St. Martin – Lampions march, and how I got drunk with Kinderpunch

6^th of November is a lovely holiday in Germany. In honor of St. Martin, a saint who gave his own to the poor, the children march with lampions and sing some nice songs. This year I took the time to join my son YA. at his Kindergarden festival.

Around 5 PM the parents were gathering, chilling, on the Kindergarden playground, waiting for the kids to come out with their lampions. They came and stood round in a circle, a fire in the middle, singing songs and with their lampions in the small hands. Lovely. Then they each got a Martin-man out of dough and we all, parents and children, went to the stand with Kinderpunch (a hot  beverage made of juice and spices). We had been told that the Kinderpunch is free for the kids, and for one and a half euro for the parents. So I got myself a glass, going straight to the first stand with a steaming bowl, and invited YA. to take a sip. He smelled and did not like it, “iiih”. So I drank it all, all alone, walking around, chatting, finally sitting down to take the last sips. To my surprise all stuff around got blurry, lampions and decorations started dancing as I stood up. I cannot be that tired, what was it that I was drinking? The thought of hot wine crossed my spinning head, YA. was holding my hand tight. Did anybody mention hot wine?

I simply cannot drink. Well, maybe I did a few times, but just a few sips and then funny things happened. Like that first time in the village of my grandparents, I was a child, I got a sip, a really small one, of the hot, aromatic home-made plum-drink, thought to make the kids strong during winter. It made me kiss all the church icons on the walls and sing till I fallen asleep. It was that early that I realized, drinking is fun, but I should maybe let it be.
Back to the Kindergarden party, I concentrated heavily, stumbled to the stand with the hot bowl and asked, in a broken and funny German, what´s inside. The confirmation came quick: hot wine, did I want another glass? Oh my God, I got drunk on a glass of hot, red wine. No way driving back home now.  I had already been pulled over by the police, just that one time, sober like I always drive. I was cruising in my car in Karlsruhe straight on the tram line, wrong way. The Policeman who stopped me looked like Freud and told me that people like me should never, never be allowed to drive.

Faithfull to the pattern of a lady in distress, I called my hubby, only to realize that he was miles away across the ocean, so no help there. He picked up, laughed at me being so drunk and instructed me to take the tram back home. We did, YA. and me, singing and chatting, me trying to walk straight and keep a low profile, both of us counting the moons and realizing that my moons were outnumbering his by far.

Love is blind

I´ve been busy but pretty happy in the last few months, let me tell you why. There´s a new guy in my life and he´s a very handsome one: quite slim, blue-eyed and dark-haired. And with a smile that melts my heart every time I see it. I am so heavily in love with him!

I must admit though that his manners are not perfect. He burps and farts and smiles while doing so. But that´s ok, it´s all natural stuff.

He´s also flirting with most if not all women he meets. He throws his charming smile at them and is always happy to receive their compliments. But I don´t mind, I can fully understand why so many other women are charmed by him.

Well I should also talk about it openly: he drinks a lot and sometimes makes a scandal. But I love him the way he is.

He entered my life some four months ago and every day he charmes me more and more. His name is Yannick and he´s my son.

Why my passport foto could bite you

After I got married it was time to change my passport with the new name - so I planned to do so at my country´s consulate in Bonn. There followed a small bureaucratic adventure that I must tell you about, if not for other purposes than to get it out of my mind.

I started by reading the instructions on the consulate´s website and got so confused with all the bureaucracy, trying to understand which cases I fit in. One thing clear was that I needed an appointment to change my passport. As it was difficult to catch a free phone line, my mom assisted me and spoke with a very nice lady who gave me the next free appointment... in about four months, sometime in July. I was happy: I imagined how I will go there to my appointment and solve everything quickly and efficiently. Yes, I am an incurable naive, I also still believe in Santa Claus.

