Come to Germany if you’re looking for a Black Bastard

Do you find that statement racist? If you do, you’re not alone. I think it’s extremely racist, but that’s the whole point. A company in Germany is trying to cash in on the energy drink craze and is producing something along the lines of Red Bull.

They call it Black Bastard.

I don’t know how you can look at that word combination and not come to the conclusion it’s racist. I’m sure they’ve thought of that, because if you turn to a page on their website and scroll down, you’ll see a smiling African woman wearing a Black Bastard t-shirt.

Is that supposed to act as a fig leaf? What if a pack of placard-waving demonstrators shows up at one of their so-called events? Will they hold a press conference the following Monday to announce they’re donating a quarter of profits to build schools in South Africa? Don’t hold your breath.

Germany has already been saddled with the reputation - earned or not - as a place where mobs of screaming skinheads chase foreigners through the streets like a pack of wild dogs, as a place with no-go areas where black people fear for their lives.

Is this going to help? Does anybody out there care any more about the painful effect words can have, or have they been so debased in modern society that insults that would get the shit kicked out of you in some neighbourhoods are slapped on trendy drinks at a heavy markup? How numb have we become?

© 2007 lettershometoyou
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Hurry up and wait

Just because I happen to have a stamp in my Canadian passport which allows me to stay in Germany as long as I like doesn’t mean I’m all through with dancing with the German immigration bureaucracy. That’s because I have to get a new passport every five years. So every five years, I have to schlep myself down to the local Ausländerbehörde to get a new visa stuck into a new passport.

There is a phone number for arranging an appointment, but after dozens of failed attempts to get through I break down and head over to the office this morning to try to set up the appointment in person.

I get there to find a roomful of people who all look like they’ve been waiting for a couple of hours already. Though the room is large with high ceilings, I notice how stuffy it is, how there’s this vague yet familiar odour wafting through.

There’s no machine to take a number, so I ask the people at the head of the line where to get one, but they don’t understand my question. I try English. Still blanks. So I turn around and in a too-loud voice which startles everybody, bellow out in German: can someone here show me the end of the line? Where is the end of the line?

So now I’m sitting down in line and the lingering reek hits me again, only now it’s almost bringing tears to my eyes. I don’t so much smell as see the odour, because it throws me back to my childhood. I see my mother’s old black steamer trunk in the basement, the one that closed with a clasp in the middle and two cracked and fraying leather buckles on the sides, lined with thin cardboard plastered with what looked like checkered wallpaper, full of wool blankets, winter jackets and old clothing which in her thrift she could never bring herself to get rid of.

As I turn in the direction of the odour to see an elderly gent beside me, the name hits me: Mothballs. Did a grandson play a trick on him, switch his bath salts so that last night he bathed in them?

Trying hard not to leap up so as to make it obvious why I’m doing so, I get up to move away, still maintaining my place in line. I stay on my feet a safe distance away for nearly two hours rather than sit next to him.

I try to console myself with visions of my first trip the Ausländerbehörde in Hamburg 10 years ago, fond memories of getting up at four in the morning to ride my bike all the way across the city to line up in the cold, the dark and the rain beside a six-lane highway to wait for the doors to open at six, shuffling through creaky old doors up a smelly, piss-soaked rear stairway to the entrance to file one-by-one past a man handing out grimy number cards which, after another two-hour wait, gave us the opportunity to line up at a machine to receive an official wait-list number, allowing us to speak many hours later to another official who made an appointment for us to come back another time to actually get something accomplished.

Welcome in Germany.

Now it’s all been decentralised, so even though more or less the same bullshit is still playing itself out at various locations all over the city, at least now you only have to show up to the one closest to where you live, and the conditions are better. Instead of lining up in the rain to get a filthy wait-list card, in my neighbourhood you get to walk into a big, beautiful building where scores of people are milling about, all looking to get the same thing done and having to agree with one another - sometimes in mutually incomprehensible languages - who lines up first, who’s the next, where to place the newcomers, and so on. Then after you finally have all that sorted out, an official comes out with numbered tickets to give away. So you don’t have to go through what you just did.

The background music fails to deter me. Despite screaming babies, thumping, hammering and the screech of buzz saws from renovations underway next door, and of course, in a lamentable update from a decade ago I’m sure some say is the sound of progress, intermittent outbursts from cellphone ringtones, I somehow manage to scribble a few notes and read a few pages from my novel.

Somewhere near the end of this ordeal two latecomers, people in an even sadder position than the rest of us, try to butt in line. “We just want to get some information,” they tell us. Suddenly in an explosion of Turkish that reverberates off the high vaulted ceilings and back down past the plaster cherubs along the columns, the women are put into their place by a half-dozen women in headscarves and robes, the shapeless kind that never have feet but seem to walk everywhere. “You have to phone to make an oppointment. Or come back tomorrow. The tickets are all gone for today.” Or so I guess they’re saying. If I could speak their language, I’d have said: the phone number is useless. Show up in person or spend the rest of your life listening to a busy signal.

