Attack of the clowns

As you may remember from this post, Karneval (I misspelled it before, oops) is coming up in Germany and clowns are the major decoration. This is true in more than one establishment window.

Behold:

In the window of a hairdresser

And then:

A perfectly normal shop window

This one is for an interior design company. But what is that lurking on the left side?

They're everywhere.

Clearly German's haven't gotten the message. Clowns aren't funny or cute, they're terrifying. The internet confirms it.

Mr. Chuckles, please stay out of my pre-Lenten non-revelry. My dreams would appreciate it.

Shock and awe tactics

My students got their report cards on Friday, so this week marks the beginning of a new marking period. For reasons unknown to me, certain classes and teachers get entirely new schedules each marking period and others do not. Naturally the roster of stable and changing classes does not remain the same from marking period to marking period. Remarkably, today saw only the second time that I've walked in on the completely wrong class after one of these changes, but it happened.

On the bright side, I may be getting to know a new sixth grade class who I visited today. As is typical my first time in a class, the students had a chance to ask me questions about myself, the States, English, etc. This led to several cute moments. Upon learning that I come from the States, the entire class let out a collective gasp of amazement. One little girl asked me how it was to live in the best country in the world. ("Um...it's not the best?" "For us, it is!") A little boy asked me "Was you ever visited the London Dungeon?" and seemed very sad when I told him that dungeons are typically too scary for me. He brightened considerably when I said I liked the London Eye and Buckingham Palace and he informed me that he planned to visit London one day.

Later in the day I accompanied several hundred students to a screening of The Hobbit in English, which I think was more a treat for me than for them. As you remember from before, I saw the movie in German and enjoyed it, but I really enjoyed it when I could understand all the dialogue.

One of my seventh grade students asked me on the way out if I'd understood everything said in the movie. I deadpanned "not everything" and he got a faintly horrified look on his face. "Really? It must be very hard English," he said. I couldn't help but laugh. Since we weren't in class I spoke German with the students, much to their delight, and they all informed me "Jessica, your German is so good! You should speak it all the time with us." Nice try kids.

Ready to learn?

I'm at a possible impasse with my Lord of the Flies twelfth grade class.

Side note: When I have three different twelfth grade classes, it can be a little complicated to differentiate them in talking to people who don't work with me. Thus far they are called "my guns twelfth grade class," "my Macbeth/religion twelfth grade class," and "my Lord of the Flies twelfth grade class" but that does get a little unwieldy. Trouble is, calling them "12a" or some other logical denotation doesn't mean anything to anyone but me and I would always have to follow it up with "the ones who are reading Lord of the Flies" or similar, which kind of defeats the purpose. So unwieldy it is! At least for now.

This isn't a real impasse. They're a good group of kids with the normal spread of good, bad, and middling students. When I ask questions someone always answers me, but on Wednesday it was the same three very good students who kept raising their hands and no one else. Occasionally I would get a half-hearted shrug of a raised hand from five or six other students, and the rest of the class mostly stayed silent. We got through the lesson, it was generally good, etc. After I left the teacher asked them why so many were quiet and relayed to me that a number of them didn't understand me because I was talking too fast.

Sigh.

Anyone who knows me is well aware that I talk too fast, always. Native English speakers often don't understand me. My family has a code word they say every time I've blurted out a sentence too quickly for them to follow. (Seriously. Plus they always laugh. Every time.) And while I do my best to slow down for my students, my idea of speaking slowly is anyone else's idea of a little faster than normal. You can imagine how frustrating this is for non-native speakers.

The impasse is that my students won't tell me they don't understand. For some, they're embarrassed to admit they can't follow my English. For some, they don't care. For most, I think, school is something you passively complete rather than actively engage in, and it's not worth the bother.

I chatted with my family this weekend and we brainstormed ideas. So far my strategies are: beginning the class in German so they can hear that I struggle with a second language as well, asking them to come up with a code word that means I've talked too quickly, and reminding them that even native English speakers have trouble understanding me sometime. I'm open to any further suggestions.

We'll see how this goes.

Getting ready, Easter edition

Even though we're barely off of Christmas, here in southern-ish Germany it's time to prepare for a new holiday: Carneval.

Like the New Orleans celebration of similar pronunciation and spelling, Carneval marks the time just before the beginning of Lent and therefore the lead-up to Easter. Most people don't go vegetarian for Lent anymore, but several cities in Germany (Cologne and Mainz, for example) still make a bit deal out of Carneval excess and everyone gets very drunk. I think the German version includes fewer topless women and plastic beads, but that could be wrong. No intentions of finding out.

The pub/bar up the street from me has decorated its windows in preparation for Carneval. The decorations are meant for inside and these pictures are taken from the outside, but I think the clowns are easy to make out.

Lurking in the window...

...the windows themselves are really quite lovely.

One clown head, two clown head, red clown head, blue clown head.

