Die Rückkehr der deutschen Tochter... und die deutschen Großeltern

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Anne lived with us in Seattle for a year, 2011-12, attended Highline High School as a member of the senior class, and got to walk in the commencement ceremony at the end of the school year. Of course our entire noisy mob of a family attended commencement and did our best to embarrass our kid at it, as loving families must do. When she came home to Hamburg, she still had two years of Gymnasiumahead of her: not university, not high school, not quite but probably closest to what American students do at community college when they're planning to transfer to a four-year university to complete a Bachelor's degree later.

Anne told us Gymnasium has nothing like the American high school graduation ceremony, and she wasn't wrong, but she didn't entirely give us the complete picture either. So after we'd already planned our family's visit to her/our family here in Hamburg, and picked our travel dates based on our American school and work schedules, come to find out there's something called an Abitur-Zeugnisausgabe, a ridiculously long German word which is nevertheless shorter than "commencement ceremony", at which graduating Gymnasium students are celebrated for passing their important final certification exams. Or rather, for taking said exams. For privacy reasons, all students participate and are handed folders whether they pass the exams or not. (Highline did the same thing, handing out empty diploma cases and only mailing the actual diplomas later after final grades were reported and library fines paid, so it was possible to walk and not graduate.) Anne did pass her exams, as far as you know, and her Abitur-Zeugnisausgabe would be taking place while we were here, so we'd get to embarrass her again! Auf deutsch!

Of course, because nothing can be easy, after we got all excited about the serendipity of the ceremony falling in the middle of our visit, Anne found out that she had a mandatory orientation week somewhere far away within Germany to prepare for her upcoming service year in Kenya and would miss pretty much our entire time in Hamburg. The principal of her Gymnasium had to write a strongly-worded letter to the Kenya program to get permission for Anne to come back to Hamburg for a few hours to attend her own Abitur-Zeugnisausgabe! At least that letter was successful, so we declared the serendipity back "on" again.

And so, here we were, and there Anne went to the orientation thingy, and then we were absolutely thrilled to be able to welcome Anne's grandparents, Arnold and Doris, whom I've met and stayed with and blogged about on previous trips and who, if they were ordered to be more delightful and more perfectly suited to our American family, would have a difficult time finding ways to improve upon how much they already are, into our noisy mob. Even though there actually was sleeping space (this house is huge!), they wisely decided to stay in the fancy hotel next door rather than share one bathroom and one shower with the eight-is-enough of us at the Walters' place. They arrived midday on Abitur-Zeugnisausgabe-Tag (-day), which happened also to be the fourth of July. (Yes, they have the fourth of July in Germany. Right between the third and the fifth.)

We'd been resting, bumming around, making a leisurely progression of cycling eight people through one shower, and finally we were ready to head for the bus to Anne's school for the ceremony.

German schools are a lot smaller than American schools, and the Gymnasium is the mostly-self-selected subset of students who wish to prepare for university, so it's even smaller, and Anne's school is a small community focused on arts, social sciences, and sport, so it's even smaller. And the nature of the ceremony, in the school's own little auditorium, is a lot more modest than a typical American high school commencement (Anne's was held in the local concert hall/professional ice hockey arena with the school's concert band and a lot of screaming families and leis made out of candy and whatever). The principal made a speech, and some teachers from each of the concentrations made speeches, which I am pretty sure were not any more interesting to the people who understood the language they were given in. Then the Zeugnissen (certificates) were handed out to each student, and then students from each concentration made speeches, and just as we'd reached the end of the printed programme and were about to celebrate it all being over, the students went off-script and started presenting gifts to the teachers, so we had to sit for a while longer. Finally, whoever was speaker onstage at that point announced that they would be serving Sekt (champagne) in the commons room and, far more importantly, that the Germany-France FIFA World Cup football match would be shown in one of the classrooms, and then the Abitur-Zeugnisausgabe was over and yay.

Anne ran around saying goodbye to her classmates and teachers, looking typically frazzled yet dazzling in a formal dress she designed and made entirely herself. (Arts concentration, I forgot to mention.) I told her that Oma Judy and Opa John in Seattle sent along a little graduation gift which would be waiting for her at home and she almost cried, so that was sweet.

She didn't have enough time to attend her school's formal ball that evening, which I'm not sure she minded at all, and she did have just enough time for a quick dinner with all of us before catching her train back to orientation, so we all headed for the bus to the Altona Bahnhof (train station) to find some food nearby. Happily, the streets surrounding the Bahnhof were filled with carnival rides, booths, and food trucks as part of a huge summer festival, and just beyond the bus stop we spotted something unexpected, exciting, and totally apropos - Flammkuchen! I previously blogged about these delicious crispy Alsatian pizzas on two separate trips with Arnold and Doris from their home in Ettlingenweier into nearby Alsace, France. This food booth offered the traditional Alsatian style with cream sauce, bacon, and onions; a Spanish version with chorizo and black olives; and a vegetarian Italian version with tomatoes, arugula, and I'm not sure what else because the vegetarians claimed those ones when they came out which was fine because I like Alsatian best. And Bier (beer). Yup, a Bier booth just next door serving large glass mugs (2€ deposit per mug, refundable upon return of mug) of real alcoholic beverage to be consumed out in public with no fences and no signs prohibiting the proximity of minors. Easy and fun. We ate a lot of wonderful Flammkuchen before bidding adieu, I mean Tschüß, to Anne as she headed off to catch her train.

And then we headed back to Schenefeld to get acquainted, or in my case re-acquainted, with Doris' famous Punch. I had mentioned to Andrea that one of my favorite memories of Ettlingenweier was sitting out on her parents' terrace overlooking the duck pond, drinking Doris' delicious Punch and talking animatedly about politics in Germlish late into the evening. Therefore, I requested Punch and they made it so: several bottles each of Weißwein (white wine) und Sekt (sparkling German wine), a very great quantity of Mandarinen (mandarin oranges, the peeled canned segments kind), and normally but not this time Cointreau. The result was a vat (seriously, a ridiculously large bowl the size of one of Andrea's kitchen sink basins) full of Zauber (magic). Doris instructed that we were not allowed to go to bed until we emptied the bowl, and so over the course of hours we complied. We had several sub-conversations going on in various languages throughout the evening, and some blogging. I very recently learned the phrase feucht-fröhlichen as part of a translation project I've been working on, which bewilderingly literally translated as "damp-cheerful". My German-speaking friends on Facebook explained that it means "convivial, with alcohol consumption involved". Timely, as an evening with Punch is definitely feucht-fröhlichen, and as you might expect a good time was had by all.

The next morning, after an unsurprisingly slower-than-usual start to our day, we revisited the Altona street fair with Arnold and Doris before their train home, culminating in tasty Eis at an Eiscafé where Doris demanded that Andrea sit with us and provide language translation support so that she could grill me in detail about what I do at my job (a new job since the last time we met). The whole conversation was highly complimentary; it's always nice when someone takes a genuine interest. Doris was eventually satisfied with my answers and pronounced my job similar to the education work she and Arnold had done during their pre-retirement careers. That's a compliment, too. We concluded with their demand and our promise that we'd all come visit them in Baden in some future year - total score, since I love Baden and was really hoping to be able to bring everyone sometime but you never know where a noisy mob might or might not be welcome. We'll help make the Punch.

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Comments

[J&J]

Anne
Thanks for explaining the German school system. What is Anne's interest in Kenya? Sounds dangerous at a time like this.