stoneunhinged

Actually, we had gone to the Reeperbahn a few days earlier to go to Hamburg’s wax museum, the Panoptikum.

It’s just a wax museum, of course, but we had a lot of fun. The first figure one sees when entering the museum, is…

…well, here’s a picture:

The wax figure is on the right. Actually, the figure was only three or four feet behind Billy: it looks farther away because the Pope is apparently a very small man—scarcely over five feet tall, I’d say. I wonder if that’s in Wikipedia?

A bit further in the same room were figures of the current German chancellor and her predecessor having a champagne. I joined them and Billy snapped my picture before the woman watching the place yelled at us.

That’s what the woman did: yell at people. There were no other employees in the place. Just one woman who stood at the ticket booth and sold tickets and yelled at anyone getting too close to the figures. There were four floors in the building. The floors she could not see with her eyes had some kind of alarm system based on movement sensors or lasers or something.  When an alarm went off, she yelled through a microphone at everybody in the whole house.

I found this out when I decided to take a close-up picture of Joseph Goebbels. I reached forward to get my cell phone close to his face and an alarm went off. I looked around at the others with a “hey, who set off that alarm?” look on my face. But I did snap the photo.

Now, this figure is incredibly fascinating. Suitably creepy, don’t you think? But get this: the figure (as well as figures of Hitler and Göring) was made in the early forties. Which means, of course, that it was done with his full blessing. Creepy though it might be, had Goebbel’s found it unflattering he most certainly would have had the figure destroyed. So he must have liked it. What a creepy little man he must have been.

That’s all the pictures I have from the wax museum. I don’t have too much more to report about it, either, except for this: assuming they got all the proportions right for Marylin Monroe, she absolutely deserved her status as a sex symbol. Even in wax, she pushed all my right buttons.

jj

For thematic reasons, I’m going to skip ahead to the latter part of the vacation.

It was time to make my second attempt to find the clubs where the Beatles played. During the first trip I got flustered by my walk through the Herbertstrasse and plum forgot all about the Beatles.

This time, my pilgrimage was not going to get sidetracked. After all, my wife and son were with me, so I wasn’t going to get to gawk at prostitutes.

So we went to the St. Pauli district and started walking down the Reeperbahn. Billy and I got hungry, so we grabbed a bite to eat from KFC. Somehow a KFC in the most famous red-light district in the world seemed very funny to me. But there was also a Burger King and McDonald’s. Fast food—America’s gift to the sex trade!

Susanne got hungry, too, and bought a falafel sandwich. She shared it with Billy. I thought it a good family moment in which to take a picture:

After they finished eating, we headed down to the street which I knew from memory was the street on which the clubs where the Beatles played were on: the Grosse Freiheit, meaning “Big Freedom”.

The problem was, we walked down the street and saw nothing but bars and strip clubs and sex clubs. No Beatles. I walked around nervous and flustered: I was near Mecca but couldn’t find anything. Finally, Billy called us over. He had walked up a short alley and seen a plaque.

Yes, a plaque. As in: there’s no club or bar there anymore. Just a plaque. So I took a picture with Billy standing in front of it:

Billy, realizing it was important to me without knowing why, asked for my cell phone and took a close-up picture of the portion of the plaque to which he had pointed:

A plaque is what is left of the famous Star Club. Wikipedia tells me that the Star Club—or at least the building it was in—burned down in 1987. Why wasn’t that on the nightly news?

So we moved on. We went back out to the main street, and this time Susanne found a very small plaque just across the street from where the alley came out. An investigation showed that this was the world famous Kaiserkeller where the Beatles cut their teeth as real professional musicians, playing several hours a night, seven days a week. So I ran across the street and had Billy take my picture.

This, as you can see, is the “Grosse Freiheit 36″. You can see the plaque in the background over to the right.

There is no Kaiserkeller anymore.

Okay, I wasn’t crushed. But if you go to Rome and find out that the Sistine Chapel has been occupied by a restaurant chain and renamed The Olive Garden, you might find yourself shaking your head.

So my pilgrimage to the Holy sights of Hamburg was only a semi-success. But I at least got to eat some fried chicken (which I only get to do about once a year, since there is no fried chicken in my home town).

And this is my first multiple-photo post. I hope that doesn’t mean this page takes 20 minutes to load. Let me know.

jj

First up, my previous experience in Hamburg.

