Nuremberg, Nueremberg, Nüremberg or Nürnberg? Correct.

I'll try to refrain from taking my usual potshots at the German language on this one, but you may have noticed that the city where we currently live has multiple, conflicting and yet altogether entirely correct spellings. That is due to the Umlaut (those 2 points above the letter u) in the "true" spelling, Nürnberg. But because most folks do not have European keyboards, the standard agreed-upon spelling is to change the "ü" to "ue" when writing on a keyboard... except that in this case, the consensus is that the alternate correct spelling is in fact "Nuremberg," which is how pretty much the rest of the world spells it, and I can not for the life of me find out the exact reason why. For what it's worth, the city website is www.nueremberg.de (that's with the "ue,") however typing in nuremberg.de will redirect and get you to the same site-- so both spellings are OK in the city's eyes. On a similar note I still can't figure out how folks make the leap from the German "Köln" to "Cologne" (that city's own tourism website is Koeln.de, the proper "alternate" spelling). But, like everything else, just note the exception, memorize it, and move on.

That's my daily view of the city from my school window, at the southwest corner of the Altstadt. Now that the class is in its second phase, it has doubled in size and has moved to a larger classroom at the back of the building, the view is much better-- a couple weeks ago, we had awesome views of the city bus corral and transit mall. I much prefer this one. Once again, those are the city walls in the foreground, the moat has been drained and is a biking/jogging path and small park, and the Kaiserburg (castle) is in the upper left hand of the pic.

Sometimes, The Jokes Just Write Themselves

"Honey, where are you going?" "To take the fugging money to the Fugger bank, that's where!" All kidding aside, the Fuggers ('scuse me while I stifle a laugh here) are one of the oldest banking families in all of Europe dating back to the 1500's, and this private bank caters only to the hyper-rich. The family certainy did walk-the-walk, and have been involved in works of charity for centuries-- the Fuggerei (snicker) claims to be the world's oldest housing project for people-in-need, and still exists. Rent for a small apartment with all mod cons in the city of Augsberg (the Fuggerei is a small walled city within the city) works out to 0.88 Euros per year, plus 3 prayers daily for the benefactors. Read more HERE

This One's For You Bubba

One of this blog's regular readers sent an email wanting me to find out more about those life-sized Playmobil figures that adorned the local retail store during the recent toy fair (entry and picture HERE). Well, sorry to say that the Playmobil figures are not for sale, but I did manage to take another shot of one inside the store. I also took a photo of life-sized stuffed Pumas and Bison in the store's toy section, and at least THOSE are for sale. What's the going rate for a toy bison these days? A cool 9500 Euros-- over $12,000 at today's exchange.

Street Food Pt. 2: Simit

I've talked about the local fast food before, the famous Nuremburger sandwich HERE, and here's another treat: the Simit, a Mediterranean/Middle East delicacy, known as a "Turkish Donut" in some parts. Bavaria (and Germany in general) has a fair number of Turkish immigrants, and I picked this example up at a Turkish bakery near my language school. Besides the thing being huge (that's a regular sized knife to give you an idea), it's also pretty cheap-- anywheres from 0.45-0.60 Euro cents. Simits are faintly sweet bread (small amounts of sugar and molasses are used) covered with plain or toasted sesame seeds, and the texture falls somewhere between a bagel and a fresh-baked pretzel. I love the things, even though it takes a full day for me to consume an entire Simit.

Smart. Very Smart.

I've seen this in evidence here and there back home, but the Germans really have this parking thing nailed. The sign shows exactly how many parking spots remain in the noted parking garage, and is updated every couple minutes. It's one thing to see this in Nuremberg; quite a pleasant shock to see it in smaller cities like Erlangen (population 100,000) and Bamberg (70,000). Not sure of the technology used to register the car counts-- could be something as simple as the number of admissions/exits of the ticket dispenser gate. These types of signs are typical for all parking garages, large and small-- the garages, far as I can suss out, are all city controlled.

Whose Language Is Easier To Learn? The Not Terribly Surprising Answer Follows.

