After being gone for over ten years, visiting occasionally to catch up with family, my country doesn’t seem to be my country anymore. It is an odd feeling altogether, everything seems so familiar yet everything is strange to me now.
I still feel home here but in a disconnected way. I know how German works but I do not work German anymore.
Each visit becomes a great philosophical journey.
Now that I have an outside vantage point I can observe objectively, amazed and fascinated by the culture that I was a part for the first 22 years of my life.
At the same time I can reflect on the society that I belong to now. Listening to my friends, by passers on the streets, people in coffee shops sipping their Milchkaffee, discussing life, I get an outside view on my American me. I get so startled by the lack of insight or critical thinking I observe in myself at times. I find it frightening when I notice myself oversee vital arguments that I should have made when we talked this over months ago at home.
This really is the beauty of travel: it gives you the opportunity to shed day to day life and habits, enables you to step out of old patterns and gain new insights on yourself, your life and the society you live in as well as the society you are temporarily part of on your passage.
On a lighter note, there are the small scale oddities in behavior and action, mostly charming, that one encounters on travel:
Like Lizette marvels at the ordeal of facing a 5-locked South American door, Europeans find it extremely odd that the American check is put, quite indiscreetly, on the table just minutes after the main course arrives.
It is a well known fact that the Germans get up at the crack of dawn to throw their towels on the deck chairs of the hotel pool, thereby supposedly reserving the seat, returning after a follow up snooze and breakfast to claim their prime real estate, finding a bunch of pissed off Brits standing by the pool for lack of available seating.
The number of greeting cheek kisses in France is three, in Italy two (or the other way around - I will never learn, forgive me France and Italy), Germans don’t kiss at all, Irish hug. The list goes on...
On my last visit here I learned that Germans are immune to fatness. Paul and I made it our hobby to count the number of pastry eating Germans at any given time. It came out to about 80% of Germans snacking away their day. But hardly anybody is overweight, probably because everybody is walking everywhere. Walking is big here.
Evidence is hardening that the service industry is not about service in (North) Germany. I have been suspecting this for years dealing with extremely unfriendly sales personnel in stores, rude waiters and difficult public transport vehicle operators like bus drivers.
When I was a kid I was convinced that the local tram driver was determined to overtake the tram ahead of him.
On this visit, I learned that taxi business is not about taxiing:
If your ride is in any way walkable, think twice before hitting dial on your phone!!
They may ask you straight away where you are and where you are heading and if they deem your ride not worthy the comfort of a hired automobile on this frosty night because you may make on foot, they will eat you right there, lecturing you on the atrocity of your humble request: How dare you even think about wasting their precious time, have you no sense at all? Just because they get paid for it doesn't mean they need to take your shit. Clearly, you should chose to struggle your way home manually in the oncoming blizzard after a hard days work (ok, that's my sister, not me)!! This is an outrage, an insult at large to the very core of taxihood!!!
And if they don't ask you right away, god help you deal with the monster of a cab driver that you will have on your hands when he finds out where you are trying to get him to take you.
He may just tell you to get lost and speed off into the dark, shouting abuse out of the window, manically honking his horn in much exaggerated anger.
Now, that did not happen at all to us last night. Indeed, we chatted to a lovely lady filling us in on the latest Hamburg celebrity gossip.
But just the fear on my sisters face, phone in hand, ready to dial a cab, told me that things could have taken a different turn...
Seems to me that services here try their best not to provide the service they boldly claim to offer.
And how I love it all :-)
