The Seasonal Inquisition, i.e. the Existential Crisis of 1996

Last week at the afternoon coffee break for all library scholars, I fell into conversation with a few colleagues. The topic at hand included some recent statistics that had been publicized, which demonstrated that this winter has been the darkest winter in over forty years. Germany as a whole, it seems, had only seen some 100 hours of sunlight since early December. If the next few days continued on in cloudy grayness, we would soon be breaking a 70-year record. My colleagues and I felt torn: do we hope for some sun, for which all our vitamin-D deprived bodies are ceaselessly yearning, or do we root for Mother Nature in hopes to be a part of record breaking history? Alas, little did we know, that only hours later the sun would penetrate our cloudy fortification for several days before retreating back into its snowy cave, where it has resided for the last  few days. But as we debated the topic, my mind wandered to an  experience I had in elementary school I hadn't thought of in years. I suddenly launched into story-telling mode, after which the colleagues were  adamant I write the same tale down. So, here goes. Enjoy.

I recently took a winter hiking trip to Goslar, on the edge of the Harz mountains.

It was late winter. I was in the fifth grade. Earlier in the same season, the Packers had played in the Super bowl. Later that year, the summer Olympics would take place in Atlanta. But between the former and the latter, my small little life would temporarily spiral into a season of existential turmoil the likes of which I had never experienced, at least not since the previous year, when I’d learned firsthand that the word “unit” was not spelled with two t’s—loosing the class spelling bee in the final round to Maria F. Or the year before that, when—by displaying some very complicated hand movements as evidence of his superpowers—Curtis S. convinced me he was not a just a boy from the learning disabled class, he was also a messenger from outer space and desperately needed my help to save the world, if I would help him persuade the rest of the playground of his true identity. Or the year before that when…

I digress. Back to the existential crisis at hand. Now this particular state of philosophical and emotional quagmire in which I found myself as a fifth grader came about at a very specific moment in time. To set the stage for this moment, let me take us back to that winter of 1996. This was a time before Global Warming or climate change was widespread. And for whatever reasons, it had been a particularly long and dismal Wisconsin winter that year. I can’t name specific statistics, but I remember there being snow days, I remember the recesses being endlessly cold, and the time I had to spend in the morning as crossing guard made me feel impossibly cool—not just in the sense of popularity but also in the sense of real, physical cold. January came and went, and then February, and then March came. But before March had quite left, my teacher wanted to talk about the word “acclimate.” To acclimate was to get used to something, Mr. Wilson explained to us. He told us to look outside—it was gray and dreary, beneath the sparse blanket of dusty snow was the evidence of frozen clumps of black, wintry earth.

            “Look, right now the temperature is ten degrees, see?” he pointed to the class thermometer we had clipped on the outside of the window during science one week. “In a few weeks, the temperature will hopefully be more like thirty degrees—which is still pretty cold, but not as cold as the weather we’ve been having lately. So it will feel very warm to you—some of you may even take your coats off at recess and get in trouble with Mrs. Andre.”

A few of the boys chuckled, likely recalling a notorious scene that replayed itself every recess: Mrs. Andre barreling across the schoolyard while waving her clipboard and casting incomprehensible spells at the top of her lungs upon all manner of hooligans that dared cross her path. Mr. Wilson went on to tell us, though, that last autumn when the temperature dropped to thirty degrees we all probably felt very cold, because we had been used to the warmer temperatures of summer.

            “But over the winter, your bodies have become acclimated to the cold. The cold starts to feel normal, so that when it gets a little warmer, it suddenly feels very warm,” he went on. “After a week or so of warm weather, you will be readjusted to the relative warmth and start to be glad for your jackets again!”

            I continued to stare out the window as the snow softly fell. We were on the top floor of Smith Elementary School, and from that window I could see the whole side of the empty playground and the sleepy houses sprawled out across the neighborhood. As smoke and steam rose gently from the brick chimneys of all houses near and far, I tried to imagine the sun shining over the same rooftops, the snow melting and dripping from the eaves. I tried to imagine warm air that smelled faintly of lilacs, green grass poking through the toes of my bare feet, of the gaping Lake Winnebago three blocks away unfrozen and teeming with walleyes and lakeflies. I tried to imagine all these things—but suddenly, I realized with something like terror, I couldn’t. Gazing out over the snow covered roofs at the endless, sallow snow clouds a prodding question rose up through the hazy depths of my mind.

