cubicle. Each of my documents was inspected thoroughly: the paper quality was compared to that of the copies, stamps and seals were looked at through a magnifying glass, watermarks were examined. Once she was satisfied that the originals were real, the bureaucrat went into action.

First, she thumped a huge stamp (three inches square)onto the back of one of the copies. A small box with lines for signatures remained. (Stamp #1: Creating document-like grid for further stamping/signing)

Using a ruler (!) to fill out the now-stamped lines, she filled in the destination of the document and signed. Usually date and place can also be handwritten, but in this case, they needed to be stamped. (Stamp #2, 3: Date and place).

She then took a key from her pocket, opened a locked drawer, and took out three more stamps, one at a time. Some of these looked like seals of the city, others had no clear meaning for me. Two of them required her signature. (Stamps #3, 4, 5: unknown)

Because I had three documents with two copies each to notarise, there was much paper-flipping and stamping in order to use each stamp most efficiently. I can still hear my notary at work:
Flip--stamp on pad--stamp on paper--flip--stamp on paper--flip--stamp on pad--stamp on paper--flip--stamp on paper--flip--change stamps--stamp on pad...

You Love Eurovision

2009-05-17T09:09:00.001+02:00

Last night was a media event that brings together a sometimes geographically creative Europe for tastelessly American pop music, the occasional folk tune in an obscure Slavic language, and lots of higher SMS bills: Eurovision Grand Prix du Chansons.

Once again, I managed to vote for the completely wrong nation, namely Moldova (14th of 25). Moldova, for those of you who have forgotten, is in Eastern Europe between the Ukraine and Romania.

There's something authentic in her bright green dress, in the backup folk dancers, in the DOS screen saver quality of the lighting show. Sure, they sing "hoy, hoy, hoy" over and over, but that's what Moldova is all about. And I want my Eurovision to be about authentic Europe, even if that means having to shout "hoy."

France also gets kudos for not singing in English, and for stubbornly not including back-up dancers or a show of any kind:

Eurovision France 2009 (finale) - Patricia Kaas

Much more typical of Eurovision, though, is the kind of crap that wins third place:

Eurovision Azerbaijan 2009 (Final) - Aysel & Arash - Always

Or second place:

Eurovision Iceland 2009 (Final) - Is it true

Many Eastern European countries seemed to follow Turkey's lead (yes, Turkey, like Israel, is in Europe) and hired hip-shaking Shakira look-alikes to sing American pop with enough traditional instruments to make it sound adequately un-American.

Germany's spectacularly bad entry managed to get it to 20th (of 25).

Germany, which only won the Grand Prix in 1982, spends a lot of entertainment television time discussing what should go into their entry. This year's sure-win idea was to have a "famous" Hamburg stripper perform onstage--without taking off any clothes, of course, because Eurovision is strictly cheesy. Neither political or oversexy entries are allowed. For example, System of a Down was supposed to perform this year for Armenia, but they wanted to sing about the 1915 genocide, and there's no faster way to irritate your neighbor countries than to say nasty things about them during Eurovision. Georgia had to withdraw this year from the competition because their song "We Don't Wanna Put In" was determined to be too anti-Russian (for a contest being held in Moscow).

Overt sexuality is clearly not the answer, because Norway won on cuteness. He's actually from Belarus, which has only made it to the Eurovision final once. Maybe Germany should stop importing Americans (like this year) and start getting political refugees to learn the violin.

Tricking Children With Grapefruit

2009-05-14T16:37:00.006+02:00

A Flight of the Conchords song about France reminded me of a funny German word.

No, they don't call fish "Jacque Cousteau." Grapefruit are now commonly called "Grapefruit", but they used to be called "Pamplemuse," though in no way pronounced like in French. While I was quizzing some children on fruit names, I asked "What is 'Pamplemuse' in English?" They were unable to make the connection, somehow having never learned the older word for grapefruit.

This lead to the grapefruit's inclusion in our next activity, storytelling with three unrelated objects. Although some of the stories were no better than "I am eating the grapefruit," I couldn't help but imagine some of the children's stories as postmodern grammar adventures. An example:

"I and my mother are eating in the restaurant. The waiter is coming with the fish. I am eating him with the spoon. Then I am going home and sleeping. Pamplemuse!"

Sure, you think it's just a matter of overusing the present progressive. That is, until we play with line breaks.

I and my mother
are eating in the restaurant.
The waiter is coming
with the fish. I am
eating him with the spoon.
Then I am going home and sleeping. Pamplemuse

And you thought writing in the simple present was literary!

German Sunday

2009-05-07T16:00:00.001+02:00

My orchestra friend Kathrin declared her last Sunday to be "absolutely ideal," and I found it to be almost stereotypical.

9-ish Wake up, hurry in sweatpants and houseshoes to nearest bakery (a.k.a. the only store open on Sunday) which will either close at 11 or run out of rolls.

10-ish Eat rolls with the widest possible variety of things to put on bread: cucumber, cheese, marmelade, Nutella, leberwurst, butter.
Under no circumstances should warm foods be prepared for breakfast.
*Church-going Germans (the few, the proud, the tax-paying) do, of course, get up earlier as to not have to sacrifice the roll-eating.

Remaining early morning: wander around the house in underwear and house shoes (always, always house shoes), possibly read newspaper or watch television.

Around 12ish--go to your parents' (who, of course, live in the same village as you) and help them prepare a large meal almost certainly involving cabbage.

1ish-Eat, eat, eat. To prevent indigestion, drink schnaps. Topics of discussion include: geography, local history, public transit schedules, and (rarely) football.

2ish--Sleep off alcohol/food coma.

3ish--Go walking in local park, a pleasant leftover of aristocratic rule. Excitedly point at squirrels, rabbits, ducks and other small animals to anyone who will pay attention. Ignore extensive signage forbidding the feeding of ducks. Feed ducks hard, leftover rolls from previous Sunday.
*Other Sunday afternoon activities include bicycling.

5ish--Go to grandparents' (same village) and eat cake with coffee. Should grandparents be dead/on holiday/in a different village, eating cake with friends is also acceptable.
*Those Germans foolish enough to have left their home villages make regular pilgrimages back in order to eat the cake of their grandmothers, even if said grandmothers buy the cake from a bakery chain available outside the village.

Early evening: Do washing-up from cake, sleep off cake, do laundry to get off cake crumbs, put cake recipe from grandmother into files.

Before Tatort: if the children are hungry, they may eat bread.

20:15 Tatort. You might not care enough about current events to watch the news program that immediately precedes Germany's most popular detective show, but you damn well will be able to talk about Tatort the next day at work. Coinciding well with their love for national geography, the most exciting part of any Tatort episode is to determine where the Tatort is taking place before the detectives arrive on the scene. Tatort is produced by all of the regional public television channels in rotation, and accordingly takes place all over Germany. The detectives rarely change (hence the easy association of detective with location), and any rotation in cast is a cause for national discussion.

Post-Tatort: Anne Will, television's equivalent of the BILD Zeitung, their New York Post. Imagine a female, wildly populist Larry King about a third his age. While she and her guests try to solve Germany's problems with as much overdramatic transition music and as many one-sided reports as possible, fall asleep.

A Hard Bread

2009-04-07T08:00:00.013+02:00

For the last three years, I've been flirting with three different careers. Sometimes I decide I want to become a professor, and do research and apply to wildly competitive scholarship programs. Sometimes I decide I want to work in one of the varyingly ailing humanities-related industries (publishing, journalism, nonprofit culture) and do and apply for internships in those fields. Sometimes I consider that schoolteaching is not only socially respected but also useful for society and (often) recession-safe, and metally accept this possibility without doing anything.

Money has just pushed me (finally, finally) away from the first option. I've been accepted by Oxford and Cambridge but without any funding. Just how much would I have to borrow to get a Masters', you ask? Cambridge's acceptance letter came with a large, bolded number that conveniently includes living expenses for me and Steve: 25,294.25 GBP (37,243.25 USD, as of today). Oxford's acceptance letter was less informative, but I imagine that studying there without being allowed to work would be equally pricey.

I spent the whole weekend avoiding doing anything, and I'll probably keep avoiding the question over Easter as well. I could fill out FAFSA and get enough Stafford and GradPLUS loans to pay tuition and college fees; I could assume that I could work nights; I might hope that Steve could find some kind of work there and pay his own way. Or I might just say "thanks but no thanks" for a degree to nowhere.

To be more specific: I've been accepted to "read for" (we love you, BrE!) a Master of Philosophy in English Studies (Criticism and Culture) at Cambridge and a Master of Studies in English (1900-present day) at Oxford. At Oxbridge, unlike many US universities, PhD programs in English require a Master's degree. More importantly, like in the US, I'd have to apply again to get into the PhD program, and then fight (again) for a slice of a very small humanities-funding pie. In plain words: I would have to borrow money to pay for a Master's degree in something that provides no professional training and no further job options or certain pay increases on the off-chance that I might get funding for a PhD, which again provides no professional training, further job options or certain pay increases.

Considering the above and that I am already barely paying my minimum balance on my Emory Stafford loans, and that the minimum amount borrowed would very likely double the amount I'd have to pay back, I'm not going to England next year.

So where's the difficult part of my decision? What makes this, as the Germans say, "a hard bread"? These most recent (indirect) rejections are the end of a long-running attempt to get scholarship money in exchange for my college resume, on which I've been coasting for nearly three years. With the addition of a few writing prizes and my thesis grade (and the Fulbright, which counts for remarkably little), my resume hasn't really changed since I nearly got the Marshall in 2006. That too-early near-success convinced me then that I had the right stuff to become an English professor, the kind of professor who went to only the best schools with only the least amount of borrowed money. Although the first round of rejections before the Fulbright should have taught me otherwise, I hung onto the idea because of the Gates-Cambridge. I was certain that following the Peace Corps and the Fulbright, Bill Gates would pay for my studies at Cambridge, and glorious success in life would follow, etc., etc. Have decided to follow my heart instead of my ambition, I have started listening to my common sense instead of my ego.

However, studying at Cambridge or Oxford, or getting the Marshall or the Bobby Jones, or going to the Peace Corps weren't really about having a fancy education, or doing research, or representing Emory or the United States. They were all about ME. I wanted to make it big, not by making lots of money or saving the world but by proving myself clever, not by invention but by wordsmithery. Not only was I convinced this way my way to the top, but I was also convinced that I was destined for the top. Anything less than the very best would have been failure.

Was this error of judgment one of arrogance? Yes. Of pride? Yes. Of egoism? Absolutely. A side effect of a "praise, don't criticise" padogogy and writing lots of exaggerated application letters? Maybe. But what is certain is that what I had come to expect from myself, and how I set myself (mentally) apart from my colleagues, my friends, my lover, was nothing other than clever bullshitting to get something for nothing. But like dealing with lost privilege, giving up a beloved dream, however unrealistic, is not easy to chew.

[Footnote one: This whole drama would not exist, of course, if Steve and I could get partnered in the United States. I could easily find generous funding somewhere (Emory gives all of its PhD candidates a free ride, for example) and Steve would (via marriage) get the necessary visa and permits to find work. But we cannot get partnered nationally, and Steve does not have any fancy technical training, so until then, we're staying in Europe.
Footnote two: In case you're wondering why I only applied to Oxbridge and not to any other, less prestigious UK universities, I did so because they were the only I could find that offered any money whatsoever for Master's students from neither the EU nor the Commonwealth studying neither science nor for a research degree (i.e., me).]

The NYTimes Knows Germans

2009-04-05T08:29:00.000+02:00

Week in Review
The Lines a German Won’t Cross
By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: April 5, 2009
Germany’s devotion to precise rules and regulations has made America’s bold and improvisatory response to the credit crisis a tough sell there.

Sousa Makes Me Feel Patriotic, How Ironic!

2009-03-19T08:34:00.000+01:00

To pass the time better during the university holidays, the some members of the brass section of my orchestra and I have started playing brass quintets together. For some reason, an arrangement of "The Washington Post March" is among our music selections.

I can see the baton-twirlers in redwhiteandblue spandex, their sequins glimmering in the hot July sun. I see children, smelling of mosquito repellent, twirling overpriced glow-rings, and waiting for fireworks after a picnic of fried chicken and Coke. I can feel my own sunburn and my burning need to say sarcastic things about American democracy. Sousa marches make me feel patriotic.

[This is hugely ironic, of course, because Sousa marches are my absolutely most hated thing I ever had to play in a marching band. I only like the music because my brass quintet part has no rhythm.]

Meet Weetabix

2009-03-14T10:23:00.002+01:00

The tastier, British version of Shredded Wheat:

Internet=Necessary

2009-03-03T15:36:00.003+01:00

In the last days, I have:

arranged to pay my student loans online
called three different financial institutions at low cost via Skype
started to fill out my taxes

In the last months, I have

dealt with applying to the Peace Corps, online
applied to a number of different scholarship programs and universities
been advised on all of these applications

And I somehow keep in regular contact with people I never see and never talk to over the telephone.

Question: How did people live abroad before the Internet?

25 Things I Hate About Germany

2009-02-24T10:04:00.005+01:00

And here's the reverse of my first "25 Things."

#1 Little nonregional beer. I may be spoiled by the Brickstore Pub and Taco Mac, but I expect my bars to provide a little more beer selection than just the local beer and two national varieties. Furthermore, despite German beer's stellar reputation abroad, it's pretty mediocre here, especially compared to Belgian or Czech imports.

#2 Ruler usage. German children and many adults are incapable of drawing a line without a ruler.

#3 Disdain for the USA. Bush might be gone, but the general belief that the USA has no culture—in direct disregard of the lack of interest in "high culture" by most Germans—is still widespread.
Oh, and if we're not culture-less, then we're a bunch of militaristic, Zionist, homophobic, fascho-capitalists. No exceptions. Not even for you, Oregon.

#4 My BA has no value. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the German higher educational system hates the liberal arts.

#5 No preservatives in food. It might seem wonderful to have lots of chemical-free food, until you realize that you have to go shopping almost every other day, lest everything get moldy.

#6 No black beans, and by extension, no burritos. Willy's, I miss you so! And no, döner kebab do not compensate.

#7 No (inexpensive) green vegetables in winter. Sure, maybe only eating seasonal vegetables is a good thing, but I got sick of weird winter vegetables like white radishes and red cabbage pretty quickly.
And when it is not asparagus season (May), there just isn't any asparagus. Or rather, there isn't any for under 10 euros a kilo.

#8 Dubbed television. TV originally in German is largely shit, so they tend to import everything from the USA and Britain, but because there are just enough German-speakers to make it worthwhile, I have to watch "Little Britain" and "Stargate" in German. The Swedes don't have to put up with this!

#9 Techno. The hip-hop scene isn't worth mentioning, and the result is that all discos play house music. And not necessarily good house music.

#10 Metal. Angry long-haired men screaming dominate the alternative scene here. And Goths. And the three indie kids in North-Rhine Westfalia moved to Berlin in 1991.

#11 Schlager. German pop music for people over 40, or the majority of German musical production since the end of WWII. Imagine "Feliz Navidad" for all seasons played a very great deal during all major outdoor events.

#12 No diversity. While it may be true that there are a lot of "foreigners" (Germans never say "immigrants") here, they have very little influence on mainstream culture, except that Germans now eat Italian, Chinese and Turkish food. The absence of integrated nonwhite non-Christians* makes even the most liberal German intolerant when it comes to thinking about other ways of living and doing, and a lot blind when it comes to criticizing their own.**
*The really low percentage of white collar nonwhite Germans also drives me crazy. It's just a visual thing.
**Germans DO criticize themselves a lot for things they did during the Holocaust, but only those. That means hating on Muslims is okay, but not hating on Jews. That means that denying the Holocaust is a crime, but that there is no government-approved way for Muslims to become government teachers of religion.

#13 Weird sense of humor. A lot of Germans would have trouble with someecards.com. They prefer slapstick to irony or "randomness" (a bad term for something strange and unexpected being considered funny rather than weird, donkey); in other words, "MadTV" rather than "Family Guy."

#14 Little original contemporary culture. Germans would not have come up with someecards, or Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube, or "Little Britain" or "Six Feet Under" or "The Office." Germans are good at scientific solutions and museum exhibitions.

#15 My accent marks me as an American, and that means that every person who meets me will ask me a series of questions including: "Why are you in Germany?"; "How long have you been here?"; "How do you like it?" (which means, "how is Germany better?"); "What do you do here?"; and either some smart remark about Bush, an anecdote about when they were in the USA as an exchange student, or a polite comment about some aspect of American culture. Basically, I'll be stuck in "just moved here" mode until I get a non-English job or eliminate my accent.

#16 No shopping on Sundays. If you don't buy milk or bread or aspirin, you're screwed until Monday.

#17 No OTC drugs. Vitamins, herbal teas and band-aids are available at drug stores (never groceries), but if you want aspirin or Alka-Seltzer or allergy meds, you've got to tell your tale of pain and woe to a pharmacist. And there are no bottles of 300 aspirin.

#18 Discount groceries. Nothing is out of its original containers, nothing is arranged nicely, there is no muzak, and about three people work in the store, so in addition to having to wait in a line of 20 people to pay, you feel guilty about the exploitation of labour. The alternative is too expensive for someone on my wages.

#19 No central air. No central air means no air filtration, and that means that dust accumulates within a matter of days. I vacuum as soon as the dust bunnies would be a threat to the health of children, and that's once every ten days.

#20 No sandwich culture. Despite the similarity between a "belegtes Brötchen" (a white dinner roll plus) and sandwiches, the Germans have failed to develop a gourmet sense for their snack-like bread choices. Bread (though quality) rarely ends up with dry-roasted tomatoes or grilled eggplant or sliced honey-baked chicken or arugula. German bread culture is still somewhere around American housewife with high-waisted pants, circa 1983.