I had been to Hamburg before, but for only a few hours, which didn’t give me time to look around much. I had something I needed to do in person at the American Consulate, so I went there, did my business, looked around and went home.

Wait. I should, as an aside, tell what business I was on. Before I got married, I had to obtain a document which proved that I was single. Apparently other countries have this. It seems silly, since it is essentially proving a negative. No matter. The point is that no state in America—as far as I know—has such a document. So I had to go to the American Consulate. There I swore an oath that I was single and they gave me a piece of paper which said that I had sworn I was single. Why couldn’t I have made the same oath in German in front of a notary? Because it had to be a piece of paper from the American government. Right.

Anyway, on this first trip to Hamburg I didn’t do anything interesting. I went to the harbor, then looked around the famous Reeperbahn (where I didn’t see what the big deal was about: I went into a peep show where I got to look at a 50 year-old naked woman for about 60 seconds along with five other men while she begged us to pay her 20 DM for a “private show”; and I went into a sex shop which just looked like a sex shop but was the size of a small department store).

The most interesting thing I saw during this first trip was the less famous but still well known side street—Herbertstrasse— in the St. Pauli district through which only men are allowed to walk. There’s a gate on each end with a sign saying that children and women are not allowed. For me, this was like a written invitation: “Jeff, walk down this street!” Along the 70 or 80 yard long street there are maybe twenty houses—ten or so on each side—with large picture windows in which prostitutes sit wearing lingerie.

Two things impressed me to no end:

1. These women were beautiful. They had none of the junkie-skag-streetwalker look about them. Rather, they looked like Victoria’s Secret models. And since it was only 2PM, I was the only man on the street. The thought that I could simply pick out an attractive woman, pay her some money, have a bit of afternoon delight without the slightest chance of my girlfriend or parents or sisters or pastor or anyone else knowing about it…well…was a very strange feeling. I was struck by the utter ease and anonymity with which one can purchase flesh.

2. As I walked by each window, the woman would open it and invite me in. This, of course, shattered the illusion of “I’ll just walk by and do some window shopping and no one will notice.” The women noticed, and they wanted me. They really wanted me. They really wanted what was in my pants. In my back pocket. As I said, illusions were being shattered, and I shuffled rather quickly to the other end of the street, feeling red and embarrassed.

When I went through the gate at the other side, some late 50ish, conservatively dressed woman came up to me and said, “I’ll get you a woman for fifty marks.” I thanks-but-no-thanksed her and went on home to my girlfriend. But I have never ceased wondering, to this day: how much were the women in the windows? Stupid me for shuffling away quickly. I should have at least done my fantasy the favor of knowing a few more details.

jj

Northeim is pronounced “Nord hime”.

I’ve taught at least three courses there, all for unemployed people looking to improve their employability with some kind of certificate or other kind of evidence demonstrating a modicum of English skill.

These courses are provided by a school which generally provides courses for the unemployed. The school is literally on the wrong side of the tracks. I arrive on the train, walk to the end of the street and turn left under the tracks. To the right is the town. To the left is…well…the run-down, industrial, cheap-rent side of the town.

And the people there are, for the most part, decent people who are out of work and a bit desperate for a chance to improve their employability. I generally like them, and respect them.

But then there is the Kiosk.

In Germany, a Kiosk is a small convenience store or even smaller. If a school has a small room where they sell coffee and candy bars to starving students, it is called a Kiosk.

The school I work at in Northeim has a Kiosk.

And it’s a good thing, too, because the school—being on the wrong side of the tracks—isn’t near any other source for coffee and candy bars.

This Kiosk is a very small thing. Basically, a couple of unemployed kids—mind you, these are kids who are unemployed because they have never had a job before—sell you sandwiches, coffee, and usually have a cake or some waffles to offer as well.

They even have a cute name for it. They call it:

The Lunch Box

I’m not translating here. They call it “The Lunch Box” in English, and photocopy their daily specials—should they have any—and post them throughout the school.

So, several months ago, I go to The Lunch Box to buy my mid-morning coffee.

Stop. Let’s back up. EVERY morning that I work in Northeim I buy a cup of coffee from The Lunch Box before I start class, then I buy a second one mid-morning. The first cup of coffee I actually buy at the train station before getting on the train to Northeim. I save the cup, present it in Northeim, and they fill it for fifty cents (Euro cents, that is). My second cup—the mid-morning cup which is actually my third for the morning but my second from The Lunch Box—also costs fifty cents…UNLESS…I choose to buy a sandwich as well.