            I raised my hand.

            “Nicole, do you have a question?” He asked. At that age, I tended to keep my questions to myself, the exception to my shyness being the all to often occasion of an existential meltdown.

            “Yes. How do we really know that the winter will end?” I asked him. He smiled.

            “Because if winter didn’t end, then how would we have spring?”

            My heart sank at the sheer pettiness of that answer. Given the simplicity of his thought, it felt as though my question exploded into a deep cavernous void within me, a void in which the world threatened to remain in a perpetual state of cold, frost-covered wintry death. He didn’t understand I wasn’t after pithy proverbs, I was after the truth.

            “That’s not what I mean,” I stammered, thinking how I could be clear. “I mean, how do we know that spring will come again as it has before? How do we know spring even…”

The word I was looking for was on the tip of my tongue. I had never used it in common speech before, only recently learning it on the discovery channel. Now what was that darn word? Oh yeah.

“How do we know spring even exists?” I asked him. And I knew, with the unveiling of a glorious word like “exist,” that I was playing in the big leagues. Such a word, I expected, would be a shibboleth between me and Mr. Wilson and he would know--we were now speaking a secret, age-old language of depth and philosophical truth, the likes of which would remain incomprehensible by my classmates, and realize my question was worthy of a better response than some rosy maxim.

            Instead of an answer satisfying in philosophical breadth, a few of the students laughed, and Mr. W’s smile became slightly more condescending.

            “Why, Nicole, of course spring ‘exists’’” he winked dismissively at me. “Now let’s move on to--”

            “Wait. So, kind of like Santa really exists?” I pulled out the big guns, with a tone of defiant persistence I rarely utilized at that age except when my mom told me to do something foolish, like clean my room.

            “What do you mean?” Mr. Wilson’s eyebrows raised.

            “Well, every Christmas, Santa comes to bring presents to my cousins, even though my parents told me that Santa doesn’t actually exist, and we just have to pretend he does because my cousins believe in him and we don’t want to make them upset. For my cousins, there is a Santa—but only because my aunt and uncle said there is. In reality, Santa doesn’t exist, you know, for real.”

            Now my classmates were no longer laughing. They all stared at Mr. Wilson with rapt attention, and their expressions indicated that there were basically two types of people in my class: the Santa believers (whose faces were clouded with utter fear and shock), and the Santa unbelievers (whose eyes bore the hallmarks of smug amusement).

            “So,” I continued on with my seamless argument. “Maybe you’re just saying there really is a Spring, when really there isn’t.”

            Mr. Wilson just stared at me for a few moments, and then sat in his chair with a grave expression, likely imagining the throngs of parents who would be calling him later that night wondering why he had taken the liberty to dispel the entire class’s faith in Santa Clause. I made a mental note to keep the whole Santa debate in my arsenal when I needed an adult to really answer a question. Unfortunately, I had discovered this a little late, since I was less than a year from starting middle school, and no one believes in Santa in middle school anyway.

            “Spring is different than Santa,” he started with some uncertainty.

“Mr. Wilson?” Michelle in the front row started asking, her eyes filling with tears. “Is there really a Santa?”

A general hubbub spread throughout the class.

“Children, okay! I want everyone to take a deep breath and just calm down. Whatever your parents have told you about Santa is true. I just want to be clear on that!”

Then he sighed and stared at me.

“Now then… Spring is a different kind of true than Santa. Santa is just a person that not many of us get to see in real life. But Spring you can feel with all your senses, and you know it’s really there. With Santa… Well, even if he exists, it’s a little different because that’s more of a faith we have.”

            But once the seed of doubt was planted in my mind, it only germinated and sprouted and grew with the rapidity of each millisecond.

            “No, it’s the same thing. I can taste and touch and smell the presents my cousins get from Santa, and read his name on the tag,” I reminded Mr. Wilson. “I really don’t see a difference.”

            He sighed and rolled his eyes.

            “Nicole, we need to move on. I think you should save this question for a while,” he said.

“How long?” I asked him.

