Europe without barriers

The Czech Republic has kept quite a low profile since it came out from behind the Iron Curtain, split with Slovakia and joined the European Union a few years ago. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen the Czech Republic making the news as I was growing up. But even I can remember the diplomatic incident a couple of years ago that caused this quietly prospering state to make headlines around the world.

Each year, the presidency of the European Union passes to a different member country. Per tradition, the presiding state commissions an artwork to adorn the EU headquarters in Brussels for the year. The resulting installation is generally bland, inoffensive, and unimpeachably PC.

In 2008, it was the Czech Republic’s turn at the presidency. They decided to commission a work addressing the mission statement of their tenure: “Europe without barriers”. And they chose David Černy, a Czech sculptor, as the visionary for the project.

Černy is one of the most controversial artists in Europe today, and his fingerprints are all over the Czech capital city of Prague.  He likes to take advantage of his country’s willingness to laugh at itself. Case in point: Miska Republika, a statue installed in front of the Kafka Museum, in which two men with motorised pelvises pee all over a map of the Czech Republic.

There is even a small plaque at the base of the statue explaining that by SMS-ing a certain number, you can have the pissers spell out a message for you. (I had stupidly left my phone at the hotel. D’oh!) Can you imagine this installation lasting even a week in Washington DC? I don’t think so.

So… you can imagine that Černy didn’t take the, ahem, expected approach to this very visible EU-sponsored project. He told the Czech government that he was collaborating on a nice, pretty artwork with one artist from each of the other member states. But behind the curtain, he was working on something a lot more provocative.

To the abject horror of diplomats across the continent, Černy splashed the crassest stereotypes of each EU nation on a 16x16m, six-tonne installation right across the front of Europe’s halls of power. Germany was depicted as a maze of autobahns laid out in the shape of a swastika. Sweden was flat-packed inside a big Ikea cardboard box. Portugal was a cutting board containing slabs of meat in the shape of its former colonies.

Černy addressed the theme of removing barriers, all right. He just decided to do it in a very confronting way. He called his work Entropa, with the subtitle Stereotypes are barriers which must be removed.

Černy’s intent was to provoke people, and in that respect at least, he was wildly successful. The response to the unveiling of Entropa was loud and livid. The government of Bulgaria, which was depicted as an interconnected web of squat toilets, was particularly furious. The Czech government was in damage control.

In the end, the artwork was taken down several months early. It was attracting attention to Brussels, certainly, but for all the wrong reasons.

When I was planning my trip to Prague, I found out that Entropa had been brought back to Černy’s home city, and was being displayed at the newly-opened DOX museum. After following all the kerfuffle on the news, there was no way I could leave the city without seeing this sight for myself.

It was a bit of an adventure trying to find this contemporary art gallery tucked away in the suburbs of Prague. After following some bad tram directions from my hostel receptionist, I ended up in a random Prague suburb that was nowhere to be found on either of the maps I was carrying. My grasp of the Czech language is for all practical purposes non-existent. Although it didn’t seem like a shady area, it was rather lonely and I had only a very high-level idea of where I was.

With some targeted wandering, I found a real estate agency that had a more comprehensive city map in the window. As I was finding my bearings on that map, three cops happened to walk past. Using a combination of my sign language and badly-pronounced street names, and one policeman’s fragmented knowledge of English, I managed to have them walk me to the area where the map I was carrying started. And then I was back in business.

When I finally got to DOX, I made a beeline for the courtyard which is now home to the notorious Entropa.

The photo gives you an idea of the imposing scale, but in person, Entropa has more than just a static visual impact. It’s a whizzing, whirring, howling blur of colourful, moving parts. The cars on the German autobahn actually move. Romania, which is depicted as a Dracula theme park, emits ghostly wails every now and then. And the bagpipes sticking out of Northern Ireland actually play too. (Btw – I thought bagpipes were Scottish…)

Other, ahem, “highlights”:

• France simply has a big banner across it reading “GRÈVE!” (STRIKE!)
• The Netherlands is completely flooded. The only structures tall enough to stay above water are minarets.

• Luxembourg is a golden nugget with a “For Sale” sign sticking out of it.
• Cyprus has been jigsawed almost completely in two, with one half swinging precariously in the wind.
• Denmark is built out of Lego, with the colours forming a turbaned face that looks suspiciously like the Prophet Muhammed – although the artist denies that this was intentional. Yeah, right!
• There’s an empty space where England’s meant to be, ‘cos they’re such Eurosceptics.
• And the Czech Republic itself? It’s a neon sign flashing up very controversial quotes from a former president, who Černy likes to refer to in interviews as the dick.

