As many of you may know, I'm trying to grow a beard. I grew a paltry, thin one last spring when the cherry blossoms were blooming (why should they have all the fun?) but shaved it off shortly thereafter. I sculpted the remains into a Van Dyke, which has sustained me ever since.
But with the approach of No-Shave November this year, I decided I wanted more. A month without shaving would be the perfect chance. That scraggly thing I'd had on my face in spring wouldn't suffice to knock "grow a beard" off my bucket list. I'm aiming for a real beard this time around. Something that would make a mountain man proud, or at least refrain from calling me "pilgrim."
But first, a confession: I have been a bit unfair. I quit shaving halfway through October, and it's halfway through December now, so my nascent beard is obviously a bit longer than it should be. My facial hair grows really slowly, you see. Dang genetics. None of the Post men can grow beards. I suppose my Germanic/Viking ancestors were like cats: they got to the warm, sunny New World and started shedding. The big, bushy, manly beards must've been the first things to go. Accordingly, I had to hedge my bets a little. So I started earlier than everybody else.
This is what I've got now:
These were taken, incidentally, under the Gwangjin Bridge, on the eastern shore of the Han River, during a lovely December day. That's my new Stanwell pipe clenched between my teeth.
I'm going to let nature run its course through Yuletide, January, and the ensuing February. After I get back from Hokkaido on February 9, I'll do another post and show you all what my new-and-improved beard looks like. I've come to terms with the fact that it'll never equal the thick, woolly thing Robert Redford had stuck on his face all through the film Jeremiah Johnson, but I think I've found a suitable middle ground: Jürgen Prochnow from Das Boot.
Minus the weary, haunted look of utter despair.
I frickin' love that movie, not just for the drama, the splendid acting and the gritty realism, but for the epic beards that the crew sprout over the course of the film. Submarines and submariners have always fascinated me: the camaraderie they necessarily had to have, the insensate dangers they faced on a daily basis, the physical hardships of life in a metal tube, and their downright slovenliness (sanctioned under the circumstances). There was an enthralling article called "Sweat and Rum" in the BBC News Magazine a couple of days ago. It centered around the crew of the HMS Ocelot and other British submarines of the 1960s. "The Queen's Pirates" they were called. Feckin' awesome.
Anyway, Prochnow—who is one of my favorite actors on the basis of Das Boot alone—and I have a lot in common in the facial hair department. His beard runs along his jawline and flows down to his neck, steering clear of his cheeks. Mine does the exact same thing. So that manly chinwig you see in the picture above? That's what I'm going for. Sans blood and sinking submarines, of course.
WARNING: What follows is exceedingly general and perhaps a bit non-PC. I don't care, and neither should you. Au contraire, you should laud me for admitting my ignorance rather than disguising it. Consider this a list of what I don't know about the world (and hope to learn someday).
DISCLAIMER: You'll notice that I said a Californian like me. You can no more judge all Californians to be the same than you can judge all Dubliners or all Tokyoites to be the same. We're a mixed lot. But even among them, I am an outlier. I was born in Northern California, for one thing. I've lived in the capital, the Midwest, the American South, and the Great Plains, so I know a bit more about the rest of America than the average Californian does. My political views don't exactly match up with a lot of other Californians', either. I'm a white middle-class twenty-something, and proud of it.
Ready? Then let's begin:
THE REST OF AMERICA:
OREGON: Best known for portraying that forested planet in The Return of the Jedi. And being mispronounced by Midwesterners and foreigners alike.
WASHINGTON STATE: Coffee. Rain. Pine trees. Killer whales. Reggie Watts. Legal marijuana. Sententious living.
IDAHO: Potatoes.
MONTANA: Looks really good on a postcard.
NEVADA: Vegas, baby. And machine guns. The rest of it's desert. And Reno.
UTAH: Mormons! Who doesn't like Mormons? And saltwater?
ARIZONA: Simply marvelous gun laws. Cacti which are the envy of the civilized world. Gila monsters. Fatuous Nicolas Cage movies. Mountains that look like Indians.
NEW MEXICO: Are the rocks supposed to be red like that?
WYOMING: Fewer people than a single suburb of Los Angeles. Seriously, the antelopes outnumber the humans. Scary thought.
NORTH DAKOTA: I felt like a celebrity there.
