Germany Doesn’t Suck

The party this year was at the school. BossA started cooking the turkey at 14h and then continued on making other Christmas goodies such as stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, salad etc.

We had it in the teachers’ room – a place where we all come together several times per day to prepare lessons, share ideas, have lunch and pass time between classes. It’s the place where we interact with each other five days a week – sort of like our home away from home.

I was seated between Vince and a part time French teacher that I didn’t know and didn’t speak English. Next to her was our full time Spanish teacher and a new part time Spanish teacher and at the end of the table was our Arabic teacher (who also doubled as a French teacher). On the other side of Vince were some of our German teachers – all of whom speak English well, so that was the language that was mostly spoken on that side of me.

Wine drinking happened among all while good conversation happened and delicious food was served to all.

While we were eating, Vince said to me, ‘I’d hate to be the Arabic teacher. Nobody’s talking to him,’ so I looked to that end of the table and saw that that was indeed happening. I tried to convince the French teacher sitting next to me to go down there and talk to him, since they had a language in common (and I didn’t feel like speaking German), but she wouldn’t. I looked at Vince and said, ‘Right, I’m going to keep him company.’

We ended up speaking German the entire time and he turned out to be very interesting. He’s from Lebanon and has lived in Germany for four years now, but doesn’t really like it. However, he can’t go back due to the fact that he was involved in politics and is not allowed back. He is a Christian and knows all about Christmas. He told me that 40% of his homeland is Christian, but it used to be 50% ten years ago – the change being made due to the high birth rate of the Muslims there (10 to 2). He was also a big fan of the US. He told me that he had a brother-in-law in El Paso and had visited a few times for Thanksgiving as well as also visiting San Francisco and Santa Cruz.

Some people left shortly after dinner and those of us that stayed sang Christmas carols for quite a while – which turned out to be interesting. I work for a language school and many of the non-native English speakers didn’t know the words in English. We printed them out and they attempted to sing them in English with us, other than Silent Night. We decided that everyone would sing that in their own language at the same time – English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. It turned out to be quite good.

One of the coolest things that happened was with our Italian teacher. She’s a quiet and somewhat shy woman in her 50s and was wearing a black dress and a purple boa. When ‘Santa Baby’ came on – a song that all knew – she got up and did a seductive Marilyn Monroe type dance flailing the boa around. Just perfect.

Of course, a can-can line happened. For some odd reason either a can can line or a Congo line frequently seems to happen at parties I attend.

The rest of the evening was spent, and then spent the rest of the evening chatting about various non-work related things.

I don’t usually spend time with my colleagues away from work nowadays, but this was a lot of fun. Some of my colleagues thought that the bosses were being cheap by not arranging for us to go to a restaurant, but I was among those that didn’t. We had a delicious homemade Christmas dinner, lots of great conversation, Christmas carols, tons of silliness, etc.