On German Elections

This Sunday was Election Day in our state (see the results here). For the six weeks beforehand, our neighborhood was home to a lot of interesting posters. Germany has a coalition system, which means that there are a lot of parties (approximately 18 on the ballot). You vote first for a candidate and then for a party, and in some sort of way it translates to a legislature – I’m not sure of the exact process.  It’s an interesting change for us, since we’re used to just having two parties, and maybe a third slightly viable party. In Germany, if it’s something you care about, there seems to be a party for it.

A typical poster looks like this:

This is the guy whose party won. Doesn’t he look smug?

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is Angela Merkel’s party – they’re the conservatives in this election (barring a few exceptions discussed later), which puts them on par with American Democrats. They won, which is a bit of an upset, because our state is a labor union stronghold.

These guys are the typical party for labor union members and the working classes:

Seriously, that’s the best headshot you could take?

The Socialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) are the liberal party (think… maybe Bernie Sanders? my analogy falls apart here) in the election. They were expected to do well, so it was a surprise. However, they had a typo in an ad they put up about education (read about in German here), so maybe it was not such a surprise.

Enough about the boring parties. You’re here for the weird ones, I know.

We have two different Communist parties. First, the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei with some good posters here:

Translation: “Reduce the rent!” (translator’s note: I didn’t think Communists believed in rent…)

Translation:: “Training for all!”

Translation: “Right to work instead of Hartz IV” (Hartz IV is an unemployment program)

Translation: “For cheaper rent, higher salaries and training for all!” (At least the Communists looked a lot more representative of Essen, which is more than I can say for the CDU)

 

Then we had the Marxist-Leninist Partei Deutschland, who had the best posters, but I am still unclear what the difference is between them and the regular Communists. Judging by the content of the posters, though, I’d bet it’s ideological. Lack of purity, or something like that.

“VW, RAG… Prosecute environmental criminals!” (RAG is the mining company in town)

“The anticapitalist alternative”

“Against every imperialist aggression!”

“Participate! So that something really changes!”

“Forbid all Fascist organizations!”

“Protest is leftist”

“Up with International Solidarity!”

“Proletariat of all lands, unite!”

“Politics for workers, not billionaires” (note, they and the DKP use the feminine form of workers)

“Freedom for Kurdistan and Palestine”

“Jobs AND environmental protection”

“Against the rightward shift of the goverment”

We have some other serious parties like the Greens:

“1. Strengthen Families 2. Have time!” I’m not convinced this works better in German

This is too boring to translate.

“1. Build mass transit 2. Get anywhere!”

And other environmentally-focused parties:

“Free bus and train instead of traffic and noise!”

“Protect consumers, not lobbyists!”

“Animals are living things, not industrial commodities!”

Die Linke (the Socialists, or as my conservative student called them, “the third communist party”) chose an old-school revolutionary pose for their posters:

“Show strength for basic rights for everyone, including refugees”

“Show strength for cost-effective living space not in the ass of the world”

“Show strength for a minimum wage to protect from poverty: 12 euro”

“Show strength for Hannelore’s [Hannelore Kraft, the current state governor] forgotten child and school.”

There’s some other more normal parties, with niche appeal. However, there’s also some joke, or slightly joking, parties. For example, the Pirate Party, who are very technologically-focused, and appear to be comprised mostly (if not entirely) of systems administrators. In Düsseldorf on Saturday they were giving out balloon pirate swords, so they were at least popular with children.

“Rad governance? Don’t talk about it, do it!”

“Vote against Nazis!”

And for the fully joke party, we have Die Partei (The Party). They’re inexplicable, but they have funny posters. They also had posters they put up high on lamp posts that said roughly “you could hang a Nazi here.” Those did seem to get taken down rather quickly.

“Fight against elderly poverty! Especially mine.”

“For a weak NRW!”

As you can see, it’s a dizzying array, and I left out a couple I had pictures of (the FDP, for example) for being too boring. I also left out Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD, the allegedly anti-refugee but secretly Nazi party), mainly because I was unable to find one of their posters that wasn’t defaced or torn down.

Election season is one of those “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore” moments for me. I’ll try to do something like this again for the national elections in the fall.