My first thought on seeing this in person: this guy has got balls the size of small planets. I can’t imagine a more effective way of saying “f#%* you” to an entire continent than using its taxpayers’ money to produce something like this.

Černy has been accused many times in the past of simply being an attention whore. And I have to say, some of his ideas certainly seem controversial for the sake of being controversial. For example, he proposed to install a pissing giant on the roof of Prague’s National Theatre, a plan which was shot down by the city council. He told the the council that they were pussies for not going through with the idea, but didn’t really have a good explanation for how the public consciousness would be enriched by a overgrown plexiglass man bestowing 24/7 golden showers on the national theatre.

(And, well, the guy just seems to have a disturbing preoccupation with peeing in general. In Entropa, Lithuania is depicted as a brown field with three hobbits pissing off the side of it. Why so much urinating, Davo? Why?!)

On the other hand, maybe the guy has a point with Entropa. As confronting as the stereotypes depicted are, they do exist subconsciously in the minds of even the best of us, I think. (Yes, I realise I just put words in the mouths of an entire continent of people.) If the EU really does dream of bringing Europe together, they need to win over public opinion to make that happen. And if the continued failure of EU-related referenda is anything to go by, Europeans are still extremely suspicious of about bringing down the barriers that currently separate them. Do deep-seated, subconscious stereotypes play a role in that? They must, to some degree.

So I’m not sure how history will record this little diplomatic furore in fifty years’ time. Maybe Černy will be remembered as just another celebrity-seeking provocateur. Or maybe he’ll be hailed as a genius. But I think that will take a while.

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Wow – second post in a row about art. I must be turning into an arty-farty European… oh look Mum, another stereotype!

The art of filling a rainy day

One upshot of moving to Munich’s university district is that I now live only blocks away from the city’s clutch of prestigious Pinakotheks (art galleries).

I completely ignored all museums through summer and autumn, reasoning that I should make the most of the weather while it was still  conducive to outdoor exploration. But finally, a few weekends ago, I found myself twiddling my thumbs on a cold, rainy Sunday, and decided to go see some of what my new neighbourhood had to offer.

I soon discovered that the Pinakotheks offer one of the best deals in Munich. Every Sunday. entrance to each art gallery is a mere €1. This is not a cheap city to live in, and I was pleasantly surprised!

Now, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m something of a Neanderthal when it comes to art. I can only spend a short time in galleries full of old paintings, because there’s only so many portraits of kings and duchesses and the Virgin Mary that I can take. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to the Prado and the Uffizi, and they were both amazing. But after two hours, I was done. Done.

And really high-concept modern art goes completely over my head. When I visited Berlin, I visited a tiny but greatly feted art gallery called Kunst Werke, which was featuring the work of a contemporary German artist. Of the perhaps dozen installations, I felt like I connected with about two of them. The others were completely wasted on me. For example, there was one work where two antique projectors were creating a little Venn diagram on the opposite wall with their yellow haloes of light. And that’s it. Not only did I not understand it, I didn’t even understand the explanation in the little booklet I got at the front desk. D’oh.

But enough complaining about my art illiteracy. On this rainy Sunday in Munich, I decided to visit the newest addition to the Pinakothek family: Museum Brandhorst. Partly because it’s new, partly because I wanted to give modern art another chance, but mostly because the building is rainbow and stripy. And anyone who knows me knows I am a sucker for rainbow and stripy.

Having paid my single paltry Euro for admission, I wandered into one of the few art galleries I have ever thoroughly enjoyed. The stuff in there was edgy and interesting, while still being accessible enough for barbarians like me. Of course, there was loads of Warhol (everyone loves Warhol):

 

And plenty of visually pleasing finger-painting:

But also some genuinely amazing, confronting stuff. There was this work by Damien Hirst, which was giant boxes full of medical waste that was generated treating civilians in a war zone. It was called “Waste, Twice”.

Oh, and this room full of er, larger-than-life turds, accompanied by a quotation from a French philosopher saying that no great civilisation has ever existed that didn’t figure out how to nicely dispose of human waste. “If we gave this phenomenon what we might call its fundamental import, we would find the prodigious analogy that exists between sewage and culture.” Deep.

And, well, a lot more interesting stuff. I won’t spoil it all for you. I will definitely recommend this gallery to anyone who visits me in Munich on a rainy day. Talk about bang for your buck (literally)!

Carnival comes to town

One thing I’ve been amazed by in Germany is how good the locals are at making their cold, bleak, snowy winter months bearable, even fun. From the magic of the Christmas markets, to the playful romp of the Perchten, to the little wooden shacks selling hot chestnuts on the street corners of Munich, there’s really a unique charm to winter here that I’ve never experienced anywhere else I’ve lived.

