Tales from Studio Mailbox

Precious Loden, a German Treasure

One of the things I've done while living here is manage to accumulate an amazing collection of German fabrics, ribbons and buttons.  Not only have I combed the flea market stalls, but I've had great luck by simply letting the women of the local charity shop know what I'm looking for.

The second-hand store "Brauchbar" is run by long-term unemployed people.  Brauchbar literally means "usable."  Often I get a loud resounding groan when I tell Germans how much I hang out there.  I've been lectured how these people "don't want to work" but "still want to receive" government money.  I don't fully understand the whole German social system so I just shrug my shoulders and say that I've never met anybody who wanted to be on assistance.  Compassion first peeps. (TJ shakes head).

All I can share is that for the past five years I've had nothing but positive experiences with the four locations I peruse and I can think of at least 7 people who I've come to know and have enjoyed my countless transactions with them.  Goods donated to Brauchbar are resold and the money you spend there goes back into the social charity system.  Everybody is a winner, especially me - the one who happens to love ratty old German crap! 

For a time, I was buying items and then destroying them in order to bring them to their next life as a new creation.  Everytime I did this I felt a little bit guilty that I was wrecking a wearable garment.  I knew in my heart that Brauchbar had to be recieving a lot of donated goods that were damaged and no longer "useable" in the traditional sense.  It was after I brought in my set of three German Christmas stockings that two of the women really understood what I was doing with my purchases.  Ever since, I've had my own VIP box tucked in back where the ladies have laid everything to the side that they were going to throw away due to holes, cigarette burns and stains. 

What is Loden?
Loden is a very special and rare type of wool used in traditional clothing in Germany and Austria.  Since it's already been shrunk down and felted, it's one of the most warm and rugged outdoor materials imaginable.  Normally green or grey in color, it's very heavy and a cultural classic here in Germany.  Buying Loden by the meter off the bolt is not for the faint of heart.  I just checked here and noticed that 1.5 meters is priced at 59.99 euros (that's about 86.00 USD).

One of the problems with traditional clothing is that it tends to be worn and owned by much older people.  And sadly, often these garments are stored improperly, or have been long forgotten.  Loden, (like any wool) can be a moth magnet.  If you learn anything here today, remember to always have your wool garments properly cleaned before storing them in boxes or closets.  Pack everything with scented cedar or lavender as natural pest deterrents.

When the two ladies started salvaging on my behalf, I knew I had to make them a small token of my appreciation before I left.  I managed to get a couple lavendar-filled sachets sewn up for them, complete with traditional antler buttons.  And although I'm sad that I'm leaving my secret source, I'm pretty sure I've hoarded enough stuff to keep me busy for years to come.  I'm so grateful for these kind ladies who took the time to "get it" and made the effort to save so much for me.

Sachets made from alpine curtains, a man's jacket and scraps of Loden - finished off with traditional rick-rack and antler buttons attached with red thread.

Want a walk down memory lane?  Here's proof that one German's junk is a foreign woman's treasure!
Other Brauchbar-related posts:
My Collection of German Easter Ornaments

The Orange Kitchen Cupboard Before

The Refinished Cupboard and Video

Vintage Paper Score

Our Perfect Office Table

My Toadstool and Wooden Christmas Ornament Collection

Parking on a German Saturday

Here in Germany, shopping is forbidden on Sundays.  This is what makes Saturday the worst possible time to go and get some errands done.  Germans work hard all week long and have one day to get their private lives in order. Groceries, pharmacy, new shoes, household stuff.  If I have to go out on a Saturday I usually come back a shaken, crying wussy. Not from the crowds themselves, but from parking.

Don't give me any lip about European parking lots being smaller and cars getting bigger.  I lived in London for years and people did not park like this.  Of course there is always one jerk who takes two spots, but I took these photos on one Saturday, in several locations in less than a few hours time.  I didn't have to go "hunt" for examples.  I just observed and recorded.

In fairness to my host country, some of the images are from one of the worst ramps in Wuerzburg.  But my bigger point with this is the blatant disrespect of mother-and-child spots and worse, the handicapped spaces. 

