Football Season Is Here!

The same day my alma mater Purdue Boilermakers exited from the NCAA Basketball Tournament also marked the beginning of Football season. No, not soccer (known as "Fußball" in these parts), that's been going on for months--including a brief winter break, European soccer season runs roughly from August to May!! Not American football either; I haven't cared about the NFL for over a decade, and my beloved college football season won't begin for another, let's see... 155 days. Nope, it's time for Australian Rules Football, known to many in that nickname-crazy country down under simply as "Footy," where it is massively popular-- crowds of over 90,000 to watch the matches are fairly common. I got hooked on this sport years ago when it was still on cable TV's Fox Soccer Channel-- the skill and athleticism required for the game is simply not to be believed. Far from being a bunch of muscle-bound goons, today's footy players have to run like soccer players, punt like the NFL, move the ball around in team formation like basketball, and... hit like a muscle-bound goon, yet with no padding. While Footy may look like rugby to some, it's a completely different game and skill set required. The problem for me lies in viewing the games-- although Footy is being broadcast more and more in the USA, it's still a fairly exotic sport here, televised once a week and relegated to a minor channel only carried in sports bars... who are too busy airing soccer. There is an amateur team in Munich, and we plan on going down to catch a couple games down there with our rugby snob friends. In the meantime, check out this masterful video-- there's really nothing else like Footy. Oh, and that jump that occurs at roughly the :44 point of the video isn't some CGI magic-- that's a standard maneuver called "marking" that occurs fairly regularly in matches. Crikey!

Six Month Anniversary: What Have We Learned?

Filed under "meaningless milestones," today marks our first six months in the Federal Republic of Germany, at least in the German's eyes (new residents have to register with their local city hall immediately upon moving in, and we touched down on a weekend), which is close enough for us. So, 6 months and 75 blog entries later, what have we learned? What follows is a less-than-comprehensive, off the cuff (this date holds little real significance, and I sort of forgot all about it), rattling off of one couple's expat experiences, in no particular order:

This is a lot harder than we thought: Different culture, different rules, different language. This happens to all expats, and it really is something that you can not adequately prepare for-- even if we moved to Canada, there would be differences. Moving to Germany, a beuaracratic nirvana, where even the most standard forms are in triplicate (seriously) with a vastly different language can be a bit of a mind-mangler.

Embrace the differences: I've come across a number of very unhappy expats here-- Brits, Czechs, and especially Americans-- that just can't get past the fact that this isn't like back home. Really? Who'd a thunk it? You can either roll with the changes (and spoof on them-- feel free to read any of my other blog entries for further evidence) and learn to deal, or simply be consumed by your anger and frustration and be a very miserable person who doesn't have many friends. Your choice. Sure, there's a lot of things I wish these Germans would adopt from North America--being able to buy aspirin from a drugstore (or supermarket or gas station checkout), less red tape for... well, anything, longer shopping hours for the sake of convenience, etc.; but there are things I've seen here that would make total sense in the USA: clean diesel car engines, excellent city planning, public transit to die for, and... shorter shopping hours so you can spend quality time with your loved ones. It's the differences that make a foreign country, well, foreign. Accept them. Celebrate them.

Saying "I understand I probably won't be working" and actually living it are very different: That's more of a personal note than any great revelation, and doesn't need much in the way of explanation. Six months in, and the move is almost complete-- while the apartment still needs work to be done, the intensive language classes are over and the driver's tests are next week. That was enough activity to keep me reasonably busy, but now that this part is over, it is time to move on to the next chapter, and I'm casting around for something to do. I have some ideas, some contacts, and a handful of work projects from the States on tap and will not let boredom get the better of me. But for somebody who has worked all their life to suddenly, voluntarily stop, it can be an odd feeling and a beartrap a lot of expat spouses and partners fall into.

This isn't the USA: Deal with it. While I covered this subject in some detail above, let me just say I've heard stories of folks that rashly took a job here, quickly decided they hated it, and spent their remaining days marking their calendars angrily waiting for their contract to expire, and treating this as a hardship tour. What a bunch of dumbasses.

Make the best of it, and enjoy the experience: There are times when walking to the tram, to the supermarket, to get my hair cut, etc. it just just strikes me: Holy crow, I'm living in a foreign country-- a lot of people would kill for this opportunity. The history, the food, the culture of Europe, and here we are in the middle of it. With a tiny bit of planning, we could be in Paris for dinner, dipping our toes in the fjords of Norway in the evening, or sunning on the beaches of Cape Town the following morning. This is a wonderful opportunity that for some folks, will never come their way. Make the most of it.

