Word on the street is that Click Clack Gorilla is writing a travel guide. It’s about Germany. Having recently escaped near financial ruin at the hands of a sinister, yet (conveniently) easily flustered ticket controller, I am posting a piece of the section on (free)riding the German rails in celebration. Here here. Break out the champagne already.

die Bahn

Schwarzfahren—in literal English, “riding black,” or, in English English, the practice of riding public transportation without a ticket—carries two risks: getting thrown out of the train in a potentially inconvenient place and/or a 40€ fine. Urban legend has it that schwarzfahren is statistically proven to be the smartest financial option. I don’t make this shit up. The people on the news do. Having done a little math I reckon it’s true. But it all depends on the train.

RE (regional), IC (Intercity), and ICE (Intercity Express) trains are checked uncomfortably thoroughly and often. It is not impossible to ride these trains without a ticket, but requires a high level of concentration, creativity, or the patience to lock yourself in a small hot bathroom for hours at a time. One variation: Purchase the sort of ticket that allows you five trips across Germany dress like a businessperson, and see if you can’t sleep through the entire ride without being shaken awake by a ticket-checking conductor. As long as no date is recorded on the ticket, it can be used again. Buying tickets to cheaper destinations that lie along your route is also rumored to be effective.

Public transportation companies within German cities employ plainclothes men and women to conduct random ticket checks. (The conductors on REs and ICEs wear blue uniforms and snappy little hats.) Possible signs that you are trapped in a car with one of them: He remains standing as the train starts in preparation for beginning the check, she is carrying what looks like a portable credit card machine, or she is with a uniformed railway security duder, recognizable by his own snappy little red tam. They tend to come in twos and there tends to be something about them that just doesn’t look quite right. But maybe that’s just urban schwarzfahrer’s legend. If you see a snappy little tam though, don’t panic. Most of these in are false alarms—duders waiting for a ticket checker in another car or doing security duty. Each city has its “hot” routes and times. Learn them, heed them, and get the fuck off the train if you smell a rat. Multiple offenses can lead to much higher fines and harsher penalties. If you pay with cash, they won’t record your name, and no one will be counting, so if you can afford it, consider keeping a 40 tucked into your wallet. Or there’s always that fake ID you used in high school to buy 40s, but don’t come crying to me when you get arrested for falsifying documents.

Signs within the train cars will attempt to guilt you into seeing your failure to purchase a ticket as a grave social offense and before the train system was privatized, I might have agreed. You, being an American taught to like the taste of corporate cum and to despise all social programs as communist propaganda, will be immune to their social guilt. Consider buying a ticket once in a while to appease the direct action cods, and your own guilt at having refused to pay your share of an already underpaid driver’s salary. Also consider the thoughts of your travel companions. There is a certain breed of Germans—fuck it there is a certain breed of people—who have a general tendency to take corpor-ehem-I mean social responsibility and abiding by the rules rather seriously.

If asked for a ticket there are several approaches you can take to attempt to avoid the fine. There is the Oh Shit I’m a Slow Witted Tourist from Am-eer-e-ca approach. There is the I’m an Exchange Student Just Starting (note: the new semester usually begins in October and March) and I Don’t Have My Student ID Yet (students ride local transport for free) maneuver. There is the Ticket From Earlier in the Day tactic (tickets are usually only valid for two hours, but some employees are not detail-oriented and look only at the date and not the time). There is the Quickly Flashed Ticket From Yesterday scam. And if you’re dressed right, there is the slightly more involved Oh My God I’m SO Scatter-Brained Can You Believe It I Lost My Ticket Oh Dear Look at These Tears of Sorrow Shining in My Eyes (I’d Like to Thank the Academy) double whammy get out of jail free card. Or you could just run. Most Bahn employees have big Bahn bellies, and most will take you off of the train, right out into freedom, in order to collect your information.

I met Joey at the Tuesday Fischladen Vokü. He was standing outside, smoking. I was early, and awkwardly looking for a way to break the ice.

“You have a light?” I asked him. He did. I rolled us both cigarettes, and we sat at a table outside making small talk and drinking one-euro beers while waiting for our food.