#21 Washing machines built like jet engines. They take at least an hour and a half to finish a load, making washing anything less than one's collected whites or colors not worth the time or water.

#22 No powerful chemicals. I don't know if the contents of American detergent are illegal in the European Union, but German detergent does not take out stains.

#23 The German personality. They like order, they like organization, they like control, they like paperwork. They might complain about bureaucracy in their country, but they secretly love obsessing over tiny details and talking about obscure points of geography or history. And they suck at small talk.

#24 Bad journalism. The "quality" newspapers are written like philosophy papers, and the few decent newsmagazines rarely achieve the same in-depth, authoritative perspectives of the New York Times or The Economist.

#25 Winter. Atlanta spoiled me. Gray weather from October to April makes me sad, sad, sad.

Inefficiency

2009-02-24T09:58:00.003+01:00

It might be winter, it might be my Karneval hangover, and it might just be regular life: I feel terribly inefficient nowadays, and it's really bringing me down. It'll be two years in two months from the time I turned in my undergraduate thesis, and I haven't felt productive since then.

25 Things I Like About Germany

2009-02-21T14:49:00.015+01:00

I wanted to do the "25 Things" meme about three weeks ago, back when it wasn't passé, but I didn't get around to it. Obama's election has made me really sentimental for the USA, so I've written the Innocence Abroad variant to remind me why I like living here.

#1 Public Transportation: It's cliché, but it really is an enormous relief to not have to own a car. Rather than sit in traffic, I get ahead on my reading.

#2 Walking Everywhere: Obviously goes hand-in-hand with #1. Rather than having to go to the gym constantly, I just carry my groceries home.

#3 Quality Inexpensive Bread: We of the soft white bread countries really don't know what we're missing when it comes to quality, fresh-baked dark bread.

#4 Quality Inexpensive Wine: A five-euro wine here costs around fifteen dollars in the US.

#5 Quality Inexpensive Culture: Thanks to big government subsidies, almost all cultural institutions are considerably cheaper than in the USA. An "expensive" museum visit is ten euros. Need I remind my fellow Atlantans that a visit to the High is eighteen dollars?

#6 National health care: Unless they're unable to fill out paperwork, everyone has medical and dental care.

#7 Welfare state: Sure, taxes are high, hospital rooms shared and economic recovery slow, but Germany is a country actively interested in ending major class differences. My tax euros are used far less often to kill people in other countries, and far more often to make sure that working class children can get an education.

#8 Nearby foreign countries (I): I live two hours by train from Amsterdam, four from Paris, and short, cheap flights away from the rest of Europe. I can (and should!) take three-day weekends to visit those places most Americans consider "trips of a lifetime." And getting to big US destinations cheaply is a matter of a decent search engine.

#9 Nearby foreign countries (II): Those foreign countries are authentically foreign, i.e., food and language are radically different there. I'm preempting my fellow Americans who enjoy going on vacation inside the USA, which is mostly the same everywhere. I'm also thinking here of Belgian pommes frites ("Belgian French fries" seems odd to me), which are OMG delicious.

#10 The BBC: German TV is pretty shitty, but the BBC beats out every American channel except HBO. And getting the BBC is as easy as having a digital dish.

#11 The coin pouch on wallets: Steve gave me a wallet for my birthday from Freitag, and I love its coin-carrying abilities!

#11a Having unit currency in coin form (i.e., one and two euro coins).

#12 "Hollander" bicycles: They're just perfect for those of us who like to get around town on a bike without having to always bend forward or have uncomfortable seats. Also, they almost always have mud guards and lights!

#13 Potatoes: They're just better here, and sometimes they are called by women's names, like Sieglinde and Linda. Again, Belgian pommes frites.

#14 Wind power: In addition to ending dependence on coal-fired power plants, wind turbines give bored children in rural villages something to watch during school.

#15 Permanent employment as a native English speaker: It's reassuring to know that I will never have to prostitute myself so long as I can prostitute my native tongue.

#16 Cloth shopping bags: Yes, we have these in America; yes, I know your mother uses them all the time; but everyone uses them here and there's almost always a charge for plastic bags.

#17 No suburbs: While it's true that a lot of Germans commute to work from small villages outside of larger cities, those small villages still have their own culture, and importantly, their own groceries. There's no such thing as driving a half an hour to go to the store, which I did every time I wanted to go to Your International Dekalb Farmer's Market.

#18 No Wal-Mart.

#19 Going walking in parks: One major advantage of having had nobility is that they tended to build a lot of English gardens (a planned wilderness), and that they left all of these gardens behind for us to go walking in. Also, Germans like to leave their park space as park space and not ruin it with 10 million sports fields.

#20 Small clothing sizes: The walking mostly compensates for the possible danger of fat people in thin people clothing.

#21 Parliamentary elections with many political parties: The elections are usually about the issues and not about the people; voter participation was"so low like never before" at 77 percent in 2005 (compared to 60.1 percent in the US in 2008); and there are so many colours!

#22 Same-sex partnerships: They're far from equal but better than nothing (or a Constitutional amendment against them, State of Georgia!)

#23 Going for "cures": doctors can prescribe trips to hot springs on mountaintops to cure arthritis and depression.

#24 Lots of vacation time: Everyone (not just office workers) has at least two weeks of vacation per year, which always roll over until the next year. Taking a month or two of vacation at a time because of rolled-over weeks and overtime isn't uncommon.

#25 My fiancee Steve. [awww]

Uschi Blum: A German Kelly?

2009-02-01T17:36:00.002+01:00

Germany's leading gay comedian, Hape Kerkeling, in his drag persona, "Uschi Blum." "Slave of Love" is her hit single for 2009:

A Bit of German Pop For Your Listening Pleasure

2009-01-28T18:16:00.006+01:00

Polarkreis 18 "Allein, allein"

I'm not yet savvy enough to get around the embed-block, and until then, you'll just have to follow the link.

High School Dates

2009-01-25T22:46:00.004+01:00

Steve and I went to a disco at an ice-skating rink (read: a Rammstein/Nina remix, among other bizarre techno) and then spent the rest of the weekend at home, playing hot-seat Civilization IV.

Let's hear it for dates that don't involve alcohol, dressing nicely, hip locations or other twenty-something activities. If there were a miniature golf course, we'd be going.

Overexcited for Obama

2009-01-21T14:45:00.000+01:00

I was on local German TV, making grammar mistakes and being generally overexcited for Obama.

Paving My Childhood

2009-01-11T18:30:00.002+01:00

A journal entry from the middle of July, 2007.

I was a dork in high school. I didn’t really know it at the time because I was too busy playing “Dungeons and Dragons” and the French horn. But I had one important weapon against my un-coolness: my mother’s car. Free access to her red, hatchback Honda was a sure ticket to the only nonreligious gathering place my Southern suburb had to offer. Everyone went to the Waffle House after everything—football games, prom, homecoming, band practice, even Model UN. Sure, there were other places where people would hang out (Steak & Shake had its own legion of devotees), but my people were at the WaHo. Between a guaranteed carful of grateful younger students and my double hashbrowns, scattered and covered, I could feel cool once per week, despite my lack of knowledge about hip-hop or Dawson’s Creek.
Once I left for Emory, I only came back to Duluth for holidays, choosing instead to work internships in Atlanta or go abroad during the summer. I couldn’t help but notice that my community changed radically and quickly. The people got poorer, the traffic got worse, and strip malls grew faster than kudzu. The Waffle House, though, remained the same, stolidly serving Diet Coke that tasted like cherries and suspicious steak. My Waffle House refused to adopt the tacky cornices of its newer, “highbrow” cousins in different parts of Gwinnett County. My Waffle House was still interested in football letter jackets, Southern cooking and Charlie Daniels’ “Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
After ten months in Germany after graduation, I took a slightly different way back from the airport, determined to welcome myself back to the USA with hashbrowns. My Waffle House, though, wasn’t waiting to welcome me. It had been paved over.
The Waffle House had once stood about 500 feet away from a major intersection, one that had always been plagued by a nearby railroad crossing. While I had been gone, the county had finally implemented a plan to build interstate-style exit ramps and to lower one of the roads under the railroad. My Waffle House fell victim to this effort to solve traffic problems by building bigger, wider roads.
Suburban sprawl had never hit me in such a way. I had seen forests where I had once played turn into forests of houses (now under foreclosure); I had seen open fields disappear under parking lots for big-box retail. A county once full of farmers and dirt roads, where my mother and I had gone looking for tomatoes and “folk art,” had filled up with the same bar and grills, discount retailers and Starbucks as the rest of Suburbia, America. Suburbia’s old foe had been Nature and “Mom and Pop” remnants of the Old South; now it turned against its own pioneer, the Waffle House. Too trashy for the stucco’d, Bluetooth’d, prefab “progress” preferred by the county’s leadership, my high school refuge needed replacing with something with better air-conditioning and more iceberg lettuce. A new two-story McDonald’s is on that corner now, pushing “healthy” fast food like a drug dealer in Prada.
Walking around the city center, I hardly recognize the sleepy town of corny fall festivals and wooden churches. The high school has a new archway entrance; the town hall isn’t in a Masonic lodge any more; the Methodists have gone mega-church; the once-dusty “downtown” features condos and fountains; the (other) Waffle House has white walls. To be cliché, I can never go home again. It’s been rezoned Suburban.

Not Exactly "Silent Night"

2008-12-26T17:37:00.000+01:00

I went with Steve's family on Christmas Day to a karaoke bar. Here's a sample of what we sang together.

On Privilege

2008-12-20T18:08:00.000+01:00

My Düsseldorfer dentist’s Web site features large, friendly words in one corner: “We speak English!” When I went in for a check-up, he insisted on speaking in English in strange and easily understandable ways.
For example:

“Your teeth look good. Bitte folgen Sie meine Kollegin ins Röttgen-Zimmer.”

I’ve often written of worrying about feeling less like an expatriate and more like an immigrant. When I was spoken to in the same way as nearly every Latino/a in the USA is by doctors or lawyers or accountants who habla Espanol!, I knew I had crossed that line.

Being handled as an immigrant, besides being a constant reminder that I don’t belong in their culture and still aren’t at home here, strips me of my privilege. And privilege, like heroin, is a hard habit to break.

***

That being an immigrant can strip an extremely-privileged person of his unearned social advantages can be a little hard to believe, I know. A moment in a “recent” episode of “Dharma and Greg” [Germans get American television shows years and years after they end in the US] explained to me how this works. In an effort to “get to know the help,” Greg’s wealthy mother goes to her Mexican housekeeper’s wedding. There, she learns from her housekeeper’s friends that she was a math teacher before coming north to scrub the toilets of wealthy Americans. Her housekeeper enjoyed the privilege of university education and a socially respected profession in Mexico; in America, her employers are surprised when she speaks English and imagine she comes from a poor farming village.

By contrast, I’m the white, Protestant, suburban son of college-educated parents and grandparents. My family may not be “wealthy” in Obama’s more-than-$200000-per-year view, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying more than my share of privilege. Going to Emory only built upon that privilege, and most of my resume is made up of reputation (Phi Beta Kappa, and the Fulbright, for example) rather than experience. In the USA, this combination of reputation and privilege would help me find work almost anywhere. And I would have never realized that I was getting there because of these advantages, not my own abilities.

An African-American friend once complained to me after a conference with University leaders that they would “never see past their privilege.” Unlike me, he was at Emory because he was honestly cleverer, more intelligent and more hard-working than everyone else around him. I openly recognized his abilities but silently claimed a similar success (being an Emory Scholar) for myself. After all, weren’t the disadvantages of his upbringing cancelled out by affirmative action programs and social entitlement? Obviously, the answer is "no," and that’s why we keep them in place. Although many of the privileged vote for these programs, they still can never “see past” their privilege because to be without privilege is beyond their scope of experience. We’re always already privileged.

Furthermore, the privileged today have no way of grasping nonprivileged living because their privileges are largely invisible. We’re largely past sex and racial exclusion on paper, at least. The “invisible” privilege most people know—education as a social value, fiscal responsibility, healthy ambition—can be taught by schools. The chief advantage of privilege, however, can’t be taught by schools or enforced by the state. It’s also the most trying lack when privilege is lost. What the German system has taken away from me is confidence.

If you belong to a disenfranchised group, what I’m writing about is usually called “arrogance.” Whenever white people patronise nonwhite cultural expression without a clear access route, it’s usually out of this arrogance (or guilt). When men fail to understand why women still feel disenfranchised by expectations of motherhood, or why questions like “do you plan to have children” are sexist, they’re inevitably and accurately called arrogant. It is arrogance, but arrogance is also misplaced confidence, and confidence is often more essential than social connections, a reputed university or educated parents. Softball and field hockey, for example, have been re-invented as “women’s sports” so that girls have the confidence to become engineers.

I’m not writing about the kind of self-confidence that helps shy persons make friends, or that which helps women tell men to wear condoms. The kind of confidence the Germans deny me is very similar to American national confidence. We believe so strongly that we’re the best country in the world that it sometimes actually happens. Barack Obama was elected, to a degree, because our country realized that we’re not living up to our potential, and he says that we can do better. “Yes, We Can” would not fly at all here, a country where smart teenagers don’t dream of being chancellor, but of being bank employees or self-employed hair stylists. My privilege in America is the same as America’s privilege in the world: it’s built on the suffering of Others, it denies those Others a place based on reputation and ideology rather than facts, and it enables the privileged to achieve more than his or her actual qualifications or abilities.

How did a Westerner in a Western country lose his privilege? It's as simple as being in a country interested only in professional qualifications. Germans care about experience and qualifications and distrust reputations and big names. More importantly, the liberal arts are completely dead here. University is only for the study of a very specific subject and the study of that subject is the qualification for a specific kind of job. There is no such thing as a "flexible" degree. My BA in English qualifies to teach business English or get a Master's degree in English. Forget doing marketing or public relations or journalism or any of the the other bullshit(ting) jobs done by English majors in the USA. Germans have specific majors for those people.

This sudden dis-qualification, this unexpected dis-empowerment is pretty crushing. Everything I had once believed about myself, about what I could be, seems untrue and impossible. Here, I can’t get a job because of my cleverness, or wit, or wordsmithery. I won’t be given a job outside of my field because of the soft skills of my privilege. It’s not my native language, and no one will give me a break on a name. Ryan Plocher is not someone with potential; he’s an immigrant with a convenient native language. But worse than the Russian with an engineering degree, I’ve lost the confidence of privilege in addition to the recognition of my degree. Suddenly recognizing (via absence) that you have been put ahead your whole life because of your background rapidly destroys any mask of success and the confidence it generates. Unlike those who have always had to prove otherwise, success was often an assumption for me. Privileged children who end up as less than their fathers are failures; children born in poverty are expected to die in poverty. My decreased status has relatively raised expectations while depriving me of the advantages that would have achieved those expectations in the first place. But though my emigration erases much of my public identity and associated confidence, it’s also a great opportunity.

When I find a real job here, one that doesn’t involve just prostituting my native language, but one exploiting my actual abilities, it may be because I’ve actually earned it. But it’ll be a long, hard road. But it’ll be one full of opportunity to prove myself better than names and skin color. Like a child addicted to heroin before birth, a sudden lack of privilege can permanently hinder the always-already privileged. But rather than the way of fallen gentry everywhere (decadence and suicide), I’d rather follow those junkie babies who, despite their born addictions, proved to be more than their lack. Getting clean is the opportunity to prove that I am more than my privilege.

Waiting for January, Part One

2008-12-19T16:21:00.003+01:00

If you didn't know, this is what Christmas sounds like here in Germany:

We're spending the holiday in Steve's tiny East German village, Reideburg near Halle an der Saale. If I survive, I'll manage to post some commentary about celebrating a capitalist, Christian holiday with a bunch of post-Communist atheists.

A Few Things

2008-12-12T23:16:00.003+01:00

#1 I would knife someone for the following American foods:
a Reuben sandwich, specifically, corned beef from a deli;
a lox bagel (and not the tiny, overpriced variety sometimes found in large cities)
a Willy's burrito. For a burrito of any kind I may hurt someone, but not with a weapon.

#2 Germany's long-running crime series, "Tatort", may be entertaining. But it's not "Law and Order," nor can it ever be. I'll never see a German Jack McCoy (Sam Waterson) raise his eyebrows incredulously at a defendant we all know is GUILTY; I'll never see a German Eliot Stabler (Chris Meloni) beat up a suspected rapist. Sex crimes may be more interesting to watch, but Germans don't like watching their police beat up on accused criminals (BORING!). German courts make decisions based on the exact words in a law, not on principles, thus, German courtroom dramas can never be interesting to watch. Even if Steve admits that seeing someone being declared guilty is oh so pleasurable.

Unemployed People Procrastinate Better II

2008-11-28T16:03:00.002+01:00

I've been employed now for two weeks, and I must revise my previous post. Unemployed people are better at procrastinating with nothing; employed people are better at effective procrastinating. For example, while unemployed, a trip to IKEA to buy a single item could easily take the entire day. Now that I'm employed and have things to do (today's task: finish Oxford application), I'm much better at doing other things that need doing (hanging the shower curtain, wall repairs, cleaning the house, cooking meals for three days, baking cookies, shopping) instead of the task at hand.
Unemployed people, we might say, are better at procrastination in its truest sense: doing anything—in the best case, nothing—rather than one useful thing. Employed people procrastinate less authentically, but for that, more effectively.

Unemployed People Procrastinate Better

2008-11-21T16:04:00.003+01:00

There are a few things to be done around the apartment. We really need to hang the shower curtain, for example. I could finish my application to Oxford. I could blog more often.

I've been unemployed since the end of June. There's nothing like having nothing to do to make doing anything simple—buying broccoli or making lunch—take the entire day.

