Abmelden

Earlier today, I drafted a blurb on visiting the Freiburg Bürgeramt (public authorities office), but I decided my description sounded unnecessarily petulant. Suffice it to say, this morning I went to the Bürgeramt to continue to initiate the first step in the process of commencing to bid adieu to what the proper paperwork filled out in duplicate and then submitted to and stamped and dated by a civil servant might, regardless of the temperament of said civil servant that day or any other, justifiably be identified as German Bureaucracy. Schoenen Tag noch.*

Whether I was successful remains to be seen, as I eventually abandoned hope of speaking with a live human being in the Un-Registration office, and instead used my Oblivious Ferner's wiles to convince the woman at the welcome desk to take my form. She looked dubious, because giving her the form meant I would not be able to obtain a receipt. Fortunately, the U.S. government doesn't give a hoot whether I have proof of un-registration from the city of Freiburg.

Afterward, I went out into the fresh air, stood on the corner with a bunch of other people, and pretended to be German by dutifully not crossing the street until the pedestrian signal gave us permission to do so.

*"Have a good rest of the day."

Bermuda Triangle

In Germany, as in the U.S., socks that you know went into the washing machine mysteriously fail to emerge from the dryer.

School and a field trip

Elias headed off this morning for a two-night field trip to the Landschulheim ("country school home") in Bonndorf (in the Schwarzwald) with his 3rd-grade class. This trip highlights all sorts of ways school here is different from school in the U.S.

Consider:

* Third graders here go for extended overnight field trips, without parent chaperones. The 24 students will be supervised by their teacher and four trained teaching assistants. The kids will go hiking, play games outside, build kites, and learn how to safely whittle with pocket knives. Parents are advised to chill out and trust their kids are in good hands.

* We first heard about the trip two and a half weeks ago, when Elias's teacher sent home a xeroxed hand-written note: "In the flurry of school starting up, I forgot to tell you the class will be taking a two-night trip to Bonndorf Oct. 13-15. Details to follow at the parents' meeting later this week."

* Instead of weeks of permission slip requests and reminders and final warnings, a permission slip came home a week ago, along with a finalized list of things to bring (sheets, hiking boots, warm clothes, a flashlight) and not to bring (iPods, Handys, Gameboys), and instructions for paying the 70 Euro fee by Ueberweisung (bank money transfer). Asking parents to pay 70 Euros for a field trip is possible here because most of the kids live in Herdern, a relatively well off neighborhood. The government will subsidize the trip for families who need financial assistance.

* Meals will be provided, and vegetarians will be accommodated. Elias said that when his teacher asked the class who else besides him doesn't eat meat, everyone raised their hands; when she asked who else can't eat meat, all but one of the hands went down.

Field trip aside, there are other observable differences between school here and school back home in Durham, NC.

Elias attends 22.5 hours of school per week here; at home, 32.5 hours per week (or if you subtract lunch, 30.5 hours per week). He claims that kids at home are much better behaved, but that he's learning more here.

At the parents meeting, the teacher described the class as "almost completely homogenous"--meaning almost all of the kids are performing at the same academic level.

Several people told us kids don't learn multiplication here until after third grade. It turns out that "multiplication" in Germany means "multiplying numbers greater than 11." Kids learn "Das kleine Einmaleins"--"the small one-times-ones," a.k.a. multiplication from 0-10--in second grade. Third grade covers addition and subtraction of numbers up to 1,000.

Religion--a choice between Katholisch and Evangelisch Christianity--is taught at school twice a week. Children can opt out of these lessons, although no other lessons are provided during that time. Elias is hanging with the Protestants, but it continues to grate on my U.S. sensibilities that in a country where millions of people not so long ago were slaughtered for their religion, government-run institutions are asking children to self-identify as being outside the mainstream. The folks I've talked with here about this have reassured me, saying that even Christian kids are opting out more often these days. Hmm.

"Sport" is taught three times a week. Kids bring and change into gym clothes on those days. After they get all sweaty, the kids either change clothes again or go for the layered look and put their regular school clothes on on top.

Children bring slippers or houseshoes to wear in the classroom. Street shoes stay outside by the door.

In Grundschule, the same group of kids typically has the same teacher from the first day of first grade through last day of fourth grade. Each classroom operates as an independent entity: while Elias's class mingles with the other third grade classes during recess, they don't mingle academically.

Kids practice spelling and handwriting with regular "Diktat" (dictation) exercises. As in the U.S., when German kids compose their own texts, the pedagogical emphasis is on expression rather than spelling and grammar.

German kids are just as reticent as U.S. kids when their parents grill them about what they did at school on any given day. The one-word highlight of the school day in here is virtually identical to the one-word highlight of the school day in the U.S.: "Pause" ("recess").

Frohe Weihnachten!

A month ago, I thought it was just an anomaly. I thought the big Edeka on Habsburger Strasse was simply selling leftovers from last year, clearing out straggling inventory, perhaps from a dusty, misplaced box recently re-discovered in the storeroom.