Anyone else would have noticed that Joey was crazy within the first couple of minutes. I suppose I must have noticed, but considering that I often come across as being a few cards short of the deck, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Besides, most “crazies” usually turn out to be a lot more rational and interesting than the rest of us.

Continued on Young Germany.

“Das ist sau komisch.”

Literal translation: “That is pig strange.”

What I would have said in English in the same situation: “That is really f@–ing strange.”

And therein lies the entire problem of translation. The itch that can never quite be scratched. The photo that just won’t hang straight. It’s not just the (impossibly imprecise) art of translating culture- or language-specific idioms that get my panties in a bunch. It’s the (impossibly complicated) translation of what a certain person with a certain personality would say in a certain situation. It’s an issue that goes beyond the realm of words and accuracy and into the realm of identity. Of personal propaganda. Since moving to Germany I have often found myself posing the rather confounding question: Am I a different person in every language that I speak?

Continued on my debut Young Germany blog.

Alternatively, the entire problem of translation can be explained by and through Zero Wing. That’s right. I went there.

“Turkey is nice. It’s just like chicken, only drier and with less flavor.”

So quips the sardonic Birgit of Cathy Dobson’s new book, Planet Germany. When Cathy contacted me to request I review her book on clickclackgorilla, I almost peed myself. I mean, I would consider selling my soul in order to get free books from people who actually wanted me to, after reading them, express my opinion—in all it’s mean-spirited glory—in print. Then I read Cathy’s book, did a lot of thinking about where ex-pat writing is and isn’t these days, wrote the first chapter of my then still-patchwork novel, and then almost peed myself again.

It was an exciting week.

Planet Germany is a year’s worth of vignettes about daily expatriate life in Germany—a whimsical handbook of cultural quirks that it would take years of experience and embarrassing mistakes to discover on your own. I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone, but I would recommend it to anyone considering moving to Germany (think of it as a survival manual) or to anyone who’s moved to Germany already (think of it as a night of commiserating at the pub with the friendly new ex-pat in town). The people I wouldn’t recommend Planet Germany to are the sort of people who become violent at the sight of excessive exclamation points or anecdotes about cats.

Instead of writing the sort of review that would have given away too much and said too little, I decided to interview Cathy on her self-publishing, novel-writing experience.

There were a number of people who, when I told them I was quitting my job to work on my novel, actually laughed at me. And “I’m writing a novel,” is a sentence that still feels strange in my mouth. When did you decide “and now I’m going to write a novel”? Life-long dream? Sudden whim? How did people react?

The whole experience of living in another culture is a bit like finding yourself cast in the lead role in a slapstick comedy. Hilarious, baffling, and downright stupid things happen to you when you least expect it. You’re an odd sock tossed around in the tumble dryer of life.

Writing, for me, is a way of processing all these bizarre experiences and capturing the sheer idiocy of situations. I’ve always written accounts of the strange goings on around me—whether in the form of letters home, emails to friends, or posts on forums. I have a compulsive urge to tell all these stories, and I love to make people laugh. Writing a book was a way of moving from telling just one person about the latest lunatic episode of my life, to reaching a wider audience.

Of course when I started writing, I found out that there’s a lot more work involved that I’d thought. Also, having announced to my friends and family that I was writing a book, they all expected it to be finished in a matter of weeks. So for the next three years, while I wrote in sporadic fits and starts, I was bombarded with phone calls and emails asking whether it was nearly finished (”erm…almost… well I’m part way through Chapter 2…”).

What was your writing process like?

I approached writing rather like I approach any other project. The first stage was the planning. I decided the book was going to cover a year of the family’s life in Germany—with one chapter for each month. Of course the original outline-plan got adjusted and amended and things were added, booted out and generally revised totally. But the fact of having a plan was essential.

What was more frustrating was the fact that I couldn’t just sit down and write uninterrupted. I run a business, my colleague comes to the office four days a week and the kids wooft in and out all the time too. Not to mention my husband who also works from home.

My colleague was wholly unaware of the central role she was taking not only in the book itself, but also in the research process. With a real German on hand, you see, I could casually raise a stupid Brit question like: “How does the du and Sie thing work exactly?” or “Why are German toilets built the wrong way round?” and I’d get a full detailed explanation, often with diagrams. (In fact, now I think about it, I should probably have got her to write the book as well.) But I never wrote any of the book when she was in the office. I was a bit paranoid about how she’d react if she knew what I was up to.