 

A trip to the Polish Forest

Aileen read a website years ago, called Idle Words. It had a post about visiting a primeval forest in Poland with lots of wildlife. The forest he described sounded intriguing, but the process of slow death due to blood-loss to mosquitoes sounded less appealing. So Aileen and I, by some process, decided that the thing to do was to visit in winter. Because, you see, in winter the large animals which one might want to see are still active. The mosquitoes, in theory, should not be. So we booked a trip to Białowieźa Forest for February.

Accordingly, last week, we hopped on a plane and flew to Warsaw. There we were met by a guide from the company we booked a tour with, Wild Poland. From Warsaw we took a long van ride, interrupted by a lunch of “polish dumplings” (dude, we know what pierogi are!). We also stopped at an oddly well lit petrol station.

We arrived in Białowieźa at our accommodations, which were a lodge, normally used by biologists and photographers.

The downstairs had taxidermy and antlers mounted to the walls. The upstairs was frog -themed.

The trip was two days of wildlife touring, then a drive back to Warsaw, where we spent a few hours checking out the old town there.

The first day we went out in the morning before breakfast to look for bison. We very quickly found a few, one of whom posed very nicely for us. I suppose by “posing” I really do mean “showed us his butt.” But I live with a cat so that’s really quite normal behavior for me. Apparently the bulls (which this guy was) are quite unafraid of people, and mostly ignore them unless you get to close. Then…

So better to stay away. More on that later. We also saw a fox later that day. He was running through a field as we drove by in the van (my least favorite fact of the trip–we were riding around in a small group in a van) so I didn’t get a great photo. But he looked pretty fox-like.

After this we had a nice walk in the woods, starting by following the track of a narrow-gauge rail that the Russians put in during World War I so they could get timber out of the forest. We came across the remains of a red deer that a wolfpack had totally stripped – all that was left was some of the bones and the skin. Our guide said sometimes, if it’s a lean winter, they even eat the skin.

We continued walking deeper into the forest, and went to a bison feeding location where a webcam is set up. Sadly, no one wanted a midafternoon snack, so the feeding station was empty. However, on the walk back, we spotted a larger herd, deep in the forest. There were about ten animals, cows and calves, but they were more shy than the males we saw in the morning, so they ran away. In the fresh snow from the storm overnight, we saw the tracks of: wolves, raccoon dogs, foxes, squirrels, badgers, pine martens, roe deer, red deer, mice and voles. We had our lunch break and one of the other travelers sent his drone up to get some footage. He reported that the footage was pretty boring (“just trees as far as the eye can see”, which was sort of the point, but whatever). We went back to the hotel to warm up and dry off. After dinner, we went on an evening walk to spot some more animals. We spotted only tracks (this time deer, fox, boar and hare) but it was great to experience the hush of the forest and Justin took some star photographs.

On the second day in the forest, our pre-breakfast wildlife drive yielded a rare gray woodpecker and two bison.

After breakfast, we got to visit the part I was most excited about: the strict biosphere reserve. This section of the forest is a UNESCO heritage site, and the trees have been untouched for thousands of years. You can only enter with a local guide, and you have to have a permit to go beyond a small corner of the reserve. Most of it is used for scientific study, to examine an ecosystem that was once prevalent in Europe but now really only exists here. Irek, our guide, is a biologist who tells us that his current study is plant tracking, but that it’s very easy right now, since the plants are mostly covered in snow. An unexpected thing about the forest, besides the giant trees (the oldest is ~600 years old), is how much of it is bog. A large part of our walk is through alder carr, a type of forest where alder grows even though it is frequently submerged. Irek also tells us that they can tell where the partisans hid during World War II, because that’s where birch trees grow (as in the picture at left). Birch trees spring up where there’s a clearing, but are generally shorter than other trees so they eventually lose out on the competition for light that governs the structure of the forest. So only where humans have disturbed things in the relatively recent past does one see birch trees.. During our walk, we added the middle spotted woodpecker to our animal list.