“Oh…” He trailed off and a smile lit up his face as he stared out the window. “Maybe in a month or so we can revisit the question. For today, we are talking today about Meteorology. Does any one know what that word means?”

Denied. What am I supposed to do for a whole month? I wondered. Couldn’t he see this question was tearing me apart? My face burned with shame, confusion and fear. At that age, when I was averaging 1.5 harrowing existential crises per year, there was only one thing more tempestuous to the small seas of my childhood heart and mind than the unplumbed depths of epistemological questions, and that was to have such questions ignored by the only people in this world who hold the keys to limitless and perfect knowledge: the Adults.

An hour or two later, after the meteorology lesson had ended, I decided to spend some of my recess time in spiritual solitude, so as to better reflect upon the world and the dubiousness of so-called reality. As my friends played tag on the monkey bars, I retreated from the midst of the restless worldliness of common recess endeavors and fled for refuge to the desert—in this case, the furthest corner of the playground, across the playing field, where there was a small mound of sandy soil (covered, of course, in several layers of ice and snow). Like a statue, I stood upon this island of desert and stared at the heavens as the snow came down. I tried to believe in Spring, I tried to believe in some form of warmth beyond the stark cold I was experiencing, but that belief escaped me.

            And it’s funny, these types of questions. It’s not that I had ever had a distinct belief in spring before—in fact I’d never questioned it at all. I had more or less lived my life in blessed ignorance, and the changing of the seasons simply formed part of that constellation of assumptions that make it possible to live daily life with any degree of sanity. But now that that assumption was called into question, it felt like a crisis.

            Sort of like we have perfectly meaningful lives until we stop and start wondering what the meaning of life is.

How can winter ever turn into spring? I wondered. It just did not seem possible that anything could come of the future but the same bitter winds I knew in the present. My gaze turned from the vast expanse of the skies to gaze upon the mortals that surrounded me, specifically the boys from my class and the other fifth grade class who were tossing a football across the field. Laughing, one boy swerved in to tackle another and pull him down to the snow. With the speed of a vampire and the size of something, Mrs. Andre’s serpent-like eyes narrowed in on them as she yelled at them through the snow and pulled out the ominous rule-review clipboard (this was the Smith School Elementary School equivalent of a felony charge). I wished I could be normal like them. I mean, not boys like them. And not in trouble with Mrs. Andre. I just wished I could play games and not worry about things like the existence of reality. Tears began to sting my cheeks in the cold air.

            “Are you okay?” My friend Cassie ran up to me from behind.

            “It’s all a conspiracy theory,” I spun around, glaring at her through my snow-covered glasses. Evidently, the term “conspiracy theory” was familiar enough to use it in every day speech, but not familiar enough to know that in this case—since I was the one theorizing conspiracy—it was more so just a plain conspiracy and not a conspiracy theory.

            “What is?” She asked. It seemed my best friend in all the world, at least at that time, had forgotten the earth shattering enlightenment that had broken into my peaceful world not one hour previously in science class. Can you not stand watch one hour without falling asleep? Jesus asked his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane.

            “The seasons, Cassie! The seasons!” I ranted, forcing my voice not to waver. “Every single one of them! Well, all except winter. The other ones were just a… A lie!”

            “Oh, that,” she replied. Cassie was a great friend and all, but she didn’t share my proclivity for epistemological doubt. Then again, few of my peers did.

            “Don’t you see?!” I asked her, flinging my hands into the air. “Spring is never going to come! It’s gone! It was all a lie! We’re going to be stuck with this frickin’ snow forever!”

            Frickin’ being about the worst word in my vocabulary that I could safely use without incurring the wrath of Mrs. Andre who had the entire playground bugged and may have been a Soviet spy.

            Cassie only stared at me, then.

            “But spring comes every year,” she said matter-of-factly, as though talking to one of her many younger sisters. “It’s a known fact.”

            “Facts?” I asked her. “But what’s a fact? There are no facts!”

            “Yes there are, Mr. Wilson even said so! A fact is what happens after you go through all the steps of the scientific method!”

            A bitter chuckle escaped the hollows of my throat.

            “Yeah, well how do we know that? What if the adults made up the scientific method, too? What if everything’s a conspiracy theory! How can we know spring comes every year? How can we know anything at all?”