In the end I took to getting up early in the morning (usually around 5) and writing for a couple of hours before getting the kids ready for school. I also did a lot at weekends. The reason for any shortages of coffee on the global commodities market over the last three years are entirely my fault. I drank vats of it while writing.

As I read, I found myself wishing for as much of the characters in the book as there is of Germany. Birgit for example. Hilarious. I wanted more Birgit. More Birgit and less cats. Was casting Germany as the leading character a purposeful decision, or something that happened along the way?

The initial aim of the book was to write about Germany…all those other characters muscled their way into the narrative and took over. Bastards!

I do see the potential for a sequel though, which goes far more deeply into the dysfunctional relationship between the German and English business partners. I’ve already mentioned it to the real-life Birgit as a concept. I said: “It would be entitled something along the lines of Things my German business partner and I have argued about.”

Her response was to shrug and say: “Whatever you strange Brits think is funny. But this time, make me a proper villain. The portrayal of me was much too nice in the last one.”

There’s no pleasing some people, is there?

Another of my personal writing concerns: How did you deal with getting people’s permission to include them in the book? Or didn’t you?

The only person I asked before publication was Birgit. I gave her a copy of the manuscript. She read about half of it and then said: “You can publish it if you like—but I don’t think anyone will laugh. It’s all very boring and just about normal life. Nobody does anything amusing or unusual.”

That was how I knew I’d got it spot-on and it was going to be a real hit with all the non Germans.

I just finished reading a Mark Twain travelogue in which he goes on a very long, very mean-spirited rant about how authors should never ever ever include foreign words in their writing without at least providing a translation. It’s an issue I wonder about myself more and more as I loose touch with which German-isms are common in English these days. I noticed you used quite a few German terms in the book, for example when it came to holiday names or local specialties. How did you decide what to leave in German and what to substitute with an English phrase or term?

Mark Twain didn’t have the advantage of the internet at his fingertips—so he would have had to get on his bicycle and pedal off to the nearest library to look up “Altweiberfastnacht” or whatever. No wonder he got pissed off.

Actually I think most of the German terms used are explained at the first point I they’re mentioned. Of course, I can’t be held responsible for people skipping over the explanation because they’ve been inspired to drink an entire bottle of Glühwein while reading.

What authors inspire your writing?

Because I studied literature at University, I’m a big fan of lots of serious literary heavyweights. But Planet Germany is written more for light entertainment than to convey deep messages or save the planet or anything. So I’d probably say something more along the lines of P.G. Wodehouse or Spike Milligan here.

And specifically travel writers?

I’ve always been a fan of Bill Bryson. And of course I’m spitting with envy at Peter Mayle because A Year in Provence is a similar concept (a year of a Brit’s life in a foreign country), but he managed to do it somewhere that has great red wine and fabulous weather. Where did I go wrong?

Aha! I had a feeling you read Bryson. Your style vaguely reminded me of him, although a much kinder version. You make far fewer jokes involving the sudden and violent death of people you dislike, which is a shame really.

I shall be sure to rectify this immediately. In my next book, all the Germans will choke on their own bratwursts, Dachshund owners will inadvertently lob their pets onto the BBQ at the Grillfest, and Officer Gorgeous will suffer a bizarre recycling accident while checking out the contents of my yellow bin.

Planet Germany is published by Grosvenor House, a self-publishing house. When did you make the decision to self-publish and why?

I always intended to self-publish. I didn’t even approach any mainstream publishing houses.

Self-publishing is the best route for anyone who is a first-time (unknown) author and whose book is on a topic that isn’t going to attract a mass audience. Germany is a niche topic as far as book sales are concerned—and Planet Germany is doing well in that segment. It’s economically better for author and publisher to go for Print on Demand if it’s a niche because you can do it on flexible short print runs.

The self-publishing process sounds like a diy wet dream. More control over your book, no meddling editors. Were there any bumps with Grosvenor along the way?

Grosvenor House was great. They’re a bit more expensive than some of the other self-publishing houses—at least as far as the upfront costs go. But their prices for reprints are cheaper than most of the others. And the quality of layout and execution is good. It looks professionally produced—which isn’t true of all print on demand books.

