German Things

After you live in a place for some months, you start to get a feel for the little nuances of their culture. There were so many little things I noticed while in Germany, things that made perfect sense to me, or made no sense at all. Some things still remain a mystery.

Cigarette vending machines are a thing. In fact, there was one along the sidewalk right in front of my apartment building. Every bar also had one. (Un)fortunately, you needed to use a German bank card to buy cigarettes, to prove you were old enough, I guess. Bad news for foreigners.

Your average Zigarettenautomat: a fixture in every neighborhood! 

Also, you could smoke inside in a lot of places. In bars, in your apartment, nobody cares. Also, lots of people roll their own cigarettes. It's more economical, but can turn out really weird and disgusting if you don't know what you're doing.

People go out late. Unlike in Ithaca, where bars close at 1, in Freiburg the bars didn't start to get crowded until 1. We made that mistake the first few times we went out...the clubs were a ghost town at 11pm, and when we tried to leave because it was weird and empty and not fun, the bouncer was like "Where are you going? It's still so early!" I think most places closed in the 4:00 hour, and there is a really strange hour of the morning between when the bars close and the trams start running again. I was only walking around downtown during that hour once, and the people you see at that hour sure are weird.

Public transportation runs on the honor system. Don't bother flashing your ticket to the driver or conductor when you get on; that would take too much time. Just get on and get on with your day. You never know when the Fahrscheinkontrolle (ticket collector) might come. I think I made it through 3 months of riding the tram at least 4 times a day before I was ever asked to show my ticket. Some people risked it and never bought a pass, but I didn't really want to have to get kicked off the tram and fined 40 Euro. I do know a few people that got fined and kicked off the tram for Schwarzfahren ("black riding"), including someone who was stupid enough to do it on an international train trip and got booted in the middle of the Netherlands. I also had a professor who, born and raised in Germany, told us that whenever he goes on trips, he never buys tickets and always plays the dumb foreigner card if there are any issues. So, I guess the moral of the story is to do what you want.

Restaurant service in Germany is almost exactly the opposite of what it is in America. Servers don't work for tips (it's polite to round up your bill, but nothing more is really necessary), and you have to try really hard to flag them down to get them to serve you or give you the bill. It's nice, because they leave you alone and you never feel like you're being rushed through a meal. As an American accustomed to waitstaff waiting on my every beck and call, I actually found it a bit frustrating at times to get a server's attention and ask "Die Rechnung, bitte" ("The check, please"). And splitting the bill is never a problem there. The servers carry little purses and make change for you right at your seat. It's really awesome!

Germany is a cash economy. Credit cards do not get you that far, and good luck to you if you don't have either Visa or Mastercard. Also, everyone in Europe has chip-and-pin cards that don't use the old, outdated magnetic strip system. It makes things awkward for when you finally do use your card, and the cashier asks you for your pin code and you're like "What? Sorry I'm American and am using stone age credit card technology." Sometimes I was able to get around it, and sometimes my card wouldn't work at all.

In Germany, stores are generally not open on Sundays, except in train stations and a few bakeries that open for a few hours on Sunday mornings for people to buy their daily bread. I learned very quickly to do my grocery shopping during the week. It made things difficult when I traveled on weekends though, because I couldn't buy any food or souvenirs if I was traveling in a German city on a Sunday, and I also couldn't buy any groceries when I got home on Sunday night.

There are not really any free public bathrooms. Even at restaurants and stuff, there is often a cleaning person either in the bathroom or sitting right outside with a little box for tips, and you have to walk right by them. It's weird. However, having to pay 1 Euro to use the bathroom at a train station means those bathrooms are CLEAN. I could have wept at how amazing some of those bathrooms were. I remember this one bathroom somewhere in Germany, I think it was at the Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof, that was like this beautiful palace with all of these private sinks and little tables to sit at and fix your hair and makeup. And I'll tell you, after you've been cooped up on a bus or train for five hours, a bathroom like that is a really comforting sight. Bonus: for whatever reason, bathrooms are abbreviated WC for "Water Closet." How wonderfully archaic!

No Euro coins? No toilet.

WiFi is also not really there. Most places that advertise free WiFi on their windows are lying (technically they called it WLAN). There was always some weird gimmick. Unless you were at Starbucks. I made a point not to go there while in Europe, with the exception of using their WiFi to contact people when traveling. Most of us Americans were working with 5 Euro shitty pay-as-you-go phones, that were really cumbersome to text with and sometimes had weird results when we left the country. I had my iPhone for camera and WiFi purposes, and sometimes Facebook messaging was our lifeline, provided you could find WiFi somewhere. I couldn't even use my phone in my apartment though, because all of Vauban used ethernet cables. Luckily IES and the University had WiFi, but that was about it.

