The Triple Crown

Forgot to post - P. successfully achieved his Yellow-White belt at Judo the other day. For those not in the know, these days they have added intermediate belts for the junior judo circuit, so the wee ones needn't wait years between levels. Unfortunately, P. didn't place in the intra-club tournament that had, but he was awarded an honorary 3rd place medal as solace.

St. Martin's Day

These past weeks have been a flurry of activity to prepare for the annual St. Martin's celebrations. These are a big deal for the little kids, who spend hours preparing paper lanterns (with varying degrees of help from the mothers). The children will meet after dark (i.e. 4:45pm at this time of year) for a procession through the village. In the olden days these lanterns would be lit by candles; but as every adult can remember the heartbreak of a friend's lantern engulfed in flames, everyone uses specially purchased battery powered lantern rod & light combinations.

After the parade, in which the children sing the traditional St. Martin's songs about his generous exploits to the accompaniment of a small marching band, there is a bonfire. St. Martin, who's been shadowing the parade the whole time on this horse, comes to the front and re-enacts the famous St. Martin-and-the-Beggar story (see picture). Then he hands out to all the children a kind of slightly sweet pastry in the shape of a man carrying a clay pipe, called a Weckmann. I've read this is supposed to represent Martin, who was a bishop, and the clay pipe is an inverted Bishop's crook.

After this activity (which is usually accompanied by Glühwein, or mulled wine, for the grown ups), the kids go door to door with their lanterns, singing for the homeowners and collecting candy. This has been going on for generations though, so unlike a lot of things here the Germans can't blame an American cultural trait (here: Halloween). And I must say: the kids' haul was much bigger, for less "work", than in the U.S.!

St. Martin is apparently a popular saint throughout Europe. It's always pointed out that the festival is a good chance to teach the kids the power of sharing, but splitting of a cloak in half to share with someone who has NOTHING seems a rather shaky platform on which to build an entire festival! I'm also not sure what the significance of the lanterns is; probably descended from some pagan ritual.

In my more cynical moments I wonder: If Valentine's Day is a "Hallmark Holiday", and Christmas is encouraged by the toy and luxury good industry, then is St. Martin's Day pushed by the paper products industry? Somebody has to buy all that construction and transparent paper!

But it's still really cool.

Interesting note: at 11:11 a.m., on Nov. 11 (11/11), Karneval season officially opens. New royalty is named, and slowly, very slowly, Karneval activities begin, like Sitzungen (literally: A Seating), which is sort of a series of corny stand-up comedy acts in a beer-hall type setting.

Picturs of the lanterns to follow.

Peter can drive a pen.

Well, the boy passed trial number 2 this week, successfully obtaining his Fountain Pen Driver's License. His teacher felt his chicken scratching was real handwriting. How am I supposed to know - I can't read this (*&$%@($ "simplified" handwriting the kids have to learn. In my defense, other parents I talk to (including my German teacher) can barely decipher it either.

P. insists on having the License with him in class, to prove to the other children that he is worthy. Although, he did point out the down side - now he MUST use the fountain pen, whereas before he might choose his implement.

Now onto trial number 3: Judo.

Ein Hattrick.

Big week for Peter.

Monday we met his swimming teacher for a swimming test. He passed and is now the proud owner of a 'Seepferdchen' - or little sea horse - certification. Thursday at swim class he will get his patch, which I, or someone who actually knows the sharp end of a needle from the dull, will sew onto his swim trunks. To achieve this he had to jump into the water, swim the pool end to end, and back (25 meters each way), and dive down to retrieve a ring.

I believe the certification is called little sea horse because of the way Peter swam - only a little offset from vertical, with his feet doing little else than providing a little upward force. Reminded me, in fact, of a sea horse's style. His arms did all the work. But he never gave up, and even did an extra set of laps just to show off (ok, maybe because his teacher told him to).

The next test of the week was to get his 'Füllerführerschein' - or fountain pen driver's license - in school. The German schools still encourage the use of fountain pens because it's believed that it encourages the children to be more careful in writing. Indeed, his handwriting with the fountain pen is better than with a pencil, but he always has blue splotches on his hands as a result. He has a special 'beginner' fountain pen, suitably colorful. After weeks of agonizing, Peter finally finished up the last few sentences of the text he was supposed to copy 'error free'. This means only that he had to catch and correct all his errors before the teacher did.

Friday: We'll see if he manages to go from his White belt in Judo to his White-Gold belt. Nowadays they have intermediate steps for the little ones so they don't have to wait years between promotions. Wouldn't it be nice if real life was like that?

