So nice to see you after all these years

We’re going to a reunion this summer, a three-day fest on the Rhine gathering together former employees and spouses of Hong Kong’s German-Swiss International School.  My wife was a teacher there in the early nineties, had been for three years before I landed in early 1994, got a job, found a girlfriend, broke up, met K, moved in, married her, had our daughter, quit my job and then moved to Germany.

Along the way I met many of her colleagues, some of whom we’re still friends with after all these years.  Looking over the list the other day of those slated to attend, we smiled and said how much we were looking forward to seeing many people who up to now have existed only in that place and time we filled before moving on. 

There are at least a half-dozen I want to have a long catch-up with.  One of K’s girlfriends back in the day will I hope recall an incident barely a week after I’d started going out with K.  The three of us were at a bar somewhere up near The Peak and Karin was wearing a dress that showed off that great figure she still has.  When K went off to get some drinks I turned to her friend and said something like, “damn, she looks fantastic, doesn’t she?”  She gave me this horrified look and spat back, “WHAT did you say?”   With the loud music and her not understanding English very well, she thought I was making a pass at her the moment K’s back was turned.

But as much as I’m looking forward to the reunion, there’s a certain dread about it too.  Not that I might feel like an outsider, because I do know a lot of the people.  It’s just that I know exactly what’s going to happen.  If you’ve ever been to a high school reunion, you know the drill.

Not long after you arrive you’ll see the people you’ve been thinking about all these years and you’ll rush over and greet them.  After the first excitement of recognition has blown by you’ll have the catch-up gab, the what-you-doing-now where-you-been-in-the-meantime chat, the great-to-see-you-again tap on the arm for good measure when you go refill your drink.

It will go on like that until someone gets up to make a speech or the buffet is served.  With any luck the food will be decent and drinks flowing.  By now you’ll have coalesced into groups you used to hang out with ‘way back when, avoiding those you don’t know or only had a superficial relationship with.

The evening will be a pleasant one and it will all end a bit too soon.  If there are events the next day and evening, you’ll enjoy them, basking in the memories and nostalgia which, if the atmosphere is right, will come in bunches.

As the last event draws to a close and everyone drifts off saying their final farewells, there will be hugs and shoulder shakes and thumps on the back, cards swapped, telephone numbers, email, website and blog addresses scribbled on the back of napkins or scraps of paper, and sincere looks exchanged as you look each other in the eye and say, “It’s been so much fun to see you again after all these years.  We must keep in touch.”

But you know what?  You won’t.

A few bloggers I’d like to meet, but maybe not in the sauna.

For personal reasons it was lucky that I was unable to attend the 2006 Whiney Expat Bloggers’ meetup in Bonn, but to make up for it I had a great time with many of Germany’s English-language bloggers in Dresden last year.

Now that we’re all having to decide where to meet up in 2008, you may be forced to get out a map to find the town of Wiesbaden because the voting seems to be headed in that direction. Wiesbaden? Where? What? And perhaps above all: why Wiesbaden?

Is it because the place is famous for and dominated by a huge spa?  Do you realise that if we were to meet in Wiesbaden and not go to the spa, it would be like squeezing into a small diner for lunch never once mentioning that 800-pound gorilla plopped down in the corner?

And of course you all know by now about German spa and sauna etiquette, right? I know some of us like to bare all online, but…

Anyway, I haven’t heard much of the place, so I thought I’d ask my wife and favourite German for her opinion, seeing as how I was pretty sure she’d never been there before.

So have you ever been to Wiesbaden? Never.

What have you heard about Wiesbaden? Pretty, with rich people.

Why rich? It’s not that far from Frankfurt, but it’s smaller, - anyway, not nearly as ugly as Frankfurt.

What have you got against Frankfurt? It has no soul. It’s just business and banks.

Would you go to Wiesbaden? Why should I?

Well, there’s going to be a bloggers’ meetup there. At least that’s the way it seems to be going. Are you going to this meetup?

I’m asking the questions for now. If you were to pick one place in Germany you think we should meet, where would it be? Hamburg.

You can’t pick Hamburg. (laughs) OK, Leipzig or Weimar. They’re two cities I’m interested in getting to know.

By the way, I like your haircut. You look very good at the moment.

So there you have it. Hamburg balcony poll results confirm a swing in sentiment away from Wiesbaden and toward Leipzig or Weimar. Besides, how can you not trust the opinion of someone who makes an observation like that?

And now: A few bloggers I’d like to meet who weren’t there last year. Not a complete list and in no particular order:

• Charlotte of Charlotte’s Web. That is, if we don’t interfere with her novel-writing.
• Headbang8, the man behind Deutschland über Elvis
• Jen of HeisseScheisse. Yes, I know you were in Hamburg long enough for us to meet but it didn’t work out.
• Tatiana.
• Beaverboosh. He’s actually blogging from Norway, but being Canadian he gets a free pass, if not ticket.
• Cathy, the woman behind the blog and the book Planet Germany.
• Jul.
• Indie of Indeterminacy. OK, we’ve already met, but it would be great if he could attend.
• Click-clack gorilla.
• And last but not least, azahar, who is going through a rough time.

