Ich bin immer RISK ADVERSE

After the best Tatort ever (in my humble illiterate opinion) Sunday nite, I watched Anna Will as I usually do, straining to improve my German and keep up with German politics. The subject this week was, of course, the Wikileaks scandal that involved what my home country embassy said about Angela and Guido. I just don't get it...the big news about Angela is that she is "risk adverse" ????? The Big Insult????
HELLO This whole country/culture is risk adverse. In fact, you could use those words as a synonym for Deutscher. That's why Germany is the richest economy in the EU and called upon to bail out, or retten as they say here, the poorer members of the family. When I first came here it annoyed me to no end that you couldn't ever use a credit card anywhere or very few places. Now, I've come to admire it.

But back to Chancellor Merkel..not many of my American friends know that she used to be a scientist, a physicist, before she got the calling to politics. A scientist by training is reticent to jump to conclusions. That might explain some of her caution or what others see as lack of commitment. In any case, its hilarious to me that the US diplomats expressed their reservations about their ally in this manner. Now I'm no fan of the FDP or Guido(who notoriously doesn't like to speak English)but the American ambassador called him a weak choice for the Foreign Minister. I still don't get it! That's the German system...the second major party leader gets that position in a coalition government.

An Exaltation of Larks and a Crowd of People

I don't know what happened but summer in Berlin lasted about three glorious minutes this year and I didn't want to waste it working on my blog ...so this is the first post in many months. Also, when I thought about things to write about I kept finding myself thinking negatively about city living which wasn't so inspiring.

Moving through crowds everyday is strenuous on the soul. In English, we have many different words to describe a group of animals depending on what they are. Sometimes we big brain creatures forget that we too belong in this scientific classification. Most everyone knows a herd of horses, a flock of birds, a school of fish. But do you know my favorite: an exaltation of larks? Now think of the word 'crowd'. For one thing, it rhymes with loud. It has a a hard, closed feeling, quite opposite to the open grandeur of 'exaltation'!

Have you ever wondered how birds flying in a large group manage to stay in graceful synchronization with each other? This is especially noteworthy when they suddenly take off from the ground, or wherever they have been at rest. They follow cues that are invisible to us. Evidently we do something similar when we are crossing streets and working our way through congested areas, but I suspect that our modern habit of living with our heads in the digital clouds is seriously damaging this delicate mechanism. City people are becoming less aware of where their body ends and other's begin.

The Berlin undergound at major stops like Hermannplatz and Mehringdamm are life-threatening during peak travel hours, I AM SO tired OF BEING SMACKED AND POKED without so much as an "entschuldigung" as commuters run around blind corners and down stairways, or push into the car without waiting for the passengers inside to aussteigen! Really, folks, is this necessary? Sometimes people walking directly at you stare you down like in a game of chicken.."you step aside or I will mow you down." I gradually became aware of how often I was altering my path, bending to this silent aggression.

If I was more hardy, I'd stay on my bike all winter. A herd of horses, a pack of dogs, a gaggle of geese, a crowd of people, and a lone biker.

Does Justin Bieber Know What German Means?

The Celebrity Curtain

You have to love America and its mysterious ability to elevate ignorance to an art form. Evidently this poor boy (whose name and fame has somehow escaped my brain's celebrity spam filter) was home-schooled. What is classic is how he refuses to say, "I'm sorry I don't know what that word means." Instead he resorts to the idea that "We don't do that in America"!!!!!

To be fair, it's probably true that though we now have so much access to digitalized information, young people in all industrialized countries are becoming less adept at choosing what information is worth retaining and less able to analyze and interpret information. Yeah, let's throw another Bake Sale so we can pay our teachers...but seriously, there is a deeper issue which is how culturally ISOLATED the USA has become, and how intelligent discourse is being completely displaced by celebrity chatter.

Here in Germany, people talk about and follow the lives of "Promies" as they are called, but they also are regularly exposed to the films, music and television series from other countries. Also, in this part of the world you find people working in a pizza place who can speak four languages fluently. DVDs are always subtitled in several languages and synchronization--where German actors redo the dialogue--is very common, so that television and movies from other lands and cultures have a better chance of penetrating the market.

Okay, on one hand, Whoopi Goldberg in German is not a pretty sight, but on the other hand, what would the world be without any exposure to her at all..if all her comedy had been locked down, only available to English speakers?

The reverse situation is reality for Americans; despite internet and satellite media, so little is getting through. Americans self-censor. They don't look outside of themselves very much at all, dismissing the greater world as irrelevant. The cultural and therefore intellectual scope of the average American is continually contracting, which leaves the nation increasingly vulnerable in a global economy where the balance of power is shifting.

A friend of mine who grew up in East Germany suggested that this cultural isolation is comparable to what was once life behind the Iron Curtain.

Addicted to Simit

When I first went to live in Izmir, Turkey, known in ancient times as Smyrna and the birthplace of Homer, I was invited to tea on the the palm-laced Kordon, a busy artery paralleling the Aegean Sea. My new best friend Emel broke the sesame seed encrusted ring of bread in two, and handing me half said, “We Turkish people are addicted to simit, we can't live without it.” I ate it with my dark sweet tea and made the appropriate appreciative noises, but all the time I was thinking it wasn't anything to write home about.