            The alacrity with which my dull skepticism grew more focused only increased with each rhetorical flourish. The cave of hazy disbelief, once only big enough for the questionable existence of spring, was quickly expanding to encompass in its treacherous shadows anything I ever thought I knew with any degree of certainty at all.

            “Oh my Lord, are you crazy or something? I know spring will come because I remember it. Duh!”

            “So what? That doesn’t mean anything!” I informed her. “I remember a doll I had. My mom threw it away, I don’t have it anymore. And I really liked that doll. But no matter how much I remember it, I can’t get it back again.”

            “Come on, this is stupid. Guess what. When I was on the monkey bars, Kyle was chasing me. Wanna go see if he’s still there?” She ran away before I could ask her if she would desert her best friend in a time of desperate need for a boy, much less Kyle Thomas who was the biggest jerk in the fifth grade.

            As her outline became a smaller and smaller blot of ink set against the field of snow, I felt myself grow more and more alienated from the ignorant world around me. This alienation momentarily subdued my thirst for truth into a dull listlessness. For the rest of the afternoon, I remained silent in class. We had a spelling test, and I wrote the words Mr. W said dutifully onto my paper with little emotion: “science,” “scenic,” and of course the token trick word of the unit: “sensible.” We took a math test and I barely heard Chris Minglis, the boy in back of me, teasing me for getting ten wrong. In a daze after school, I donned my orange safety jacket and stood on the corner of Oregon and 17^th Street, helping younger students cross the road. And then, after my crossing guard duties were finished for the day, I walked the four blocks to my babysitter’s house. From the outside, no one would have suspected anything was wrong,  but on the inside I knew I was just going through the motions. Life as I had known it  had lost all meaning and promise. As the four blocks passed slowly, I stared ahead and barely noticed the snow, cars or pedestrians that swirled around me.

            “Maybe when it gets warmer out, your mom will let you guys walk to the park on your own. I think you’re old enough,” said Wendy, our babysitter, later that afternoon to me and Matt, my oldest brother.  But her empty promises came at the worst possible time in my childhood career. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, I burst into tears.

            “Yeah right!” I screamed at her, running out of the room. Matt followed.

            “Nicky, are you okay?” He asked, afraid by my sudden maniacal outburst. I wanted to tell him my struggle, because I wanted some solace in my newfound agony of stark reality.

            “I just…” I hiccupped and stared at him. But I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t ruin his childlike belief before I had to. He would find out about the truth of the world soon enough.

            “I just don’t think Mom will let us go to the park like Wendy said,” I lied, zipping my secret struggle within me like a stifling corset. The future stretched out before me in my mind like an endlessly dark tunnel to be travailed only in silent solitude.

            “Oh. Well… Want some of my snack?” He handed me part of his apple, which I accepted even though apples made me kind of sick to my stomach.

            The heavy burden of reality followed me for a few days or so, during which time it was hard to get out of bed in the morning and I found myself weeping over things that never used to cause me duress: the sight of slush puddles on my way to school, our backyard sandbox covered in a fresh blanket of snow for example. All these tearful sights only offered more proof of the reality of winter and the likely unreality of Spring or any other season.

            The child’s heart, however, is strangely resilient and recovers daily from a great many tiny injustices. This was the case with the existential crisis of 1996, as it soon happened that all of my questions and doubts concerning spring (not to mention all of reality) began to fade slowly into something else, something new. I cannot say what it was that buoyed my doubt with fresh hope, for I never did manage to prove the reality of spring. The process of healing, in this case, happened almost imperceptibly, just as the most beautiful things in this life often do unfold without our notice: the rising of the sun over an endless lake’s horizon, for example, or the slow and steady blooming of a rose. And perhaps it was simply time itself that healed my harrowing questions with its soothing balm of forgetfulness.

