Bookstores

A big part of my trip was browsing German bookstores for books and lots else. I am a media junkie, I read and collect books, CDs and videos and with a burning desire to learn about what could be found in Germany, I could not pass a bookstore without going inside.

My favourite haunt was Dussmann in Berlin, located quite conveniently in the Friedrichstraße and open Monday to Saturday to midnight. I was there until closing about a half dozen times during my six weeks in Berlin. They call it the Kulturkaufhaus, literally the cultural department store, with stock on display on five floors. A highlight of my visits to Dussmann was calling my friend Glen to tell him I'd found an obscure CD from one of his favourite 70s bands Sweet.

Another chain I found in both Berlin and in München was Hugendubel, with their locations on the Kurfürstendamm and near the Marienplatz in München being my most frequently visited locations. Thalia is another chain, and the nicest store of theirs I visited was in Hamburg, with a view of the Binnenalster from the Europa Passage. I found them in Berlin and Reutlingen as well.

Finally, a great local chain in Württemberg was Osiander, with a location in the Wilhelmstraße in Reutlingen and three locations concentrated in the old town in Tübingen.

Two special stores I found were related to maps and travel. They may have been somewhat underwhelming since German bookstores have enormous travel sections, but Schropp in Berlin and Dr. Götze in Hamburg are must-visit stores if you are interested in maps, travel guides, posters, globes and such. (When I visit Seattle, I make sure to visit Metsker Maps just outside of Pike Place.)

For online book ordering, I'm still a fan of amazon.de. Their selection of more than books is fantastic, and they allow me to maintain a Wish List, as well as keep a record of books that I've bought.

When I started looking for German reference books in stores, I thought I would look for a series called "Der Kleine Duden", but I found that despite the higher costs, the books in the regular "Dudenreihe" were much more satisfying to use and read. My first purchase was Volume 4, Die Grammatik, followed by Volume 9, Richtiges und Gutes Deutsch. Die Grammatik is obvious enough, Richtiges und Gutes Deutsch is more of about German usage. The best-selling book in the Duden series is Volume 1, Die Deutsche Rechtschreibung, which isn't really what I would consider a dictionary (the definitions of words are far too terse for that) but is intended primarily as a guide to correct spelling and word breaks. This book could always be found at a promotional price, probably to get people to start collecting all twelve volumes of the Duden series, but I chose instead to buy a copy of the Deutsches Universalwörterbuch (with the CD). All of these books are now prizes in my collection--they are so nicely made and so interesting to read! I can't look up something without getting immersed in some other topic...

Things that I never found...

Okay, so the most obvious thing I didn't bring back from Germany was something cuddly to occupy either of the two empty seats next to me on the plane, and I don't mean something I could win at the Cannstatter Volksfest. There were a few other things I expected to put into my suitcase for the trip home, but which somehow eluded me:

1. Really delicious sour pickles.

For all the hype around Spreewaldgurken and Germany's close proximity to Poland, I was never able to find pickles like Bick's Polskie Ogorki or the varieties of Vlasic Pickles that I love here. The pickles that I either bought or sampled were always too mild, even if they were labeled as "knackig und würzig."



2. Benco distance cards.

One very nifty thing I received from Dad before my trip (along with some Euros in order to borrow a cart in the Stuttgart Airport) was a simple map of Germany printed on a cardboard sleeve with distances marked on a slidable card inside. By sliding the card, you can pick a start location and the distance to a destination is shown through a hole in the card--a nice piece of functional art (and a gift I would like to give--they exist for many countries). The card my dad gave me was from the days of the DDR (distances to East German destinations took the limited number of border crossings into account), making it a great piece of history, to boot. Even the stores I visited which specialized in maps (Schropp in Berlin and Dr. Götze in Hamburg) didn't carry the Benco cards, so I came home empty-handed. A company called Hallwag makes regular folding maps with a distance card integrated into it (branded as Disto-Guide), and make such maps for many countries. I found a map of Denmark for a friend of mine, a nice item which features Danish, French, English and German in its legend.

3. Redoxon Vitamin C effervescent tablets.

For a long time, I've taken my vitamin C in effervescent tablet form, a brand called Redoxon being both available and having an acceptable flavour. The tablets are quite expensive (about $3.00 for a sleeve of 10 tablets) and since they are made in France by Bayer, I was hoping to run across some. Well, no Bayer products, but effervescent tablets are popular in Germany--I found tubes of 20 multivitamin tablets for about one Euro a crack.

4. Germans Under Cover

An earlier post on this Blog from Roy Black and an invitation to meet him in Berlin never materialized, which I suppose, but the worst part is that the great Schlager music he shared (perhaps illegally) is no longer available for download, nor is the savage commentary about it. If you're out there, Roy, please get your commentary back online! The music you posted lives on in my iPod!