Pfand. Oh, beloved Pfand. Pfand is German for "deposit." So, many beverage containers produced and sold in Germany have deposits on them. Like the US. Except the deposit values for German bottles is so high it's actually worth it. Glass or heavy-duty plastic bottles that can be cleaned and refilled (Mehrwegflasche) are worth  0.08Euro apiece. Have a party at your house, return the beer bottles, and you'll be rolling in the dough. Anyways, plastic bottles are worth a whopping 0.25Euro!! That's enough to turn anyone into a believer. Having higher deposit values really increased the incentive to return the bottles. When I went somewhere and acquired a plastic bottle, I did my darndest to take it home so I could get the money for it. Pfand collectors were a real thing, and sometimes I heard people rummaging in the glass bottle recycling bins looking for Pfand-bottles that someone mistakenly recycled. The Pfand system really cut down on beverage-related litter in Freiburg. It was perfectly acceptable to set down your empty bottle wherever you were standing when you finished it, like finishing a beer before entering a bar for instance, and by the time you came out of the bar the bottle would be gone, because somebody collected it for the Pfand.

The Mehrwegflasche Pfand symbol found on bottles.

The German recycling system was so beautiful, although a bit complicated for a newcomer. There was glass recycling, separated by color (green, brown, white), and the trick was you had to find where the glass receptacles were, because at least residentially, they weren't always where the rest of the recycling was. Then there were separate bins for paper, packaging, garbage, and sometimes compost. The "Gelbe Sack" for packing material was my favorite, because in Germany you could recycle so many things that you couldn't in the US: mixed plastic and metal packaging, and everything from chip bags to aluminum foil. In Freiburg, recycling was free, but you had to pay for your garbage by volume. It really gave people an incentive to recycle as much as possible.

A recycling station, with glass, packaging, garbage, and paper.

Glass recycling in residential areas is separated into green, brown, and white.

Also, people don't really use dryers. The laundry room in my building had several washers but only one dryer, and it was very expensive to use. I never saw anyone else use the dryer to dry their clothes, it seemed like a faux pas. Instead, people air dry their clothes: either on the clotheslines in the creepy basement of my building, or mostly on drying racks inside the apartment. There were four drying racks in my apartment alone, and on laundry day, the common area of my flat would be a maze of drying racks. And my flatmates were not shy about leaving their delicates out to dry in the common area...I got to know everyone's underwear. I was a little weirded out by that idea and tended to set up a drying rack in my room, where it was more private and I could also open the windows to let in the breeze. It was super energy efficient (and cheap!) to air dry my clothes, however there were definitely a few cons: everything was super stiff, towels and jeans especially. Sometimes my pants were downright crusty when I tried to put them on for the first time. Also, they stretched out, and sometimes my jeans would have baggy knees...things that dryers tend to correct. And when it was time to wash my sheets, I basically had to wait FOREVER until I could sleep. There was simply not enough space to spread out my sheets and have them all dry before bed.

You know it's laundry day in the apartment when...

Speaking of beds, did you know that in Europe, no one uses flat sheets? Your bed has a fitted sheet and a duvet, that's all. I got used to it and ended up really enjoying it, but the lack of layers to my bed was a little bit disconcerting at first.

Me? I got a super cool duvet cover from the Kinderwelt (Kid's World) section of IKEA.

Amusing customs:
Hanging out in the smoking room of Mudom, one of the student bars in Freiburg, I learned a rather amusing German custom/superstition. The smoking section was dimly lit and had lots of little tables with candles on them, and one of the Americans tried to light their cigarette with the candle, and was sharply reprimanded. Never, ever light your cigarette with a candle. It's bad luck. And according to the internet, it's because they believe a sailor will die. Save yourself the humiliation and ask somebody for a lighter. I found that A: Many of my most successful German conversations with locals began with "Hast du Feuer?" and B: Apparently, if you ask them "Hast du Feuerzeug?" (aka the proper word for lighter), they will think you are from Switzerland or someplace that is not Germany.

There are no open container laws in Germany. That means you can drink your beer on the street, at the bus stop, on your stoop, on your way to class, and on the tram. Also because the drinking age is vastly lower there, it was not uncommon to see teenagers doing the same. You start to feel old when there is a bunch of rowdy sixteen year olds at the table next to you in the bar..

Drinking in public is A-OK!

