A Voyage To Saturn

Last night, while Shelby was in her German class, I went to Saturn. Saturn is a German electronics-store chain -- this particular store, off of the Mönckebergstraße (one of Hamburg's main shopping streets), claims to be the largest electric-goods specialty store in the world. I get the feeling that their count is missing some store in Tokyo (or even the giant Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale), but spread out over six floors, Saturn is big.

I was looking for a few particular items: a new Wi-Fi card for Shelby's laptop, lightbulbs for our floor lamp that decided to burn out all of its bulbs at the same time, a can of compressed air (the collected dust of four years seems to finally be taking its toll on Shelby's hand-me-down machine). After rounding those up, I roamed the store, geeking out until it was time to go meet Shelby outside her language school.

I started out on the top floor, which sells music and movies. In the music department, there's a section for German music, there's a section for French music -- but there's no section for American music, because it makes up the majority of what's in the store. Everything you've ever heard about America's total supremacy in the entertainment industry is completely true. Personally, I'd be pretty disturbed if I walked into the average American music store and found that most of its content was in, say, German, but most consumers here seem to lap it up.

Then I went down to the cameras. I found that Canon has already eclipsed my measly 5-megapixel camera with a new 'prosumer' digicam, the 8-megapixel PowerShot Pro1. While playing with the toy, I felt a temporary twinge of geek envy -- I should have waited to get this camera! -- but then reflected that had I waited to get that camera, I wouldn't have had a camera for the first three months we were here. And the street price wouldn't have fallen yet . . . and I'd be just as covetous of the next-camera-after-that down the pike. Where does the circle end? After finding this site dedicated to Minolta manual-focus cameras yesterday, it's almost enough to make me want to break out the old Minolta XD-11, buy some classy used lenses at KEH Camera Brokers, and go all-manual. Or I can just wait five more years, and then probably get a digital SLR with more resolution than my dream camera, the Pentax 67.

In a disturbing encounter, I moved on from the digital cameras to the tripod section -- and there, out of the blue, someone starts to speak to me in English about a particular model of tripod. I hadn't said a word -- his choice of English couldn't be because I'd opened my mouth and revealed my foreignness. It was obvious that English wasn't his first language. Which can only mean one thing: that my Americanism still sticks out like a sore thumb, even if I don't do anything but just stand there. Damn. It must be the white tennis shoes ...

(White tennis shoes? It's a strongly-held fiction among certain "in the know" American tourists -- most notably the kind of people who hang out on the Rick Steves message board -- that white tennis shoes simply don't exist in Europe, and that wearing them will instantly mark you as an American. Conversely, wearing some other color of shoe will allow you to "go native". As a matter of fact, I am wearing white tennis shoes, but I bought them at Karstadt Sport here in Hamburg -- right across the street from Saturn. And if nobody here wears white shoes, then there certainly are a lot of Americans walking around . . . )