Turns out that clowns are a very typical thing to see around Carneval, so the cafe near my school also has a little niche with clown decorations. Creepy. (I'm told that when I was young I started crying around clowns. I think my toddler self was on to something.)

I've confused a number of people asking about Carneval, since Germany also has a celebration called Carneval that beings at 11:11am on November 11 every year and goes through January. That Carneval seems to have little connection to the Easter/Lent Carneval (though maybe it is connected, sources vary) and every time I've asked its beginnings or what it celebrates, I get the very helpful answer of "It's Carneval" and a shoulder-shrug. In addition, I've gleaned that in Cologne the November Carneval is considered a fifth season of the year, right between winter and...winter. So there you go.

As a side note, this continues to be the view from my window:

Notice both the construction equipment and the snow

 So much for the early assurances that the Rhine gives us a temperate climate. Both Saturday and Sunday look to be below freezing yet again, and the weather forecast is for "partly cloudy, possible ice in the mornings". Brr.

Playing a shell game

One of my favorite autumn/winter foods is butternut squash soup, but as we're out of season for squashes, the internet offered up sweet potato soup as an alternative. The internet was right. Naturally this was no easily-microwaved Ramen noodle-style soup and the recipe called for creme fraiche as well as a garnish of buttered pecans. Should you ever care to make buttered pecans, drop a bunch of pecans in a pan with some butter and cook them for a bit. It's a very self-explanatory name.

Finding the bunch of pecans to drop was a bit more difficult. The grocery store had multi-kilogram bags of almonds, walnuts, and cashews and even offered more exotic options like Brazil nuts and macadamia nuts, but no pecans. I finally located a bag pecans in their shells and bought it, figuring that they couldn't be so hard to get open.

Hilarious.

First I tried prying, which didn't even begin to work. Then I tried poking the shell with a fork and knife. Also a no-go. The internet, that bastion of all information, suggested a nutcracker but grudging noted that a pair of pliers could work just as well. You may remember from earlier posts that my landlady is something of a DIY-er, and lo and behold, I found a pair of pliers in her basket of tools.

My pecan-shelling setup

Following digital instructions, I used the pliers to crack the shells and used the fork to help me pry out the meat. I pretty much failed to get them out cleanly and ended up with a bunch of pecan fragments. This was fine for the recipe but a bit of a blow to my pride.

The end result

You'll notice from this picture that there are far more shells than pecans. Often I couldn't even get the bits of pecan out of the shell and had to leave it behind.

I'm happy to report that while scanty, the buttered pecans turned out well and were a nice addition to the soup. And it was kind of fun to turn on Star Trek and shell some pecans for a while. I might even do it again. Hopefully I'll manage to get more whole pecans the next time, just for the sake of aesthetics.

Daily Chuckle #3

When German students don't quite know the English phrase for something, they tend to literally translate the German. Some common examples:

"What means (German word)?" instead of "What does (German word) mean?"

"In the near of (a place)" instead of "Near (a place)"

"The nature" instead of "nature"


The last is especially difficult for Germans, because German attaches an article ("the" or "a") to all nouns. Conversely, I often forget the article when I speak German and say things that sound rather like "There is river" rather than "There is the river". Essentially, I speak in the equivalent of Germanic faux-Neanderthal.

Oddities

One of the dangers of being an outsider in Germany is that I can fall into the trap of generalizing from only a few points of data. While four months here have served to introduce me to German society, I'm limited by my own observations and a flurry of question directed at my ever-patient colleagues. I do my best to catch myself, too, by looking for several repetitions of the same behavior. With all that in mind, here are a few odd things I've noticed.

German adolescent boys, approximately ages eleven through fifteen or so, seem to be unironically wearing fanny packs. Whether this trend is widespread or limited to a certain group of friends who rides my bus in the mornings, I don't know for certain. I haven't seen any of my students donning the "I'm a target for thieves!" look, which argues that this is a localized trend. I hope that's true.


Certain German adults seem to make a habit of checking the garbage cans at the old mall and the bus terminal right outside. These people are all a little older - sixty or so - but don't appear to be homeless. None of them wear suits, but all are reasonably well dressed and carry a small backpack or briefcase, if anything at all. I wonder what they're looking for. My instinct says bottles and cans to recycle, probably out of a combined desire for the deposit and an overriding concern that recyclables do not belong in a garbage bin. Ever. Everything must be in order.


German schoolkids raise their hands with one finger up instead of the whole hand. It looks like this:

When I asked why, both students and teachers looked at me like I had just questioned gravity and answered "You don't?"


German parents are very lax about their babies and children, displaying no concern when a stranger leans over to pinch a cheek or pat a head. Entire restaurants can stare at a baby and the waitress can bring a piece of bread over to be gummed and no one seems to think it's the least bit weird. Whenever I ask to pet someone's dog, however, they seem taken aback and some even say no and hurry away.


It all makes me wonder: what do I do that Germans find baffling or strange? I'm sure the list is very long.