Sandwiches normally cost €1. But you can buy a sandwich together with a coffee for €1.30.

So one morning I go to The Lunch Box to buy my third cup of coffee and I’m…a bit hungry…so, I decide to get a coffee AND a sandwich.

I hand her my styrofoam cup and tell her what I want, and she says,

“That’s one Euro and fifty cents.”

I say, “That should be one Euro and thirty cents.”

She says, That’s one Euro and fifty cents.”

I point to the sign, which happens to be about two feet from my head, taped to the door to the small kitchen where she is selling her wares, and on the sign it says,

“Sandwich AND coffee: €1.30″

I point to the sign and say, “It should be one Euro and thirty cents.”

Now, in telling this story I might have given the impression that this was the first time I had done this. In fact, I had done this at least a dozen times. I am often hungry at the mid-morning break, and I often buy a sandwich with my coffee. For €1.30.

But on this morning, it was not going to be easy.

She said: “But that is only when you use one of our cups.”

I said: “I have never used one of your cups; I ALWAYS use one of these cups…”

Which she knew, of course.

Let’s back up a bit. I am strange. (All my regular readers know this.) And one of the signs of my strangeness is my…well…habitualness. In this case, I always gave them a styrofoam cup from the exact same place from which I buy my coffee at the train station. Which happens to be a fish and chips stand. So my styrofoam cup ALWAYS has this little red fish emblem on it, something like the bumper sticker fish which some Christians put on their cars. Very distinctive.

So this girl had filled coffee in my red-bumper-sticker-fish cup DOZENS of times, many of which were in combination with a sandwich—which cost me €1.30.

She said, “Ms. Soandso recently told us that these are the rules.”

AHA! New rules! Or old ones newly applied! Whatever!

I wasn’t accepting it.

I said, “well, I’ll pay you €1.30. That’s all I’m going to pay, because that’s what the sign says. If you don’t like it, you can tell your boss. But that’s what I’ll pay. You decide.” And I gave her a €2 coin and thirty cents.

So the poor girl (Why do I call her poor! Rather than frustrated, at this point she was just getting bitchy) actually gave me a €1 coin for my change, and whispered something nasty under her breath.

And that was that.

Except for it wasn’t.

The next week I returned to Northeim. I went to the Kiosk with my cup and asked for a cup of coffee.

The (same) girl said: “You aren’t getting anything from us.”

In German, I had received what is called a Hausverbot. I would not be allowed to buy anything anymore from the Kiosk.

I looked at her and laughed (which I’m sure she didn’t appreciate). I went to my class and told them the story and laughed some more.

The problem was, I still wanted coffee. So I went and found the director of the school and said, “Do you think you could get the Hausverbot lifted at the Kiosk? They won’t sell me any coffee anymore.” He looked at me strangely, then said, “Let’s go.”

Dear friends, perhaps I have bored you up till now. But here is the interesting part of the story.

We go to the Kiosk, and the big, dark-haired, unemployed (because she’s never had a job in her life) cow is there, and the school director says, “What’s the story here?” And she says, “Last week he didn’t pay for his coffee.”

I gave a puzzled look and said, “That is not true. I paid for my coffee. I paid €1.30 for a coffee and a sandwich. The sign here says…” (and I literally put my finger on the sign) “…that this is the price. It is not true that I did not pay.”

She said, “Ms. Soandso said that the discount only applies when someone uses one of OUR cups….”

I said, “Well, I could have used one of your cups and then just poured the coffee into my cup. The rule is silly.”

She said, “Those are our rules.”

The director said, “Excuse me.” To her: “No, those aren’t the rules. A coffee and sandwich costs €1.30, no matter what cup a person is using.” To me: “We apologize. There was a misunderstanding.”

I did not think that there was any kind of real misunderstanding, but that the girl was simply an idiot. Furthermore, she was falling into the horrible, nightmarish German insistence on “rule following” that—while 99% okay—can lead—has indeed historically led—to tragedy. Yes, we should usually follow rules. When they make sense. When they are ethically sound. We all must think about rules and what they mean. Americans and Germans included.

So I said, “Well, she still should have used her brain to think about whether the rule made sense.”

And he said, “Hey, wait a minute, let’s not start talking this way…”

And she started bitching very loudly.

And I said, “I’ll talk any way I want. This girl has an attitude problem and I am a customer here.”

And she started bitching VERY LOUDLY.

