Men Day 2015 Part 3

I'm trying to get caught up with posts but more things keep happening and it's hard to keep up! Admittedly I haven't been trying very hard.. Our gym upstairs keeps calling my name instead of my laptop and the couch.

So, I get this message from Mario saying he's in the hospital, and of course I can't go back to sleep. Instead, I did what you should probably never do - look online for reported accidents the night before. Two 20 something men had been hit by cars and one was hit by a street tram (alcohol/drugs almost certainly had to be involved in that one unless the guy was in a wheelchair that got stuck on the tracks or something). Great, now I was really panicked.

Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do except wait until Mario wrote me again to tell me where he was, what happened, etc.

Around 1pm Jenny checked her phone and saw that Mario had copied and pasted his messages to me in a Whatsapp group with our best friends. She called me instantly and we tried to piece together what happened.

After she and I said goodbye at 4 am, she walked back to the Ubahn station -- but instead of going home, she decided to check Alte Kantine to see if the boys were there. Which, as I mentioned before, we were sure they would be. I wasn't surprised to hear that she'd gone there, but I was surprised that she didn't ask me if I'd like to go. She'd probably made up her mind on the way to U Eberswalder, but still... It's one of those "If only she had told me she was going, then maybe all of this wouldn't have happened" hindsight things.

So, Jenny is standing outside the club and Mario comes out. He was quite drunk and Jenny asked if he needed help getting to the subway station. He said "No, I've got it." So Jenny went inside the club and met up with Olli.

At this point that's all we knew.

I was fielding frantic messages from Mario's cousin Andrea when the phone rang about an hour after my call with Jenny. Mario had called her, explaining everything, and asked her to pass me important information in English. He wanted to be as clear as possible, and using Jenny as a go-between was the best way.

He still didn't know where he was, but he was feeling better after the nap and some pain medicine. He had a broken nose, an 8cm long gash from his forehead into his scalp, and various bruises and scrapes everywhere. He'd write me when he knew which hospital he was in.

A short while later he wrote the name of the hospital and asked me to bring some clothes, a book, etc. I scrambled to get everything together, did a quick google map search for the place, and set off. I get to the hospital about 20 minutes later and ask the information desk where Mario is .... and the man tells me that he's in a different branch of the hospital in Prenzlauer Berg, not in Friedrichshain. Great. The nice man gave me vague directions on where to go and I set off.

Everything that could have gone wrong did. In my sleep-deprived, frantic state I went in absolutely the wrong direction every single time I had to get on a tram or walk anywhere. But eventually I made it to the hospital just as visiting hours were almost over, and after dealing with a (very unhelpful) information desk worker, and asking nurses on his floor, I found his room.

It was surprisingly nice - the hospital had a private room that was free, so they stuck him in there. It was like a hotel room for a 90-year-old - adjustable bed, raised toilet seat with handles, but surprisingly roomy. And all that for 10 euro per day. Go socialist health care systems!

Mario wasn't, and still isn't, sure of what happened. The last thing he remembers he was heading to the UBahn station, and then two men were standing over him and calling an ambulance. He was apparently lying on the ground covered in blood for at least an hour, but had all of his valuables on him. So either people saw him and gave him a wide berth, or no one came by.

He passed out again and woke up briefly in the ambulance, and then came to again as the doctor was working on him. He'd have to stay the weekend for observation, per the norm for head injuries, but was otherwise feeling OK. Just extremely exhausted and sore.

So, that was my weekend. The following day several of his friends and his parents visited him as well. His parents were just like, "Ach, Mario, man man man." Translation: We are happy that you are alive and recovering but disappointed that you get yourself into these situations, but because you are hurt we can't be mad at you.

The scar from the gash will be there forever, although it has lightened quite considerably since then. To this day we still don't know what happened. Theories include:

• a break dance battle (not serious)
• attack from Lord Voldemort (also not serious but plausible for Potter fans)
• hit by a car
• a fight involving a bottle
• a fall down stairs

I personally think it was either a fight or a car. Mario was bruised heavily on one side of his entire body and his right fist was swollen and sore. I wouldn't be surprised if Mario started joking with someone, went too far, and found himself surrounded by intoxicated and aggressive men. A hit to the head with a bottle, they think "Oh shit look at all of that blood, we killed him," and run off, not thinking to check his pockets.

