Dienstag, 11. Juli 2006:

Why does nothing ever go according to plan? Ever? Spontaneity is often prized, but I would sometimes rather stick to a laminated schedule, especially when I ought to be doing a variety of things. Like blogging. Or writing vocabulary index cards and actually doing my homework. (Which, in my defense, I always, always do!) But even so, I planned to do a lot more work today than I actually got done, but sadly, sadly…

By the time I was actually ready to get some work done, I was on my way home from internet browsing and randomly enjoying the sunshine in Karlsplatz when I encountered my roommate and Stephanie talking with Jeff and a girl named Alma. Jeff goes to my university and I never knew him very well there in the first place, though I’d seen him about, and Alma I was just then introduced to; Jeff comes from New Jersey and Alma from New Mexico. We all decided dinner would be a good idea to go in for together, but instead of going out, we went to the grocery store Jeff led us to, down in the Karlsplatz U-Bahn station, under Karlsplatz. It was huge! Or, well, not so big, but it had plenty of food. And pasta for 0,65€ a bag! For 500cL! Haha! I was practically dancing. And, wow. The beer.

Alcohol in Germany is interesting… they don’t card—anyone—well, unless you look twelve, and the attitude is completely different from the American attitude toward it. Beer isn’t something you drink here to “get drunk” as people at colleges across the country (and, I’ve learned, high schools) do routinely. It’s a simple beverage. You have maybe one, or two, with dinner, and then you mosey on home in the setting sunlight. It’s cheaper than the Evian, which is pretty dirt cheap for bottled water here at 1,60€ for 0,5L. Beer in a German grocery store is about 0,70€ for a 0,5L. That’s roughly… $1.00, depending on today’s conversion rate. Perhaps as much as $1.20. For half a liter. And you can recycle the bottles for 0,30€ if you know where to go, which I don’t. And we’re talking about the ones that sell for $4.50 as German imports, here, not just any random German beer. For Franziskaner, or Paulaner, or Hofbrau, or any of the maybe 8 or 10 kinds of typical Bavarian beers they sell on tap for about 3,50€ for the same amount at a café. I still can’t believe it! Wine is fairly expensive—anywhere from 4-40€ at the grocery store, and I’m not very knowledgeable so I haven’t spent the Euro for it yet—and liquor is liquor. Euro gone to that is wasted, in my opinion. This is Germany! I’d rather have a Franziskaner with my pasta with my tap water for my side dish any night. (I’ve been refrigerating tap water in the water bottles I’ve accumulated. Best idea, ever. I had to use my tour book to assure my friends that the kind people at Frommer’s insist the water is drinkable in Germany.)

It’s funny to see different people’s reactions to alcohol. The kid in my class from Iran can’t buy alcohol [easily] in his country, so he spent most of last week sleeping off his consistent hangovers. A good number of people from nations where the age is 18 consistently go pub-hopping, because that’s part of their ritual, but they tend to be fairly responsible about it; that, I’ve seen, varies as much depending on the person as it does on their country of origin. There are a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, from all different countries, and the fact that they can legally buy beer in Germany at sixteen is shocking to them, but most are being more responsible than I would have given them credit for. I’ve met a varying bunch of attitudes towards the alcohol, and strangely the Americans are the worst when it comes to controlling their drinking. Not that I didn’t expect that, what with America having the highest legal drinking age of any nation I’ve heard of so far, but the twenty-year-olds are doing much better than the American eighteen-year-olds. Yet another cultural gulf that can’t easily be bridged.

So we bought some pasta, pesto, and beer and headed back to our dorm (a block away from Karlsplatz; whereas Jeff and Alma respectively lived a pretty great distance away). Of course nothing ever goes to plan. We planned to cook the pasta in our kitchen (we live in the outbuilding of the two buildings of the dorm complex) and we’ve used the kitchen daily for pasta and washing dishes and all of that. The four other girls on the floor see us and they say, “Hallo,” and go about their business, sometimes giving us disdainful or haughty looks, but have never been openly offensive. But apparently the fact that we brought people over (who were on our side of the floor, about 30 meters from their rooms!) probably pissed them off. They didn’t seem to like our pasta dinner idea. They took our pot off the stove and poured it out. Yeah. Manners. Right. Then they put up signs in the kitchen saying, in English, that we couldn’t touch the communal kitchen stuff. Right. So they speak English…but they can’t talk to us personally. Our German is terrible and obviously if they can form a contraction, they can passably speak English. They have to take our pot from the stove and pour it out. My roommate was practically having an anxiety attack. She kept saying, “But they wrote ‘Don’t touch!’ So they speak English, yes? Why can’t they talk to us? Why must they write the note?”

I was furious, but I wasn’t about to go pissing off people who have the ear of the Hausfrau and could have her kick us out by making up lies… because these girls seem to hate us that much. Why? We seem to be Americans. (Nevermind that Ayse is Turkish.) Germans don’t like the haughty American tourists because they think we’re all unilaterally the same — some sort of close-minded, McDonald’s-eating idiot — and so they treat all Americans the same way. (By the way, people keep asking us, “Did you really vote for Bush?” We now roll our eyes. As if all of America is the same.) I refuse to think that all Germans are the same — why do they think that of us? I know that Germany was made up of dozens of kingdoms and was ruled by empire after empire, and resultantly people in the north, south, east, and west of Germany are fundamentally different. They speak with different accents, use different slang, eat different foods—they are 88 million people, and they’re different from each other. Same with Americans. A New Yorker is fundamentally different from a Texan who is fundamentally different from a Minnesotan, who is different from a Floridian and so forth. Isn’t it enough I’m here in Germany to learn German, instead of coddled in an American classroom? I hate ignorance in all its forms, and those girls really, really annoyed me.

We ended up making the pasta in the central kitchen of the main building and ate out on the patio, drinking our beer and having a great time. That was, until the Hausfrau came out at 10pm and said—rudely, because she only knows one way to speak to people younger than herself, apparently—“It is now ten pm. All visitors must leave. Now.” She looked pointedly at two of the six of us gathered there—both of those girls LIVE in the building!—and then walked away. I didn’t spend three years at college to be treated like a fifteen-year-old by a woman who knows better. We are not her charges, we are Goethe students using her building. She has an agreement with the Goethe Institut to house the ten or so of us, not to mother or treat us like children. Granted house rules are house rules, and we will obey them out of courtesy, but I know she knows how to say, “Danke schön.” I know she could have said that.

Okay. I apologize for the angry rant. I… I really do hate it when people don’t attempt to be somewhat polite. I always say, “Danke schön,” and “Bitte,” and “Entschuldigung.” Even badly pronounced, I try. I haven’t met rude Germans anywhere except those having to do with our dorm. Everywhere—cafés, bookstores, on the street or subway—they’ve been so kind and polite, as long as we’re polite, so it’s worked out. When I’ve been with some loud Americans (yes, there are a few at Goethe) we get some wry or disdainful looks, but heck, I do that in Pittsburgh when I see someone being loud and annoying, too.

Ah, international manners.

[End of rant.]

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