After lunch at the hotel, we headed back out, looking for wolf tracks. We saw some fresh tracks in the snow that fell this morning, but didn’t find a wolf. We did find two Tawny Owls, who our guide drew out by knocking on their tree, startling them more than intended. We visited a badger den, but Mr. Badger was off defending Redwall or looking for worms. It started to rain, so we headed back to the fireplace at our warm, dry hotel, stopping only to see a beaver dam, and then for some bison in a field. This visit yielded our best bison photo.

It also yielded our best bison story, as another tour group saw our van pulled over and also stopped. They apparently hadn’t gotten the strict instructions we had (no closer than 50 meters, if the bison wags its tail, grunts or paws the ground, flee) and proceeded to get very close. The bison pawed the ground, and we vacated his field ASAP. Our last view of him from the van was a triumphal pose, having successfully driven the puny humans from his territory. Then it was back to the fire and the bison beer.

After that, the next day we packed up and went to Warsaw and Krakow, which will maybe be the subject of another post. But we will leave you with a photo from Warsaw:

Bad Bloggers. Bad!

So it turns out we don’t do so well at keeping up with this blogging thing. So this entry will attempt to cover, well, all of 2016 I guess. When we last left off in March Aileen was complaining about dictionaries being priced unfairly. Much has happened since then. I’ll mostly cover our travels, because those are probably the most interesting bits with the best pictures.

Neviges

This trip was a short one. I am, for reasons unclear to almost everyone, a big fan of brutalist architecture. So I was browsing Pinterest one day (as you do) and saw a picture of a church. I thought it was neat, and tried to find out more information. Eventually after some google image search detective work I determined it was a church in Neviges. Google maps then told me that this was 15km away, and I had ridden my bike through it before. So I decided we had to visit this church. So one snowy day in January we met up with Juan Carlos and Nuria, and drove to Neviges. The church was an absolutely giant concrete monstrosity. It was weirdly spectacular, especially in the snow. So I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Brutalism

With Lovely stained glass

Very much rose themed

Creepy hands in steel

Belgium and the Ronde

We had a bit of a travel hiatus until spring, when Aileen as a birthday present for me, booked a trip to Oudenaarde in Flanders. On the weekend of the Tour of Flanders. So we rented a car, packed up our bikes drove down Friday evening and met our Airbnb host. We were his first guests ever, which was kind of neat. And he greeted us by offering us two bottles of Westvletern 12. Which was spectacular.   The next day we ambled into town, and saw that the amateur ride of the Tour route was happening. So we jumped in. Partway through Aileen had a small mishap on some cobblestones, so she treated her wounds in the proper Belgian fashion, by stopping for some beer and Frites. I continued on, learning exactly how nasty it is to ride over Flandrian cobbles at (not even racing) speed. Then the next day was race day. We watched just after the feed zone, and not only did we not get a musette or a bottle, we had our little Flandrian flags (seen in the photo below) stolen by a couple kids in full Ettix Quickstep team kit.

Aileen recovers from the excitement

The main bunch cruising home

World champ and eventual winner Peter Sagan making his move

The women’s race

They aren’t poppies, but it is flowers in flandrian fields

Amsterdam

In April our super-cool friends Kacy and Steve and their daughter Paige came to Amsterdam, and we met them there. The original plan had been to go to Brussels, but we rebooked to Amsterdam due to misgivings after the terror attacks in Brussels. So as a consolation prize we brought Belgian beer we’d acquired while in Oudenaarde.

Many adventures were had in Amsterdam including putting a child seat on a rental bike, eating lots of pancakes, and playing a smartphone-based version of charades. And once again, here are some pictures:

Bubbles!

The rijksmuseum lirbary

tunnels & bikes

We did a little geocaching too

We saw some art

Elevators are important with strollers

Beer!

Bike adventures

 

This is already a lot of photos, so to avoid complete overload I shall close for now (it’s also dinner time) and continue the wrap up in a second post.  Or possibly a third.

 

Discrimination in Dictionary Pricing?

I was thinking about getting a pocket German-English dictionary. I was looking at the classic yellow Langenscheidt ones, and I noticed that there’s both an “Englisch” and an “Amerikanisches Englisch” one. However, I noticed something alarming! The Amerikanisches Englisch one is €11.99, while the regular Englisch one is €9.99. Why the disparity? I even compared page numbers (about the same), and publishing dates (a year apart). Hmpf. Oh well, either was more than I wanted to pay, so I left dictionary-less.

