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"market research"
Jan. 17th, 2007 12:58 pmI took my littlest to the Altstadt (old city) today, which, unlike most of Germany, is no longer the center of town. In 1705 the town burned down, and the rebuilding, combined with a large influx of French settlers, moved today's downtown up the road a bit. So, although the city is 1000 years old, it only looks 300 or so. Waa. Anyhow, we went in the little city museum and poked around. The basement was cool--arched stones and fragments of prehistoric people and odd tunnels off to the side, where supposedly the mayor hid out in 1946 when the Americans drove their tanks into town. (This particular area of Germany was very, very brown.) The exhibits dedicated to local industries was largely boring for me (if I ever go back to the mystery about the guy who gets a job making gloves I'll no doubt be fascinated, but until then...yawn.) I want older stuff. Upstairs they had a decent display of WWII artifacts, including a real star armband and a lot of photos of fierce-looking girls in long braids wearing swastikas and marching downtown. Also, directions of what to do in case of an air raid from the "Tommies," and posters advising people of what they said in case of spies. Again, not what I'm writing about, but interesting.
On modern Germans: this is a very pedestrian-oriented country, so you see and talk to people on the street all the time. Here are three recent encounters:
One of my kids dropped a piece of bread while waiting for the bus. Instantly, there were 50 pigeons. An older lady who was also waiting lost no time in letting me know that feeding the pigeons was utterly verboten. (Someone will always let you know when you overstep the rules here.) Still, she was just as fascinated as we were at the spectacle.
In the dollar (euro) store: a nice grandpa-aged guy looked at a bin of stuffed animals. He picked out a very small, cute dog and handed it to my toddler. "Look, it's a dog! Isn't it cute!" Um, I hadn't actually planned on buying toys that day. It wasn't until we started talking about how the dog was tired now and needed to go back to his bed that the guy realized what he'd done.
In the grocery store: my toddler is parked in the stroller in the produce department. A lady comes to get one of those plastic bags for vegetables, and gives the end to my kid to unroll. Then she rips that part off, gives it to my kid (!) and gets her own. And then she gets after me to be careful, since "kids can suffocate on those bags, you know."
Mostly people are nice and thoughtful. But every once in a while I'm astounded.
I keep trying to tell myself it's character research.
On modern Germans: this is a very pedestrian-oriented country, so you see and talk to people on the street all the time. Here are three recent encounters:
One of my kids dropped a piece of bread while waiting for the bus. Instantly, there were 50 pigeons. An older lady who was also waiting lost no time in letting me know that feeding the pigeons was utterly verboten. (Someone will always let you know when you overstep the rules here.) Still, she was just as fascinated as we were at the spectacle.
In the dollar (euro) store: a nice grandpa-aged guy looked at a bin of stuffed animals. He picked out a very small, cute dog and handed it to my toddler. "Look, it's a dog! Isn't it cute!" Um, I hadn't actually planned on buying toys that day. It wasn't until we started talking about how the dog was tired now and needed to go back to his bed that the guy realized what he'd done.
In the grocery store: my toddler is parked in the stroller in the produce department. A lady comes to get one of those plastic bags for vegetables, and gives the end to my kid to unroll. Then she rips that part off, gives it to my kid (!) and gets her own. And then she gets after me to be careful, since "kids can suffocate on those bags, you know."
Mostly people are nice and thoughtful. But every once in a while I'm astounded.
I keep trying to tell myself it's character research.