Gradually during the year I spent teaching in a university there, I became hooked as well, discerning the subtle differences between neighborhood simit bakeries and the wares of the different sellers who hawk them from bright red trolley carts and baskets carried on the head. I started every day buying a fresh ring with green or black olives and small slices of a sour white cheese, all wrapped in a small paper parcel which I took to school, so that I could leisurely enjoy breakfast with my office mates who did the same.

Back in Berlin, I learned the name I used for simit 'gevrek' (meaning crispy in Turkish) was peculiar to Izmir, and likewise, though I have tasted and tried all the Turkish outlets in Kreuzberg and Neuköln, I can't find the exact, subtle combination of texture and tastes that I remember as my simit, which like Proust's madeleine might unlock those mnemonic codes of emotional pleasure inside my brain. I didn't quite understand the significance of this until I read with great surprise and pleasure, Elif Batuman's “Letter from Istanbul” in the April 19th issue of The New Yorker, where she writes about an extraordinary restaurant, Çiya Sofrasi, found on the walking street in Kadiköy's market district.

Last New Years, I was taken by a friend to eat there, a short distance from his apartment. It was a very unassuming place and never in my wildest dreams would I expect to find it written about in an American magazine. My host Erçu had explained to me that Çiya's owner was dedicated to recovering and preserving the native cuisine of Anatolia, and 'folk recipes' from other regions as well. Apparently, even a place like Turkey needs a Slow Food movement and champion like this chef/entrepreneur, Musa Dağdeviren, who is reproducing the dishes that patrons like Erçu remember from their grandmother's kitchens. Though I didn't see it the night I was there, guests tend to burst into tears brought on by culinary-induced nostalgia for a way of life that's disappearing!

Time Challenged

I once had a friend tell me kindly that I was time-challenged, when I turned up at their door in Montreal a day earlier than I was apparently expected. It wasn't until I spent some time living in India that I realized that my personal sense of time was shared by many other people on the planet.

One thing I love about living in Europe is that since we are nine hours 'ahead' of California time, I always feel that my day has been extended beyond the limit of 24 hours, so I don't have to worry about how much is getting done at the 'moment'.

This reality is fully supported when I'm cooking dinner and listening to NPR radio and Neal Conan (Talk of the Nation) greets me with "Good Morning."

I found this video on another blog and find it both funny and important in understanding how crucial time perception is to culture. Please take a look and if you live in Berlin tell me in which time 'zone' do Berliners really belong?

This is a tree; this is a bicycle basket.

WHY DO PEOPLE THINK MY BIKE BASKET IS A GARBAGE CAN?

This 'disturbing trend', as they say in mediaspeak, began slowly. It happened occasionally and I thought it was the result of leaving it parked overnight or a day or two at a U-bahn station. Some dumb kid noticed my forlorn bike standing there one too many times and thought, “Oh that must be there especially for me so I don't have to look around for a Müllheimer, move my fat Burger King ass down the street any further!

But no! Soon, it appeared, or should I more accurately say, garbage appeared in my rectangle black wire, rusting-out, not-so-fest-attached-to-the-back basket at a predictable rate, like let's say, every time I left it somewhere in Kreuzberg, Mitte, or Neuköln, for more than thirty minutes! Empty bottles, cans, paper cups, paper bags, currywurst plates and plastic utensils were the Top of the Pops. “I'll just pop it in there.”

I'm thinking of hanging a sign that says: Kein Leer Gut!

Here's the 64 million dollar question: Are these people well meaning (they don't litter the street) but brain-damaged (the shape of a small bike basket is confused with the form of large garbage bin), or are they just plain aggressive? .

Or is this ascribing too much wattage to their brains at all? Could my personal outrage be ludicrous? On a planet that is choking itself to death on carbon waste faster than I can say, “I'd like it my way,”
what should I expect oder?

A business on my street planted a hopeful little garden around the base of a tree opposite their cute Kinderdesignladen. A low fence bordered the plot to discourage dog toiletten, but soon their garden looked just like my bike basket but worse. They posted a sign in German that began, “This is a tree...”

Urban Birds

It was clear by half-time, when we left our local beer garden, that Germany would beat Australia. A friend of ours who was returning to Albania for his summer vacation had left his big flat screen high-def TV in our keeping because he was worried about thieves. Fleeing the unseasonable chill in the air, we invited our friends home.

We stopped at the Turkish bakery where they were selling Italian ice cream and ebullient with World Cup fever. Every small business in our Kiez was still open—with families and neighbors gathered around screens of all sizes, the old huddled in blankets and the children with Germany's red, black and yellow painted on their faces. Even the dogs were decked out in the tricolors. Sometimes living in the city drives me crazy, but at times like these I can't imagine returning to the isolating, indifference of life in my native habitat—suburban California, and I think I'm slowly adapting.

After the game, my husband and the guys retired to the kitchen with a bottle and their tobacco, and I fell asleep in front of the new mesmerizing god that dominates the bedroom. At dawn we were aroused by a racket on the pitch of the giant chestnut tree outside our window. Crows were challenging the home team of magpies. Scientists from the Netherlands and the U.K. have published studies revealing that some species of city birds are changing their songs to adapt to the rise of noise pollution from traffic, trains and planes. The researchers said birds have developed shorter, more varied, higher frequency sounds to make themselves heard. Male birds use their song to mark territory and attract mates but “If their song is not heard by the targeted audience they have to physically fight off intruders, and attracting females may be difficult.”

My life is spread over three countries in four languages and I dream in two.