            By pure coincidence, this mysterious healing process coincided at the same time the stiff winter winds were slowly converting to the warm rains and sunshine of Spring. It is, after all, hard to despair of anything when there are early daffodils poking up through the near-frozen earth. This, too, was a slow and imperceptible process. It seemed one day I was positively in anguish as I tried to face the fact that winter would last forever, and the next day through no conscious effort, was persuaded to leave my playground monastery, and take off my hat at, which then entreated me to run around with my peers which quickly offered enough distraction from my existential quandary.  Of course several weeks later, I forgot to take my coat outside for recess, and discovered it was not nearly as cold as it had been on my walk to school, and by this time, well, there was quite enough to think about than proving the existence of Spring—what with the end of my last year of elementary school approaching and such. And as is so miraculously the case, not only did I recover from my once debilitating angst over the question of spring, I forgot all about the question itself and went on to lead a fairly normal, existential-crisis-free, ten-year old life for about two months or so.

            By which time it was late May, during which month there happened to be an unseasonable heat wave for two days. I don’t recall what unit we were on in science, but Mr. Wilson took the opportunity of the heat wave to review with us why there are different seasons. In summer, he said, the earth is turned more directly towards the sun, which makes the air feel warmer. He was holding a globe, and had placed a basketball on the table, and was walking around in circles to demonstrate.

            “And then, see, when the earth is here, the axis is tilted away from the sun, and we have colder  temperatures, and snow, and that’s winter,” he informed us.

            As often happened while Mr. Wilson talked about science, I grew distracted and began staring out the window. Once again, I could see the rooftops glistening in the glare of the sun’s light, beyond them I could just see some sunlight reflecting off Lake Winnebago. Dressed in the lightest sun dress that was suitable to wear to school, I was still sweating. As I gazed out across the housetops, I tried to imagine what they would be like covered in snow, with smoke rising out of the chimneys. I tried to imagine being too cold instead of too hot. I even closed my eyes and tried to convince myself I was cold, fake shivering to see if it worked. And it didn’t. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine winter ever coming. What if winter doesn’t really exist? I asked myself.

            My mind settling into an ominous dread, I foresaw spending the rest of my life sweating and being told to drink water all the time.

            I raised my hand.

            “Nicole? Do you have a question?” Mr. Wilson looked up from his impromptu demonstration. I trembled slightly in trepidation.

            “How do we know that Winter really exists?"

Mr. Wilson slapped his forehead, dropping the basketball. Before he could  deign to condescend and come to the rescue of his  existentially challenged student, the bell rang. Recess! 

           

           

           

           

           

           

Deutschisms: German Ingenuity

I've gotta hand it to them, one thing the Germans excel at is mechanical and technological know-how.

Historically, Germany was not the most richly-endowed apple of the bunch in terms of natural resources. In the Middle Ages, they didn't have the flax to weave into linen like France and England. They didn't have the spices and access to trade like Italy and Spain did.They certainly didn't have the tobacco and cotton that the new world did, nor did they have a thriving sea-faring enterprise with which to colonize, like England, France and Spain did. So, the Germans learned to compete by taking every one else's raw materials and figuring out what to do with them--and how to do it in the most efficient, economic and technologically sophisticated way. This may not be the land of flax or wheat or spices or trade, but it is the land of the printing press, SIEMENS, Volkswagen, Daimler-Chrysler, and a few other things.

As such, there are two universal, unspoken laws when it comes to this level of what I call mech-savy:
 1.) Give a German some kind of physical object that requires a multi-step process to operate, and he/she will know what to do with it.
2.) If a German doesn't know how to work the object/ machine, 99% of the time, it is because that object was not logically or efficiently designed in the first place.
3.) If an object, machine or part is German-designed, it will make sense. If at first you don't understand, it is because you do not think as practically, compactly and efficiently as the Germans.

I came face to face with this facet of German mentality on Friday morning, a day which marked the umpteenth-day anniversary since I started having all manner of technological problems in this country from my internet to my computer to my cell phone. On account of the fact I'd been in there nearly everyday the whole week, the man in the cell phone shop already knew me by first name, a rare demonstration of social intimacy here that in the US is the equivalent to promising your best friend with your first born child. I had already bought ANOTHER German Sim-card for my cell phone, charged and recharged it, gotten a new phone number... And still, my phone read "No Sim-Card inserted, emergency calls only." A SIM-card, by the way, is that little plastic chip you have to put in the back of your phone, underneath the battery, any time you get a new cell phone contract.  It's like your phone's little id card in the world of cell phones--it tells other phones what your phone number is and who your service is through. My phone had apparently lost its ability to detect its own sim card and by Friday, I had lost my ability to detect my own sanity.

