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. America is a land of convenience and Europe is not. That in my estimation built on spending about a third of my adult life hopping around, traveling through or living all over this continent, is the main difference between Europe and America.
Of course there are many more. The most obvious being language. I speak food Deutsch. I can order the meal, ask for the check and not gag on either. The rest of the language is pretty foreign to me. Although courtesy of John Mangan, the German teacher at Mc Nary, whom I managed a “B” in first year German, I can understand more than I can speak. Others are money; most of Europe uses the Euro, the value of which seems to fluctuate to the advantage of the smart people of the world and to my disadvantage. They don’t have miles in Europe, they have kilometers. Just multiply by six and drop some zeros and you’ll be close. Temperature in Centigrade instead of Fahrenheit, which means that zero is zero and not thirty-two and thirty is hot not cold. No pounds to lose here its kilograms. I weight somewhere between ninety and one hundred kilos depending on
which time of the year I get on the scale. In America in my good times I weigh about two hundred pounds and in my bad times, much to my cardiologist’s horror, about two twenty. Multiply 2.2 times kilos to reach pounds.
Then there is the bathroom. Oh my. I’ll never figure out that flat bottomed toilet with not enough water to float or drown a leaf but at least now the toilet paper is an improvement over the sand paper they used in the early sixties when I first visited Europe. It requires about four hands to work the shower because the shower head is on the end of a hose that you have to hold over your head while tying to soap down. It’s extremely difficult to reach some parts of the body with one hand holding the soap and the other the hose. And the hose is never long enough which makes you imagine a very short person invented this contraption. Maybe it was Napoleon, one of his wives was Austrian. Her name was Marie or Ann or Twinett or something like that and I believe her pretty head landed in a basket after the guillotine
executed its job description. That is if I wasn’t asleep during that particular History of Western Civilization lecture.
If all that isn’t inconveniencing you enough, there is this other little fact. Nothing is open when you think it should be. Like, I forgot to buy milk so I’ll just trot on down to the 7/11 and pick it up. Not likely. There is no 7/11 and all stores close by six o’clock at the latest and by noon on Saturday and are closed on Sunday. So get your stuff together and shop when those places are open. And don’t try to drive around the block to shop here; you’ll end up in Poland. There are no such things as blocks, there’s winding, zigzagging, turning this way and that streets that are designed to confuse and they surround buildings built about a thousand years ago. So if you miss the place you are going, stop, turn around and you might have some luck.
Another thing, the refrigerator is about the size of your microwave and it doesn’t get very cold. Something about not enough hydroelectric power sources so electricity is very expensive. The result is shop for today and
then tomorrow shop for tomorrow. Eat what you buy, now, and don’t plan on stocking up for the week. No preservatives in the food so if you don’t eat it, it won’t last. Of course it tastes better as a result. Eggs taste like eggs. Tomatoes taste like tomatoes. Potatoes taste like potatoes. Kind of like it used to be back in the states in the fifties when I was growing up.
Actually I prefer Europe’s way of living most of the time. I can figure out the kilos and the temperature and the kilometers and how many dollars I spend every time I pluck down a Euro. I don’t drive often so getting lost and ending up in Warsaw or Krakow or Auschwitz isn’t a problem either. The public transportation system gets me where I want to go when I want to and doesn’t take very long. I don’t have to try and find a parking place, spend too many Euros for petrol or park in the wrong place at the wrong time because I couldn’t read the damn sign. I don’t have to worry about driving down the einbahnstrasse, one-way street, the wrong way because they changed
the direction last night. They do that to keep the drivers alert. It must work; I don’t see many head on collisions here. I can live with the bathroom as well.
I like walking through the outdoor market. Picking out dinner that I know was growing in the field until about four o’clock this morning makes me smile. I know that banana wasn’t picked in the twentieth century and shipped from Argentina on a tug to give it time to ripen, and it still isn’t. The fruit is juicer, the vegetables more colorful and the fish is swimming in the bucket, alive. The bread is baked today and doesn’t come in slices. It comes in all shapes and sizes and the only white bread is the Greek flat bread that is awesome especially with some of those olives stuffed with nuts or garlic or pimentos. Wash it down with a glass of local red wine you buy from an old guy that has been doing the wine thing for about a hundred years and charges you two Euros per bottle. It isn’t liable to be vintage but it sure isn’t Annie Greensprings either.
Europe makes you plan ahead
and think about life. It’s structured. It has substance. In America you can just float along without really thinking about anything. Forgot dinner, hell just pick up the phone and some teenager with his pants hanging below his butt crack will deliver a pizza to your door. You can sit on your duff and watch every game ever played by pushing a remote control device that has a life of its own. You can watch some criminal grab his crotch for doing his job and scream obscenities for every toddler to hear. You might get your kicks rooting for the home team, but the home team will be somewhere else next year and that criminal will be making more money playing his little game of f-you for another multi-billionaire in another city who made his money in cyberspace when he was nineteen. Sometimes I prefer one to nil and gooooooal. Pretty simple and pass the mustard. They have about fifteen kinds here; it’s called senf in Deutsch. Some is very sweet and some spicier so have another hot dog and keep smiling.
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