But then they appeared in the back-to-school section of the Karstadt department store.

With the sudden and purposeful arrival two weeks ago of similar items at our small corner Edeka, the evidence became too strong to overlook, and could only mean one thing: Advent, the secular season that, in the U.S., begins the day after the Hallowe'en candy is cleared from the shelves, starts even earlier in Germany.

The consequence is that we have over three months--more than a quarter of the year!--to enjoy Lebkuchen. Traditional German christmas cookies, Lebkuchen are made with ground almonds, hazelnuts, or walnuts, candied orange and lemon peel, flour, eggs, honey, and spices of the cinnamon/cardemom/cloves variety. They're baked on thin wafers called Oblaten, and then brushed with a barely crispy sugar or chocolate glaze. Sometimes jam is involved, sometimes decorative blanched almonds and candied fruit. The shapes vary from traditional rounds to hearts, Christmas trees, and pretzels. The cheap ones, many of which can be purchased in stores now, substitute ground apricot pits for some or all of the nuts.

Joining Lebkuchen on the shelves are Spekulatius and Pfeffernuesse, also traditional Christmas cookies. Spekulatius are thin, spiced, stamped shortbreads, sometimes with slivered almonds pressed into them; in the U.S. they're known as Dutch windmill cookies (and in the Netherlands, as Speculaas). Pfeffernuesse are little glazed spiced nut cookies. They're the crunchy hard siblings to the tender chewy Lebkuchen.

Our corner store is not terribly large. That they're dedicating almost as much shelf space to Christmas cookies (about twice what's shown in the photo) as to noodles says a lot about the expected demand for the cookies in the coming months. Such treats have not yet arrived, however, at the Lienhart bakery, where the bakers continue to produce colorful fruit tarts, as though fall has barely begun.

Love's Tempests

There's a certain sound that a door makes when it closes and locks behind you. When you are on the outside of your apartment door with your child, signing for a package from DHL at the building entrance, and you hear that click, and the DHL guy hears the click too and looks up wide-eyed from his electronic signature device and asks with concern whether you have your key with you, and you and your child are standing there, both in sock feet, and you say "um, no, but, um, we'll be OK"--that's when you're grateful for a neighbor like Frau Ht.

Our apartment building has one or two apartments on each floor. In the two months we've lived here, I've seen a grand total of six neighbors, four of them just once. Frau Ht. is our first-floor neighbor, so we see her somewhat regularly in the back yard. We invited her over for a glass of wine two nights ago, and because she is generous with foreigners, she insisted we abandon siezening right off the bat.

So today, after the door locked behind us, we paid Frau Ht. a visit, and she kindly took us in and kept us entertained for the next three hours. (Stefan had forgotten his cell phone, so my increasingly desperate phone calls to him at work were being received across the hall in our living room). Halfway through our pleasant, wide-ranging conversation, Frau Ht. paused and introduced us to (bestill my beating heart) "Glotze"--German soap operas.

The show we watched today (Sturm der Liebe, episode 923) had it all: the Dumped on Good Woman and the Evil Rich Woman with the Heart Defect (switched in the neo-natal unit as babies!); the Kind-Hearted Pretty Young Thing who was still attractive even when poutily miffed at her Sympathetic Boyfriend the Aspiring Hotelier; the Manic Depressive Who Wouldn't Take Her Pills; the Simple Bavarian Country Couple who served as a foil to all those nasty rich people and showed what it meant to be a loving family (who needs money and hotels anyway?); the Blossoming Bavarian Country Daughter, who, despite her simple attire, radiated with natural beauty; the Handsome but Geeky Blond Guy who had such an obvious fondness for the chaste Blossoming Bavarian Country Daughter that he happily spent an evening playing card games with her family next to the Kachelofen (tile oven) in the small wood-paneled living room with deer antlers and handmade regional pottery lining the walls and then (ha ha) spent the night on the sofa despite the Simple Bavarian Country Couple's hopeful insinuations that maybe tonight would be the night he would finally deflower the Blossoming Bavarian Country Daughter; the Ruggedly Handsome Doctor, who romantically danced in the woods without music with the Dumped on Good Woman (who resisted the temptation to answer her cell phone) but appears to be in cahoots somehow with her enemy the Evil Rich Woman with the Heart Defect (who is the mother of the Sympathetic Boyfriend the Aspiring Hotelier); two Power-Abusing Male Hotelier Elders, one of whom switched those innocent babies so many years ago (oh, how could he?) and the other of whom was once the lover of the Manic Depressive Who Wouldn't Take Her Pills.

Most educational for me was the iciness with which the Dumped on Good Woman and the Evil Rich Woman with the Heart Defect siezened. For his part, Elias learned that every time a phone rang, the music changed and you could expect the character answering the phone to dash out of the room without finishing his prosecco.