Or a car, whose driver who was possibly drunk himself, speeding around a corner and not looking for a pedestrian. Bam, hits Mario, checks to see if anyone saw, then speeds off.

Or of course, Lord Voldemort was lying in wait to cast his next Killing Curse and my love for Mario saved him.

Men Day 2015 Part 2

Jenny and I downed a few grenadine-heavy tequila sunrises and around 11:30 decided to go out. The boys' cell phones had died several hours before but we could predict where they would end up -- the Alte Kantine in Kulturbrauerei, a large building complex that formerly housed a brewery (hence the name Brauerei). Now it houses several clubs, small businesses, and a couple restaurants. Alte Kantine is a favorite of the boys because of quite a few reasons that keep them coming back week after week after week, despite the dozens of amazing clubs that provide Berlin its famous nightlife:

• cheap 5 euro entrance and hardly any line
• reasonable drink prices (3 eur beers, 6-7 eur rum & cokes, 1 eur shooters)
• partygoers are in their mid 20s - because no one wants to go out and party with 16 year olds just able to get into clubs
• big dance floor and good mix of music. The DJ normally plays a few songs from one genre and switches to another one; so you'll hear Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, then a few German pop songs, then a few rap songs, then some modern pop songs, and maybe even some good ol' 90s grunge rock after that
• not really any electro music, which the boys don't really like for an entire evening anyway, and which ensures that drugs in the club are at a minimum

So we could predict with 90% certainty that Olli and Mario would be heading to Alte Kantine some time that night, if they were still coherent enough to decide they even wanted to go out. Remember, they had been drinking for about 12 hours by this time.

She and I went to a dive bar in Prenzlauer Berg called Mokum. It was everything a dive bar should be - dirty, filled with drunk loud people, shady changing drink prices, darts, pool table; and it even had a  small dance room with a few tables and worn fake-leather couches sprinkled along the walls. 

outside of Mokum (yelp.com)

The DJ was playing heavy metal when we arrived and found a spot on a couch. The dance floor was mostly empty except for a few guys who were really into the music. I couldn't help sitting there and laughing silently -- watching these crazy white people bounce around and headbang reminded me of the "Black People not Amused with White People" meme. Of course Jenny didn't get it when I told her because there are seemingly only 3 black people in all of Germany, and those who are here definitely do not have the same culture as in America. So she just nodded as if she knew what I was talking about and we went back to watching the crazed rockers mosh around. 

I was beginning to understand what rocker Jenny liked about the bar - she is a rocker through and through and while she tolerates pop, it's really not her thing. I went with her once to an 80s metal night and was like "Who is this person and how can she headbang so much?"

Blah blah blah, party party party, dance dance dance, beer beer beer. Fast forward to 4 am. Shortly after we arrived, Jenny had requested a Judas Priest song - and the DJ promptly played everything except 80s metal. She was getting pretty annoyed and definitely not feeling the atmosphere any longer, so we called it a night. The bar is situated directly on the tram line I needed to go back home, and would have been faster than walking back to the Ubahn station and taking the subway with Jenny, so we said goodbye and headed our separate ways.

I unfortunately managed to just miss the tram. During the day, almost all of the public transport systems run ever 5 - 10 minutes. After midnight regardless of the day, the trams run once every half hour. I arrived at the stop and saw 30 minutes until the next one. Perfect. I was in relatively safe Berlin, in a relatively safe neighborhood, and the sky was already beginning to get lighter, even at 4 am, and I was sober. I decided to follow the tram line and walk from one station to the next. It's something I would never do in San Francisco, with the high-crime areas of the Tenderloin and Western Addition blocking the path to my apartment in pristine Pacific Heights. But here in Berlin, it was just a walk in the cool, early morning air.

So I walked.. and walked.. and walked. The minutes on each tram station dwindled but not nearly fast enough. At this rate I would be all the way to Frankfurter Allee before the tram even got close. So when I came to the intersection where Mario always turns left while driving home, I decided to follow that road instead. The hypotenuse is the shortest distance between two points, and I've come this far, might as well walk the rest of the way, right?