Mid-February marks the start of Lent in the Christian calendar, and while I can scarcely imagine the merry folk of Munich giving up meat and beer for four weeks, the festival of Fasching that precedes Lent seems much more up their alley. I’d never heard the term “Fasching” before (it’s only called that in southern Germany and Austria), but I had heard of the famous Carnivals in Cologne and Rio, and the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. I had just never made the connection that they were all regional variations on the same thing.

Everyone told me that if I wanted to do Fasching right, I should go to Cologne, which sees an Oktoberfest-like influx of party animals every year for its Carnival. But I found out about it too late, and the few train tickets and accommodations remaining had already become prohibitively expensive. So it was Munich and Fasching – not  Cologne and Carnival – for me. Luckily, I have no point of comparison, so despite the fact that it didn’t turn the city completely upside down, it was still a nice week-long diversion for me!

Fasching actually has its roots in pre-Christian traditions, but from what I can see, these days it’s mainly a big excuse for a party. You leave the office around lunchtime on Faschingsdienstag (Fasching Tuesday), change into a quirky costume (if you weren’t already wearing it at work – one of my colleagues turned up in full storm trooper regalia), and head out to have the kind of good time that results in distinctly suboptimal productivity at work the following day.

The festival kicked off on the first Sunday of February with a parade through the streets of the city. I’m sure it didn’t measure up to Köln’s parade, but what the procession lacked in size it certainly made up for it in colour and music.

The participants of the parade seemed to come from all walks of life, from retirees to schoolkids, hipsters to immigrants. For that hour or so, the dull, off-white sky didn’t seem so oppressive somehow.

Handfuls of confetti and candy emanated from each float as the procession made its way down Brienner Strasse, chased by throngs of excited children trailing sagging bags of loot. At one point, I was almost knocked senseless by a full packet of Liebnitz arrowroot biscuits, thrown with abandon by a guy in a Viking helmet, drinking beer at the helm of a wheeled wooden ship. Good times.

In the days leading up to the parade, I noticed that all the local bakeries were starting to stock up on different kinds of krapfen, or cream-filled donuts. As always, there is a story behind this tradition.

In pre-Christian times, at this time of the year each town would crown one of its men as “king” for the year. In order to randomly choose the king, the town baker would bake a single coin into one of a big batch of krapfen. When the donuts were distributed, whoever got the one with the coin would become king for the week. I suppose it mustn’t have been as good a gig as it sounds, or someone would have volunteered. I assume there’s some kind of government regulation against baking metal objects into food these days, but donuts are still king during Fasching.

(Btw, “krapfen” is a southern word too. In the rest of Germany, they are called Berliners. As in “ich bin ein Berliner”.)

Being a health-conscious gal, I can very rarely actually bring myself to buy and eat a donut. They are so deeply out of the question that they don’t even register on my radar when I scan the wares at a bakery – kind of like the choc-chip pancake-wrapped sausages in the freezer aisle at American supermarkets. But in recent weeks, there were some really eye-catching krapfen displays in bakery windows across Munich – piña colada, Vienna almond, Jäger tea, apple, cointreau and more.

After walking past this amazingness day after day, I was, unsurprisingly, starting to crave for donuts for the first time in years. Happily, the weekend before Faschingsdienstag, my marathon training schedule called for running my longest distance ever – 23km. I couldn’t think of a more guilt-free, seasonally appropriate way to break my donut drought.

So off I went on my run, a one way slog from my apartment at Universität to the suburb of Unterschleissheim in the north of Munich. I took the train back, and stopped in by my local bakery on the way home. Still sweaty in my running gear, I ordered the sugary treat I had admired in the window for the last fortnight – the Kinder-Krapfen (kids’ donut), schmeared with tan-coloured icing and dotted with Gummi bears and Smarties. Mmmmm. Mmmmmmmm.

My poor krapfen never even had a chance to be photographed for posterity. It was so delicious, that before I knew it I was licking the crumbs off my fingers. Light and fluffy, it almost melted in my mouth, and the chocolate-cinnamon cream inside made me a happy, contented woman. And, well, I’m a sucker for anything that involves Gummi bears. I’d forgotten how amazing a really good donut can taste.

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And the Faschingsparty I was invited to in my last post? Well, I had actually decided not to go – I was really tired from the run, and had to wake up at 6 the next morning for a full day of skiing. I’m not good in large groups of strangers at the best of times, and at this point my energy was ebbing fast. But since my neighbours had been nice enough to invite me, I decided to at least go and make my excuses in person.

