I've known for quite a few years that age restrictions on alcohol consumption are lower in much of Europe, including Germany, than they are in North America. I've known at least since I was a teenager myself. Maybe 2/3 of today's teenagers can't count to three or write their own names or find their own arse with a flashlight, map and recorded instructions, or whatever the latest statistic of mind boggling ignorance among today's youth is, but there are certain facts of law and biology that are widely known within the barely-post-pubescent set. Although calling these nuggets of knowledge "facts" is a bit misleading, since they are characterized by a certain less than scientific nature, a core of truth and a patina of myth, like a favorite pebble kept in one's pocket and worried smooth by a million touches. But in any case, every half-worldly North American teenager knows that those lucky European bastards, born with the silver spoon of continental sophistication in their mouths, don't have to spend the latter half of the week trying to network their way into someone's big brother buying their alcohol for them for the weekend's festivities. (Ah, but wasn't that half the fun of it all?)

Having long known all about the continental laissez-faire attitude in these matters, I haven't really blinked an eye at the clumps of teenagers drinking on streetcorners downtown on Friday nights. I don't even feel that judgemental about it. This is an undeniably lovely destination for a tourist, but I'd probably drink too if I was a teenager in this burg. I'm more concerned by their appallingly bad hair cuts and the fact that every single one of them wears a kaffiyah out of some misplaced sense of "fashion". Still, nothing could keep me from feeling a bit of shock and unease, deep down in my culturally conditioned gut, at looking over at the next table in the pub the other night and seeing what to my ancient eyes appeared to be four twelve year old boys drinking their beers. It was just... wrong. Not even in a moral sense, just a "this is not how the universe is supposed to function" sense. Is this what it's like to be eighty - that everyone else looks comically, unbearably young? Thanks for making me feel older than the hills, Germany!

The uniforms were pretty snappy though, weren't they?

In retrospect I feel I should have tossed a few Euro cents his way just for having the brass balls to be German and decide that that was the optimal configuration for his facial hair.

On Humility

One of the best things about living abroad is that it leaves no room for pride. You are practically guaranteed to be humbled at least once a day by something utterly banal. Today it was photocopying the readings for a class. First you have to find the readings. Then you have to find the photocopiers. Then you have to figure out where to stick the copy card. Then you have to figure out how to stick the copy card in correctly. This sort of thing always occurs in front of an audience. You can’t really feel like a dumbass about failing at a simple task like trying to get the card reader to read your card unless there are at least three people waiting in line behind you to use the copier, watching you try every possible permutation of putting it in with the chip backwards, frontwards, upside down, and under the influence of voodoo chanting. Only then, when you start to consider forgetting the whole university thing altogether and going in for something that requires no photocopies, like garbage collecting, do you realize that you had it right in the first place, you just weren’t pushing it in far enough. (Why do you always feel dumber when you had it right in the first place?)

But that’s just the opening act. When you think you’ve got the situation under control, that’s almost always when it gets better. When, for instance, you’re halfway through the tedium of copying the first package of notes, and the guy behind you – who is in your class (why is it always more embarrassing when it’s someone you kind of sort of know?) - asks you with a touch of concern and an undertone of impatience if the “Einzug” is broken. It should also be noted that these situations invariably involve vocabulary that one has never come across, the better to make one feel completely at sea. The Einzug? That large slot on top of the copier cover that you didn’t notice, because the ones at your university at home don’t have one. The slot that you whack all the sheets into at once, so that it copies and collates them all in one three-second go. “Oh. Well that would be faster! [idiotic laugh]” Stupid foreigner here! “We don’t have such good technology where I come from!” As if at home I live in an igloo and ride a polar bear to school and we make our copies on birch bark with quills.

Other advanced space-aged technology that has stumped me here: how to work a washing machine, the difference between shampoo and conditioner, how to lock the bathroom door, how to deposit money at the bank machine, how to open a window, how to get ketchup out of the ketchup bottle, how to set up the voicemail on my cell phone. (“To confirm your personal password, please press the ‘mwetph’ button now” Guess how many buttons I had to press to figure that one out. If you guessed all of them twice, give yourself a cookie. I still don’t know what the right one is called in German, but that’s okay, because I certainly came up with my own name for it.)

Conversely, trivial successes also count for more. There is a feeling of victorious satisfaction that comes with things like finding the flush mechanism for the public toilet, locating and borrowing a book at the library, actually receiving what you were trying to ask for in a store, or being able to give a correct and comprehensible answer when someone asks you for directions on the street. That’s right, I live here. I flushed the toilet this morning and everything.

