My left heel hasn’t been right since I tripped down the steps in the Bahnhof on the way to a beer festival a couple weeks ago, the traditional Bavarian Trachten shoes a half-size too big, making it that much harder… Read More ›
expats
The piper will lead us to reason
At the German school, the kids get dismissed for five minutes between every class to go outside and get some fresh air or have a smoke, some of the younger ones play on the climbing bars and hang upside down… Read More ›
Americans just think they can go anywhere (2)
We met Eberhard and drove to the Landratsamt to get our new/used German car registered, by the police station and other government offices where he worked as a cop for 40 years. We took a number and sat, and the… Read More ›
Uncommon denominators
Today we put down a deposit on a used car in a town we couldn’t pronounce that sounded like a slur or spit coming up — Eberhard got right on the used car search with his handy at the Bahnhof… Read More ›
Who needs Munich when you’ve got the Wasen?
For reasons perhaps too private to get into it’s hard peeing in lederhosen, hard undoing the suspenders through the clasps when you’ve been drinking, hard clearing the edge of the leather because they don’t come with flies or barn doors,… Read More ›
Meet me at the cemetry gates
We dropped the kids off for their first day of German school, their first class French — French taught in German — and I walked to the cemetery by the Realschule, where we’ve started our third week of German classes,… Read More ›
Leaves clawing the cobblestones
When the French arrive, it’s with armsful of things from France: breads wrapped in brown paper bags, coolers full of cheese, boxes of wine, even duvets for their beds. It feels like a hotel and we lose track of how… Read More ›
I love my liver when I eat my lover
Drinking beer in the morning in the kitchen cooking with a wife-beater and Tom Waits, finally found something the cat will eat that’s not decapitated, some calf’s liver in a yogurt sauce from a plastic packet mom adds olive oil… Read More ›
Pigs in zen
We thought something was burning in the house, but it was just the Backhaus up the road, where the women gather to bake bread and gossip in the fall and burn clippings from the grape vines. We journeyed to Stuttgart… Read More ›
Hearts wrapped in cloth
It sounds like a joke, two Turks and a Kurd in our German class replaced by two Croatian construction workers and an Afghan refugee, but it’s no joke really when we go around the class and say where we’re from,… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 