Vignettes from German Class, Part II

I started a new German class a couple weeks ago. It’s the A2 Intensiv level, 3 hours a day for three days a week. It’s been interesting getting back into the swing of intense German grammar, which really rearranges how you form sentences. I told someone “I must to the grocery store go” last week and I wasn’t entirely kidding, that’s sometimes how my brain makes sentences now.

Starting a new class is always an opportunity to meet lots of new people. My class has students from Iran, Nigeria, Guinea, Iraq, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, and Egypt. I am the only American, and people are really confused when I say “Ich komme aus den USA” (I come from the USA), and usually I have to follow it up with “Ich bin Amerikanerin” to really get the point across, or “Ursprunglich komme ich aus New York” which seems to help. I wasn’t so strange in my last class, because there was another American, and the class before that one, none of us had enough German to really ask questions.

Now, I often get a really skeptical “Warum lebst du in Deutschland?” (Why do you live in Germany?) Most of the people in my class are fleeing wars or looking for jobs not available in their homeland, and they assume that coming from a stable, economically-ok country, I would not have any reason to move to Germany. Saying that my husband works for a German company appeases people, but I still get some strange looks.

Typically, I sit between an Iraqi woman wearing a hijab, and a Polish nun wearing a veil. I have joked that I need to get some sort of characteristic headwear to fit in. The best suggestion from my American friends so far is a “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hat, which would certainly be comical.

Our German textbook tries to give cultural context along with grammar lessons, and sometimes this is pretty funny. The second chapter is all about trash separation -as a springboard to talk about life in apartment buildings here, furniture, consumer goods, etc. Still, it’s pretty funny to spend a week of classes talking about what types of trash you separate, how there are fines if you don’t separate the trash correctly, that you need to bring the glass to the containers on the street and separate it by color. One day we even brainstormed all the compound nouns that had the word for trash (“der Müll”) in them.

The upside is that we get to discuss the cultural contexts we come from, and so I’m learning lots about the homelands of my fellow students. Sometimes this can be heart-wrenching, as when Maysun Ali (from Iraq) shows me pictures of her sister’s house before the war (normal middle eastern house with garden) and after the war (pile of rubble). Sometimes it’s a little more comic, like when we discussed hostess gifts. In Spain, when you bring a bottle of wine to dinner, it’s expected your host will open and serve it. Our German teacher found this custom quite funny, since to her it seems like you are judging the host’s taste in wine. It’s great to experience these international moments, which are the reason we moved here.

 

Anecdotes from Life in Europe

My Bulgarian coworker needs to move some furniture this weekend. He found, via the Internet, a man with a van to help him. He called the guy, and they spoke in English. After hanging up, the coworker said “I think he’s Bulgarian. I’m going to call him back.” And thus, he called him back, and after a short conversation, turned to me and said “He’s Portuguese.  But he speaks Russian.”

On Mistranslation and General Confusion

On the whole, Germans speak excellent English. They start learning it in elementary school, so they develop much better accents than we Americans do when learning foreign languages. In Munich and Berlin, ordering something in accented German usually gets a response in English.

Aside: my German teacher was asking me about if I had noticed how Berliners tell the time (it’s a little different from standard German dialect) and I had to explain that no one in Berlin would speak German to me. Here in Essen, people are not so confident about their English, but will use it if needed. They are happy to let you practice your German, and in fact I often get encouraged to speak German by people who are excellent English speakers.

The dark side of this general English proficiency, though, is that sometimes a bit of overconfidence strikes. This seems to happen most often in translation of food and menus. One culprit is that the German verb “braten” can be translated as, variously, “bake”, “roast”, “fry”, “sauté”, “broil”, “braise” or “grill”. This adds to a lot of confusion on menus, where you need to investigate the context to determine what you’re getting.