I've learned over the years that it won't help to argue.  The times I've opened my foreign mouth, I've been eaten alive.  Since I've been back from my quick trip home in America, I've been honked at, screamed at, sworn at, and gestured at.  I know the whole world is getting more and more hostile.  But there is a special dose of it here.  I've almost lost hope. 

For so long I've done my best to be a good Ambassador of America.  I know better than to blow in and start telling people how they "should" be.  Who am I to say what's right or wrong?  But this is my blog and I'm here to let Germany in on a little secret.  Most other cultures do not park this way.  When people from outside of Germany see this, we think it's rude.  When we see it on women-and-children spots we're irritated, and when we see it on handicapped spots, we're appalled.  Try harder Germany.  You are good people. Start parking like it.

Oh there's a spot!  Everybody hold your breath... we'll make it fit!

TJ has mad Porsche love!  But just not for this one.

Hey, there's a spot open over here... for a rickshaw!

Let's blame the bricks on this one. 

Apparently I missed the rule where only half of your vehicle needs to fit in the spot...

That'll do when you've got the luxury of a sliding van door...too bad about the other sucker!
Oh I'll just borrow a little slice from the reserved lady parking spot... they're smaller anyway!

Let's just get it parked first, then we'll worry if we can get out of the car...

Ahh yes, the ultimate woman-hater.  Reversed in slant-wise over two women-and-child parking spots.  NICE.  This one is so bad, I'm kind of turned on.

Roll on wheelchair user...

Me and Hansi

*Note to readers: I drafted this back in 2008 and I don't know why I never posted it.  Maybe I just wasn't ready to face my feelings..!

Everyone probably has a story about their kid getting their hands on the remote control and in the end having to call customer service or getting a repairman out to get the TV in working order again.

Well when this happens to me, I get pop-up messages in German across my TV screen and a remote that freezes up and a cable box that only speaks in German and refuses to cooperate as well.

The other day while the hubby was away for an overnight business trip, my 18-month old Larsi boy worked some serious magic with the remote and the TV would not even shut off.  The channel would not change and the cable box would not shut down.  It was increasingly frightening when I realized we were stuck on a channel that played only Hansi Hinterseer.

Who is this man with an Edelweiss belt and a white linen shirt open at the chest?  I had no idea.  Complete with happy musicians in the background, one with fingers flying over a rhinestone encrusted accordion, my first reaction to the concert was denial.  Was this a wild band of German Liberace Impersonators?

I watched my child sway back and forth clapping his hands and dismissed it as his overall happy and optimistic personality.  

The full-packed concert consisted of a mixed demographic, many waving giant tongue depressors with the image of Hansi floating in the center of an Edelweiss.  This isn't happening to me, I thought. 

An electrician was scheduled at the house and when a pair of them arrived, luckily one was quite technical. I explained my predicament and despite their open amusement at the situation, the young man rescued me. 

But now comes the confession...after a few hours exposure to Hansi, I fell in love with him. Maybe it's just my edelweiss obsesssion but so similar to my crush on Neil Diamond, I realized that Hansi is the Austrian equivalent!!

So here is an awesome video depicting the regional love for this man.  Join me in my new crush:

 

Edelweiss Video and Debut

This week I was the lucky artist to submit calendar thumbnails over at the new site that everybody's talking about: Create Mixed Media! 

I decided to make a little video in celebration of the occasion.  For those of you who are regular readers, you already know this is a hard step for me in spite of my Flickr Phobia. 

Yet I thought it was important to illustrate just how much crap I made until I got some good results. I didn't cut one linoleum plate with my beloved flower, I carved several.  And then I printed them every which way on everything I put my hands on until I got something I was happy with.

My low point was when my Count Pretzula artwork was one in a series of rejections last year.  Oh well, despite the fact that my orange Edelweiss were a flop, I stand firm that it's genius to submit Oktoberfest artwork as an alternative to the typical Halloween stuff that saturates our life every autumn.  This is what Twist Defiance is all about - doing your own thing!