"Look, I NEED that cell phone to work so I can call the internet company, so they can come fix my internet, so that I can then fix my computer, " I explained to the man. He nodded.

"Unfortunately, Nicole, nothing seems to work. I can only guess that something is wrong with your phone. Can you send it to the manufacturer to repair?" He asked.

"I bought it used on Amazon," I stated, nearly in tears. "I needed an unlocked phone to use in Europe and that's the only way I could afford one. That was a year ago--there's no way the random person I bought it from is going to be able to do anything. I've never had problems until this last Christmas. I don't have money to be buying a new phone with!"

"YOu said this also happened in Canada, as well?"

"Yes, when I had the North American Sim-card in." I told him.

He shook his head, and said that he had never seen anything like this--a phone that couldn't read a cell phone. He was sorry but there was nothing else he could do.  He shook my hand goodbye (another Deutschism for another day) and wished me and my phone luck. As I was exiting, however, he suddenly called out to me.

"Wait!" He said. "I just thought of one more thing! Let me see that phone again."

And I knew, as soon as he said that, that he would be able to save my phone, because when a German sees the technological light, there's nothing that can stop them. As he began peeling layers off my phone, removing the battery and everything else, he proceeded to make small talk. We talked about the library, my program, my degree.

"A PhD, huh?" He said. "Wow, that must mean you're really smart, right?"

I nodded awkwardly, just trying to go along with the conversation, then shook my head realizing that nodding was probably going to make me look full of myself.

"I don't know. I suppose I was just trained by smart people," I answered finally. But secretly, it was nice to hear a German call me smart,  because compliments from them are so few and far between.

"Huh," he trailed off, staring at the inside of my phone. "And in all that 'training' no one told you how to insert a sim card into a cell phone in the right direction?" I stared at him.

"Nein!" I yelled, as he turned the phone so I could see him take the sim card out and flip it around.

"Ja!" He yelled just as loud. "So, let me get this straight. You are getting your doctorate, and the last two times you've traveled, you've managed to insert the SIM card incorrectly, and then you had the audacity to blame it on your cell phone, and then on my service here, and then..."

But I didn't listen to the rest of what he said because by now, I just tune out the German social shaming rituals. As he expressed his thoughts on my intelligence (or the lack thereof) with increasing creativity, I walked out the door smiling. Thanks to German ingenuity, my long week of mech-stress came to an end. Next task is to conquer my slow internet on Tuesday.

Deutschisms 2: Cultural Paradoxes and Paradumbness.

Author's preface: Just to clear my conscious, I had a post ready for the occasion of the New Year... But it got destroyed on my computer and I haven't had the nerve to reytype it all. In the meantime I've found some new things to write about. OK. On with the post...

~*~

Now that I'm back in Germany after a month-long stateside hiatus, I'm a little more than half way through this year-and-a-half research stint. Coming back has made me actively notice a few more oddities about the Germans, and looking back on my time thus far has also made me realized how much I've learned since April. The following anecdotes are taken from real life... (btw I think they are technically vignettes rather than anecdotes, since there is no moral or inspirational purpose behind them. Although, I suppose enlightening the rest of the world on the occasional idiocy of this culture [and I suppose my own culture at times] is in and of itself a valiant enough purpose to warrant the name anecdote.)

~*~
Muenzenkultur, ie  Coin Culture. The Germans have a rather interesting relationship to their currency, and by that I don't just mean that they are prudent to the point of inhumanity (in Germany, one pays to use public restrooms for example). They also like all dealings in their currency to be done with exact precision as humanly and wallet-ly possible.

