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Life in Germany since the Invasion of Ukraine

by | Mar 21, 2022 | , , | 0 Comments

I was in the throes of Covid when the invasion of Ukraine began. In my own personal pits of exhaustion and despair, I watched in disbelief as a war in Europe began.

The first 48 hours we were glued to the news. I watched line after line of Russian military vehicle stream into Ukraine as the people did their best to prepare. There were images of Ukrainian teachers picking up arms through tears, everyday civilians making molotov cocktails to protect their homes, and soon-to-be refugees fleeing in all directions over the borders.

Even before Ukrainians began arriving at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof (main train station) – estimated at 10,000 people a day – the effect was immediate. Donation centers and welcome reception were hastily arranged. People opened their homes to the refugees for a day, a week, a month and even more long-term. A mountain of food is required and individuals and businesses are doing their best to provide. People have been writing their representatives in Germany and in their home countries. Many people have cut their power usage significantly as bills are expected to balloon significantly, and to limit the revenue for Russia (a powerful supplier of energy for Germany). I was still Covid home-bound during the first protest at Brandenburger Tor, but watched from social media as over 100,000 people rallied. About a month in, if you talk to anyone long enough the topic of Ukraine will come up.

Doves for Ukraine at German school

Doves for Ukraine at German school PHOTO: Erin Porter

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The True Cost of Gasoline in the USA and Germany

by | Mar 7, 2022 | , , , | 0 Comments

Gaining a Better Perspective on the Cost of Gasoline and Diesel Today

You may have noticed the recent spike in gasoline and diesel prices caused by Adolf Putin’s little war in Ukraine. But it’s not the first time world events have made motor fuel prices fluctuate dramatically. Historically the price of gasoline has both risen and fallen, but rising is much more common. So now is a good time to take an objective look at what most people understandably view as an unfair increase for a vital aspect of daily life.

The human brain functions in strange ways in our daily lives. First, we Menschen have a short attention span. Second, we have poor memories. Yes, even the younger folks! Third, too many of us humans are poor history scholars. Fourth, most people wince when they hear the word “taxes” (Steuern in German). And fifth, few of us are very knowledgeable in the field of economics. Each of these five factors plays a role in our reaction to “gasoline prices” and “gasoline taxes.” Let us attempt to gain a better perspective on all of this.

Gasoline Prices Adjusted for Inflation and Fuel Efficiency
The price of gas (petrol) has always been variable – in good times and bad. Recessions, wars, and pandemics are nothing new. In the United States in 1918, as the First World War ended, a gallon of gasoline cost 25 cents. By 1932 the price had dropped to 18 cents a gallon.

Shell Spritpreise Berlin 2016

Berlin: German gasoline and diesel prices per liter in the good old days of 2016. Will we ever see these prices again? It’s doubtful. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

But a US dollar in 1918 or 1932 had far more purchasing power than a 2022 dollar. In the 1930s, the nominal price per gallon was around 18 cents, but adjusted for inflation (using 2020 figures), the price was $3.66. But now, only two years later, the inflation adjusted price would be even higher. We all know, just looking at our own lifetimes, how inflation affects the cost of living. And right now, in March 2022, we know only too well how pandemics and wars affect prices.

In the 1960s, I personally remember buying gasoline for 32 cents a gallon. (It was probably 32.9 cents, but we’ll discuss that pricing oddity below.) BUT, and it’s a BIG but, at that same time in history a very nice new automobile cost about $2,000-3,000. That nice new car could probably go about 10-12 miles on that 32-cent gallon of gas. For an accurate economic picture, it’s not only the price of a gallon of fuel, but also how far I could drive on that gallon. (My apologies to you metric folks among my readers, but I live in the only modern industrialized nation on earth that refuses to go metric, and in the 1960s it was even worse.) read more…

Winterferien in the Austrian Alps

by | Feb 20, 2022 | , , | 0 Comments

Since my daughter started Grundschule (elementary school), we have come to the grim realization that we are tied to the school schedule. While schools in Germany have many extended breaks throughout the year, they have traditionally been inflexible about vacation days outside of those on the official calendar. Schulpflicht (Compulsory Schooling) strictly regulates attendance and I have heard of parents of school-aged children stopped at the airport and fined for taking children out of school for a holiday. 

This is quite inconvenient for people like myself where a visit home consists of a 12 hour plane ride. In particular, the one week of Weihnachtszeit (Christmas vacation) last year just wasn’t going to cut it. So we informed her teacher that we intended to stay in the USA past the break, wrote the school a letter, and hoped for the best. I wanted to get a letter of approval (preferably stamped) from the school but along with securing all the other paperwork we needed to fly during the pandemic we didn’t get one and I was definitely sweating it in the lead up to the flight. Perhaps in response to the last two years and irregular attendance, or maybe we just got lucky, no one batted an eye at us traveling during school times. Whew!