And I said, “YOU shut up!”

And he said, “Hey, wait a minute here…!”

And I said, “I’m not just a customer here; I’m a teacher here, and I do NOT ACCEPT a student talking to me in this manner, and I do not take the train here each morning to be treated like this by the students and trainees in this school!”

Subtext: You, Mr. School Director, have never paid for a single cup of coffee in this school ever. No, you come here every morning and fill an entire pitcher up to take back to your office. I—an itinerant teacher with no permanent contract here—not only pay for my coffee, but get bitched at by 19 year-old unemployed girls as if I were a piece of shit and have to argue about whether I should pay twenty cents extra to use my red-bumper-sticker-fish cup instead of making them put one more cup into the dishwasher.

And I stomped off to my class.

jj

Epilogue

Yes, the dark-haired cow was still working there when I returned for the next course. I avoided her. I kindly asked one of my students to go get my coffee.   Though I sent my red-bumper-sticker-fish cup with the student with.

So who won? Actually, I think she did.

As for the school director, whenever I saw him in the hallway he just smiled at me as if he knew I was working there but wasn’t sure who I was.

So who won? Against him, I did.

So the moral of this story (if there is one)?

The big, dark-haired, unemployed (because she’s never had a job in her life) cow won—is perhaps still winning. And this should be a lesson to us all.

jj

Sunday was open house at the new prison.  Here’s a link, though it’s all in German.

Billy and I went along with my friend Juergen and his son Johann.  Unfortunately, we did not take cameras, because the paper said that we would not be allowed to take cameras or cell phones (presumably because cell phones have cameras).  This was doubly unfortunate, because people all around us were taking pictures; the prohibition was apparently redundant, given the number of people.

Given the number of people.

Juergen and I wanted to see the inside of a prison, and this was a good chance to do so.

Apparently, about 25,000 other people had the same idea.

Damn!  I wish I had had a camera.  The line to get in—at least at the time we went through—was an hour long.  We spent another hour and a half taking the tour.  It was interesting in a small way, but in the large part disappointing.  The most interesting thing was…

…the number of people.

And while it was not exactly a party atmosphere, there was something…a bit…strange about it.  They were selling grilled sausages and drinks (including beer:  hey, I live in GERMANY!) for the people waiting in line.  And in the last room we visited in the prison itself—apparently some kind of work area for the future prisoners—they were selling all sorts of souvenirs.  You could buy a T-shirt, a baseball cap, a coffee mug, a cigarette lighter, an umbrella, or a shopping bag—each separately or a package of everything for 16 Euros.  I bought Billy a baseball cap.  I normally snap up T-shirts whenever I get the chance (why did no one offer a “I was in the Gettysburg Hospital—and lived to buy this T-shirt!”  T-shirt?  I would have bought it.)  But the one the prison had for sale I found aesthetically unpleasing (and a bit silly.  It said:  “I was in prison” on the front, and “but only for a visit” on the back.  I think they should give these away free to the prisoners when they leave.  Kind of a rehabilitation statement, if you know what I mean.)

So:  new prison, open house, 25,000 visitors.

Is that normal?

jj

German slang is just a bit different than American slang. In general, it isn’t nearly as flexible and rich. It also tends towards the scatalogical.

Here, you don’t say, “kiss my ass”. You say, “lick my ass”.

And although you won’t hear it in church, sweet little old ladies, small children, priests and pastors and nuns all say, “scheisse!” Which means, “shit!” This expression is so common that it hardly means more than “shucks” or “darn”.

But they don’t usually use the German equivalent of the word “fuck”. This makes dubbing Hollywood films not only difficult, but sometimes hilarious. Lately, they have given up and started translating a bit more literally—which is also funny in its own way. A friend of mine told me his wife walked out of the theater when watching the most recent Scorcese film. She had never in her life heard such vulgar language. There’s a whole generation of people who have never heard the German F-word in a movie before.

Sometimes they make up their own F-word expressions—they’ve got to keep up with the Americans, afterall. But the expressions don’t always make sense. A common one (not that using the F-word is at all common) is, “Go fuck yourself in the knee!”

What in the world does that mean?

But the expressions I hate the most have nothing to do with cussing. Rather, they are the expressions for something being really cool. The first word of choice is probably the word “cool” itself. This should be okay, I suppose, but it offends my ears because of how they pronounce it. They say, “Koo-uhl”. Yes, cool has two syllables.

