Positivity

As the most wonderful time of the year (TM) draws near, let's review German expressions of approval. These are suitable for use in approving of the weather, the food, the decor - whatever, go crazy! "But do," you ask, "Germans actually approve of things?"

Yup! Sometimes! And when they do, they say things like this:

• Dieser Schnitzel ist der Hammer! (Literally: This schnitzel is the hammer!)
• Dein neues T-shirt ist geil! (Literally: Your new t-shirt is horny!)
• And the ultimate expression of approval: Das Backstreet Boys Konzert war sau geil! (The Backstreet Boys concert was sow* horny!)

In conclusion, if you work really, really hard, maybe someday you, like me**, can be the hammer. Or pig horny. Whichever you prefer.

* sow, a pig, a female pig; ray, a drop of golden suuuuun...
** me, a name I call myself; far, a long long way to ruuuuun...

Weapon of mass multiplication*

Yes, I know what it looks like (poo. It looks like poo.), but hold the judgement until you've tasted one. It's called a Granatsplitter, which translates to grenade splinter, and it's an ingenious way of recycling and selling bakery scraps. The bakers take the leftover dough from pies/cakes/whatever, mix it up with a bit (or sometimes a lot) of alcohol, and dunk it in chocolate. YUM.

And then you buy one, eat it, and spend the next half hour contemplating whether this was the best or the worst decision of your life. Then you realize that you need a larger sample size to draw a reliable conclusion and are forced to repeat the process. The travail of the scientific method, I tell you.

For the longest time I couldn't remember the name of these delectable... piles... and I was forced to develop a memory aid, which went as follows: "If you eat too many of these, you're going to be a real granite splitter." Granite splitter = Granatsplitter. And that's what you call a mnemonic device, kids.

*by which I mean that these top the list of "Things That Would Make Me Fat If I Spent Too Long in Germany."

Wahlkampf

I might need to change the name of this blog to "German Jokez 4 Life", but I couldn't resist this one. It's an election joke + German joke hybrid. Mathematically irresistible!

*mit = with, ohne = without

Now you get it! Now you're LOLing! ROFLing? I sure hope so.

Linguistic differences

As previously discussed, I love the German language. But as also previously discussed, I love JOKEZ more.

Canadians for sale or rent

Today in Useless Fun Facts About Germany (UFFAG? I'll keep working on it), Germans call canoes Kanadier, or "Canadians". As in, "Hey, you know what we should do today? Rent a Canadian and ride it down the river." Me: "GUYS I'M RIGHT HERE."

I don't know if it's one of those generic trademark situations or just a free association that stuck really well, but it's always fun to pass shops with "End of summer sale: all Canadians, 40% off" signs in the window. Get 'em while they're cheap!

Comedic stylings

What has four wheels and comes after the pre-nup?

Thank you... thank you. I'll be here all week.

The day of reckoning

Part of moving is rediscovering all the stuff you thought you would someday find a use for and coming to the realization that there never was one and that you're just a hoarder. For me, that meant finding these:

Now, some (most?) people would have just sighed and thrown them out. But others, with inquiring minds and an abundance of time, might decide to sort and count them and tabulate the results for... posterity? Sure! So, out of 183 Ritter Sport bars consumed by yours truly (with some assistance, I hope and presume) in the period between January 2011 and August 2012,

42 were Halbbitter*
41 were Marzipan
20 were Mousse au Chocolat
15 were Nougat
12 were Noisette
8 were Olympia
7 were Pfefferminz
7 were Amarena Kirsch, and
31 were something else (aka the lesser Ritter Sport flavours)

Would you like to see that represented as a pie chart? Of course you would!

Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in this study. I didn't save every wrapper - some were lost in transit. Some of the wrappers (and the chocolate they once contained) were won in bets, meaning that the contents did not accurately represent my preferences, but rather those of the bet loser. However, I think that the sample size is sufficient to compensate for the effects of these factors.

*Halbbitter chocolate therefore mathematically = the meaning of life.

Moving's a bitch

"He who would travel happily must travel light." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This quote has been hanging on my wall for the last couple of years and now it's mocking me as I struggle to fit three years of my life into a box, a suitcase, and a backpack. Anyone want to guess how many pairs of shoes I own in Germany? What about how many books? I'll give you a hint: it's (significantly) more books than pairs of shoes, and (significantly) more pairs of shoes than years of my life so far.

The last straw

I emptied my last box of Cheerios this morning. Time to go, I guess.

Apartment tour, part 3

Welcome to the latest, greatest, and last installment of the apartment tour. It's relatively unusual for a shared apartment in Germany to have a living room, so the kitchen, the bathroom, and my bedroom are pretty much it. There's a balcony too, but that's just where I keep my dead plants.