That said, we didn’t want to risk our luck again and planned our next trip in accordance with the school calendar. Arriving shortly after the Christmas break at the end of January for Berlin (school breaks differ between Länder or states in Germany so everyone doesn’t hit the road at the same time), Winterfeirien provided an additional week of vacation from school. In need of a true escape while still keeping fairly isolated we chose the side of a mountain in Österreich (Austria). It was glorious. 

Austrian Alps

View from our Holiday Home PHOTO: Erin Porter

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What’s in a Name? Exonyms: Köln vs Cologne, Donau vs Danube, Beijing vs Peking

by | Feb 7, 2022 | , , | 0 Comments

Exonyms: Shape-Shifting Place Names

“Munich” is the English exonym for the city that Germans call München. An exonym is a name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing from the original name (toponym). Another example is “Austria” for Österreich, or “Bavaria” for Bayern.

Not all place names change that dramatically. Many cities in German-speaking Europe keep their original German form in English: Augsburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Graz, Hamburg, Innsbruck, Regensburg, Stuttgart, and Trier are examples. Others may only lose an umlaut (Zurich, Dusseldorf) or a single letter (Hanover/Hannover; Hessen/Hesse) in English. The Mecklenburg region of Germany keeps that spelling in English, as seen in Mecklenburg County in North Carolina and Virginia, both counties named after Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the German wife of British King George III. (The German name Mecklenburg is Low German for “large castle.”) Queen Charlotte also gave her name to the city of Charlotte, North Carolina (the “Queen City”).

Antiquated Forms of City Names
Time also plays a role in English exonyms for German places. The English terms for some German cities have changed over the centuries. This can be seen in historical documents or in English place names for towns in North America that are named for German cities or regions. When Thomas Jefferson traveled through the Rhineland region from the Netherlands to Strasbourg in 1788, he wrote the names of the towns he visited in his journal, more or less following the traditional spellings of the 18th century. The Francophone Jefferson wrote “Francfort” for Frankfurt, but he wasn’t consistent, reflecting the haphazard spelling of the 18th century. He also spelled Strasbourg “Strasburg,” which is neither the German, English, nor French way to spell that city’s name today (but is the name of a small town of 5,600 residents in the Uckermark region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern/Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania).

In the past, the English name for Frankfurt has been Francfort, Frankford, and Frankfort. French forms of some German places are still used in English: Cologne for the city known as Köln in German (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium in Latin), and Alsace for the region called Elsaß in German. An older form of Leipzig in English was “Leipsic,” still seen for communities in two US states that were named in the 1850s – the small town of Leipsic, Ohio (pop. 2,022) and the village of Leipsic on the banks of the Leipsic River in Delaware.

“Germany” in Other Languages
But of course English is not the only language that alters Germanic toponyms. “Germany” is the English exonym for Deutschland, but in other languages Germany is known as Alemania (Spanish), Kelemania (Hawaiian), Allemagne (French), Saksa (Finnish), Germania (Italian, but Tedesco for German), Tyskland (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), Germania (Latin, Romanian), Alemanha (Portuguese), Almanya (Turkish), and Niemcy (Polish).

The famous European river known as the (blue) Danube in English, is die (blaue) Donau in German. The Rhine comes from der Rhein. (In German, rivers are either feminine [die] or masculine [der], most of those outside of Germany are masculine, but not all: der Amazonas, der Mississippi.) The French call the Rhine le Rhin, while in Spanish it’s el Rin, Italian il Reno, Dutch de Rhijn, Portuguese o Reno (all masculine). read more…

Comparing the Covid Response of the USA and Germany

by | Jan 24, 2022 | , , , , , | 0 Comments

After 2 years of not seeing my family, I was back in the USA twice at the end of last year. In October we booked emergency tickets and were back visiting a sick family member within 72 hours. A Christmas trip was planned. Both trips were a low-key shock to the system.

As an American who has lived in Berlin for the past 11 years, I heard from friends who visited the USA that the Covid-response was being handled differently and I wasn’t surprised. We’ve all heard the numbers, the reports of high deaths, of laissez faire attitudes from the top down. I also heard from my parents in semi-rural Washington State, taking the pandemic very seriously, limiting contact and retreating back to their homestead.