So I went downstairs and rang the bell. The door was answered by a random dude in a clown costume. “Ist Vroni da?” I enquired, asking after the one person at the party whom I’d ever met in my life. The clown craned his neck to look behind him and caught the attention of Veronika, who excitedly flounced over in her black-and-teal flapper outfit, and started chattering to me in rapid German. “Oh! Hi! Hi! You came! Come in! Have a drink!”

“Well, actually, I’m really tired, and I have to –”

“Ach, alcohol makes everything better! You’ll stop being tired after a couple. Come on!”

And she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the room. Seconds later, she thrust a plastic cup of spiked orange juice into my hand. Everyone was in wacky costumes – Hercule Poirot, Charlie Chaplin, hippies. My favourite was a girl dressed up as cartoon onomatopoeia – on her front and back she was wearing giant jagged cardboard speech bubbles saying “BANG!” Awesome. It was kind of like Halloween, except none of the guys were dressed scary, and none of the girls were dressed naughty.

In the end I landed up staying for three hours and having lots of fun – possibly due to the liquid courage of my new favourite mixed drink, Amaretto and OJ. Thanks, Fasching!

Making sense of the madness

Nuremberg is the second-biggest city in Bavaria after Munich, and there’s lots of reasons to love it. Like so many German cities, the architecture is gorgeous. There’s a big fortress on the hill where you can walk up and watch the sun set over the red rooftops of the old town.

It’s the spiritual home of lebkuchen, and that, in my opinion, would be reason enough on its own to go there and never leave. The city also boasts Germany’s most celebrated Christmas market, and is reputed to have the best sausages in the land. Gingerbread, glühwein, bratwurst – what’s not to like?

But the city of Nuremberg has a dark past. If you played the word association game with people outside Germany, I’m guessing the first thing the name “Nuremberg” would conjure up would be the infamous Nuremberg rallies.

Bavaria was the spiritual home of the Nazi movement, and Nuremberg was praised to the skies as “the most German city in Germany”. The city received its ultimate “compliment” when it was chosen as the venue for the Nazi Party rallies in the 20’s and 30’s – giant gatherings of the party faithful, replete with fearsome military displays, kooky pseudo-religious rituals, and of course, fervent adoration of the infallible Führer.

The huge parade ground of Zeppelinfeld (Zeppelin Field) was specially built on the outskirts of Nuremberg by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, to host these party rallies. Special railway stations were constructed to deal with the influx of thousands of enthusiastic visitors, and giant tent cities would sprout up on each occasion to accommodate them.

When the Nazis were finally defeated in 1945, Germany was split into four parts, each ruled by one of the major Allied powers (America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union). Bavaria came under US military control, and one of the most iconic images of that decade is the footage of the American forces blowing up the giant swastika towering over the Zeppelinfeld.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

After the war, the Allies began an intense campaign of “denazification” to destroy Nazism as comprehensively in an ideological sense as it already had been militarily. An Allied unit called the Psychological Warfare Division was set up to instill a sense of “collective guilt” among the German people – that the atrocities of the period were the fault of the entire nation, not just the Nazi elite. Graphic films of the concentration camps were screened across the country, and ordinary Germans were conscripted to exhume mass graves and rebury the corpses of the victims.

Then there was the question of what to do with the prominent party buildings commissioned by Hitler. Should they be ignominiously destroyed and forgotten, as Hitler’s body was by Soviet troops after his suicide in Berlin? Or should they be preserved as a reminder never to allow history to repeat itself? You could plausibly argue for both sides.

In the case of Nuremberg, it was decided to go with the latter option, and I think they’ve done a good job. You can still walk on the Zeppelinfeld today, and it’s interesting to see what the government has done with it. Instead of destroying it completely, they’ve selectively taken down some of the more imposing parts of the structure (the big swastika for example, and some of the towers around the grandstand). The bleachers have been abandoned to nature and are overgrown with thick weeds. The Nazi pretensions to grandeur have been belittled by turning over what remains to much more mundane uses. The main marching area has been converted to football fields (and is occasionally a venue for large concerts). Can you imagine having to play your weekly soccer game here?! It would be surreal.

If you stand on the balcony from where Hitler used to speak, you look out over a truck parking lot, separated from the football fields by a four-lane stretch of road where a group of petrolheads were doing wheelies in the snow when I came here a second time. It’s a deservedly ignominious fate for a soapbox that spawned so much cruelty and suffering. Well played, Nuremberg.

Right next door to the Zeppelinfeld, the half-finished Kongresshalle (Congress Hall) also remains intact. It’s the largest Nazi-era building still standing. But it’s been converted into the Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Centre), a museum chronicling the rise, rule and fall of the Nazi party. The exhibition is absolutely outstanding. You come to understand how Hitler managed to bring an entire nation of ordinary people unquestioningly in line with his extremist agenda. This is certainly something you cannot miss when visiting Nuremburg.