In any case, my favourite piece of German cover version Schlager nostalgia is this priceless clip from a 70s German music show, where the duo of Cindy and Bert synthesize contemporary fashion, Arthur Conan Doyle and Black Sabbath.


At the Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin, there is a room filled with TVs where visitors can call up old TV programs, including full episodes of shows like this one. A can't miss for Germanophiles.

Neat stuff: Kurvenbeisser Biker-Salamis

Something I wanted to find in Germany, and was successful finding, were these tasty products.

Sure, the salami quality was what you could expect in a motorcycle store, but the packaging is first-rate: Kurvenbeisser translates as "curve biter", a cheeky double entendre, and there are four packages to collect, each with a description of a suggested motorcycle route in Germany. Very cool, my motorcycling friends really appreciated them.

Something I plan to do as soon as I can is obtain a motorcycle licence (I was prevented from doing so a year ago because of my foot problems)--the roads in Germany are excellent, and the motorcyclists in Baden-Württemberg and in the Alps were having at least as much fun as I was having on my bicycle.

Stuttgart has a sort of "motorcycle row" along Bundesstraße 27, not far from the centre of town, with several shops side by side. If you take the S- or U-Bahn trains north from the Hauptbahnhof, you can't miss them on the west side of the street as you emerge from underground.

Auf dem Eis mit den Tiefkühlschränken

One of the stranger aspects of German sporting life is the nicknames of the teams in the DEL, or their top ice hockey league. There are examples of

1) Nicknames in German

* Augsburger Panther
* Eisbären Berlin
* EV Duisburg "Die Füchse"
* Kölner Haie
* Krefeld Pinguine
* Adler Mannheim

2) Nicknames in English

* DEG Metro Stars
* Frankfurt Lions
* Hamburg Freezers
* Hannover Scorpions
* Iserlohn Roosters
* Straubing Tigers

3) No nickname at all

* ERC Ingolstadt (note that they do have a Panther in their team crest)

4) Nicknames combined with a sponsor

* Sinupret Ice Tigers

5) Nicknames on drugs

* EHC Wolfsburg Grizzly Adams

The Hamburg newspapers sometimes refer jokingly to their local team as the "Tiefkühlschränke" (the word for the applicable household appliance); I'm curious to know if the nickname relates to ice in an
arena or if it's an allusion to Hamburg's fame for warehouses and storage.

I talked a friend of mine from my German class, Gérald (a Swiss who is now a Canadian citizen working in Québec) into going to the game. According to Gérald, the wonderful atmosphere in the ColorLine Arena was what you would expect in a European arena (but maybe not as boisterous as in Lausanne, where the team he supports plays), but definitely better than that in the Montréal Forum. I had to tell him that the fans in Montréal are historically among the more vocal in Canada!

Gérald and I showed up at the rink over an hour before the game started and tried to find two seats together in the fanblock (north end of the Arena) and it took some time to find them--fans in the fanblock get there very early to claim seats (normally by putting their scarf across the seats) and then go into the concourses to socialize. We found some down fairly low in a corner, next to the Holsten Fan Couch and I did my best to get in the camera shots of the guys who were lucky enough to sit there. The fanblock does not stop singing for the whole game, and we were on our feet the whole time. I have never had so much fun at a hockey game!

As usual, I was looking for souvenirs. I almost bought a scarf which featured the title of a song they play in the rink when an opponent gets a penalty, "In Hamburg sagt man Tschüss". (It's cute. They alternate playing that song with some punk song for which I'm still trying to find the title.) Nearly everyone in sight had a scarf (one guy had enough scarves to make a dress out of them) but light blue and 15 Euros just weren't my colour. Something I could have used, and didn't think of at the time, was a Freezers jersey, especially since I plan to play more hockey outdoors and on the ice.

Addendum: Back home, I was quite stunned to find that a friend's copy of NHL2007 has DEL teams in it, including my beloved Freezers!

Blog updating

Sorry about the lack of entries, but I haven't found it easy to sit at a keyboard and write. I am making notes and taking some pictures, and my upcoming schedule looks like this:

Week of

August 13 Paris sightseeing

August 20 Paris-Brest-Paris

August 27 Lage (Hannover/Bielefeld area) visiting relatives

September 3 Hamburg-Goethe Institut German studies

September 10 Hamburg continued

September 17 not sure

September 24 Stuttgart UCI World Road Championships

October 1 Packing and returning home

Best wishes to everyone who has visited this site, there is much more I will tell you.

