David Goes Abroad

As I type these very words, I am spending my last night for the next four months breathing the free air that floats above these United States into my beautiful, pink, American lungs. I've spent the last two weeks soaking up every bit of Americana I could find. I went to Pittsburgh, where I watched first the Penguins then the Steelers destroy their respective opponents. I went to Atlanta, where I watched my South Carolina Gamecocks get beat up on by Florida State in some good old-fashioned college football. I came back to Columbia, where I got kicked out of a bar for daring to enter into it at the tender young age of twenty goddamned years old, ate lunch at the Hooters, and dined on a New York Strip with Maw-Maw and Grammy. God bless America. 

So, with that being said, let's have a look-see at all the things I love about these United States of America, and how I plan on replacing them with poor, balding, unimposing substitutes in the Old Country.

And mercilessly reminding them of their inadequacies.

I'll do so with an homage to my blogging hero, Tara: a list.   

#5. Temperate Weather
Last year, all of us DC-ers gained firsthand knowledge of the wrath of a vengeful God as the aptly-named Snowpocalypse dumped four feet of snow upon America's capital as a warning sign of punishments yet to come for, I assume, continuing to allow politics to happen. It was the worst winter I ever experienced. We were trapped and, after a meager 2 days, booze-less. Washington lies just north of the 38th parallel.

Replaced With: Tundra
Compare that to Berlin, which lies just north of the 52nd parallel. For those of you who aren't intimidated by large differences in numbers, how's this for some perspective: the 52nd parallel demarcates the northern border of Quebec. In Canada.

Or, for those "glass-half-full" kinda guys, the southern border of Labrador.

For those of you unaware, Labrador is best known as half of the rock and soul duo that is Labrador & Newfoundland province. Despite being twice the size of Newfoundland, bearing a name not comprised of words comically just added onto each other and said in a funny accent, and lending said name to the most popular dog breed ever, Labrador is home to just 6% of the province's population. Why, you ask? Because Newfoundland is to the fucking south, and right around the 52nd parallel is where people begin to realize that they're slightly less comfortable than a polar bear's left testicle. 

#4. Football
I'm going to Germany literally the day after the end of the NFL's regular season. This unfortunate circumstance means I'm going to have to scramble around Berlin at odd hours looking for playoff games. Bear in mind that I'll be doing this in what I can only imagine will be subarctic conditions. 

Replaced With: Fußball
As anyone with a pretentious white friend will tell you, American football isn't even the most popular sport in the world. In fact there's another sport called "football" that they play overseas, but you've probably never seen it. Oh, you call it "soccer"? Typical American. Do you even know where overseas is on a map??? 
Since international popularity is the only factor one should use to determine whether or not one should pay attention to a certain sport, I'm going to have to get alot more into this "football" thing. WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY??? They even only use their feet to play, and, therefore, the sport they play is more deserving of the name "football"?!?! Preposterous.

I, for one, am glad they don't do this pansy shit anymore.

Unfortunately for me, Berlin's premier fußball team, Hertha BSC, was relegated to the 2.Bundesliga at the end of last season, so I won't be seeing top-flight competition anytime soon. Regardless, I still haven't worked out the economics that allow the country to survive commercially without the stimulus of Super Bowl advertising.

#3. Fatty Foods
American ingenuity is one of the rare virtues we extol that has historic bearing. When the time calls for a genius to step up, America generally has a newly-imported genius to do just that. Everything (this is a false generalization, but I'm running with it) that defines the modern era was invented by an American: industrial assembly, airplanes, computers, nukes - all America, baby. Defining the very mantra of "come the hour, come the man" were such prodigies as John von Neumann, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Alva Edison. With the popularization of automobiles, the nation and the world demanded a means by which to get fat while driving. Come Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson. 

Heroes, all. Here's a short list of my last few meals: 

• Double quarter-pounder with cheese
• Chick-fil-A sandwich
• 2 Georgia Dome hotdogs
• 6 Krystal cheeseburgers 
• Hooters bacon cheeseburger
• 12 oz. New York Strip steak
• Sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit from the Waffle House

There's more grease in my digestive tract than there is atop Pauly D's head.

Maybe not.

Replaced With: Traditional Fatty Foods
If there's one thing I know about Germans, it's this: every German is apparently thin until their early thirties, whereupon everything they know and love about their dietary lifestyles turns against them.

Above: Tragedy.

So instead of my wonderful soul food, I'm left with German soul food, which I assume is just a ridiculous amount of meat. And I'm not one to turn away a schnitzel. 

#2. English
English is pretty much the best language ever. It's the closest thing linguists have had to an underdog success story since Aramaic somehow sweet-talked its way into becoming the official language of the Assyrian Empire (it still makes no goddamned sense!). 

English had humble origins as the tribal language of some northern Germanic tribesmen who'd grown tired in their ordinary Germanic lives and decided to bond over a merry little voyage to the future England. Along the way, they made English - Old English to be exact, which would achieve immortal fame in the epic of Beowulf. It actually doesn't seem a damned bit like English, but we'll give linguists the benefit of the doubt here.

Then the nasty Normans came (themselves old Vikings whose fathers had grown tired of vikinging all the time and retired instead to northern France), beat up on the drunk-ass godless Saxons at Hastings, and threw crappy Old French all up into the language. 
Eventually Shakespeare grabbed English by the balls and made it cry "Uncle," added his own words to it, and generally improved its reputation. By the time the 19th century rolled around and everyone was throwing in whatever Greek-chic they could find and jump-starting the thesaurus industry, English - supported by the world's most pretentious navy - was all up in e'erbody's respective grillz. 

Including my own. And I couldn't be happier.

Replaced With: Old Old English
Let's face it: whenever you hear someone say "Was ist das?", you're aware they're just speaking English with the most contrived accent possible. And that, friends, is really all German is: English that never got to be English. The howler monkey to our homo sapien. The Gary Coleman to our everybody else who doesn't have what Gary Coleman had. 

Here's my favorite two stories about the German language:
1. The word for "head" is "Kopf." This doesn't sound like "head." It sounds more like cup, actually. Well guess what? Back before Aenglisc and German were two separate languages, Kopf meant cup. The Angles just chucked deuces a little early on the party, and missed the whole joke that would later ensue: EVERYONE back in the fatherland started referring to heads as cups, like we do in English when we refer to a "mug." Only it wasn't Hollywood's portrayal of 1920's gangsters using the term, but every damn person in the country 800 years before Internet memes were available to spread jokes to the farthest reaches of nerddom. 

At least English waited until the Internet to destroy itself.

2. This is actually the exact same story, but with different words. In German, if someone wants to give you a "Gift," you shouldn't take it, because "Gift" means "poison." How did this come about? Well, as it turns out, the entire German nation is composed of facetious little hipsters, because they all, once again, went along with the same nation-wide joke. That's right: they all collectively thought it would be hilarious to ironically refer to poison as a little "gift."
If Germans had been as intent on political unity as they'd been on humor unity, maybe they'd've been a part of a unified country for more than 94 years in the 3 millennia of their entire history.  

#1. Patriotism
Just hit play, and let Toby tell you all you need to know.

God bless us, every one.

Replaced With: "Is It Still Too Soon?"
Judging from the German track record for starting World Wars, I expect at least one to break out while I'm over there. 

Looks like there's some solid support. Except I can't find a comparable song advocating forcing footwear into any orifices, so I think America would still have the upper hand.