Wir haben gewonnen!

We won! We won! We won! Last night Kevin and I, and my friends Chris and Birthe won the annual pub quiz hosted by the university’s English department. You could say that we were at an unfair advantage over the other teams. After all, most of them were German and there were three native English speakers on our team – four, if you consider that Birthe’s English is almost perfect. But there were lots of teams made up of native English speakers, and they didn’t win. ‘Cause we won!

When it comes to pub quizzes, it’s all about picking the right team, or Gemeinshaft, as they call it over here. I picked my team very carefully. I knew that anything having to do with an English-speaking country was fair game, so I chose accordingly. We had Chris batting for the English, Kevin for the Canadians, me for the Americans, and Birthe, who’s German, pick up the slack for all the wild-card European questions. (Really, Chris and Birthe are pretty much my two best friends here in Würzburg.) We really needed one more person, preferably someone from Wales. There was a disproportionately large number of Welsh-related questions, owing to the fact that the organizer himself was Welsh. “What is the surprising ingredient in laver bread?” for instance. Or, “What is the English translation for the Welsh motto, ‘Cymru am byth’?” (The answers: “seaweed” and “Wales forever,” respectively.)

Still, we did our countries proud. We were ahead from the very first round and maintained our lead to the bitter end. Kevin covered science and politics (Q:“Which two Nobel prizes were awarded to Germans this year?” A. “Chemistry and Physics”). Chris did all the heavy lifting when in came to sports. And Birthe was responsible for identifying all the obscure European personalities. And me? Well, my specialties run the gamut from high to low. I successfully answered such brainteasers as “Who painted ‘The Nightwatchmen’?” and “Who is the on-again, off-again girlfriend of England’s Prince Harry?” (Rembrandt van Rijn and Miss Chelsea Davy, respectively.) I also got both parts to the final question, “For what two films did Dustin Hoffman win an Academy Award for Best Actor?” The answer: Rainman and Kramer v. Kramer – not Tootsie and The Graduate as our opponents so foolishly guessed. So I guess you could say that I won. I won! I won! I won!

Obviously, I have a penchant for trivia games; it’s the only sport I’m any good at. Back in Boston, when I was just starting out after college, my friends and I used to go to the weekly pub quiz at the bar near our office, where we were all slaving away as unpaid interns. The prize for winning was always $60 – just enough to cover our dinners and beer. So, naturally, we all tried really hard to win. And we did win – every week for six weeks in a row. We were kind of famous. The other teams feared us. Once, our winning score was twice as big as the second place team’s. That’s how good we were. And then one week, a new team appeared. They were interns, too – medical interns. And they destroyed us. We never went back.

And so, it was very satisfying to finally win a pub quiz again, even if we only won by one point. Hey, we won. Birthe was so excited she did a little victory dance. She said she had never won anything before. Afterwards, we took our winnings – 50 euro – and blew it all on beer and cab rides home in the wee, wee hours of the morning. Nothing gained, nothing lost, I guess. Except our self-respect.

What happened to Jack's face

I’ll bet your reaction just now was similar to mine when Jack met me at the Freiburg train station, looking like he’d just been attacked by a cheese grater. What happened to his face?

“Well, this is what’s bound to happen, at some time or another, when you ride a bike in Freiburg,” he said, trying his best to crack a smile despite the pain. “It’s all my fault, actually,” he explained. “I was tailing a car too closely and didn’t notice when he stopped.” His bike was totaled, and he hit the pavement face-first. Actually, he’s lucky it wasn’t worse. He was not wearing a helmet. Still, you can imagine my concern, not only for Jack’s face, but also because this was my introduction to the city’s famous cycling culture – and just a day before we were schedule to tour the region by bike.

Freiburg is one of the most cycle-friendly cities in all of Europe. According to the tourist literature, there are actually more bicycles in the city than there are citizens. Wherever you go, you encounter cyclists of every stripe: dreadlocked co-eds and businessmen in suits, white-haired pensioners and parents with young children. I even saw one man riding despite a sprained ankle. He carried his crutches in one hand while he steered with the other!

I’ve always been a fan of city cycling and wished that it were more prevalent in America. I mean, what’s not to like about it? It’s cheap, it’s environmentally friendly, it’s an enjoyable form of exercise, and it reduces the volume of city traffic. Unfortunately in America’s car-centric culture, it’s not always practical. One summer, when I was living in Boston, I tried cycling to work everyday, but I felt so under threat from the “crazy Boston drivers,” who don’t signal, don’t share the road, and often fail to see cyclists, that I was forced to give it up after only a month.

Since then, I often fantasized that if I were Supreme Dictator of the Whole Wide World, I would shut down all inner-city motor vehicle traffic, except for public transportation, and give the roads over to the cyclists, who, in my experience, are a remarkably polite and law-abiding bunch. But, alas, I’m not. In America the car is king, and all other vehicles have to jockey for their right to be on the road. So I was really curious to see what life was like in Freiburg, where cyclists rule and automobiles are relegated to the outskirts of town.