The only thing that held up the process was that I wanted the word “Germany” on the cover to be in a gothicky font and their designer didn’t have one. But a couple of emails and we obtained the right font easy enough. I didn’t even get the impression that they were grinding their teeth in the background and muttering “Bloody authors, getting all precious about an effing typeface” Though I’m probably wrong about that and someone in deepest Guildford actually wants me dead.

What does the process of getting a book self-published involve, and how does it differ from the mainstream route?

You have to pay something up front to get your book published—but in return you get to keep a far higher royalty on copies sold. So basically as the author you are taking on a bigger commercial stake in your own work. Higher risk, higher reward if it works.

A word of warning to would-be authors though. There are lots of different self-publishing houses and print-on-demand companies, and you need to do your research. I would say some key things to watch out for are:

- Do you get to keep 100% of the copyright in your work?
- What is the quality of the layout and design—in particular, typeface, type size, paper, paragraph wrapping, etc.
- Do they offer things like index creation?
- Can you design your own cover? How much flexibility do you have?
- What do reprints cost? What margin will you make on any copies sold via Amazon or other booksellers?
- Do they offer distribution through retail stores? How?
- Where are the books printed? Will you have to pay shopping costs on top?

I think most people would say that deciding to spend years and years writing a book and then self-publishing is ballsy. Did you have any doubts?

As far as writing for years, not knowing if anyone would read it … no it didn’t worry me in the slightest. It was fun to write. I read it out to the kids as I went along, and we had a lot of fun with it. I even got special bedtime requests… “Can we have the bit where the horse shits all over Dad again?” etc. Who needs Harry Potter? I would have gone ahead and published even if I’d known in advance that I wouldn’t sell a single copy. It was just something I wanted to do.

And having strangers read it doesn’t worry me. Even if they don’t like it—it’s my book and that’s the way I wrote it. So tough shit. Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion—I’d rather receive a negative review than no review.

You can read more of Cathy’s work on her blog. Speaking of blogs, the internet is drowning in them, and I am repeatedly frustrated with the lack of variety in what ex-pat blogs have to offer. Any recommendations?

If you want an ex-pat blog which is a bit more than just a description of the latest encounter with a bureaucrat/liver dumpling/u-bahn inspector try Jeff Taylor’s blog. He is English, lives in Paris, works as a translator, and has a unique perspective on life. Try his account of his own version of Officer Gorgeous. Loads better than anything I’ve ever written. The bastard. I must introduce him to Birgit one day.

And, any parting words of encouragement or warning for the aspiring starving-artists among us?

Writing is only part of the battle—before you ever set pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), you have to really and truly live the experience. The key to living abroad is developing your senses. You need to see below the surface, to listen to more than just the spoken words, to delve for the underlying meaning and subtleties. And most of all, you need to be able to laugh. As an ex-pat, you’ll always be the fish out of water. The butt of the jokes. The one who is helpless and baffled while all around you seem to know what they’re doing—however stupid it may appear. Laugh at the situation, laugh at them and most of all laugh at yourself. It might not make you a better writer—but it’ll keep you sane.

Considering how hard sanity is to come by these days, I’ll take it. I’ll also take bribes, compliments, and further requests for book reviews. Self-publishing is the new black. Viva la diy.

For those of you who speak German, but who have never been over to the wild east, feast your ears. This is a parody ad about a mechanic from the west who gets a job in the east and can’t understand fuck all. Maybe this is what that taxi driver said to me.

“What are those kids doing?” I ask. It’s raining and two girls are standing in the middle of the street below the apartment, wearing aprons and carrying rolling pins. Every time a car comes along, they stretch a colorful rope across the street in an attempt to stop them. Most of the cars avoid the girls completely, slipping quickly around them. Some stop and give the girls candy and money.

“Ah, Faschingszoll. Carnival toll. Begging for candy basically.”

I’d been watching people in costumes stroll past the window all weekend. Witches and cows. Cowboys and Indians. Bright sparkley wigs and soft red noses. All on their way to parades and costume parties and all-night binge drinking extravaganzas.