We unemployed people aren't lazy. We just can't help but procrastinate.

Sorry God, No Church Taxes For Me

2008-11-21T15:07:00.005+01:00

German law requires that all residents register with the police. It's a simple procedure: one goes to the registration office, waits in line about three hours, gives an address and his/her passport, and a few seconds later, a bureaucrat madly stamps a few papers and BAM! Germany starts keeping track of you.
There's an important minor step during the process easy to forget: the answer to "religion."
Sometime in 2005, I checked "evangelisch" (Protestant) in that little box. I don't know why I checked the box then. Perhaps it was a part of my bizarre enthusiasm for filling out forms (it's a test you always get right!), perhaps I didn't think self-identifying as a Protestant would have any consequences.
I was wrong.

Upon finally getting my work permit on Monday, I hurried to get a tax card, the last government step between me and a wage. To my surprise, in the box under "church tax" were two, large, capitalized, bold, expensive letters:

E V
"I'm not a member of a church in Germany," I said.
"You registered as a Protestant. If you want to leave the church, you must make a declaration before the municipal court, and then request a new tax card. NEXT!" the bureaucrat (faceless) replied.
"This might not be so bad," I thought to myself. "I've always wanted to tithe."
Telling my boyfriend got a different reaction: "You're in the church? You know that's another 10% tax, right? We need to go to church more often, if you're paying so much to them."

We might all remember from Sunday School that one should tithe 10 % to the church, but in taxes? That's another story. My health insurance is 15.5%; my income taxes (retirement, unemployment, disability insurance and other taxes) are probably around 30 or 40 %; I should pay another 10% to the state, just because I was baptised? If the tax was called "Tax for the Maintenance of Historically or Architecturally Important Buildings," I might consider paying it. After all, everyone likes a nice-looking cathedral.

I'm also not entirely opposed to giving money to the church. Here in Germany, both churches run two-thirds of the retirement homes and hospitals, help homeless people, and generally do a lot of "good works" (with plenty of Jesus thrown in, of course). And despite my sympathy for agnostic thought and opposition to any kind of religious politics, I'm not entirely ready to leave the church, in the faith sense. It may make me a hypocrite to not practice the faith I profess, but I'll live with that rather than feel separated from my religious culture.

It is, however, the infringement of religion on politics and politics on religion that I entirely oppose. Jesus says to the Pharisees in Matthew 22: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." That Caesar is upon the coin demonstrates, for Jesus, that the coin belongs to Caesar already, and can be given back to him. Refusing to pay taxes is a political act, not a religious one, even if what the state does is in opposition to your faith. (I know there are other better, readings, but bear with me.) The currency of the State is coin; the currency of Heaven is faith. Now, of course, the church cannot be run entirely by faith alone; pastors need currency to buy food, clothing, education; the church needs currency to carry out its good works. The tithe represents faith in the church in material form. If that tithe, however, is collected by the state without my will, it is no longer an expression of my faith, but of my submission to state power.

I know the German government collects church taxes largely to keep up their huge number of unused churches. There are too few devout Christians in Germany to maintain the number of ancient cathedrals. Moreover, the churches built in the Middle Ages have architectural and historical worth but do not serve the needs of Christian communities today. They don't have space for Sunday schools or outreach programs or food kitchens or kindergartens. Unfortunately, the taxes the government collects from all the lazy Christians mostly pay for these community programs, and not just for Germany's interest in historical buildings. I think Christian kindergartens are all well and good, but the government should not be collecting money to finance religious entities. If you want your kid to go to a religious kindergarten, fine. Pay for him to go there, and leave my tax money for my secular kindergarten.

I have the impression that most Germans are comfortable letting the government decide if they tithe. The Germans who don't pay church taxes are all actually nonreligious, and they're doing it because they don't want to support the church. I want to support the church (sometimes), and if I am going to do it, I'll do it myself as an expression of faith.

Moreover, there's something basically un-American about leaving something as individual as religious expression for the government. And at this point in my immigrant experience, I refuse to be that German.

At Home In English

2008-11-21T14:49:00.004+01:00

I started working at Stevens English Trainers this week after having waited only six weeks for my work permit (two weeks faster than official estimates). None of my colleagues that I've met are Americans, but I already feel at home with the British. I don't have any idea what a "hob nob" or a "ginger nut" is, or that the bathroom should be called the "toilet" or why my grandmother may need not be taught to suck eggs (rather than eat them with spoons), but there's something about speaking English in a non-teaching situation that does the expatriate good.

It may just be that we can bitch together about how obsessive and awkward the Germans all are, and how our respective national bureaucracies are obviously much more efficient and friendly than theirs. The common knowledge of the improperness of eating dinner rolls for breakfast, that bread can and should be toasted often, and that Goethe is overrated brings us closer together.

What's naturally curious is that I'm more willing to invest in Anglo-American national mythology here in Germany than at home. Henry Miller explains it well, in lines from Tropic of Cancer that I just can't stop quoting:

The last thing we talked about, as we stood there waiting for the train to pull out, was Idaho. The three of us were Americans. We came from different places, each of us, but we had something in common—a whole lot, I might say. We were getting sentimental, as Americans do when it comes time to part. We were getting quite foolish about the cows and the sheep and the big opens paces where men are men and all that crap. If a boat had swung along instead of the train, we'd have hopped aboard and said good-bye to it all. [...] It's best to keep America like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea...

The name I give to my abstract idea "home" is exactly that, not "Zuhause."

Germany Makes Me Crazy (I)

2008-11-21T14:24:00.005+01:00

I haven't read anything backing this opinion, but my experience tells me that my view of my new country will change in waves very similar to the "culture shock" of my study abroad days. Culture shock for those who don't know, has three phases: "honeymoon," "negotiation" and "adjustment." In other words, a newcomer will feel excited about the host country for a few weeks, feel disgusted with it for a couple of months, and come to some kind of compromise afterward.
To my surprise, I'm still going through this dialogue with German culture, even though I studied it in college, studied abroad here and have gone through short-term culture shock at least twice. The phase of being enchanted with Germany has only gotten shorter and shorter. This time around, the country is really starting to drive me batty. The relative similarity of German and American culture (compared to that of say, Turkmenistan) aggravates the less important differences so much that I may, in ten years, be a red-white-and-blue patriot.
The occasional series "Germany Makes Me Crazy" (aptly named, I know) will document my frustration with the Fatherland without offending any Germans.

Complaint Nummer Eins: The Movies!
Large multiplexes are exactly the same here as in the USA. They show mainstream Hollywood movies, sell overpriced popcorn and give teenagers a place to make out other than their parents' basements. The German obsession with rule-making and control, however, has tainted yet another quality American import. Ticket prices, for example, vary greatly depending on where you sit. The advertised ticket price is almost always for sitting very close to the screen; good seats in the back cost almost twice as much. Where exactly you sit is thus very important and each seat is accordingly sold individually. In practice this means that the row of best seats can be completely sold out, and the REST OF THE THEATER will be empty. Because Germans (even German "anarchists") don't believe in breaking rules, they would all rather sit in this completely full row and listen to each chew their (gross, pre-popped) sweet popcorn than just move elsewhere in the theater.
To be fair: sweet popcorn can be okay, if it's fresh. German multiplexes don't pop their popcorn fresh; they buy it from pre-poppers, probably in Romania.

What makes little sense is that small art theaters with one or two screens don't share this obsessive need to place each customer exactly in his or her place, or this love of pre-popped popcorn. Many of these art theaters were (re-)founded immediately after the war and are accordingly un-Americanized. They stay open through the magic of state subsidies, I think, because their popcorn and ticket prices are still reasonable.

Olbermann's Special Comment on Prop 8

2008-11-11T19:48:00.002+01:00

As I've said in my last post, I won't live in the USA until my husband is recognized as such and allowed to live there. Germany, the nation responsible for the Holocaust, lets me love.
Why not you, America?
Why not you, Georgia?

Three Post-Election Thoughts

2008-11-06T17:15:00.005+01:00

You might be expecting the German response to the American election here, but I'm in the USA for other, nonpolitical reasons this week. Three thoughts:

No, I'm Still Not Moving Back
I'm sure a lot of you think I'm living in political exile because of the Bush. The Obama presidency ought to be reason enough to start being patriotic again, right?
Maybe. But as the success of Prop 8 in California (and similar bans in Arizona and Florida, bringing the total of states with gay marriage bans to 30) shows, there won't be nationally recognized gay marriage in the United States anytime soon. Until my husband is recognized as such, and allowed to live in the United States as the spouse of an American citizen, we're staying in Europe. German domestic partnership is far from marriage and far from equal. But as Steve's partner, I am allowed permanent residency. A Massachusetts gay marriage won't give Steve the right to live in the US—only a federally-recognized marriage will keep the INS from our door.

Those who think domestic partnerships should be enough (including Pres.-elect Obama) need to remember that the laws granting domestic partnerships almost never include all of the (thousands of) little, important privileges granted to married couples. In Massachusetts, I pay state taxes as a married person but my husband gets deported. In Germany, I pay taxes as a single person, but I get to stay in-country. Until everyone can have a civil marriage—called marriage—we're still going to be second-class citizens.

Time For The Posters To Come Down
A lot of alternative bars and discos sport Obama posters. During the election, it was as fun, kitschy and trendy-radical like a Che T-shirt. But in three months, the dude on the poster will be IN CHARGE. The Man. The Establishment. Are we living in a dictatorship? We all might love him, but having a poster of Our Glorious Leader is a bit too 1984-ish for me. Take down the poster and save it until 2030, when it'll be as retro-trendy instead of creepy.

A Word of Appreciation
You want me to write about how my faith in America has been restored, how Obama's presidency proves that our country's rhetoric is true, at least some of the time. As pleased as I am with the result, I don't think our country needs to be so proud of doing what it was supposed to hundreds of years ago. No, my word of appreciation is for American bedding.

Coming up on the end of year one in Germany, I can understand and appreciate their complex recycling system, their restrictive views on education, their need to wear house shoes. But I still hate sleeping under a feather duvet. Being able to peel off or add on layers and layers of blankets—that's what American adaptability is all about. Sleeping under one layer of duvet, regardless of bedroom temperature—that's German inflexibility at its wurst.

No More Chit-Chat

2008-11-02T13:16:00.004+01:00

CEILA
No… it isn’t that I want to be alone,
But that everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other.
And I’m sure they don’t. Is that a delusion?

REILLY
A delusion is something we must return from.
There are other states of mind, which we take to be delusion,
But which we have to accept and go on from.

—T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, 1949

“You look nervous.”
I looked at Roland, questioning.
“Nervous. Tense. Uncomfortable.” Roland searched for synonyms, assuming that I hadn’t understood.
“No, I’m just fine,” becoming nervous at the suggestion of being nervous.
“Why do you ask?”
“You’re not as outgoing as usual.”

Wednesday was the university gay organization’s semesterly champagne reception. I had looked forward to it because lots of new people usually show up. I usually enjoy meeting new people, but this time around it was just a strain. Every time I meet someone new, I have to answer the same questions: “Where are you from in America? What do you do here? How is your German so good?” Sometimes I manage to get the Germans to talk about themselves, about their work, about their majors, about German politics, but they always want to know about me because I’m American. The United States—its policies, politics, history and culture—are so predominant here that any contact with an American is thrilling for Germans, far more interesting than meeting any other foreigner.

I enjoy meeting new people (in English) because I’m good at making small talk, and because I like to hear their stories. In German I would rather not bother, even though I have an uncomfortably small circle of acquaintances. But even talking with these people can be exhausting. Because these acquaintances are principally Steve’s friends, I have to talk to them as friends, even though we have nothing in common and barely know one another. Because we’ve met so many times, we can’t have any “getting to know you” conversation. Our conversations are sometimes so strained and awkward that I begin to withdraw, to simply stop making conversation. In my thinking, I’m the nonnative speaker, I’m the foreigner—why do I have to do the work to hold up a conversation? If I don’t have anything to say to you, why can’t we just be silent?

The trouble with withdrawing from conversation is that people assume it is because you are sad, troubled, worried, depressed. Happy and contented people apparently always have something to talk about. Conversation, however, has little to do with emotional state. It’s an art, a talent, a doing that takes energy. We “make” or “have” conversation just as we make dinner and have shoes. In German, conversation can be paired with betreiben, a verb also used in relation to playing sports and herding animals. Conversation isn’t something that comes of its own accord, like ordering a slice of pizza or asking the time. Conversation has to be learned; in foreign language learning, it’s usually the most advanced course. Conversation, like all arts, has to be done for its own sake; it is not communication. Some conversations are really tests in disguise: interviews and dates, for example. Other, apparently less important conversations require infinitely more finesse: at the barber, standing in lines or in an elevator, travelling with an acquiantance alone. As Uma Thurman so aptly points out in “Pulp Fiction,” it takes a lot of familiarity with a person to simply be silent:

MIA
Don't you hate that?

VINCENT
What?

MIA
Uncomfortable silences. Why do we
feel it's necessary to yak about
bullshit in order to be
comfortable?

VINCENT
I don't know.

MIA
That's when you know you found
somebody special. When you can
just shit the fuck up for a minute,
and comfortably share silence.

***

I’m trying to write a story of someone who suddenly refuses to make conversation. Rather than asking questions and playing at interest, this person forces other people to do the work. He just stands around at parties. Then this person stops faking emotion, doesn’t smile to greet the people he barely knows. Why demonstrate happiness when you’re just feeling normal, without emotion? Imagine if we frowned all the time in greeting, even if we weren’t feeling angry. Smiling without feeling happy is the same.
The person might also stop bothering to read the newspaper, because we only read the news to have something to talk about. He only speaks to communicate important information at work, at the market, at home. This person stops listening to the radio, watching television, using the Internet, and with effort, manages to block the advertisements that he sees on the streets. Eventually, he gives up language entirely, having recognized that the entire thing is just a sham. We’re all pretending to understand one another; we’re all pretending to recognize each others’ signifiers, but we really don’t. Most of what we communicate is nonsense, and its intention is to function as nonsense. My existentialism professor insisted that nonessential communication was social grease. The human being can’t walk around in silence. The person refusing to participate in nonessential communication, refusing to play his role, would be considered insane by others, inhuman. Hermann Melville gave us a similar character, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, a copyist who “prefer[red] not to” do anything. That character had been broken by failed communications, by having to sort letters to dead men. I think mine would not undo himself, as Melville’s character does, but would be undone by others who find his refusal fundamentally troubling.

***

Living in a foreign language—forgive the cliché—demands learning new sets of rules for making conversation. I have no intention of giving up conversation or leaving society on some Randian journey of personal development. But it has come time that I start to enjoy the silence.

Pettiness Everywhere, Experience Shows

2008-10-27T18:49:00.007+01:00

My father mailed a bunch of scarves and blankets to me in anticipation of the bitterly damp winter here on the Rhine. I wasn't home when the post came, so I had to go to the office to pick everything up. My father, in his wisdom, put only Steve's name on the box because my name might not have been on the door when I arrived. A long lead up to...

a very long line at the office and two drones working slower than you can imagine.

After waiting about thirty minutes, Steve and I finally make it up to the counter to ask for the package. We've forgotten the slip of paper left by the carrier—thinking it unimportant—but the bureaucrat is apparently unable to look up Steve's name in his computer and find the package without the slip of paper, which has no barcode or legible writing.

I return with the slip of paper, leaving Steve at home to work on his thesis. He's signed the back, giving me the legal authority to pick up the package for him. After I stand in line for thirty minutes, I give the slip to the same drone. Foolishly, I also give him my drivers' license. Still programmed for the USA, I think that what qualifies as identification in the USA might fly here.
No way, no how.

"This is a drivers' license," he says. He looks critically at my address on my license and the address Steve has written on the slip.
"Yes, it is. Please note that my address on the license is the same as the return address on the box—those are my things," I say.
"This isn't identification. The slip says you need identification," he says.
"No, it is identification. See, it's got a hologram and a picture and my signature and it counts as ID at home!" I whine.
"No, it's a drivers' license. I can't legally give you the package without identification."

I mostly hate assholes when they're right. What's worse, I can't say this never happens in the USA.

***
During Steve and my road trip this summer, we went to an Irish pub in Washington, DC. I ordered beer and showed my Georgia drivers' license, and the waiter (who had no other tables) accepted it. Steve showed his national identification, a giant green laminated thing with multiple holograms, a dozen stamps and more security measures than my passport.

"Sir, do you have a passport or American identification?" asked the waiter.
I knew with the "Sir" that we were in trouble.
"No, that's my ID," Steve said.
"I can't accept this. I can't sell you alcohol unless you show me American identification."
I basically lost my temper and nearly called the waiter a idiotic Homeland-Security Fascist (noting that the Department thereof was across the street), but my father was tired and old and not interested in raging against the machine.
We stayed and drank Coke. Luckily for Steve, who had upon my advice left his passport in Atlanta, no one else in the country gave a damn what kind of identification he showed.

****
Once upon a time, when I was young, impressionable, and an expat newbie, I paid attention to some bit of study abroad propaganda. I made copies of my passport, carried them duly with me, and always left my passport in a safe place someplace else.
"Replacing a lost passport can be difficult and expensive. Don't keep it with you!" urged the propaganda.
Even my well-traveled father believes this bit of passport propaganda. At the airport—the one place in the USA where one might actually need a passport—he asked me over and over to hide my passport someplace inconspicuous, as if some crazed person would try and steal my passport from me.

They're partially right. Replacing a lost passport is difficult and expensive and most importantly, inconvenient. But unless you're the kind of expatriate who spends most of his time drunk in divey bars, keep the damn thing with you.

Engaged and Still Leaving for Turkmenistan?