A Fine Example Of Eastern Bloc Engineering

Not terribly far from the local Ferrari/Maserati dealership, and a few blocks over from where I took spy shots of the not yet released Porsche Panamera test mule (story and photo HERE), I spotted this by the side of a repair shop. Fans of the band U2 may also dimly recall these cars hanging over the stage on their Zoo TV world tour. It's a Trabant, a car made in the former East Germany continuously, with very few modifications or changes, from 1957-1989. In those times (before the wall came down) the waiting period to purchase these cars when new was around 10 years! By any standard, this was a primitive car: an ear-splitting, heavily polluting 18-horsepower 2-stroke (think snowmobile or chainsaw) engine for most of its life under the hood (1990-1991 Trabis had a small modern VW engine), and the car bodies were made with something called "Duroplast," an East German invention that was a byproduct of dye-making chemicals and resin, reinforced in varying degrees by things like cotton or wool (whatever was available at the time). This particular example has been modified-- there was no such thing as a Trabi convertible, and the "spoiler" on the rear is definitely an aftermarket product. While I have yet to see any actual Trabants on the streets, Germans have come full circle to embrace these oddities. While used Trabis could be had for (literally) just a few Deutsch Marks immediately after German reunification, a fully restored prime example these days can be sold for upwards of 10,000 Euros. We'll see if this comes to pass, but before the economy got twitchy, there were plans afoot to do a limited run of "modernized" Trabants with BMW engines, in the vein of the New Beetle and New Mini. The proposed price tag may be a little too dear for the exclusivity though-- 50,000 Euros. We'll see if the company shows their prototype at the 2009 Frankfurt auto show. For pictures and story of this New Trabant, click HERE.

When Formerly Angry Young Men Start Looking At Their Portfolio Statements

I read somewhere that this series of adverts was just named "worst British commercial of the year." It stars John Lydon, better known to a generation of people as the notorious Johnny Rotten of the seminal 1970's English punk band The Sex Pistols. While some will claim "sell out," ol' Johnny has earned his bones in my view, and he can do whatever he likes-- because he's still the real deal, gleefully jabbing his thumb in the eye of The Man for the last 30+ years (I'm still searching for the backstage video of him getting kicked off Rosie O'Donnell's old talk show by a freaked out producer BEFORE he even went on the air). So if he wants to earn 6-figure (or whatever it is) paychecks for espousing dairy products, I say let him. But to prove he hasn't mellowed, I give you another recent clip (click HERE) of Johnny at his best-- and gentle readers, you have been warned-- this is an unadulterated stream of profanity that would make several generations of sailors blush, definitely NSFW. Hey hey, my my.

This Will Be All I Have To Say About This Subject (until I can think of more zingers, anyway)

German class (or at least my wrestling with it) has come to a close. I spent over 4.5 hours a day/ 5 days a week for 2 months in class, limped through my A1's, and now it's time to move on. German is a difficult language to master even under ideal circumstances, and the bottom line is that I came to realize (and will eventually make peace with the fact) that I'll never be able to talk or comprehend much better than a 3-year old Berliner who just took a slug of Nyquil. While the natural reaction is to blame others, I'll fess up and say that I probably could have been more motivated, and probably could have studied harder. But my heart just wasn't in it. For this I WILL lay the blame with my lousy teacher (an older woman, but a first timer at this school with this curriculum), who somehow thought that lecturing to us for 90 minutes a shot entirely in German with near-zero speaking exercises or student:teacher/ student:student interaction would make us-- apparently by osmosis-- fluent in German. Shockingly, it didn't happen. And the times I did speak up and demand better answers than the "that's just how it is-- deal with it" she was giving, I got my wings pretty well clipped. I was doing this for fun and betterment-- but I wasn't having any fun, and I don't think my language skills got much better, so I waited for the unit to end and punched the "eject" button. Next challenge, please.

Kind Of Quiet Here...

Sorry for the lack of posts-- there's a bunch of stuff all coming to a head at the same time, and I have been lacking the inspiration to write due to all of these things-- Apartment woes (yes, the place still isn't ready for prime time), my language finals, both of our driving tests (the Germans take it as a point of pride that the failure rate hovers around 90% for first-time test takers), plus some genuine pangs of homesickness. Everything will work itself out in the next couple weeks, but until that time, keep watching this space.