A lesser-used variant is the word “krass”, which means…well…”crass”. Which is of course a good thing. Unless it isn’t. I guess we have the same problem in English.

Sometimes an expression doesn’t last. Two summers ago I heard some of my softball players using the expression “porno”. Also meaning a good thing. As in, “That catch you just made was porno”. This was a stupid expression, and as far as I know it has disappeared.

But the big winner for words which irritate me, in fact the most used word to mean “cool” other than the word “koo-uhl”, is “geil”. This is pronounced with a hard G and a long I sound, as in “ghile”. So one might say, “Oh, your shoes are geil!”

Why does this irritate me? Well, it is not only vulgar, it is grammatical nonsense. The word originally meant something like in heat—as in the birds and the bees during the mating season. Of course, it came to be used for humans as well, so in its most literal sense the word means “horny”. So one might say, “Oh, your shoes are horny!” Again, this is not only vulgar, it is ridiculous. How can shoes be horny? But then again, how can one copulate with one’s knee? It doesn’t have to make sense.

As is the case with “scheisse” (pronounced with a long I and with the last E also pronounced, as in “shissuh”), “geil” has become so wide spread that one hears it everywhere but in church. And this irritates me. Lately, I’ve even caught my wife and son using the term. Apparently the word is not to be stopped. Someday we’ll hear the pope used the term in some speech.

Well, maybe not. Someone must have standards.

jj

I live in Germany. Last I checked, Germany has the third largest economy in the world. Germany is rich, technologically advanced, and people here like to spend money.

But they can’t keep popular products on the shelves.

This winter, in particular, has been particularly irritating. My local supermarket just can’t seem to keep the shelves stocked with the items I buy. It can be anything, from toothpaste to toilet paper to toast.

Today it started with one of my favorite snacks: Snyders of Hannover pretzel pieces, Jalopeno flavored. I was hoping to stock up, since I hadn’t seen any on the shelves for at least six weeks. I figured six weeks was time enough to restock. I was wrong.

On a roll, I decided to see if they had my favorite chicken wings—spicy honey-barbecue Canadian style. I found them the last time I looked for them, so I thought maybe they were restocking them again on a regular basis. You see, I had gone from October through January without seeing them, so I thought—apparently wrongly—that they had simply discontinued and then recontinued them. But no, they weren’t there.

So I went to buy some ramen, which was the main reason for going shopping this afternoon. I usually get duck flavored ramen from Thailand. But the shelf where they used to keep them was filled with some kind of cookies or something. So I roamed the store until I found the new location for the noodles. They had shrimp and chicken flavor (which I bought) but no duck. (By the way: they did have honey mustard flavored pretzel pieces, just not jalapeno.)

The last thing on my personal shopping list was a lemon cake.

Out of stock.

Of course, the stuff on my list for my wife and son was dutifully there, which meant I spent money on them but not on myself.

I once talked about this to a professor of business to whom I give private English lessons. He just laughed and agreed it was a mystery which could not be explained. We also talked about how bakeries run out of bread and bread rolls, especially on Sunday mornings. Why does this happen? Are the people not doing the math? If I turn away 20 customers who would have spent five euros each at bakery A, I lose 100 Euros in sales. If I throw away (or give to a local food bank or some other charity) five Euros worth of bread and bread rolls to make sure I have enough to sell to those 20 customers, I am 95 Euros ahead of the game. If I own fifteen bakeries in a chain serving this fine town, I have earned an extra 1,425 Euros. If I do this every Sunday, I earn an extra 74,100 Euros per year. All I have to do is take the risk of throwing away a few bucks’ worth of unsold bread and bread rolls.

But back to the supermarket: what I do not—what I cannot—understand is why it should take several weeks to restock a certain item. I can imagine a Walmart not having the Stan and Ollie chocolate frog buttermilk mint ripple ice cream I like on a single occasion, but I bet there will be some in the freezer in a day or two. Okay, it’s a weird flavor: it might even take three or four days.

Here in the Democratic Republic of Germany, however, it might take two or three months before I see the product again.

And let’s not even begin to discuss the absence of Hostess fruit pies.

I am an unhappy consumer.

jj

Telling my story about a French toilet in Spain, and reading about a similar toilet in India, and remembering similar toilets in Taiwan—well, I saw a pattern. Seeing a pattern, one looks for a Greater Truth.

Here is the greater truth: Squat Toilets.