Well.. Not exactly. I've got a habit of heading off in the general direction of something without knowing exactly how to get there. I always arrive, but it's not necessarily the best route. It's actually usually definitely not the fastest route. And this happened again. See, the thing about Berlin is that it is huge. HUGE. It is 891 km sq. San Francisco is a measly 121 km sq, including Treasure Island and Alcatraz. The entire city of San Francisco is basically a district inside Berlin. I failed to take this into account and walked for about 50 minutes. I saw a landmark, a tall hotel, that is about 10 minutes away from our apartment. And it was probably at least 20 minutes of walking away. By now the sun was almost over the horizon and my refreshing morning walk had turned into drudgery. I found an Sbahn station and hopped onto the train, getting home in 10 minutes.

I texted Jenny as promised, letting her know that I got home all right. It was almost 5:30 am and Mario still wasn't home. That isn't anything strange - sometimes he gets home at 7 am when he goes out without me, and sometimes we get home at 8 or 9 when we go out together. But this time something didn't feel right. I waited and waited, and finally at 6:30 I decided it was time to go to bed.

I woke up just before 9 am with a start. Still no Mario. I had a really bad feeling. I immediately checked my phone and saw that he had written me just minutes before:

"Baby ich bin im Krankenhaus und muss erst mal hier bleiben... Es geht mir so weit gut also mach dir bitte keine Sorgen. Ich liebe dich. Ich muss jetzt schlafen"  - Baby I am in the hospital and have to stay here for now. I'm OK so far so don't worry, please. I love you. I have to sleep now.

 Cue instant panic.

Men's Day 2015 Part 1

In Germany, Father's Day is celebrated by all men. It's actually called "Männertag" (Men's Day) and falls on Ascension Day; the day that, according to Roman Catholiciscm, Jesus ascended to Heaven after His resurrection. Fun fact for those of you who are wondering: this tradition dates back to the eighteenth century when prizes were awarded to fathers after Ascension Day parades in rural areas.

Men who are fathers generally spend the day with their families. Men who are not fathers use it as an excuse to go day drinking and get wasted, then continue drinking into the night whereupon they are shitfaced around 5 am.  It's a national holiday and always falls on a Thursday, so naturally everyone takes Friday off as well and the streets can be fairly chaotic.

This year, Mario would be spending the day with his friend Olli. I am good friends with his girlfriend, Jenny, so she and I decided to have our own girls' day. We ate breakfast together around 11 am, and then the boys left to celebrate "being a man." Meaning having their first drink around 11:30, and many more thereafter.

She suggested that we go to a couple art galleries. A quick check online and we were on our way to Alexanderplatz. In the Ubahnhof we saw our first sign of Männertag: a group of 5 or 6 guys dressed like Superman. They had rigged up a little kid's wagon as a portable bar, decorated with Superman's red and blue colors and logo, and had speakers playing the Superman movie theme. It was pretty elaborate and also funny as hell. They kept doing the Superman pose as if they were flying, one fist in the air.

The gallery turned out to be closed, so we poked around at a Flohmarkt (a flea market) and headed to Museum Island, a clustering of diverse museums here in Berlin. You can buy tickets for each individual museum or, if you are a tourist and want to get your money's worth, you can buy a master ticket and spend the whole freaking day wandering around looking at old stuff.

On the way there we stopped to drink a beer. I had my wine and sipped it a bit while sitting on a park bench and pretending to be asozial, one of those day-drinking rednecks who hang out in front of Spätis (corner stores, very popular here in Berlin). We were right on a major tourist pathway between sights so I got a lot of funny looks. Mission accomplished.

We headed to the Pergamon Museum, which is cool because it has several huge displays including the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, which is a towering beautiful blue tribute to one of the greatest cities of the ancient world; the Market Gate of Miletus, which is a dominating two-story high, 30m wide monument; and the Mshatta Facade, an intricate palacial facade of an ancient desert castle in Jordan.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Pergamonmuseum_Ishtartor_05.jpg

Mario was writing us periodically with updates so that we [aka Jenny] wouldn't worry. She kept saying things like "I wonder what the boys are doing now," and "I wonder what the boys are doing now." It seemed like they were just hanging out at our apartment drinking and Olli was singing and playing the guitar. He's quite good at it for someone who is self-taught, and it's his biggest passion. We sent them a few pictures too.

Men's Day Fun - Olli (L) and Mario

Sophistication and Culture - Girls' Day at the museum

I am someone who can appreciate museums, but I do have my saturation point. I have to see the coolest stuff first because once I reach that point, I am just wandering around staring at more old stuff instead of appreciating it for how cool it is. I also have persistent lower back pain, compounded by too much time on my feet, so by the time we left the museum my back had fused into one grinding ache.

