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.