2008-10-25T04:40:00.002+02:00

An unfinished blog post from 12 September, 2008:

If I were talented blogger, I’d start this first entry in months with a clever anecdote, but I’ll instead resort to bold typeface:
I’m engaged to the love of my life and I’m still joining the Peace Corps.

In other words, I’m depriving myself—voluntarily—of two years of marriage, something yearned for by many, and successfully accomplished by few, to do national service for a country for which I have little patriotism in a place I have less knowledge of or interest in. The Peace Corps was the first to question my dedication upon learning of my engagement, but I placated them with plenty of rhetoric about desiring to serve my nation before leaving it. In this political and patriotic season, they ate up my Eagle Scout-quality bullshit (or birdshit, or Scoutshit) with relish.

My actual reasons for joining the Corps have changed greatly since I applied in May of 2007. Back then, I was bitter about my Teach for America rejection and guilt-ridden following Paul Farmer’s graduation address. Something about working for a literary magazine didn’t strike me as being a great contribution to the betterment of humanity. So I found and applied to the aid organization that would look best on my resume: the United States Peace Corps. Nothing like a combination of militaristic language, John F. Kennedy’s idealism and a large and well-connected alumni network to guarantee job interviews in 2011. Once I found out I was going to Turkmenistan, I knew that lack of knowledge about that nation’s geographic location would make even the best-traveled employer want to talk to me. While I was living in Germany, a combination of Barack Obama’s convincing rhetoric about restoring the promise of the American Dream and my own frequent attempts to explain the American Dream to German 8th, 11th and 12th graders re-awakened my once Boy-Scout-ish patriotism. I was going to Turkmenistan to spread the good news about liberal democracy, laissez-faire global capitalism and “liberty and justice for all.” While I was doing so, I’d help a country rebuild its educational system and give it the necessary communication tools to sell its natural gas to customers other than Russia. A long argument with Steve in front of the Knorr Products at Real changed all of that pretty quickly.
For one, the Peace Corps doesn’t really help anyone but the United States. We’re there not to spread ideology—that’s expressly forbidden by PC rules—but just to raise awareness about the real USA. I’m wondering how real that USA is supposed to be. One where moose-hunting mayors suddenly are qualified to have nuclear access codes and veto power? One where millions work multiple jobs to make sure they can afford emergency health care, let alone preventative medicine? [Not like health care is an issue anymore, ever since the economy tanked. Why isn’t anyone bothering to note that health care IS an economic issue?] The long and the short of the issue is that the Peace Corps says lots of good things about the West so that natural-resource-rich places like Turkmenistan think better of us than of their immediate neighbors, in this case Russia, China and Iran.
For two, the US government (i.e., those whom I’m actually representing, not Citizen J. Doe) rarely pursues any of the virtues it claims to support (rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.) at home or abroad. The American Dream, as I have already noted at length, is a clever ideology to motivate workers domestically and to encourage cheap labor to immigrate. If I’m serious in my criticism of the crimes of the US government, past and present, should I really be helping these people?
For three, and most importantly, why should I give up, even temporarily, a great relationship with someone I love in a country I can respect? My answers continuously crop up in three categories: rhetorical, personal and material.

Rhetorical:
I write and re-write these entries trying to cut out the endless generalization, stereotype and rhetorical vagueness. “Never” and “always” have little place in good writing, or good thinking. I am forced to recognize that I cannot argue that the American Dream was never valid, or never works for anyone. As a college-educated son of college-educated parents and grandparents, gifted with generations of inheritance, I have enjoyed the best of living in the richest, most powerful country in the world. My awareness of how many people over whom I enjoy privilege makes me want to give back to their nation, in some way. Community organizing isn’t really my thing, and neither is living in the USA, and Teach for America agrees. Military service isn’t for pacifists or homosexuals, and the US government agrees. That’s why the Peace Corps has an anti-discrimination policy for sexual orientation. I imagine my national service to be a temporal payment on my student loans, a thanks to my homeland for my upbringing. Before I become a Staatsbürger der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, I need to have a clean conscience when it comes to doing my duty to God and my country. And while I’m in the authoritarian desert, I may find a few things to appreciate in the USA.

Personal:

I want to have adventure before I settle down and start remodeling Steve and my rooftop studio apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. Too many times have I heard older people I respect quietly wish they had seen the world before becoming responsible, pregnant, employed. Too many times have I seen my friends from college and high school sit through boring/exploitative job after job. I'd rather spend these first post-college years in places where jobs as boring as teaching my own language become challenging and exciting. I want to be able to irritate my grandchildren, neighbors and acquaintances with stories about a country they've never heard of and will never visit. And I want a distraction-free situation where I can finally give my best effort at trying to write.

Material:
Clearing my conscience and fulfilling a lust for adventure, however, aren't reasons to separate myself from my beloved. They're reasons to go to the Peace Corps that make me a wiser and more responsible person, but probably not a better husband. The separation has two material functions, the first being that it keeps me occupied while Steve finishes his thesis and looks for his first job, two things made more difficult by an unemployed househusband. The second is that it gives me the "community service" credibility that I need to win the Gates-Cambridge scholarship.
That's right: the telos of this Innocent Abroad is not only to become a permanent expatriate, but then to study abroad from his adopted home.

I wrote these words on the 12th of September. Steve had left the United States after five weeks of vacation on the 4th. The next day, I came to a very different conclusion:

I started painting the deck today, and, partially because of an hangover-induced stomachache, felt the separation from Steve quite viscerally. I called my sister, and tried to explain again why I was joining. She asked me if the Peace Corps would provide me with any concrete benefits to my next job, if the skills I would gain in the Corps (besides the much-touted “flexibility” and “dedication”) would help me find a job. I had to admit that all of the reasons that had inspired me in the first place were mostly rhetorical. My sister, a nurse, told me to get my head out of the clouds, lose the idealism and start thinking very seriously about joining.
I talked to Steve briefly this morning, and he said something that really got me thinking while I was painting. Our mutual friend Roland had told him that he hoped John McCain would win so that I would come back to Germany. Steve said that it was important for me to go for three, six months, a year, and then decide. I heard in his voice that he couldn’t imagine my staying there for an entire two years.

In a jumble of thoughts and worries, I kept painting the front deck. Steve and I had painted the back deck together, and each brushstroke was a reminder that I wouldn't be able to do even chores with Steve for ten months at least. We'd only been together for ten months. Even engaged, could we survive, as a couple, as people, as psyches, for a separation longer than our actual relationship? If six days felt like months, what would it be like to write a letter and know that it wouldn’t arrive for a month?

I phoned a friend and something more important became clear to me:

Steve had always allowed me to go to the Peace Corps. He loved me enough to let me go, to let me do the service and have the adventure that I thought I needed. Only when I could go, when I was so close to going that I was nearly there, did I see that I didn’t need to go at all. Had he taken it from me, I would have been bitter. I had to let it go myself, to know that I love Steve enough to be content with him; that I would be discontent without him; and that I don’t need the Peace Corps to be a bigger person. I just need Steve. Part of his Oneness is his ability to let me go, when I need to be let go. He’s the love of my life because I don’t need to go to a developing nation to feel like a complete person with direction and meaning. I just need to go home.

Ironically, I would never have come to this conclusion had I not proposed, which I wouldn’t have done if I weren’t going to the Peace Corps. In another life, if we had dated slowly, we could have been boyfriends for years without my recognizing that Steve is the one. Without the Peace Corps to give us a sense of urgency, we wouldn’t have spent so much time with each other. Without the Peace Corps, I wouldn’t have bothered to think about life in Germany, about life with another man, at 23. It would have been too much, too early, too soon. My dreams were too ambitious, too filled with nationally-recognized names and shining resume points.

But as that pacifist panzer loomed larger and larger, it seemed less and less necessary to get onboard. While I was in Germany, I blew up the Peace Corps’ importance to make it seem essential to me. It was the only way to get international experience of that kind; it was the only way to make a difference to humanity; it was the only way to get into Cambridge. It isn’t. It isn’t. I can make a difference in different ways from something required for future diplomats and NGO presidents. I just want to be a “humble Modernist” (to paraphrase Jim Morey, a humble medievalist) with my family, my nice flat, my bike. Tutoring poor children or adoption or political activism are all more than enough.

I'll have that adventure, someday. But for once, I should concentrate on the good things happening to me now, rather than continuously plan for the future. I am more than my resume.

Don't Fry the Kochwurst

2008-10-24T17:09:00.005+02:00

Steve and I fight often. We fight especially often in the kitchen, where my freewheeling attitudes about recipes, cleaning up before eating and the preparation of certain foods turns my normally calm boyfriend into an anger-filled criticism-monster. Something like the Hulk, if he were a stepmother.

Today's lesson: certain sausages can only be prepared in certain ways. A Kochwurst may only be boiled; a Bratwurst may only be fried. Any deviation may have serious consequences.

The run-of-the-mill Bockwurst (sold in tasteful glass jars) is apparently a Kochwurst. I fried it.
Hearing the sounds of popping and crackling sausage, Steve rushed to the kitchen, his eyes filled with confusion and rage.
"What are you doing? You can't fry Bockwurst! It'll be too salty, inedible!" he cried.
"Just taste it," I said, offering him a bit of what I perceived to be an ordinary hot dog.
Fried, it was just as cheap-tasting as if it had been boiled.

I am a kitchen rebel.

Bureaucracy Is Mighty Expensive

2008-10-17T11:14:00.010+02:00

The Germans may be internationally famed for their beer and genocide, but they would probably describe their nation as profoundly bureaucratic.
Before my regular life can restart in Germany, I have a few bureaucratic hurdles to overcome, all of which are many times more complicated than in the United States.

Back to the Salt Mines
Following a flurry of interviews and online applications, I've found work again as an English teacher in only a few days. But before I'm allowed to begin, I have to get a work permit (Arbeitserlaubnis), tax card (Steuerkarte), and residency permit (Aufenthaltsgenehmigung).
The word permit requires that I have my employer fill out a "position description" and a "description of the candidate" so that the employment agency can decide whether or not a German could do my work better than I can. Because my residency permit is contingent upon my having work, I turn the work permit paperwork into the immigration office. They then send it to the employment agency, which takes between two weeks and three months to decide if I get the permit.

Once I get my permit, I fill out an application for a residency permit, which requires that I prove that already have German-quality health insurance, a "biometric" photo, and fifty euros.
This takes another two weeks.
Upon getting my passport back with the residency permit, I take these two in hand over to the tax agency to be given a tax number. I then turn all of these into my employer, who will then and only then start my training. Until then, no income.

Sweet Sixteen (at 24)
As an American, I'm allowed to drive for up to six months after arrival. I then have three years after getting my residency permit to convert to a German license. This conversion should cost considerably less than for a young German (at 18)—around 2000 euros—but it certainly ain't parallel parking in Lawrenceville for $10.
Because Germany considers each American state to be a different country, some states don't have to take any tests, some just the theoretical or practical, and in my case, everything. To convert my drivers' license, I need:

my passport
my drivers' license
a certified translation of my drivers' license (30 euros)
an eye exam (10 euros)
a first aid certification
another fifty euros
a written test (12 euros)
a practical test (80 euros)
a couple of passport photos, just for kicks
and the certification of a driving school that I can actually drive, which means I need to:

hire a driving school (90 euros)
take a few lessons to prove that I can already drive (30 euros a pop)
buy books on passing the exams (90 euros)

So in total, I need to spend around 600 euros just to get a drivers' license I already have, in a country that I only maybe need to drive in.

Tying the Knot
Even Germans admit that getting married in their country is inordinately difficult. They like to get married in Denmark instead: there's little paperwork, and the scenery is lovely. Steve spent a few days while I was still in the US trying to reach the justice of the peace's office (Standesamt) and find out what kind of paperwork is necessary. After brutal hours of standing in line to get an appointment to be advised about the paperwork, he learned that we need:

Passports or personal ID
Residency permits (mine from the USA for some reason; a copy of Steve's registration)
Birth certificates, in German, and no older than 6 months (translation cost, 50 euros), and an "apostille," a document requiring my translator to recognize the copy of my birth certificate as an actual document
Marriage affidavit (an Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, an obscure document only available at US embassies and consulates)
Eighty euros
A notarized "domestic partnership contract" that deals with all the other legal rights you might think we get through the "domestic partnership" but don't (around 150 euros)

Once we turn in all this paperwork, we make an appointment for a few weeks later to make an appointment for the ceremony, in the event that everything has been stamped, translated, dated and signed by everyone in question appropriately.

How Germany got a reputation for being an efficient country is a mystery to me.

Welcome Back to Innocence Abroad

2008-10-09T18:27:00.002+02:00

So months after having left, with much anticipation of and little explanation for my joining the Peace Corps, I'm suddenly back in Düsseldorf. There's been a lot of drama between now and then, and my postings over the next few weeks will seek to explain why there's no more pacifist panzer looming over my future. Look forward to, in no certain order:
—Of Wheelchairs and Road Trips
—South Carolina Is For Lovers
—Being A Boy Scout Won't Cut It, Anymore
—Dashing Off A Resume and Other Deadlines

Afterward, "Innocence Abroad" will change to "Eingedeutscht." Feel free to guess what the new title means in the comments.

May I please recycle more?: Culture Shock

2008-07-23T18:20:00.002+02:00

At the university gay group’s farewell cocktail party for me, I was asked if I was looking forward to anything in particular in the USA.
“Chemical preservatives in food and lots of waste!” I joked. I had spent the last few months promoting an Emory-centric version of American life, full of recycling and organic vegetables. My friends who had spent time in America were just in rural, backward parts of the country, where they still eat Twinkies and recycle only their newspapers. In the big cities, I argued, people care about the environment. I must have invested pretty heavily in this largely-inaccurate view of the USA because I’m really missing the Fatherland for lots of ordinary things.

Recycling
The German recycling system is inordinately complex, derived from postwar traditions to save glass and the separate green movement of the 1970s. I’ll use my teachers’ lounge as an example. Three separate bins stand next to the door: blue, yellow and black. Paper products go in the blue; “green point” recyclables go in the yellow bin (or sack); and everything else goes in the black. Certain glass and plastic bottles, however, are not “green point” recyclables, but rather “deposit” bottles that have to be returned separately to grocery stores for change depending on the size of the bottle. In my apartment, it meant that I would do my recycling when there was no more space in my kitchen to separate the glass from the paper from the plastic from the biodegradable (a trash option in residential areas) from the everything else. If I hadn’t had a German roommate (or boyfriend) to explain the trash system to me, I would have stood in front of the bins like a confused child, wondering what to do with paper (take it down the street to its own, special bin, next to the nondeposit glass recycling).
I thought that I would look forward to Duluth’s (actually impressive, for the USA) recycling system, in which you throw everything vaguely recyclable into one bin, and leave it on the street for the recycle-persons to sort and carry away.
But consider this: everything we buy comes wrapped in plastic. Yogurt containers (plastic themselves), newspapers, light bulbs, lunchmeat—it’s all in plastic. Germans buy things covered in plastic, too, but somehow, they can recycle all that plastic without a second thought. I stare at the plastic wrapper of the New York Times and ponder: “Does Duluth take plastic number four? Emory only took types one and two…”
But it’s more important to wonder why everything is covered in plastic in the first place.

Preservatives
When I first moved to Germany, I found the rapid expiration of foods exasperating. I could buy a tomato on Monday, and by Thursday, it would be moldy. Yogurt, cream cheese and dried sausage all found ways to go bad in my refrigerator. Even the maple syrup (bought for some of that “cultural exchange” nonsense) managed to go bad, a biological near-impossibility, as the sugar content should kill most of the bacteria. Following the leads of my roommate and later, my boyfriend, I learned that most food needs to be bought fresh every single day. My old tactic of buying everything for a week on Sunday would not fly for meat or vegetables. Learning this strategy well means that an empty refrigerator is a regular sign, not of poverty, but of not having been to the store in two days.
Upon my return home, I nearly collapsed before my father’s overstocked pantry: cold cuts in great quantity, vegetables of every possible sort, three kinds of cheese, milk, juice, and lots of premade spreads and dips. “How are we going to eat all this stuff before it goes bad?!” I asked, nervous at the prospect of having to throw everything away.
“It’ll keep,” my father said confidently.

I found a rind of gruyere already a year old, cookies baked last Christmas, a loaf of bread from the previous Monday, and an opened container of tomato pesto of uncertain age. All seemed to still be fresh. I was suspicious, uncertain, perturbed. It was a relief to me to throw out greening meats and moldy celery.

In America and my father’s defense, his habit of overbuying isn’t typically American or even typical Dad. He’s still learning to buy food after the death of his wife (2 years ago) and my departure for college/Europe/Peace Corps (4 years/10 months/in the future). Buying for three is always easier than buying for one.

Distance
Staying at home is also easier than going out, especially when a drive to my college hangouts lasts forty-five minutes. Going out in Cologne took the same amount of time, including changing and waiting on trains. I didn’t have to worry about falling asleep or being drunk on the way home, and I certainly didn’t have to feel guilty about wasting gasoline. My changed perception of distance is more important, however. Here, choosing to change locations from Blake’s to Mary’s doesn’t take that much thought—the drive is only a half an hour. Only in Berlin could a German decide to switch party locations, stay within one city, and have to travel as long as is normal for an Atlantan. The USA is HUGE.

Air-Conditioning
Indoor-outdoor changes of over twenty degrees are apparently also normal for Atlanta. I’ve fought with my father to raise the temperature at home to seventy-four (it’s at sixty-eight); I’d be more comfortable near eighty. I shouldn’t shiver when I walk into restaurants or coffeehouses or malls when dressed appropriately for Atlanta summer. I blame fat people and fear of sweating. Not to say that Germans don’t sweat, or to say that Germans have summers as nearly as hot as Atlanta ones. Instead they tell each other fearfully of American air conditioning and the summertime illnesses it certainly causes. [For those unaware, Germans are very sensitive as a nation to drafts and temperature changes.] Like eating foods full of preservatives, they perceive air-conditioning as wasteful and unhealthy.

