Some of the first post boxes on display at the Communications Museum, Photo: M. Dallashi

Two days ago I became another victim of technology – I bought a new iPod! Since then the world appears much differently, the world suddenly seems much smaller than it used to be. Now all of my friends so far away are within just a click with my Facebook, Skype and Gmail applications!

It also seems that from now on I won’t be getting lost thanks to the Google maps application. I’m there. I’m in the new media world. I know it’s a bit late, but I’m not really a fan of gadgets. Sometimes, I still prefer older things.

Photo: BM

One of the things I’ve always liked about Germany is the cultural tendency to “completeness”, as I like to call it. Germans always say “keine halbe Sachen” – i.e. they don’t like to do things by halves. This especially applies to festivals and seasons, and is something I enjoy greatly. Whereas in England, where I was born and grew up, it might just happen to be strawberry or asparagus season, in Germany, they really go the whole hog – or spear: restaurants have menus composed entirely around Spargel (asparagus) and everywhere you get invited, the host is cooking the stuff.

Chanterelles in the woods (Flickr: EdWohlfahrt)

One of the most challenging things about writing is trying to sum up entire places and periods in a few words so that you’re able to move on with your story. Yet if I were ever to need, for some reason or other, to briefly describe Germany in mid-September, I know exactly how I’d do it: chanterelles and plums.

That sounds better in German, since chanterelles are called Pfifferlinge and plums Pflaumen, which would give any such description a poetic alliteration of the first order. Yet apart from the usual writer’s aesthetic considerations, why consider these two particular foodstuffs?

Wines from the Palatinate (image: Neustadt Tourism/tks)

Germany is, as regular readers of this blog will know, a country that I value above all for its mastery of the art of brewing beer. Well, not above everything, but at the top of the list of reasons I moved to Germany, beer is right up there next to functioning public transportation and irresistible pork products. So there’s a certain irony to the fact that my most recent excursion in Germany was to one of the country’s major wine-producing regions, the Pfalz, or Palatinate as it is called in good English usage.

One thing newcomers have got to learn about Germany is the importance of regional identities: That’s why I posted on state elections in Germany just last week. Especially for Brits, the sheer variation between different parts of this country is astonishing; Germany is far more American than British inasmuch as the capital city is not the be-all-and-end-all of everything – and every city has its own identity markers of which it is exceptionally proud.

So just as each American city has a nickname (Chi-Town, the Big Apple, etc) and a baseball team, no German city would be complete without a major football team, a regular episode of the long-running who-dunnit legend Tatort, and a trademark item of baked goods. Germany is, after all, well known for its penchant for baking, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Hmm, beer… (Image: BM)

“Oh God“, I hear you cry, “he’s writing about beer again!” Well, with three of my posts in the last year having beer in the title and my recent post on bottle deposits, you might think the topic has been covered as much as it can.

Yet far from being ashamed, I stand by my record! After all, there’s a good reason I drink so much beer in Germany: it’s the sheer variety, the fizzy excitement of discovering a new brew almost everywhere I go.