Expensive drinks

I've blogged before about Germany's strange relationship with drinking water, but here I am, doing it again.

Last week in Berlin, Elias and I shared a .75L bottle of bubbly for a whopping €7,50.

Of course, when water comes in bottles, your waitperson needs to unscrew the cap for you so you don't strain your genteel hands, and that comes with a price.

Yesterday, back in Bayern, Elias and I stopped in tiny-town Seefeld (OK, at Schloss Seefeld, the local tiny-town castle) for refreshment during a long walk, and we shared a .75L bottle of stilles (non-bubbly) Wasser for €6,50.

See that "Getraenke Divers" for €2,00? That miscellaneous beverage was a mug of cold milk--a drink so foreign to Germany that restaurants don't even have a receipt name for it. Hot milk is another thing. The milk yesterday was actually lukewarm, suggesting it was ultra-pasteurized long-shelf-life boxed milk. You'd think the effort of getting the milk out of the cow, pasteurizing the wazoo out of it, putting it in a box, and hiring someone to open the box and pour the milk into a mug would be more expensive than putting water in a bottle, forcing some carbon dioxide into it, and then getting someone to pour it into a fancy glass, but what do I, a gauche American tourist, know about such things?

In Germany, as in the U.S., ganz normales Leitungswasser ("totally normal [i.e. plain ol'] tap water") tastes quite fine and is available for cheap from most sinks. Why folks pay hundreds to thousands of times more money to get water from a bottle, I just don't understand.

Der Triumph des guten Geschmacks

Look what Elias found!

This is the weirdest made-in-Germany product I have ever seen.

The can says Der Triumph des guten Geschmacks ("The Triumph of Good Taste"). The gumballs inside are sour, crumbly, and hard to chew. The can is made from old-fashioned sturdy metal that is decadent in its environmentally unfriendly thickness, with a color halftone photo that looks like it dates from ca. 1970. It has a pull-off foil top, like Pringles cans in the U.S., but without the plastic lid, so presumably one is to chew all 25 or so gumballs in short order once the can is open.

And to think, all of this, for just one Euro! As far as we know, this triumph is available--along with similarly canned triumphs like salted peanuts and sour fruit gummies--only in a vending machine in a rehab hospital for geriatric patients in a tiny town about 14km outside of Dachau.

So of course we bought them all.

Daisies in Helen's garden

Hallo

When I first visited Bavaria in 1991, I learned how to greet folks in the Bavarian style. One could say Grüß dich/Griaß di to individuals, or Grüß euch/Griaß eich to groups, or Grüß Gott to anyone. All of these are short versions of Es Grüße dich/euch Gott, meaning "May God greet you-singular/plural." If one wanted to demonstrate one wasn't from these here parts, one could say Guten Tag (good day), or simply Tag (hiya).

For the non-native speaker wanting to blend in, the advantage of saying Grüß Gott rather than Grüß dich/euch is that one doesn't have to feel awkward using the informal dich/euch with complete strangers, even though the informal words are implied. The disadvantage is that Grüß Gott sounds explicitly religious, far more so than it's English partner, "goodbye" ("God be with you").

In Bayern, what one was to never ever say was Hallo.

Hallo was reserved strictly for telephone interactions, as in Hallo, hier spricht die Liz ("Hello, here speaks the Liz"). (The German use of definite articles with names, as in die Liz, der Jens, and whether such use is regional, grammatically necessary, or utterly ridiculous, is a topic for another post.)

Thus it has come as a bit of a shock, on my walks and jogs in Steinebach this week, that when I say Grüß Gott to folks, they say Hallo in response. This has happened multiple times.

I tested the inverse, thinking that perhaps if I said Hallo, Bavarians would remind me of my foreigner status by replying Grüß Gott. So far, the response to every Hallo has been Hallo.

I asked Stefan about it.

"It's possible that you're only meeting people from out of town," he said. "Now is Ferienzeit ["vacation time"] in the north, and Steinebach is swarming with tourists. But it is also possible," he added solemnly, "that you are witnessing the degradation of the Bavarian character."

I mentioned my observations to Stefan's Tante Puppi. She is 93 and sharp as a tack.

"Oh!" she said with a disgruntled frown: "die Hallo Krankheit." The Hello Sickness. She declared it "furchtbar." Terrible. The linguistic plague has its hold on southern Germany.

Every time I visit Germany, I learn a new word that comes up so frequently in conversation that I wonder how I ever got by without knowing it previously. This visit marks the first time I've noticed familiar words fading away. Farewell, Grüß Gott. Hello, Hallo.

Faux pas at the Bäckerei

We're back in Germany. The first important thing we did after disembarking yesterday was to visit a bakery in the Munich airport.