A Word on Generalization
It's important to note here that what is typical for a suburb of Atlanta can't reflect the United States as a whole, nor can my experience in Düsseldorf be considered representative for all Germans. While one goes through culture shock of any sort, it's important to always compare your own, specific, prior experience with your own, specific, present experience. Generalization is the first cousin of stereotype.

Police State or Land of the Future?: My Return to the USA

2008-07-13T22:36:00.004+02:00

The lady standing in front of me in airport security has a green passport—a bad sign. When the officer starts leafing through it, I notice that she’s from Pakistan.
“TSA! T—S—A!” he shouts.
“Ma’am, you’ve been selected for additional screening today,” he says to the lady, who is not dressed especially Western and is, of course, brown-skinned.
“Big surprise,” I whisper loudly.
The TSA officer barely opens my passport when he says to me, “Sir, you’ve been selected for additional screening today.” Not looking up, he adds, “By your airline.”

Comfortable in my opinion that the TSA is run by Nazis and that the petty bureaucrat has decided to punish me for my sass, I head to the “special area” and start unloading my bag. A soldier is here, but he just walked through the line without being searched—“additional screening” is military for “express lane.”
The next person after me is also brown-skinned, but I hear later from her accent that she’s also American; the man after her “looks Middle-Eastern.” I was too busy being searched to see his passport as well.
Before I leave, I notice the next token white person has been taken through the line—an old obese woman. Good to see that American standards of color-blindness are being upheld.

I’ve had a six-hour layover in Chicago, time to immediately notice all the other small things that make our great country different.

Racial Diversity
I lived in the international section of Düsseldorf, so I got to see Turkish people and a smattering of Africans every day. I ate Japanese frequently, so we also went to the Japanese district pretty often. In the last ten minutes I have seen more persons of color—and of different colors—than one of my students in Hardt would have seen in a month. Admittedly, I’m sitting in an airport (and in Chicago O’Hare at that), but if one were just to compare the airport staff of O’Hare and Düsseldorf International Airports, DUS would come out pretty homogenous and bland. Three cheers for diversity.

Children
Again, having lived in a Muslim-rich district made my experience a little atypical for Germany, as I had to endure loud, irritating children often. But even the fruitful chador'd women of Oberbilk can’t hold a candle to how many brats the fat blonde women of the Midwest seem to produce. They don’t add chlorine to the water in Germany. They add FEMINISM! [Equal rights for women will save this planet via declining birth rates. Equal education for women NOW!]

Fat People
I won’t deny that many of my nonchador’d neighbors (i.e., the poor Germans) were overweight (and ugly). Although the Americans have better teeth (on average), they are also, really and truly, more fat.

Credit Cards
This fatness, I am sure, partially stems from how easy it is to buy fattening foods. In my first few hours in America I managed to drop ten bucks on a food court pizza floating in oil, all through the magic of credit cards. Who needs to carry currency when you’ve got plastic? Who needs to pay attention to how much you’re paying when you’ve got plastic? Who needs to worry about their health when they’ve got so much debt already that they’d be better off dying early?

I know it sounds sarcastic, but I really did miss not having to carry around cash constantly. VISA may everywhere you want to be if that everywhere doesn’t include anywhere you can go shopping in Europe.

The Well-Armed Police
Whenever Germans told me about their travels to the United States, they inevitably mentioned that they thought the security and complicated immigration procedure made the USA seem unfriendly, cold and militaristic. Every time I stand in line (at security, at check-in, at the border, at customs), the number of armed persons in uniform amazes me. What are they there to protect us from? All the guns we bought at the duty-free store? The bazooka I built—MccGuvver-style—out of Lufthansa forks and mashed potatoes?
Despite the lack of an obvious threat, I’m sure their intimidation is to be matched by competence. Competence in shooting guns, that is, because it surely isn’t in stamping my passport correctly.
I flew to the USA, land of infinite possibilities, on July 12. Time travel is one of those possibilities. As the lady at the baggage check said to me when I showed her the mistake and laughed: “Welcome to the land of the future!”

Final Thought #5: People Are More (Important) Than Resume Points

2008-07-06T22:28:00.004+02:00

My year in Germany has turned out completely different than I had planned. Per my journal from last year, I was supposed to join a Schutzverein (a German marching band), enjoy village life, write a regular column for my local newspaper, recruit European authors for The Chattahoochee Review at the Frankfurt Book Fair and learn lots of Russian for the Peace Corps, after which I would return to the USA in Grand Style and work for the National Endowment for the Arts.

So I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t find a single author at the Book Fair; I barely managed to keep a journal or this blog; I fled the village on my first day there; and I can’t so much as count to ten in Russian. But I did find my future husband. Steve is caring, smart, handsome, funny, silly and he doesn’t take any shit from me. We fight constantly and make up constantly. We’re one of those couples, the kind that drive single people crazy.

Steve knew early on that we were meant to be together. As I’ve written before, I didn’t want to rush things, and I didn’t want to get into some crazy long-term, long-distance whatever. I wanted to have sex and practice German. We had some nasty fights about my refusal to commit (two months in), and to put it bluntly, he forced me to see that we were in love. But my romantic reluctance wasn’t the typical “male fear of commitment.” It was about getting spiritual fulfillment and money; it was about working constantly, building a killer resume and having the car and the trophy husband and the titles and the awards. It was the American Dream. I couldn’ t find and publish the Great American Novel in Germany; I couldn’t write reviews for the New York Times; I couldn’t be the next Stanley Fish or Harold Bloom (in reputation, not politics!); I couldn’t prove to myself, and to the world, that a great nation deserves great art, because I would end up a foreigner, forever. America, and my American ambition, stood between me and Steve.

I’ve already imagined the book title: I Gave Up America For Love, in which I trade in my blue American passport for a purple European one and subsequently go on Oprah to talk about gay marriage. [Not like they have marriage equality in Germany, but that’s a subject for another day. EQUAL LOVE, EQUAL RIGHTS!] But what the book should really be about is my learning that a person's value isn’t dependent on the awards or titles one achieves, or what fancy recommendations come with the resume.

I should have learned this lesson a long time ago.

***
I’m eleven, in the fifth grade. I’m crying in my bedroom closet, having been picked on at school. You’d think they had called me “faggot” or “sissy boy” (they saved those for high school), but “Mr. Encylopedia” and “the Walking Dictionary” were their words of choice for me. My mother knocks on the closet door and asks me if I am coming to dinner.
“None of this matters!” I howl at the door.
“What doesn’t matter?” she asks.
“These stupid awards! They’re just paper! They don’t mean anything!”
“What makes you say that? You are a very gifted boy, and that's what they show.”
“It doesn’t matter, I still don’t have any friends!”

In the years that followed, I grew a lot more cynical, which made me funny; I grew a lot more bitter, which made me bitchier and funnier; I made a different sort of friends, and got the hell out of Duluth. The awards got me to where I am today; they paid for me (as Brooke put it in the blog comments) to go to “amazing bubble of overachievers and opportunities for overachievement.” They send me to Germany, where I got to know a value system that doesn't understand (voluntary, unpaid) summer internships, building a successful resume, or success for the sake of success. I got to know a man for whose affection and company I would trade my nationality and some of my future success.

Now, I'm not about to give up my ambition entirely, nor have I doomed myself to a lifetime of being a house-husband. I've come to recognize that I am just as invested in dreams of success in return for a lifetime of hard work (amid relentless competition) as the next Willy Loman.

Final Thought #4: The American Dream

2008-07-04T10:34:00.008+02:00

In honor of the Fourth of July, I thought I'd share my only America-directed final thought for today. I taught the "American Dream" four times this semester, based on MLK's "I Have A Dream" and "The Great Gastby," in a study group for English final exams and in a unit on "American and British Traditions and Values." Like everything else in their curriculum, the German perspective on the American Dream is rather socialist and prefers to emphasize the "shadow side," which pretty much prevents students from understanding why anyone would believe in it in the first place. It took me a long time to realize why anyone would believe in it either (I am an English major, after all, and am therefore, like, totally disillusioned) and found in the end that I had believed in it all the time.

An example lesson-rant:

"The American Dream, class, is the belief that hard work and freedom will bring material success. "Material success" is what you want to get out of life, not spiritual fulfillment or knowledge. Materialism is spelled M-A-T-E-R-I-A-L-ism, and means (in our national consciousness), having two cars, 2.5 children, a dog and a house in the suburbs. “Freedom” here means “freedom from” government control, not “freedom to,” in the empowerment sense. This is why Americans are allowed to own guns but don't have national health care. "Hard work” means that “work” is the central American value: people who don’t work are lazy or stupid; and working constantly, too much, is hardly regarded as a problem, even though it destroys families and leads to anti-social behavior. This is why Americans have almost no vacation time. That and capitalist exploitation, but this is a lesson in English, not economics.

Another angle of the American Dream is to believe (and a major difference here to socialist ideologies is that we always say "believe") in the West, or other wide-open wilderness spaces. “Into the Wild,” is a quintessential American movie, in this sense. Did any of you see the movie? Tragic. You should read Walden by Henry David Thoreau instead; it's much better and has the same ideas; I'm not certain why I'm telling you this because you certainly aren't paying attention TOBIAS! Anyways, Christopher McCandless enjoys total freedom as a bum, and by working really hard, he manages to achieve spiritual fulfillment. It's important to note here (and you should be taking notes) that you can have either spiritual fulfillment or material success, but only rarely both. This would be the main conflict in True West, which you should read the SparkNotes for because you will be tested on it in comparison to Death of a Salesman, which you should have read but didn't because you are all terrible, lazy students.

All of these ideas came out of our earliest years as a nation, when all of Europe was suffering under systems of class oppression that were easy to identify without having to read Marx. Many Americans (even though it is not so) believe (there's that believe again!) that the USA is a classless society, and they therefore believe that class cannot possibly have an influence on individual freedom. Back when the country was founded and consisted mostly of wilderness, though, class didn't really have influence over your individual freedom. Unless you were a slave, or a woman, of course. In any case, all the forests lying around to be harvested encouraged people to believe in the following ideology (and here's the summary, PAY ATTENTION!):

Hard work (that is, working constantly) in a country with lots of freedom (that is, no government) will make you rich, or spiritually enlightened. You can achieve these things in BIG OPEN SPACES, such as the West. Or as it was in Thoreau's day, in Emerson's back yard.

Now read the following text and tell me where these ideas show up. IN WRITING."

As you all can tell, I'm a killer teacher. And it's not just my German-made cowboy hat.

Considering my fairly critical stance to the American Dream, I would never have thought that I actually believed in it. But as my next final thought will discuss, I'm as guilty as the next Emory overachiever when it comes to valuing my life based entirely on resume points.

Final Thought #3: Gemütlichkeit

2008-07-04T10:20:00.003+02:00

I didn’t realize that Memorial Day had come and gone until I saw Alex Pollack’s blog entry because German schools have pretty much a holiday a week that month. Between Karneval, Easter, and all the other strange Catholic holidays, I don’t think I worked two weeks without a break during the entire spring semester. Schools and churches aren’t the only institutions with so many holidays: German companies are required to grant their employees at least 30 days of vacation per year. More noticeable than the hordes of vacationers during August is that everything from supermarkets to gas stations is closed on Sundays. Posters and banners go up all over the city for the occasional “verkaufsoffenen Sonntag,” when most major retailers stay open for that extra day and enjoy almost orgiastic crowds of shoppers. "Moonlight shopping” is also somehow quite trendy, but to go shopping at midnight, you need the help of alcohol to grasp that the store is open after 7 p.m.

All this not-working-time has to do with the chief German virtue of Gemütlichkeit. Real Germans, I’m sure, will contest me and say that punctuality, bureaucracy, order or exactness are the chief German virtue, but those are all just secondary effects of the desire for Gemütlichkeit. The dictionary translates it as “comfortableness,” “coziness,” but those are adjectives for describing a sofa, not a lifestyle.

Gemütlichkeit is the total opposite of American hustle and bustle. Germans politically demand Sundays on which they can do nothing but eat breakfast for hours and then go walking. Their schoolchildren are legally protected from having to do homework from one day to the next (i.e., homework given on Monday can be due on Wednesday at the earliest). If you’re sick here, you’re expected to stay at home, even for a sniffle. “Ruhe dich ein bisschen aus” (“take a little break, take a rest”) isn’t just phrase for the sick or the elderly, but something for everyone, anytime they do anything even remotely strenuous. When I tell schoolchildren that American kids do homework every night and usually don’t have two fifteen minute breaks before lunchtime, they react with horror. When I tell my university friends that I usually had a job in the summer holidays, they react equally surprised. “Did you have to pay for your education?” they ask. Working for pocket money and resume points is unheard of here; why work when you don’t have to?

Americans work because working is a virtue unto itself (that we have no social welfare system to let people not work is an effect of this virtue, not a cause). Germans sit in gardens and stroll through parks because taking it easy, not having to stress, is a virtue unto itself. And importantly, all this not-ever-stressing (which involves a lot of going to the sauna, by the way) makes their work at lot higher in quality than MADE IN USA. It takes a lot of punctuality, bureaucracy, social order and extremely exact work to make sure that everything works smoothly enough that nobody needs to stress about anything.

Final Thought #2: Emory and GCPS Are Amazing

2008-07-02T10:21:00.003+02:00

In my second update, I wrote that I missed “the manicured lawns and gardens of our marble-paneled, Italian Neo-Renaissance university” and its cultural offerings. I’ve since realized that what Emory was offering us was a lot more than just a nice gym, country-club-style pool, world-class museums and libraries and undergraduate research and arts opportunities. Emory expected us to do great things and helped us along the way. German universities don’t even expect their students to graduate or even graduate on time. If you do one major thing here (work as a Referent, play a sport), it’s astonishing; if you do several, you’re an overachiever (because classes here are SO difficult).
More importantly, if the Uni Düsseldorf, the Uniorchester and the Gesamtschule Hardt have taught me anything, it’s that my perception of “average” has been totally skewed by going to amazing schools. Something I've had to admit is that most American schools and universities are actually much, much, much worse than Emory or Gwinnett County Public Schools. Any time I say "It's better at home," all I really mean is "It's better at Emory" and I could say that almost anywhere in America.
But we all know that Emory is an amazing university (Emory says it to us all the time). What I had to really accept is that my public school education was way better than it was supposed to be (in the USA). We might not have learned foreign languages, but we learned how to work and how to think. German schoolchildren, as far as I can tell, learn NOTHING in elementary school. I think they spend most of their time singing and going on field trips. [Field trips, by the way, are a huge part of the German school system that continue until the 12th grade. Somehow they haven’t realized that no one learns anything on a field trip.] These kids don’t learn basic information (in history, for example), how to take notes, do their homework on time, do presentations, give talks in class or use computers. German schoolchildren don’t learn about WWII until the 10th grade; by then, I had had "Nazism is wrong” about three times. Maybe they’re secretly learning about it at home, or it gets mentioned at strange times in Religion, or maybe they just don’t answer when they’re not 100% sure, but as far as I could tell, they know zip and they learn less. They’re also not expected to really do anything.
I know that the amount of knowledge one can demonstrate in a foreign language class is limited, but quality work can always show itself. If you’re doing a presentation, you can practice at home. If you’re making a poster, you can use a ruler and colors that make sense. If you’re preparing a handout, you don’t need to use all of the fun fonts available in MS Word. We learned how to do all of these things in elementary school. My kids at Gesamtschule Hardt didn’t know how to, or didn’t do, any of these things, and they weren’t expected to. Teach for America is right: low expectations lead directly to low quality work.
I would say the same is true at universities as well. If I were to explain a passage in class at Emory, it would take five minutes, summarize the most important points, and lead directly into a discussion of the most important questions. Here, a Referat can last several periods (because of constant interruption by the professor) and can have little or no content besides the author’s biography. And this counts for much of that person’s grade (something a lot of professors oppose, just like they oppose recommending classes to students, because it prevents them from “exploring” on their own). If I didn’t know how to do the work, or how to write an essay, I would go and ASK someone how to do it, so I could do it well the first time. Here, they would rather just give up and hope that they will know in the future.

What is really confusing is that at some point, all this mediocre work suddenly turns into one of the most efficient and high quality economies in the world. It all has to do with Gemütlichkeit, which I’ll address in my next Final Thought.

The Year in Review

2008-06-30T10:58:00.002+02:00

School’s out. I’ve cleaned out my desk, baked farewell-cookies, said good-bye and been said good-bye to, taken pictures I’ll never look at, been given a large number of mediocre books and gotten the hell out of Mönchengladbach. In Düsseldorf, I still have to watch the European Football Championship, play in an orchestra concert and say good-bye to a lot of gay people, but otherwise, I’m done with Germany. No more trips, no more illegal work, no more hours upon hours of mass transit. Over the next week or so, I'd like to close the German section of my blog like an episode of Springer.

Final Thought #1: A One Hour Commute Is Bearable

For those who haven’t been paying attention, I worked four days a week in Mönchengladbach-Hardt (a tiny village close to Holland) and lived all the time in Düsseldorf, the capital of North-Rhine Westfalia. It took me thirty minutes of train, twenty minutes of bus and about ten minutes of waiting to get to my school, one way. Thanks to a Deutsche Bahn strike in October, I discovered that five of my colleagues live in Düsseldorf, and that I could commute with them in the mornings. This commuting option didn’t prevent me from spending a lot (and I mean, a lot) of time riding the train. Besides being really thankful for my university semester ticket (and associated free mass transit in all of North-Rhine Westfalia), I had the opportunity to do a lot of reading (I think only Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and Thomas Mann’s short stories are worth mentioning), and to learn the important skill of being able to sleep anywhere.