SOUTH DAKOTA:Big stone heads. The Black Hills (yeah, baby). Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.
NEBRASKA: What the guy who thought of the phrase "middle of nowhere" was thinking of.
KANSAS: You're not there anymore, Toto.
OKLAHOMA: Bombs. Musicals. The Dust Bowl. Tornadoes.
TEXAS: If it weren't for them, Mexico would have invaded long ago.
MINNESOTA: So, like, let's go to the lake, eh?
IOWA: The Minnesotans are right. The best thing coming out of Iowa is I-29.
MISSOURI: My dad went to college there. Considers himself more Missourian than Ohioan. They've got an arch. That's the limit of my knowledge.
ARKANSAS: Most direct route between Tennessee and Oklahoma.
LOUISIANA: Bayous, swamps, Cajun food, levies, Mardi Gras, and hurricanes. Especially hurricanes.
WISCONSIN: Cheese.
ILLINOIS: Abraham Lincoln.
INDIANA: No friggin' idea. Maybe basketball?
KENTUCKY: Is the grass really blue, or is that just a figure of speech?
TENNESSEE: Too many mullets for my taste.
MISSISSIPPI: Hard to spell.
ALABAMA: Probably has the most likeable/least unpleasant Southern accent, depending on where you stand on Southern accents.
GEORGIA: Good peaches.
FLORIDA: Can't think of it without thinking of the auto-tuning rapper. Thanks a bunch. Before Flo Rida was a thing, I associated Florida with Scarface, my grandmother's house with the orange trees in the backyard, the one billion percent humidity, and the white-sand beaches.
MICHIGAN: They make cars there, don't they? And awesome music?
OHIO: Hot in summer, rainy in spring, miserable in winter, the most beautiful place on the planet in autumn.
WEST VIRGINIA: Coal. The Civil War. Trout fishing. Caves. Chuck Yeager.
VIRGINIA: This may sound weird, but I can't help but think of Virginia in terms of the famous people who were born there: Ella Fitzgerald, George C. Scott, Sam Houston, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (yes, that Lewis & Clark), Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, Tom Wolfe, Booker T. Washington, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and, like, twenty U.S. presidents.
NORTH/SOUTH CAROLINA: What's the difference?
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Crazy homeless people in the streets, crazy people in the government.
MARYLAND: You need to put on some weight, you're too skinny.
DELAWARE: Sounds like a seldom-used word you'd find in a dictionary.
NEW JERSEY: Just as all myths have some basis in fact, the moniker "Armpit of America" must on some level be well-deserved.
CONNECTICUT: Pretty. And filthy rich.
PENNSYLVANIA: The birthplace of liberty and independence. Looks nice in autumn, too.
NEW YORK: California's biggest competitor in terms of culture and coolness. They've got some pretty country, too; and heck, they even have their own version of the San Andreas Fault. We'll get you yet, you buggers.
RHODE ISLAND: Too small for my Californian mind to encapsulate.
MASSACHUSETTS: Baseball. Football. Clam chowder. Cod. Moby-Dick. Cheers (the TV show).
NEW HAMPSHIRE: The last stop before Maine.
VERMONT: The second-to-last stop before Maine.
MAINE: The last stop before New Brunswick. Also, Stephen King is from there; I do know that much. A lot of his books are set around those parts.
ALASKA: I know as much as everyone else does. Grizzly bears, gold, the Inuit, glaciers, the tallest mountain in North America, savage cold, bush pilots, hunting, cruises, trains, oil, fishing, formerly Russian, real men and real women. Oh, and I'd give my right arm and two or three toes to live there.
HAWAII: Palm trees. White-sand beaches. Turquoise water. Tropical fish. Sunshine. Ukeleles, luaus and leis. Volcanoes. Surfing. Pearl Harbor. The U.S.S. Arizona. Paradise on Earth. California's biggest competitor in terms of fun in the sun and water sports. Not bad if we can take on New York and Hawaii and still compete, eh?
THE REST OF THE WORLD:
MEXICO: Lovely beaches, great food, incredible culture, marvelous natural beauty, and good booze...but a corrupt government and a few too many all-powerful drug cartels. Oh wait, that's California.
