I took the kids to the Children's Culture Carnival on Saturday. The Karneval der Kulturen is an annual parade in Berlin that celebrates all the diversity in the city. Every Brazilian puts on some traditional duds and does some caiporeira, Africans grab any drum they can find, and various women from various nations get half-naked and dance. Since Berlin's a homogenous place, these ex-pats have to rely on locals to fill out their ranks.

To me, it's more the parade of bored German women looking for excitement in dark-skinned men. Well, I use a different lexicon to describe just what it is the women are looking for, but let's keep this a family show.

Every year I've been disappointed by the lack/quality of the performances, frustrated by the three-deep crowd along the route and shocked at the mundane food booths (beer, wurst and a token ethnic dish or two).

This year I thought I could circumvent it all by going to the kids thing. The festival was in Görlitzer Park. There was less variety than your average German kids fest and longer lines than a Detroit unemployment office. Though I bribed them with cotton candy, the kids were as happy as I to leave.

The highlights of the day were Martha convincing me to take public transportation rather than drive ('Cars make the environment dirty, dad!") and stumbling into an estranged boyfriend trying to win his ex's heart via her kids (they were terrified of him and a large man escorted him away, something I was about to do only I couldn't figure out what to do with my own kids).

And the in thing to do at this year's Karneval was to scroll your mobile number on your kids' arms and then ... well I don't know what these parents did then because I never saw them. This left me and another frayed woman to explain to these four-year-olds (yes, they were that little) the art of waiting in line (or at least getting in line behind us). And of refereeing the internal fights they had as they failed to understand the art of waiting in line (or at least getting in line behind us). Were there any pedophiles there, these numbers would have made it easy for them to find the kids least likely to be missed for an hour -- and arrange a future play date.

The one good time I had at Karneval was five years ago when Martha was still a baby. I met Marc and Benedikt there and, since Martha was asleep in the stroller, we decided to grab a beer. As the crowds pushed past they would look into the stroller and smile at Martha and then look up, hoping to congratulate the parents for having such a cute kid. Instead, the smiles slid away as they saw three louts coiffing lager.

We had a good laugh, the only one I'd ever have at Karneval der Kulturen.

Lately we've been having trouble with Martha being slow. Slow at getting dressed. Slow at eating. Slow at walking to the car. It isn't that she's daydreaming, that's a different kind of slow. She's just slow. S-L-O-W. M-O-L-A-S-S-E-S. At first we tried to nudge her into picking up the pace but it didn't seem to have any effect. Then we started doling out time outs here and there. No result.

[And pardon a quick aside on Time Outs. My kids either head into the penalty box kicking and screaming or just sit down casually and offer to set the timer themselves. The former is perfect because it means they know they did something wrong and are as upset at getting caught as they are embarrassed for doing something wrong. The latter is bad: it means they don't really feel they did anything wrong and have no intention of changing their ways, which can be a problem.]

So, anyway, Martha reacted with total indifference to the slowness-related time outs which, if you think about it, makes sense since it made her that much slower. So our next option was to try the screaming. Maybe a bit of yelling. Idle threats? Sure.

Did this work? No.

Then one day I walked into the kita (daycare). A mother coming out said, "Man, Martha is real slow getting dressed." Then a child walked by. "Martha was the last one finished eating lunch today." And, as if that weren't enough, another kid said: "Martha took forever to brush her teeth." It was like that scene in the Orient Express where everyone lines up to take their turn on the hapless victim, only rather than kill me everyone seemed to be pointing out what a crappy father I was.

I started sweating. We had made her slower by making an issue out of the problem. We've done this several times before. We're good at it. Heck, sometimes I even do it to our friends' kids. But I also started thinking.

It took me a whole night to come up with a solution but the next day in the shower it hit me. I quickly toweled off and sprinted into the kids room (OK I got dressed too).

I grabbed Martha's cherished Princess Lillifee alarm clock and introduced her to the big hand. "When the big hand is here, I'm going upstairs whether you're ready or not." I gave her five minutes. That seemed fair.

She made it upstairs on time. At breakfast I gave her fifteen minutes to eat before I said I was heading out. Afterward, I gave her another five to get ready or I'd leave without her. To my amazement, she made it.

"Wow, Martha, that was great (positive reinforcement, you know)!" I said. "What do you think, should I give you the clock every day? Does it help?

"No way, dad. That wears me out."

Indeed.

Yesterday I was sitting outside at a cafe in the Bötzowviertel when a tatooed skater guy road by and blurted out, "Schwabenficker!", which translates roughly as F**K YOU YUPPIES. In typical passive-aggressive fashion, he did this as he was in full motion and without actually looking at any of us.

I retorted with a, "You go, Green Day!" but I'm not sure he heard me let alone understood the implications of my Green Day slur.

I then noted his Vision skateboard, Diamond Back BMX bike and Eastpack backpack and thought: Dude, check yer own glasshouse before you go tossing molotovs. It's even more absurd when you know what it costs to cover 85% of your body in ink (about as much as a small car).

