How did it come to this?
Hi,
My name is Ryan. I was once a nice young Tennessee boy with a bright future, but I fell in with the wrong crowd. It started out small, like all addictions do. I took Spanish language in middle school. In high school, I moved up to the hard stuff- Spanish itself isn’t so bad, but it is a gateway to things like German. At the tender age of 14 I was introduced to Duetsch Huete, a textbook featuring main characters name Udo and Heike, both of whom were sporting huge afros and bellbottoms, and extolling the utility of German because you could speak it in 5 countries; West Germany, East Germany, Austria, Switzerland and, as always, Lichtenstein- a small country named for an ancient tribe whose religious rituals centered around the licking of giant stone monoliths. This should have been a clear warning, but I was blind.
I consoled myself with two things; my German teacher, despite teaching German for 26 years, had as far as we know never actually left Tennessee, and I wasn’t as crazy as those kids who were hooked on the Latin- you would see them sometimes down by Church Circle in Kingsport, Tennessee. Looking all scraggly, burdened with hideous facial tics, “two dollars man! All I need is two dollars to get me a new wheelock’s!” Driven to the edge of madness by their need to figure out what, exactly, the ablative case was, I told myself I would never let it get that bad.
I knew when to stop. I would never get that foreign. No way man. As soon as I got to college I was going to quit. Study engineering. Marry a nice corn fed girl. Settle down and work for the Eastman.
But in college, I only got deeper into the foreigness. I took, against my better judgement, a class in pre-war German Film. I couldn’t stop. I took another class in port-war German film. I got back into German classes. The downward spiral had begun.
After several years, I found myself in a flop house in Prague. Surrounded by Godless Canadians and worse. And finally, the nail in my coffin.
Every time your child studies a foreign language, watches the BBC, reads the economist, or moves to a suburb of New York City they are in immediate danger of meeting a foreigner. And, ultimately, they will meet the worst type of foreigner, the one that will seal their doom. The hot Latina.
The hot latina is every parents nightmare. Particularly the Portuguese ones. Not raised in a culture that is obsessed with skinniness, she actually looks like a real woman. Once little Johnny meets her, you can forget about the nice wedding with that Smith girl from church at the country club. She will conqour him, and drag him off to foreign lands as war booty, never to be seen again.
And that is what happened to me. I was unfortunate enough not only to marry a Latina, but to marry one with mad financial skillz and a high paying job with a foreign company. A job that eventually took her, and me, down that road from which no one ever returns. The giant german chemical company mothership called my hot Latina home. “Come” it beckoned. “Come to a land with high quality plumbing, where we will pay you in Euros and give you six weeks of vacation a year. Come to me….”
So now I find myself, as so many do, at the rock bottom every foreign addict must eventually come to. I am, myself, a dirty, dirty immigrant.
I am kept under lock and key in a small apartment in Mannheim Germany, surrounded by Germans, only allowed out to gaze in stupefaction at insanely complex rail schedules and to search fruitlessly for a single jar of peanut butter, while not understanding why there are no bags in the supermarket.
My only lifeline to the world is this, my blog of exile- both a cry for help and a warning to you all not the do the things I’ve done, as the great Kenny Rogers once said.
So tune in for regular updates on what it is like to be an American in Germany, how you can avoid this fate, and (should you find yourself here) perhaps a little bit of my experience can help ease the pain. The bitter, bitter pain.
In future posts we will address the burning questions that you have always had about Germany, such as:
-What is that stanky plastic “Biotonne” bin for?
-How come I am in Germany and all my neighbors are Turks?
-Why are these people naked all the time?
-Why do German apartment have no light fixtures?
-Why is it considered appropriate to tell new acquaintances all about your Urinary tract infection?
It’ll be a lot of fun.