Alcohol is cheaaaaap! Rarely did I ever spend more than 4 Euro on a bottle of wine. And it was decent wine, too, especially since we were right near Alsace. 4 Euro was actually a splurge for me. Liquor was also nearly half as cheap as it is in the US. I don't think I ever even came close to hitting the $20 mark when buying liquor. In the student bars, shots were 1 Euro (used to be less until the EU program kids abused that privilege, haha), beers were less than 2 Euro, mixed drinks were 3 or 4 Euro. I could be off because I'm thinking about this months after the fact, I just know that I was impressed how unbelievably cheap stuff was at student bars and in stores.

Speaking of cheap alcohol, one of the regional alcoholic specialties is this stuff called Joster. It's this deep purple liqueur made of the Jostabeere, a ribe that is a cross between blackcurrant and gooseberry, or something like that. According to Wikipedia, Josta= Johannisbeere/blackcurrant ("Jo") + Stachelbeere/gooseberry ("Sta"). It basically tastes like grape juice, even though it was 15% ABV.  It's the kind of thing you take shots of, and it happens to be the cheapest shot available at just about every local bar in the Black Forest. I miss that stuff! It really must be a super regional thing because I cannot find much about it on the Internet anywhere.

We also had the tendency to store our alcohol on the windowsill to chill it, because when your kitchen fridge is a glorified minifridge, there just ain't enough room to chill your beer in there. And our building had really deep windowsills, like 12" deep outside of the window.

Also, everyone travels by bicycle if they're not taking the tram. Which means they ride their bike to bars and parties, especially since the tram stops running regularly from 2-6AM. Do you know what that means? Bike DUIs are a thing. I know of a couple people that got them.

The German toast is "Prost!" and you have to make sure you look each person in the eyes or you will get seven years of bad sex. Fun fact, one of my American friends broke one of the huge 1 liter beer mugs when we were in the beer tents in Munich from "Prost-ing" so hard. You can also say "Zum Wohl," which means "to health."

Spargelzeit, or Time for the White Asparagus!
Germans go crazy for Spargel. It's a super seasonal vegetable, and when it comes out in spring, restaurants have special Spargel menus featuring different incarnations of the pale vegetable. Spargeltime is springtime, and Spargel pops up in grocery stores, at farmers' markets, and even in little pop-up street vendors. People eat it in soup, with Hollandaise sauce, with fish, or even as the star of the meal. I had a bowl of  Spargel-Suppe on my birthday!

Spargel: it's what's for dinner!

Erster Mai, or Tag Der Arbeit
(The First of May) or (Labor Day)

1. Mai is how you write May 1st in German. Periods take the place of the "st" or "th" when writing ordinal numbers. Which reminds me, German numbers switch decimal points and commas, so the English 1,000 would be 1.000 in German, and if we're talking dollars and cents, $1.59 would be $1,59. Weird, right? Also, 24 hour clocks. I can't tell you how many times an American would mess up the tram schedule because they accidentally looked at the times in the 10:00 hour instead of the 22:00 hour.

Anyways, May 1st is Labor Day in Germany. It's a combination of May Day and also International Workers Day, both of which are widely celebrated in Europe. In Berlin, it's all about labor and not the spring holiday, and there are huge labor demonstrations and celebrations, and sometimes riots. In Freiburg, however, it's more about the spring holiday, and it's traditional to fill a wooden wagon full of beer and day-drink outside with friends and family. Lots of clubs also had "Tanz in den Mai!" ("Dance into May!") parties the night before. Because it was a national holiday, the university was closed, so I went with my German roommates with a wooden wagon with several Kisten of our favorite Augustiner Helles beer and walked down to the Dreisam (river) in a happy little caravan after having a traditional Bavarian breakfast of Weisswurst and Brezeln (white sausage and pretzels). There were tons of other people playing outside and drinking, and I played my first game of Flunkyball, which is now my favorite drinking game. German drinking games involve drinking to win, by the way...my German roommates were very frustrated by beer pong when we played once: they were disappointed that the losers drink, and that the cups are filled with such small amounts of beer. Culture shock! I thank the Germans and Flunkyball for training me how to down a half liter can of beer. I can't seem to round up a team in the US though...nobody likes beer enough. Schade!

Our Bierwagen down by the river.

Gearing up for my first-ever game of Flunkyball.