We arrived to Seatac airport on that emergency trip with no time to plan or prepare besides wading through the mountain of new paperwork it takes to fly.  I truly did not know what to expect. In liberal Seattle and the westside of the mountains people were generally abiding by the rules. Once we ventured further east to the more conservative side of the state the level of adherence dropped significantly. As I’ve told my 7-year-old every time she looks at me quizzically like, “Is this ok?” – I have no idea. We are all clearly making this up as we go along.

Travel during Covid

Masked, Vaxed and Ready to Travel PHOTO: Erin Porter

I reported once before about my perceptions of the pandemic in March 2020. Unbelievably to me (and many others) we are nearly two years in and still deep in a pandemic. After these recent adventures I thought it was time to share again about what things look in Germany (or at least Berlin) and how that differed from what I found in the United States of America. read more…

How many lives does a cat have? What is Trick 17?

by | Jan 10, 2022 | , , , , , | 0 Comments

Number Idioms in German

Cats have been around for thousands of years. They are said to have more than one life. Just how many lives depends on where you are. Arabian and Turkish cats have six lives. For some reason German or Spanish cats have seven lives. In the English-speaking world, cats get two more. Of course, in reality, a cat anywhere has only one life, like all living creatures. So how did felines get a reputation for having additional lives?

Domestic cat

A domestic cat (eine Hauskatze/Felis catus). PHOTO: David Corby (Wikimedia Commons)

In ancient Egypt, cats were revered, some even considered gods. In the Middle Ages cats had a generally bad rap. They were associated with witches, Satan, and paganism. The black cat superstition (der Aberglaube) is still an international thing in the 21st century. Yet these nimble creatures could fall from great heights and manage to land on their paws (the “righting reflex”) and walk away unharmed. Was it witchcraft? A superpower? In any case they seemed to have more than one life. But why multiple lives? I don’t think anyone really knows why, much less why seven in German, but nine in English.

One common explanation is that the number seven has long been considered holy or lucky: the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Deadly Sins/Virtues. Even among the Germanic tribes, seven was considered lucky, even before the arrival of Christianity. In the British Isles on the other hand, possibly influenced by the Vikings, it was nine that was the charmed number. The ancient Greeks as well considered the number nine the trinity of all trinities (3+3+3) and a supernatural number associated with the gods. They believed it took nine days to fall from heaven to Earth. William Shakespeare mentioned a cat’s nine lives in Romeo and Juliet in 1597. An old English proverb refers to the idea of cats having nine lives: “A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays.”

More about 7 and 9: Clouds and Heaven
There is also at least one other similar 7-versus-9 English/German expression pattern. For instance, if we talk about clouds – in a positive sense – we indeed may be on cloud nine in English, but “auf Wolke sieben” (on cloud seven) in German. “Cloud seven” in German is similar to being in seventh heaven in English. But Germans also say “im siebten Himmel” (in seventh heaven) when they’re blissful. read more…

Marijuana in Germany 

by | Dec 26, 2021 | , , , , , , | 0 Comments

Christmas has passed and we are entering the truly dark days of winter between Weihnachten and Silvester, waiting for the weather to finally warm again in …. May? I was on a call with a new colleague from Turkey and she visibly blanched at the news that we have months of this cold and dark environment ahead of us. 

However, there are bright spots to look forward to. Berlinale is planned to be back as an in person event in February. Snow has already made an appearance this year offering the chance of sledding fun. I am home in Washington State and was able to enjoy a very rare white Christmas. 

Possibly more exciting than any of this is that I might be able to indulge in a delightful, formerly illegal, drug in Germany sometime soon. Marijuana is slated to be legal in Germany some time this year.

Marijuana in Germany

PHOTO: Marijuana in Germany by kat_geb, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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10 Things Expats Miss After They Leave Germany

by | Dec 13, 2021 | , , | 0 Comments


Reverse culture shock can be disconcerting, even scary. While driving in my US hometown recently, I had a flashback to my time in Germany when I noticed a few things that Americans do that contrast with normal practice in Germany and Europe. Some of them are funny, but more often they’re scary. Whether you agree with them or not, Americans and Germans (Europeans) tend to do things very differently. Not all of them have to do with driving, but I’ll start with that. Most of these ten items also apply to Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.

German door and windows

German doors and windows are among the things that expats miss when they leave Germany. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

What US and Canadian Expats Miss After They Leave Germany

1. Drivers Using Turn Signals | American drivers don’t seem to know that their cars have a turn signal as standard equipment. German drivers signal when they leave their own driveway. In the US, drivers who signal a turn or lane change are the exception rather than the rule. In Germany it’s the opposite. A non-signaling driver in Germany is as rare as a banged up, junky car. read more…