Something similar happened the other day. All of a sudden I could smell winter in the air. I've started wearing my toque again, lip chap is now being liberally applied, and the thick winter scarf is in regular use, likely for the duration of the wet and cloudy season the locals call winter.
The upside is we only had to wait a couple more months for the Christmas markets to open. Now the city squares smell of grilled sausages and spiced, hot wine. If you can deal with the sudden chill in the air, this is a great time of year to be in Central Europe.
Christmas Markets
It is never too early for Christmas carols. Well, no, unless it's a store, than it's in the service of commerce and not Yuletide cheer. Anyway, the same can be said of Christmas markets. They're arrival is more than welcome as long is Christmas is close enough for me not to get angry about being told to buy shit.
Germany's Christmas markets pick up sometime on or about the first week of advent (it's also still a religious holiday here). This it meant that Kata's mother and brother missed out on the markets when they visited the Dorf and Cologne a couple of weekends ago. There was still plenty to do, we wandered the Dorf and visited a few sites in Cologne as well, including a Cologne-style brewery.
The next weekend, Kata and I dropped into Cologne again to visit its Old Christmas Market. These markets are pursuing the same thing as their corporate brethren in the department stores of North America. There's no shortage of vendors in the selling their schnick schnack, there's a fantastically convivial and festive spirit to Germany's Christmas markets.
Some of the markets have very similar knick-knacks for sale whose labels would inform you that they didn't come from some rustic german village, but a tin-roofed factory in Bangladesh.
The Old Market in Cologne has enough stalls with lovely handmade or uniquely German items that you can come away with nice gifts without feeling like a 10-year-old Bangladeshi girl made any of them.
Shopping was one reason. The other reason was eating and drinking. We sipped on some hot wine and tried some of the snacks. There was Flammkuchen, which is like a German pizza, made with sour cream, onions, bacon and cheese. It's good.
The second snack seemed like a head-scratcher to us.
I usually avoid falling back on stereotypes but there are some you can apply to Germans, like their fanatical love for potatoes and apples. The bakeries are rammed with apple cakes and tarts. If the national drink is beer, the national non-alcoholic drink is apple juice mixed with sparkling water: Apfelshorle. And the potatoes come with every dish you order here.
So when we saw dozens of Germans dipping deep-fried potato pancakes into apple sauce, we're not surprised but we didn't think the combination worked. We tried them. Those Germans are right, the reibekuchen, as it's called, is pretty damn good.
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| And lo, the moon rises above the Allianz Arena. |
A Soccer (Football) Match in Munich
I don't usually delve into work to much in this space because, well, advertising in real life is not as exciting as Mad Men would have you believe.
But I'm making an exception, because the Allianz international team at my agency was rewarded for a year of toil with a trip to a soccer game at the Allianz Arena in Munich. It was a nice treat to see Bayern Munich play and defeat some Greek team whose name I couldn't pronounce. I also can't pronounce Bayern either, but that's neither here nor there.
It was also an interesting experience because – again I'm leaning on stereotypes here – soccer games usually mean soccer hooligans (stereotype number one), yet Germans seem so well behaved (stereotype number two). I didn't know which stereotype I was going to witness.
This was a Champions League game, which meant no alcoholic beer was being sold, just the non-alcoholic swill. I was tempted to have one glass, but they also don't accept cash in the stadium. You pay a man 10€ to fill up a card with more money, then use that card to pay for everything. Then at the end of the match you must return the card to get your 10€ back. So no beer for me.
Every soccer team has its fan songs and the Bayern fans have theirs. I didn't understand them. I didn't even understand their German dialect. What I did understand was the banter between the stadium announcer and the chanting crowd. The announcer would state who scored a goal and crowd would say "Danke!"
So, between the soccer hooligans or the good behaviour, I guess you can figure out which stereotype I witnessed at this soccer match.
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