We went to Dolores, a California-Mexican restaurant. I had no idea that Dolores referred to the Dolores in San Francisco. The walls were plastered with blown-up street maps of the Dolores Park and Mission neighborhoods of the city. I stared at the maps, reliving my memories in that glorious city. The walking tour with my brother that we had to cut short because the poor guy's foot was fractured and he couldn't stand to walk anymore; the day in the park with my cousin, when a guy randomly brought out DJ equipment and was spinning tunes while strangers gathered around and had a mini-dance party, sharing weed and throwing beach balls around; the towering hills rising out of nowhere, making you feel like you were on top of the whole world as you stared down at the entire city... I was nostalgic but Jenny was unimpressed, so instead of blabbing on about SF I just stuffed my face with my vegan burrito bowl, feeling like a cow as twig-sized Jenny picked at her salad.

With our early dinners down the hatch, we headed to a nearby art gallery Jenny had seen online. She's an aspiring photographer and loves going to those things. It was.. Interesting. Very tiny, with only 12 or 13 exhibits crammed into a single small room filled with people. One of the pieces of "art" looked like someone had dug up metal chain link fence posts, painted them pink, and badly taped pieces of paper with Sinhalese writing on them. No joke. The concrete was still on the bottom of the posts. We moved around the room and Jenny gave me her artistic opinion on the art, which ranged from a picture of a man holding a mirror and looking at himself to abstract colors on canvas. There was also a painting of skeletons walking to a funeral, most of whom looked old and somber in pinstriped suits and bowling hats. They had normal bodies and hands, just skull heads. One was even in a wheelchair. And then towards the end there was this sassy voluptuous blond skeleton in a super short skirt and huge boobs, carrying a skull under her arm. Unfortunately there were no explanations of the art, so Jenny and I amused ourselves trying to explain what the heck was happening in this picture. My theory was that the bombshell skeleton was the mistress of the rich old skeleton who died and that's why she was prancing her way to the funeral. But who knows, really?

The room quickly filled up to the point that there was no more room, and we had already done our tour, so we squeezed past the artsy hipsters who were chatting with people like they knew everyone already. They probably did. There was a small camera crew outside interviewing the artists and we stopped to listen for a few minutes, but Jenny could see that I was itching to sit down so we headed back to her apartment for tequila sunrises and girl talk.


Stay tuned for Part 2! It involves a weekend stay in a hospital, 8 stitches, and ruined bloody clothes!

Pizza or Volcano

I mostly do all of the meal planning around here. And by "mostly" I mean that my boyfriend will occasionally buy a frozen pizza for lunch on days when I don't feel like cooking.  It's not his fault -- I am vegetarian, he's not. He can cook the heck out of schnitzel or a roast, I'm sure -- but when it comes to legumes and tofu and veggies he's 99% clueless.

Today he asked me to write a shopping list for tomorrow's meals. I spent 15 minutes looking around online for something and finally decided, "Pizza." I just didn't feel like dealing with finding something new, and I am burned out on pasta and Asian.

My boyfriend hesitated. I could see the wheels working in his head... "Pizza.. But I ate that last week.. And making it at home isn't great... Mehhhh..." Then he remembers my psychic powers, and that I know he's not crazy about pizza tonight. He also remembers that my last Pill was two days ago and my hormones are going crazy, stirring like fiery pools of magma under the Earth's surface, just waiting for a tiny fissure in the crust to appear so they can rage out, covering everything in a 100-mile radius with white-hot fury.

"OK, pizza is fine!"

Good man. 

10 Phases of Watching German TV as an Expat

Moving to another country is a complicated process, and watching TV is an excellent way to have insight into the culture and improve your understanding of the language. Plus, true to Germany's "tax everything possible" policy, everyone has to pay a TV tax regardless of whether or not they have a TV, so you might as well use it, right?

I started learning German pretty intensively right around the time when I started dating my boyfriend, who can't speak much English. Due to external circumstances, we moved in together pretty quickly, and my German was still in its infantile stages. It was also the first time that I had access to a TV since coming to Germany. Alone at home while my boyfriend worked, I ended up watching several hours of TV each day. Note: I was also working out, cleaning the apartment, and getting outside when the weather was nice. No judging! While it was incredibly tedious at first, it played a HUGE role in improving my German very quickly.