Finally it’s my turn. I enter the little receiving office, reminding myself to remain friendly at all times and to remember that the person behind the counter has probably been having as much fun this morning as I have, but that she has to do it every day and I only once every five years.

Good morning. I have a new passport and need a new visa stamped in it.

Oh, you’re too late for an appointment today. We are taking appointments for later though.

How about next week?

The first available slot is in January.

Four months away. I take this in and then ask: if I have to travel within Europe - as I will be in a few weeks - can I still use my new passport without the visa?

Sure, just bring along the old passport.

Sensing a possible opening, I then ask: In my work I’m often sent overseas. What if I have to travel for work to the United States, or Russia?

Oh, that would be a real problem. Just a minute, I’ll see if we can squeeze you in.

I can’t believe this. Is everything falling into place? This isn’t supposed to happen.

You’re lucky, she says, handing me a slip of paper with a room number and an appointment time a half-hour away.

Fifteen minutes later - I still can’t believe this is happening, I’m out of there, suddenly elated with the idea I somehow got away with something and that I wouldn’t have to slog through this mess for another five years.

I skip over to my bike, unlock it, almost giddy with the thought of a care-free day ahead of me. I stop at a crosswalk, my nose brushing the fleece jacket as I lean over to adjust my toeclip.

Mothballs.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

What kind of dope came up with Yourope?

Bad translations may be simply entertaining, but if there’s one thing that riles me almost as much as an ad campaign telling me I should be nice to jerks who waft cigarette smoke in my face and over my food it’s the overuse of the prefix EURO for everything.

Just off the top of my pointy little head I can rattle off:

Euronews

Eurosport

Eurolines

Europack

Eurostar

EuroCity

EuroCityNight

Eurovision

EuroNext

EuroTop

EuroFlex

Eurotunnel

Euroshuttle

Now it appears that every conceivable Eurocombination of Eurowords has been Eurosqueezed out of the Eurovocabulary, or maybe a certain German bank just wanted to appear Internet-cool and EuroEnglish-trendy.

How else to explain this bastardisation hitched onto a new gimmick for a credit card:

I can just picture the suits sitting around the boardroom brainstorming.

Ahem.

Hey I know! Let’s combine the first part of the word YOUtube with the last part of euROPE. You get YOUROPE!

Brilliant! The kids will LOVE it! Their parents will love it! EVERYBODY will love it. We’ll be the talk of Madison Ave. Uh, or what passes for Madison Ave around here.

I dunno. It sounds kinda dorky to me. Don’t we have enough Euro-prefixy words already? I mean, look at them all.

YouTube! It’s so beyond bleeding edge! Upload videos, upload your life!

Yeah sure, but we’re talking about a …. credit card.

But that’s our selling point! Individual videos, individual card! Spend it here! Spend it there! Spend it everywhere!

That’s what you do with a credit card anyway…

But with this card, the user not only gets a few bucks’ discount here and there, he gets to feel like he OWNS Europe like he OWNS the card! You ARE the card. YOU! YOU! YOU! (Gets up onto the table.)

You’re mad.

(Singing and dancing the can-can now.) I’VE…GOT… 90-thousand pounds in my pyjamas. I’ve got 40-thousand French Francs in my fridge….

Will you get down from there?

Sex-sex-sex! Must get sex into it. I see a nude woman - in a bath - holding a YOUROPE credit card!

Hey! I saw this on Monty Python once. Do you have their CD of all their songs? It’s great.

See? There you go! We’ll launch the campain on YouTube!!! We’ll hypertext link to all the blogs! Whatever the hell THEY are!

Get down from there and listen, you blithering idiot! You can’t just go on sticking YOU onto EUROPE and expect it to be taken seriously by ANYONE, especially someone with ENGLISH as a native language!!! It sounds like YOU-ROPE. Like YOU’VE. GOT. ROPE. And from that you can rhyme DOPE. As in: YOU DOPE! And besides - it’s contrived, a fake, a lie of the language, a pose by and for POSERS!

But that’s advertising! Didn’t you learn anything at school? YOU’RE FIRED!!!

Ahem.

A quick check on google will show you that Youdope Yourope isn’t even original. I guess if you’re a bank, you can do just about anything, including expropriating fake words, but if I get another piece of crap in my mail with that so-called word on it, I swear I’ll switch banks.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Take the pub quiz and get some Respect

A lazy Sunday short-and-sweet one.

Take Der Spiegel’s quiz on what’s been happening over the past week. There are only 12 questions and it takes only a few minutes.