Btw: The title's not a typo; it's Denglish for Hat Trick.

Family Matter

This week the husband installed the new card for the satellite receiver, to enable us to continue receiving the subscription channels with the English-language programming. Of course, in an effort to hook us on more expensive services, the company gave us 2 weeks of all their programming, free.

S. was exploring the new offerings and the packages available - just as American cable companies bundle certain channels together. One caught his attention - the 'family package'.

Now, in the U.S., a family package usually refers to programming which is suitable and attractive to the whole family - a mix of movies, kid's programming, and sports, usually. In Germany, however, or at least for this particular company, 'family' apparently means that there are channels for everyone in the family, even that creepy uncle around whom no one is really comfortable. For part of this package is the 'Beate-Uhse' channel, inspired by a famous chain of sex-toy shops.

Yes, the family package includes a porn channel.

Of course, the broadcasts don't begin until after the small kids are in bed, and therr is apparently a 4-digit security code you can invoke, so it's obviously meant just for the adults. Maybe it's just considered a part of a normal adult lifestyle here.

Or maybe it's all part of an effort to increase the birth rate in this country - as this 'Germany Needs More Babies' commercial seems to suggest.




Ok, there will be a comment accusing me of watching the porn channel. I wasn't impressed. It involved a chimney sweep and his encounters with the ladies on his route. Lots of bad jokes about how he was a 'bringer of good luck', nudge-nudge, wink-wink, and a lot of shots of him, literally, cleaning chimneys. Maybe the hard core stuff is on after 10 pm.

Environment Zones

The new trend among local municipalities is to institute "Environment Zones".

You have to understand that here in Moers we live just about adjacent to the Rhine and Ruhr rivers. Along the Rhine are large cities like Düsseldorf and Kologne; alone the Ruhr is the famous (in Europe) Ruhr Region, Germany's own Rust Belt. As a result, our state, North-Rhein Westphalia, has not only the largest and most dense population in Germany, but also some of the worst traffic in Europe.

Diesel cars are far more popular here in Germany than in the U.S. Diesels, however, put out a lot more particulates, than gasoline powered autos. (I have read that particulate output is actually more closely controlled in the U.S. than in Germany; the required filter to take care of the fine particulates is one reason diesel cars are more expensive in America).

So now cities are delineating areas into which only the cleanest cars can go. Luckily both our cars earned a green 4; my in-laws, with a diesel red 2, can no longer drive into the downtowns of several cities in the area. To do so (and to be caught) would mean a fine as well as points on the license.

I find this trend interesting because it's one of the few areas I've noticed where local levels of government are moving to regulate something like this. Usually, it seems to me, most of these directives come from the federal level.

I suffer, you suffer

This is what was in front of my house the other day. Yes, I did get out a ruler and measure it for all of you; no one believed me when I said they were 4 inches long. Enjoy.



The blue-green pellets are the "slug corn" I put out to kill the beast. It ignored them disdainfully. So I eventually had to get a stick from the woodpile and flick it (they scrunch up rather painfully appearing when they are poked) several times until I could push it down the hole in the manhole cover in front of the neighbors' house. I couldn't let it just go about ravaging the neighborhood, could I?

Then the (brave?) slug slayer celebrated with a cup of coffee, extra cream. Livin' large!

German woes

I'm taking an intermediate German class. After we were a third through the first term, our first teacher disappeared to a full-time job, and our new teacher came. Let me describe her: she is about 6 feet tall, size 6, obviously a runner, and sweet as a summer's day. She is also made of steel and carries an invisible whip made of smiles. You can't decide if you should fear her or take her out for coffee.

I come home from this evening completely exhausted. The exhaustion comes from having had some concepts of grammar I've had in my head for 30 years completely turned on its side, taking my head with it.

Turns out that what I've always fondly called an adjective in English isn't always in German - sometimes it's an adverb. And it wasn't even the subject of the exercise, this dismantling of my understanding; the point was a review of German declinations. Take this example:

The beautiful woman (die schöne Frau)
The woman is beautiful (Die Frau ist schön).

Now, we always learned in school that in sentences where the verb is essentially, "to be", the verb is essentially an equals sign and there's no real predicate - what comes after the verb is equivalent to the subject. And you can't really modify "is" in English. We also learned that anything that describes a noun is an adjective. So in English, both "beautifuls" are adjectives. Turns out that "beautiful" in the second sentence is, in German, an adverb. I'm told this should be clear to be because it's not declined (the "e" missing from "schön" in the second example). But I'm really still trying to get my mind around the concept that, in German, you can modify "to be".