For fun, here are the 10 basic phases of watching German TV:

1. You just stare at the TV, unable to pick out more than just a few words. At this point you're watching to get used to the sound of the language and not for comprehension. You are also still watching movies and TV shows in your native language, possibly with subtitles in German if you're being ambitious.
2. You've studied a bit and learned some more vocabulary. Most of what you hear is still gibberish, but sometimes you can understand an entire sentence! A small victory indeed, but you pat yourself on the back anyway. At this point you'll take anything you can get.
3. You're slowly increasing your vocabulary so you know what these crazy-looking subtitles mean. And you are realizing that German grammar has almost nothing to do with English, forcing you into a little black box of "I can't do this!" despondency. You finally realize you really can't do this on your own. Forget your hopes of magically learning German -- it's going to take some serious studying.
4. Take a break from the TV (it's not like you understand the shows anyway) and spend some time with actual books to learn this impossible language. You're pleased to realize that those viewing hours from step 1 - 3 were not wasted -- you have a slightly better understanding of the spoken language than you thought. You're still struggling to keep your head above water at this point.
5. OK! Break over. You've got the basic grammar down and you've memorized an impressive list of the most common vocabulary. Time to turn on the TV again.
6. You're watching your favorite TV shows and movies in German, with subtitles of course. And I mean movies that you have seen a million times and can almost recite by heart. A pocket dictionary is by your side at all times. You spend more time staring at the subtitles than watching what's happening with the actors. Frustratingly, sometimes the captions don't match up with what they say.
   Unforseen side effect:
   TV is no longer the relaxing, brain-numbing pastime it once was. You have to work to watch. A 20 minute sitcom leaves you feeling like you've been teaching yourself calculus -- which you have been, in a way.
7. You're slowly memorizing the German text from watching the same shows over and over. You don't rely on the subtitles anymore and can actually watch the action on screen now, jumping back to subtitles quickly for a bit of help.
   Unforseen side effect:
   You are really, really thrown off by the mismatch between the actors' lips forming words in English and hearing the German voice over. You never before realized how much you relied on mouth movements to understand what someone is saying. You have to train yourself to stare at their eyes. Also, while they usually find a German actor with a similar voice, sometimes you are totally thrown off by the voiceover. This happens way more often with cartoons, for some reason.
8. Fast forward in time. You've been studying since Step 4 and now it's time to leave your safe TV/movie reruns (thank goodness, you were getting so sick of them!) and venture into real German TV. You quickly realize that the news, and documentaries, are your new best friend. They speak Hochdeutsch (proper "high" German) and clearly. No confusing slang, mumbling, or accents. Also, while closed captioning is required for handicapped persons, the actual amount of captioned shows varies. And when the show actually does have captions, you realize that, like your favorite newly-hated TV shows, the captions often don't match up.
   Obvious side effect:
   You quickly become an expert on current world events and WW2 documentaries (which .is apparently all that Germany has, unless you stay up late and watch UFO conspiracy docs, imported from the US). Great for trivia nights!
   Unforseen side effect:
   See that cultural differences really do exist, especially towards nudity. Naked voluptuous women showering? No problem! Show it on the "Good Morning Germany"-type show when families are breakfasting together. "But it's just a human body," they say. "Kids see their parents and each other naked all the time," they say. Yeah, maybe -- but it doesn't stop my boyfriend from yelling "TITTEN!" whenever boobs flash on the screen.
9. Graduate to normal TV shows, but keep your training wheels, aka subtitles. You are getting better at understanding conversational German and learning all kinds of interesting expressions (and swear words, because they don't carry the same weight as they do in English and are used relatively frequently in normal conversation). You're also getting pretty jaded from seeing butts and boobs on screen.
   Unforseen side effects:
   Realize how many TV shows America exports, and how great they are compared to German TV. Become actually appalled at the quality of most German TV shows, with either a) are not funny; b) are just plain annoying; c) have terrible effects, acting, and plot lines; d) are a pitiful shadow of American TV shows.
10. Several months after your TV journey started, you graduate to the last and final step: watching whatever you want without subtitles (but let's not lie, most shows didn't have them anyway). No, you don't understand 100% -- but the balance is more like 90% for news shows, and 75% for normal TV. What you don't get is easily figured out by context clues on the screen. And there's always the "Ask a buddy" option if you're watching with a native speaker...unless it's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," in which case you need to just give up now because you're never gonna understand that show. Congratulations! You've persevered and now have a wonderful/shocking/shameful window into German culture whenever you want.
    Unforseen side effects:
    Become so annoyed by Germany's sitcoms, dramas, reality TV, and soap operas (other than GZSZ, which is the only soap opera I'd ever watch because it RULES) that you give up on watching them altogether, which is ironic because you started this whole process so that you could watch them in the first place. Luckily, they are pretty good at showing good, relatively new (American) movies every night at 8:15, directly after GZSZ -- so there's your evening TV program. 