Not Leftist Enough, Continued

2008-06-12T17:01:00.002+02:00

The New York Times explains handily why I don't feel comfortable with banning the NDP (Nationale Demokratische Partei, the Neo-Nazis):

American Exception: Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech

Counting as Foreign, and Hating Poor People

2008-06-11T11:31:00.007+02:00

Yesterday, Steve and I saw a woman in a burka. A black one. A really black one. She got on the train with her family, three women (a mother and two daughters) who were all wearing headscarves and dresses. Everyone in the train stared at the woman in the burka without staring (look—look away—talk to neighbor—look again—look away).

Steve found it gruselig (creepy) and a little bit grausam (horrible, terrible). I admit, it was a little bit difficult to look away from a person who had covered her (his?) entire face (including the eyes) and hands in deep, deep black. The picture I’ve taken from Google doesn’t really show the complete black of the burka; none of the light from the UBahn lights was at all reflected. I know it’s an outrageous comparison, but I immediately thought of the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings.

Afterwards, Steve and I talked about the difficulties of integrating a culture that encourages masking into one with identification cards and security cameras: What happens if a man wearing a burka robs a bank? Do burka’d women de-burka in special rooms when they go through airport security? In a nonlegal sense, Steve thought of her complete withdrawal from the societal gaze to be both extremely arrogant and voyeuristic. He couldn’t consider her covering to express humility, because it prevented all human interaction. For Steve, humility requires positive human interaction: to deny any kind of recognition, but allow herself to recognize others is offensive and arrogant. While I understood Steve's line of thinking, I couldn't control my liberal knee-jerk reaction of "a negative judgement of someone's religious expression is intolerance."

***

Hijab symbolizes the difficulties of integration for Muslims in Europe. Government officials (including teachers) are forbidden from wearing hijab in many German states; some schools and universities have discussed banning the tradition from their campuses. They argue that state-funded institutions should be kept secular, and for any person to wear such a shocking statement of their religion would change the tone of instruction or service. Naturally, wearing a cross or a yarmulke would not be forbidden, because it would not be so shocking. Nuns can teach classes in Bavaria because of tradition, but Muslim women in hijab would not.

What is really the difference between a nun’s habit and hijab? Feminists would claim that nuns choose to wear a habit and women in hijab are forced to by their patriarchal families. But the real difference for run-of-the-mill Germans is that nuns are German and hijab is foreign.

Having apologized for the Holocaust and done their best to reintegrate Jews into their culture, Germans staunchly deny their own racism. They learn about American racism during English classes, and because they don’t see apartheid in their own culture, they refuse to see how actively they discriminate.

After all, racism only occurs when you discriminate against your countryman. Hating on a foreigner is something different entirely. [Yes, I know it's called xenophobia.] The difference, however, between a foreigner (Ausländer) and a German is pretty unclear.

A person born to Turkish parents who speaks Neudeutsch (broken German spoken by immigrants) and doesn’t “act German” is basically a foreigner, despite his or her actual German citizenship. [I’d like to make a linguistic note here. Where Americans almost always say or write “immigrant” (Einwanderer), Germans almost always use Ausländer (foreigner).] This born-foreign status can apply to many, but not all actual first-generation German citizens.

One might assume this has to do with skin color. Turks, Italians, Moroccans, Africans—they’re from other places and they don’t/can’t/won’t integrate. That Germans refuse to acknowledge them as Germans is just racism, right?

But Russians, Poles and Czechs also count as foreign/ers. It’s taken me a long time to recognize, but integration and acceptance of foreigners has to do more with language and speech than with skin color. For once, it's not entirely about race.

The United States prides itself on its integrative capacity. I always think of the various Indian or Chinese kids in our school that I thought of as being American, despite their parent’s national origin. What made those kids “American” were their values and speech habits, not their skin color.

In defense of my fellow Ausländer, I’ve tried to identify with them and call my friends and fellow students out on what I perceive as racism. They, in response, deny that I’m really foreign.

A few things that "foreigners" do:

Honk when someone gets married, has a baby, or wins a football game.
Let their children pee in public during the daytime.
Barter with the baker about the price of bread.
Violate building codes by cramming too many people into one apartment.
Park or drive inappropriately (because German parking rules are not at all complex).
Have mullets.
Oppress their womenfolk.
Listen to loud, bad music in the train through their cell phones.
Speak bad German.

Clearly, real Germans don't do any of these things. I don't do any of these things, speak German, am Protestant and have a cute accent, and therefore, I'm not foreign.

***

Neither Steve nor I really like our neighborhood. It's full of loud, ugly people with too many children who can't park their pimped-out cars. I don’t like our neighbors because they’re proletarian and loud; Steve doesn’t like them because they’re foreign. Or because their foreign-ness expresses itself in irritating, proletarian ways.

As a left-liberal US-American, I constantly look out for racism in my thinking and doing. Disliking our neighbors for their loud dog, thieving children and huge pile of shoes in front of their door and then referring to them as Gypsies comes off as racist to me.

I don't only dislike our neighbors at home. I also dislike our neighbors when they shop at the local discount grocer, "Penny Markt." I actually prefer shopping with the Muslims, because they're quiet, don't smell and rarely buy huge amounts of cheap beer. Proletarian Germans, on the other hand, often shop in their house shoes (i.e., socks with sandals), don't wash beforehand
and have loud children in tasteless, whorish clothing. For Steve, hating on these people is worse than hating on the Gypsies because these people are just poor.

Class, once again, is the most important difference between Europe and America. Americans worry about discrimination mostly because of race, religion, national origin. [If we really care about misogyny is another question entirely.] Our land of immigrants is "classless," so class is never an issue. Europe, on the other hand, takes only slowly to multiculturalism but has been dealing with class ever since there were plebians and publicans.

Learning English Through Daytime TV

2008-06-10T11:52:00.004+02:00

A friend of Steve's from Halle sent us an unexpected gift recently: copies of The Complete Golden Girls. Now that we've got short and kind of entertaining to watch (I'll explain Steve's love for crappy trashy movies later), I've been subjected to a lot of Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia.
Although watching complete seasons of kitschy old TV may seem painfully gay-bourgeois (someone intervene if we start watching Bewitched), there is a silver (or in this case, Golden) lining: Steve's learning television English. By the time he gets to the end of season seven, there'll be no hindrance to my watching The Daily Show, Law and Order, and Adult Swim when he comes to visit.

Strange Inconsistency

2008-06-10T11:31:00.003+02:00

So Emory graduated about a month ago. School ended in Georgia a few weeks ago. I haven't been able to keep track of things because it still doesn't feel like June to me. The weather here is more like April in Atlanta: pollen-filled, warmish but occasionally chilly. Or in other words, I'm not sweating constantly, so I don't think that it's actually summer.

In any case, it stopped being cloudy for a few hours one day recently, and I decided to go for a run. Feeling painfully white, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and jog shirtless, both getting tanner and getting fitter at the same time.
Totally normal, right? One of the benefits of living in a neighborhood in the US near a school or university are the hot shirtless teams jogging around; I went jogging shirtless between April and October in Atlanta without anyone batting an eye (that I noticed).

Running down the staircase, I caught the firemen who live in the second floor at the mailboxes. "Hello," I said.
Their response was an ugly glare of shocked outrage.
Had I broken some strange taboo? Have I really gotten so fat as to not go jogging shirtless?
As I continued down the street, old people stopped to stare at me, and a teenage girl of Turkish decent took time to shout at me.
Once I was in the park, no one seemed to respond, but those in the street troubled me. What was so wrong with jogging shirtless?

When I asked Steve, he told me that I was #1 crazy to use a few hours to go jogging shirtless, since it is never sunny here anyway and #2 stupid to think that other people would do that because "we're not so vain to care about being well-tanned." My behavior was akin to going to a supermarket without a shirt on, in his view.

The huge numbers of tanning beds and popularity of nude beaches would prove to the contrary. Germans love being tan, just like all other white folk. What I completely didn't understand was their shock at my shirtless-ness (as opposed to my desire to tan).

German magazines are full of topless women. All of the major tabloids have full spreads of naked or nearly-naked women. Gay magazines with naked men on the covers and full frontage in the centerfold are sold on streetcorners in normal kiosks. There are almost always more sex shops than fast food joints around central train stations in this entire country. They pride themselves on their openness with sex—my 8th graders make out in the hallways, something punishable in the USA—and frequently deride American culture as being "prudish." When I explain that jogging shirtless (or in a sports bra) is normal behavior, my friends almost always respond with a surprised comment about supposed American prudery. And when I point out that being uncomfortable with people jogging (or playing soccer) without a shirt is equally prudish, they claim it has nothing to do with sex and therefore an inapt metaphor.

I'll put this strange inconsistency down with other unexplainable quirks of German culture, like buying bread in house shoes and fear of cross-ventilation.
From the Bild Zeitung:

Itchy Eyes Say Yes To Desert

2008-05-27T21:59:00.002+02:00

My number of reasons for going to Turkmenistan has plummeted over the last few weeks: relationship with Steve, lack of patriotism, weariness with being an English teacher. My itchy, watery eyes and simply delicious post-nasal drip, on the other hand, are more than a little bit excited to leave the fruitful, well-pollinated lands of the West.

You don't need to worry about your antihistamine tolerance in the Karakum.

Most Eurotrashy Thing Ever

2008-05-25T21:51:00.004+02:00

I've discovered the European version of the Super Bowl party: the Eurovision Song Contest.

Three hours of some of the worst pop you've ever heard, from a Europe that includes Turkey, Israel, Russia and the Caucasian states.

For your listening pleasure, the winners:

Russia

Ukraine

Greece

The last two are actually from the semi-finals; YouTube, why do you fail me?

The Serbian commentators had some pretty fantastic "bored English" accents, and all of the Eastern European participants confirmed the stereotype that ex-Communists wear too much makeup.

Not Leftist Enough

2008-05-25T21:38:00.006+02:00

Steve and I went to a counterdemonstration today. About 700 “anti-fascists” gathered across from an old memorial, where around thirty Neo-Nazis had decided to honor some guy from the 1920s, who had blown up a bit of subway while the French were occupying the Rheinland. Police surrounded us on every side and were carefully checking that no one had brought glass bottles or explosives. All of us—anarchists, communists, “left autonomous groups,” and ordinary leftists—were given a sheet of instructions and a number to call in the event we got arrested. Warnings about police spies, resisting “state force” without being punished for it and otherwise tips on giving the police (Bullen) hell gave me cause to worry.
“Are we doing something illegal?” I asked.
“We’re showing the Nazis that we don’t want them to carry through their demonstration. The police will try and keep us from doing that,” Steve explained.

During a (neo)Nazi march, the anti-fascists like to sit in rows on the street to be marched on and prevent the Nazis from going down it. The police then usually respond by asking the anti-fascists to stop interrupting a registered and permitted march (the Nazis always do their paperwork), and then arresting them en masse when they do nothing, hence the “what to do when you get arrested” instructions. At this protest, we just made a bunch of noise to try and distract the neo-Nazis, because the police had already cleverly circled around the anti-fascists to prevent us from getting close to and/or bothering the Nazis.

The anti-fascists had two major topics to shout about, besides hating on Nazis in general: one, that they were revising history and two, that they are a registered party in some state parliaments.

Opposing historical revisionism (i.e., making heroes out of murderers) is something I can get behind, but banning a party from parliament makes me uncomfortable. Something about it just seems, well, fascist to me.

And preventing someone from demonstrating—their democratic right—strikes me as anti-democratic as well.

Does this make me pro-Nazi? Not exactly, but for a lot of the socialists there, it made me uncomfortably libertarian.

***

A few months ago, some friends and I were discussing whether or not the Green Party should continue its support of German troops being in combat zones in Afghanistan. When my friends came to the firm conclusion that German troops have no place fighting abroad, ever again (Nie wieder Krieg!), I asked them if it were morally responsible to just leave a country in the middle of a civil war, just because sixty years ago, Germans were responsible for the greatest war and genocide in history.
I was a little shocked at myself. What was I doing, defending one of our wars? Hadn’t I just used a Republican argument for staying in Iraq?

When I try to explain the American (educational, health care, electoral, economic…) system, “but that’s just not humane/moral/just” comes up pretty often, and I find myself falling back on obtuse libertarian arguments to explain why it happens to be that way. I know that the American system is terribly unjust and clearly NOT WORKING, but I defend it anyways. Even if you know your mother is an abusive, alcoholic bitch, you just have to stand up for her when someone else calls her a slut. Somehow, I’m not leftist enough to overcome elementary school patriotic brainwashing. Nor am I so leftist to think that all American values are totally evil, but we’ll come back to that later (with my justification for joining the Peace Corps).

The political scene here is much further to the left here, so in a way, I’ve been moved to the right by a matter of national origin. All Germans take (nearly) free higher education, universal health care, generous public retirement pensions and unemployment insurance for granted. The government might start asking for tuition to better fund their universities and encourage students to graduate in less than ten years, but it’s not going to let “the invisible hand of the market” so much as touch the health of the people.

Belief in all of these things and thinking that capitalism isn’t always such a good thing lets me casually define myself as “radically leftist” in the USA, even though that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’m friends with real radical leftists here. They believe in the Revolution, in anarchy, in destroying rather than reforming the system.

This kind of skinheads-and-baseball-bats kind of leftism makes me nervous. Can’t we just tax the wealthy and work slowly (through education, through social entitlement programs) toward a classless society? Will hitting Nazis with golf clubs (or banning them from parliament) help them (or other conservatives) recognize that class privilege and market greed ruin human life? Probably not, but that’s not what these anti-fascists got into the game for. They’re the same breed as the Nazis: angry, discouraged working class people who’ve been cheated by the System, and they’ve found their release in Mohawks, bad techno music, black clothes and violence. The Germans have gotten used to these kinds of radical leftists. Police train all year long for the annual riots on May 1, when “leftist autonomous groups” and extreme right-wingers fight each other in the street and set cars on fire. Steve rapidly got frustrated with me when I couldn’t understand the difference between ordinary leftists and these “radical leftists.” Apparently “radical leftists” are not the vegan stoners who make their own clothes and ride sweatshop-free bicycles that I imagine (those would be Green Party members), but just angry people without any real political goals. They just don’t want Nazis to express themselves at all because Nazis are bad.

***

Between defending America, wondering if Nazis should really be kept out of parliament, suggesting that capitalism is sometimes a good thing, I’ve somehow fallen into an uncomfortably conservative position. But that’s not necessarily bad. As I’ve seen from my students at school and my friends at the university, being leftist can be as uncritical and unaware as being Republican. Doodling an anti-swastika doesn’t show any real understanding of why National Socialism was such a great evil, just as wearing a cross doesn’t mean you know what Christ meant about loving your neighbor. Am I investing in a broken system, believing that open debate and a competitive electoral system can bring about social justice? Maybe. But as Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Restricting free expression is anti-democratic, whether you idealize Che or Hitler.

If you feel moved to donate to the ACLU and protect your (and the KKK’s) freedom of expression, please go here.

Only Rich Kids Need Apply

2008-05-21T11:15:00.003+02:00

Big surprise: I have to do my dental examinations for the Peace Corps again, because my exams will be more than one year old when I actually start training. An understandable requirement, considering that there will be little or no dental care in Turkmenistan. The expense, and the thinking (or lack thereof), behind it makes me ANGRY.

#1 We're getting all these examinations primarily so that the U.S. government can't be sued, or otherwise forced to pay for our health care post-service. I'd prefer honesty over the obvious lie of "your health is our first priority." BULLSHIT. The US government doesn't pay for anything except killing people in other countries.

#2 The examination requires not only a full dental exam but also "Panorex bitewing x-rays." These aren't the run-of-the-mill pictures that the dentist always takes, but a huge contraption that takes one picture of your entire mouth. It's accordingly expensive: the x-rays alone were well over $100 last time. And what is the Corps paying for this? Twenty bucks.

I've asked where they think we can get these x-rays for so cheap (does public health have dentists?) but I'll be really surprised if they give me anything more than a form answer.

The medical examination was also a slap in the face: $120 for an exam that included tests for every conceivable disease, the tests of some of which cost well over a hundred dollars by themselves. I didn't get worked up last time because I knew that I should have gone to some "Cheap Testing, FAST!" [We do paternity tests!!!!] place and gotten a $30 exam from some overworked clinic doctor in public health. Instead, I just let papa's health insurance pay for everything, like the spoiled rich boy I am.

Considering the large amounts of CAPITALIZED PRINTING and bold type preferred by the Corps, I'm sure they're pretty inflexible on the "SHALL NOT EXCEED $20" line. It follows that people who can't afford to pay for all these tests clearly should not apply for the Peace Corps.

Being that the Peace Corps (unlike AmeriCorps) requires a bachelor's degree, one could argue that it's already an classist organization. But it is theoretically possible for working class young people to get college degrees, and the Peace Corps even pretends to want to help them (that's what the "loan forgiveness" part of their recruitment propaganda is all about).

But these prohibitive application expenses really demonstrate that the program is exclusively for people with dental care, i.e., people with rich parents.

By contrast, the U.S. military gladly pays for your health and dental care.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The rich have glamorous adventures doing "service" in foreign countries to polish their resumes; the poor die horribly murdering enemies of the state.

Spring, A Season for Travel (Part Two)

2008-04-30T02:02:00.006+02:00

I went to the British Museum over Easter and it overwhelmed me. Not the museum itself—it is certainly quite large—but rather its content forced me to think about my place in humanity. In this museum, people who died and were mummified three thousand years ago are gawked at by schoolchildren every day. They dutifully write down the names and places and strange customs of the Egyptians, but I wonder if they ever really feel wonderment. Three thousand years. I’ve been alive for all of twenty-three of those years, can only remember half, and would never be able to comprehend the depth of my own experience, even if I were to die now. What am I doing, thinking about the life of an Egyptian noble, when I have no idea what I’m doing, here and now?

