Vocabulary fun fact: gutbürgerlich
(roughly, good-citizeny) is an adjective used to describe foods, places,
activities, and even people that exemplify German culture—it reminds me of my
father, extolling the importance of “good midwestern values.”
On my first day in Frankfurt, I experienced a couple of gutbürgerliche things, starting with a
typical German breakfast complete with Speck
(bacon), Fisch (fish), Brötchen und Semmel (rolls and more
rolls), Sahnemerretich (creamed
horseradish), und saure Gurken (pickles).
Then for dinner (most gutbürgerliche
activities, I’m noticing, involve food and/or drink) we went to Atschel, a
prototypical German restaurant in the super-touristy district south of the Main
called Sachsenhausen. We drank Apfelwein (apple
wine, more like cider) poured from a stoneware pitcher called a Bembel, and I ate Frankfurter schnitzel
with grüner Soße. Apfelwein and grüne Soße are both ganz hessisch (very Hessian).
Also at the restaurant, there was a group of men on what is
called Junggesellabschied or Junggesellfeier, the German equivalent
of a bachelor party. The Kellner carried
trays upon trays of drinks out to the backdoor patio for these guys, and as
they drank, they started to sing: the drunker they got, the louder and more
jovial the singing became. My Betreuungslehrerin
S and her daughter G (there's also a son, M, 25) seemed mildly annoyed by this, but, as I told them, “Das finde ich wahnsinnig toll” (“I think
that’s insanely great”) because it’s so typical of a certain image of Germany
that we have in the States. Additionally, when men get together and drink to
excess in America, they rarely sing, and if they do, it’s nothing as cheerful
as a German beerhall song. Going in die
Kneipe (to the bar), drinking and singing: also gutbürgerlich.
After dinner, G, who’s twenty-four, was going out with some
friends, one of whom was just back from Jakobsweg,
a six-week religious pilgrimage of Catholic origin. G asked me if I wanted to
come with, so in the interest of adventure, I tagged along. When we got to her
friend’s apartment and G explained who I was, one of her friends asked me if I
speak German, and G said, “Ja, sie spricht komplett Deutsch.” And I glowed
with pride (inwardly, of course).
The bar we ended up going to was in Westend-Süd and was
called Bar ohne Namen (Bar without a
Name). It was extremely small and extremely full, and there was only one toilet
for women, which meant a tortuously long Schlange
(literally, “snake,” the German word for line/queue) when one needed to access
it. We sat at a picnic table on the patio and enjoyed the “retro” early-2000s
R&B pumping through the sound system. One of our group was A, the younger
sister of one of G’s friends, M. Incidentally, A looks exactly like a girl I
danced with at my studio in Mason; M looks like the mean girl from Zenon: Girl of the Twenty-First Century. The point, though, is that A is only sixteen, but she was there at the bar and
absolutely no one cared. There was no carding, nothing—although M did order her
drinks from the bar for her. Apart from the non-sensationalized presence of a teenager in a bar, and of course the ubiquity of German, drinking
at Bar ohne Namen was exactly the
same as drinking at any bar in the U.S., complete with overpriced drinks and
creepy/awkward men staring from afar. Also,
nicht so gutbürgerlich. Aber es hat trotzdem viel Spaß gemacht. (So, not so gutbürgerlich. But it was
a lot of fun anyway).
Sonstige Bemerkungen (Miscellaneous
Observations)
v
My thought process is already starting to morph
into a komische Mischung of English
and German—in fact, a good chunk of this blog entry was written in German and
then translated. I’m surprised (and thrilled) that this is happening so soon—aber so geht es (but so goes it) when
you’re surrounded by German and Germans, I suppose.
v
Bikes are a way of life here— they’re the most
convenient way to get around the city. I definitely need to look into getting a
cheap one somewhere (der Flohmarkt, flea market, is a
possibility). But riding around the city will take some getting used to:
M&M (S’s son and his girlfriend) took me to Eis Christina, an Eisdiele (ice cream parlor) in Nordend,
and it was a bit anxious-making having to look out for cars and pedestrians—and I didn’t even have to navigate for
myself. Also, M lent me his bike, which was a little too big, and since I’m a
bit out of practice, it was a somewhat ungainly process.
v
New method for disguising my Americanness:
pronounce English words with a German accent. Specifically, words with the
short “A” sound—they don’t have that in German. So here my name is “Keth-rin”, S's dog Nancy is "Nency", and “Android” and “Apple” are “Endroid” und “Epple.”
v
In Germany, almost all businesses are closed on
Sunday, which provided me with my first concrete experience with culture
shock—apart from the Celcius-Fahrenheit and Meter-Feet Conversion Problem,
which has come up several times.
v
One of the most difficult units in
Intro/Intermediate German in my opinion—both when I was learning it and when I
had to drill it as an AT at Kenyon—is asking for and giving directions. An
effective means of teaching this information, I realize now, might be to put
German language-learners in a car with three German twenty-somethings arguing
about the best way to get to a particular bar:”Geh hier links.””Man kann hier nicht links gehen.” “Doch Maria, natürlich
kann man hier links gehen””Geh eine Weile dieser Straße entlang, und dann
rechts—nein, nicht hier rechts sondern das Nächste. Ja, hier gehst du rechts.”
Und so weiter und sofort.
v
On a similar note: While I was out and about
earlier today, just trying to get myself oriented in Westend-Süd, a man stopped
me and asked me, in German, if I knew where to find the Alte Oper (old opera house—which is not, incidentally, that old,
having been destroyed during WWII and later rebuilt). I did, in fact, know
where the Alte Oper was, and I
directed him accordingly: “Gehen Sie
geradeaus, und es liegt auf der rechten Seite der Straße.” But not five
minutes later, the warm fuzzies of having successfully interacted with a random
stranger in German disappeared, when a man shouted something at me in German
and, when I looked startled, immediately switched over to English. Rats.
v
Hearing small children (dh. Five or six years old) speak German fluently continues to be
the cutest and at the same time most humbling thing ever. Additionally, according
to one particularly precocious specimen I saw at Rothschild Park today, German
children, much like the American ones at my summer camp, “like to move it move
it.”
v
Even in Germany, the debate about what, exactly,
constitutes a hipster rages fast and furious—and indeterminate.
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