Sooner or later I knew I would get around to writing this post, I have had enough experiences over the last 5 months here in Germany to be able to answer my question “is there rascism in Germany?”. Before we moved here, I scoured the ex patriot sites looking for posts about heath insurance, types of visas and so forth. Once in a while I would come across articles about racism in Germany, some people experienced little to none and others had negative experiences and shared their stories.

I knew when I moved here it would be like when I moved to Oregon, a very white state. It is as white here, of course, after all it is Germany, but living in South Florida, a veritable melting pot, I had forgotten how it felt to be different. I get the stares again now, I know some are because I am an immigrant, an American; but some are because of my skin which, is not all that dark, my mother was white and father was black/native american. I can’t explain the stare, I just know it when I see it. The kids especially will stare at me like I am from another planet; an alien from outer space for all they know, they probably have never seen a brown/black person in their entire life. Couple that with games that used to be popular here – “who’s afraid of the black man?” and there you have it, seeds of ignorance planted. Not knowing about someone because one has never had a chance to be around them is one thing, not liking someone because of the color of their skin is something totally different.

I have seen more black lawn jockeys with plates of bananas in their hands in 5 months than I have in the last 5 years. Coincidence? I think not! The thing that gets me the most is my reactions. I know how to deal with this, I have had these experiences all my life at one time or another since grade school, back in Schenectady. In Oregon, I lived near the small town of Drain and when I would go anywhere in town I would  sometimes get stared at, I was the only person of color around for miles, until people from Mexico started moving there. Alien stares run amok! Once in another small town, Cottage Grove, I actually had the cops called on me as I sat in my car outside the laundromat waiting for my cloths to dry. The lady working in the place told them I “was scary!”. For christssake leave me alone, I was just doing my friggin laundry! I usually just stare back until they stop staring or just ignore them, but every now and then I get these feelings of panic wash over me when I walk into a room where I am the only person of color. I just get really uncomfortable and want/need to leave immediately, which I do.

I had one such experience today, Susanne and I got invited to an election party (it is the German elections here today), the woman putting having it was the woman who lent me the German books to study for my A1 test and the name of my langage teacher. Both very nice women. We got to her house, I walked in and there are a dozen or so kids of various ages sitting in the living room and a huge group of adults sitting outside. The panic thing hit me, of course I am the only brown person there. I helped Susanne set up her massage table and sat down at a table near by. People would turn around and look at me (probably wondering who I was and what I was doing there) every once in a while, didn’t make me feel any better. I felt like a fish out of water. I left shortly thereafter.  As I was walking home I though about the people from Africa that live here. ther are quiet a few here in Muelhiem, Susanne said that when she lived here there were none. I really don’t fit in with them either. I am mixed, neither white nor black. I sometimes wonder just where I fit in. I know I am probably taking this too far, German people take a while to warm up to someone, so I will keep going when invited and see what happens.

I know it won’t be forever (thank goodness), we to eventually live somewhere warmer, even Susanne doesn’t fit in, she is more free spirit and dosen’t like to feel boxed in. So it has been tough to go back to this way of feeling, Susanne has had a difficult time trying to assimilate back into Germany culture; she has been in America too long! I noticed that she smiles much more than people here do and  is much more freer in body expression. So yea, I answered my own question, there is racism here but it’s also in America and lots of other countries where people are judged solely by their skin.

So here we be; the brown alien from outer space and the un-German German. For better or for worse, we are sticking it out, supposedly what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. We’ll see.

I have learned so much about my laptop, troubleshooting and fixing computer related problems since moving to Germany. I had never though about script and registry cleaners before. Never really needed them until I killed my laptop one day. Yea, I killed my precious computer, out of sheer stupidity. I had, for reasons unknown, decided that I needed a yahoo toolbar, then the next day I decided that it was a useless thing taking up real estate and I wanted to get rid of it. I looked everywhere for a way to get rid of it, even in my forbidden zone- the js pages in Dreamweaver (coding is NOT a strong point for me), I looked in the control panel, everywhere trying to get rid of the thing. I Googled and read somewhere that is is actually a virus and oh boy, that was the last thing I needed to hear! Now I am paranoid that I am going to loose my computer to a yahoo toolbar virus. So I go into Kaspersky, my anti virus and look for malicious anything that I can construe as a yahoo toolbar virus. I saw 5 items that Kaspersky said were highly critical. I forget what they were but because I was acting out of fear, I deleted the items without doing the usual research to see what they were first and if the were essential to my operating system.

