Winter Coats

So I'm showing this photo of the Christmas Market to an English friend. "Oh, it looks so cold", she says. I go "Duh? How can you see cold?" "Well, they're all wearing coats and hats!" - Ahhh, yes - so they are.

Germany and France are very much alike in winter: Everybody wears the full Monty: Wintercoats, boots, gloves, bobble hats, scarves (of which more later). Accessorize to the hilts! Even if it isn't very cold, it's an opportunity to show off your newly bought winter wardrobe.

And now picture the scene in Britain - how different it looks. People very rarely wear any form of coat. Instead of boots they wear wellies. I'm always flabbergasted when I hear "Ohh it's snowing, get those wellies out!" For what could be more terrible than wellies in the snow? They're slippery and cold. (And look awful, especially the novelty ones with patterns...)

But this isn't about what I like in fashion - it's intercultural insights we're after. And I think that in Britain, people really refuse to be blackmailed by the weather. They wear what is there, and don't compromise. Just think of the eponymous Midland girls in their micro-minis and high-heeled sandals on a Friday night. And in Edinburgh I once saw a man wearing flip-flops even though we had 3 inches of snow on the ground. I also noticed threre is quite an ageist attitude to the cold in Britain - wrapping up warm is for oldies.  Nothing could be less true here on the continent - young women wear the chicest winter outfits which would keep them warm even in -20 degrees.

Britain's attitude is much more utilititarian - if it is too cold to go out in a t-shirt, they just put a fleece jacket on top. I can always spot an English tourist here in Munich as they're the only ones to wear fleeces. And trainers. And never a scarf. ( I know I said I'd come back to the scarf topic but I think it's actually a whole blog post in itself....)

Intercultural Ailments

When I first arrived at Oxford, I was plagued by pretty annoying recurring headaches. The weather had been bad, and I conveyed my theory that the headaches were due to "Kreislaufprobleme" because of  low pressure. My newly found English friend just burst into laughter. "Sorry, she said after a long while during which my head hurt even more, "but this is just soo funny - circulation problems, I love it! When I lived in Germany, everybody was always suffering from circulation problems, and now you come up with it too!" It turned out that English people do not suffer from circulation problems, and don't really understand the term. "Does it mean your arms and legs don't have enough blood flow?" "Well no, it means you feel faint and dizzy, and have headaches, like I do now". That was my first encounterwith the fact that ailments do not really translate very well.

Not much later, it was my turn to be slightly puzzled by an indigenous illness. (It seemed too serious to actually laugh.) Lots of students seemed to be falling ill with something called "Glandular Fever". Hmph, "Drüsenfieber", I thought. Apparently this was caused by late nights, essay crises, and general overwork. It resulted in a very lengthy (often several months) absence from college, and was apparently cured by calm, regular meals, and lying in bed. I'd never heard of it, or anybody who had succumbed to this illness before England, but quickly learned to look utterly shocked and slightly panicked whenever "Glandular Fever" was mentioned. I kept it to myself that the illness in question was probably best thought of as "flu".

In France, people suffer from something called "Jambes lourdes" a lot - heavy legs. Of course everybody has probably encountered the sensation, e.g.after a lengthy hike. But can it be a proper illness which makes you stay away from work for several days, for which there is a plethora of medication available in pharmacies? Apparently yes, in France at least.

So I suppose the learning is, everybody shares the same symptoms but whether you call it an illness is up to you - or rather the cultural context you live in, and how seriously it is taken there.

Happy to hear about your country's special illnesses and ailments, I'm on twitter: @Margit11

Is Football Intercultural?

Well, wherever people from many different nations and cultures come together, there is something for the interculturalist to study. There are preconceptions, prejudices - there's admiration, envy, ignorance, and in the case of football - there are bound to be negative emotions like aggression and even hatred as well. So quite a rich field!

We've all heard of the England team always having high hopes, but somehow each time the end seems to be very close to the beginning for them. So there's almost a cultural expectation for that squad to break through their own limitations. "This time", we (or their fans) say - definitely! And thus a totally new intercultural field is created. England as a footballing entity is very different from England the nation (polite, funny... or whatever else we associate with England in other walks of life). England is suddenly the underdog we're backing.

It's therefore nice to see how arbitrary such preconceptions that we harbinger about other nations turn out to be. They are fluent, and transitory - not written in stone. Or think of the decade-long dread everybody had of England fans! Being drunken, violent yobs! When Chelsea last played Bayern Munich - and won! the fans sat nicely in beergardens (photo at the top) and behaved like ordinary tourists, bar the odd bit of chanting.

Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to hold football up for a prejudice-breaking area, I do think it is refreshing to see that sports in general comes with its own set of appreciation of other nations' abilities, problems and strengths.

Let's hope Euro2012 lives up to its expectations, and even if you're not a football fan - just treat it as an intercultural playing field!

(In Praise) Of Teabags and Nescafé

What sparked this off? I'm neither a teablogger nor coffee afficionado. And yet something I read recently struck a chord, and sparked off an "Intercultural Musing."

I've always liked tea, and have never been very fond of coffee. I don't mind it, mind. I find these either/or, only this/never that decisions that people make in their lives tedious. Cat or dog? France or England? Beach or mountains. I always say "both!" to all of them.

So okay, I prefer tea, slightly. My memories of coffee are exclusively associated with Germany. Relatives coming "zum Kaffee". The table already layed at their arrival, tablecloth, tiny forks ("Kuchengabeln") - and in the kitchen, something that smelled good. Coffee brewing. Many, many spoonfulls of ground coffee ladled into a "Melitta"-Filtertüte, the drip drip of the coffee machine would soak the ground coffee into a hot brown, fairly obscene looking dark brown mess. Then the pouring into the tiny cups at the table. Lots of milk,. sometimes cream. The result? An infernally evil tasting brew, indescribable in its glissando of sour and bitter. Maybe foul is the only word to describe it. The fuss, the taste. "Noch jemand Kaffee?" Err, no thanks.

Coming to England changed all this. No coffee machines, no brown disgusting mess to be disposed of. No Kuchengabeln, Milchkännchen*.. no fuss. Nescafé in a mug - hot water, milk straight from the carton, if any. (Since changed, obviously - but Nescafè is thankfully still very popular).

Relief. A new world. Freedom.

Tea: A teabag in a mug. Hot water. Milk, sugar if you wanted. Glorious. If you never had a cup of tea made from a teabag of English (origins unspecified) Breakfast tea in a mug, you have no idea how good tea is. And equally importantly, how blissful the escape from fussiness is. I will never own a Milchkännchen, neither will I be the proud owner of a tea basket, tea egg or tea sieve. No brown sludgey mess of tea leaves or wet coffee. The embarrassing word "barrista" will not be used, and the condescending chatter of tea snobs will not be heard.

That's the sort of self-confidence changing countries gives you.


*A tiny milk jug matching your cups and saucers in design.

A Professional Foreigner Writes....

I'll start this guest post with a confession: My name is Rhino75 and I'm a professional foreigner. By that I mean that I'm one of those people who have lived outside their home country for so long that they no longer fit in properly anywhere. Ask me where I'm from and I won't miss a beat: "I'm British" I say in my best Home Counties accent. But when I'm actually back in the "old country" I fumble with small change, I'm confused by public transport and I don't recognize two-thirds of the people on the telly. Yet in France, my adopted country, I'm seen as the embodiment of all things British, a kind of unofficial spokesman. "What do people in *your* country think about this?" French friends ask me, while offering me another cup of French-style tea (weak, without milk). Or "We're planning a weekend in London, what do you recommend we see and do? And where should we stay?" Do I come clean and say "I've absolutely no idea"? Or "The last time I was in London, I spent almost the entire weekend in Dalston, with only a brief foray out to the White Swan in Stepney"? No, because they'd be disappointed. So I quite simply make it up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining - being from a different country has provided me with a nice sideline in media punditry over here. But the truth of the matter is that, after 12 years, France is naturally more familiar to me than Britain is. When I bump into people in the street, my first instinct is to excuse myself in French. I know the names of most of the main politicians - in Britain, I recognize Brown and that's it - and all the tv stars. I can tell the difference between a 2 centime and a 5 centime coin with my eyes shut and can describe all the symptoms of my cat's asthma without getting a single noun gender wrong. I know the right wines to drink, the right gifts to take to dinner parties and can even decipher the alphabet soup of French bureaucracy. While the Britain I knew, the Britain I remember, no longer exists, not quite as it was anyway. The references are different, the goalposts have shifted, leaving me feeling hopelessly old fashioned. Someone asked me on a recent trip home how I feel when I return to Britain and I replied "Like David Niven" - and yet the country of my birth is the very thing that defines me, at least initially, to many people I meet. "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," runs the old Jesuit motto. But does that count for national identity too, I wonder?