Why you should stay away from pregnant women. Or why I was called Asozial today

So, I really shouldn't be writing this. I should be showering and heading to bed because my alarm rings bright and early at 6:30 am (and my boyfriend's alarm at 5:45) but I am rebelling against my better judgement.  When did I ever care about going to bed early anyway? (Answer: around 25, which is apparently the age where everything starts going downhill)

I was in the grocery store today. I wanted to get there "early," meaning, before the lunchtime crowd of local workers looking for a quick bite to eat hit the registers. Unfortunately either they were early or  I was late, and I ended up in a lengthy line anyway.

I picked out the ingredients for my lunch (a spinach salad with marinated artichoke hearts and sundried tomatoes, for those who are interested) and headed towards the checkout line.

I got there at exactly the same time as a woman carrying a box of stuff. For those who aren't familiar with German supermarkets, food is simply taken off the truck and put on the shelves in the boxes it came in. If you want an entire 6 pack of 1.5L water bottles - no problem! Just grab a whole pack. The system is kind of like a) you want to buy a 12 pack of coke -- grab the whole pack. If you want to just buy 3, then b) open the 12 pack and pull out 3 cans.  If you don't need a ton of stuff, you just grab an empty box from an item that people previously picked out of and use that as your shopping bag. Also, it's important to note that you have to purchase your shopping bags here. And the cashier doesn't bag them for you. The whole checkout process is an extremely stressful situation in which you try to gauge exactly how many bags you need and pack them while simultaneously paying and getting your change and getting out of the way because the cashier is already ringing up the next person 1 second after she hands you your receipt and says "Have a nice day."

But I digress. Again, I knew I shouldn't be writing this late. Anyhoo, this lady was holding a box of foodstuffs and we got to the line at the exact same time. I arrived from the left, she arrived from dead-on straight. I didn't even really look at her. Germans either don't make eye contact, or go full on creepy. I am not comfortable with Option 2 so I always just kind of look everywhere except at that person.  As we waited, the person in front of us moved up about .678 steps. I waited a few seconds to see if she would take the spot. She didn't. So, per German custom, I did.

The conveyor belt with all the items from the entire line was slowly moving forward. The man in front of me was really dragging his feet and finally I had enough space in front of the conveyor to lay down my meager foodstuffs for the salad. There were probably about 2 centimeters between the end of the conveyor and the end of my purchase.

Suddenly someone shoved me from behind. The woman behind me was literally shoving me out of the way so she could set down her purchase items.

"Excuse me, I just need some space. I'm Hochschwanger [literally translated: high pregnant; figuratively: about to pop]," she sniped. Using polite words in a tone that threatened to punch me in the face if I suggested otherwise -- typically German. They love writing passive aggressive notes like "Dear neighbor: I noticed during the last World Cup game, during which Germany won (Go Germany!) that you and your friends were having a party in our shared courtyard. You left some beer cans, kept our children awake, and I also saw several people relieving themselves in the foliage. Thank you very much for not doing this in the future," meaning if you do this again they will come down from their apartment and punch you in the face.

Back to the story.. She shoved me aside and mentioned SPECIFICALLY that she is high pregnant. And that she is "fed up with asozial people." Asozial (or azzies for short) is an innocent sounding insult in English. But in German it's pretty strong. Like, rednecks who beat their wives all the time are asozial. Or people who just hang out in the corner stores (Spaetis) all day and drink beer and start fights. The low rungs of society are filled with them - so when you say it, you are seriously serious.

