My adventure in ALEMANIA, la cuarta parte. --The Germans celebrate the beginning of Lent! Orrrrr Mardi Gras? The beginning(ish) of spring? the week? Sunday?

I always start out these posts really ambitiously, planning to cover all kinds of stuff, but then I end up spending an hour and a half rambling about a small encounter that really has no bearing on the general story arc that I’m focusing on.  

So to counter this unfortunate happenstance, (I didn’t really know what this word meant so I google-define:-ed it.  Apparently it’s a French film produced in 2000 featuring Audrey Tautou and Faudel – adjust your vocabulary accordingly) (hahaha "Faudel"  she should do a duet with Fergie/form a 1950s comedy duo: "Faudel & Fergie"! [For maximum effect, pronounce "Faudel" as "Foddle"]) [I’ve decided to just start sentences over when an extended interruption like this occurs; I promise it’s not just to up the word count] So to counter this unfortunate happenstance, I’m going to set my sights really low for this post.  That way I can be pleasantly surprised when I manage to cover a fraction of the actual topic at hand!  In this post I, Michael, will inform the reader of at least one thing that I did or saw or was assaulted by while within the borders of Germany.  

Happenstance is a French word? I think I've been pronouncing it wrong.

So we’re talking about cultural differences between Germany and America, specifically the differing attitudes about alcohol.  We covered children’s beers, and now I’m going to tell another story.

Story #2

While I was in Germany, I witnessed an event of epic proportions called Carneval.  It was a city-wide party, and it was ridiculous. It was on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, so I’m fairly certain it was vaguely connected to Fat Tuesday, although I’m not sure if the Germans knew that.  Keep in mind as I begin to describe it that we were in Erfurt, which is a city of just about 200,000 people.  There are much bigger cities around Germany, and probably much more prominent celebrations throughout the year.  

When we got up that morning, we were aware that there was to be a parade later that day.  The magnitude of this incredible parade is what caught us off guard.  As we walked to church at about 9 that morning, we already started to see random families on the street, completely dressed up like it was a ridiculous German version of Halloween that you never grow out of.  Right after church, a group of us made our way to the plaza where the parade was to begin…

The streets already smelled of beer.  Once we reached the plaza, we noticed three things immediately:  

1. There were parade floats everywhere, and there were tons of people in them, yelling, eating, drinking, and yelling again. 
2. Every single person (there were a lot) in this huge plaza was dressed ridiculously
3. Many(most) of them were drunk. 

There were open bottles of alcohol everywhere.  I saw a half-full bottle of vodka sitting on the ground out in the open, like someone had gingerly set it down to give someone a big tipsy hug but absentmindedly left it there. 

German Mutant Ninja Turtles

Once the parade itself started, we were mesmerized.  Float after float of happy Germans rolled by, and people were going crazy.  I saw a man on a float holding a beer in one hand and throwing candy with the other.  You know how at baseball games, a lady will walk around and sell hot dogs and peanuts from this big box she has attached to her front?  There was one of those selling little tiny plastic bottles of liquor.  At first I assumed it was candy, but then I looked closer and realized my mistake.  

"Party" and "Fun" are regular parts of the German vocabulary.  THAT'S IT!  This is an ESL instructional video!

There were two kinds of floats:  musical ones, and drunk ones.

But seriously, the entire city was filled with drunken costumed Germans.  A wise man once likened it to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, except more family friendly (less nudity), no beads, and more public alcohol consumption.

The floats themselves and the costumed people in the parade were absolutely ridiculous, as you will see from these pictures.  After we watched the parade and danced and sang and participated in back-and-forth shouting of “Hallo!” between the floats and the observers for a while, we went inside a big tent which was labeled “Irish pub”.  Apparently this is where the more elderly Germans go for Carneval.  It was a huge tent with rows and rows of benches, and a stage up in the front, which was covered with instruments and other musical stuffs.  There was only one guy up on stage, however, and all he did was yell “hallo!” to the audience every now and then.  (A popular greeting apparently)  Most of the time he was just playing recorded music.  (He also wandered around the stage a lot because he didn’t have a chair.  My hypothesis is that he had just wandered up there earlier and started yelling and no one had bothered to interrupt his fun.)

Notice the fanny pack.  Also: She was embarrassingly drunk and did not speak a bit of English.

