Naked in Germany in February
Saying Hallo! and Tschüss! to the Bremen Town Musicians and German Beer
Dear Reader,
“So what did you do this weekend?”
Herr Reich stood at the front of our class, our chairs circled in a U in front of him, waiting for our answers to start flowing out of us in German.
I remember thinking that he looked exactly like a human version of a miniature Schnauzer (if a miniature Schnauzer wore a turtleneck and chain smoked outside the building).
The first time he asked us on a Monday morning we all looked at each other wondering how to say in German, “I studied German at the library,” when in the back row a large blonde football player of somewhat questionable intelligence raised his hand with an absurd level of confidence.
“Ich bin bier getrunken!” he yelled, as if winning the German Cup, nodding his head at us as if to say, “I’m the only one in here brave enough to tell the truth.”
We all laughed out loud because we knew the boy had been honest and had indeed, “gotten drunk on beer” over the weekend.
I mean, who here can’t relate?
I thought of that moment in that class which repeated itself every Monday of that semester while I was taking a THREE HOUR beer brewery tour in Bremen, Germany last week.
THREE HOURS .. about beer, which I don’t even drink by the way, but which I felt was a near mandatory obligation to experience while in Germany.
But here’s the thing.
I had no idea the tour was going to be THREE HOURS when I entered Beck’s Brewery on nearly a whim at a random point in the afternoon.
I just lucked out that they happened to have a tour starting in ten minutes and it was in English, which looking back, almost seems like kismet!
After all, it was a freezing cold afternoon in northern Germany, the wind was whipping through the streets from the Weser river, and thousands of crates of green beer bottles were being loaded into vans for delivery when I walked up to the set of buildings that looked a lot like a set of Montana grain silos.
The front door was blocked and had a sign on it to call the tourist information office to arrange a tour, and I was about to give up and head back to the tram in the wind, when other people started to arrive and a woman let me in as if I was expected.
When I asked at the front desk how long the tour would last and how much, the woman shrugged and said maybe an hour and a half and asked for twenty euros.
It was only when the guide got us all huddled into a conference room to watch a power point presentation about beer (and by all I mean a hodgepodge of thirty or so Africans, Americans, Brits , Germans, and Belgians) did he mention that it would be THREE HOURS.
“Our agenda today includes a presentation about the history of Beck’s Brewery,” he started in English with the kind of thick German accent you here in movies, “and then we will go through the history of beer making in Bremen, then I will show you the ingredients that make up our beers, and then we will visit the assembly line where you are not allowed to take photos.”
“Maybe his English isn’t all that good,” I leaned over and told my friend. “They told me at the front desk it was going to be 90 minutes. This can’t possibly take THREE HOURS, can it?”
I looked at my watch.
I would be late for the 5:00 free organ concert downtown.
Oh, drat.
This is the best part of travel, when things you don’t even plan for, just work out!
And when in Germany … you must drink beer.
But by the time we all got to sample a beer of our choice, at the end of THREE HOURS, I was more looking forward to the pretzels on the table than I was the beer.
The twenty-somethings across from me couldn’t wait.
They sipped the sample beers in front of us and we each guessed correctly that they were … pilsners.
Alina, and her boyfriend (I swear he said his name was Pfeffen), were munching pretzels, and shared that they were on a winter break from university in Belgium, and so they took the train to Bremen.
I thought, “Well, I guess they don’t have Florida around here so Bremen will just have to do!”
Over beers, we talked about Alina’s recent time in Kansas on a high school foreign exchange program (which she loved), and how her host mom was horrified when she suggested they take the train … anywhere.
“I will drive you!” she insisted.
Americans.
I told them I was impressed because of the thirty or so participants on the tour they were the most inquisitive.
We were watching thousands of green beer bottles fill on the assembly line when Alina asked our guide how many empty beer bottles are delivered slightly damaged and can’t be recycled.
“Not many,” the guide responded.
Pfeffen asked if he could taste the barley seeds that were on display with the other beer making ingredients (hops, water, and yeast).
“You can’t,” the guide replied.
The rest of us standing around in an unheated museum in February were just trying to figure out how we could get the tour guide to talk faster so that we could get to somewhere heated, faster.
Or get further away from the man whose body odor was so bad it was coming through his thick winter coat in waves.
Though I was particularly riveted by his description of how young children (or someone as small as a child) were at some point in history put to work painting the inside of beer barrels with pitch and the only thing keeping them from suffocation was a candle.
If the candle went out … they had to jump out, fast.
Talk about dark times.
But also beer, if you didn’t know, is old, old, old and invented by a woman.
According to our guide, somewhere in Mesopotamia 7,000 years ago a woman left bread out to rise.
She went inside. Her husband probably distracted her. The rain started to fall. She forgot about the bread. It fermented, and poof, beer!
I told this story to a friend and she said, “Yes, and I bet she didn’t get any credit for it then either. Just some grief that the bread was ruined!”
I also learned that the city of Bremen has the oldest beer brewing tradition in all of Germany.