That would be the guy on the right, the Klingon Worf from the newer Star Trek series, and not Austrian singer Falco (from his Rock Me Amadeus video). The more I learn about German, the more frustrating it becomes-- there are times when the exceptions to the rule are as numerous as the "correct" use of the rule itself. For such an old language, I swear they were making it up as they went along, and nobody has gotten around to making the reforms in the hundreds (sometimes well over a thousand) of years since. Oh, there have been some reforms to the German language, but those were done by the Austrians and Swiss-Germans. Things like getting rid of something called an "eszet," which looks like this: ß, and is unique in modern western language. The other German speaking countries (including the tiny Principality of Liechtenstein, which follows Swiss-German language reforms) got rid of the eszet (aka "scharf S"), and replaced it with "ss," which is how it's pronounced. My research is far from complete, but I believe that the Germans themselves started to abolish this sometime in the late 20th century, but then stopped, so there are words that have the "ss" and words with the "ß." Then there's the whole ending-of-nouns thing: there are no less than 10 different ways to make a word plural-- jeez guys, ever heard of the letter s? The truly annoying thing is that there are are a distinct lack of shortcut tricks, nothing on the level of "I before E" type things-- you simply have to memorize everything. I call it brute force learning, and it's not fun.

I'm not a geek, but my frustration with German led me to look into made-up languages like Esperanto and Klingon-- where all of the mistakes, exceptions, and codified rules of world languages (and believe me, English is a major offender here) were identified and sidestepped to create something that was easier to learn. Not that I'll be going to Klingon class anytime soon-- my hair looks too damn good to cover it up with a turtle shell. But it is a growing language created by a team of linguists, with new stuff added all the time. So much so that a person can sing in Klingon-- like this nerd here:

Just How Badly Do We Crave English?

Well, I actually paid 13.80 Euros (about $18.00 at today's exchange rate) for 2 tickets for us to see Australia, a 2.5-hour movie that was chased out of American first-run theaters months ago. My review? Meh. It was a not-bad movie struggling to get out from under a not-entirely-awful movie, one that desperately wants to be Gone With The Wind, but is more like Pearl Harbor. It's one of the rare movies I've seen where the sum of a couple of parts is better than the whole-- the acting was uniformly excellent, the cinematography was magnificent (the scenery just won't translate to a small screen when it comes to DVD), it had some great action scenes... but was done in by uneven directing and a lousy storyline, with plot holes so large you could drive a truck through them. Would I recommend it? Eh, if it's at your local second run brewpub theater for $3.00, give it a go-- but remember the beer. Still... 2+ hours of straight English to these ears was a treat, even if the movie was merely average.

Hey, How's Your Move-In Coming Along?

The story so far: We moved in to our apartment on December 13. That was 8.5 weeks ago, and it took something just short of a court order to get us the keys to the place here. It still isn’t completed, even though all remaining fixes were supposed to take place no later than January 13. That was 4 weeks ago. Yesterday, at least some of the more obvious lingering work was (re)scheduled to take place: the too-short kitchen countertop was getting replaced and another cupboard (the first one was the wrong color) installed. Again, both of these fixes (and a few smaller ones) were supposed to be completed in mid-January. So this time B drew the short straw and took time off of work to meet up with the work crews while I went to school. Surprise! The work still isn’t done, but a comedy of errors took place in my 5-hour absence, to wit:

- The replacement kitchen counter was also measured wrong AGAIN, so the one special order item that took months to arrive here won’t fit. Again.

- Even if the counter was the correct size, the workers wouldn’t have installed it. Reason? It wasn’t paid for, and the workmen weren’t about to install it unless they got their 1200 Euros. Um, we were supposed to be in here months ago—and this still hasn’t been taken care of by the landlord/building super? Of course, this all would have been taken care of if the super was a man of his word and showed up with the installers (and signed one important piece of paper to issue a withdrawl of funds from his construction account). Instead, he had his phone shut off all morning and was unreachable. He finally returned the messages, and seemed perturbed that his daylong meeting was interrupted. Bear in mind that he actually volunteered to babysit the installation crew while B went to work and I was at school… for better or worse, I’m glad we knew that the guy was a flake and somebody chose to stay home.

- The “cupboard” wasn’t a cupboard at all, just 2 shelves, certainly not what we were told was going in. But hey, at least THOSE were paid for, so we have the suckas now.

- The plan was for B to work from home remotely, and I was going to spell her when I returned at 1:00, and she could go in finish up the workday at her offices. Except… the internet crapped out (server down), and she couldn’t even do that either. Add this to the frustration and drama unfolding in the kitchen, and pretty much nothing got accomplished today, with the exception of a couple more shelves.