So imagine this: Old cheesy German folk songs are being blasted on big speakers.  The huge tent is filled with old intoxicated German people in ridiculous costumes singing along to these songs from their childhood that all feature accordions and sound like what lederhosen would sound like if it was an audible phenomenon.  It was made all the more better when they played “Sweet Caroline” though, as we made sure those Germans would not soon forget those obnoxiously loud and regularly dressed Americans who kept waving their arms in the air and imitating the brass in a horribly clumsy, dissonant way.  

He was judging us with those eyes. He is now my desktop background.

So judging from this story, you might say that the German attitude towards alcohol is ever so slightly different from ours.

My Time in TYSKLAND Part Drei (You're supposed to yell it, regardless of the language you're saying it in) More cultural differences! Hooray for what's different from us!

I’m not sure exactly how much mileage I’m going to get out of this whole “Germany” thing, but I’m just gonna keep rollin’.  (Why is ‘gonna’ not a word?  For the sake of informality and literary voice, you will have to pardon the non-words. [Not to mention the excess punctuation.]) 

So last post I talked about one of the major differences between German and American culture, probably the most well-known one: children’s playgrounds' design. (The conclusion we came to was that abstract thinking, aggressive behavior, and escapology/parkour training are the biggest priorities, displacing the boring American standbys “fun” and “safety”.)

Now that I’ve gotten that one out of the way, I’d like to talk about one of the more unexpected differences which, quite frankly, we were astonished to encounter.  I’m speaking (Woahhhh, just a sentence ago I was expressing a desire to talk about something, now I’m “speaking” already? I need to slow down a little bit!)  I’m speaking of the German culture’s general attitude towards alcohol.  (You might want to sit down for this one.)  

First off, the drinking age is 16 for beer and wine, and 18 for liquor.   Now that I’ve covered the basics, I’m going to approach this discussion as I approach every cultural analysis, intellectual debate, Q & A session, press conference, life-changing decision, family member, and justice of the peace: anecdotally. (I’m going to leave a minute/a blank space here to give time for that sentence to soak in/for my brain to recollect its marbles)

Storytime #1: 

Actually some of this is still exposition; I’m really bad at organizing stuff.

So you know how you always get water in American restaurants when you’re trying to be cheap?  Well in Germany you either let yourself thirst (I’m using it as a verb like “starve”) or you get beer.  It’s everywhere; very few restaurants do not sell any.  

New game/idea for blog post: start a post and then periodically put in random google images and make it relevant somehow. (That's not what I'm doing here, I promise.)

I didn’t realize exactly how “everywhere” (figuratively) the beer was until I ate at a restaurant named Tiffanys’ in Berlin. (There was no breakfast food, and not a trace of Audrey Hepburn or Deep Blue Something memorabilia.)  Unbeknownst (Holy cow that’s an amazingly spelled word) to me, *gulaschsuppe* in German is a direct translation to *Campbells chunky beef soup*.  So needless to say, the meal was not entirely satisfactory.  What made it really interesting was my beverage choice. So I was perusing the beer menu, (What a great sentence fragment) and I saw 2 options titled “Berliner Weisse”. One was labeled “rot”, and one was labeled “grün”.  This meant to me that there were two white/pale beers that were apparently made in Berlin, and that they came in two different colors.  I wanted to try something regional and unusual (like green beer), so I got that one.  

I immediately realized something was wrong when my beer came in a short stubby glass and had a straw in it.  I remember it saying something like “Berliner Kindl Weisse” (Which google translator gracefully turns into “Berlin white children”.)  There was also a picture of a beer mug and a child’s face peeking out over the top. (Which, now that I think about it, seems to be endorsing childhood intoxication; Why else would you climb into a big old beer mug? It's probably sticky.)  I tried to maintain my composure and ignore the snickering wait-staff as I slurped (I may’ve blown bubbles in it too) my half beer, half green soda, 100% delicious beverage.  

OMG THAT'S WHAT I HAD.

My apologies; Story time #2 about alcohol in Germany will have to wait for next week. I've already spent an inordinate amount of time researching children's beers and even more trying to figure out what font this text is in. (Georgia.) And why it's smaller than in other posts. (Voodoo.) 

Rest assured, The wait will be worth it. It, the story, will be worth the wait. (There will be actual story-relevant pictures from my trip!)

DEUTSCHLAND parte deux. Some obvious differences, interesting similarities, and unexpected variations between German and American culture. Or: If M.C. Escher and Josef Stalin were locked in a room and told to design the perfect jungle gym.