A few weeks before I went to Nuremberg, I visited Dachau, the first concentration camp built by the Nazis (it’s just outside Munich). It wasn’t exactly a fun day, but it was educational. My experience in Berlin was the same. All throughout Germany, the horrors of the Nazi era have been unflinchingly documented.

Not to excuse what happened, obviously, but you have to give this country a ton of credit for being brutally honest about its past and trying to understand how it was allowed to happen. You don’t see the same mea culpas from many countries who still chastise Germany about the Nazi period, yet have had equally shameful periods in their own past, and way longer to come to terms with them. I don’t see a slavery museum on the Mall in Washington DC, for instance. And Australia still celebrates its national day on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, dispossessing the original inhabitants of their land and beginning two centuries of their decimation and misery.

There was a neat ending to the Nazi period for Nuremberg, though. During the denazification period, the city became the scene of what are now known as the Nuremberg trials, in which the big wigs of the Nazi party who still remained alive were tried for their war crimes. Incredibly, many of them denied all knowledge of their own party’s policy of systematic genocide, even though they had signed with their own hands the orders that brought these horrific acts about. The Dokumentationszentrum has video footage from these trials, and it’s pretty gobsmacking to watch these guys baldly lying about their involvement. What utter creeps.

It’s a shame that after two visits to Nuremberg, I just spent an entire entry talking about Nazis. It really is a beautiful city, I promise. I’ll have to go back there a third time and come back with a blog post that’s solely about lebkuchen and sausage…

Banana bread diplomacy

I love my life here in Munich – the job is great, learning German is an everyday adventure, and the city provides a never-ending supply of new things to explore. But I have to confess, there some things I really do miss here.

One is the wonderful circle of friends I had in Seattle. Although I’ve made some good acquaintances here and my colleagues are awesome, my, ahem, developing German skills make me feel pretty socially retarded at times.

To be honest, I think I like my own company a little too much, or I probably would have put more effort into meeting new people. I spend a lot of time on my own here (hence the blog name). But sometimes, a gal just wants to call someone up and go for some pad thai, y’know? Around holiday time, I had to stop going to the Christmas markets after a while, because walking around by myself seeing everyone drinking glühwein with their friends was kind of depressing me.

By extension, another thing I miss here is being able to feed people. I adore cooking, and these days it’s not as easy to find willing guinea pigs for whatever recipe I’m dying to try out. I have to be a lot more judicious with my grocery shopping and cooking to make sure I don’t end up throwing out half the contents of my fridge every fortnight. My backlog of “to try” recipes is growing by the week.

A seemingly unrelated dilemma helped me make baby steps towards rectifying both these deficiencies: the bananas in my fruit bowl were starting to go soft. And there is really only one right answer to what you should do when you have overripe ‘nanners: make banana bread.

So I baked some bread, and ate three giant delicious slices with impunity because I was running 22km that afternoon. (If you’re wondering why runners run, that’s one of your reasons right there. If you love eating, I highly recommend you learn to love running – your life will instantly attain new levels of awesome.) But then I still had 9 giant slices of banana bread left, and they certainly weren’t going to fit into my belly, nor were they going to still taste good for my colleagues on Monday.

Then, I remembered something. During my first couple of weeks in Munich, I had met a random Canadian PhD student who’d been here for two or three years. She told me that she’d spent her first six months in Germany holed up in her lab and her apartment, too scared to strike up any non-essential conversations on account of her terrible German. One day, she finally decided enough was enough. She spent the morning baking, and walked up and down the stairwell of her building, ringing on doorbells and handing out brownies.

“Oh”, I said, “I didn’t know Germans did the whole randomly-pop-in-and-say-hello-to-strangers thing. It doesn’t seem in line with the national character, does it?”

“Oh, it totally isn’t!” she said. “They all looked at me like I was dangerously insane. But they liked the brownies. And now they all say hello to me on the stairs. I’m the girl on the second floor with the brownies.”

In a burst of resolve, I decided that I would go downstairs and offer my neighbours some of my banana bread. It couldn’t be that bad, right? I think the people who live below me are students, because there are four names on each apartment door, and I’ve never seen anyone in the building over 30. And students are generally nice. So I grabbed my container full of ‘nannery goodness and walked down one flight of stairs.

And suddenly, I was terrified. For about five minutes, I just stood on that fourth floor landing, silently freaking out. I sidled from one door to the other, trying to decide which set of names looked the friendliest.