I felt equally moved, as I always do, by Greek sculpture. Is our civilization producing anything that will last as long, and remain as beautiful, as that which stands in so many museums? Probably.
Am I producing anything, or taking part in anything, that will be stuck in one of those places? Probably not.

The museum is not only impressive in duration but in breadth. In a matter of moments, one can see not only collections on Antiquity, Africa, the Americas and the Islamic World, but also the vastly different cultures of Japan, China and Korea. Human history is not only Western history, but that of many, radically different cultures, each as long as the other. [I know that sounds like an elementary school history lesson.]
Being in London reminded me of how great humanity can be, and what a tiny part of it I am. [That too.]

Paris (which I saw about two weeks ago), by contrast, reminded me that most people do not care. Paris was, without a doubt, the touristiest city I have ever visited. There are fewer obnoxious tourists in Disneyland than in Paris. Not to say that the city wasn’t beautiful, or majestic, or grandiose or Parisian. It was all of those, but all of the famous places were lost behind German retirees and Japanese hordes.

The Louvre, most especially, lost its glamour behind a thousand digital flashes. Anyone who has visited the Mona Lisa knows that the world’s most famous picture sits within a giant immobile frame, as firm and static as her reputation. At any given time, about forty tourists will stand in an arch in front of the picture and take many, many photographs, with flash, even though this is expressly forbidden. No one actually looks at the picture, or wonders why so many people care about such a small portrait; they really care about getting a decent picture to take home to whomever they want to impress.

Although the Mona Lisa rates its own security wall and location marker on the Louvre map, there are other paintings in the museum’s most crowded room. I doubt anyone ever looks at them. I certainly didn’t, for there were way too many people in the room for me to even think of doing anything but leaving. Each of those unviewed paintings is of some historical significance, else it would not hang in the Louvre. Each of those paintings counts as a major contribution to humanity. And yet, the room with the Mona Lisa has nearly forty paintings; the Louvre has over 35000; I have seen at least four museums with similar collections to the Louvre; these museums document exclusively Western art (with a smattering of stolen goods from the Ancient Near East). So in the grand scheme of human history, they are indeed quite unimportant. And the people who take pictures of the most famous of these unimportant paintings are somehow even less important, and someone who blogs about their behavior…

But as all of the tourists to the Lourve and schoolchildren in museums everywhere implicitly understand, all of this would have no importance at all if no one said that it did. And we’re back at cultural construction theory 101.

For those who are reading, this blog is important. I say so.

Another Anti-American Complaint

2008-04-30T00:22:00.004+02:00

I'd like my fellow expatriates to confirm this, but I am completely convinced that American clothes are all designed to be dried in dryers. I have not lost enough weight to look like a 15-year-old suburbanite pretending to be a hip-hopper.

Germans all wholeheartedly believe that driers are not only a waste of electricity (and therefore money), but also damaging to your clothing. Dryer racks and washing machines that spin like jet engines are thus the only appropriate way to get clothing dry.
After only eight short months of dryer-rackage, none of my clothing fits properly. America, lose some weight and get off the drier. I want my future American jeans to hug my ass properly.

Of Sofas and Love(seats)

2008-04-27T19:48:00.007+02:00

“I love you… and not only for your free healthcare.”
Before heading to Germany on the Fulbright, I joked often that I would find a man there and marry him for the entitlement programs. I had always planned to find a boyfriend in Germany—for sex, for German practice—just as I had done in Berlin (and have often recommended). These boyfriends would be like any others that I’ve ever had: fun for a while, but always inherently flawed. Gay dating is like Greek tragedy, full of hubris, thanatos and naked men. Ever a Classicist, I associated long-term relationships with other heterosexual activities, like breeding and living in the suburbs. Thus, gay boyfriends are like cheap sofas: you ought to have one, they can be found anywhere with an IKEA, and they’re not worth moving. Leave him on the sidewalk for the garbage man.

With this in mind, I went looking for men in Gladbach and Düsseldorf almost before I arrived. The gay scene in Germany is very similar to that in the USA. There are lots of parties with terrible house music, lots of required alcohol consumption, lots of cheap sex (from/over the Internet, in bushes, anonymously), and the occasional drag queen (Tunte). The important difference is that gay people here can get domestic partnerships, which grant them to some of the rights of marriage (adoption and taxes being the most important exceptions). As a result, the scene isn’t as wildly decadent—these people can enjoy the knowledge that when they’re fat and old, they can easily find and nearly-marry someone in the same situation. American gays (un)consciously fear old age not only because they won’t get laid as easily, but because they know that boyfriends can always get other jobs and move away. Without paperwork, a relationship is as passing as a blowjob in a park. When 35 hits, the men don’t come as quickly, and all that’s left over are fat girls and cases of clap.

***
I met Steve at the university gay organization’s semester-opening party. We both ordered gin and tonic (an uncommon drink in Germany), and I made some clever comment. We danced, drank heavily at a different, skeezier bar, and talked about the nature of man. A standard opener, for me. A few dates later—at various bars, baking pie at my flat—and we were together.

It started to get complicated when Steve and his colleagues in the gay organization were part of a drag show. Every year, all of the university gay organizations in Germany have a conference near Göttingen, and all participants are required to put on a show. Düsseldorf/Gladbach won the last time, and decided to perform it in public. After the show, we all went drinking, and Steve suddenly said to me, “I love you.” I laughed, of course, and told him that he had had too much to drink and had let the cosmetics go to his head. Later, after cold leftovers at my apartment, I realized that he was being serious. He would wait for me.

I panicked.

There are lots of difficulties to dating abroad: cultural and linguistic misunderstandings (see Alex Pollack's blog for plenty of those), differences in values, arguments about what to eat for breakfast, and most troubling, the inherent deadline. An expatriate always goes home, eventually. That’s why permanent expatriates are called “immigrants.” I have never had plans to immigrate to Germany. The Fulbright was supposed to be another shiny point on my resume, not a first step toward German citizenship. But suddenly, a handsome, smart, caring, politically-appropriate guy had fallen in love with me in a country where gay people have long-term, government-approved relationships.

I decided to pretend that the comment had been one of drunk passion, and keep playing the game as it should have been: we had been together about two months, and that was no time for the L-word. But after we came back from Berlin in January, we started fighting over the smallest things: bitchy jokes, roommate-relationships, that I go swimming on Friday nights. Steve thought I wasn’t putting enough time into the relationship, because he believed that we could make it past the Peace Corps hurdle. I didn’t want to hurry things, and felt like seven months to July was a long time. Moreover, I was afraid about being trapped in Germany. I compromised, we made up, and I promised to return to Germany, even though it felt like a lie.

Then we went to Frankfurt for my government passport. Because the trains were on strike, we had to walk everywhere. And sometime during that long walk in the beautiful late-winter sun, through medieval alleys and modern streets, I fell in love, too. Maybe it was just a sugar high from the marizpan balls we had for dessert, but I decided along the river Main that it wasn’t just all lies and tragic flaws, but that I could, no would, come back to Germany and make this love thing work.

Since then, we’ve seen Paris, and will visit Amsterdam and the USA. We’ll be together until September 8, about three weeks before I go to Turkmenistan. Our correspondence during my Peace Corps service will certainly be turned into a novel, a movie, a mini-series. I’m thinking something Jane Austen-like, only gayer and with more camels. And as of last weekend, Steve and I are living in sin, together.

Moving in with a significant other is a big deal for straight people, but it’s not the end of the line. They can always get engaged, get married, reproduce and otherwise be permanently stuck together. Living together is just another outpost along the relationship Oregon Trail. For gay people, cohabitation is THE END. If you’re lucky, you might live somewhere with domestic partnerships or friendly adoption policies, but for most, if you start living together, it’s time to buy a dog and renovate the floors.

Now I know I’m not really turning into that HRC “ideal bourgeois gay” loathed by queer theorists and mocked by the NYT. We’re only living together for three months before 27 months of desert and distance intervene. Even if I make it back to Germany, we’ve got typical cross-cultural issues to overcome before we get partnered, for example, my inability to speak German properly before my first cup of coffee and his belief that all my American values are capitalist nonsense. And most importantly, we bothered to carry my sofa five kilometers down a busy street because we were too cheap/broke to buy a new one.

***
A clever homily on moving in with a significant other would be appropriate here. So would a reflection on how life is impossible to plan, or how living abroad is all about surprises and new ways of thinking about yourself, the world, and other people. I tried writing all of these, but they all ended up too cliché, too shrill, too kitschy. As for dating abroad, I can still recommend it for improving language, making friends, and learning sexual tricks. But sometimes you just can’t bear to leave that sofa on the sidewalk, and not just for the health care.

Easily Influenced

2008-04-22T19:11:00.003+02:00

Back in January, I read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, saw Into the Wild, and nearly broke up with my boyfriend over my newfound Romantic love for America.

Kurt Vonnegut's ranty semi-memoir A Man Without A Country and a Frankfurter Allgemeine article about the ugly new American embassy in Berlin are turning me anti-American again.

Constant change really keeps a love-hate relationship going, I think.

Easily Distracted

2008-04-22T19:08:00.002+02:00

I admit I've been procrastinating a lot on my updates. A Prolific Squalor proves how easily distracted I've become in my first year, post-university.

Unlike most expatriates, I waste most of my time sitting on trains and not on the Internet.

Spring, a Season for Travel (Part One)

2008-04-04T18:40:00.008+02:00

Part One: Alden-Biesen, Frankfurt

The impending arrival of spring has encouraged me to get out of rainy Düsseldorf and visit other, equally rainy parts of Europe. Since about the middle of February, I’ve been traveling about every other weekend, sometimes for business, sometimes for pleasure. As you can see from the subhead, I haven’t been to a bunch of famous places, but tourism hotspots rarely feature life-changing experiences.

Alden-Biesen, Belgium
Starting in November, I began to direct an extracurricular group with a colleague of mine. The students (grades 10, 11, 12) were to prepare a presentation on a topic of European interest (integration), a proposal for the European Parliament on the topic (funding for integration courses), give a brief introduction to their school and region, and play two countries in a debate on the proposals. We were Germany and Ireland, and schools from the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy played Finland, the United Kingdom, Poland and Romania. Twelve students and two teachers from each school stayed in the Hogwarts-like castle for a week, and enjoyed trips to Maastricht, NL, Leuven, BE, Aachen, DE and Brussels.

Maastricht is cute and NOT in Belgium (despite our having bought waffles there); Leuven is the origin of Stella Artois and home of an envy-inspiring ancient university; Aachen is really small for being so-very-founded-by-Charlemange; and Brussels is wonderful. Something about very small alleyways, extortionary prices for everything and being home to excessive bureaucracies just says “Europe” to me. Oh, and that European schoolchildren can go and have Model UN-like conferences in castles is just unfair. Why couldn't we have had an aristocracy?

As for the actual work of the trip, our school proved to be totally unprepared and disorganized but nevertheless capable of improvisation. We mingled easily with the Belgians and Dutch; the Italians were unfriendly and/or bad at English. The educational value of the trip wasn’t that we got to tour the EU Parliament or learn about the real influence of the EU over the policies of its member states, but that our students were forced to speak in English.

As a “Fremdsprachenassistent,” I’m supposed to make English seem exciting and fun. Putting the students into a situation in which they had to speak English was a thousand times more effective than trying to be a “friendly, accessible native speaker.” Talking to a native speaker is intimidating; hitting on a cute Belgian girl in English is just a pleasant challenge for the boys of the Lower Rhine. After a week, even students who never normally speak in class had made friends and were talking fluently with their peers. As the Frankfurt Book Fair taught me in the fall, this trip demonstrated how English works as a world language. Egoistic English-speaking countries assume that the world wants to talk to them; after all, don’t we learn Spanish to go on vacation in Cancun? But the rest of the world isn’t really interested in the English-speaking world; the rest of the world is interested in talking to the rest of the world, and thanks to the British, they do it in English. Any time I think that my jobs of “Fulbright TA” or “PC Volunteer English Teacher Trainer” are totally worthless, I think of the German boy hitting on the Belgian redhead and know that I am not just a footsoldier of American culture imperialism.

Frankfurt
As for my quest to become a tiny pawn in America’s war for world culture dominance, I learned just after getting back from Belgium that the Peace Corps was sending me to Turkmenistan and that unsurprisingly, I had even more paperwork to fill out. My old civilian passport can’t be used for work for the government, so I had to apply for a new one. But because I live abroad, I had to find a “passport agent” somewhere to use the special “apply for a new passport but keep your old one” form. The only passport agent in my part of Germany is in Frankfurt.

To my great surprise, the General Consulate in Frankfurt is not only closed on German and American holidays, but also the last Thursday of the month, which was, of course, my first day free to travel to Frankfurt.

Having waited the week, made an appointment, found a ride over Mitfahrtzentrale and printed out the appropriate forms in duplicate, Steve and I finally got to Frankfurt, only to discover that everything was on strike. The less-than-helpful transport personnel suggested that we take a taxi; we walked. To our great surprise, there were indeed buses running around the Consulate—“strike breakers” when we complained later. No matter how we arrived, Steve had to sit outside in the cold to hold onto our cell phones and camera, both “potentially dangerous electronic devices.” I made it past the inefficient and rude security and waited dutifully in the holding pen for my number to be called. Upstairs, in the “American Citizens Only” section of the Consulate, the bureaucrat on duty told me immediately that I had the wrong form. Confused, I read aloud all the information the Corps had given me, which he dismissed by giving me a new form. It was the same as the old one, but on thicker paper and with pink lettering. In the end, they sent all of my forms somewhere (despite having claimed that they were passport-issuers), including my visa application for Turkmenistan.

Steve and I applied the German Tourism Method and visited: Goethe’s house (surprisingly boring), the Pauluskirche (where German democracy began), the river Main and the Frankfurt School. Frankfurt is Germany’s banking capital and has appropriately ridiculous amounts of money. No life-changing experiences here, except for the post-photography recognition that I need to live somewhere with sunlight.

A Vision of Turkmenistan, or On Entering the Blogosphere

2008-03-27T17:38:00.006+01:00

It’s sometime in 2009. The sun has risen early over the desert, and I’m sitting at my desk before breakfast with the Turkmen, trying to plan the day. I take my glasses on and off, occasionally polish them, and wonder how the hell I’ll make it through another day of teaching without books, Internet, listening comprehension tapes or a bloody chalkboard.

Procrastinating, I read through the last letter from Steve. It arrived two weeks ago, and I’m desperate to hear from him. An embarrassing share of my living allowance goes to writing to “Steffi,” my German “girlfriend” and convenient way to shield myself from Turkmen girls desperate for American citizenship.

Piled on my desk are various dictionaries (English—Turkmen, English—German, German—Russian), a Complete Works of Shakespeare, a book of recorder etudes, and lots of Peace Corps propaganda. When I’m not out wandering the desert streets, drinking tea or trying desperately to understand Turkmen, I sit here, memorizing verbs, playing the recorder and writing.

Writing home, writing to Steve, writing to a class at my old high school; writing lesson plans, letters, journal entries and short stories. Far away from mass culture, newspapers, English-language libraries, movies and even bad pop music, I’m writing more than I ever did in the USA.

Rattling in the kitchen tells me I need to join my host family at table before walking to work, but I indulge first in another moment of nostalgia, back to when I lived in Düsseldorf, in Atlanta, to when I could talk to anyone honestly. After about half a year in Turkmenistan, I’ve gotten used to being in the closet, lying about Steve, and keeping lots of frustration to myself. After all, the Peace Corps is there to help, not to criticize.

But even though I don’t have a camel, even though the Peace Corps has absurdly strict regulations, and even though I haven’t heard from anyone beside Steve or my father, I’m still having a great adventure.

***

I learned of my assignment to Turkmenistan at the end of February. Having been heartily impressed and entertained by Alex Pollack’s series of travelogues, I had been toying with launching a blog for months. I knew, though, that yet another blog by an American teaching English in Europe would be less than interesting, even for the people who occasionally respond to my update emails. Turkmenistan, on the other hand, is a country almost everyone has to Wikipedia before responding to any announcement. Any writing about it would certainly be interesting.

As for writing, I haven’t written seriously since my last letter in the Wheel, and a book review in the last Chattahoochee Review. My journal is less a chronicle of my life and travels and more of a worry stone during times of crisis. I feel English slipping away from me, and I worry about losing my only marketable skill. Forcing myself to keep up a blog and actually write the reflective essays I had so talked about last summer would be the best practice possible for my ideal post-Peace Corps lifestyle. I know none of them will get published in the Gwinnett Daily Post or Atlanta Magazine (despite my wild fantasies to the contrary), but presumably somebody will be reading them, and I’m exactly exhibitionistic enough to enjoy it. Sure, the blogosphere is a realm of cookie recipes, political extremism and wanton bad grammar, but it’s better than nothing.

Welcome, then, to my blog: the new, shiny, Web version of “Innocence Abroad.” Until I leave for Turkmenistan on September 29, 2008, regular updates can be expected. Afterward, look for signs of life every few months.

American Addendum

2008-03-27T17:26:00.002+01:00

Not long ago, a very well informed friend of mine from Düsseldorf's Schwulenreferat expressed the best stereotype of Americans ever.

"Americans really like Impressionism."

Admittedly, it was in the context of a new exhibit coming to Düsseldorf and generally about the weird lack of Impressionist art in Europe, but the image of fat people in shorts talking about Monet at McDonald's just cracks me up.

I Am A Lemon Cookie With Frosting, or Learning to Feel American

2008-03-18T09:52:00.007+01:00

An American is a kind of cookie in Germany. It’s fluffy and lemony, and one side is covered in frosting. The difference between “I’m American” and “I am an American” is the difference between nationality and bakery.