If you get the whole dozen correct, this is what they tell you.

Now I can’t get that Aretha Franklin song outta my head.  Damn earworms.
© 2007 lettershometoyou

A few short hours in Porto

When I started this blog I intended to write the posts in the form of letters. That soon proved impossible to hold on to, because the format is simply too constraining. From time to time I actually DO write a letter though, with envelope, stamps, the works. Like this one to my mother which should be arriving on her doorstep Monday.   It’s an excerpt.  All I’ve added is a few thumbnails and a link or two.

Just got back last week from four days in the north of Portugal. I was sent there for work to attend an EU meeting of Foreign Ministers at Viana do Castelo, a small city about one hour north of Porto. I flew into Porto via the Mediterranean island of Majorca and took a taxi north to avoid waiting three hours for a bus.

The driver spoke beautiful French as did a surprising number of Portuguese I met.   He may have talked my ear off, but at least I got to know one man’s life history in less than an hour, how his parents took the family to France in the late sixties so his father could find a decent-paying job, how he came back finally to take care of his ailing mother, how much Portugal is changing.

At the end as I was about to get out and as he was filling out the receipt he asked me what date it was. Then it hit me – and I had to tell him - I said that today was the 60^thanniversary of my parents’ wedding. I was looking up the mountain at a beautiful cathedral as I said it, and this memory I think will always be with me.

Another burned-in memory of that day was seeing the city of Grenoble suddenly pop into view on the first leg to Majorca. About a half-hour or so into the flight I was looking out and thinking to myself that with the gently folded, layered mountains and rolling landscape, it looked a lot like the Jura – we must be over France, not Germany. Then about 10 minutes later I looked out again and there it was.  A city of my youth laid out before me like a glimpse back in time.   It was so unexpected, so overwhelming, I was quite moved.    Scrambling for the camera stuffed in my bag under the seat in front of me, I just managed to get off one shot that shows where I used to live, the neighbourhood I hung around in, the road from home to school, the park overlooking the city, the places I used to ride my bike on the weekends. Even the start of the route I took leaving the city headed toward the Rhône Valley on my cycling trip through Spain to Morocco you can trace in the picture.

I thought of the people I used to live with, how close we got to be, how much I looked forward to their letters and to writing them,  and how our contact has slipped away to nothing.  I read somewhere an item which said you lose one friend a year between your twenties and forties.  Can that be true? 

You two loved the Algarve and I don’t know whether you ever made it to the north of Portugal, but in many ways it is much like the south. Life takes place out on the street and there is a great mingling of people. Unhurried in their affairs, they have time to sit and ponder and enjoy things as families or groups of friends. I especially enjoyed the people-watching. I think you know what people I prefer to watch, eh?

The town of Viana itself was not that interesting beyond the cathedral up on the hill I mentioned, which I unfortunately never had time to visit.   It’s like that on a lot of these trips.  I fly in, work, fly out, never really seeing the places I’ve been to.  But because I had a late-afternoon flight Sunday, I left my hotel before sunrise and took the train to Porto.  Good move.

Once in Porto you change to a commuter train whose tracks follow the high riverbank slowly downward.  Just as you start to get a good view of the many bridges, you plunge into a tunnel to emerge in a magnificent old train station bordered on two sides by cliffs overhung with tiny apartments clinging to their faces. 

I left my luggage in a locker and headed down to the port area.    Every shop was closed but a few people haunted the empty streets.  An exhausted-looking young couple, drunk and quarreling and a trio of men holding onto each other for support made a perfect foreground for the run-down buildings and gritty sidewalks.

At the the foot of the hill a sign said: next boat 10:30, so I hopped on for a one-hour tour of the port area.   Loved it.   We cruised under the famous bridge built by Gustav Eiffel (of Paris tower fame) and five others in total, all spanning the immense gorge over which Porto is built.  Best 10 bucks I’ve spend in ages.   They let us off on the other side and suggested we take a tour of any one of the port-wine cellars there. But I didn’t want to have the very few hours I had on my own to be so structured, so I so wandered along the shoreline, up a winding street to get a good look at the bridge, then over the other side to have lunch at a small restaurant along the quay.

 

At a table next to me, two men with strong northern English accents and three Portuguese women – all in their late-20s I guessed – were having an animated conversation about the city of Porto itself. I thought this rather strange, and as I listened more closely, got the impression the women were students of English doing an oral exam, because not only were they speaking clearly and carefully, the whole conversation was being recorded on a digital dictaphone placed in the middle of their table. They told stories of people they’d met that weekend, of an old lady who’d told them she remembers having to shovel bullock shit from the sidewalk in front of the family doorstep and dodge donkey carts, but that now she is sometimes prevented from crossing the street for how closely the cars are parked together.