But it turns out that it is not as safe or peaceful as I had imagined. In fact, as a pedestrian in Freiburg, I felt under threat from the cyclists! For one thing, German cyclists are allowed to ride on the sidewalks, which seems pretty unreasonable since they’ve already been given the roads. You can’t imagine how incredibly nerve-racking it is when they weave in an out of the crowd at full speed, passing you within inches – without any warning. I’m sure they think that they don’t pose a danger, but they can’t know when you might take it into your head to turn off in a new direction.

Futhermore, German cyclists are not the conscientious citizens that American cyclists are. They don’t wear helmets, they don’t obey traffic signs, and they don’t feel the need to ride in the direction of traffic.

So I’ve begun to wonder if it’s not American cyclists’ minority standing that makes them such a virtuous bunch. In order to survive the hazards of city cycling, American cyclists have to be hyper-aware of the behavior of everyone around them. If they’re not, they’ll be run off the road by some woman in a tinted SUV, who’s talking on her cell phone while trying to sip her Starbucks. Maybe it’s just the tyranny of being in the majority that makes European cyclists such careless custodians of the road.

On the other hand, it could be that most people are just bad drivers – no matter what their mode of transportation. Perhaps the American cyclists are a self-selected group of naturally prudent people, who would make excellent drivers, too. But in Freiburg, almost everyone rides a bike, and so, at any given moment, the majority of people on the road are likely to be idiots behind the wheel.

Whatever the reason, you can be sure that the next day, when Jack, Kevin and I rented bikes to tour the Durbach vineyards, I observed the rules of the road with vigilance. I wasn’t able to find a helmet, but I never went too fast or followed anyone too closely, else I wind up with a mug like poor Jack. That is, at least not in while we were riding in Freiburg. Once we got to the country, you had better believe I sped down the steep roads like I owned them, as if I were the Supreme Dictator of the Whole Wide World.

Arkansans Abroad: Freiburg Edition

During my Easter break from classes, Kevin and I decided to get some traveling under our belts, and so we set out for Freiburg, the warmest, sunniest, southwestern-most city in Germany. Its climate is perfect for producing light, sweet wines, and it’s a popular launching point for trips into the nearby Schwarzwald (Black Forest). But Freiburg had no real attraction for us, save one: It’s the home of my brother’s high school best friend, Jack.

This may seem a tenuous connection at first, but we’re Southerners – Arkansans at that – and all Arkansans away from home can claim one another as friends, even if they don’t actually know each other that well. And as it turns out, we’re even related: My great uncle married his aunt, etc. Although that may seem even more tenuous connection than the first, there’s something to be said for being able to talk to someone who know where you’re from and knows where you’re coming from, and there are scant few of those in Germany. Although maybe more than could be expected.

It had been a few years since I’d seen Jack, but I remembered his being one of the more ambitious of my brother’s buddies, and in his life after college it’s clear that he has lost none of that “get up and go.” After graduating two years ago from Centenary College in Louisiana, he decided to move to Europe and see if he couldn’t play soccer for a European league. Now, Jack is a great soccer player – I believe he might even have been ranked first in the state when we were in high school – but he was under no illusions that he was a big fish in a small pond. Arkansas is hardly prime soccer territory – and Europe is clearly the Mecca of the soccer world. “I knew I wasn’t a Pélé or a Mirabella,” Jack told me, “but I wanted to see if I was any good.”

Well, it turns out the Jack was pretty good and got picked up by a small semi-pro soccer club in the village of Durbach (pop. 4,000), about 40 minutes north of Freiburg. This, in and of itself, is an amazing accomplishment. Germans are crazy about their Fußball and have no shortage of their own highly skilled boys to chose from. Even their small, semi-pro leagues are highly competitive. Furthermore, Jack didn’t speak a word of German, and in this corner of Germany there are few Germans who speak English. “In order to understand the terms of my contract, I had to have a member of the team translate it into Spanish,” he said. “It was the only language I had in common with anyone.”

But what impresses me even more than his signing with a German team, is how he’s made a whole life for himself in a foreign country in less than two years. His first year here, he boarded with a family in Durbach and worked in a local winery (more on both of these later). Between the two, he became completely fluent in German, with only the slightest hint of a Southern accent. Now, he’s got his own apartment (and a German girlfriend) in Freiburg, where he’s studying for a master’s degree in exercise science at the prestigious Albert-Ludwig University. He also works at a wine research institute and occasionally schleps tables and plays guitar at a local Irish pub. And of course, he’s still playing soccer for Durbach.

I’ve lived in Germany for four months now and have come to feel myself quite at home. But I can never imagine creating a life for myself the way Jack has, even if I were to live here a dozen years. So more than anything else in Freiburg, Jack was the main attraction, and in touring around with him for several days, I saw more of “the real Germany” than I’ve seen all year. Funny that it was with an Arkansan as my guide.
[Jack with the lovely and talented Anja, who is studying to be a journalist for public television. Needless to say, we hit it right off.]