My edelweiss phase lasted an intense 6 months, and now I'm sort of riding the tail of the comet.  I'm not exactly "over" them, but I haven't really moved on either. I hope you enjoy these few minutes of my journey and that you'll take a moment to go see the calendar I made over on Create Mixed Media.  *In the video you get to see the last slides with the German days of the week, but over on their site you get to see the magic of what happens when you view them horizontally!  Thanks in advance for taking a look and here's to an inspiring week ahead of us...

 

Geranium Wars

This morning was pure madness in the German retail sector.  Not because of market trends or a shift in meat pricing but simply because geraniums went on sale.  Now I've journaled about the beloved balcony flower before but I hadn't really touched on the whole gardening part of the story.

I was thinking about re-naming the flower "Germanium," as in a funny little play on the words "German" and "Geranium."  But as it turns out, there already is such a thing as Germanium which is apparently some sort of magic element that doesn't know if it's a metal or not.  Wow.  Whoever would've thought that whole periodic table thingy would actually show back up in life again.  Nutty.

Anyway.

Normally I avoid any type of sale like the plague since I'm just not into full body wrestling in order to save a few bucks.  I'm pretty much the kind of person who's willing to spend a bit more and tolerate the milder German shopping clientele where all you'll  get is a cart jacked up the back of your heels once or twice along with heavy sighs of impatience if you're purchasing more than the average German daily shopper does.

The trick with gardening is you've got to watch where the old folks go.  These people have wisdom and it's safe to assume that if there's a traffic jam of walkers and canes, the plants are probably pretty darn good and affordable.  And I had walked smack into a geriatric convention.  Less than 15 minutes after the store had opened, entire carts full of 10-plant trays were empty.  Swiped clean! 

So although I happened to be at this store for a whole different reason it suddenly occurred to me after five years of living in this country, that I wanted my geraniums too!!! 

I got out my elbows.  And I went in.  Very quickly I realized that the ones I was after were scarce.  Until I noticed that way down low on the wheeled carts, way down by the ankles, were packages that the elderly just couldn't get to.  Imagine my glee!  Then the shame truck hit me realizing that it's probably fundamentally wrong to benefit from other people's physical limitations.  So after tucking a couple boxes into my basket, I got down on my knees in the store and pulled out and re-merchandised all the rest of the plants so that the individuals a couple decades older than me could actually access them.  (Note to self:  check off "good deed for the day").  This reduced my guilty feeling of grabbing the healthiest of the flowers for myself.

Now it's here in the story where I did the unthinkable.  I attempted to engage strangers in conversation. 

I was a little skeptical if it isn't actually too early to plant these annuals.  And there's nothing I hate more than putting effort into a dirty job where I've got to scrub out my nails and then they die on me.  So I whipped out the one German gardening term that I know in an attempt to impress two of the ladies next to me.  I asked them about Eisheiligen.  Dang I felt like hot shit.  These ladies eyes lit up and it didn't matter that I spoke with a wacky accent.  I was suddenly a young gardening protege with potential!!  Off they went telling me about frost and covering plants with newspaper at night.  Discussion ensued over whether or not it's too early to have them on a balcony with an overhang, close to the house where we'll outsmart father frost.  It was awesome.  I thanked them while flashing my big toothy American smile and trotted up to the cashier with 30 little sprouts of potential.  Dang, maybe I am practically  famous after all.  What a great morning!!

Froehlieche Ostern

We've been having unseasonably warm weather here and I'm not complaining.  I took my collection of German wooden Easter ornaments out on the balcony and had a little photo shoot in order to share them with you. 

Most people tend to think of the wooden Christmas ornaments, but after years of hunting I've managed to amass quite a collection of bunnies, eggs and birdies. 

When I've gotten really lucky, I've found some oldies that are crackled.  They stand out because they tend to have a small metal eye screw for the string instead of the modern version where they're directly attached to the ornament. 

Next week daycare is closed.  I've planned a few posts ahead for you but I'll be taking a computer break and not keeping up my usual level of interaction.  Fret not, I always come back and until then you can go peek at the goats that greeted you last year! 