CANADA: A dichotomy. On the one hand: nigh-socialism, a Governor General, and a certain amount of cultural snobbery (though that might just be the folks from Toronto). On the other hand: maple syrup, the Yukon, Nova Scotia, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, the Canadian Rockies, ice hockey, Shania Twain, William Shatner, Dan Aykroyd, Kim Cattrall, Stana Katic, Nathan Fillion (whom I hear is from Edmonton), Rick Moranis, Leslie Nielsen, Donald Sutherland, Alexander Graham Bell, Elijah McCoy (the real McCoy), James Howlett (better known as Wolverine), Anne Shirley (a.k.a. Anne of Green Gables), Chris Hadfield (the astronaut), Rush, Barenaked Ladies, Great Big Sea, dinosaurs, Black Velvet whisky, the Devil's Brigade, lentils, Swedish Fish, and some of the friendliest, politest people on the face of the Earth.
BRAZIL: Great barbecue, oddly-named mountains, and the best jungles and parties (and jungle parties) anywhere.
BOLIVIA: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid got zonked down there, didn't they?
URUGUAY: It's all about the tango.
KENYA: I know Tanzania, Mozambique, and some of the other countries have amazing biodiversity, natural beauty and safaris, but whenever I think "East Africa," my mind just leaps to Kenya. Craters, rhinoceroses, the Serengeti, poaching problems, and now some election brouhaha. And a spectacularJohn Wayne movie.
SOUTH AFRICA: Let's move past the bit with the apartheid and get into Sharlto Copley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Basil Rathbone, Manfred Mann, Candice Swanepoel, and that sweet movie Zulu with Michael Caine. Just please don't mention Dave Mathews. We don't mention Dave Mathews on this blog.
LESOTHO: See RHODE ISLAND above.
EGYPT: Revolutions. Pyramids. Rivers. Desert. Camels. Political turmoil. And they have their own version of The Daily Show.
MOROCCO: I only know where it is 'cause I watch Bogart films.
CROATIA: It gave the world Serious Sam, so it can't be all bad, can it?
RUSSIA: I was born five years before the Berlin Wall fell, but I'd venture to guess that my generation's the first one that doesn't think "Commie bastards" whenever we hear the word "Russia." That doesn't mean I trust Putin or the KGB, but I sure would like to visit the country, ride their trains, drink their vodka, walk over their bridges, and so forth. Oh, and see St. Petersburg in the wintertime.
FRANCE: The other place an aspiring artist or writer might go besides California.
ICELAND: All of the wintry fun of Canada or Alaska with none of the urban sprawl.
ENGLAND: Sorry, did I say Canada was guilty of cultural snobbery?! Though that could just be Londoners. Seriously, some of my best friends are from England. I wouldn't mind retiring to Newcastle someday, having fish and chips down by the quayside, a pint in the Turk's Head, then a walk 'round the priory and a pipe-smoke on the point. Geordies rock.
SCOTLAND: It gave us Scotch whisky, haggis, Robert Burns, Ian Anderson, and some of the world's finest and hardiest soldiers. I think a good many wars would have been lost without a few good Scotsmen.
IRELAND: The setting of another rather good John Wayne movie. If you don't think about the Troubles, you can get lost in the whiskey, the beer, the corned beef and cabbage, the stew, the River Liffey, James Joyce and the wild Irish countryside. Gotta love Chloë Agnew and Liam Neeson, too.
GERMANY: Efficiency. And cake. And philosophy. And awe-inspiring classical music.
SPAIN: Sunshine. And beautiful horses. Architecture to die for. Paella. Soccer. Bulls, and a lot of sports that shouldn't be combined with bulls. And tomato-chucking.
SWITZERLAND: Americans voted it the best place to go if you're trying to escape from a German prison camp. I've heard they make pretty good watches and toys, too.
INDIA: Outsourcing. Overpopulation. Sacred cows. Fascinating religions. Fantastic architecture. Pollution. Garbage in the streets. People pooping in public. The Ganges River, which I wouldn't dunk my worst enemy in.
VIETNAM: The site of a rather nasty and unconventional war. Now home to gorgeous waterfalls, delectable cuisine, a generation of suspiciously blond-haired Vietnamese, and tons of unexploded ordnance.
