Earlier this week I was asked if I feel comfortable 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 difficult. I’ve certainly not mastered it, and I continue to make mistakes, but I feel more at ease speaking a different language. It’s an ongoing challenge, one of many. Work culture, family culture, dealing with bureaucracy, buying bread, no matter what the activity, every task is slightly more complex because of language and culture. I’ve come to rely on it, even enjoy it. Since there’s always something new to discover, life here keeps me guessing. 

Shopping is a great example of the surprises that can still be found. In Britain supermarkets have become great temples to homogenisation. No matter which chain you go to, you find most have exactly the same standardised layout, with products organised and placed in a similar way across the country. Not in Germany though. Here the franchise system means that most supermarkets are organised by whim of the proprietor, with products ordered to cater specifically to a hyper local clientele. This took a lot of getting used to, with shopping trips taking far longer as I tried to navigate the organisational logic of each supermarket I visited.

Now I understand what I’m facing, shopping takes no time at all, 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’. Sometimes I wonder if she’s doing it on purpose. A few years back, I was trundling around the aisles of our local REWE and I saw that my wife had written “Blau Zwiebel” on the shopping list. I was certain she was setting me up for an embarrassingly confused conversation with some poor supermarket employee. 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. Blue onions and blue cabbage. The employee 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 surprising ways, challenging my entire conception 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. Finding that the average German bathroom has open plug sockets is one example. 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 switch. Then I came to Germany and what did 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 heard 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 eventually fade into the everyday after a few years, but not everything is so easy to accept. One thing that 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 Latte Macchiato here and some lunatic will put it in a glass, as if testing the very borders of reality. The madness doesn’t stop there. To further goad the very fabric of my understanding of the universe, they hand you a straw with which to drink your already dangerously prepared refreshment. I’m so irrationally annoyed by this process that I’ve stopped ordering lattes and much to my wife’s embarrassment, I will ask if hot drinks comes in a glass whenever I order anything. Maybe I look foolish, but at least I don’t have third degree burns. 

Everyone’s different of course, and we all have our limits when it comes to what we can accept and what we cannot. 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, I would be very disappointed if I made all this effort only to move to somewhere that’s exactly the same as where I had left. I might complain occasionally, but I sincerely love knowing there’s a mind bending discovery or challenge around every single corner. 

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