just john

I'm back in German class, apparently not having learned everything there is to known about speaking it in 7 months of tutoring. This particular morning involved a listening exercise with a short film entitled  "Schwartzfahrer." or 'Black rider,' a German term for people who ride the transit system without buying a ticket. The film featured a very old-school German woman bitching about the state of modern Germany. She received a modest dose of justice at the end. The point I was interested in was that our teacher kept referring to one of the main characters, who was black, as "der Schwartze." I just had to ask if that was politically correct. Turns out it is. More interesting was her expansion of the topic. Germans have a habit sticking an -er at the end of your place of residence to refer to the people. Munchners, Stuttgarters, Berliners (also of th famed Kennedy "I am a donut" comment and so on. Several years ago, Germany had a lot of immigrants from Niger and followed their own naming convention. The stigma a political incorrectness didn't exist here until it was explained to them from outside (the U.S.). That's pretty much it. The last thing I saw tonight on the way home from the gym was a license plate reading J EW 39. First letter for the town, last digits for the registration...

You can't even legally get an ASS MAN plate in South Carolina.

As I've said before, there is racism here but it's directed at a different group of people. It's odd, though, that once you pull out the (traditional American) bias, vocabulary that makes me cringe is no more than everyday speech here.

During my, largely useless, cultural training in the U.S. they showed me a graph of, let's call it an index of depression, that bottomed out around three months and then climbed back up again. Statistically, I'd say I pretty well followed the curve. Things are really approaching a sense of normalcy. For a while I was so frantic and hurried I kept forgetting to go to the bathroom, the end result being a mad dash when I got home. I'm happy to report the situation was due to temporary stress and not a bladder control problem.

This will be a four day weekend due to Easter holidays and I hope to be motivated enough to try out Frankfurt this weekend.