CHINA: Big. Really big. Filled with people. Controlled by a Communist government. Mao's noggin is everywhere. Still, even though fat guys go topless in public and toddlers poop in the streets, the trains run on time and the countryside is undeniably gorgeous.
JAPAN: My knowledge beforehand was mostly limited to World War II, anime and manga. Now I see the country through the Korean lens, and that colors my perception a bit. It's definitely one of Asia's bright stars, a broad, clean, polite and user-friendly country. But its foreign-relations record is a black mark in its ledger.
SOUTH KOREA: Before I came to live here, I knew the name of the capital and that the country got snow in winter. That's it. Now I know that, despite the bali bali culture that grinds students and salarymen into the ground, Korea has elevated itself from a smoking crater to one of the most prosperous, bright, advanced and innovative nations on the planet. The people, though bound by millennia of tradition and rigid societal and behavioral mores, are some of the most friendly and unconditionally kind folks I've ever encountered.
NORTH KOREA: If you're ever in need of a good laugh, just look up some of their propaganda.
AUSTRALIA: Deserts, mountains, jungles, forests, beaches, great music, good actors, some fantastic sports (and sports players), architectural wonders, storied history, a charming accent and some of the weirdest animals to be found.
NEW ZEALAND: Like some weird mix of England, Iceland, and Hawaii. But it did give us Peter Jackson, Lucy Lawless, Karl Urban and Bruce Spence, and some lovely glaciers.
ANTARCTICA: Snow. Ice. More snow. More ice. Mountains. Volcanoes. Rocks. More snow. More ice. Frigid seas. Storms. Penguins. Blubber. Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and every other adventure or horror writer who ever needed a remote, bleak, barren, ice-blasted place to set a secret base or an eldritch abomination.
Five hundred yards from our hostel, wedged onto the corner of Queensferry Street and Shandwick Place, a half-mile from the Haymarket Rail Station, lies a little bar named Mathers.
It's an unassuming place: stony façade, brass lettering, long wooden bar with an oblong room in front of it. Standing room only, unless you grab a bench in the corner. High ceiling. Some television sets. Flags from all the soccer-playing nations strung up across the walls. Regular patrons having a sip of ale or cider. Two hooch-mongers meandering slowly up and down behind the bar, like ducks at a shooting gallery.
It was here at Mathers that Jeff and I decided to start our Great Pub Crawl on the evening of June 20, 2010. Showered, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we waltzed into the establishment at about five o'clock to start our pregame warm-up. As the sun set slowly over the New Town, Jeff and I sipped some Strongbow and watched the World Cup, omnipresent as always, twinkling away on every TV screen in every pub in the U.K.
We only stuck around for a little sip, though. We gulped down our glasses and gave a satisfying burp apiece. When we felt the first blurry tendrils of the alcohol begin to tickle our brains, we adjourned across the street to Ryan's Bar, a distinctly larger and more energetic establishment.
And more touristy. Billing itself as "Edinburgh's Busiest West End Bar, Cellar Bar and Coffee Shop," Ryan's was situated quite conveniently on the opposite corner of Queensferry and Shandwick, right where Shandwick met Princes Street. Simply put, the place was on the outskirts of the largest tourist trap in Scotland. It was only later that we found out that Ryan's was also a "tied house," and thereby required to buy at least some of its beer from the breweries which owned it. The general feeling in the U.K. is that a tied house can never be superior to a "free house" which, as the name suggests, is allowed to buy its beer from anywhere. Selection, as you may guess, is generally better at a free house. Free houses also preserve more of the character of an "authentic" British pub. The atmosphere at Ryan's, I noticed, was almost akin to a grill or a classy fast-food joint.
Ryan's was, indeed, a gastropub. That was something of a consolation. Undaunted, Jeff and I sat down, ordered some Tennent's, a roast for Jeff and some nachos for yours truly, and watched as Brazil literally kicked the crap out of the Ivory Coast on the numerous TV screens.
I should point out that Ryan's was our second and last stop. (Some pub crawl, eh?) Certain events transpired which prevented us from leaving. Number one, they were late in bringing Jeff's roast. I got my nachos on time, and they were incredible. They didn't have quite the same flavor as (finger quotes) authentic nachos. I'd say they were lacking in certain irreplaceable spices, unique to the Mexican culinary hemisphere. But nonetheless they were tasty, with adequate amounts of salsa and sour cream to go around.
