Work, Fish, and the Latest on Furniture

We started work on Friday. It went well and I can’t complain. Here are some of the details: our schedule is flexible. We just have to be at work by 10:30. And if for some reason we can’t manage to drag ourselves to work by 10:30, we need to call by 10:00 and say what time we can manage to drag ourselves in. Also, they provide (really good) coffee, juice and bottled water. I know, it’s kind of a small matter. But, damn, the coffee’s good and it’s nice that the IEA cares. What else? David and I share an office (neat!) and the people in charge of such things keep asking what we need, to include plants to make the office more habitable. There are two big windows in the office, which for a recently former grad student is a big, hairy deal. I was informed today that it is German law that workers must have access to daylight – very impressive, maybe even more so than the coffee. The job seems very cool, if slightly undefined. We’ve been hired, at least in part, to get a research program off the ground for the IEA. The details, I think, we’ll have to work out with our boss, who arrives from New Jersey next Tuesday.

Ok, next headline topic: fish. We went to the “fish” market on the harbor Sunday. There isn’t much fish for sale, hence the quotes; however, you can get just about anything else from fruit and vegetables to cheap crap such as cell phone covers and shoes to tourist chotzke like t-shirts and coffee mugs. A Hamburg institution, apparently, the market opens at 5 a.m. and is conveniently located right near St. Pauli, the city’s party district. I learned that it is somewhat customary to spend a night whooping it up in St. Pauli and then proceeding to the “fish” market to grab a coffee and some food before heading home to sleep (mark your calendars, J-Amy!).

Besides the staggering drunks, the best thing about the fish market are these four, evenly spread out vendors, who have gigantic, well-elevated stands and huge signs advertising their wares. The first is a guy peddling pasta, second is a fruit guy, next is a fish man and finally there are a pair of kooks unloading plants, all for bargain basement prices. Their sales method is really unique – they are very loud and make quite a show of putting together a package of what they have for sale. For instance, one of the plant guys has an enormous handle bar moustache and he curses, tells lots of jokes and throws small, potted plants into the audience. His partner showed us a good bit of his tattooed ass right before he sold a crammed-full giant box with about 10 plants, including a huge banana plant and a palm for 30 euro. It is a real spectacle.

The fruit guy throws bananas in the audience all while stuffing a huge wicker basket full of pineapple, bananas, grapes, melons – you name it. He’ll even throw in a flat of pineapples at the end of the morning. This is all for 10 euro (about $12). David and I bought one and we got so much fruit, it filled three shopping bags. We froze most and we are currently working our way through about 20 bananas and 4 pineapples. We’ll be regular, to say the least. The basket that the fruit comes in is nice, too. It will come in handy for hauling groceries home.

Furniture update: while we have no new furniture, we have actually visited two excellent prospects. We are still sans-furniture because we haven’t received the pin number for our bankcard and this country wholesale doesn’t take credit cards. Who ever heard of such an outlandish proposition? So, as soon as the pin comes in, we’ve got our eye on a sweet orange couch, a dining table from a closeout store and a desk and some other odds and ends at the used store. I am really looking forward to sitting on a couch.