I finally decided on the apartment directly below mine, since one of the names on the door was Irish – possibly an exchange student? If so, maybe this mob would be more patient with my craptastic Deutsch. And even if they weren’t, offering them some banana bread would at least assuage some of my guilt about the fact that they have to hear me walking across my creaky floors at 5:30 every morning.

After picking a door, it took me another full two to three minutes to muster the courage to ring the doorbell. I started to imagine that someone inside was looking through their peephole wondering what the hell I was doing out there, and that made me even more nervous.

Finally, I grew a pair (not literally) and hit the d0orbell. I heard some movement inside, and then a muffled female voice: “Ja, hello?” Crap, they weren’t even going to open the door. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

“Er, hi. Mein Name ist Urmila, ich wohne auf der 5. Stock. Ich hab’ viel zu viel Bananenbrot gebacken. Möchtest du ein Stück?”

(Hi, my name’s Urmila, I live upstairs. [I totally piecemealed that sentence using my limited vocabulary.] I made way too much banana bread, would you like a piece?)

Oh lord, I thought, please let there have been less than three grammatical mistakes in that ad lib. And should I have used “Sie”, not “du”? I can’t tell how old the person behind the door is. Help?!

There was a pause. And then the door opened to reveal a girl around my age (so “du” was okay – phew!). She looked a little bemused, but not in an omg-is-she-a-stalker kind of way. I held out my tray full of banana bread in appeasement for the way I’d just discombobulated her mother tongue. And then, in German, she invited me in.

I walked into her living room, and she told me that she’d been asleep. Oh bollocks, bad start. But she didn’t seem to mind. She took some banana bread, and we chatted for a few minutes. As I headed out (leaving another couple of pieces for her roommates), she invited me to a Fasching party at their place that evening. She was a nice girl!

I walked back up the stairs to my apartment and sat down at the kitchen table. That encounter had gone better than I thought, but I really didn’t have the wherewithal to go knock on any more doors. It was exhausting.

This is the real reason I haven’t made any friends, I thought. I’m happy to yak for 45 minutes in terrible German to a random shopkeeper in Regensburg, because I’m never going to see them again, and therefore I don’t really care how stupid I sound. But when it comes to trying to make friends, you don’t want someone’s mental index of you to be “that foreign girl who talks like she’s in kindergarten”. And forcing a German person to speak to me entirely in English in their own country seems like a cop-out – I don’t want to do it. I’d rather be friendless. (Like I said. I like my own company too much.)

So I’ve made it into a Catch 22 situation (or, as I heard a German once call it, a “hen and egg problem”). If I don’t learn to speak German, I won’t make any friends. But if I don’t make any friends, who am I going to practise on?

It’s really hard, trying to make a connection with someone in a language you’re still learning. You can’t express your personality, you can’t pull out the anecdotes and idiosyncratic figures of speech that make you you. Hell, half the time you’re asking the other person to talk slower just so you can understand what they’re saying. You just have to plough on, knowing full well that you probably sound like an idiot, and hoping the person will appreciate your efforts and be patient with you. The entire process is totally humbling. But each step, each small achievement is also very satisfying.

As my manager at work once told me in a totally different context, I have to stop being such a perfectionist. I can’t keep standing in the background too scared of making mistakes to even open my mouth.

So I might have only given away a third of my banana bread today, but I’m still happy with my baby step. I have to keep pushing myself out of my shell, no matter how much my pride gets dented. The ultimate reward is well worth the - *gasp* – mistakes. Let’s see how this Faschingsparty goes – no pressure, no diamonds…

Excuse me ma’am, I think your epidermis is showing

I arrived in Germany for the first time in the dog days of summer, and it didn’t take too many trips to local parks and lakes to confirm that people here are quite comfortable in their own skins. FKK (Freikörper Kultur, or “free body culture”) is alive and well in Germany.

It’s quite noticeable after several years on the more prudish side of the Atlantic. The city parks here have a designated section for nude bathing in summer. (Nude senior citizens playing volleyball – I promise it’s a sight you won’t easily forget.) Watching the screens at the gym one morning, I saw a news story featuring uncensored footage of topless Ukrainian women leading a protest march (don’t ask me, I had no audio). And in a recent nationwide poll of attitudes to the new full body scanners being deployed at airports around the world, most Germans are fine with having a stranger seeing the outline of their naked body.

In a nutshell: nudity is not such a big deal here.

It makes sense when you think about it. We all have arms and legs and body hair and private parts – so what’s to hide? In a secure, modern, civilised society, what are we trying to protect ourselves from, exactly? When you consider the gratuitous violence that’s par for the course in Hollywood, it seems almost laughable that Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction could cause such an uproar.

