Nine things we didn't know about Ireland

1.   Irish men all have the same haircut. (Charlie has one now. This is him eating a yogurt at a bus station.)

2.   Glen Hansard is the only living Irish man with a beard.

3.  Full Irish Breakfast includes: eggs, sausage, ham/bacon, beans, toast as well as black and white pudding. Don't expect to eat the rest of the day. 

4.   Black pudding is a blood sausage made of pig fat, unspecified parts of the pig, oatmeal and flavorings. (This may be scary to Americans, but to a German it’s just Grützwurst.)

5.   Some Neolithic Irish people around 3700 BC, predating the pyramids of Gizeh, buried their dead in passage tombs covered by gigantic earthen mounds. (Did they have too much free time on their hands?)

6.   The Vikings were the first to settle Dublin. Dublin city government bulldozed what could have been the Pompeii of Viking times to build this:

7.   Irish is an interesting language. It takes two times longer to read written Irish than for a native to speak it.

8.   Elves do exist in Ireland. (We have no photographic proof of this, but we have totally seem them.)

9.   If you and your dog walk around a well the wrong way, you will be chased by its water until you and the water reach the ocean and you drown. (This is how the river Boyne came to be.)

Freedom with Justice: Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and John F. Kennedy

On Wednesday afternoon, President Obama gave his speech at 90+ F temperatures to a selection of invited guests on the east side of the Brandenburg gate.  Afterwards, Germans wondered a little bit about just how imprisoning people without judicial cause in Guantanamo, killing civilians in Afghanistan with drone strikes, and collecting data on citizens’ internet and cell phone use went together with his oft-repeated theme of “Freedom with Justice”. But then the heat made it all one big blur in Berliners’ brains as they headed to the next lake to cool off.

Also on Wednesday, as freedom and justice fighter Nelson Mandela himself was struggling with his failing health in far South Africa, Ruby sailed through her entrance exam at Berlin’s Nelson Mandela High School:

Her future peers, a group of kids from all over the world, were whisperingly coached by their ambitious, wealthy diplomat parents in the hallway before the interview, reminding me of American soccer moms. Happily, today we got Ruby’s acceptance email for the new 8th grade class at this high demand international school. This despite the fact that she answered the question “What does your dad do?” with “He owns a bar.” Oops, wrong dad to refer to. Our “High Mobility Family” letter (Hochmobilitaetsbescheinigung, yes, that is a word) submitted to the school was based on Charlie’s work requiring frequent travel and change. Not on Uwe’s Bowling Alley/Bar in Berlin-Wedding.

Charlie and I escaped the heat of Berlin by heading to Dublin and then the beautiful Boyne Valley. Mild sun, tempered by cool sea breezes and today’s gentle rain made me appreciate the fact that we don’t have to endure the heat and smoke-tainted air of New Mexico right now. We had a great pub lunch in Dublin and a nice train ride to Drogheda. I swear our cab driver taking us to the hotel from downtown tonight is paid for by the local cultural preservation council – his name was Patrick Collins and he made lovely Irish small talk about the weather. Unlike Americans, the Irish use no superlatives –  the untoppable “awesome” becomes “fairly good”, or “not too bad”. Tomorrow we’ll look at some ancient ruins in Newgrange, older than the pyramids and Stonehenge.

The Irish meanwhile, a few days after the current US first family came through here as well, are commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s visit to Ireland with a series of emotional events involving his family and the people and places he touched back in 1963. Obama left much less of an impression in both Ireland and Berlin this week. But it would have been hard for anyone to top JFK's act - visiting Ireland as the first Irish-American US President, or saying something as dead-on as “Ich bin ein Berliner”, right after the wall was built. Yet, the US have a long way to go, walking the walk, in order to be credible in Europe when talking about “Freedom with Justice”.

Jet Lag, BIg Data and Hair Cuts

Jet lag is a brutal condition. Our first night at my dad’s house I woke up at 3:15 am. I sat up and looked at Lucy (who, along with Benny, had spent our first day collapsing into sleep on the ground anywhere we stopped). Now, in the middle of the night, she was sitting quietly on the floor, wide awake, staring into the dark. Benny’s jet lag manifests itself in him sleeping ALL the time, day and night.