The Greater Truth is that the “squat toilet” can be found all over the world. Just google squat toilet and you’ll see I’m right. China, Japan, Turkey, India, Bangladesh…you get the picture. The squat toilet is a general fixture in the Orient.

So why do they have squat toilets in France and Spain? Okay: Spain was occupied by the Moors for 700 years. The Moors were North African Muslims, and Islam is “oriental”. Perhaps squat toilets thus moved north from the middle east to the Moors to the Spaniards and north to the French. But who knows?  Is there a standard historical work on toilets?

It is a great mystery. I mean, the French pride themselves on being civilized. They have their “ooh la la” language and Parisian fashion and the world’s absolute best bread in the baguette. They have their fancy wine and cuisine. They have their well-educated political elite and ultra-sophisticated attitudes towards just about everything in the universe.

But they have squat toilets.

Not everywhere, perhaps. Your hotel room in Paris likely has a sit-down toilet (it also likely has a bidet—but that’s another story altogether). But go to a a normal bathroom in a normal restaurant in a normal town and you might very well have to use a squat toilet.

This is the French Mystery. Why would a country which could create something so civilized and perfect as a croissant not wish to perfect and standardize basic hygiene?  Is French culture all about outward appearance—well-dressed, well-coiffed, and perfumed on the outside, but psychologically indifferent to any advances in shit-removal technology.

Here in Germany things are different. I have never seen a squat toilet. But EVERY toilet, public or private, has a toilet brush nearby—which you are expected to use. That’s right: in Germany, whether you are at a train station or an airport or a gas station or a campground, you can expect that the toilet you use will be relatively clean. Because after you flush you ARE expected to look at the toilet bowl and use the brush to brush away any remaining shit-streaks or particles so the next person doesn’t have to look at them.

Germany, in general, has the cleanest public toilets of any place I have ever been.

Which I find to be one of the nicer things about Germany.

jj

Okay, our house has three toilets, and only mine looks like this:

What you will notice is that the hole where the waste goes is NOT under your asshole.  What this means is that when you defecate you defecate onto a shelf.  Later, when you flush, the waste will be sent down the hole.  But until you flush, you have a nice pile of steaming, stinking shit to examine and analyze.  This is very healthy.  When your doctor asks about your “stool”, well, you can give a good answer, because it was sitting on this little shelf and you had time to look at it and smell it.

Again, my personal bathroom has such a toilet.  What this means for me in real life is that I no longer read for twenty minutes while doing my business.  I shit, I wipe, I flush, I leave.  I have other things in life to analyze besides my shit.

jj

One of the jobs I started this week was in Northeim (pronounced “nord hime”).

I worked there last year. This year, I am always hungry. This is new for me. In the past I never had any appetite before 1 or 2 in the afternoon. BUT: I haven’t had any tobacco since my Gettysburg experience, and I am now STARVING in the mornings.

This is all an introduction to tell you about an experience last year in Northeim. Although I wasn’t hungry, I still needed my coffee. So each morning I went into the “cafeteria” of this small school. You’ve got to get the picture in your head to understand this story. This isn’t a real cafeteria: it’s just a room the size of a normal classroom, but they make coffee and sell waffles and sandwiches and such.

So I walk into this room to get my coffee and I see four tables set for guests, as if there was going to be a party or something. Each table was set for four or five people. Each table had a big plate in the middle, filled with Mett.

Apparently a group of manly men handworker types were going to have breakfast together. At least six or eight manly men handworker types were already there eating breakfast.

And they were eating Mett.

Again, each table had a plate of Mett in the middle. I estimated—and I think my estimate was probably pretty accurate—that each plate hat about five pounds of Mett on it. So there were four tables, each with a plate of five pounds of Mett. That’s 20 pounds of Mett for 15 to 20 manly men handworker types for breakfast.

What is Mett?

Mett is raw ground pork.

So thes manly men handworker types grab a breakfast roll, cut it in half, and smear raw ground pork onto it. And that is breakfast.

I watched one guy smear his roll with Mett and put a few sliced onions on it and squirt some ketchup on it.

I watched the guy, but bought my coffee and left without tossing my cookies.

Later I told the class what I had just seen. They all found it funny—though none of them would themselves have eaten such a breakfast. Some found it as disgusting as I did. But they told me that such a breakfast is called “Feurwehrmarmelade”.

Roughly translated: “Fireman’s Jam”.

I’d rather just have a cigarette.

jj (craving tobacco at the moment)