Here is photo from another bakery, in Steinebach. I had to take the photo there instead of at the airport, because we had committed a faux pas at MUC.

See that plastic tray on top of the display case, with the advertisement in it? It probably has a special German name--maybe even a word that is also used for something completely unrelated. For now, we'll simply call it a Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale (cashier's coin-receiving plastic tray), which sounds like a perfectly legitimate German word.

At the airport, while Stefan was picking up the rental car, Elias and I trotted off to buy two Butterbrezen and one Frischkäsebreze mit Schnittlauch. The grand total was €5.20. At first I was worried that I didn't have enough money and would have to run back to Stefan to get some more, but after I counted the coins out on top of the display case (woe! instead of on the Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale), I breathed a sigh of relief: we had exactly the right amount.

The cashier attempted to remove the coins. She was clearly not practiced in the gauche art of display-case coin removal, presumably having experienced only the refined art of Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschalemünzeentfernung (cashier's coin-receiving plastic tray coin removal), and the consequences were embarrassingly unsanitary. Half of the coins fell, plop, right into the puff-pastries behind the counter, and the cashier glared angrily at the dumb Americans as we made our hasty retreat.

On the bright side, I finally understand why Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschalen were invented, and I will be careful to use them for monetary transactions from here on out.

Update: Stefan said, "try googling Wechselgeldschale." Turns out that's the German word for Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale.

Benediktbeuern and a new cousin

Could it be, could it be--the last Wadlstrumpf post of the 2014? I close with photos from two quick southern Germany side trips.

First up, Benediktbeuern. We made the 45-minute drive on a Saturday to meet up with friends from home--another American mom-German dad family--and friends and family of theirs. They've been visiting Benediktbeuern for the past several summers, and we can see why: a pretty Kloster, a train station, and hiking trails that are kid- and parent-friendly out the wazoo (a trail of wood and stone sound sculptures; a trail that rewards an hour's hike with an eco-playground, zipline, and raft hidden in a wooded marsh; and a "barefoot path" that encourages you to take off your shoes and feel the textures underfoot).

This worm was longer than a 7-yr-old's shoe

The day began with sunshine, and then a storm swept through in the afternoon. We returned from our walk just as the skies opened up. 

Finally, a quick trip to meet the newest member of the family.

Baby L is E's first cousin once removed

We enjoyed dinner in an award-winning establishment...

...that is part of the "nice toilets" movement. (We thought that was funny, until I looked it up online: new public toilets are expensive to build, so participating establishments post the sticker to let the public know they're welcome to use the toilet for free. Smart, and very German.)

Fürstenfeldbruck

We arrived in Steinebach on Monday afternoon (6/23) and commenced our ritual of hanging out and eating. We did build some local excursions into the mix, including a trip to Herrsching for big-town errands and gelato.

Three generations of post-gelato smiles

Back in Steinebach, the ginormous cat appointed S "Assistant Royal Tummy Scritcher"

We also took a trip to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck to go to our favorite kitchen gadgets store to gawk--but apparently the kitchen gadget store closed a few years ago. I guess we should have gone more often than once every five years. We did find a new kitchen gadget store that had bannetons (which we had forgotten we were looking for) and a special slicer for making Prinzregententorte (would that be cheating? We didn't get one, although we did try a piece of PRT at a bakery and decided it couldn't possibly be worth all the effort).

Fürstenfeldbruck city center appeared to be entirely under construction, with cranes and bulldozers and torn-up streets and sidewalks everywhere. With the old kitchen gadget store gone, the streets seemed unfamiliar. While crossing one street, we saw this memorial statue:

The plaque reads, "Hier führte in den letzten Kriegstagen im April 1945 der Leidensweg der KZ-Häftlinge aus den Todeslagern Kaufering/Landsberg vorbei ins Ungewisse" (Here, in the last days of the war in April 1945, the suffering path of the concentration camp prisoners from the death camps Kaufering/Landsberg passed into the unknown). The memorial, by Hubertus von Pilgrim, was erected in 1994 and is one of 22 copies commemorating towns along the KZ-Dachau death march; the first was erected in Gauting in 1989 (copies are also at the Dachau KZ museum and the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem). These close-to-home reminders are sobering, but a good thing. Even after coming to Germany regularly for the past 24 years, I still sometimes find it strange to see or meet folks of a certain age; the common thread is that no one knew yet everyone knew, no one participated yet everyone participated. And we say "Never again," but these sorts of things nonetheless continue around the world.

We saw the memorial in a relatively quick crossing of the street; the rest of our afternoon was spent at the FFB Kloster, which we had never visited before.

Organ info and up-close photos are here

Music notation on the ceiling! "Veni sponsa Christi."

Random happy dog