Happy Easter or whatever you celebrate my dear friends of the blog-o-sphere!  xxx tj

The Essence of Klein Ochsenfurt

The Expat in Germany blog put out a call for photographic submissions that "capture the essence of your city." 

I sent one for Ochsenfurt although technically I live in Klein Ochsenfurt.  "Klein" simply means "little" or "small."  So if you're one of those "specific types" we live in the little part of Ochsenfurt on the other side of the river from the main village.  Thanks to the expat blog, I'm inspired to share my surroundings with you...

Ochsenfurt is a beautiful town full of traditional timber frame houses.  It has a very strange and distinctive courthouse with a skeleton shaking an hourglass at you when you peer up at the clock tower to check the time! (Yikes, no wonder the folks can be a bit pushy...) 

Ochsenfurt is also the home of the Suedzucker Factory.  This means that every fall the wine-producing village is invaded with load after load of trucks hauling sugar beets.  The factory kicks into high gear and when they start cooking down the root vegetables you get blasted with a smell that somehow reminds me of burned pancakes.  If you're foreign like me, this might make you hungry.  If you're from here, you just shrug your shoulders or don't even notice it.

The rural roads get jammed with impatient drivers taking crazy risks to pass tractors and semis headed for the factory.  Since the first few days send me into some kind of food foraging frenzy, I try to keep my head on straight because several times I've seen the beets come tumbling off the over-loaded piles like some kind of sugar shower.  Then again, it isn't the first time the sky has fallen around here. 

Being the paranoid American that I am thoughts like wearing a hard hat or pimping my baby stroller with a metal brim to ward off flying vegetables cross my mind. 

After a few weeks of the unrelenting odor even I can't stand the smell of any sweet cooked thing being near me.  But then magically, just as suddenly as it appeared, the air goes back to it's clean clear self and for the next ten months you forget all about the fact that you live next to a food manufacturing plant.

We were asked to describe in a few sentences the essence of our chosen city and I struggled to concisely write my thoughts about my German home.  I finally went with;

"Capturing the essence of Ochsenfurt isn't easy because it's a small town with a lot of facets.  I could've went with the woodland loops, trailers full of sugar beets, the vineyards, or an image from the local wine fests, but in the end I decided to flash a sneak peek of the postcard perfect timber framed buildings that line it's main street.  I'm pretty sure I won't live in Germany forever, but I really do think a little bit of Ochsenfurt will always live in me."

The small but busy "Nixe" ferry transports residents back and forth over the river.  You can see the crumbled pedestrian foot bridge that is currently out of order due to an accident with a boat that crashed into it a few years ago. *Note to readers.  This is a sore spot with the residents.  Don't bring up the broken bridge at the wine festival.  You. Will. Get. An. Earful.  Seriously.

The other important industry to mention when it comes to our town is wine!  Ochsenfurt is full of grapes.  And as romantic as it sounds, it appears to me that it's a hell of a lot of work.  There is constant activity up in the fields.  These families work their butts off to produce some of the world's most famous wine.  At the end of this post I'll list the weekends for Klein Ochsenfurt weinfests scheduled for this season. 

Since I've never shared a lot of photos of our dear village, here's a selection of it's many sides.  The busy skinny tractors zipping up and down the rows of grapes, the goats next door, the record snowfall, and the rainbow over our street that ended directly in Studio Mailbox itself!  I searched everywhere for it's exact location hoping to find a pot of gold, but instead I just kept finding Boxbeutels.

Click over for more images from my beloved German home...

HELAU!

It's Fasching time again!  I loved last year's sign from our local Kauzen brewery.  It was hung proudly on the old-timer fire truck that was actually pumping out glass after glass of free beer to the crowd.  (Can you imagine?)

And check out this awesome hand-made cardboard sign in English of all things.  You've got to love these people!

HELAU

Here is how it works: "HELAU" is screamed from the passing parade of floats. The crowd comes back with a hearty "HELAU" in response. And that's it.

I asked the first lady how to translate this last year.  And I guess it's an ancient German mystery.  I came home and looked it up, and sure enough there is no literal translation.  Helau is simply the fasching greeting for our region.