South of the Border

If you ever get the chance to go to Müllheim on a Sunday, don’t. Unless you’ve had enough of this life and have decided that death by boredom is the way to go. Last weekend we decided it was time to get the hell out of Freiburg for a few hours, and had heard that there were many charming small towns in the region. And maybe there are, but picking a name from the train schedule at random is not always the best method. Anyone rolling up in a small German town on a Sunday, without checking in advance whether there’s actually anything to see or do there, is a person making a mistake. We would have taken just about anything, really. A local sausage festival, say. Perhaps a cuckoo clock factory. All we got was darkened shop windows, cold weather, and a few older people with closed faces walking their little dogs through the empty streets.

We decided to head back to the station and take the next train onwards to Basel. Unfortunately, it was only after we had purchased tickets, boarded, and made it halfway there, that it occurred to P and me that we were, you know, traveling to another country. A not-Germany, not-even-EU country. So, there we are, hurtling towards an international border, not a passport in sight, M (secure in possession of her EU travel document) looking at us with a combination of sympathy, amusement at our retardosity, and perhaps slight concern that she might end up implicated in our impromptu illegal immigration scheme. Meanwhile, I’m getting automatically generated text messages on my cell about per minute rates outside Germany, and then we see the last German flag and there’s the customs checkpoint on the Autobahn and tada we’re in Switzerland, oh crap oh crap, why are we so stupid? But nothing happens, no one came by to check our tickets let alone our travel documents, and upon exiting the train we were definitely not thrown down, cuffed, and whisked away to be interrogated about possible ties to international terrorism. Not that any particular scenerios had occurred to me or anything. Of course, just when we thought we were home free because there was no border control on the train, we stroll into the station and… you can see this coming, can’t you? There’s a customs booth. But! This is German speaking Europe. It’s a Sunday. No one works on Sunday. The customs booth was closed. Score one for economic regulation.

Apparently Basel is actually slightly smaller than Freiburg, but somehow it manages to feel like the Big City in comparison. Maybe part of that is that it’s set on a real river, the Rhine. Freiburg is also on a river, technically speaking, but the Dreisam is about as impressive a leaking garden hose. Maybe it’s the proper museums or the fact that less that 90% of the people on the streets look like they’re cut from the same ethnic cloth. Maybe it was just the novelty of being somewhere else, with different shop fronts and funny Monopoly money. It probably also seemed livelier because the autumn fair was on, spread out over squares all over the city centre, which we thought was quite clever, since the lights and noise and food smells seemed to always be beckoning out of the chilly early evening gloom from right around the corner, and the attractive smaller scale setting of the squares tempered the brashness of the manically flashing lights and clanging bells and scratchy speakers with a coziness and humanity totally lacking when these things are segregated to a huge, flat, grey fairground on the outskirts.

After an aborted visit to the art museum (we got there late, it closes early) and a bit of wandering, M had to be back in Freiburg early, but P and I decided to stay in Basel, get something to eat, see if anything was on for the evening. I’m not even going to tell you what a cheese pizza costs in Switzerland. The menu prices were physically painful just to read. In the end we found a kebab place. $8 for a fucking falafel. It was a damn good falafel, I’ll give them that, but $8! Now I understand why the Swiss guy we know here throws cash around like it’s squares of toilet paper.

On the other hand, we had stumbled over a concert rehearsal in a church while we were wandering around looking for the cathedral earlier, and after turning up and standing in line for what felt like roughly a million years (P spent about 10 minutes trying to teach me to roll my “r”s – unsuccessful, sadly) we managed to get tickets. Face value 25 Swiss francs (so about $22 or so). We got them for 10 francs a pop. “Oh, they’re for the very back here, but if you see something better go ahead and take it, we’re closing the doors now.” I guess I bitch about things here a lot, but when you find yourself in Europe, in a new city, sitting in the third row at a concert you’ve found by chance, in a lovely old church, for under $10, and the soloist starts in… you realize that maybe it’s time to pack in the whining for a while. Oh, and at intermission waiters came around with trays of macaroons. Yes. I guess I could question the interpretive dance that accompanied the fourth movement, but why bother?

Full of macaroons and culture, and glowing with the success of our spontaneity, we got back to the train station with almost an hour to kill before the next train home. Just as well considering how long we ended up fighting with the ticket machines. We eventually wandered down towards the platforms and I needed to use the toilet, which were immediately on the other side of the ever darkened and deserted customs booth. When I came out, we debated a little over whether we should go back into the main part of the station to kill some time where it was warmer. Then we noticed that there was a light on in the customs booth. “Hey, the computer’s on in there.” P walks over and peers in AND OH SHIT THERE’S A CUSTOMS AGENT IN THERE. We hightailed it hand in hand up the stairs to the actual platforms, laughing in the slightly hysterical way that you do when you get away with something seriously stupid. While we waited in the cold for the train, we celebrated our continued freedom by using our remaining Swiss change to buy American chocolate bars from the vending machine on the platform. Let me tell you, that Snickers tasted like liberty.