However, there’s no linguistic reason for the translations Justin’s company inflicts on users of its cafeteria. Here are a couple of examples:

That “Wok” option should be translated as “pork strips with vegetables in sweet and sour sauce”, but instead, the powers that be decided “Schweinefleischstreifen” (literally “Pork-flesh strips”) should be “Porkbeef”. You may also notice they only take a cursory stab at translating the desserts, and don’t really understand that the compound nouns in German separate in English.

Again, the “Wok” is our unappetizing culprit, with the slightly more correct “Turkeymeat” substituted for what should be translated “Turkey breast strips”. Also, again they cannot be bothered to separate the dessert compound nouns. No photos are immediately available, but we’ve also seen the related “Beefmeat” in previous menus.

On my part, sometimes the things I see in the grocery store confuse me. A sterling example is this gem:

Squid is definitely not popular in the USA, and I’m not really sure what “American Sauce” is. Some Googling indicates that it’s likely some variant of Thousand Island Dressing, which makes this even more mystifying – it sounds pretty gross to me.

On German Apartments

Justin’s company provided us with six months of compensation for rent when we moved to Germany, and they set us up with a lovely furnished temporary apartment. We thought “Six months! How generous!” and assumed that would be plenty of time to find an apartment. We dawdled, settling in for January, deciding in February whether we wanted to stay in Essen or move to Düsseldorf, and finally got into the hunt for an apartment in earnest in May.

Let me provide a little background here: Germany is a nation of apartment renters. 52% of Germans rent their residence, and I’ve been told that they stay in that residence for on average a decade before moving again (but I can’t find the figure for that number). Expectations are totally different for renters here than in the US. For example, as I was writing the first draft of this entry, a painter we hired was painting the rooms in our new apartment. We were compensated a month’s rent by our landlord for this, but it was required that we paint the apartment at some point during our residency. On the upside, this meant we could paint it whatever we want. On the downside, the previous tenant painted the windowless hallway dark red, the spare bedroom a weird yellow with white borders, and shoddily painted over an existing pink stripe in the master bedroom with blue. We’re also expected to clear snow in the winter, and sweep the cellar storage area and attic clothing drying room on a schedule. If something breaks that requires a plumber or a carpenter, we call and set up the visit, and pay for the first 100 euro of any repair. A friend’s lease tried to stick him with the entire repair costs for any repair, but that’s not as common (I hope!)

Apartment kitchens are getting their own paragraph, because they are CRAZY. Where in most places you would get a kitchen that comes with your apartment, in Germany you are only guaranteed a room that’s got the utilities such that it could be a kitchen. Frequently, when people move here, they take their kitchen (and light fixtures!) with them, and moving companies here specialize in that kind of removal and installation. You can look for apartments with ‘einbaukuche’, which means that the kitchen is staying with the apartment. Typically, this means that you need to come to an agreement with the previous tenant on the worth of the kitchen and compensate them accordingly. I’ve seen ‘einbaukuche’ fees ranging from 200 euro to 5000 euro. We really impress our friends when we tell them we got our ugly but functional kitchen for only 250 euro. Unfortunately, one of the door shelves on the refrigerator broke, and it’s missing all its drawers, so we are currently refrigerator shopping. We are debating whether a Slovenian fridge would be better than a Polish or Turkish one – the Germans will tell you that you should always buy the good German brands of Bosch or Siemens. There are also no built-in closets in any German apartment, so you have to buy a giant IKEA wardrobe. It could be much worse, though – a friend who worked in Poland said there you rent an apartment and it has no finishes – just cement floors and walls.

Justin and I looked at apartment after apartment. We’re not too picky about apartments, but there was another problem: we’re not German. Specifically, we don’t have the deep German credit history that other people looking at apartments had. Additionally, you need to decide fast. There’s no waiting, looking at more apartments for a week, and then getting back to the one you want. If you want the apartment, you must say so as soon as you see it. Otherwise, someone (probably with better credit history) will claim it. Additionally, some properties allow the current tenants to help in the decision-making process. This muddies the waters further since you can negotiate with the current tenant, saying you’ll pay them X amount more for their kitchen/washing machine/leftover furniture/etc. and then they can recommend that you get the apartment to the landlord. We looked at one glorious, inexpensive apartment with a garden, but it was clear we weren’t going to get it because a. there were about 10 German couples at the viewing and b. one of those couples was a coworker of the current tenant, and he was clearly partial to them.