We learned that there are three types of haircuts to be purchased in Kreuzberg: The €10 haircut, the Hipster haircut and the Turkish haircut. This one is Turkish ($12 Euro on Oppelner Strasse):

Best coffee in Berlin: a few steps down the street at Passenger.

Staying true to our Silver City manners here, we don’t run over pedestrians who try to cross the street. We also stubbornly smile at people we pass and we say good morning or something equally civilized. We get puzzled looks in exchange, which just sometimes do change into a smile. But most people have that perpetual stern German look on their faces. Maybe they are angry that the US secret service is collecting data about their communication habits?

Certainly, people and media here are very critical of the NSA gathering data from phone and internet communications. The US Government, no doubt in order to appease US citizens, stated that the information is mostly just collected about foreign nationals. Don’t worry if you are a lawful US citizen.  Germans, however, think this is totally NOT cool. That the NSA issue has severe international implications seems not to be part of the American media coverage…. and the US public remains unconcerned with our international relations as usual. Obama is going to get an earful from Merkel this week! Meanwhile, security personnel are soldering shut the manhole covers all over Berlin in preparation for his visit, so nobody can spy on him.

Benny to Maddy: “You smell like Germany. I still smell like America.”

Dispatch from Queens - The Immigrant Lens

We made it to New York, and are awaiting our international flight later today in a somewhat dumpy hotel near JFK. Lucy is tired but unfazed. The kids have settled into their travelling mode, as if that's all they ever do.

***

I don't drink coffee I take tea my dear
I like my toast done on one side
And you can hear it in my accent when I talk
I'm an Englishman in New York
Sting

When I first began thinking and writing about my 20-year experience as a permanent alien in the US, I realized this: For an immigrant, life could be viewed as a series of cultural choices, small and big, on the continuum between assimilation and rejection.

In my case that looks like this: No, I won’t shave my legs all the time, yes I will let my son get a driver’s license at 16 (kicking and screaming, albeit). But I won’t buy him a car. I’ll joyfully eat burgers and Mexican food, but I’ll buy German “brick bread”, never that spongy stuff in plastic bags they call bread here.

I happily lose the antiquated, formal 2nd person pronoun “Sie” (Usted, Vous, Lei) to address people.* I smile at or greet everyone in the street and do my best to learn small talk.

But I continue to be annoyed with the idling SUVs at my children’s elementary school. And I don’t pretend to understand why forced air heating systems, hot water tanks and top loader washers persist....Neanderthal behavior and technology.

I tip all wait staff generously, and refrain from complaining about stuff at the restaurant (and am embarrassed when my visiting parents do, in that stern, unadorned-by-politeness German tone). I proudly serve on the board of a local nonprofit, volunteer at my children’s school, and make donations to charity and to NPR. I just don’t like it when my husband donates to a political campaign. I’ll stand up for the pledge of allegiance at the Rotary Club meeting, I just skip the “under God” part. And I will move around my house naked and insist that my children speak more than one language. And on and on. Choosing where to draw the line, every day.

So why would this stuff matter to anyone but me? While the US undoubtedly is a multi-cultural society, it somehow suffers from cultural and political isolation, and from a lack in diversity of perspectives. Many people are bilingual and bicultural thanks to their ethnic heritage. But that’s not celebrated, let alone leveraged by the schools.

Increasingly, each discussion ends up in a black and white dead-end. You either believe that government should stay out of people’s lives, or you’re a socialist. Really? We have two political parties, currently producing … nothing: A month ago, the US Senate failed to pass a law requiring background checks for gun buyers, even though the majority of the US population supports this middle of the road policy. Despite all the information available to people, political and cultural polarization grows, reinforced by social media - the dipstick of polarized viewpoints.

The immigrant perspective provides a cultural, political and social lens on US society, different for each immigrant, colored by where he or she came from. Wouldn’t it be interesting to read a series of essays by immigrants from all over the world, describing what the US and their life here looks like? And what the view back at their home country looks like now, through each of their changing lenses. You'll hear about that one from me over the coming 12 months.

I’ll provide my very personal and subjective view to the readers of this blog, and hope that it shows some of the very colorful and intricate areas between the black and the white. The readers, I hope, will be provoked into some new thinking, conversation, and productive controversy.