Michael

PS A highlight of my trip was visiting my cousin Volker in Freiburg--this picture was taken from the Schlossberg in Freiburg--the fellow who more closely resembles the men in my family is on the left--that's Volker. Volker works at the airport which can be seen in the background.

Volker's mom took us on a driving tour on the Swabian Alb later in the day, and the kloister church we visited in St. Trudpert and the view from the Schauinsland were spectacular.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.--Mark Twain

Part of my experience this year was to improve my German, and I think I have. A little bit, anyway.

For the past four weeks, I studied German at the renowned Goethe Institut in Berlin. Every student's German knowledge is a little different. My German was learned at home, almost entirely informally, the exceptions being my attending German schools on Saturdays until I was about 15, which I never enjoyed, and one high school correspondence course, which I learned to dislike. (When I was 18, I started reading German magazines during the 1986 World Cup and have kept reading them, and other German material here and there, since.) The result of my German education, if we I can call it that, is that my pronunciation is quite good (I am sometimes mistaken for a Swiss person when I'm having a good day), my understanding of German is fairly good, my vocabulary is reasonable and my grammar is pretty atrocious. I have to say that everything, including my grammar, is a little better now.

The course was entertaining--aside from the grammar exercises, we discussed current events, listened to music, gave presentations (mine was about the € Euro) and there were plenty of opportunities to explore Berlin with other students.

The best part of the course was that I now have a pretty good understanding of what I have to work on: grammar. Sounds obvious, but it's pretty clear now that I have to learn German grammar from the ground up. And if that sounds like fun, you might want to read Mark Twain's account of German Language which is not surprisingly called The Awful German Language, and someone has collected even more quotes from Twain about German. Enjoy!

Another wonderful part of the course is that my eyes were opened up to a little bit of literature. Our class read Remarque's Der Nacht in Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon), and I also learned that my favourite author, David Foster Wallace, has been translated into German, including an essay of his, the titular essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (translated as Schrecklich amüsant, aber in Zukunft ohne mich, or "Terribly enjoyable, but next time...without me"). DFW has an affinity for the Oxford English Dictionary, and it will be great fun to read the article again merely to see how it was translated. Not only will I read some DFW in German, but it's about time I read some Mark Twain as well. Twain's account of his travels in Germany is beautifully illustrated by a 20th century German cartoonist, and A Tramp Abroad is something the the GVPL has at home.

Later this year, I will return to the Goethe Institut (they're located throughout Germany) to complete an examination, probably at what is known as the B2 level. My class was the C.1 level, and although I was far ahead of many in my class in some areas, it was clear that most of my 13 classmates had learned German systematically, and recently (most of the students were between 18-26). There was a short control exam at the end of the course, and I did very well, but the B2 exam should be challenging.

Berlin: Juxtapositions

Hello from Berlin, Germany,

It's going to be a long summer as far as Internet access goes. I've just found an Internet Café about 15 minutes from home which does not allow smoking and damn right I'm pleased. Too bad I'm leaving Berlin in a couple of weeks...

So, what can I say about this vast metropolis. Well, I was prepared long ago through the words of Henry Rollins, who visited the Berlin Wall many years ago and was staggered at the sight of it. Solid stone walls adorned with barbed wired and armed guards everywhere on patrol with orders to shoot to kill anyone who entered the zone between an inner and outer wall. Inside the zone, with no predators to worry about, were bunnies. Oppression and bunny rabbits. The wall is essentially gone, but the juxtapositions still exist.

Before class today, I went on a tour with my schoolmates at the Goethe Institut of a number of sites along the wall, with our final destination being a checkpoint at the northwest corner of Berlin, the Bornhomer Brücke (Bridge). A remaining section of wall still stands at the right of the photo; the site where I took this picture was where visitors from West Berlin had to pass through East German customs.

Back to juxtapositions... the Soviets built the TV tower at the Alexanderplatz to be the second tallest building in Europe behind only the TV tower in Moscow (how appropriate!), which of course makes for this wonderful shot I took:

In the foreground is the Berlin Marienkirche, which features a monument to Martin Luther, and behind it extending into the sky is the symbol of Communist supremacy, the Berlin TV tower. Unfortunately, the sun wasn't shining on this day, so we can't see what is known as "The Pope's Revenge."

An even better juxtaposition found on this day was the European School of Management and Technology, supported by multinational corporations with courses conducted completely in English. Not that unusual, save for the fact that inside the building is this stained glass display:


Yes, the ESMT is located in the former East German"Staatsrat" (National Council), and the stained glass mural depicts communistic ideals. Parked out front on the Straße den 17. Juni are luxury cars and Trabant Safari taxis.

That's all for now...