Monthly archives of “April 2013

The Secret Dreamworld of a Schroppaholic

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2013 was to develop a delusional unhealthy obsession for german actor and tv host Jochen Schropp.

jochen schropp

I haven’t had a tv crush in a long time, and the moment I saw his deep brown eyes and his cheerful smile in the commercials of The X-Factor’s german version I knew deep down that he was the one.

I didn’t want to rush things, though. The plan was as follows: after the first episode I would have started fantasizing about him; around the 4th/5th episode a folder named Jochen Schropp I Love You would have suddenly appeared on my Desktop; by the semi-final (8th/9th episode) I would have started carrying a picture of him in my wallet, telling people he was my boyfriend; after the final episode I would have found a way to break in Jochen’s apartment and smell his dirty underwear.

Sounds like a perfect plan, right? Read More

german habits featured

Top 5 German Habits You’ll Pick up (Against Your Will)

Don’t know about you, but I’ve always liked the expression embracing a new culture. It sounds peaceful and reassuring, and when I planned to come to Germany I used to think of myself as a Pocahontas in reverse ready to absorb and confront with open mind and arms this new teutonic world.

I soon realized, though, that if Pocahonts had known about McDonald’s, guns, stuffed turkeys and Zoey Deschanell, she would have probably spared  us some songs  and filed a couple of complaints. I also realized that there’s times in which you don’t feel as you’re embracing another culture as much as you’re handcuffed to it.

Everybody tells me that Berlin is not representative of Germany, but there’s things, little annoying habits, that I picked up along the way during my expat life in Berlin and they look 100% Deutsch to me.  I’m pretty sure you’ll pick them up too if you get to live long enough in this beautiful city.

1) Leaving bottles on the street

Kulturkonditorei: Pfand gehört daneben
My education turned me into a strict recycling machine and the thought of somebody leaving his trash on the sidewalk used to horrify me.
But.
In Germany empty bottles are not trash: they’re money. You go to the supermarket with your empties, a machine sucks them up and returns cash; for an empty bottle they give you up to 60 cents, which you can then reuse to shop.
It’s not very difficult to understand that leaving an empty bottle on the public soil of a relatively poor city is like anonimously delivering donuts to a fat camp. You lay the bottle on the ground, turn one second to your friend who’s trying to decide if the fourth club of the night should be Berghain or Watergate and zac – onomatopoeic italian sound – the bottle is gone.
You kind-of-sort-of-like give to the poor and you also avoid storing another empty at your place.
I mean, the fact that I’m just a couple of Club Mate away from buying myself a car makes me proud, but I can barely see the entrance of my apartment anymore and at this point my only hope is that the crew of Hoarding: buried alive finds me before it’s too late. Read More