Sarcasm

A busy week for your correspondent.

Tuesday night I had German class. It's my weekly opportunity to shed the feeling of being a foreigner among Germans. Instead I go there for the experience of seeing a German (my teacher, Andrea) among foreigners. It's refreshing. This week took an unexpected twist, when we practiced introducing sarcasm to our speech.

Yes, in the hopes of expanding our ability communicate our teacher is trying to impress on us the importance of mastering gestures, exclamations and even intonation. So we had fun the other night expressing irony and irritation with phrases such as 'Thank you very much' and 'So, you will be visiting us in our office then'.

Little did I know that I would have the chance to use it Wednesday, when 1st grader A. and I were almost run down by an inattentive driver at an intersection on the way home from school. Thank goodness it was me, a hyperactively paranoid mother, in the crosswalk, and not some preoccupied chatting 2nd graders, because it was my booming exclamation of 'Scheiße' (shit) that got the accelerating driver's attention in time.

I turned back to him from the relative safety of the other side of the median line and scolded very loudly 'Perhaps you could pay a bit more attention, please' (in perfect German, I might add). He heard me - his window was open and we made eye contact. It was just dripping with the right intonation of sarcasm - I may have left a puddle of it behind me in the middle of the street. An ancient but spry gentleman, who was crossing the street towards us, looked at me with a nod and said, as the car drove off 'Just so'.

I may master this language yet, if I don't get killed by errant drivers first.

Da Bomb

World War II is still, to the people living around here, a Current Event. Not in the way that your more extreme American Southerner refuses to accept that the Confederacy has fallen. No, folks in the Ruhr River and lower Rhine areas constantly find old unexploded bombs during routine excavations (i.e. for roads, new subways, building cellars).

Since the area where we live is pretty much the heart of heavy industry in Germany, it was bombed pretty heavily during the war. Earlier this year a member of a bomb squad was killed during the removal of one 65-year old bomb. So naturally, the guys who defuse and dispose of these bombs are treated with the same respect that Americans would accord to NYC firefighters.

We've had at least 4 or 5 such discoveries in the area so far this year. The latest, in Duisburg, an (American!) 5-zenter munition, was discovered yesterday at the construction site of a new intersection (on a stretch of road I used to travel regularly). It will require the mandatory evacuation of a 250m (approx. 1/8 mile) radius, and the recommended evacuation of all within a 500m (.3 mile) radius. Luckily this one is located in a relatively developed area; one of the rare agricultural areas tucked amidst the conurbation* that is Duisburg and Düsseldorf. Mostly affected are the 4-legged inhabitants of a riding school. But you can see on the map how close it is to real populations centers!


More on how the bomb perhaps got there: The Bombing of Duisburg



* I like to throw in real English words no one uses, but that Germans think everyone would know.