So why did I wait so long to show you the place where I spend most of my time? What's that you say? Maybe because this is the first time since I started writing that it's been clean enough for pictures? How dare you? How dare you come to my blog and say things like that?

Good night (and goodbye) Berlin

I like the Brandenburg Gate (like most landmarks) better after dark. Things lit up at night always make me feel like Christmas and it's easier to get pictures without people popping up in front of your camera like crasher squirrel.

This is, hands down, my favourite memorial in Berlin. It's on (or under, I guess) Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the Nazis burned over 20,000 books deemed "un-German". You look through this window into a room lined with empty bookshelves and, nearby, there's a plaque with the Heinrich Heine quote "Where they burn books, they will end by burning people". I must have taken pictures of this group for at least five minutes and there are several pictures where one of the group members is giving me the evil eye. But I was there first and anyway, I think the picture's better with people in it!

This is 1/3 of the Gendarmenmarkt, the "prettiest square in Berlin". The square is framed by an opera house and two former cathedrals (now museums) - the French Cathedral and the German Cathedral. The French Cathedral was built first and the German one (above) was built to "match". It was supposed to be the twin (in size and almost in design) of the French building, but then they made it one metre taller. The anti-French shenanigans never stop in Berlin!

And this is the Berlin Cathedral again, with the apparently indefatigable Fernsehturm still playing peekaboo. It's 11 pm, Fernsehturm! Go to bed!

Heaven on Earth

After you see the Fernsehturm and the Brandenburg Gate (or before - I'm not judging), you should probably head on over to Ritter Sport World.

You can buy Ritter Sport in the Schokoladen.

You can eat food and drink beverages made with Ritter Sport in the Schoko-café.

 

And you can learn things about Ritter Sport (like how they make it and why it's

called "Sport") in the little museum. So it's *cough* an educational trip.

Straight spyin'

While I'm not going to suggest that the Stasi* in East Germany was anything other than terrifying (because imagine not knowing if your neighbours, coworkers, or family members were spying on you and reporting back to an agency that could straight-up ruin your life), this formerly-classified document showing the many disguises of a Stasi agent is unintentionally hilarious.

Fun fact: Stasi files are now open to the public (within limits). If you lived in East Germany, you can go look up your file and find out what the Stasi knew about you. This represents the first time in history citizens have managed to force a secret police service to open their files, which is pretty cool when you think about it.

*short for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security)

Berlin 101

The Brandenburg gate was finished in 1791 and topped with the figure of Victory in her chariot. But when Napoleon conquered Berlin in the 19th century, Victory (and her chariot) were shipped off to Paris. Of course, the Prussians got the statue (and Berlin) back eventually and put her back on top of the gate. And then, just to show the French who's boss, they renamed the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate "Paris Place", so that they would always have Victory over Paris. And people say Germans don't have a sense of humour!

This is the Reichstag building, which houses the German parliament (Bundestag). The Reichstag fire in 1933 served as Hitler's excuse for assuming emergency powers (which he kept until his suicide in 1945). It's been refurbished with a new glass dome where you can look down and see parliament in session. A symbol of transparency and so on...

But lest you think there's nothing you'd like better than frying up a few Bratwürste while watching the sun set over the Reichstag:

It's VERBOTEN. I wonder what the Alberta Legislature's stance on grilling is?

This is the Fernsehturm (TV tower), which was built to make the West Berliners insanely jealous of East Berlin's technological prowess. The first time I was in Berlin, I decided against taking the elevator up the tower and I've been regretting it ever since. So this time I manned up, paid the twelve Euros and waited the two hours. And then I stayed up there until I felt like I'd got my money's worth (three hours).

This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The name's a little unwieldy, but the monument's quite impressive. It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but the ground rises and falls between the blocks, which are all the same size but different heights. You can walk between the blocks, but the aisles are narrow and you have to walk single file. It's quite cold in there, even when it's hot outside, and it's really easy to lose your companions because the monument covers an entire city block and the chances that your paths will converge is minimal. The general consensus seems to be that it's supposed to give you some idea of how the Jews felt (isolated and terrified) and that its sheer size is supposed to make it hard to ignore. 

This is the Berlin Cathedral (with the Fernsehturm playing peekaboo). The cathedral is old by Canadian standards (completed in 1905), but it has no business looking quite as old as it does - it was deliberately "aged" to fit in with the older buildings around it.