But Jeff's roast had gotten lost in the shuffle. When we called this to the attention of the barmaid, she apologized, took the offending item off the bill, and brought a sizzling, delectable beef roast to our table and set it down in front of Jeff, lickety-split.
Now that's service.
Number two, we wanted to see how the Ivory Coast-Brazil game ended. That was a foregone conclusion. We should've known better. The Africans are renowned for their expertise in the sport (as they would prove a few days later, when I was back in Newcastle); but the Brazilians are among the top five on the planet, consistently making it into the final rounds of every championship. It was still a pretty good game, though. So Jeff and I waited it out and watched the rest of it. That's what we had come to the U.K. for, after all.
And number three...
There was a rather pretty girl standing up at the bar.
(Try and guess where this is going. I think you can figure it out.)
I noticed her about halfway through my nachos. She was of medium height, neither skinny nor plump, with a tactical stockpile of curves. Her skin was fair, and lightly freckled. Her nose was assertive and lent an angular sort of seriousness to her otherwise round and innocent face. Her hair was bobbed short, and either dirty-blonde or brown with golden highlights. Her wardrobe was modest, a top and jacket over jeans and tennis shoes. A woolen scarf completed the ensemble. I perceived her charms at a glance; the effect only grew with each successive look.
After a little thought, some more beer, and a few more Brazilian goals, I made up my mind.
"Jeff," I said, "I do believe I'm going to go talk to that girl at the bar."
Jeff gave me his blessing. That is to say, he knocked back another Scotch ale, and I took the gesture to mean "Go to it, buddy." It seemed like a favorable sign. I was a bit sozzled by now and everything was suddenly open to interpretation.
I swung myself out of my chair, sauntered up to the bar, and planted my elbows down upon it. I looked the bartender squarely in his two foreheads, and asked for a whisky. I chose the ten-year-old Springbank, distilled in the Campbeltown region—the only one I had yet to sample. Then I casually turned to the lady.
"Evening," I said, or something equally eloquent. (At least I managed to refrain from the cheesier pick-up lines, like "Is it hot in here, or is it just you?" or "Do you know karate? 'Cause your body's kickin'.")
"Evening," she replied, in heavily accented English. I couldn't quite place it. She introduced herself as Karla, a German student on holiday in the U.K. She was quite fluent in English (though with the noisy pub, her soft-spoken nature, and my own thick-headedness I sometimes found her hard to understand). Jeff joined the two of us at the bar and we whiled away a happy few hours laughing and joking. In between glances at the TV (which helped fill up the occasional awkward pause), we discussed everything from the number of fouls Côte d'Ivoire had committed against Brazil, to the demographics of Germany, to the general hostility felt toward the German people by most European nations. (I believed Karla when she said there was a lot of it still around.)
I enjoyed the conversation and the whisky immensely. I found the former to be rewarding, refreshing, just the ticket after a couple of days spent solely in the company of my erstwhile travel buddy; and the latter I thought very light, the lightest I had thus far sampled among single-malt Scotches. It had a sort of dry sweetness that was rife with vanilla, easy and mellow. The effects, however, crept up on me. If I'd had more money and the booze had cost less than four pounds a sip, then I probably would've had to be carried back to the hostel.
Our three-person party broke up around 11 or so, when Karla said she was getting tired. The poor woman had likely had enough of the rowdy foreigners badgering her. We parted on good terms, settled up at the till, and made our way home through the mild Scottish twilight.
Back at the hostel, I was on my way to the john when I spotted an attractive American brunette peering gingerly through the open door of the ladies' room.
"Oh, God," she groaned.
"What's up? I asked.
"There's no toilet paper."
I winced. "Oof. They forgot that, huh?"
"Yeah."
Being the chivalrous man I am, I went to the front desk. "Is he not here?" I asked the night watch, referring to the janitor.
"He's out smoking a cigarette."
"Well," I said, after explaining the problem, "let's go get 'im."
I poked my head outside.
"Need something?" he asked, between puffs. He was a short, dark-complected fellow with spiky black hair and a goatee.
"Looks like there's no toilet paper."
"Oh."
He came cheerfully inside, twirling his keys around his finger. The paper was refilled in minutes.