Oooh, kind of a stealth meme. How did that happen?

Blogging about blogging isn’t all that bad, is it?

Caution: 525-word ramble ahead.

A reader who sometimes emails in his comments rather than place them in the appropriate box had this to say about my recent post on how if I were to quit blogging, I’d do it My Way.

Not being a blogger, I’m not really qualified to comment about the content.  However, I’ve noted in general that I’m not fond of songs about singing, movies about movie-making, and blog posts about blogging kinda fall into the mold.  To be good, a blog poster must have a unique experience to share with the world, and the greatest blogs are like that.  Your friend the psych nurse is about as unique as they get.  You, as an expat small-town Canuck are similarly imbued with a perspective that lends itself to insights no-one else will have.

Blogging about blogging seems somehow to be merely filling space.  On the other hand, one of your best efforts was the 20 commandments one.  Like I say, not being a blogger, I’m not really qualified to comment about the content.

I agree with him up to a point.  It’s true you will never turn on the TV News to hear the announcer say: Today at an editorial meeting this station’s editors decided to place the item you are about to see two items down from the item you just saw because… well actually we had to decide it by an arm-wrestle followed by rock-paper-scissors, and Susan won.

The media doesn’t like to talk about itself or other media because it’s generally seen as navel-gazing.  Still, most every newspaper and newsmagazine has a media page where the trivialities of news personalities and media trends are written up and discussed.  The media also makes the news when it’s a big business story, and editorial content there is often brought up.

Unless of course you’re talking Richard Quest at CNN, where getting caught with in the park with your pants down and your wing-wang out and tied to a rope while snorting illegal pharma products won’t generate so much as a burp’s worth of mention down in Atlanta. 

So when a blogger blogs about blogging when his blog isn’t mainly about blogging but about getting down what’s going on in his head while living this Canadian-expat-in-Germany life so that one day when they drag what’s left of him out from under the wheels of a bus his wife, daughter and people closest to him will be able to say, “yeah, I really knew him…”  is that such a bad thing?

I don’t think so. 

If you’re talking about the process of doing this very public and at times very thought-provoking hobby - and a hobby is all it will ever be to me - you can’t help but want to discuss the things you go through.  So many issues come up, be they about relationships, online etiquette, joy, frustrations, fatigue, the learning process and so forth.

I realise it could get a bit repetitious, so I try to pace myself, but there’s simply so much going on while doing this, it can’t be just ignored. 

So forgive me if sometime over the next couple of days I post the third one in a row about blogging.  It’s just kind of built up to it. 

Score one for Toytown Germany

Ever been on a forum for a while and notice that it’s always the same-old, same-old? The same people talking about the same things, usually pointless banter, often turning into infantile squabbles, name-calling, and other crap you thought you’d left behind before high school?

Sometimes, though, you run across a gem of a post. Like this one today on Toytown, a forum for English-speaking expats living in Germany. Seems a few women in Munich had been noticing that in the city’s main central square Marienplatz, they were getting hit on. A lot.

So one member - a good-looking 23-year-old woman who became suspicious after being chatted up three times in two months by German men all in the same small area of town - decided to test things out. Even better, she brought along a fellow forum member to take photos.

Hanging out on the square for a while, sure enough, a guy came up and started to chat her up, followed by his wingman. As the post says, both are members of the Munich Lair, an online club for guys who get together to try to pick up women.

Great stuff. A little investigative reporting, a little story-telling, photos to back it up. Brilliant!

Learning English the Calvin and Hobbes way

I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.

“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”

So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.

“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one - philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.

Forfeiture

Epiphany

Sophisticated

Pandemonium

Euphoric

Voyeurism

Subjugate

Co-dependent dysfunctionality

I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?

Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.

She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times  over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.

I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now.   Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.

If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Taxi driver refuses midnight fare to broken-down cyclist

The last two posts combine into one as my love of cycling to work clashed early this morning with the usual crappy German customer service.

About twice a month I have to get up in the middle of the night and work the hell shift. It’s tough on the system to blast your body into night shift mode and back again so quickly, but I do it because I like my job; it supplements my blogging income.

Anyway at about 3:20 this morning I’m wheeling along enjoying the cool air and stillness on the way to the office when suddenly I get this scraping, crunching and banging from the back wheel. I can’t shift gears anymore and the chain’s not catching on the rear sprocket set.

I stop to look and realise that one of those two little sprockets that keep the tension on the chain derailler had popped out.

Excellent. Middle of the night and only half-way to work.