While I charted her rudeness up to fluctuating crazy pregnant woman hormones, it did piss me off.  Actually, I didn't realize you were pregnant. You were too busy balancing that huge box of candy and whatnot on top of your baby belly, hiding it from view. ON TOP OF YOUR BABY. Since when did using your stomach as a shelf become OK? How did you plan on carrying that shit home if you can't even hold it for 30 seconds in a grocery store? Believe me, if I could make the cashier go any faster, I would.  And since when did your growing a baby become my problem? It's not like I jumped in the only available seat on a 7 hour bus ride and refused to give it up. Wow, you had to carry your gummy bears 30 seconds more before the conveyor belt moved enough for your stuff. I've never had a baby, never been hochschwanger, but from what I understand -- birth is a pretty serious thing. If you're getting flustered because you have to carry your snacks for a minute more, I don't want to know what your labor is going to be like.

I just ignored her, reminding myself that she is basically growing a living moving tumor inside of her body -- but I just had to write something about it. Get it out of my system. And then a few years later look back and laugh at the time I was called Asozial.

Asozial.. Jeezus. Hopefully the first and last time in my life anyone ever calls me that.

Christmas

Christmas in Germany is pretty much the same thing as in America. Lots of family time, presents, lots of food. There's only one main thing that stands out: they give presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. I personally don't care much one way or the other, but it seems like the German way creates a lot more problems -- it's easy enough to convince kids that Santa came during the night while they were sleeping, but how do you convince them he stopped by on Christmas Eve afternoon?

I spent pretty much a huge chunk of the Christmas week with Mario's family. Christmas Eve - afternoon cake and coffee with his parents and brother, followed by dinner, presents, and more cake.  I was expecting to get a couple of things but not a lot, since we don't see Mario's parents very often and when we do see them, I am mostly just the quiet shadow in the background, too shy to say much in my bumbling German. Not this year -- I had just as many boxes under the tree with my name as the boys, which was quite a pleasant surprise. I've gotten less for Christmas from previous boyfriends' families whom I'd known longer (and actually had conversations with).

Among the spoils were: way over 100eur in gift cards for H&M and IKEA; two months' worth of toiletries and perfume; a 1000 page book (in ENGLISH!) that I devoured in a week; a key holder to hang by the door; and a bag of Christmas chocolate that dwarfs what any kid could hope to bring home for Halloween.

Mario and I were invited back over the next day (25th) for cake and coffee for his grandma Sonja. She's a sweet lady but has Alzheimer's and forgot where the bathroom was 7 times. She also signed Mario's Christmas card twice.

On the 26th we headed back again to his parents' apartment. This time we had dinner and exchanged presents with the extended family -- mom, dad, brother, aunt, uncle, 2 cousins, and an 8 year old nephew. They were all chatting away excitedly in Berliner but from what I could tell, the favorite topic was life in East Germany under the DDR.

They had lots of stories about how the children were left alone at night while the parents went out. The kids were scared, the parents came home to find every single light on in the house, etc.

I finally asked, "Don't you have babysitters here in Germany?" Turns out that under the DDR government, they were all too poor to afford babysitters. Everyone was in the same boat and helped each other out when they could. Instead of paying a babysitter they just put the kids to bed and gave the neighbors a key to the apartment. The neighbors could hear through the walls when the kids cried and would go over to comfort them.

Mario's parents were coming home from one such night out. Their route took them along the wall, which of course was still intact and heavily guarded. The Stasi were extremely heavy-handed about anti-DDR propaganda and it was normal for people to be taken in for questioning and just disappear. Fun fact: their former headquarters are just a block away from our apartment! Makes for a very cozy feel in the neighborhood.
Mario's dad decided just as they were walking along a checkpoint that it was a good time for him to start loudly voicing his [extremely negative and honest] opinions about the soldiers standing guard and the DDR. His wife had to clamp her hands over his mouth and drag him away, fearing that the father of her children would also disappear.
At first glance this story doesn't seem all that crazy. But when you really think about it -- can you imagine going up to a policeman and saying "Hey, you're a dick," and then he beats you and throws you into jail where you rot for the rest of your life -- if you're lucky? And to think it was happening until the late 80s in a country that is as modern as Germany!

After dinner they continued telling stories and we drank the night away until midnight or so, then said goodbye and piled into our cars (with DD's, of course. Germans are very strict about having a designated driver).

So, that was my Christmas. Warm and fuzzy and filled with family, just like in America. Except for the Stasi stories.