Of course, there’s a difference between being able to accept that logic intellectually, and actually putting it into practice. Old hang-ups die hard.

During my first three weeks in Germany, I was somewhat mortified not to be able to find a gym where you could shower in the privacy of a cubicle. In America and Australia, you’ll see one or two people walking around the locker room in the buff, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. And there’s always a private shower. I was brought up the Indian way – I don’t walk around naked in front of other people, even if they are all women. I just don’t.

So when I finally found a gym with shower cubicles, I joined, even though it cost almost twice as much as the cheapest gym in my area. All was well again in the land of Urmi’s maidenly modesty.

That is, until the day I came back sweaty and exhausted from my workout, grabbed my gym bag, and headed to the showers, only to find that – *gasp* – the entire cubicled section was closed for repairs. The only bathing facility available was the tiled 4x4m prison-style shower room, with shower heads spaced three feet apart along each wall.

Oh, how my heart quailed.

I was already running behind schedule, so there was no time to decamp to the privacy of my apartment. And I’d hit the gym hard, so there was no way I could skip the shower and be sure that my colleagues would leave the office alive that afternoon. So I was in a little bit of, ahem, hot water.

Slinking back to my locker, I took a few deep breaths, shut my eyes tight (I don’t really know why), and changed out of my gym clothes. I opened my eyes  and peered around. No-one was giving me a second glance.

I walked over to the shower room holding my ineffectual little square of gym towel that is small enough to fit in my gym bag, but not big enough to cover me up. A tall, blonde, athletic Aryan amazon sauntered past me nonchalantly, and I wanted to go hide in a corner. But I steeled myself and moved on. Onward to the Dusche (it’s going to take me a while not to find that German word funny).

There were already two other women at opposite ends of the shower room. Both were facing the wall and getting on with things. I set myself up in the far corner, trying to stay inconspicuous in the eyes of whatever bogeyman my vivid imagination had decided was watching me.

And then, at some point while standing under the hot water, I simply stopped caring. We were all just a bunch of people trying to get through our Monday, and worrying what anyone thought of me in here was about as ridiculous as wondering whether my fellow commuters on the U-Bahn were taking notes on my choice of shoes. I stopped comparing myself to everyone else, and stopped fancying that anyone else was comparing themselves to me.

I’m not saying I’m about to go join the nude volleyballers in the English Garden. But I’m a little less uptight than I was last week, and I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.

Cool runnings

I have a small confession to make: I’m one of those weird people who likes to run. I spent my single-digit years watching my parents run the City to Surf every year, until one day in Year 6, I convinced my dad to take me one of his weekend jogs. I’ve been running on and off ever since.

2009 was a high watermark in my running career. I ran my first half marathon in San Francisco. I was in the best shape of my life, and would enthusiastically spring out of bed before 6 each glorious Seattle summer morning to enjoy some miles before the sun got too high. But I’ve always had one weakness: I’ve never run through the winter. Each year, when the days get short and Seattle’s thermometer starts to dip below 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7°C), I hang up my joggers for the season. Running in the rain for 6 months is no fun.

So perhaps it was a rather foolhardy move on my part last October to sign up for my first ever marathon, in Vancouver in May. At that point, there were still leaves on the trees, the beer gardens were still open, and daytime temperatures were comfortably in the teens. I guess after a typically sublime Seattle summer and an autumn spent drinking beer under the lime trees, I had managed to forget what winter actually feels like.

And then… it got cold. Kind of batshit insane cold.

The first stage is always denial. I went and hid in the gym all November and December, taking shelter in the fact that my 18-week marathon training schedule only started after Christmas. Ah, sweet procrastination.

But then the holidays came and went, and it was time to stop being such a complete and utter wusser. As a wise, 100% genuine Münchner colleague of mine told me: “there’s no such thing as bad weather – only bad clothing.”

My baggy trackie-dacks and jumper weren’t going to cut it in Munich, that was for sure. I had to shell out for some proper cold-weather running gear. This is what you’ll see me decked out in these days for a run:

• My green knitted tuque that makes me look like a homeless lady
• A moisture-wicking t-shirt (I now understand the catchphrase “cotton kills”), under a breathable fleece, under my trusty old REI rain jacket
• Stupendous ninja-style running tights with racing stripes, which cost me almost as much as the rest of my clothes put together. But they are worth every penny, god bless them: miraculously warm, and if I am ever hardcore enough to run the Polar Circle Marathon, these are the pants to whom I will entrust my life.
• Moisture-wicking gloves, with woollen gloves over the top.
• 2 pairs of long socks, and running shoes.

The first time I put on this outfit, I went over to the mirror, fully expecting to look as sleek, athletic and stylish as the runners I saw in Montreal last Christmas, cranking out hill repeats on Mont Royal in -20.