Ultimately we all make our value-based choices every day, immigrant or not. May the immigrant lens make your choices more interesting!

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*Losing the "Sie", is actually not a choice, since the informal singular “thou” has been lost to the English language, and the former plural “you”, never took as the polite form as in other languages, and since has become the universal English pronoun.

It's Better Over Where?

I am reposting a facebook note from almost two years ago. We had not decided to leave the US yet, at that point. But the thoughts completely still apply today, as we are leaving.....

September 2010

As I am reading the late great Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land” (jumping up and shouting YES! every couple of pages…) , out comes another book comparing European social welfare states with the American model: Tom Geoghegan’s “Were you born on the wrong continent?”

Based on Geoghegan, I was born on the right continent, but must have temporarily lost my mind and moved to the wrong one. How could I leave a place providing guaranteed vacation time, free education, free child care, free nursing home care and generous unemployment payments?

I have lived in the United States for many years now and “the country” has been good to me. I have been able to pursue a diverse career of my choice, changing jobs and locations in a way that would have made me an outcast on the German labor market. I have been able to make a decent living (in large parts thanks to that free German education putting me ahead of Americans, financially and in terms of basic skills), raise a family and live in a beautiful place of my choice.  Working in the nonprofit sector, my work has made real change in local communities, people and policies in a way that would not have been possible in the more static German welfare and political system.

The country has been good to me. So I will not join too loudly the choir of people on all the social media networks and the press who took the publishing of Geoghegan’s book as another opportunity to complain about how terrible this country is. I feel more at home in Tony Judt’s camp: Looking at the welfare systems through his vast historical perspective (a European who lived in the US by choice, like myself) many of the paradoxes on both sides of the ocean make more sense.  For example, he reminds the reader that neoliberalism hasn’t always ruled American political thought and decision making: “ …, much that was best in American legislation and social policy over the course of the 20th century – and that we are now urged to dismantle in the name of efficiency and “less government” – corresponds in practice to what Europeans have called ‘social democracy’.”  He explains why even in countries like Germany, middle-class support for the social democratic model is now waning. And he chastises our generation with having missed a great opportunity:  After the fall of communism, “we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.” Thirty years of erosion of social policies in the US have made the country more unequal  “ … - in incomes, wealth, health, education and life chances - than at any time since the 1920s.”

And here’s a big point (one of several) on which Judt and Geoghegan “agree”: Poverty (Geoghegan) and inequality (Judt) corrupt society, endanger democracy,  and ultimately undermine the economy: “Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.” Judt explains the emergence of the social democratic systems after two world wars in Europe partially as a way to avoid another catastrophe. Geoghegan shows that poverty carries a tremendous cost to US society and economy.

Here's a West-German Cold War quote a fellow German expatriate reminded me of “ Geh doch nach drüben!” which is what German conservatives used to say if someone in post-war West-Germany was too lefty, meaning, go to Communist East Germany. The reviewers  that have praised Geoghegan’s little book are now getting the same comment: “go there, if you like it so much better than the home of the brave and the land of the free….”

Meanwhile, I am running out of the benefits my European free education provided me: A large portion of my salary goes towards the private education of my younger children, because where we live, school districts are too underfunded to provide a solid public education. Our teenagers go to the local college to make up for what high school does not offer. This means, I am putting away no money for my retirement, let alone a graduate education for our children. The secondary education they get here does not adequately prepare them for the (free) higher education programs in Europe. So, is it  “Geh doch nach drüben” time? should we move our family back to Europe?

We have not made that decision. Maybe the question is not, where is it better, or,  where would we be happier. One of the challenges for us 21st century homeless cosmopolitans might be to find a way to be at home in both worlds. Not only from an individual perspective, taking advantage of the best of both worlds and avoiding the worst. But also from the perspective of ambassador between the worlds, showing our fellow citizens on both sides of the Atlantic what is dear to us and worth transferring to the other side. The freedom of making creative choices in one’s life and one’s community from the US, and the solidarity of social democracy that affords everyone the chance to do so, from Europe. Judt the European and Geoghegan the American do a good job bridging the Atlantic for this discussion. Everyone should read their books.

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