Coming up on four years

On March 8th I will have lived 4 years in Germany. If that's not an opportunity to put my two Heimats on the scales, starting with...Things I miss about the US:
 
1) Cultural differences are flaunted, and it shows up best in the diversity of restaurants and ethnic grocery stores. I especially miss tacos and burritos. 

2) Americans are open toward strangers. In fact, Americans even like to confide in strangers. (Once a woman asked me at a craft fair: "Do you think this sweater is too baggy? Recently my daughter said I look like a hobo.") Germans, by contrast, need to down a few beers before they can make eye contact with strangers.

3) Small food co-ops, consumer-owned, where you can buy beans, grains, honey, olive oil, and peanut butter (ground from fresh peanuts) in bulk quantities. Here, a rare sighting of a want-to-be co-op in Germany:


4) The Unitarian Universalist faith. (UUism is a "religion" that draws its values and members from diverse religious traditions, and focuses on social justice here and now.) It has no equivalent in Germany that I know of. (For Germans, UUism is another example of America's love affair with à la carte: take what you like, ignore the rest.) 

5) The US is smoke-free almost everywhere but in private homes. Even there, smokers don't light up around non-smokers. In Germany, smoking in public is still a widespread phenomenon, and you (i.e., kids) can even purchase cigarettes from vending machines on the street. On the other hand, here is something else you can buy on the street: bike inner tubes. That also says something about differing cultural values, leading me to...



...what lures me to stay in Germany (aside from livable/bikable/railable cities):


1) Hearty, whole grain rye bread with pumpkin seeds. (Did you notice that food tops both of the lists? For all our philosophizing, what drives us humans is really quite simple.)

2) Ubiquity of shared flats (Wohngemeinschaften). A not insignificant number of Germans live with housemates/roommates into their forties and beyond, and not just for the sake of convenience.


3) Craftsmanship. In Germany you can still apprentice in bread baking, boat building, and shoe making. In Bonn, there is even a school for organ construction. The long-held tradition of systematically passing know-how from one generation to the next leads to an appreciation for things seasoned and of high quality.


4) Sperrmüll (large item garbage pick-up). Four times a year (to specified dates) people put their old furniture, etc. on the streets - so it is up for grabs until the next morning, when the small portion of it that remains is transported to the dump.


5) Finally, I don't mean to flaunt it, but it is true: five weeks of vacation and 80% of full-time with full benefits is hard to beat.

Size Matters

When you return to America after a long hiatus, you feel like you have shrunk, because there is no place in the world where all the objects around you are as large as in the fifty, nifty, thrifty, and colossal United States. I shared this insight recently with the handful of German teenagers who have a love of language or a sense of pragmatism and show up Friday afternoons at school for the English conversation practice I offer.

Actually, I shouldn't say "insight," because America's love affair with larger- than- life qualifies as known wisdom. The country's vast plateau still captures the imagination as the land of ever- expanding frontiers. And inspires justifiable disgust with its bulky cars, mammoth houses, and shopping centers the size of small countries.

Since I don't like to spend long hours recounting ideas that other people have articulated better, I posed a new question to my students: what objects, (anything that you can touch), are smaller in America than in Germany? Silence. So I changed the conversation back to what everyone had planned for the weekend. But five minutes into the chatter about a drunken rampage at a party the previous weekend, I got a nagging feeling not to let the thread of the original conversation die so easily. "Come on, guys, I know most of you haven't been there, but you learned that there was an America before you learned to talk."

"Carrots," said Isabelle.

"Carrots?" I asked. "Our carrots look just like your carrots."

"You have mini carrots."

"Oh, those." I didn't know whether to be offended or bemused. "You mean the ones shaped like fingers?" (How did she think they get like that?)

"Yes," she said, "these."

"But that's a marketing tactic. They're cut like that. It gets kids to eat them." You can also buy them before they go under the knife. America is the land of the strange, but let's not exaggerate.

After that our conversation stalled again, so I gave up and waited to try the question out at home on my globe-trotting friends, the anthropologists and geographers in Heidelberg. Here's the list that we came up with (comparison US/Germany). Please add your ideas.

• churches (store-front neighborhood church v. gothic cathedral)
• chocolate bars (300 g bars are not unusual in Germany - by God, that's nearly a pound!)
• the first letter of nouns, "size" or length of words in general
• high school teachers' shoulder bags (because teachers move from classroom to classroom in Germany)