And then my German friends suggested I don't use it in other areas of Germany. 

It was explained to me like this; "if you scream "HELAU" at the wrong parade, you might just get killed!" 

For instance it's, "ALAAF" in Cologne.  This mystery has lead me to the conclusion that the carnival processional greeting is the German version of the "secret knock" or maybe some kind of evolution from ancient hieroglyphics.  This of course was not an exact scientific study, but instead dreamt up in my own head.  Sorry about the shoddy research on this one.

So there it is then. 

A local driver's school had the most amazing window display of giant old fashioned paper mache masks.  I've got to call this guy and see if I can get in and photograph them properly, and not through the store window.  They look like they should be in a museum instead of exposed to sunshine, but hey I'm not complaining I was excited to see them!

Don't Need Glasses!

The Germans wear the most extreme eyeglasses imaginable.  For Germans, eye wear is fashion.  They are not afraid to walk around with frames that make you wonder where they've parked their mother ship.  They are trendier than trendy.  Germans are the face fashion trend setters.

So deep down inside I was a little excited to have my eyes checked.  I had already tried countless frames on wondering if I "looked Swiss" or excessively intelligent.  I checked my look at different angles.  With my hair up.  With my hair down. With my hair moving.  (Visualize me shaking my head from side to side while the Germans slowly move towards their telephone.  You can almost taste their confusion as to whether I have epilepsy OR if they should just be calling the police).

I sat down in the examination chair all prepped.  I'd gone to the safe space in my head practising the letters and reminding myself that W's are V's and V's are W's.  That E's are I's here.  If I say the wrong letters, they're going to give me the wrong prescription!!  But no not me, I was ready.

Well it turns out I don't need glasses.  I'm kind of crushed.  And confused.  My eyes are so bad by the end of the day.  I can't tell when photos are sharp anymore and I struggle to thread the needle on my sewing machine. 

"Well how many hours a day are you on the computer?" she asks me innocently.  The fool.

"Umm, pretty much the entire day except when I'm on my iPhone" I answer a little embarrassed.  (I totally did not bring up the times that I sleep with my MacBook or the instances where I've awoken to a Scrabble word being played on the mobile that's still clenched in my fist).  

So yeah, I've got tired eyes.  And apparently I'm not supposed to go anywhere near my old reading glasses. 

"Don't even touch them!" she told me.  They are "so wrong" that they might be part of the problem.  (Note to self: have your eyes checked a little more often than every 8 years).  Oopsie.  Who knew?

Does anybody know where I can donate my old coke bottles?  Seriously.  Tell me where to send these off... aren't there charities that take frames?

 

 

Hochwasser = Flood Waters

  We live along the river Main where we are experiencing flooding at the moment.  This whole phenomenon has either been quite fascinating for me because I've never experienced one before or else I've lived here so long I've become obsessed with the weather like the rest of the Germans.

Although I'd like to report high drama with volunteers filling sandbags, that's not the case.  It seems the locals have this pretty much under control and expect this type of problem since tons of real estate has been sitting directly on the river banks for hundreds of years.

We drove into Wuerzburg last night (while we could still use the B13 - today our route is flooded).  The city had installed metal walls blockading certain routes and closing off the stone city walls, trasforming into a solid barrier against the water. 

People crowded the Alte Main Brucke which is the oldest river crossing.  It's a beautiful historic bridge that's managed to survive the World Wars.  Locals and tourists alike were leaned over in awe of the lock that had disappeared from view and the raging water.  Everybody was flashing cameras and cell phones, shaking heads in disbelief while huge chucks of natural debris roiled and swept beneath the scene.

One car was attempting to drive through a closed route, like the German Don Quixote in a white Volvo.  I was hoping for a stalled vehicle and a chopper rescue, but he just turned around instead. 

So far a bit anti-climatic for my first natural disaster but then again a lot easier to blog and enjoy than the type that requires emergency units and soldiers. Obviously, stay the hell away from the violent water.  Keep your kids reeled in and don't take any exits marked "Hochwasser" unless you have one of those cars that magically turns into a boat.