"Thanks," the brunette said to me. "I've been holding it for two hours."
Bedtime came, but not sleep. I lay in my bunk and stared for hours at the high vaulted ceiling, limned by the lights in the roofless hallways. The sky outside was not black, but purplish; I found it oddly comforting that the sun was not on the other side of the world, but merely hovering below the horizon and not far off. I gazed over the wooden buttresses and arched windows as a dying man might look upon his final sunset. I couldn't get enough. All was magic and wonder and Heaven itself. I was living high, in the midst of a dream, but I knew it wouldn't last. I used that last night in Edinburgh to soak up as much as I possibly could before the daily grind came back into my life. I strove to confine some shred of the marvels of my environment to memory, and carry it away with me into years and travels unknown. Drunkenness be damned. I was seeing with remembering eyes.
When sleep finally did come, it didn't last. Between the sagging mattress, the alcohol in my veins, the titanic snores of my fellow tenants, and my own tendency to rasp, I didn't get much rest.
But there was adventure even in that. On the morrow Jeff and I would go our separate ways: I back to Newcastle, and thence to California; and Jeff across the Channel into France, bound for all the major European capitals, and North Africa beyond.
For the moment, however, I threw myself onto my side, shut my eyes, rubbed my congested nose, and slept.
It is with no little regret that I present to you the last of my RANDOM TRAVEL DESTINATIONS. I just can't sustain it. Too many countries and too much info (and so little time!). I don't like doing things I can't sustain. You probably noticed that I let my football-related posts fall off. I couldn't keep pace with the games and couldn't bear to blog about San Diego's umpteenth humiliating defeat in the conference championships. Screw it, I say. I'm not going to cover any more seasons. Leave it to the sports writers.
But back to why I'm giving up on RTD: I'm going to run out of countries pretty soon. There's only 192 or so (well, 193 now that South Sudan's referendum went through). I'm sure all of you have heard enough about Bahrain and Libya and whatnot anyway. And some countries just don't have anything going for them, either. I mean, what's there to see in Qatar? Doha? Yeah, that's pretty much it. Might go just to say I've been there. Everybody I've talked to that's been there says it's a hole in the wall. Small potatoes. Nothing to write home about.
I think what I'll do instead is start up a new column, called BACK CORNERS OF THE WORLD, where I'll illuminate some hidden-away paradise I've discovered in my travels. Like the best arcade in South Korea. The darkest pub in Edinburgh. The tastiest street fare in Central Asia, and so on. And better yet, I'll have actually been to these places instead of blathering copy at you like a travel agent.
So, here's the last RANDOM TRAVEL DESTINATION. I chose Germany because that's where Miss H and I are going to try and wind up when we leave. We're going to teach abroad together. Seeing as how I've already done Asia, and Miss H would like to see Europe, and Germany seems to pay the most of all the European countries...Deutschland sealed the deal.
About the country itself:
Well, jeez, what can I say? You know most of it already. The Protestant Reformation, and Kaiser Wilhelm, and the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, and the fall of the Wall, and the rest of it. In fact, ever since the Cold War ended, Germany has just gone right out of the American line of sight, hasn't it? The Average Joe couldn't tell you who the president of Germany is, or the chancellor, either, or whether the president or the chancellor is in charge. (I think there's an Angela Merkel in there somewhere, but I could be wrong.)
So let's just start from the beginning and I'll give you some stuff you may not know.
Back in the wild days (before soap), 750 B.C.E. or so, the Germanic people rose in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, and headed south with the sun to colonize the rest of their future country. Not much is known about them, except when they got there—because as soon as they did, they bumped into the Romans. It's estimated that the words "Germany" and "German" stem from the Roman word for "men from the forest" or perhaps "men with spears." The Germans and Romans did indeed have martial contact, for the Romans invaded Germania (a region which, by their estimation, stretched from the Rhine River to the Ural Mountains) under the reign of Augustus. They were trounced, too. A fellow named Arminius, who had big ideas about uniting the Germanic tribes under one banner, defeated the Roman armies in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Arminius was eventually assassinated by rival Germanic leaders, but his military victories against the Romans had done their work; Germania remained outside the Roman Empire. In a few centuries, the Germans had occupied most of Germany, including the shores of the Rhine and Danube, as well as Austria. A great number of disparate Germanic tribes sprang up, among them the Franks, Frisians, and Saxons. You might know the Saxons. Their descendants are generally accepted to be modern-day Germans, Dutch, and English. And since the early United States was composed mostly of English and Germans, well...the Saxons might very well be considered our progenitors. (Certainly there are quite a few English words that have Germanic roots, and that's gotta count for something.)