At the due date my husband and I drove to Bonn - about two hours away from our place. As we got there, the receptionist - an elderly man - invited us to go in and wait in front of window number three. In the waiting room with the three windows I got a familiar feeling: so are the public offices in my home country - closed or barely opened windows, with long lines in frong of them and officials that only come once in a while to pick up or give a document. Point for Germany: here you are invited in the respective office, you sit down and are kindly helped and barely need to wait. I hope I am not idealizing it, maybe I was lucky until now. However I will never understand why some Germans complain about their bureaucracy - they should get the taste of the one in Romania for a change.

Well, we still had about an hour till my appointment, so we sat in the line and waited. The clerks were coming and going about once in an hour, picking documents, bringing forms or giving information from behind their glass windows. All was happening so slow, so painfully slow. The time for my appointment came and went, I was still in the line and had no idea whom to tell I should be now in a cosy office solving my stuff - there were no doors to knock on and the clerks were disappearing too quickly from the windows. I was starting to be impatient so I went back to the old man in the reception hall and asked him what´s up with my appointment.

That´s when I got blessed with the knowledge that that was the guy in charge of customer satisfation there. In two steps he was getting out of his cage, coming very close to me and explaining me that appointments don´t mean a thing, it´s just a way to keep masses from coming all at once. The he asked me, concerned but also a bit severe, if "I planned to make any problems". I´m not so comfortable with making other people´s lives difficult, so I agreed to go in again and wait like everybody else did.

Later I saw him calming down another very nervous lady and telling her "c´mon, go out, dring some coffee, smoke a cigarette and come back... maybe it will get better". There´s always a solution and you cannot be upset with someone who gives you such a reasonable advice.

So I got back waiting in line, while my husband was quickly losing all his patience and asking me if we should not better leave and get me the German citizenship when the time comes. Finally I got at the small window where a very polite lady asked me why haven´t I said that I had an appointment. Then she sent me to ... window number one where I should have sat from the beginning to register our mariage before she could issue me a new passport. I was boiling, the opening hours were almost ending, but I went and sat in line to window number one. To calm myself down I started imagining ways to make things better in this consulate, simple ideas how to treat the people better and help them more efficiently. I can´t help it, wherever I see problems I think of solutions too - and I was looking forward to sharing them with the nice lady who finally invited me to take photos and finger prints for the passport.

As I was also complaining about the chaos, one of the high officials stepped in the room (the program with the public was already closed) and started to explain to me that hey, this is Romania, what did I expect? Things will never change, and it´s actually very good that I get the taste of home bureaucracy every once in a while... not that I get bored here in over-organized Germany. I was arguing and presenting my ideas, like them getting some interns who can give information and forms and help organize the appointments better, but he argued loudly that such solutions are unreasonable and will never work in Romania. Then he complained on for minutes about their problems, their low pay and the stress with citizens who don´t read or understand what´s on the website (I knew I belong to this group too). So I ended up calming him down and telling him I was sorry for their stress and hard life. Also I promised myself never to cause them stress anymore, so for the first time I strongly decided to apply for a German citizenship and never step foot in the Romanian consulate again, cross my fingers.

The whole fun cost me about 400 Euro, but to see the glass half full I did get my documents in time. As I got my passport, sent to my home address, I could clearly remember of my frustration as I looked at the photo - it´s almost growling at me. In spite of the nice lady´s attempts to make me compliments and cheer me up, in my new passport photo I look serious and a bit ferocious, like a member of the Adams family.

The Wedding - Part III: Chicken Dance? No thanks

Every international wedding must have its interesting and funny parts. In our case, the challenge was how to combine Romanian traditions and a German way of partying.

Romanian weddings mean a lot of traditions, too much food, endless dances and doing all these over one night – regardless how early the party starts.


There are some really funny traditions - for example, the bride and groom each leaving their homes (where they supposedly lived in mom and dad´s house till the marriage) to go to the wedding ceremony. There´s something celebrating and sad in the same time about it, and the Romanians like to mark the moment with music and dance. This old tradition started in villages and it is quite funny now to see it replicated in the large cities – where basically the wedding party starts in front of the block with a circle dance on the street and live music with folk (mostly accordion) musicians. Not everybody does it anymore– and I wouldn´t have had it this way. But I´ve seen some in Bucharest, and my cat Ciquita Bonita was also a big fan of them, always curiously watching from our balcony on the 7th floor.

