The Eternal Challenge
Earlier this week, I was asked how comfortable I feel living in Germany. It was a question I hadn’t really considered, but when I thought about it, I realised that for the majority of my time living here I’ve never felt entirely at ease. Initially my anxiety revolved around language and communication. I’ve always been a good communicator, so transitioning from speaking my native English to learning German was rather difficult. I’ve certainly not mastered it by any stretch, and I’m still prone to the odd clanging language failure, but I do feel more at ease speaking a different language. With time, some challenges become less daunting, but there’s always another waiting in the wings to surprise me. Work culture, family culture, dealing with bureaucracy, buying bread: no matter what the task, most days are slightly more complex because of language and culture. I’ve come to expect these little complications, maybe even rely on them, and strangely, in many cases, I’ve grown to enjoy the daily tests life in Germany throws in my direction.
Life here keeps me guessing, which can be wearing at times, but at least it can’t ever be described as “boring”. I’ve never been one for setting life goals, and if I have one at all, it’s a desperate desire to never be left twiddling my thumbs in a perpetual state of ennui. Building a different life in another country meets this deep rooted need, as it takes commitment to stay the course, and requires the people who choose a life away from the comfort of their own culture to accept the rough with the smooth, to almost welcome the unexpected with open arms and, in my case, with a perpetually confused look upon my face.
Even with the most routine of activities, there are still surprises to be found, and shopping is a great example of this. In Britain, supermarkets have become mighty temples to homogenisation, so much so that many people go on autopilot once they enter a store. No matter which chain you go to across the UK, you'll find that most have exactly the same standardised layout, with products organised and placed in a similar way to make the process of doing the weekly shop as mundane as humanly possible. Not in Germany though. Here, the franchise system means that most supermarkets are organised by whim of the proprietor, with products ordered to cater very specifically to a hyper-local clientele. You have to work to find that tin of tomatoes, because it’s never in the first place you think. This took a lot of getting used to initially, with shopping trips taking far longer as I tried to navigate the organisational logic of each supermarket I visited.
After a while, you become accustomed to this inbuilt confusion, and shopping generally takes less time than it did before, but that doesn’t mean I remain unchallenged. My wife will sometimes catch me out with some unheard German vernacular, leaving me desperately trying to work out what I’m meant to do with a ‘Gelbe Rüber’, which sounds like some exotic plant, but is in actual fact simply a carrot. Why they’re described as “Gelb” (yellow) is anyone’s guess, and sometimes I have to wonder if she’s doing it on purpose. What’s all the more bizarre is that it’s not just the humble carrot that has seemingly been given a mismatched descriptor.
A few years back, I was trundling around the aisles of our local REWE and I saw that my wife had written “Blau Zwiebel” (blue onion) on the shopping list. I was certain she was setting me up for an embarrassingly confused conversation with some poor supermarket employee. However, I gritted my teeth and asked someone, fully expecting to be laughed out of the shop. Instead, the employee smiled, nodded and walked me over to the red onions. It turns out red is actually blue in certain parts of Germany. There’s also Blaukraut (red cabbage) to contend with, which leads me to conclude that German vegetables were named by people who had some severe form of colour vision deficiency. This was all but confirmed to me when I happened to mention my theory to the employee who had kindly led me to the onions. They laughed when I asked why Germans called red onions blue. “I know, it’s ridiculous” they said, “Everyone knows they’re purple”.
The low-level discomfort of life in Germany can also manifest in other ways, to the point that it calls into question my entire concept of reality. We’re all raised believing in some fundamental truths about the world, but when you move countries, you realise that these concepts can be entirely ethnocentric. For most British people, this discombobulation occurs on finding that the average German bathroom has open plug sockets. As a child, my brother and I would ask our mother if we could watch TV in the bath. At least once a week, we would demand to watch it and my mother would explain in patient tones that we couldn’t have electrical items in the bathroom because we might electrocute ourselves. There wasn’t even a plug socket, nor were there sockets to be found in the bathrooms of friends and family. Even the lights were switched on and off with a pull cord. Then I came to Germany and what do I find? Not only are there normal light switches in the bathrooms, but they all have multiple plug sockets too. I wondered for years whether this was some kind of Darwinian thinning of the herd idea: anyone dumb enough to electrocute themselves probably deserves it. No. Just a normal everyday German thing. Want to plug in a radio? Maybe the laptop? Perhaps you just want to use a hair dryer. Feel free, no one will stop you. Apparently, electrocution is only a British problem.
Though some of these challenges can cause embarrassment or confusion, most people eventually come to terms with the differences, but not everything is so easy to accept, at least for me at any rate. One thing I will never fully understand is the desire to put hot beverages in glassware. What’s more baffling to me is that Germans don’t put all hot drinks in glasses, that would at least be coherent. No, only certain drinks get that privilege. Order a basic cup of coffee, and you’ll be handed a proper cup, but order a Latte Macchiato and some lunatic will put it in a glass, as if testing the thermal resistance of the average punter’s hands. The madness doesn’t stop there. To further goad the very fabric of my understanding of the universe, they also hand you a straw with which to drink your already dangerously prepared refreshment. Just writing that sentence made me wince at the memory of trying to suck near boiling liquid through a paper straw. I’m so irrationally annoyed by the process that I’ve stopped ordering lattes, and much to my wife’s embarrassment, I always ask if hot drinks come in a glass whenever I order anything. Maybe I look foolish, but at least I don’t have third degree burns on my hands.
Everyone’s different of course, and we all have our limits when it comes to what we can accept. My buck stops at hot drinks in glasses, but others have much higher or much lower thresholds. It’s natural for things to be different, and I would be very disappointed if I made all this effort, only to move to somewhere that’s exactly the same as where I'd left. I might complain occasionally, but I sincerely love knowing there’s a mind bending discovery or challenge around every single corner.
Proofreader: @ScandiTina
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