The Bakery: A Cultural Classroom

I strolled to the local bakery Saturday morning.  The usual malingerers camped in silence over coffee and a book, or stared idly out the windows, or admired the particularly curvaceous backsides of customers at the counter. But, when the idlers noticed me, they looked up from their white porcelain cups, greeted me with soft smiles and a polite “Morgen.” Sometimes they murmur, ‘mosha,’ or ‘moiya.’

 

Zwielkuchen, onion cakes in front, a typical fall treat.

The wonderful faces of the bakery clerks immediately brightened as I checked in for my usual double espresso and a fresh roll.  O---, a cute older clerk, with a blond ponytail that jumps like a twitching teenager when she walks, came from around the counter, stepped close, shook my hand and stared into my eyes.  For a sec I thought she’d used super glue on her fingers and we’d be stuck together ‘til dead do us part.  Can’t complain about early skin on skin. As for the staring, you have to remember that staring is a part of the German culture.  As children, I’m sure the school’s morning rule is:  first one to stop staring gets flogged.

You drive through a neighborhood and pedestrians stop and stare with the gaping intensity of well-aimed cannon.  I always smile and wave to complete strangers, just to give them pause to think they might know me after all.  And if it’s a wife who’s walking with her spouse and staring, I wink and wave and lick my lips.

When Germans toast, they raise their glasses and shout Prost!  They MUST also stare into each other’s eyes, or risk a year of bad sex.  Now, I know you’re thinking…hey, at this point in my life, and with my current hands-on life style, even bad sex...

Previously, I gave you a few ‘good morning’ options.  Language is constantly changing and being abbreviated, a lesson high school language teachers, in their slave like devotion to complete sentences, apparently never learned, mainly because few are native speakers of the language they’re teaching, or because the French they learned in 1960 does not take into account ripped jeans, green hair, tattoos, and the mandatory ‘like’ now populating every casual remark.  So now I’m going to like give you a few like for-instances.

For example, no German uses the word Fraulein to describe a young woman anymore. Everything is Frau these days, which can mean woman or wife.  I know American women would wince if a husband introduced them as “my woman.’  You might also hear’ junge Frau’ for a young woman, as opposed to ‘Jungfrau’, meaning virgin.  Another word seldom used.

But, before you get your knickers twisted and go braless (which I heartily recommend, by the way), I hasten to add it’s the same for men.  My Mann can mean both my man and my husband.

Even the word, yes (ja), is seldom used.  Instead, you’ll hear (as I did this morning from a tall, slender, very beautiful woman) the vulgar sounding yaw!   This is not to say that I’m entirely put off by vulgar women, but I do have my standards, though often cloaked in the dark corners of my libido.

You might be interested to know, even in the heat of summer, which is to say only as warm as April in Georgia, German women do not go braless.  This is unfortunate.

And speaking of sartorial arrangements, what of the other sex, the hairy legged destroyers of virtue?  German men frequently go for three quarter length to half-length jeans.  Only place I’ve seen that on Y chromosomes in the states is on toddlers being hand towed by impatient mothers.

So, I sat and joined the other malingerers, sipping my coffee, reading my book and reflecting on all I’d learned on this bright morning.  Wait a sec….O is headed my way again….and she’s staring…