So now the super wants to have a powwow with me about the “new” dates. Feh. Let’s see… we were supposed to move in to a 100% completed apartment on October 30, November 10, November 15, December 1, December 10, December 11, December 12, and all the unfinished work was supposed to be completed on January 13, February 9 so I’m sure this new “firm date” he’s going to land on me will hold up this time. While we briefly talked about moving out of the place and finding a new one—basic contract law will back our play if we decide to do that—the bottom line is that it would cost thousands of dollars to move just a few miles, even if we do this on the cheap—just setting up shop all over again is a huge undertaking, and we’d likely have to purchase the entire kitchen. That’s right, in Germany (and most of Europe), it’s the tennant’s responsibility to buy everything kitchen related. And by that I mean all appliances, cabinetry, sink, the works-- you move into a bare space. One of the reasons we liked this place so much is that we had a $10,000 kitchen waiting for us already—a very, very rare occurrence. Our next step is to haul in the actual building owners and have a chat with them. Can’t say I’m too keen about that, but when they see the shoddy workmanship and indifferent attitude displayed towards their retirement dream house and investment by their hand-picked employee, things may shake up a bit. Stay tuned. This is going into extra innings.

Really Late Reviews: When Heroes Disappoint

Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979, St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books, First Ed. 2006

Let me get this out of the way from the get-go: I am a fan of Michael Palin. I love his multiple BBC travel series (aired in the States on PBS and the Travel Channel), and I have just about every book he has published in the last 20 years. He's one of the good ones, and the "nice" guy from Monty Python. So it's with a touch of bittersweet that I have to say this book was a letdown. Oh sure, it has its moments, but not enough to justify the heft (608 pages of text, plus a 42 page index) or the time commitment needed. Palin is a "diarist," a person who keeps a diary, and this collection (edited down substantially from the original source material) spans 10 years in length, from the beginnings of Monty Python's Flying Circus on BBC TV to the release of Monty Python's Life of Brian film. But to call this a Python book would be extremely misleading, because it is a keyhole's peep (the entries are usually only a couple sentences long) into the life of a family man, one who is involved in his community, with ailing parents to worry about, and, oh yes a burgeoning celebrity as well. As such, the result is a bit of a mismash-- a Python tidbit here, a complaint about his father's hospitalization there, and utterly mundane commentary about books, and movies he's gone to see that day. The one thing that stood out for me was Palin's near-obsession with food and baths. Readers and viewers of his travelogues (all uniformly excellent, by the by) already know about Michael's love of a good bath, but hokey smokes, reading in some detail about what he had for lunch for 10 years straight tends to wear. Example: Page 418, Monday, November 1, 1977 includes "... Have a Glenmorangie at the bar and a good meal of haddock in a patsie and pheasant and cheese." The juicy bits are certainly there, and Palin takes being a celebrity in stride-- if anything, he seems a bit embarrassed by it all. But in releasing this, he probably burned his bridges with the remaining Pythons, except possibly Terry Gilliam. Let's see... He reveals that Terry Jones is insecure and clingy, John Cleese clearly is in it for the money and seems to put up with everybody just to get a paycheck, Eric Idle is a moody spendthrift gone Hollywood, and Graham Chapman is an alcoholic lout for most of the book (he gets sober in the end, and Palin's feelings towards Graham warm considerably). Other interesting tidbits include his whirlwind weeks' hosting "Saturday Night Live," his friendship with Beatle George Harrison, and some great showbiz insights including the making of the Python movies. But as I read this all, it just sort of tarnished everybody-- it's never a good thing to put anybody on a pedestal, and I'm far from being a diehard Python fanatic, but hearing of celebrities' (especially ones you like) personal foibles made me feel a bit angry and disappointed at the fella dishing them out. True enough, these were raw feelings from a diary, never more than 24 hours from that day's events and interactions with people, but still... I don't think I needed to read this. The gossipy, non-dirt dishing portions of this book left me gasping for more-- I wanted to hear more of Mick Jagger's impersonation of Johnny Rotten and George Harrison's sneaking onstage in full disguise just to sing "The Lumberjack Song" when the Pythons hit Broadway (good stories both), and the Python's constant battle with the censors-- but they were far outweighed by the mundane stuff-- the meeting with his tax accountant gets equal coverage as the story of Margot Kidder flicking Christopher Reeve's Super-package (a metal codpiece that pinged) during the breaks on Superman. But I'm a genuine fan of Michael Palin, so I'll be charitable and give this a near-miss.