HoltzLusiNation 

An Illustrated Journal
for Brian and Melisse

Last Modified 1999-11-29

Brian Visits Hamburg

Sun bought 150-person StarDivision in Germany and my group now reports to them, so a few of us went to Hamburg for some meetings. Hamburg is about 14 hours of travel time from the bay area. My successful jet lag strategy was to use daylight to stay awake until local evening at my destination. The result was that I had no Monday, but rather a long Sunday and a long Thursday. Against our hosts' advice I rented a car, as I had never driven abroad before. Driving was not a problem, but navigating inside Hamburg is pretty painful. The cars are small, the streets are narrow and short (renaming themselves every hundred meters or so), and the blocks are small and non-rectangular (averaging about 6 streets at every intersection). Parking is even worse: there essentially is none. People park on grass, or with two wheels on the sidewalk, or double-park, etc. I was lucky to find a space near StarDivision on Tuesday, but cabbed it on Wednesday. All the speakers and signs involved in transport, lodging, and food are bilingual in both English and German. By contrast, European culinary standards seem Brian-incompatible: cigarette smoke everywhere, warm cola, warm milk, orange egg yolks, diminutive steaks, pasty sweet ketchup, rubbery corn. (Admittedly, the latter two items were due to the Brits, not the Germans.)

I saw Phantom Menace in German at a Hamburg cinema.  Before the previews there were about fifteen minutes of commercials.  Most of them were in English ("Energy 97!  Hamburg's best rock and roll!"), probably because they think English sounds cool.  They also were very universal, not relying on the dialogue to make the point. Sort of like those Mentos commercials, but way cooler.  Then they showed a few previews.  For Austin Powers, they pumped in smoke and turned on a concert-style laser light show synchronized to the preview, which was essentially a music video of Madonna's Beautiful Stranger.  The video itself was colorful line drawings against a dark background, so even the projected light acted like a laser and lit swaths through the smoke.  It was awesome.  Having already seen it, the movie was easy to follow in German.  A bonus was not having to listen to that stupid floppy-eared character they inserted to appeal to kids.  Obi-Wan kept saying "Ja, meister" to his Jedi mentor.  The seats are assigned, which is nice.  In line for tickets I was telling my American coworker how I don't know any German, and then I heard the people in line behind me say "... keine Deutsch", which means "no German". English and German are related enough that one can understand some signs and the occasionaly snippet of conversation.