Berlin licence plate game

Being on holiday is supposed to get you out of your boring, everyday routine, and it certainly shakes things up in the licence plate game (an important part of your everyday routine, I'm sure). There are only so many funny licence plates that start with N, but B opens up a whole new world of three-to-five-letter words!

This car knows it's August, but thinks it feels more like November. And yet they keep talking about global warming!

And this van wants you to know it'll be back in just a second. Don't go away! It still wants to chat! It just needs to grab something to eat!

Punpoint Charlie

I visited Checkpoint Charlie the first time I was in Berlin, and I wouldn't have gone back this time except that it was really close to my hostel. Even though some world-changing things happened there, there's really nothing to do there unless you want to pay 20 Euros to visit the "Wall Museum" or 10 Euros for a fake-Russian, fake-fur hat or 5 Euros to get your picture taken with an actor dressed as an East German border guard. No? Me neither. But Checkpoint Charlie is also, apparently, Pun Central. I mean, check out this currywurst stand. Checkpoint Curry!

Unfortunately my favourite, Snackpoint Charlie (a much better pun, as I'm sure we can all agree), seems to have gone out of business since the last time I was in Berlin. It's been replaced by Kalter Krieg (Cold War), which is an ice cream shop, obviously. I mean, what else were they supposed to call it?

But back to currywurst. Currywurst is a Berlin invention and culinary specialty. It's a sausage (Wurst), cut up and doused in curry-flavoured ketchup. That's it. That's all. I opted to try my first Berlin currywurst at this stand, which despite coming in last in the pun competition, dominated the field in the letting-me-try-the-potato-salad-before-committing-to-buying-it event.

 

And in case you were wondering, both the potato salad and the currywurst gave a strong performance in the "being delicious" category.

On the homestretch

I left Danzig in the dead of night.

Okay, so I left at 6.30 am, but I needed a reason to post one more night picture of Danzig. So, "dead of night" = 6.30 am. Tell your friends! Seven hours later, I was in Berlin.

Danzig shipyards

Since I was at the shipyard gate already (and since I have an as-yet-unexplained fondness for shipyards), I decided to venture a little further.

 

The Danzig shipyards have fallen on hard times (almost 90% job loss), with the result that there are a lot of old, abandoned buildings. A couple of them have been turned into kind-of-neat-but-definitely-weird art galleries.

Foreground: shredded-magazine bales which can be compressed into shredded-magazine bricks. Background: Stalinist machine to produce the perfect worker, reproduced from contemporary sources (with some creative gap-filling, I'd guess).

This is a moveable chapel designed for people who want to marry buildings (have y'all seen that documentary about the woman who married the Eiffel Tower?) - it can be pushed up against the corner of the building and provides a "quiet, contemplative" atmosphere for the ceremony. 

Other buildings have just been boarded up and surrounded by meaningless signs like the one below. I mean, it might say "private property", but it's not like I can read Polish. Pretty ambiguous, I'd say.

Anyway, check out what you get to see if you ignore the signs!

 Yeah!

Solidarnosc

In 1980, while Poland was still under communist rule, Danzig's shipyard workers went on strike. The Solidarity trade union was formed and the concessions they won were the beginning of the end for communism in Europe. This is the shipyard gate in 1980, when thousands of people waited outside for news of the strikes.

And this is the shipyard gate in 2012. On the right you can see the two boards where the shipyard workers wrote their list of demands. Most of them were the sorts of things that every worker everywhere should be entitled to (and they were, in large part, granted), but the one that made me laugh was three years of paid maternity leave. "And we're still waiting."

 

Of course, it wasn't an easy path from the strikes of 1980 to the fall of communism in Europe. The communist regime struck back with a wave of pretty vicious oppression in 1981 and things definitely got worse before they got better. Members of the resistance started wearing electrical resistors as a sign of their opposition to the regime. Cool, yes?

An aside: While I was in Danzig, the hero of the shipyard strikes and former president of Poland, Lech Walesa, publicly endorsed Mitt Romney. You were doing so well, dude! What happened?

Danzig through life

How do I like thee, Danzig? Let me count the ways:

I like your riverfront, especially at night, when the strollers have strolled home.

I like your graffiti, even if some of it is a little whiny.

I like your abandoned warehouses, even if I don't get to explore them because I don't fancy getting arrested in a country where I can't explain why they shouldn't arrest me.

 I like your rowhouses and I like imagining I live on all six floors of this one. 

I like how much these punks are enjoying this organ grinder and his parrot.

I like your impromptu art galleries.

I like this guy using an iPad as a camera (or at least I like laughing at him).

 I like how none of the buildings in your market square really "match",

but they still look awesome together.

And I like the fact that you can buy individual pickles in your supermarkets.