As we delved into language and community with the bit on Germans and English in one of my last contributions, this time I take thee, dearest fellow-gumbooteer and interested, keen reader of this blog (hi, parents of John Horn!) into the linguistic quagmire that is Germany: Welcome to German dialects!
In contrast to nations derived from [...]

It may not exactly be “The House that Pain built“, but then the Olympic Village in Whistler is also not likely to appear as the last track on a Killing Joke-album. (And “The House that Pain built” of course is still MacKinnon Residence in Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, QC, but that’s a different story altogether). Still, [...]

Hell, I like Germany’s conservatives. Now, don’t misinterpret me here. I like those guys, because they’re always good for a laugh. Well, I gotta admit, they kinda changed. As I pointed out in my article about “Gay Germany”, we’ve got a female chancellor now, and our foreign secretary is openly gay. Hussa! The only problem [...]

It doesn’t happen any day, that you officially welcome someone into a community, with all pomp and circumstance. So today, I am really proud to introduce my old friend Zelimir to you, who, finally after the 21 years that I’ve known him, has recently received his German passport. Zeli, whose family hails from Serbia, former [...]

Today, dear fellow gumbooteers, „I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar…“ And if you don’t like that song by Electric Six, you may as well stick to the good old Tipperary Song: „All the streets were paved with gold / so everyone was gay…“
Well, not quite – and of course it meant [...]

“Oh jumble sale mums – what are they on? Kids just sit hanging round the street and they’ve got somebody else’s clothes on…” The lyrics of an old Suede-song (I guess in the US and Canada they were called The London Suede) come to mind, when I think of my mother’s volunteer work in the [...]

It’s been in the air for a while, a change more felt than actually observed. “The point at which it falls apart”, to quote the title of my favourite album by British band mesh. German society is changing. Since out of all things, the socialist-green coalition that ran the country from [...]