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Published: June 12th 2006
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The Chinese Tower
This is in the middle of the English Garden. It's a popular biergarten, and right now, they're showing World Cup games on a projection screen there. What is a holiday? Seems like a simple question, doesn't it? If you're British, it's what we Americans call a "vacation" - a trip somewhere that usually includes a beach and/or mountains and/or family. The other definitions, which come from the old English for Holy Day, have to do with days on which most people (excluding doctors, taxi drivers, and mothers) get the day off from work or school. A day which one can spend at leisure, the dictionary suggests.
In that case, Germans get more holidays than they can keep track of. Bavarians get even more. We certainly chose the right place to live in!
In 2006, in January, there were of course New Years' Day and Three Kings Day. By the end of January, Bavarians hadn't had any more holidays than Americans. February and March were extra holiday-free, and I heard a few natives complaining about that fact.
Easter is, of course, a flexible holiday so it does occasionally fall in March, but this year it was in April, and that's when the fun begins. Good Friday and Easter Monday are work holidays. Then there's May Day - May 1st for those Americans who have never
heard of it - which is a special day in Europe on which people go out and protest that there are not enough holidays and that they want a 15-hour work week.
Then began a string of holidays that we don't understand, but are greatful for:
- May 25 - Christi Himmelfahrt
- June 5 - Pfingsten
- June 15 Fronleichnam
- August 15 - Maria Himmelfahrt
Somebody, somewhere, knows what these are. Certainly, they are Christian holidays and so devout Christians are likely to be among those who know why we don't have to work those days. However, I did ask someone, a German, why last Monday was a holiday, and her response was lovely:
Hmmmm.... I could tell you why Christmas is a holiday, but...
She really made me feel less stupid for not knowing!
October 3 is German Unity Day, November 1st is All Saints Day, and then come the Christmas holidays.
December 24, which happens to be on a Sunday anyway, is Advent, then there's Christmas (December 25), and Christmas (December 26). Yes, my German calendar lists both days as Christmas (
Weihnachten ).
What a boring blog, you must be thinking right now, if you're
still reading. That's not many holidays?
Add the above holidays to the 28-30 holidays that people get off from work (as in 5-6 weeks off from work) AND Sundays.
Sundays are leisure days Come on, you say.
We get Sundays off in the United States, too, right? WRONG. You just THINK you have a day off. What do you do on Sundays? Go grocery shopping? Buy more clothes? Test drive cars? Run some errands? We don't do any of those things. That is because Sundays in Bavaria are holidays. The kind of holidays where restaurants are open, and not much else. If you run out of eggs on a Sunday, you have to run and borrow some from your neighbor or find some friendly chickens, because you can't hop on over to the store. The stores are closed. No 24/7 here! I am sure some of you do other things on the weekend besides buy things, but you really have little concept of Sunday as holiday until you live in Bavaria or in some other part of the world in which days of rest are taken seriously and you have no choice but to take it easy. You
WILL take it easy on Sundays in Bavaria.
A Walk in the Park What do we do on Sundays? We go to the park. If it's raining really hard, we stay home, but generally we go to the park. Every Sunday since we have been here since September. Going to the park is an incredible invention that the world will one day discover, but really appears to have started here in Munich. We are lucky enough to live very near the largest park in Munich - The English Garden. It's a good 2-3 times the size of New York's Central Park (I've never been to Central Park, but I hear it's big, and I read just
how big in a guide book).
The English Garden is the
place to be in Munich on a Sunday. There is a place for everyone. Surfers surf on a (literally, one) wave on the Isar River at one point where it flows under a bridge. They surf next to a sign that says something like "surfen verboten" (surfing forbidden). Then, there are the people swimming in the Isar just behind them and next to a sign that says "baden verboten". There is
a special section of the park for clothing-optional people (I don't think it's officially designated, but has developed this way- nudity is allowed in parks here). Like the non-smoking sections of restaurants (almost non-existent in the land of human chimneys), there is no barrier. Sitting in the non-smoking section does not mean the smoke doesn't enter your area. The people in their birthday suits just hang out there, next to paths, next to people walking by wearing designer jackets and scarves or ties (thatj's right - many people here dress up to go for a walk!) There are soccer matches everywhere. They do not appear to be clothing-optional, but it must be pretty funny when a particularly bad team plays near the white-tailed-deer. Do the nudies jump up from their sunbathing to get the ball, I wonder, when it rolls over to them? Then, there's the stoned section, where hippies play the same hypnotic drumbeat that they played back in Olympia. There must be some special significance to it of which we are not aware- otherwise, why would they play the same beat in Olympia and in Munich? (Maybe some Evergreen students are doing study abroad here...) There are at
least three biergartens at the English Garden, each with its own personality. The one on the lake, for example, is the one where the chichi people go. In the winter, they all wear black, because that is just what you wear at that particular biergarten. It does not take long to learn the rules.
There is a definite park culture. But joking aside, the scenes from the English Garden are truly beautiful scenes that look like a meticulously constructed movie set. When the lake freezes over, whole families and groups of friends shovel the snow to make makeshift hockey rinks - perhaps 20 or more games are being played on any given Winter Sunday. Benches are lugged from the biergarten for the sidelines, parents and children drink hot chocolate from thermoses brought from home. People of all ages ice skate, and having working legs is not a prerequisite: I once saw an elderly lady on ice skates pushing a man in a wheelchair (her husband?) around on the ice. Numerous mothers wore skates and pushed their prams over the ice. In the summer, there are countless soccer games, families having picnics, cycilists (mostly on upright bicycles), and ice cream carts.
With a day like Sunday, with everything closed, life really does slow down. Fridays and Saturdays, grocery stores are busier, and Saturday night, in the hour before they close, they are full of frantic people stocking up for Sunday. Like Atlanta when snow has been predicted. Everyone starts thinking,
Do I have eggs? Do I have milk? Do I have wieners? And if they run out, that is what neighbors are for. Sundays really do make us slow down and smell the beer.
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Moritz
non-member comment
Little correction
The Isar does not flow through the English Garden. It's the "Eisbach", and it's a small creek branching from the Isar and rejoining it downstream. "Eisbachsurfer" is a common term in Munich for the people surfing on that single wave. Every few years there a fatal accident happens in that creek, hence the prohibition signs.