Little Things

• One thing that's charming-yet-disconcerting about Germany is how everyone is constantly greeting everyone else. Every morning in my office, each person who enters calls out a cheery "Morgen!" (or sometimes "Moin!" -- Hamburg slang) and is greeted by a chorus of "Morgen!"s from the people who are already there. When you leave, you turn around to say "Tschüss!" before you go out the door -- and anybody who's still there wishes you goodbye. I think that it beats the American system, where you can grumble your way into the office in the morning, shut the office door behind you, and not talk to anyone until lunchtime. (It works better than a time clock, to boot; everyone knows when you came in.)

  The Adobe office in San Jose had people who came in to take care of the plants; they skulked around in the shadows, careful not to make eye contact with anyone. Not so in Hamburg; the plant guy makes his way into and out of the office each week with a loud "HAAAALOOO!" and "TSCHÜSS!!", and his greetings are returned just as loudly. When you go shopping, it's customary to exchange a hello-and-goodbye with the store clerks. Pretty often I worry that somebody will think me rude -- or stupid -- because I didn't exchange greetings with them, or forgot to say goodbye ...

• At long last -- and 51 Euro later -- we're both legal! Shelby's passport now has a two-page set of giant stickers to match mine. Now we get to stay up to the length of our particular visa (July 31st), rather than the wimpy 90 days permitted by a tourist visa, and should we go through passport control on re-entering Germany (which doesn't happen often, now that more and more of Europe is part of the Schengen agreement), we essentially get treated like Germans -- just a wave-through, instead of getting the intense scrutiny more typically due shifty Americans.
• I see that Avenue Victor Hugo, an independent bookstore in Boston, is closing. It's one of those bookstores that was good enough to make a special trip to if you were in town. Now I feel guilty for just browsing there during our last trip to Boston, and saving the heavy-duty buying until we got to the Strand Bookstore in NYC. While AVH still has its website, it's being used for a rantariffic twelve-point discourse (scroll down) on everything that's wrong with books, publishing, readers, authors, and society in general, and how they're all contributing to the death of the independent bookseller. I agree with a lot of the rant, but it's heavily tinged with bitterness. And while our household has definitely fallen for the convenience of Amazon -- we stocked up on several hundred dollars worth of books before we came over -- I like to think we're doing our part for the independent, too; a week before we left, I bought a copy of Jan Tschichold's Form of the Book from Moe's Books in Berkeley, knowing that I'd only have the chance to flip through it before it was time to pack it away ...

  To bring this back to Hamburg, there's supposed to be an interesting English-only bookstore near the University; we'll have to go check it out sometime soon.
  

Posted by Kevin at March 24, 2004 08:09 AM