If you have a German debit card, don't bother trying to use it. If you are like me, you will have the pleasure of being yelled at (literally with raised voice) by all matter of vendors who decry the heresy of having to pay credit card companies a nominal fee every time a customer uses such a card. Before Christmas, I was looking high and low for a particular set of cookie cutters. I finally found Wolfenbuettel's only cooking-goods store, were I found the village's only cookie cutters. I could only buy one cookie cutter, as the storefront owner was charging a whopping seven Euro (something like eleven dollars) for each one (the price tags were written by hand). I made sure to ask him beforehand if I could pay by debit card, to which he answered yes. As I went up to pay, he ran the card through, and proceeded to give me a long moral tirade on why I should only use cash to pay in public. His voice continued to crescendo, he became red in the face and other customers glanced up from their perusing of the store. Since I had asked him ahead of time, and he had a "visa" sign on his door, I could only assume that his tirade was less against the fifty Euro cents he would be charged by visa and more about the German fondness for shaming others.  I complied patiently and politely with his prolific pontification for about three minutes, at which point my patience grew thin. "Sir," I interrupted him finally. "In all honesty, why don't you simply add the fifty cents to the total cost of the product? I would be happy to pay it. It doesn't seem like you have a problem over charging your customers to begin with. Merry Christmas to you, as well."

Another thing to be aware of while spending time in Germany is that it is culturally inacceptable to pay with anything other than correct change. Does your grocery bill come to 5 euro and thirty five cents? Give the cashier any amount of bills, but woe to the man who gives her anything more or less than thirty five cents.  It doesn't matter if you hold up the line searching through your wallet. It doesn't matter if you were saving that twenty-cent piece for the vending machine at work. Though I've never attempted this before, it's highly likely that it wouldn't matter if you didn't have enough cash--as long as you give them the correct change after the decimal point (comma), they probably wouldn't notice.  If you try going through the line without giving the right change, they will stop you.

"Do you have thirty five cents?" They will ask, staring holes into your face.
"Sorry, I don't have anything smaller than a ten," you will respond.
"Five cents?" They will ask again, and at that point everyone behind you in line looks at you. What kind of unsocialzed half-breed are you that you neglected to bring correct change with you to pay?
Finally, you give up. You search your wallet, your coat pocket, the inner linings of your purse where you once sewed the family diamonds to keep save from Soviet snipers. And, after five minutes of sweating and shaming, you will find thirty five cents. If not, well, I've never ventured to find out but I've seen others who have. Those are the nameless faces that haunt Wolfenbuettel streets after dark, their eyes hollow and their stares vacant. In return for their not giving exact change, the Gemans saw fit to seize their sense of self.

One would naturally assume that this vindictive obession with receiving exact change would contain the reverse-blessing of some kind, namely perhaps a generosity of giving the change one needs. It is, for example, the plight of every library scholar here to compulsively hoard fifty-cent pieces. Not only are they the only coins that will work in our laundry machines, but they are also the rarest species of Euro coins.  Not a problem, one would assume. When you pay for something (with correct change) simply ask for one of the euros returned to you to be paid in fifty-cent pieces, right? Wrong. Last Tuesday, I went on a fifty-cent-piece safari. The following excerpts are actual things that were said to me when I asked for fifty cent pieces in return:

"Oh, sorry, I only have a few left and I'd like to keep them." (from the lady at the nearest pharmacy-type store which I frequent about once or twice a week.)

"We don't like to give change to customers." (the grocery store)

"No. Good evening." (from the natural foods store.)

I finally realized (for the umpteenth time in my life) that plain civility and mutual respect is simply too much to ask from the Germans, so I went to the Turks. I always go to the Turks in Germany when I need to feel like a human being again after dealing with the Germans for too long.  By that point, though, I literally only had a euro on me, so I couldn't buy anything.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but I've been trying to find change all evening," I asked the cashier, whom I knew from experience could speak very little German. "Could I please have two fifty cent pieces? I really need to do my laundry."

She smiled and nodded, as though she understood the situation personally. In several minutes, I left the store with the two aforementioned coins in pocket--as well as a small bundle of hand made Turkish delicacies that the woman threw in a bag "as a gift."

Every story has a happy ending.

~*~

I have a new roommate, Emilie. She is a delightful French doctoral candidate with whom I've bummed around a few times and learned a few things.

Last weekend, her friend and colleague came to visit her. He took a long train ride from Paris, which involves switching from the French rail system to the German rail system. We picked him up at the trainstation with Emilie's car, after his train was delayed for four hours.

"The conductor wanted to charge me forty euro b/c he claimed I had the wrong ticket when I got onboard in Germany!" He nearly yelled as soon as he was off the train. "I told him maybe if his train hadn't been four-hours delayed, I wouldn't have had to be on the wrong train! What a German! They'll try to swindle everyone!" He was yelling this loudly in thick French accent, and I wondered whether anyone could hear.