Carnival in Germany technically begins in November (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), but the real party starts on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday when a bunch of ruffians, probably still drunk from the night before, symbolically occupy city halls everywhere, which mayors everywhere symbolically hand over, signaling the start of a preordained chaos that lasts until Rose Monday. Women cut off men’s ties (Altweiberfastnacht, the first day of Fasching), decent people are permitted to start drinking at breakfast, and you can pinch the cute new chippy from shipping’s ass without fear of a sexual harassment suit.

Köln, Düsseldorf, and Mainz have come to be the three kings of the season. There Carnival is taken with a religious seriousness and beer is downed like it was the piss of Jesus Christ himself. The tradition cemented itself so firmly in the Rhine area because of it’s origins as an expression of anti-Prussian and anti-French occupation sentiments. Protest through parody and mockery. Here here, I’ll drink to that.

In recent years, however, Fasching has morphed from an act of protest to an act of hedonistic surplus, a time when you are allowed to (warning: tired cliche incoming) “let down your hair,” drink until your eyes cross, wear a red foam nose, sleep with your secretary, and not lose an ounce of dignity in the process.

Television broadcasts live from the center of it all kill any lingering curiosity about the event I may have once had. The newscaster is dressed as a clown, and is clearly drunk. Crowds of other drunken clowns, make-up already starting to smear, line long beer garden tables and listen to unbearable, never-ending comedy acts, and this comes eerily close to my idea of hell.

Fasching, a friend of mine tells me, is supposed to be the one time of year when you are allowed to completely be yourself and to do what you really want. It makes instinctive sense in Rio. In Germany it begs the question: is who we really are a bunch of alcoholic circus clowns with smeared make-up?

Needless to say I didn’t participate this year. I would next year, but I’ll probably have to clean my refrigerator. I prefer to act like an idiot 365 days a year. At least it keeps the hangovers manageable.

In America I have seen crazed shoppers with Mastercard eyes tear clothing from each other’s hands like rabid animals. Over-weight, over-paid women fighting each other for the privilege of buying $200 pants for $20. You’d think that killing someone over a price difference like that would be legal in America, but apparently the law hasn’t yet been passed. Working at the outlet sales, I’d always hoped I’d see a fist fight or someone pull a shotgun out of an over-sized designer handbag, but I never got to see so much as a bitch slap. Afraid of losing too much face, the customers would restrain themselves to backhanded insults and hateful glances.

Then I moved to Germany. Here, retail shopping is a blood sport.

Retail clerks, not actually obligated to wait on you, tend to treat customers much better than their waitress cousins. In retail stores, it’s not the employees you have to worry about, it’s the other customers. The clerks ignore the shoppers while the shoppers jostle each other out of the way, grab clothing from under each others’ noses, and cut each other in the dressing room lines every chance they get.

At first I thought I’d just had the bad luck of running into the rudest people in the country all in one day. Then it all happened again. And again. And again. And I started to think that maybe it was just normal. There’s certainly a distinct difference in regard for personal space here. That is, there is no regard for personal space. Try walking down a busy shopping street (like, for example, the Zeil in Frankfurt am Main). In America, it’d be considered impolite to jostle a clumsy shopper or a slow pedestrian. Many Germans would agree. But not the shoppers buzzing through Germany’s highly populated shopping districts. There jostling is not only normal, it’s expected, and, once you embrace it, a great way to take out aggression on a Saturday afternoon.

I once had a student who worked in high-end retail. Department stores, then designer jeans, then onto high-priced Italian luggage. He was sweet and witty and flamingly homosexual. We would commiserate about rude customers over cups of coffee and call it an English lesson. His name was Danny.

In German, he told me one morning, they don’t say that the customer is always right, they say that the customer is king. An appropriate metaphor seeing as “the customer” is almost never actually right and often behaves like a moody monarch on a power trip.

Once during his designer jeans days, a customer came in and demanded that Danny take back a pair of pants clearly marked nonreturnable. Danny told him that he was very very sorry, but that it wasn’t going to happen.

“I want to speak to the manager!” the customer shouted.

“I am the manager,” Danny replied calmly.

“But the customer is king!” came the arrogant response.

“Yes, and I’m the queen, and you’re not returning those pants.”

We didn’t like each other before we’d even met.