Well the computer started acting slow and wanted to disk check when I turned it on again, now I KNOW I have a bug of some type. The next morning, I get up and turn on the computer and it does this check disk thing again, something is really wrong, but it managed to boot and I got to poking around under the tools menu of the browser window to see of I could get rid of the toolbar. Lo and behold there was a recent downloads choice there and what did I find there?  You guessed it, the damn yahoo toolbar download with and option to deactivate it!

HA HA HA HA HA on me. Relieved, I got rid of the thing and went about my business. All was okay until I shut off me machine, and a little while later tried to boot it up. The Blue Screen Of Death greeted me and the  machine went into a hellish loop trying to boot but not succeeding. I was devastated (to say the nicest thing I can about my tantrum). A search for a PC repair shop was futile, only 1 in Essen, so we decided to take my paperweight to the internet cafe around the corner. The guy was nice and tried to help by booting it up from a Windows Home Edition disk, one of those brown colored ones, it didn’t work. His prognosis was the hard drive was kaput. OK, now over to Essen to Conrad Computer and Electronics store for a new hard drive and price a German version of windows media center which was 295 euros.

I check on amazon and ebay for a new operating system in English and I come across several articles that say HP Pavilions have some kind of tattoo on the hardrive and the operating system, done so at the factory, so I can’t just swap out one hard drive for another, I can’t just buy any media center software and load it, there is a great chance it may not work because of this damn tattoo. What to do now? I had put off making back up disks, so we ordered some thru HP. Took over a week to get since they don’t ship to Europe, my brother had to get in the US them and send them.

Mean while, I had time to think since I had no computer (for a week), I got an idea that maybe I deleted the wrong items and it wasn’t really the hard drive. I have also read that Pavilions come with a partitioned hard drive, one the partition rests a Systems Recovery in the event of a crash. It has all the files to restore the computer back to the factory settings, how I got it out of the box. So, I just needed to get to the partition. The laptop has a quick play button that allows me to just play a DVD without booting up the operating system and I can get to Windows thru it. So I took a recently burned disc with Umbuntu – Linux something  or other operating system, and stuck it it into the machine. Lo and behold I got the thing into safe mode and was able to boot up in safe mode to the recovery partition! The fool (me) is thinking again, this time acting out of reasoning, not panic. So I immediately made back up disks once the recovery was done and of course the Hp disks show up the very next day! Another ha ha on me!

Now on to reload all the software, or so I thought. Here was the beginning of another long, long learning process. My Adobe Mastersuite 3 would not install. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I don’t need to tell you about the next tantrum, so I’ll skip merrily ahead to how I got it to install. the problem was that if one of the programs in the collection is not deactivated before uninstalling the software, it will not install, so if your computer crashes, you are up the proverbial creek! I found out that the one way to get it installed again ( it has many installation bugs, I have read the nightmares tales of other unfortunates!), was to run a script cleanup in at level 3 and 4, not 1 or 2, which was what I was doing, then do a registry search to  find of anything having to do with Creative Suite 3 and get rid of it from the registry. This took another week to figure it out, I am a motion graphics person, I need Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, so it was torture not being able to do anything. Now I am in a hellish loop, on Google to research and read, try cleanup, try to install, it doesn’t work so uninstall and over and over again. FINALLY I get it to install after doing an mega script cleanup at level 4 with WinCS3 Clean scripts cleaner and jv 16 Power tools registry cleaner and bingo! It installed. I cannot describe the feeling of accomplishment I felt after fixing my own computer!