Well, this is no tradition for Germany. I just can´t imagine well dressed wedding guests dancing and singing on the street – somebody would call the police.

While the bride gets her hair done by the godmother, and the musicians and family sing sad good-bye songs (followed by the street dance in the end), the groom also has his share of ritual departing: he will be shaved by the godfather in the morning. This would have been pretty funny for my own fiancé – he wouldn´t let anybody shave him anyway, especially as he imagined the whole thing being done with an old traditional shaving knife.


Stealing the bride is a must in most Romanian weddings. Some brides are against it, but mostly the deed gets done by a group of loud friends who make the bride disappear around midnight and take her to some disco. This is no longer a surprise for anybody. Usually one of the thieves comes back with one of the bride´s shoes, to prove they´ve got her, and asks for a reward to bring her back. The reward needs to be paid by the godfather or by the groom, depending when exactly the bride was stolen, and consists of funny little arrangements like some bottles of wine or the groom´s singing or declaring something romantic to his bride.


You can guess this bride here did not get stolen, as the German groom declared this would turn the well-established schedule upside down and would bore the guests who would wait for the bride to come back and the wedding to “restart”. So I made it clear to my Romanian guests that stealing the bride is against the law in Germany.


A Romanian wedding tradition that always intrigued me was the Chicken Dance. This is quite an old, meanwhile no longer fashionable tradition, which I remember from earlier weddings. It´s actually the godfather who dances between the tables, holding up in his arms a dead but very cheerfully decorated chicken and collecting small money gifts from the guests. If the godfather was tipsy enough and had entertaining talent, this was a pretty funny moment – although it always left me wondering what would be its deep meaning. Of course, Chicken Dance would be a no-go for our modern and cosmopolitan wedding – not that I would have known how to sell this program piece to my German groom.


There is some meaning in another Romanian tradition, which requires that the bride is redecorated with a traditional scarf placed on her head instead of the bride´s veil. This is a sign that now she´s turning into a serious housewife (and needs to look like one too). The veil is then placed on the bride´s maid head, and this poor young lady should be the next one in line to become a serious housewife. Got my share of that one too. The only thing that I managed to keep consequently away from was catching the bride´s bouquet – but this only to avoid the traditional and cheerful “when-do-you-get-married” interrogations.


Indeed, we did not have many of those traditions at our wedding party. But we did have the Romanian folk dances, which are performed in circle and last up to thirty minutes each (“hora”). First “hora” dances were happily involving the Romanian guests, while our international guests just watched, relieved they don´t have to do it. They did, eventually, as my friend Erika raised everybody from their tables and she would not take no for an answer. The next “hora” saw most non-Romanian guests quickly disappearing God knows where, but we were happy to see some courageous ones still standing and even enjoying them.


The German wedding traditions were nice surprises from our family and friends. We had some funny power point presentations in the style of “1001 nights”, with childhood photos and how we got together. There was a map of Europe where each guest could pin a needle on the place they came from. Polaroid photos were made into a spontaneous guest book. And a bunch of games were prepared, among which bride and groom answering some delicate questions or the bride having to touch a bunch of male guests legs and recognize her groom among them.

I was telling you Romanian weddings have to go on and on till morning the next day. And at the end, you can´t wear your shoes anymore as you probably broke them or lost them during the dance. Well, around two o´clock, when I had the feeling the party is just beginning, our first guests were leaving, to my regret. On the other side, my feet were hurting in a satisfying way, so I guess we did dance enough in the end.

The Wedding - Part II - Preparations and how about an orthodox baptism?

Before we started organizing one ourselves, I always asked myself, why would organizing a wedding take so long and be so complicated? It´s only a bigger party, that´s all.