This is made the more earth-moving to me by the fact that I took my first German course in 1991, and you'd think that maybe, just maybe, I'd have gotten this concept down 17 years ago.

I am not well tonight. Wait, I just modified "to be", didn't I? Now I'm really not well.

On top of that she inflicted upon us a particular kind of German academic torture called a "diktat". Not like Dictator, but like dictation. The teacher reads a text, perhaps slowly (yes, this time), perhaps repeating phrases (no, this time), which the students have to write out. German kids start this in first grade; it's actually a subject appearing on their report cards. Being the person I am, I had to ask, WHY? Supposedly, she explained (indirect speech is one place German has English beaten), it trains the children (and childlike foreigners) to write things down automatically, without stopping to agonize over punctuation and spelling.

We wrote the short paragraph and self graded this mini exam (my 10 errors put me far from the leaders in the class, but I suspect some fellow students of undercounting). She announced that she was giving this to us because, when she asked if we had understood every word in the text, everyone nodded immediately. Once again, being the person I am, I had to point out that I had understood the paragraph and all the words in it; my problem is simply atrocious spelling and lack of any sense of German punctuation rules. So sadly, I learned something, but not apparently what my teacher was trying to show me.

Why here and not there?

I've been wondering why, given my last post, in Germany we have a female Chancellor (Bundeskanzlerin) - Angela Merkel - and it wasn't that big a deal (although a historic first) while it's a gut wrenching ordeal with allegations of sexism and female inadequacy in the U.S.

I think a big part of it is that she comes from the East, which had, during the communist era, more of a tradition of working mothers. But I think perhaps a bigger factor comes from the way the German system elects its politicians.

When Germans go to the polls, they vote for an individual (who has a party affiliation) to represent their district, just like in the U.S. However, at the end of the day, officials determine not only the winner of each individual race, but also the overall proportion of votes cast for each party in the election. Each party (as represented by the candidates) that receives at least 5% of the vote, receives seats in the assembly so that the overall proportion of the seated reps is brought into line with the vote. If a party has more elected representatives than would be indicated by the overall vote proportions, those representatives are still seated (the "overhang"). If fewer representatives are directly elected than the proportional vote calls for, the parties appoint representatives from a previously publicized list. The executives, such as Merkel, are usually then elected by the assemblies (although in the national elections, the parties usually publicize who they'll put forward for the executive spot if they win).

So, coupled with the fact that the parties put forth directly elected candidates, plus their opportunity later to fine-tune the representation, means that the parties, if it's a goal of theirs, can further the role of women in their party. Now, when I look at lists of Moers representatives, I see some women in there who list their profession as "Hausfrau". So I believe the parties are working to bring some parity to the representation.

Well, now, once you have the women in the pipeline, it's inevitable that one will eventually rise to the top.

Contrast that with the U.S. system - because every representative is directly elected by the populace, each race is again a struggle to overcome whatever societal prejudices exist - whether gender, race, religion, orientation, or one I haven't heard of yet. Yes, direct representation is a near-holy tenant of the American system, but here you can see how it can actually hinder the promotion of underrepresented groups. Of course, this process in Germany means that the parties have a lot more control over who actually gets seated - which could be a disadvantage.

What do you think?

-the d.h.

Raven Mothers

Interesting article today in the NY Times about the German working woman's dilemma - whether a mother or not. It confirms earlier posts of my own debunking the widely held belief among American women that German women are better off, family-balance-wise. A SciAm article I read recently found a statistical link between the level of support for working mothers in Europe and the country's overall fertility rate.

Wage Gaps for Women Frustrating Germany

One hears occasionally of private daycares opening up, but folks and the government don't seem quite to know what to make of that trend yet...

But it's one example of official government policies (maternity leave, equal rights, prohibiting the question about being pregnant) being ahead of societal (and business) norms. I've heard numerous comments from German friends that confirm a lot of the trends mentioned here, and I personally know just one mother working full time - even the occasional single mother seems only to work part time. And that one mother has told me a) she couldn't do it without the extensive support of her own parents, b) her in-laws only accept her working because her husband is partially disabled, and c) she chose not to have more than 1 child so she could continue working...

Granted, we live in a relatively well-off area; but that just means that most women here, if they absolutely don't have to, don't make the effort. Because they don't want to, or feel they can't ? - that's the question.