Well since then, I have had to trouble shoot Premier, it didn’t work after installing,  Illustrator had a catastrophic systems faliure I had to overcome. Yes, catastrophic- first time I ever saw such intense error message. Makes you think the world has just come to an end. I have downloaded and installed my blog and its plugins, I had to replace my DVD burner, it died afterI burned the back up DVDs. Another buggy item, DVD players in HP pavillions. There have been other assorted headaches, but I am getting more confidence in fixing the problems that 6 months ago I would have looked to a PC repair person for. It took moving to another country to get brave enough to do it! Go Figure.

The other day I sat, looking at a Peruvian man who was speaking Spanish, listening to a voice translate the Spanish into French and reading the subtitles in German. It is no wonder my brain sometimes goes to a place I call Language Limbo.
I was watching TV5MONDE the French channel. I forget just what the program was, it had something to do with the mountains and people of Peru. Looking at the subtitles, which were in German, I took it for granted that the voice I was hearing was a German translating what was being said by the Spanish speaking person on the show. About 5 minutes later, Susanne came and sat down and said something about what the translator said and it dawned on me then that the translating voice was French. My ears had heard German, I wasn’t actually paying attention to it, I was reading the subtitles! The great part about it is I am actually uderstanding the German subtitles more and more. I know a little Spanish, I had a few years of it in high school, in fact I was a member of the Spanish Honor Society in high school. I have forgotten a lot of it though, unfortunalely. I love the language.

So now I am learning German and at times when I trying to say something and serching for the right words, the Spanish comes popping up and I come out with a half German and half Spanish sentance, Granish. Or half English, half German, Genglish. When I write in English now, I often forget how to spell a simple English word, or I jusy say it weirdly. It is funny to hear me talk English sometimes!

Language Limbo, not quite one language, not quite another but somewhere in the middle.

In time my brain will sort it all out and I will be able to go from one language to the next comfortably.
Susannes German father can speak some French and a little Engish easily, her nephew who is French is now fluent in German and can speak some English. Susanne too is bi-lingual German and English and she knows French from having 5 years of it in school. I think it is cool to be able to know and speak multiple languages, that is one the things I wanted to  be able to do after being here a while. I think that as the world goes more and more global, it is a good thing to be able to communicate in other languages. Some people don’t want to speak another language though, they are content with the one they know and they expect others to speak it also, regardless of where they are. I was reading something about that recently where someones family came to visit and since they had heard that Germans know some English because they get it in school, they expected that all Germans would speak English with them and got an attitude when they didn’t. I believe they were Americans, it certainly sounds like something some American tourist would do. That and assume that every other country will gladly accept American money.
I have seen this happen and I have to wonder why in the hell would someone be so friggin arrogant? Why is is that some Americans (not all mind you), have come to think that the world revolves around them?
I am getting off the subject here, I know the answer but this blog is about Germany not America.

So anyway, I am glad that German is becoming easier for me, I can go longer periods of time understanding what is being said now before my brain goes into overload and checks out. It used to be 5 or 10 minutes when I first got here, thats about all I could take trying to figrue out what was being said. Now it is an hour and a half to 2 hours of undestanding most of the converstion. I slowly but surly getting there. Kinda like the little train that could or in my case, the little brain that could!

I am happy to say that there is no shortage of fireworks here in Germany. One thing I love about Germany is the fireworks. There are are fireworks at a lot of the festivals and I love it! Last Saturday on the Ruhr, which is a few short blocks from here, there was a day long festival with boat races. Skulling boats I believe. All day there was music, races and fun. That evening, there was another concert and afterwards the fireworks. It was great to be able to watch from the apartment and the cats, after the first loud bang, were not that bothered by them that much. I have been here at New Years a few years back and it is something to behold. Everyone is out in the streets firing off their fireworks and these are no small kabooms. These are the real deal, rockets and whatever else that is illegal for people to have in the US. There mostly what is sold are watered down versions of real fireworks to keep people from blowing themselves up, I guess. Susanne’s father was like a kid with his new toys, he out there with the rest of the people on his block firing off these really cool fireworks. I am looking forward to being here this New Years, for sure! I posted a few pics of  them, my skills at capturing moving objects wasn’t so good, these were the best ones. I will definately get the video camera out at New Years and post some edited stuff.