In all of Germany!
Records of this date back to the year 1072 when the Archbishop of Bremen ordered that beer be served to the poor.
Back in the tasting room, I discovered that Beck’s Beer tastes remarkably similar to Budweiser in the U.S. (not my cup of tea) and that I liked the oldest version of beer they had (which was like an IPA) and that I regretted not sampling the “Beauty Beer” which has more yeast in it.
Yeast is supposedly good for your hair, eyes, teeth, and nails.
Which is also why after a few beers everyone looks more beautiful!
Speaking of which, the Germans mostly recognized me as one of their own, which DNA testing has confirmed, by the way.
“I must fit in here,” I thought, after the fifth person in Bremen asked me for directions, in German!
They all acted a little shocked when I responded with one of the few phrases I remember from my college German class:
“Sprechen sie Englisch?”
But then I also thought, “I don’t fit in here,” when I entered the Finnish sauna at the gym wearing a one-piece swimsuit, looking like I was about to take a dive off the 10 meter platform, and was immediately confronted with some, ahem, naked sausages warming themselves up on towels at eye level.
“Hallo!” the naked co-ed crowd greeted me.
“Hallo!” I waved back, not wanting to seem shocked, while gingerly seating myself on the wooden planks in front of a woman lying down as if she was resting naked in her coffin.
After a few minutes of sweating it out with the oldies a man in his eighties said something unintelligible to me in German and getting nothing but a shrug from me, he got his bare bottom up, bent over and ladled water onto the hot coals.
A roar of steam came rushing over me, and I moved my non-bare bottom to the door, having learned the sauna etiquette of singing, “Tschüss!” as the door closed on my behind.
Listen, I’m just going to get the awkward part out right away.
It’s hard not to think about World War II while you’re in Germany.
Especially when it’s cold and you stumble onto a crowd chanting something together in German, and sounding angry.
“Am I having a nightmare?” I thought as I saw the crowd at dusk.
I looked around, expecting to see some green wool coats and black shiny boots but all I saw were mostly young people and women and no placards so I thought, “Well, this can’t be too bad,” and moved on.
Though they are rather tall and big-boned, the Germans I met seemed mostly easy going about life except for three things.
Recycling. Upon check-in, my Airbnb host explained to me at least three times (I wasn’t paying close enough attention during the first two times) the five different receptacles for recycling and trash in the attic apartment.
Whereas the Spanish were like, “Just make sure and dump it out after 8:00 p.m. outside on the street in the bin,” the Germans are like, “Believe us when we say, if you get this wrong, we will make you pay.”
That was scary enough to me that I washed every plastic yogurt container until it gleamed before gingerly placing it in the plastic recycling bin.
Our guide handing out beers at Beck’s Brewery - he did a great job! Biking. You probably won’t get run over by a car in Germany (unless you walk on the Autobahn), but it’s quite likely you could get run over by a bike on the sidewalk if you are not watching where you step.
Bikers use sidewalks in Germany and its lane is only marked with a slightly different color of brick. I felt like I was wandering on the road drunk when two bikes zipped past me at shocking speeds. This kept happening. So many times!Organ Music. I think there were something like 11 organs in Saint Peter’s church in Bremen. I went to an organ concert and they weren’t playing, “take me out to the ballgame” but rather a more intense version of something you might hear at Halloween. Truly stunning to hear someone play an organ like that at night (and such a rare skill!).
Here are some more touristy things you can do in northern Germany:
Say “Moin!” as a greeting, any of time of day, like a northern Deutschlander would do. Our host told us that southern Germans are a little bit horrified by this and it took her years to get used to it.
Have delicious sausage and bacon and egg for breakfast (easily found at the grocery story - REAL bacon!) and don’t feel at all guilty about it.
Find yourself confronting history at the site of a fire-bombed church during World War II in Hamburg, where I learned that 5000 children perished by American allied forces in one night.
“I fell asleep,” my friend said, as we watched a documentary in the basement of hte museum where people were rolling around in flames in phosphorous before running screaming to the river Elbe.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t snore,” I replied back. “That would have been entirely inappropriate for this situation.”
The view from the top of the church stands in the middle of the city of Hamburg (Germany’s second most important city) as a monument to one of the horrors of World War II.
Whereas the history of beer is light and fun in English, the history of everything else in German seems … nicht so gut.
We wandered around the city of Hamburg and I tried to get us into the Hamburg Dungeon museum, because I thought it might help put my life in perspective, and lighten my mood a little.
I mean, when you think about cholera, nothing else seems so bad, right?
If I had made it inside for an interactive experience, I would get to try and find my way through the great fire of 1842, watch a recreation of the Plague, stand in an Inquisition court, see Napoleon torture smugglers, and live the life of a pirate while intimately understanding cholera.
“Good times!” I thought, just to be sadly disappointed when we were told that the tours of the dungeon were given in German.
“Danke schön,” I said, watching them roll their eyes just a little at my American accent and then I turned around and said, “Do you know where I can drink some real German beer?”
Love,
Janelle
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