Finally, we found an apartment, said it was good and we would take it the day Justin viewed it, and passed the credit check. It doesn’t have the outdoor space (garden or balcony) that we were hoping for, but it is in a good neighborhood, has a spare bedroom to serve as an office for me, and the previous tenant not only sold us the kitchen for a fair price, but also the sofa, coffee table, TV stand, bed, closet and kitchen table. It also has a garage, so I am enjoying not cohabiting with four bicycles for the first time in 5 years.

Vignettes from German Class

In September, I started a new German class, meeting once a week for conversation at the local Volkshochschule (community college). This class is interesting, as it is a much larger range of ages than my first class (where I was one of the oldest students and most people were preparing to enter the local university) and a much larger range of backgrounds. In practice, it leads to situations like this:

– It is the day before Halloween. We are discussing our Halloween plans (Halloween is new here – I will have a more detailed entry about this later) and the Turkish woman (wearing a full hijab and a large coat that could pass as an abaya) says in a very self-righteous tone that she does not celebrate Halloween, because she is Muslim. We move around the table some more, disclosing more plans for parties and trick-or-treating, until we reach the woman from Afghanistan. She says, “Eh, we take the kid out for candy, there’s no harm there.”

– We are discussing the Villa Hügel, a landmark here in Essen. It was built by the Krupp family, whose industrial empire became the ThyssenKrupp company – notable mostly in the US for elevators, but also a producer of steel and many other industrial products. One of the students keeps asking questions like “Were the Krupps Jews?” and “Were the Krupps friends of the Jews?” I want to answer these questions with “The Baron Krupp was a Nazi who was convicted and sent to jail after the war.” Unfortunately, I am not sure how to say this politely, and without using the word “Nazi”, which I suspect is verboten for what should be a light “Konversationskurs”. I settle for pointing out that the Krupp factories in Essen used Jewish slave labor during WWII, and leave it at that.

– We are playing a game of 20 Questions – it turns out that a lot of a “Konversationskurs” consists of playing the kind of games you played as a kid to stave off boredom during long car rides. The Korean woman in the class is up, and she says she is thinking of a man. Someone immediately yells “JACKIE CHAN!” with the expectation that it is the correct answer. There is a pause as the rest of us are horrified, and then hysterical laughter for several minutes. We have to explain that Jackie Chan is Chinese, not Korean, and there is a difference between the two.

On Greetings

One of the things I didn’t expect to have difficulty with is greetings. You say “Guten Morgen” or “Guten Tag” at the same time you do in English, right? Well, yes and no. You don’t greet people on the street unless you know them – street etiquette is more New York than Texas – no smiles, no greetings, just do your thing. However, when you enter confined spaces, greetings are a little different. In a waiting room, for example, when you enter, you say “Guten Tag” or “Guten Morgen” to the room, and the people in the room respond. Then you wait in silence. When you leave, you say “Tschuss” or “Schönen Tag” to the room, and they respond. It’s the same in an elevator. I find it a little weird, because these greetings are in no way expected to proceed to conversation, but they’re what you do. I made a non-greeting related comment in the elevator at the Volkshochschule (German community college) yesterday, and it was startling to the other “drivers” (you use the verb for “to drive” in an elevator in German). It did, however, lead to yet another conversation about how I have a weird accent because I come from the USA. Apparently our vowels and Rs are distinct enough that usually German speakers think we’re Dutch, or are just confused.

I’ve been pondering greetings because we have a garage in the courtyard behind our apartment. This courtyard has eight garages, shared with the inhabitants of other buildings. I pulled in my bike after a ride last Sunday, and one of the other garage tenants was putting his bike in the garage. I put my bike in the garage, and after I closed it and was walking out, he said to me “Sprechen Sie nicht?” (“Do you not speak?”) I can only assume he decided this because I did not greet him, but I’m not sure. I stammered out my usual “Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch” (“I speak only a little German”), which apparently satisified his curiosity. I’m still thinking, though. What did he mean? Was he trying to ask if I was mute, or if I spoke German?

Mysteries of expat life, I guess.