I really am stunned sometimes by the kindness that I have experienced here in Bremen. I’ve spoken of it before, but its like a pretty breeze in the wind, you flip your hair to it, because it just feels so damn nice, and you can’t help remarking to your friend, “hey, don’t you love this breeze?”.
Yeah, its a nice thing to have people around you, people you don’t even know, but who are civil and sweet.
So this is what happened.
I got home from somewhere and realized that really my bike is sheisse, and that I have to tighten the screws so my light can work. So I’m there, with my red nails picking at the rusty screws, when I become aware of someone talking to/about me in the window above. I look up, and its obvious there was someone looking at me, although at first I couldn’t tell whether boy/girl/man/woman/dog/elephant. My first reaction was (naturally) to cover my cleavage. The stalkers!! But then again… what cleavage.
Eek, realized my father reads this blog. Woops. Anycase, on to the more serious matter of my red nail polish that was systematically being scraped onto rusty nails and metal. This man then comes out and in German starts chatting away, oblivious to the fact that I am an idiot who after five months in this damned country cannot follow his train of conversation being spitted at me. Yet, somehow that did not matter in any way at all, because the old man was trying to help me. Yes, in my lack of fluent German I could see what a man wanted to stop her and sort out the mess a woman was making of things. So after a bit of shouting to his wife over screwdrivers and what not he even gets the neighbor involved. I was kinda embarrassed I have to say, because all I really wanted to do was fiddle with the light and go home, but there I am, like the sheep watching the farmer build an rocket-ship, no idea what the hell is going on or what on earth I’m doing there.
In the end though, I met some really nice neighbors and they fixed my light, so now I can go on biking around Bremen, happy with the knowledge that I won’t hit any unsuspecting padestrians. Well, at least not if I don’t want to…