Culture Shock Used To Be A Friend Of Mine

Culture shock used to be a friend of mine, which made my job as a free roaming reporter much easier. There was nothing more exhilarating than being dropped in a strange and exotic place, exchanging the crammed comforts of an air conditioned Y class seat for a new reality, where you had to instantly get along with Sudanese Islamists or Colombian generales, with Senegalese interrogators or Russian bratva enforcers. Mostly it was a rush and that first moment of friendly bonding, be it through booze, drugs, prayer or sports talk, could be a real fun high.

Moving to Germany after nineteen years in New York is not quite as exciting. I did grow up here for starters. Although it's definitely not the country I grew up in anymore. Actually, the country I grew up in doesn't exist anymore, since I was born and raised in West Germany, which was part of Western Europe, while today's unified Germany has found it's way back into the cultural realm of Central Europe. For me there's of course something strangely familiar to Munich. It's not that sweet nostalgia of childhood and youth though. It rather throws me back to that suffocating feeling, when some aunt or grandmather surrounded by the waft of heavy perfume and caked with old-school make-up smothered my three-year old self with hugs and wet kisses.

For Fred it's quite different. First of all her last hometown of Frankfurt is one of the few German cities that still feel Western and cosmopolitan. She first noeiced how large and strangely expansive Munich is, and how that January gloom, the heavy-set buildings and the eery quiet in the city create a strangely threatening mood. There is something offestting in this citiyscape. On the one hand Munich is very cutesy and slightly claustrophobic, on the other hand there are a lot of architectural traces of second-rate empires with illusions of grandeur, who crammed some half-baked palaces and monuments into this place. If New York was an elegant heavy-weight champ with lots of charms and a big mouth like Muhammad Ali, Munich would be that short, stocky Bulgarian wrestler with a perennial grudge.

Well, this was just the first week, spent trying to get our bearings in Munich. Soon this will be our base for life in Europe rather than life in Munich. Soon there will be sunshine and trips to the lakes and mountains and the aforementioned Italian border two hours South of here. Whole different chapter.