Before I started my Fulbright year, I never really identified with the USA. I had studied abroad before, but always around other Americans. Americans abroad tend to differentiate themselves by region: among expatriates, I’m a Southern boy. In the South, I had always thought of myself as an Atlantan; in Atlanta, a suburbanite. Being an “American” was something vague that I reserved for the excessively patriotic.

Germans don’t know where Atlanta is, let alone the South. And for a lot of people, especially schoolchildren, the USA is a faraway place where Native Americans still live in teepees and black people are little better than slaves. Even among the educated, the average American is a gun-toting religious fanatic with less sense for liberal democracy than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The first time I went abroad, I was so entranced by the glamour of Old Europe that anti-Americanism failed to bother me. After all, I hate President Bush’s politics, the Iraq War and the lack of national health insurance and decent mass transportation. Criticizing the USA was just a part of being an expatriate, and I embraced it somewhat too wholeheartedly, especially in my last “Innocence Abroad” column.

This time around, living in Germany is as unexciting as grocery shopping at ALDI and buying drapes at IKEA. But all that banality is just a sign of my integration, an integration built out of a circle of friends consisting entirely of Germans. Building that circle meant meeting people, and that meant introducing myself.
A lot.

I still say it at least once a week: “I’m American” or “I’m from the USA.” My German accent is such that I don’t sound like Bruce Darnell anymore, and people have to ask what English-speaking nation I come from. After saying that I’m not from England/Canada/New Zealand (sadly), I inevitably have to talk about American politics.

“Did you support the Iraq War?”; “Clinton or Obama?”; “Will Obama be assassinated because he’s black?”; and worst of all, “How do you like it here in Germany?”, which really means “How is Germany better than the USA?” If we make it past the politics, occasional criticisms still slip out: “America doesn’t really have its own national food, does it?”; “I bet you eat burgers all the time”; “You all don’t have your own culture, anyway” and so forth. The comments aren’t really meant as criticism, but they require answers of the same kind. Inevitably, I resort to one of three: the “winner take all” system is at fault; diversity and pluralism are American, not a sign of absent American-ness; or that the object of criticism, be it McDonald’s, obesity or silent racism, is just as prevalent in Europe as in the US.

What should be apparent from these answers is that they are all apologies for America. What am I, a self-professed leftist and Eurocentric personality (my thesis was on T. S. Eliot, for Heaven’s sake!), doing defending the United States?

At first, I was excited to be the object of so much attention. After all, all I had to do was say that I was an American, and suddenly I would be part of any conversation. I could even criticize the USA along with them, and feel like a member of the group. But after a while, their comments about “Americans” started to feel like comments about me. Maybe it was the intensity of the looks—some curious, some questioning, some angry—or that “you all” still has a “you” in it. Every time someone accuses Bush of cheating in the last two elections, it feels like they mean I don’t believe in democracy. When they claim that Americans have no national culture—be it food, history or literature—I feel like some kind of europoseur. I’m responsible for the Iraq War, pollution, the failing dollar, the housing market, Hollywood shallowness and paranoia on the border. I know that they don’t really mean me, but they do mean my country, and I’ve turned patriot in response.

Being that offense is the best defense, I like to reflect criticisms of the USA back at Germany, a relatively easy task considering the similarity of the two nations (potato salad, automobile industries, ALDI…). The Germans, however, have had lots of practice criticizing their own nation (a la Marx), so to imply that being German is all about bureaucracy, racism against Turks and educational systems that repress rather than encourage just brings acknowledgement and shoulder shrugs. In their European superiority (trickily buried under Holocaust guilt and socialist humility), they know that no matter how bad it gets in Germany, there will always be more homeless people/Nazis/Mike Huckabees in the USA. Not like they would be proud of that, because only Americans/Nazis have national pride. Even more troublesome is that the American educational system brainwashes its children to feel patriotic, so even the most hardened leftist critic of the USA can still get a little teary during the Gettysburg Address.

Now it would be typically American of me to be really angry and bitter over their smug nonpride, but that doesn’t bother me. Overcomplicated German emotions brought us great concepts like Angst, Schadenfreude and das Unheimliche, so I would welcome Nichtstolz to the English language. Cultural exchange is part of my job here, so when I talk about educational systems at school, it counts as a give-and-take rather than pure criticism. We don’t teach foreign language; they don’t teach critical thinking; we all learn something in the end and there will be a quiz after this lesson.

It all comes down to the cookies. Not only are we fanatical warmongers with outdated economic ideas and no social consciousness, but we’re tasty cakes with cute accents. But if it comes to choosing between being the “cute American” or a flag-waving invader, I’ll live with being a cookie.

Cookie-Flavored Alcohol and Other Stories

2008-01-24T21:27:00.002+01:00

The original version of this update was repeatedly delayed and eventually scrapped for lack of content beyond an exceptionally dry analysis of the German educational system. You’ll forgive me, then, for not having written. Cheers to those of you whom I managed to see while I was in Atlanta; best wishes for the New Year to those I did not. My visa ends in June, so I’ll be unemployed in America this summer whether I like it or not.

For those who don’t want to read further: I’m in a remarkably serious relationship, relatively contented living abroad and working as a “native speaker,” and frequently miss American television, film and burritos. I also enjoy fretting constantly about the future/the Peace Corps and have come to immensely dislike riding buses.

“Perhaps You Fulfill Me The Wish That I Become A Dog”
I spent the last eight weeks or so of school accompanying one seventh grade, two eighth grade and one thirteenth grade English classes. Occasionally I managed to wedge my way into the absurdly strict curriculum, but have spent an unfortunate amount of time pronouncing words and helping children do worksheets, thanks to my natural inclination not to take away someone else’s job.
Thanksgiving and Christmas were definitely the highlights, especially the above-quoted sentence in the subhead, taken from one 8th grader’s letter to Santa Claus. Because of my failure to really get in touch with students during classes, I’m starting an English club and an Abitur (kind of like the AP exam) study session. If the next update is titled “Don’t tell the Peace Corps that I’m a complete failure,” then you know that I couldn’t motivate the Germans to watch The Simpsons in English (a surprisingly difficult task, but that’s a story for another letter).

Of Cold and Cherry Seeds
After a New Year’s Eve full of drunk people and frequent explosions (thanks to a bizarre tradition of setting off firecrackers in the street) in Berlin, I headed to Halle an der Saale, birthplace of G. F. Handel and my boyfriend, Steve. There, I learned that Steve’s family is still basically living in Socialist East Germany. They don’t live in Plattenbau (planned housing), but they do have coal stoves, something I’ve never seen in my life. I chose not to ask about the environmental repercussions of burning coal, or question the huge amounts of dust and sundry filth, because Steve seemed very excited to have such a powerful furnace. It’s true, coal furnaces are much hotter than the mediocre hot-water pipes in the West, and it was also necessary, because it was asscoldfreezing.
As a consequence, we spent a lot of time in well-heated museums. At one such museum in Dresden, one can “marvel at and be astounded by” carved cherry seeds, the most famous of which features between 115 and 157 faces, according to the bizarrely overenthusiastic wall display. A 3’x3’ sailing ship carved entirely of ivory is another excellent reason to travel to Dresden, where they recently spent billions of euros restoring a church—to look remarkably like every other church in Germany.

Sein Geist ist kühn, sein Herz ist rein
Something that Germany isn’t spending a lot of money on is my university orchestra. Although we usually rehearse in the fabulous Hörsaal (auditorium) 3A, we got to spend an entire weekend practicing together in the foyer of an elementary school. Needless to say, I’ve grown to miss Emerson Concert Hall and Dr. Prior yelling at the second violins for not practicing or Dr. Stewart’s “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” way of talking with trumpets. Our director is kind of a sap, but a nice sap. She somehow managed to sap her way into Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle (symphony hall) for our upcoming concert, though, so you can all eagerly await pictures of my musical debut in a very famous piece of Fascist architecture.

Nearly Arrested for Jaywalking or Read Henry Miller
On a particularly irritating day last week, as I walked through my shitty, hideous immigrant neighborhood, I decided to run across the street despite the red light. I managed to do so directly in front of a police van. They stopped me, asked for the identification that I wasn’t carrying (my passport), recognized that I was an American and let me go without the fine. Thank goodness I’m not Turkish.

Because my job is a total joke, my university courses a waste of time and my commute at least an hour, I spend a lot of time meditating on the future, and whether or not I want to live in the United States. Were the relationship with Steve to work out (and it seems like it might), I’d have to settle for being an English teacher and give up my vague career plans of “publishing, or the National Endowment for the Arts (because a great nation deserves great art).” I’d also have to accept living abroad, possibly forever. While I appreciate the very real possibility of living in a country with national health care, gay civil unions, excellent mass transit and tasty, tasty bread, I don’t know if I want to be a foreigner.

While I’ve certainly met non-Americans in the USA before, I never really thought about their non-American-ness, being that they all spoke perfect English and were strange only in amusing ways. I also never really considered how terribly traumatic it must be to give up a native culture in favor of that of a host country. After all, everyone wants to move to America (right?), so they should have no qualms about eating apple pie, celebrating Thanksgiving and working themselves to death. Consequently, I’m less than inclined to give up our obviously superior culture (the words “it’s different at home” come out of my mouth with surprising frequency, though I really usually mean “Emory is way better than this shithole”) and take up wearing house shoes, vacationing in Majorca and consistently wondering if I’ve chosen the correct gender of a noun.

***
I just finished Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” at the suggestion of the excellent Angela Porter, and heartily recommend it to everyone. If I slept with prostitutes instead of living next door to them and lived in France instead of Germany, it would be my life. I exaggerate, but you should read it anyway. I indulge in one long quote:

The last thing we talked about, as we stood there waiting for the train to pull out, was Idaho. The three of us were Americans. We came from different places, each of us, but we had something in common—a whole lot, I might say. We were getting sentimental, as Americans do when it comes time to part. We were getting quite foolish about the cows and sheep and the big open spaces where men are men and all that crap. If a boat had swung along instead of the train, we’d have hopped aboard and said good-bye to it all… It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman, or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…

I don’t dream of big open spaces, but I do often imagine that life in the USA is different, somehow, from here in old pessimist Europe. It isn’t really, but pretending otherwise is what being an American is all about. That spirit of wanton optimism, along with a sackful of anti-Russian propaganda, is what I plan on taking with me to Central Asia.

And My Camel Shall Be Named “Humphrey”
I still don’t know where the Peace Corps will send me, if they ever get done processing my paperwork. Steve supports my desire to do national service, and I plan to write him long letters, as if I were in the actual military. My Russian has made absolutely no progress, a consequence of my not studying and a truly disorganized language course. Whether 27 months in Nowhere, Somewherestan will be the greatest adventure of my life or pure torture is a question best left to history. Once I get an address, I expect all of you to send toilet paper.

And as it is nearly Karneval, I wish you all a very hearty HELAU.

PS One of the violas was given Printenlikör, or Christmas-cookie-flavored schnaps, for Christmas by one of her alcoholic clients (she’s a social worker). If you love eating cookies and drinking heavily to celebrate Christmas, this is your country.

You Get What You Pay For, or Tell Emory I Miss It

2007-11-11T21:23:00.009+01:00

A wise professor once told me that one can discern a lot about the quality of a person’s life based on his or her complaints. Taking this axiom into consideration, the Fulbright has turned from boring and potentially terrible to pretty awesome.

October has passed rather eventfully. My schedule has filled up quickly between classes and activities at the university, tutoring for cash, occasional travel, and partying far too late into the night. Germany, however, has lost all of its glamour for me. I feel extremely comfortable and at home here, but I could just as easily be living in the Midwest (where it is also grey, industrial and cold).

What has gained glamour, by contrast, are my four wonderful years at Emory. For background: I’m taking courses on Hugo von Hofmansthal (an Austrian poet) and Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, and in Russian (for the Peace Corps) and German at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf. I also swim, work out and play in the orchestra there. My classes take place in buildings that would make White Hall look like a paradise. The classrooms have chalkboards and barely enough lighting, let alone smart boards, computers and sufficient seating. I swim nine to twelve to a LANE at the pool that the “swim team” rents from a public swimming pool twice a week. Their workout facilities (for a university of 40,000) are smaller and filthier than one wing of the WoodPEC. Their library—besides being ugly, crowded and bureaucratic—has relatively few books, no study space and limited computer access. English majors might have been a little bookish and odd at Emory, but they really don’t compare to the unwashed, unread, pony-tailed literature majors here. And I’m rehearsing in a lecture hall. A lecture hall.

So the next time you’re walking around the manicured lawns and gardens of our marble-paneled, Italian Neo-Renaissance university, perhaps to take in a lecture (even a minor one, with the free wine and cheese), or visit our museum, or hear a concert with our wondrous organ, or even just to get a bagel, tell Emory that I miss him/her very much, and will send money soon.

****

I recently endured a conference with the other Fulbright TAs and have come to the conclusion that my school—with its petty teachers and remarkably politically-unconscious students—is pretty awesome. I have had only a few minor spats with teachers who thought the best way to explain something to me would be to treat me like a student, and my largest irritation are the giggles of inattentive seventh graders. I’ll save a later e-mail for my official rant about the weirdness of the German school system. But as for this month, I’m very satisfied with my classes and my task of “being a native speaker.”

Teaching has officially left my list of potential careers, and publishing has forced its way to the front. At the Frankfurt Book Fair for The Chattahoochee Review at the beginning of October, I shadowed a literary agent and tried to convince Scandinavians that TCR would be the perfect entrance vehicle for a literary career in the USA. Though I don’t want to work for a litmag, talking about books for money sounds like my ideal profession.
Alfred A. Knopf, here I come!

****

Other Germans stereotype Düsseldorfers as being “schickimicki.” “Schickimicki” might best be explained by the coolest Currywurst stand in Düsseldorf, a restaurant highly reminiscent (in décor) of The Raging Burrito. At “Curry,” patrons can buy a tasty sausage covered in gold foil. That’s “schickimicki.”Düsseldorf, being “schickimicki,” has extremely few divey bars and clubs (so the opposite of Berlin). A party in K21, the museum for art of the 21st century, is more our style.

At one of these late-lasting (no 230 curfew!) parties, I had the good luck to meet another gay guy my age who enjoys gin and tonic (rare in Germany), the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros, being awkwardly bourgeois, and talking philosophy. Based on our dates over the last few weeks, (baking, French film, arguing about the nature of man, lentil soup) I’d say he’s a keeper.

***

Today (November 11), at 11:11, Hoppeditz, the chief clown of Karneval, awoke, criticized
the conservative mayor of Düsseldorf, and threw a great party.
In the middle of town, on a Sunday afternoon.

Helau, everyone.

From Nuns to Prostitutes

2007-10-01T21:17:00.001+02:00

I apologize for the absurdly long delay on this update (it seems my facebook wall has a bit of a trend), but my Internet access has been sadly limited to cafés for the last month. This e-mail marks my triumphant departure from the tiny, boring, nun-filled village of Mönchengladbach-Neuwerk and my arrival in Düsseldorf.

I decided to leave the nuns almost immediately upon arriving in the Internet-less dormitory, but my displeasure didn't grow into panic until the townsfolk put on wooden shoes decorated with autumnal themes and had a parade.

Luckily, I now live in the international quarter (i. e., full of migrant workers, Turkish food, Bollywood movie rentals and callshops), next door to "Big Eden Erotel: Girls, Trans, Boys, Couples Welcome." Fellow Düsseldorfers usually respond with "oh…" when I tell them I live on Worringer Straße (sadly, not as amusing as Steve's former address).

Speaking of Düsseldorf, it's similar to any large Northern city in character, weather and architecture: Grey, industrial, on a river, and full of potato-eating people with funny accents. Think of Philly, but founded a few centuries earlier. Our local beer is "Altbier," a delicious dark beer infinitely superior in every way to the filth they drink up the river in Cologne ("Kölsch"). Cologne is our rival city on the Rhine, and even though it has a big fancy cathedral and a better gay scene, it is my civic duty to hate on it (and their beer). I'm not certain how the gay scene is here, exactly, but the people I've met are much friendlier than Berliners, and I live right around the corner from it.

And everything else, really, since I'm living right in the city center. You can find my IKEA-decorated apartment really close to the central train station, which is only a short train ride from the airport, which features a direct flight to Atlanta.

As for coming to visit, I highly recommend coming in February over Karneval (Mardi Gras), when I have school free and everyone in the entire Rheinland gets drunk, dresses like a clown and has a parade.

Another highlight of any visit will be going to a Borussia Mönchengladbach soccer game. It's only seven euros; the beer is plentiful; the mascot is a foal named Gunter; and considering all the singing and dancing, it's just a big party.

Borussia is about the only good thing about Gladbach, except for my little school in the village of Hardt. There, I teach advanced English to 8th, 9th, 12th and 13 th graders. I'm also supposedly leading the 8th graders in some (potentially disastrous) kind of extracurricular cooking event about Thanksgiving for our open house. The children are all pleasant and my colleagues are hardly as bitter and petty as they could be. We drink coffee constantly and bitch about having to grade papers—it's great! Eventually I'll be tutoring to supplement the meager sum the Germans government pays me, but I won't have students until my colleagues fail everyone after fall break.

I'm also studying at the university here, but mostly that involves playing in the orchestra, using the gym, going to their equivalent of Pride, and riding all the mass transit in the region for free. Classes don't start until the middle of October.

That about wraps up what I've been up do here in Germany, with the exception of a quick visit to Ireland. Go to Ireland. Go to Belfast. Take a black taxi tour, and learn about the freedom-fighting aspects of the IRA. It's like visiting the West Bank, except they speak English, like Americans, and you learn about state murder by Britain (instead of Israel).

And Dublin is obsessed with James Joyce.