Luckily I’m right close to a hotel, so I walk into the lobby and ask the friendly night shift guy to order me a taxi so I could at least make it to work on time.

The taxi arrives and it’s the usual boat - a station wagon. Great, I say. I can take the wheels off and bring the bike with me.

The driver looks at me with suspicion.

“Is it OK if I put the bike in the back?” I ask him. “I’ll pay you extra.”

“Well… only if it fits.”

I take the wheels off and he lifts the back door. Taking extra care not to scrape anything, I slowly try to edge the frame in, but although it passes the back door, it doesn’t fit inside by a couple of inches. Then I notice the rear seat backs are split to fold down to make a huge space.

“Can we fold the wider one down to make room?”

“Geht nicht,” he tells me. Can’t do it.

“Really, it’s just a flip of that lever. We have the same thing on our car.”

“Geht nicht,” he tells me again. “Why don’t you lock the bike to that pole and pick it up later?”

Well, I’d thought of that, but the last time I left my bike out overnight in Hamburg, thieves had stolen my derailler. I didn’t want to come back to find just my frame attached to a post.

But rather than get into an argument with this guy over why he can’t just flip the damn lever so I’d have lots of room to put the bike in, I tell him forget it, pack my stuff up and trot off.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Another typical day in Germany: the customer is never right

This is about what happened this morning, but first we have to back up six months. Last fall I took the beast in to get the winter tires put on. As usual, I stopped in first beforehand on my bike to make an appointment.

Oh, sorry. We don’t take appointments anymore.

Why not?

We found that too many customers weren’t showing up, so we had mechanics sitting around idle.

Well how am I supposed to plan for anything? My wife needs the car on some days to drive to work. I can’t just show up and hope for the best.

Well, sorry. You can leave the keys with us tomorrow morning, and we’ll try to get to it during the day.

Fine, I say.

Fast-forward six months to this morning. I stuff the car with four summer tires and head to the same place to get them mounted. I walk in and get served right away.

Do you have an appointment?

… moment of stunned silence….

But I was here yesterday. I talked to the guy who said I should just drop in this morning with the keys. He didn’t say anything about making an appointment, and I didn’t ask because six months ago I was told you didn’t take appointments anymore.

Well, you should have made an appointment.

But that’s just the thing, I tell him. I was told by you people when I brought the winter tires in last fall that I couldn’t, and besides, nobody told me that when I dropped by yesterday.

Who did you speak with?

(As if I know their names) Well, it was a guy with a beard, older fellow.

Naw, couldn’t have been him.

Well anyway, I don’t understand how I’m supposed to guess whether or not I can make an appointment or not.

Well, maybe it was just a temporary thing due to certain conditions back then, I don’t know. Just leave us the keys and we’ll try to squeeze you in today, but you probably won’t get the car until tomorrow night.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

99 + 1 too many things about me

One of the things that used to hold me back from starting a blog was the thought of having colleagues read it, slide on over to me and say, hey, you are one bizarre individual… Then one day I said what the hell, I’ll start a blog, and they can read it all they like. I just won’t reveal too much about me.

Now after a year or so of posting, I figure they know as much as you do, so here goes:

