I think the reason I have been delinquent in my posting is basically this: I don't want to bore anyone with my impressions of a place or trite comments on personal growth, and anything that doesn't fall into that (terrible) category, any objective observations I could make, are either trivially boring or otherwise have been said a thousand times before.
I am not going to be able provide any insights on the German people beyond stereotype, because it is always a fruitless endeavor to attempt to describe a nation. And you have to trust me when I say that trying to scrape together interesting words about Hannover as a city--or, even worse, as a group of people--is an altogether impossible task. I won't try to pass off anecdotes as anthropology. No matter where you go, some people are smart and some people are stupid, some people are good and some people are evil, etc. With the obvious exception of the American South.
What I can offer are a few hackneyed musings (I use the word "musings" because what follows is invariably trite and annoying) that have only recently become apparent to me. The first is that German people really could take a lesson from the French in style. German posture, fashion, music, cuisine, etc. is exactly as the stereotype describes: bad. I hate to say it, but it's true. Obviously Germany produces great people in all these fields, but I think I am working at the epicenter of "Middle Germany" in my off-brand, working class city, and I can attest to how the everyday person carries him or herself. I know this sounds like a 19th century way of describing things, but political correctness doesn't exist here, so I think I'm in the clear.
Another thing that probably doesn't matter to anyone except me but which I will mention anyway because that is what self-indulgent blogs are for is how much this has affirmed my desire to die somewhere cosmopolitan. I really really have proven to myself that I am just the kind of person who has to spend his final years in New York where I don't have to take a high speed train to find a Thai Restaurant. What makes New York great (and I can say this now that I have actually taught the place to eighth-graders) is that it belongs to the world instead of to a couple of inbred, jingoistic inhabitants. Even the immigrant community here is one-dimensional. Of course all of this is not to say that it's not a valuable experience, I just miss hearing more than one language being spoken on any given street and going to museums that actually have willing visitors.
I am not going to be able provide any insights on the German people beyond stereotype, because it is always a fruitless endeavor to attempt to describe a nation. And you have to trust me when I say that trying to scrape together interesting words about Hannover as a city--or, even worse, as a group of people--is an altogether impossible task. I won't try to pass off anecdotes as anthropology. No matter where you go, some people are smart and some people are stupid, some people are good and some people are evil, etc. With the obvious exception of the American South.
What I can offer are a few hackneyed musings (I use the word "musings" because what follows is invariably trite and annoying) that have only recently become apparent to me. The first is that German people really could take a lesson from the French in style. German posture, fashion, music, cuisine, etc. is exactly as the stereotype describes: bad. I hate to say it, but it's true. Obviously Germany produces great people in all these fields, but I think I am working at the epicenter of "Middle Germany" in my off-brand, working class city, and I can attest to how the everyday person carries him or herself. I know this sounds like a 19th century way of describing things, but political correctness doesn't exist here, so I think I'm in the clear.
Another thing that probably doesn't matter to anyone except me but which I will mention anyway because that is what self-indulgent blogs are for is how much this has affirmed my desire to die somewhere cosmopolitan. I really really have proven to myself that I am just the kind of person who has to spend his final years in New York where I don't have to take a high speed train to find a Thai Restaurant. What makes New York great (and I can say this now that I have actually taught the place to eighth-graders) is that it belongs to the world instead of to a couple of inbred, jingoistic inhabitants. Even the immigrant community here is one-dimensional. Of course all of this is not to say that it's not a valuable experience, I just miss hearing more than one language being spoken on any given street and going to museums that actually have willing visitors.