And still we found ourselves entering the long and laborious circle of preparations – locations / attire / guests / flowers and so on. And moreover, we started all these almost a year before the wedding took place – just like the good old Bridal magazines advice. However we did try to organize most stuff ourselves, and avoid the trap of buying and consuming too much stuff luxuriously offered by the prospering wedding industry.

First, we found a little nice restaurant in Schwarzwald, that we fell in love with – carrying the romantic name of Zuckerbergschloss (the Castle on the Sugar Mountain). What a lovely place to get married into.

Then I had some interesting experience when looking for the perfect wedding dress. I really didn´t fancy looking like a princess, even if the magazines shouted out loud that it´s the only day in one woman´s life when she should look like one, corsage and trail and veil and so on. Also I wanted to spend a very down-to-earth amount of money for the one-night dress – while still looking like a bride.

So I started the quest through the bridal shops. The first shop in a city near by featured a turkish shop-lady who seemed reluctant when she heard my budget, and barely got herself to look for a couple of dresses, actually quite nice. I must have been her charity case of the day. While I was trying them on, she pressured me condescendently that I should buy one right now, otherwise with this cheap price they will be gone very fast. I didn´t want to make her sad or seem ungrateful , but still I went along to other shops. Finally I found a charming one with kind shop ladies who presented the perfect dress to me and declared I looked like a „greek goddess”. Well, I bought it, even though it was above my budget – who wouldn´t like to look like a goddess then?

Planning the wedding ceremony was equally interesting. My fiance and I had long talks about having or not a religious ceremony. I am orthodox, while he was neither baptised, nor a big fan of churches or priests. In my Romanian circle the obvious solution was to get him baptised as orthodox and have a nice traditional orthodox wedding ceremony. The outlook was more than frightening to him, after I explained how a wedding takes place in the orthodox church – although harmless, it can indeed look funny to a non-orthodox. The cherry on the cake was when I told him, half joking, how young people getting baptised will be thrown naked in a big bowl with holly water – with godparents and whole family joyfully assisting. True for small babies, not necessarily for grown ups – but my fiance didn´t want to hear anything about it any more. I guess I would feel the same about some ancient religious ceremony where humans were sacrificed for the gods. So we dropped the idea and I wasn´t sorry for that – somehow I never dreamed about a church wedding myself.

The alternative was Marry Man – a young and nice master of ceremonies, who interviewed us enthusiastically on our meeting and living together and seemed genuinely excited about the whole story – even though he probably hears hundreds of similar stories in his job. Marry Man staged a nice, simple and romantic ceremony, with him telling our story to the guests, our exchanging the rings and some live music in between. All in the open-air pavilion of the restaurant. We loved it.

Another challenge was our guests list. Hey, this was about as strictly done as the Oscars´s guest lists. I was caught up between the Romanian tradition of literaly inviting everybody you know, and our wish to have a small, intimate wedding with only the closest ones. The compromise was a reasonable list where the majority of guests were Romanians, even if our wedding took place in Germany. However names kept on popping up on my side of the list, while my fiance´s face when I was adding dozens of new names on the list was priceless. And for a good reason too: he was the one to do the accomodation arrangements for all our foreign guests.
For all these, he was repaid at the wedding with a bunch of jolly romanian dances – which he had to go through more or less willingly.

- To be continued -

The wedding – Part I – „When are you going to settle down?”

The life of a single girl in Romania, even in the city area, can become complicated once the girl reaches 25 years of age – not to mention 30 or more. You know what I mean: the single obsessing annoying question „when are you going to get married?”. Well, what´s a girl supposed to answer, if she´s not a clear-sighted witch, or if Prince Charming had not yet shown up? And even if he´s there and he had not popped up the question yet?

So looking back, I got this question myself once too many. And the tone, oh my God – from plain curiosity, to condescendence and even to bitter remarks like – you career women, if you wait too long, nobody´s going to want to have you anymore.

