Last week, Germany and Italy lined up against each other for a friendly, but the atmosphere was everything but. The reason is that, apart from Brazil, there is no one country against whom Germany has a worse record than Italy: over the last 30 games, they have only booked seven wins against the Italians, whilst drawing nine and losing a disastrous fourteen games. To make matters worse, their last win was 16 years ago, and one of the many defeats they have suffered fell at just the wrong time and in just the wrong competition.

Crafts for sale at Frankfurt's Christmas Market, Photo: Lama Abdo

I was around five or six years old when I saw snow for the first and one of just a few times. I remember being so happy to know that I didn’t have to go to school that day. Everything stopped. No one was able to do anything; we were not used to having snow – I mean we hardly even have rain in the winter. Almost 20 years has passed since that scene, but this morning when I left home I felt something falling – it was again real snow in Frankfurt, the only difference being that in Germany nothing stops due to the snow, it’s as if things are prepared to sustain all weather conditions, and life continues as usual, the trains, S-bahns, U-Bahns…

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof, a typical German main station (Flickr: das_kine)

One of the first words that British schoolchildren who take German learn is Bahnhof, and very soon after, they are told about the prefix Haupt-: and, badda-bing, badda-bahnhof, you’ve got one of the most important words in the German language, a kind of key to the German soul.

What? A word which, translated, means “main station” – and this is supposed to open the treasure chest of the German psyche? Yes, you got it! Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll show you how.

There’s one thing my coach never tired of saying to me: “Hau den Ball ins Tor hinein!” – best translated with: “Just slam it into the back of the net!” What did yours used to say to you? What about this one: “If we want to win the championship, we need to win away games!”? If you’ve ever played at the top of a league, then you’ve probably heard that one before.

Teams in the Bundesliga don’t appear see things that way, though. Neither record-holders Bayern München, nor the gutsy Schalke 04, nor even title contenders Bayer Leverkusen were able to win their away games on match day 27.

In comparison to America, Germany is a fairly small place.  “Germany,” I still remember my high school German teacher telling our class, “is about the size of Pennsylvania.”  Though it turns out Germany is actually more like four times the size of Pennsylvania, it is still a relatively small place in American standards, and for being so small, it’s a wonder what a range of regional culinary specialties exist here, tucked away in every corner.

In Rheinland-Pfälz, I’ve experienced Pfälzer Saumagen.  But in Hessen you need not be so daring to sample the local specialties, because in Hessen the standards are “apfelwein,” “grüne soße,” and “handkäs mit musik.”

Apfelwein

Moving to another country was the first culture shock.  Suddenly I was in Germany, surrounded by another culture and another language.  Then the career change: instead of sitting behind a desk, whether as a student or as a proofreader, I had become a nanny, then an English teacher, then a full-time freelance writer.  Then I blew all the other changes right out of the water and moved into a little wooden gypsy caravan on a piece of squatted land on the outskirts of one of Europe’s most metropolitan cities.

In town, bankers sipped 8-euro drinks and talked about their stock portfolios, while I lived with a bunch of adventurous nomadic types with brightly colored hair and wild dreadlocks, without electricity, carrying water 100-meters from the faucet to my little house or the community kitchen, chopping firewood to fire up the woodstove, reading by candlelight.

Almost four years after the fact, it hits me one day in the bathroom.  “I live in Germany.  I really live here!  What the hell?!”

Sure, it may sound obvious to you, but the scurrility of living in another country, in another language, on another continent takes some time to really absorb.  And here I am, facing another renewal of my visa, registered at a German address, with a German bank account, German friends, German books, a German gmail account.  How did it all happen?