So I don’t really feel like taking the simple way out and chronologically going through my adventure in Germany.  Instead I’m just going to highlight some specific stuff that I saw and interesting things that happened.  Today I’m going to talk about some random and some not-so-random comparisons of German and American culture. I’d like to start with the less obvious random option.

On Wednesday and Thursday of our time in Germany, we stayed in Wittenberg, a city in eastern Germany where Martin Luther studied, taught, and preached for many years.  I am incredibly inept at judging the size of a city, but Wikipedia says it has a population of 50,000…so, yeah.  That’s how big it is.  We were in the city center, which was a beautiful area of streets with shops, restaurants and random canal-like things.  There was also a lot of green area around it and numerous Martin Luther monuments.  There was a river/drainage ditch in one part of the green area, and it was gross.  It smelled slightly of sewage, and looked pretty bad.  Whenever it went underground there was a cool stone entrance where it drained down, and it had beer bottles and trash all over it.  In case you didn’t catch it, this is similar to America, and it also has very little to do with culture. (Or maybe it does.  I don’t know.)  

The most awesome thing in this area that I’ve been attempting to get around to, however, was the playground.  It was totally unlike any conventional playground I’ve seen in America, and I’m so sorry that I have no pictures of it.  I will attempt to find somewhat vaguely similar pictures on Google images, use them, and pray that they are not copyrighted. (Aborted, there are none that will not give a false impression.)

It was a very hilly green area, and the playground was basically built on two hills and the lower valley around them. (haha, “valley”)  The hill in the center of the playground had a layered terrace-y thing around half of it, making it possible to climb up it?  Its purpose was unclear.  At the top of this hill was a bridge to the main playground structure.  It was a ridiculously long bridge and it was one of those bridges that is obviously safe, but manages to be unbelievably rickety.  Scariest experience of my life on a playground structure.   (Nevermind; scratch that, I still have nightmares about the slide in 1^st grade; that girl was vicious, and she knew how to use that windbreaker like a brutal weapon.)

*Tremble*    The "real" reason I hate the cold: memories...

The bridge connected to what appeared to be a conventionally shaped wooden playground.  Connected to this, however, was a long series of rectangular wooden poles, plastic ropes connecting them, and oddly shaped wooden blocks providing a small amount of space to walk on.  No firefighter poles, no tic-tac-toe game, no swings, no animal shapes anywhere; Just a rickety bridge and a lot of extremely dangerous, oddly spaced, and seemingly aimless and unorganized climbing equipment.  (And one lone slide on the other hill, completely separate from the rest of the playground.)  It was unclear for a while whether we were on a playground or had simply wandered into an abandoned, poorly-thought-out obstacle course.  (The architect must have written half the plan, scribbled over the entire blueprint, then gave it to the builders and insisted that they do it exactly as written.)  We were able to climb all over it, but this was only because we had longer, adultish legs, and we still only narrowly escaped death.  The obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that German children are raised from infancy to be agile, ruthless, and easily-entertained guerilla fighters.

Next week I’ll discuss more differences. :D

(Bonus: My favorite part of that day was when a friend and I raced down the slide and ran off, much to the obvious exasperation of an older German lady and her child.)  (Our immaturity was apparent, even to the < 8 year old)

Journey to GERMANY part one. for lack of a better title. (THE PLANE)

Sooooo I am in Germany for Spring Break.  I'm here for Lutherans, and it's incredible, but we're not starting at the incredible part; we're starting at the beginning.

So Spring Break started for me on Thursday afternoon.  I packed my bags at breakneck speed, and hoped against hope that I was prepared to be in a foreign country for a week.  We took what was essentially a school bus with an unusually interesting driver (he basically spent his time talking to us advertising for Cat’s Cradle, which is a fascinating example of media overlap [is bus driving a media? Doubtful.]) on the torturous 3 hour road to Charlotte.  This was nothing, however, when considering the plane ride that we were about to undertake.

9 hours is a long time.

It is SUCH a long time.

So nothing extremely eventful happened between arriving in Charlotte and getting on the flight, except that I ate pizza. It was delicious.  Here is an example of just how subjective the definition of “eventful” is on this blog. ( MY WHIM IS LAW)

Then we boarded our plane to Frankfurt.  I am in a group of 50 Lutherans, which you can imagine would be quite rowdy all together on a plane.  Sadly for us, the plane decided to split us up a bit in hopes of keeping our volume down.  