… I’m sure you already know how this ends. I possess no such natural elegance. To be exact, my ensemble had more of an eclectic, hobo-meets-lycra-goddess-meets-Paddington-Bear’s-goth-phase aesthetic. As I shuffled out into the street, an old lady hurried by me with the sideways glance you give someone who looks mildly dangerous.

You might think I’m exaggerating about how I look, but I don’t think so. The following has happened to me three times:

It’s still dark, I’m pounding down the street, probably inadvertantly emitting random words of whatever song I am listening to on my Zune. A young woman is walking alone in the twilight about half a block ahead, and, hearing my quick footsteps and strange vocal gymnastics, quickens her pace. Pretty much oblivious to everything but my body and the music, I continue full steam ahead.

When I’m about 10 metres behind her, the girl turns her head slightly and catches in her peripheral vision the apparently terrifying sight of me bearing down on her at 8:45 pace. The poor girl clutches her bag even tighter and starts to run. It’s at this point that I usually realise what’s happening and have to control my laughter. I barrel past the wretched high-heeled fruhaufsteherin and give her a cheery “Morgen!”. She looks sheepish but relieved, and slows back down to a walk.

-

After a couple of weeks of acclimatisation and clothing refinement, I got comfortable with running in the cold. It’s only the first few minutes out of the house that are hard. As I step out into the street, the sudden cold is like a slap in the face. But then after a few seconds, the only thing that’s really freezing is my feet. I haven’t figured out how to keep my feet warm when I can only wear so many layers of socks inside my runners. It’s fine once I get going, but every time I stop at a traffic light, I swear can feel the bridges of my feet creaking.

Sometimes, there’s a wind blowing. Oh good lord. That wind slices straight through every layer.  I could be wearing a bikini for all the good my layers do in a breeze.

But as my body slowly starts to warm up and I hit my stride, I start thinking how nice it feels to be out on such a crisp winter’s morning. Munich always feels big and bustling, but this is one time I have the city to myself. The sidewalks are practically deserted at this time of the morning, especially on Mondays. Only the occasional Volkswagen trundles down Ludwigstrasse. Munich’s Starbucks-style coffee chains, which were even open on Christmas Day, are yet to crank out their first Doppel Espresso. Sometimes I make it a point to run past the Wimmer bakery, which opens at 6:30, just to get a whiff of the croissants.

The sun won’t be up for an hour or so. For this surreal 60 minutes before dawn, the sky is a deep, arresting shade of royal blue (or mauve if it’s cloudy). People rave about sunset, but to me there is something just as magical about running in l’heure bleue. The sky is subdued yet radiant, the calm before the storm of urban activity ahead. Running at this time of the morning is sublime.

When I run on the weekends, the dark isn’t as much of an issue, and I can choose the warmest part of the day. (That is, I get to run in –2 instead of –10. Ha!) But there’s still another challenge. Unless there’s a been a consistent string of days either above or below freezing, there is almost always ice on the sidewalks. For the record, I am the world’s most uncoordinated person, and that’s a fact, so I don’t need any help tripping over my own feet, thanks very much.

Initially I put an embargo on running while there was any snow on the ground, but it didn’t take me long to realise that if I really followed this rule, I might as well drop out of the marathon altogether. It’s been snowing at least once a week here since early December, and we’re a long way yet from spring.

So I finally bit the bullet and went for my first run on snow. The feeling under your feet is that of running on sand, but with a lot less give, thank goodness. The main challenge is to stay upright when you accidentally hit an icy patch. The trick to this seems to be the same as with skiing – just keep going. Against all your instincts of self-preservation, you have to keep leaning forward and ploughing on when you feel your grip on the ground start to loosen. It’s the only way. 

Once I figured that out, running after the snow fall was simply wonderful. All the local parks and soccer pitches were vast fields of undisturbed white. I ran past a huge cemetery named Nordfriedhof that was full of big old gravestones and big old trees. These old European cemeteries look beautiful any time of year, but covered in a dusting of snow, they look particularly picturesque.

The most fun part was running through Munich’s Olympic Park. The home stretch of my first snowy run went over Olympiaberg, a big hill built over the rubble of World War Two air raids. There’s a cobblestone path up over the hill, popular with dog walkers, old couples and tourists getting the panoramic view out over the city. On this day, it was all kids out with their sleds, squealing with delight on each ride down the slope. Oodles of fun to watch.

By the time I got home, the cold wasn’t bothering me at all and I was navigating the ice like Torville and Dean. The best way to banish an excuse forever is to break through it once. None left now! Onward and Vancouver-ward!