1. See that photo at the top of this blog? Add a bunch of overhead cables and telephone wires, and that was our family’s view out of the front window when I was growing up.
2. When I was born, I was driven home from hospital in a banana box placed on the floorboards of an old Austin.
3. My elder brother wanted me to be a girl. I know because he wrote that in a letter to my mother right after I was born. I don’t hold it against him.
4. Had I been born a girl, my name would be Fiona.
5. I’m glad I’m not a girl.
6. My earliest memory is of me standing up looking through the bars of the crib, that same brother coming in and saying, “there he is.”
7. I don’t know if that was a dream or not, but I can see it clearly.
8. I was only three years and eight months old when JFK was shot, but I remember where I was and what was going on around me.
9. I’m the youngest of four children.
10. My sister, the family’s first born, was killed in a level crossing accident when I was seven. She was 18. Damn that Canadian Pacific Railway anyway.
11. They say she was like my second mother, constantly taking care of me as a baby.
12. I have always missed her. 
13. Not for what might have been, because my memories of her are vague, but for what never could be.
14. For the past six generations, my family has been afflicted with a hereditary skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa.
15. I consider myself to be very lucky, because I don’t have it, nor can I pass it on.
16. We didn’t have a television until I was nearly eight. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for holding out that long.
17. I grew up during the Vietnam war.
18. I’ve been fascinated with that country my whole life.
19. I started delivering newspapers when I was eight. I’d often read ours before starting the route.
20. The Canadian town I grew up in was a one-company mining town. Anaconda -  an American company - owned it.
21. I was skipped a grade. I did the first half of Grade 3, then was moved over to the other side of the room to do the second half of the year in Grade 4.
22. School mates were angry at me because they thought I’d deserted the gang.
23. I also had a terrible time adjusting, because all of a sudden I had to write with a pen, and didn’t know how.
24. I was an overweight kid from the age of eight ’til 12, when I made a conscious effort to lose weight. It worked.
25. Perhaps too well, because when I hit Grade 8, skinny and a year younger than the other boys, I was picked on.
26. Don’t worry, I’m over it.
27. I first went skiing when I was 10 years old, and hated it. I went another couple of times that year, and hated it even more.
    Then the next year, I went skiing again, and was hooked.
28. I am still absolutely nuts about skiing.
29. Photo break:
30. 
31. I wish we lived closer to the Alps.
32. I have a deep scar on my chin from a skiing accident when I was 12. Back in the day, they used to have so-called safety straps attaching your ski to your ankle, so that when you fell and the skis released, the ski wouldn’t flit down the hill and impale someone. I fell badly and my ski whipped around, smashing an edge into my chin.
33. That happened on the Harmony Bowl at Whistler, back when a lift ticket cost a kid like me all of four Canadian dollars.
34. Blood everywhere, six stitches.
35. I spent a year ski instructing at Cypress Bowl, one of the three areas close to Vancouver.  The job’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
36. We used to spend hours either playing street hockey, Canadian football, soccer or baseball until it was so dark, it was dangerous to play.
37. My first real girlfriend had an identical twin. They were beautiful girls, always leaving me at a loss for words not only for that, but because I couldn’t tell them apart when they greeted me.
38. Then on January 27, 1977 at precisely 4:20 pm Pacific time, I kissed one of them.  After that, the difference was unmistakable.
39. I learned to drive in a 1972 MGB, but I have fonder memories of a 4-door 1970 Plymouth Satellite.
40. The first three years I had my driver’s license, I was in five accidents. I haven’t been in once since.
41. If you don’t know what I mean by real girlfriend, then don’t ask.
42. I used to run around in the BC coastal rainforest behind our house from the time I was old enough to be let loose out the back door.
43. It was like a forest village, with a stream to catch frogs and make dams, great hiding places under old stumps and logs, a clearing to play little games of baseball, a hill for a lookout, and patches of huckleberry, salmonberry and blackberry to plunder as Spring slowly ripened to Summer.
44. When I arrived back from my first long trip away from home - a year-long jaunt with a backpack through most of western Europe, Egypt, Israel and Turkey when I was 20 - I discovered they’d clear-cut my forest playground to put in a fucking trailer park.
45. First day back from that trip, one of the first songs I heard was, “The Rodeo Song.” Its first line, “Well, it’s 40 below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo” didn’t make sense to me.
46. It made me wonder if I was coming back to the right place.
47. I miss Canada a lot, but I think it’s mostly nostalgia not for the place, but for the careless days of youth.
48. I can speak French and German fluently. I prefer to play Scrabble in French, though I haven’t for a while.
49. I sometimes dream in German.
50. The first five words I learned in Cantonese were five, four, three, two and one in that order.
51. I have an extremely good memory for places and dates.  That skiing photo was taken in February, 1992 at Owl’s Head, Quebec.
52. I can be very self-deprecating. That’s a good thing, because it puts me in some good company.
53. I love learning new things, even if some of them are unpleasant.
54. For example, I had to learn the hard way the meaning of narcissistic personality disorder.
55. I don’t have narcissistic personality disorder.
56. I dislike crowds intensely.
57. I have no superstitions save one: I never write anything in red ink.
58. I have climbed to the top of two of the three pyramids at Giza, Egypt. They say you’re not allowed to do that anymore.
59. In the winter of 1980 - 81 worked as a ski patroller at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, Israel.
60. I paid my way through university and for that backpacking trip by working for the Canadian National Railway at a job that doesn’t exist anymore thanks to the fax machine, a device now overtaken by email.
61. Thanks to that job, I know what it’s like to live in pretty well every town between Prince Rupert, BC and North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
62. I used to work for Overwaitea Foods packing bags and stocking shelves.  One day, the manager came up and asked me to start stocking the frozen food section.  As I was doing the job he came up to me again and said, ”the reason I’ve asked you to do this is we’re serious about training you for management, and this is the job we give everyone who’s starting out in that direction.”
63. Feeling horrified, I looked up at him with a bag of frozen peas in my hand and said, “Well, I’ve registered for university in the fall.”  He looked disappointed, and two hours later, I was packing bags again. 
64. I was robbed in Nice, France in 1980. Two years later, I was robbed in Cannes.  Watch your stuff when you’re on the Côte d’Azur.
65. When I started scribbling things down for this, my goal was to have 100 entries in the list.
66. I believe the secret to boring the crap out of everyone is to tell them them everything, so I’m going to stop here.

© 2008 lettershometoyou