After their little gang paid, the two Englishmen left and I went over to ask them what it was all about. They laughed when I asked if they were students. „Do we look that young?“ one of them asked. I explained about the dictaphone and the somewhat careful way the three of them had been speaking, and they said no – they were actually doing an official study project for the EU on how to improve the city of Porto, and were gathering all the information they could from residents on how to go about doing so. They even asked me my opinion, but I said only: keep it the way it is.

Because if you remember anything about how people live there, you’ll remember how relaxed the pace of life was. What I loved about Porto was how even down by the water near the bridges in an area that in most other cities would long since have been taken over by kitchy kiosks selling bric-a-brac to bus tourists, people actually live – hang their laundry out to dry, stick their heads out the windows to talk to their neighbours, lounge around, kids playing stick-ball or riding their bikes. It’s gritty and run-down in places, but so what? This is how people live, and I hope it stays that way.

 

 

Man feels well in Microclimate on Planet Ice thank you

I love bad translations. They’re like found poetry in a way - an unexpected tweak of the senses through a simple re-arrangement of language.

Engrish.com may have the genre locked up, but there’s no shortage of it in Germany. The local Hamburg German League hockey team splashes it on billboards, bus stops, full-page newspaper ads, you name it:

Reminds me of that old Alice Cooper song: Welcome on my nightmare.

Bought the kid some new shoes for school the other day.

On the other hand, maybe her feet will get wet anyway.

Imagine you are in charge of welcoming about 3,500 typists journalists from all over the world to a photo shoot and gab-fest at a swanky resort. They’ve gotta eat somewhere, so you set a lot of tables, lay out the warming trays, the salad bar, the dessert selection. On each table you set out three tent cards with the following translation:

Welcome to Germany. Or welcome on? I’m really not sure anymore.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Ghostly grey

Somewhere in Portugal

She was standing close to me

Naked, but not there

Herself, but not herself

A life in collage, half-tone,

Nothing to hide, and yet: nothing to show

A withered old lady dragging a string bag

Stops. If you make your eyes go dim, she says

Like mine are, you can see me as I was.

Now I’m just ghostly grey

Somewhere in Portugal.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

PS: Please turn to Indeterminacy, who inspired this post.

So where were you on September 11, 2001?

Sometime around three in the afternoon Central European Summer Time on September 11, 2001, I was trying to get the key into the front door with one hand while holding on to my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter with the other.

Suddenly our downstairs neighbour - a colleague of my wife and friend to us both - was standing beside me shaking, tears in her eyes.

She was babbling.

There’s something horrible going on, she said. In New York. Planes have smashed into the World Trade Center!

It was the first I’d heard of it, and I looked right into her eyes and said the first thing that came to me:

Weltkrieg. World War.

I pushed open the door and my mother, who was over from Canada visiting, was sitting on the couch pointing at the television.

You’re not going to believe this, she said.

Mom, turn it off, I said. Please, just turn it OFF.

I had visions of having to drag a frightened and screaming child onto planes for the next five years if what was playing out before us got burned into her psyche.

Weltkrieg.

That’s where we’re still at, six years later.

And if you look at the piece of theatre played out in New York today, you have to ask yourself: do we have to do this every year? Can’t we just move on?

Six or 60 years from now, will we still see acted out this same old ritual? Will we still have to watch these ceremonies laid before us, hear these names recited, these stories retold over and over until a solid layer of myth keeps it alive long after that day’s last survivor is gone and buried?

Of course we will. Get used to it. September 11 the tragedy is now September 11 the myth, the 9-11 emotional patriotic emergency code, the story that will now be passed from one generation to the next: we survived, we came back, we went after them.

After whom? The Iraqis, of course. They were behind it, weren’t they? And even if they weren’t, their involvement would have to be invented.

Tell me if you hear anybody in favour of this eternal war on terror saying today that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. Because as long as the mistaken perception that it did lives on, these memorials will always have a purpose.

September 11 has taken on the same role for Americans which November 11 always used to be for Canadians.

We call it Remembrance Day. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, Canadians stand for a minute’s silence to honour the soldiers who died in the two world wars.

Because November 11 is a statutory holiday, we schoolchildren held the ceremony the day before.

There’d be plastic poppies on pins, poems and prayers and a few bent, grey-haired guys from the Royal Canadian Legion up in front, their jackets pressed clean and chests twinkling with medals. One of the Grade Sevens would have the honour of standing up and reading In Flanders Fields.

I always got the feeling the whole thing was somehow wrong, that we should work toward ending war instead of playing up the heroism, the pageantry, the myths. The Vietnam war was still going on with everyone asking: what was it good for, what was it proving, where was it leading?

Still asking the same questions.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::