What to do on your way and in Sauerland
What to do on your way, well for one: you could leave behind your very expensive purse containing one very expensive camera, a once toilet-dunked cell phone, and never used German drivers license in a Burger King.
To make things really fun, you let yourself be totally preoccupied with the back seat nausea you’ve been trying to shake off for the last 3 hours and allow yourself to fall asleep for 90 minutes before realizing you have mistaken a half-eaten burger for a hand bag. How it ended for me: Happy. Florstadt is 2 hours away from Iserlohn and the people at Burger King get a gold star for holding my purse until Alex drove back to get it. I’m still shaken from my space-cadetness.
What else could you do in Sauerland? Learn about the comedian, Frank Goosen. The video to the left is a favorite skit of his and very much advanced German. I had to listen to it several times all the while everyone in ear shot was giggling. After a battery of questions I could finally crack a smile and realize that my impression of Sauerland and the Ruhrgebiet is not too far off. Ja, schön is dat nich.
So what if drab Sauerland is no comparison to the fairytale landscape surrounding Munich. The Ruhrgebiet folk seem to make up with the lack of depressing environs with the gift of gab. There is no shortage of opinion, dialog or riveting news to discuss, even a conversation about a painful hang nail could draw a crowd. There is something cool about a people who know how to make fun of themselves.
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A good friend of mine used to live in the Ruhrgebiet as a student and everytime I went down from my place at the Ostsee to spend a few days in Essen I was fascinated by the people I met. They do have “das Herz auf dem rechten Fleck”. But honestly you cannot pay me enough money to live there. Schön is dat wirklich nicht (aber woanders is auch Scheiße).
Thanks for all the great blogs in 2008. Komm gut ins neue Jahr!
Thanks for that video — I dug it. My German skillz are from the Köln/Bonn area, which is not too far off from the Ruhrgebiet dialect. And I work closely with a dude from Dortmund and another from Gelsenkirchen. They really do talk like that…which I love to listen to, but alienates (or at least identifies them to) all the Bavarians (hauptsächlich Franken und Oberpfälzer) I typically work with.
It’s so funny to read these comments: my husband’s family is all from the Ruhrgebiet and that’s what I think of as “standard hoch Deutsche” (although I don’t really understand any myself). They frequently mention (and mock as unintelligible and dialect) all the other regional speeches, most especially the Bavarian accent (and Berlin, of course).