Sprachen Deutsche, the BIG Ten-Oh, Harley Days and the Beach

So, jeez, where shall I begin? Quite a week we've had, I should say. We started German lessons: (question) Wie geht es Ihnen? (response) Gut, danke. Unt Ihnen? See? It's going well. David hates it and our teacher is like an enthusiastic kindergarten teacher. Did you know, kindergarten is a German word? Nice, huh? I have learned two very important phrases this week. 1) Entschuldigen (excuse me) 2) Sie haben? (do you have?). They are infinitely handy and have gotten me out of considerable jams, so far. I have also found that since we are white, we can spit out a phrase our two and people just sort of assume we are either German or at least European - at least they don't immediately identify us as dirty Americans. Anyway, the class is a real time-sink (3 x week for 2.5 hrs a class). It's kind of screwing up our social mo-jo, but it's never going to get more convenient than now. And the organization is paying. So! We go.



What else? David and I celebrated our ten year anniversary. Huh, you say? 10 years? Is that possible? Yes, apparently so. We have been happily hitched a decade and now find ourselves on a third continent. To celebrate, we had a nice dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, which, subsequently, we discovered in this cool area full of ethnic veggie places. We then bought a crazy expensive bottle of wine (at least for us - $30) and had a beer in the biergarten in the park. It was really great. Have I mentioned that I love Hamburg? The wine, we saved for the weekend. This nearly leads me to my next point. But first we should talk about Harley Days.



There is an annual Harley Davidson festival in Hamburg, where thousands of German Harley riders, aficionados, poseurs and folks in general come out and admire a fleet of bikes, not all (but nearly all) Harley Davidson. It's funny, for such an American event, there is always the German flair - beer everywhere and sausage galore. We listened to live music, drank beer and watched a German rock-a-billy band speak in German and sing in perfect English. Very weird and kind of cool.



For our anniversary and just to get out, we rented a car and took a drive to the coast and other towns. It was really great. We set out Saturday morning and took a drive to this old-ass town - Wismar. See, the thing about Hamburg is that it was 50% leveled during the war (80% destroyed on the port), so the historical part of Hamburg is not so impressive. But, Wismar is doubly cool. It has really old shit - I'm talking 800 years old, all over the place. And it is in the area that was formerly communist East Germany, or as the locals call it, GDR (maybe, German Democratic Republic?). Anyway, the town was stunning, really. And we camped out on the beach nearby. It was really great. The water was cold but it was beautiful. We soaked up the sun, drank our pricey wine with bread, olive and cheese (I know, how pathetically European is that?) and enjoyed the outdoors. It's been raining pretty much non-stop since we got here and the weather granted us a short break this weekend, which we thoroughly enjoyed.



Today we headed back to HH (that's local for Hamburg - it's a city and a state, hence the doppel H). We rented our car from this discount place that requires you to clean the car and it was due back between 6 and 7. We left our apartment around 5:30 to vacuum and remove all the Stella-hair, but we caught a snag. Again, funny German-ness. Vacuums at the gas station are often closed on Sunday. The automatic ones. The ones that don't require any type of supervision - you just put in a coin and whoosh. Those very vacuums may (seemingly at random) not operate on Sunday, for reasons unbeknownst to me. The girl in the gas station by our apartment was very puzzled by our inquiry for change so that we could use the vacuum. She said, "oh, no. The vacuum is closed." Whatever. So, we drove all over (not a small feat in the city with not a single pair of parallel or perpendicular roads to be had) to find an open gas station. We pulled in to a promising station, got change and were vacuuming for about 5 minutes, when the employee asked us to leave since they were closing. At 6pm. Ugh. I could go for a nice dose of capitalism once in a while. Oh, well. The trade off is that I and everyone else who lives in Germany (except the gas station attendants until 6pm) are forced to take Sunday off and enjoy life in the park or something. Weird concept, huh?

On a tangentially related note. David has noted a number of times that he is impressed by the quality of both the food and the women in Germany. I understand (sort of) both of these observations. You can get a 1 euro frozen pizza at Aldi that will just about knock your socks off. And bread everywhere, including the grocery store, is excellent. The women, too, are impressive. Particularly the older ladies. They all look like aerobics instructors. I don't know if its the bike riding or the high quality food, but these women have got it going on.