I lived in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, part of Germany's Catholic south. One of the strangest remaining religious customs that I experienced was the pre-Easter Tanzverbot, or Dancing Ban. There is literally a statewide ban on dancing on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, and clubs are either closed or not allowed to have public dancing or concerts or entertainment events of any kind that go beyond "regular" eating and drinking. It's super weird and medieval, and when I researched it, I found out that lots of young people think the dancing ban is no longer relevant and have been trying to get the law overturned for years, but they still haven't gotten enough support. Freiburg's local entertainment calendar website writes a story about it every year. I experienced this on the Easter holidays, but apparently Tanzverbot applies during eleven Christian holidays a year in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

And instead of a secular spring break, I had a weeklong Pentecost break, or Pfingstferien/Pfingstpause, in late May. This is also a good time for me to tell you that the German university academic calendar is vastly different than the American one. The winter semester runs from October to March, and the summer semester runs from April to September. Clearly it wasn't totally compatible with my American education and lots of German people did not understand my program timeline (late February-June) at all because it only ended up being like half of a semester. I got really tired of explaining myself to people.  In March I took a monthlong pre-semester Sprachkurs (language course) at the university, then I took several weeks of classes through my study abroad program until the actual university semester started in April. Once April came around, I took several modules at the university, one at a time, each three weeks long. It was a pretty welcome change of pace to take one class at a time and focus all of my energies into a single subject, rather than spreading myself across five classes at a time like I usually do at home.

My Love Affair with German Food

I'm going to be honest and say that I'm not the biggest carnivore the world has ever seen. I go through meat phases, but generally avoid pork because it's just how I was raised. I knew that traveling to Germany would be a meat-filled experience, so I told myself I was just going to let everything go and embrace the meats. And boy, I'm so glad I did.

I'm going to go through some German specialties and local phenomenons I experienced.

First of all, the bakeries. You couldn't go anywhere without passing at least two Baeckerei. The bakery is the place to be, pretty much anytime before dinner. You stop in on your way to work or school for a coffee and a pastry. I can tell you that Schokocroissants were my sweet standby, but I also switched it up and got apple pastries, almond pastries, or when spring hit, rhubarb pastries! There was the sweet and also, perhaps even more importantly, the savory. Brezeln (Pretzels). Butterbrezeln. The Germans do amazing things with pretzels. They slice them in half and spread them with gobs of butter. They cover them with melted cheese and little bits of ham. Sometimes they make sandwiches out of them. Then, there's Lauge-anything, which I interpreted to be pretzel bread. Laugenbroetchen (lye rolls) or Laugenstange (lye baguettes--literally "sticks"), gorgeous, shiny brown breads with chewy soft centers, topped with salt. Many places made sandwiches, and indeed I purchased many a Laugenstange sandwich from the little cafe in the forestry school building where I had my Uni classes.

This is a Laugenstange. The sight of it nearly brings me to tears.

This brings me to an important note, on German use of condiments. In Germany, butter is the condiment most used on sandwiches. Meat, cheese, lettuce, tomato, butter. I have to admit I was a little bit weirded out when I first noticed that I was eating gobs of butter, not mayonnaise, but I learned to love it. And mustard is reserved for Wurst. 

Back to bakeries, everything is lined up behind the glass and when it's gone, it's gone. By late afternoon there's just a few things left, and the bakeries close up shop as soon as their products are gone. 

German bread is in my opinion, without equal. The bakers created such dense, hearty loaves of bread, sometimes studded with every kind of seed imaginable. A sandwich on German bread, or even just a slice of toast with a smear of Nutella (my breakfast every morning), is unparalleled by anything American. Pre-sliced sandwich bread isn't really a thing in Germany. People go to the bakery, or the open-air market, or the separate bakery part of every grocery store for their daily bread. And if you happen to shop at Aldi, they've got an amazing Brotautomat, which is basically a bread vending machine. You press the button next to the picture of the bread you want, and out pops a fresh loaf, still steaming.

The Aldi Brotautomat. Press button. Get bread.

I would buy the densest, seediest, most whole-grain loaf of bread I could find, which means I got a lot of Dinkelvollkorn Brot, which I guess translates to "whole grain spelt?" When I was feeling on the lighter side, I'd go for Bauernbrot, which translates to "farmer bread," which was more of a sourdough. A lot of the loaves were small and square, I wonder if it's because people would buy their bread daily and want only what they could eat in a day or two before it got stale. Pre-sliced sandwich bread was not a big thing at all, in fact prepackaged bread in general was slim in grocery stores. If you bought bread at the grocery store, you bought it at the separate bakery at the front of the store.

Oh, the bread offerings!

My favorite breakfast/snack.

Such good bread.