But then it started to bug me because what he said also included a regional reference: Swabians (English for Schwaben) are people that live in Swabia, roughly the area around Stuttgart. It's one of the richest regions in Germany and Berliners love to blame them for the city's woes (as in, they come in and buy everything up and raise prices until no one can afford anything. Obviously, the people who use this slur are a bit gray on the mechanics of a free market).

Whitewashing (pun intended) people with stereotypes in Berlin -- or Germany -- always gives me an uneasy feeling. Did that dude learn nothing in school?

Anyway, I'm sure when his buddies aren't looking he turns up not just the Green Day, but probably Coldplay.

Never again will I play down the level of bureaucracy in Germany. It's. Insane.

Our nursery is essentially a cooperative nursery where parents cook, keep the rooms in shape and run the place. I've volunteered for the running the place bit and I'm run down. We're a club, which in Germany has a special legal meaning. This makes some sense because it allows clubs to act a bit like corporations -- the club carries the liability, not the members.

But in order to get club status you have to come up with club regulations, elect a club board and hold an official club meeting at least once a year. You also have to register your club and board with an administrative court. OK, I thought in the beginning, a bit of a run around but that legal status thing is kind of nice.

Except, in order to register any board changes with the court, you have to go through a notary, which in Germany are attorneys. They look at your passport, the minutes from the last meeting and charge you about 30 euros. Then you get to send it all in to the administrative court where they enter the changes. To keep my spirits up, I always envision court clerks as monks standing at long rows of lecterns entering information in centuries-old ledgers using feather quills.

You'd think that'd be the end.

You'd be wrong.

Rather than just manually entering your club's information in the ledger (lord knows German bureaucrats are still nervous about the "on" switches let alone the keyboards computers require), they actually get a cup of coffee, spread all the documents you've submitted on their desk and have a nice, deep look at everything. Everything, you assume, that's right because you paid an attorney to review it before you submitted it (isn't that what I paid her for?).

Then the court sends you a letter that you didn't follow the letter of your regulations and you'll have to do it again. In typical German bureaucrat style, they offer you a bit of a workaround with a wink of the eye but, I always think, if you're going to wink your eye, why not just let it slip past? This is not the proper etiquette, however. The proper etiquette is to thank them for moving their eyes at all.

And do it all again. I admit, the process takes twice as long for me because it's in a foreign language and -- for this particular work around -- requires me to collect letters from two other equally busy volunteers. But is this really the most efficient way of going about it? Doesn't every newspaper every day report on how the courts are backed up because they don't have enough personnel? Yet this one can care about paperwork submitted in bad German by a non-profit daycare that looks after 18 kids? Really?

I've learned to chuckle and just do what they want, though. You can't fight city hall.

But this makes it even more absurd that the EU appointed an aging German politician as their anti-bureaucracy specialist.

I hope they filled out the paperwork correctly.

Monday morning.

Martha: Cy!

Cy: What's wrong Martha?

Martha: I can't get dressed!

Cy: Why not?

Martha: Someone keeps asking me all kinds of questions.

Cy: Really? Who?

Later that day:

Cy: Dad, I know where yawns come from. All the bacteria in your mouth get tired from working and they yawn and then push all the yawns out your mouth at once.

 

As an exchange student 20-some-odd years ago, I was horrified to discover Germans living up to their stereotype as sausage eaters. Every festival, party and gathering was accompanied by at least a small barbecue with several examples of seasoned pork parts stuffed into (artificial and real) intestines. Once over my shock, it became a guilty pleasure.

Early in our relationship and decades later, Sabine introduced me to the raw bratwurst. I was used to the pre-cooked variety we get in the states or at all those festivalsin Germany, so I was skeptical of this soft, pink tube. Would the meat in the center get cooked? After eating them nearly daily while Sabine she was pregnant with Martha, I realized she was on to something. A little while later while visting her parents in Kassel she introduced me to the coarsely ground bratwurst, which sounds horrible but tastes much better than its finely ground sister -- imagine chunks of meat rather than ground ... lips and, well, you know.

Slowly I was becoming a bratwurst snob. Gradually I began to turn my nose up at the stale, pre-cooked bulk sausages offered at massive parties and concerts, especially considering their cardboard texture and non-taste. I started to scope out the best stands at the Christmas Market. And I was completely disappointed with Berlin's gastronomic contribution to the world, the Currywurst. This is essentially a bratwurst sliced up, buried in ketchup with a bit of curry powder added on top (see above). It's OK on if you pick the right place and are hungry but it can't beat a good flame-broiled brat.

And now we've discovered the ultimate. The best in Berlin. These babies are to be had every Thursday at the Kollwitzplatz organic food market, sold out of a red tent. They're made by the lady peddling pig products next door and come from her own farm of Bentheimer pigs, an heirloom (as the Americans would say) breed that has been ignored because the meat is too fatty. They seem coarse to me and I haven't a clue what seasonings she's using, but she's doing it right.

I bought 30 for Martha's 6th birthday and they hardly lasted. I could have gotten rid of 50 -- and there weren't even 50 people there. Unfortunately they're not fresh (read: uncooked) because she would have to sell them within two days, but they're really good. And Conny, who makes them, is nice.

So it's a stereotype I like.