Actually, this was only one of the often asked questions that I got during that time. Others revolved around the well-known proprietary needs of my Romanian fellows – when am I going to buy my own flat, or at least a piece of land to build a house? And I was wondering the whole time, what to do with all the inexistent cash in my bank account. Or, why am I not eating any meat? I started thinking that, besides these little details that I needed to fix in my life, I was actually quite ok, if not even perfect.

Finally Prince Charming appeared – a handsome German with blue eyes, who stole my heart at the first sight during a business event in Paris. Then the spirits around my Romanian network quieted down a bit, and version 2.0 of the question started to raise: „when are you going to marry HIM?”.

When the young couple took the decision to move together, before talks of a marriage were done, there must have been some traditionalists which were quite scandalized. My family showed understanding though and they were also happy when they heard about the romantic proposal which was done, some time after, at the beautiful Plitvice Lakes in Croatia where we were on holiday.

I must say I was already very touchy when marriage discussions were approaching – for example I told my mother-in-law that I am patiently waiting for the romantic proposal and will not discuss the topic until then.

Well the good thing is, experience taught me never to ask delicate questions to other people – such as about getting married or having kids or other standard themes on having a traditional life style. So if I ever asked you such a question, cross my heart that it was only fun or slightly ironical and I would never bother you with such stuff.

New stories for my friends

I´ve always wanted to write and tell stories. This blog started with my moving to Germany, and it was initially only in my native language, Romanian, so that my friends back home can hear about my “adventures” in my new country. After the initial wondering and admiration for my new country have calmed down a little, and after the healthy self-doubts showed up (like “do I really have something interesting to say?”) here I am with a new try – this time in English as well.

And with a new challenge to write stuff in a language which is not my mother tongue.
I will tell you stories about what happens now, but also what I found interesting in my latest happenings in Germany.. such as:

• I got married. I know, lots of people do that. For me it was an interesting experience to get married and have a wedding party in Germany, which was so totally different than all the weddings in Romania – where I was becoming a professional bride´s maid. So maybe I will tell you why this was interesting and different.


• Just like most young families, kids were also on the menu. Our first is dancing and kicking in my belly as I am writing right now, and is due in November as a Scorpion boy.


• Altogether this last couple of years there´s been the economic recession and the world is making steps to learn again new rules of the game. It hasn´t affected me more than changing the project that I was working for and travelling less. Who knows, I might have gotten better projects.. I might have done more wonderful things if the economy continued to boom. But at the end, I was happy to have a job at all during this time.


• My mom followed me and moved to Germany. Besides the intricate family relationship which makes my husband believe that I never managed to grow up or cut the umbilical cord that connects me to my mom, I think it was a good move. Even if it shocked my mom´s family and friends back in Romania, as she sold her apartment and decided to move in a new country, at the age of almost 60. And that´s how we started new bureaucratic adventures and getting a new source of amazement at my mom´s progress in speaking German language – with the inherent involuntary humor that comes with it.


• The fabulous and young German football team has won the third place in the recent world championship. And I find myself asking myself: how comes I got so interested in football? I mean, for heaven´s sake, I hardly know what an off-site is, or why those guys dressed in black whistle all the time. But I loved it, I must say: the excitement, the psychology of the teams, the surprises and last but not least the Octopus Paul. That´s my first and last football comment but I tell you: in the day that Octopus Paul foresaw Germany´s defeat in the semifinals, my colleagues were literally panicking in the office, swearing at Paul, at the weather and also at each other for being so superstitious.
  

If you´re wondering why this blog is in English, and not in German, well, maybe I will tell you some of the adventurous things I sometimes say in German and you´ll understand. Germans are a very nice people – probably to compensate with the difficulty of their language´s Grammatik – but I have to agree with Mark Twain and his followers, that it´s almost impossible to learn this language correctly in a life time - unless you´re growing up learning it. That´s not an excuse: I am making progress, seriously.

And if you ever decide to come to Germany and try speaking German, you will be amazed how many compliments you can receive for your efforts. Germans are really too polite and too nice – and I can happily live with that.