Germans seem to have an obsession with Eis. Ice cream. There were Eiscafes everywhere in Freiburg, and I was fortunate to live in the neighborhood of Limette, arguably one of the best ice cream places in town. There were 0,90 Euro Kugeln (scoops) everywhere, so I spent a lot of my loose change on Eis. Eiscafes generally serve a variety of coffee drinks, as well as coffee+ ice cream drinks, and amazing ice cream sundaes and creations. In Germany, ice cream is ART. Most ice cream dishes come artfully arranged with slices of fruit and a wafer cookie sticking out, but by far the most interesting phenomenon is Spaghettieis. It's an ice cream sundae made to look like spaghetti: a mound of whipped cream covered with a tangle of spaghetti-like strands of vanilla ice cream, topped with a strawberry sauce for marinara, and white chocolate shavings for parmesan. Every Eiscafe worth its weight in salt features Spaghettieis on its menu. One of the fancier places in town, Cafe Incontro, had a whole section of its menu reserved for meals recreated in ice cream: I'm pretty sure they had lasagne and pizza and all sorts of things; wish I took a picture of the menu. Even in cool weather, I would see tons of Germans walking around with ice cream cones. When my Ecology professor told my group how to get to our research site, he oriented us based where the nearest ice cream shop was, and he told us we had to stop there to try the Eis. So we did, every day after we collected our samples.

A quick search for "Eiskarte" (ice cream menu) yields results like this.

So many varieties of Spaghettieis!

Here's a closeup, so I can prove I'm not lying to you.

Germans also have a wondeful afternoon tradition of Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake), sometimes called Kaffeklatsch. Between lunch and dinner, people gather for a break and enjoy a cup of hot coffee or tea and a slice of cake. It was a really nice excuse to eat dessert at 4pm.

Kaffe und Kuchen exhibit A.

Kaffee und Kuchen exhibit B. 

Kaffee und Kuchen exhibit C, at the Ritter Sport Bunte-Schockowelt factory in Berlin.

Speaking of Ritter Sport, that was my favorite German chocolate. Thick square bars of chocolate with clever resealable packages; it quickly became our mission to try every single variety. We were lucky enough to stumble upon a Ritter Sport factory store in Berlin, which pretty much made my life.

One time I decided to save all of my Ritter Sport wrappers to see how much I ate, and that was a very bad idea. 

Finally, no discussion of German food would be complete without Wurst. Sausage, duh! Every region of Germany has its own special variety of Wurst, but I couldn't really keep them straight. There were red ones and brown ones and white ones, spicy ones and pork ones and lamb ones and fat ones and little tiny ones, ones you ate in a roll with mustard and ones you ate with a fork and knife with potato salad and greens. There were also ones filled with cheese. There's also Currywurst, which is really big in Berlin: steamed, then fried cut-up sausage with curry ketchup. In Freiburg, the best and cheapest lunch was Wurst from the Muenstermarkt; the daily farmer's market outside of the cathedral. You could tell where the best place to go based on how long the line was: I think Pauls was generally thought of as the best.

Wurst from the Muensterplatz. Hot dog buns are not a thing. Your Wurst will stick out of the bread, sometimes a lot. 

Currywurst mit Pommes. French fries are served with mayonnaise in Europe.

I'll be honest, I found Bavarian Weisswurst to be pretty weird. It's white and spongy and boiled. It's said you have to eat it before noon because it's traditionally made in the morning and is super perishable.

But WAIT. I forgot one of my most important discoveries of all: doener kebab, and a brief lesson in German-Turkish history! So Germany has a huge population of Turkish people, mostly because it opened up the country to Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") to help rebuild the nation's infrastructure after it got razed in World War II. Lots of Turkish people (and also Italians) moved to Germany to work, some just made money and then went back home, others remained in Germany. Turkish food is basically the Mexican food of Europe...it's cheap fast food available in lots of places, especially Germany. The specialty is Doener Kebap, meat shaved from a vertical rotisserie and served in a pita or wrapped in a tortilla-like bread called a Yufka with a red cabbage slaw, onions, cucumber, a garlic yogurt sauce, and chili flakes. It comes in lamb, veal, or chicken variety and quickly became one of my favorite meals. Doner places were very popular with the young crowd and were the restaurants open the latest, so I enjoyed many a Doner on my way home from the bars... The Turkish restaurants also served great falafel, amazing salads, and baklava. There was a strict division among my friends about which place served the best doener in Freiburg: Euphrat or Uni-Doener.

See? Even Angela Merkel likes Doener.

One of the many ways to eat a Doener.