It was nothing unusual. This was, after all Germany, and we were, in fact, in a restaurant. The hungry passerby and the German waiter are natural enemies.

“Can I get you started with some drinks?” the waiter wanted to know. He’d eagerly watched us from the bar, waiting for us to take off our coats before pouncing with the menus. I had high hopes. Maybe here, in a tiny, old-school German restaurant that proudly proclaimed “Futtern wie bei Muttern!” (Chow down like you do at Mom’s) on the sign, we would find a unicorn, a revolution, a miracle: the German waiter who had not only heard the words customer service, but who had actually looked them up in the dictionary.

“I’d like a coffee, and we’d also like two waters, not sparkling.”

“Ah, we only have sparkling water,” he replied. He said it resolutely, firmly. Oh you silly child! No one ever taught you about how everyone in Germany drinks sparkling water? Silly tourists, tap water is for National Socialists.

(This aversion to tap water had, in fact, once been mentioned to me in a small high school German classroom over an out-dated book filled with pictures of badly dressed people named Heike, Sven, and Lars who liked to go hiking and introduce themselves to each other over and over and over again. Upon arriving in Germany, however, I learned that sparkling water was not the sole monarch, and that while many people preferred it, still water and tap water were not, in fact, extinct. Or poisonous.)

I looked at him, and then at the faucet hanging smugly over the bar sink. “Well, we’ll have tap water then.”

Up until this point, he had managed to maintain the front of polite etiquette he’d put on that morning with his little white chef’s hat. But this was the last straw. The sausage that broke the waiter’s back.

“I can’t sell you tap water!”

“Why not?” (And by ‘Why not,’ I of course meant, “Oh! So you can give it to us for free!” If only I could manage to be so pert on cue.)

“I can’t legally sell you tap water. There are German grocery laws!”

He started waving his arms around, as if to point out all of the invisible food inspectors who would shut down his restaurant if he sold us two glasses of tap water. I glanced around. We were the only three people in the restaurant. Maybe he thought we were the inspectors.

“Listen, I live one block away. Am I supposed to go home, fill up my glass there, and bring it back?”

He threw his hands in the air. His eyes said “Who do you think you are!!?” His fingers said “This is GERMANY!” And his shoulders cried, “THERE ARE LAWS.” Then he disappeared into the kitchen. We never got our water.

Ladies and gentleman, I’d like to present to you German customer service. Or perhaps, quite simply, the stubborn insistence on following the prescribed rules that is as common here as dandelions in midsummer. I might even go so far as to say that certain historical events could not have happened if people…oh never mind. Point is, it doesn’t just apply in restaurants.

For example, telephone “customer service” agents have repeatedly told the residents of my WG that they would, in fact, send a technician to set up the internet service we’d ordered from them. That was two months ago. Approximately one month ago, another customer service representative told my house mate, in the first sign of intelligent life we’d seen from the company since signing up, that he would do everything he could to figure out why it was taking so long. He then proceeded to say that he would email his findings to my house mate later that day.

I guess he’d forgotten that they were talking about how we didn’t have any internet service in the first place.

And I had been under the impression that internet providers were interested in collecting as many paying customers as possible. But after considerable thought, I’ve decided that I’d misjudged their business strategy.

I sometimes try to imagine what sort of training German customer service representatives receive. Do they skip the training all together? Or are they just too underpaid to give a shit? The latter I can understand. What I cannot understand is how any of these restaurants and companies are still in business. People complain, but nobody complains as loud as the expats. And the “there is no fucking customer service here fuck this country” is a complaint I’ve heard from almost every expat I’ve met here.

It’s not that these situations wouldn’t and don’t piss your average German off as much as your average Amie expat, but it seems that, in the end, most people just sigh and resign themselves to the policies of whatever company they’re currently at the mercy of. At the end of the day it’s not the customer who is always right, but the rule or policy being enforced. And to be fair, anyone who’s worked in any service industry anywhere knows that it’s full of asshole customers who treat you like shit and expect you to wipe their asses in return. Clerks at the mercy of policies, customers at the mercy of clerks who had no say in the policies that they’re enforcing. Bitters anyone? Perhaps the disrepute of German customer service is not due to misguided training programs or incompetence, but a subtlety planned workers’ revolt. Dear Capitalism, I want a divorce.