After this, we walked around Braunschweig for a little bit. We came to an intersection where a mass of Germans waited on both sides of the empty, non-traffic bearing street (waiting for the cross walk sign is a beloved religion for most Germans). Emilie and her friend paraded across.

"We don't abide by German rules," she turned back at me, laughing. "Especially the pointless ones."

The next intersection we came to, I followed Emilie across the street.

"Hey, follow the rules!" An old man yelled out of nowhere, raising his cane at us from the curb. "This isn't France, you know!" Emilie and Louis burst out laughing--there was no way he could have known how apt his comments were.

I soon found out that there is a wide cleft separating French people from Germans. And that's the way both sides like it.

"Why did he say that thing about French people?" I asked Emilie, later.

"Because," she explained calmly. "We hate each other. It's a historical fact. Life just makes sense that way."

And it does, sort of. The Germans and the French--they hate each other, but they need each other too. The Germans are too uptight, and they need to loose Frenchies as their cultural foes in order to legitimize and exacerbate their need to be uptight. The French, on the other hand, need their German nemeses to remind them why being laid back is such a joy.

~*~

Bureaucratic culture.

I have probably already made some harangue or other about German bureaucracy on this blog. If you have forgotten, though, I suggest catching yourself up by watching any number of feature films that have been set during the period of the Holocaust.

I remember the first experience I had with the bureaucracy in Wolfenbuettel, it was a mess. I needed to open a bank account, so I showed up with my passport and some cash to deposit.

"We need three proofs of your address," they told me. I returned later that day to realize that they closed at 1PM. The following Monday I returned.

"But where is your residency documentation?" They asked. I showed them my three proofs of my address. No, residency documents are something different that, unbeknownst to me, entailed three trips to the city hall, another two trips to the bureau of immigration, paying for updated passport photos, and a myriad of other trivialities. Six moths or so later, I finally had all my ducks in a row to get a bank account, only to have to return again after I had fetched a proof of employment plus a few other things I dont' remember anymore.

I had gone through this whole process before, when I lived in Fulda during 2006, but that time, my boss had simply collected all my documents from her file on me and walked me to the bank, city hall and everywhere else herself. She did all the talking, meanwhile I think I looked at toys in the waiting room like all the other adult children or something. All that time, I thought we were just there to see the doctor or something. Little did I know she had been going to bat for me in the world's most bureaurcratically obscene society.

My experience with the bank this time around taught me a lesson. Germans are serious when it comes to documents and there is no way I'm ever going to change that. Watching a German office worker with documents is sort of like watching a child in a candy store-they just love papers with semi-useless bits of identifiable information on it! First, they lay all the papers out in organized stacks. Then they shuffle the papers. Sometimes, if they are really lucky, they get to put staples into some of the papers.

After the bank, I quickly bought a mini file box--the kind some people store coupons with. In went every document I have ever been given since the time I came to Germany--INCLUDING the promotional materials that the German rail company sends me every three months. You never know when a German will ask for this all-important document.

Today was the crowning glory of my interactions thus far with German bureaucracy: the internet company. I need to get ethernet cable internet b/c the wifi I currently have is to slow for Skype. So, after lunch I grabbed my mini-file and my passport and headed to Kabel Deutschland.

After some consultation, I finally settled on a contract, whence commenced what--six months ago--would have ended in total catastrophe.

"Passport?" He asked. I opened my file. BAM. I smacked it onto the counter.

"Pay stub addressed to your address?" BAM.

"Residency documents?" BAM.

"Bank account num--" BAM. I smacked my bank account id card onto the table before he had even asked for it. The cashier stared up at me curiously. What's that, homeboy? Or, should I say, Hausboy? Speechless? Yeah that's right. You've never been beat by an American at your culture's favorite pastime, have you? Well, you've never dealt with THIS American before, have you?

"Blood type?" He asked. I was stunned. I had no idea what my blood type was.  My heart raced. I needed that internet subscription. If he asked for one more document, so help me God...

"Just kidding," he chuckled, handing me the contract copy. It was the first time I'd ever witnessed a joke in Germany that was, for all intents and purposes... LOL.