It worked.  Rather than yelling and screaming to everyone else the entire flight through, me and my lcm neighbor flew much like we would if we were separated from a huge group of people.  (It was her first flight, so of course I knew turbulence and landing were going to be much scarier and stressful than I remembered them being before.)

I had my laptop charged and I planned on getting homework out of the way on the road, but you know what they say about “the best laid plans”….   Actually I have no idea what they say but I assume that it ends negatively.  Inform me if it is otherwise.  

So there I am, contemplating what to spend my 9 hour trip observing.  They seemed to have a good selection of movies, and I hadn’t figured out the trick to those stupid headphone jacks, so I spent 5$ on a crappy pair of airplane headphones.  They had both Social Network and The King’s Speech available, and this marvel of Oscar-winning content excited me to end.  

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that movie watching on airplanes is the most inconsistent and low quality experience there is available in terms of sub-par observance of media. (Besides listening to your ipod while you wrestle down pigs covered in filth.) [I hope that isn’t hard to follow.]

So after 15 minutes of The King’s Speech, I gave up and decided to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, but in Spanish.  I enjoyed myself immensely. (surprisingly, Alvin and Simon are actually pretty easy to understand; it’s Theodore whose squealing Hispanic speech is hilariously incomprehensible.)

TO BE CONTINUED

Great Wolf Lodge: What is it? What gives it its greatness? And what about its wolfness? Dare I ask how it achieves its lodginess?

3 more days of class and it will officially be Spring Break.  But there’s only 2 days of class before I GO TO GERMANY.  Needless to say, I am ‘psyched’.  More on this eventually.

Also: I feel grossly ill.  This may have a tangible effect on my usual “verbally spasmodic/spasmodically dysphonic” self.  {This is a good example of an intelligent joke which is also not very funny) (Do what I do; just go to Google and type in ‘define: ______’. [e.g. spasmodic dysphonia]  If no other objective is fulfilled from this blog, I hope that I learn and then subsequently teach a new term every week.)  ….One more thing: say “verbally spasmodic or spasmodically dysphonic” five times fast.

Has anyone else ever been to Great Wolf Lodge?  I was just there this weekend with my family, and it was quite the unusual experience.  It’s all the way in Charlotte, first of all.  Second of all, I think all of the guests are usually South Carolinian, whatever that says about them.  

We’ll start with a basic level of description of what the so called “Great Wolf Lodge” is, and then we will build on that conception, slowly creating a full picture in our imagination, so that we can begin to understand what makes this “Great Wolf Lodge” just so “Great Wolf Lodge”. 

1)   To begin with, it’s a lodge.  A large portion of it is essentially a nice hotel for people to stay in. 

2)        There are several shops and small places to eat, including a Dunkin’ Donuts.

3      Then there’s the décor. (Microsoft Word says there is an accent there, and it is not my place to disagree.)  It’s very woodsy, kind of like the entire thing is one huge log cabin. 

4)          Here is also where the ‘wolf’ thing comes in.  There are some cool statues of wolves near the front, and pictures of wolves and other animals (beavers, bears) in every room and on random walls.

5)           It starts to get weird here.  Throughout all of the empty space in hallways, lobbies, foyers and corridors, (some of those were added redundantly ‘just cuz’.)  there are treasure chests, huge plastic crystals, minks in cages, tree stumps with fake heads coming out of them, and big tv screens with dragons on them.  It’s something called “magiquest”, which boils down to hundreds of little kids and some oddly dressed adults running around, shrieking, and pointing plastic wands at things for “quest points”.  There’s also a huge Viking-magical-witch-cabin in the front hall, which is awesome/slightly off-putting.

6)           There is a large, ridiculous inside water-park complete with about 12 slides, a wave pool, and a huge but very wet playground structure in the middle.  

7)            The random animal wall murals (they’re a little more cartoony than the wolf portraits and statues) sometimes tell stories about the animals.  Apparently there are two beavers named Tooth and Nail.  They also have a lot of animal friends.  These include a rabbit, a raccoon, and a bear with a cupcake on his head. His name is sprinkles.  I kid you not.  (My brother and I cumulatively spent at least three hours piecing together the elaborate mythos surrounding these characters and the namesake of the hotel, the “great wolf”.  No joke. The book should be available at Amazon and your local bookstore early 2012.)

I hope you enjoyed this brief yet poignant look at the mystery that is “Great Wolf Lodge."

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