Anyway, things rattled along in Germany for another thousand years. The Great Migration saw the expansion of the Germanic tribes to the west and southwest, and the assimilation of all the smaller tribes into major ones. One of these, the aforementioned Franks, grew so powerful that it established its own empire. They survived the Romans and became a factor for the spread of Christianity across Western Europe, too. They conquered most of Gaul, which would become France. ("France," in fact, derives from the Latin for "country of the Franks." See, this just proves that the Germans had designs on France from waaaaaaaaay back.)
And the rest of it you've learned in history class. Holy Roman Empire, blabbity blabbity blah...Great Famine, Black Death, yadda yadda yadda...Martin Luther, Protestant Reformation, Thirty Years' War, yakety yak yak...
Nowadays, though its liberation from Communist clutches and subsequent reunification went down barely 20 years ago, Germany has established itself as an economic powerhouse and an influential force in European and world politics. The world's third-largest population of foreign-born migrants resides in Germany. They were the world's leading exporter of goods (of any kind) from 2003 and 2008. Cars are their cup of tea. Three of Germany's top 10 most profitable corporations are car manufacturers, Volkswagen, Daimler, and BMW respectively. Not many people know this, but the major name brands Adidas, DHL, Nivea, and T-Mobile are also German in origin. The national airline, Lufthansa, is one of the most remunerative in the world, taking in 22.3 billion euros annually (31 billion U.S. dollars at the time of this writing).
And, as with any successful economic power, there's a substantial demand for English teachers in Germany. It was the same in South Korea, it's the same in Japan, it's the same in the United Arab Emirates and Oman and Saudi Arabia, and it's the same in Germany. There are international academies and private institutions who are in need of native-born English speakers to tutor their young 'uns (and even their professional adults).
I say that with no little pride. I'd say we have Britain to thank for the fact that English is now the global language, the trade language, the pan-geographical lingua franca, as it were.
And hey, it gives me an automatic in. I ain't complaining.
Apart from all this, I know virtually nothing about the country. I'm intensely excited to learn its language (I'm 75% German myself on both my father and mother's side); lots of hard consonant sounds I'll have to learn. Cake is something else that Germany's famous for. Kaffee und Kuchen is a serious affair in Deutschland, similar to siesta in Spain or teatime in England. Everybody gets together at home or in town and has a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (literally "Black Forest Cherry Cake") is perhaps one of the most famous of German confections. I mean, come on, look at it:
If decadence were a crime, we'd have to call Germany on a Cake Holocaust. Doesn't that look like a little slice of heaven? Wikipedia says this orgasmic monstrosity "consists of several layers of chocolate cake, with whipped cream and cherries between each layer...decorated with additional whipped cream, maraschino cherries, and chocolate shavings."
Damn.
Certain bits of Germany itself are enough to make you drool, too. Take a look at Lake Hintersee, in Bavaria. Pretty country, ain't it?
Just a few reasons I'd like to go: cake, high country, old European architecture, rich history, a language I could get used to hearing every day (and not think I was in a war movie)...and, oh yes, a little thing I like to call
BEER!
Speaking of being in third place, Germany is subordinate only to Ireland and the Czech Republic in its per capita consumption of beer. According to this list, the average German knocks back 110 litres of amber fluid per year. (The U.S. drags in thirteenth place with a measly 81.6 litres.) That's well ahead of such renowned beer-drinking countries as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland. I'm astounded (and not a little excited) by this news. I've been to the United Kingdom and Ireland and thought they were boozy countries. I can't wait to get to Germany and try it out for size.
Wish us luck, people. RANDOM TRAVEL DESTINATIONS, signing off.
As many of you may know, I'm trying to grow a beard. I grew a paltry, thin one last spring when the cherry blossoms were blooming (why should they have all the fun?) but shaved it off shortly thereafter. I sculpted the remains into a Van Dyke, which has sustained me ever since. 
