The Expatriate Experience

We are Americans now among the Bahrain-exiles, forced to leave the country because of U.S. government policy enacted this past summer: the great evacuation. Presently, we reside near Wurzburg, located on the Main River in the Southwestern part of Germany.

What a difference a year makes.

It’s true; we are crazy to leave our home culture, friends and family, and live for several years in the Middle East – and now Central Europe. However, anyone attracted to wanderlust knows this can’t be helped. The dye was cast long ago.

We left Bahrain on September 3 with everything we could carry onto an airplane. This included several pieces of luggage and two small pet carriers for the hounds – Yorkshire Terriers. Everything else had to be left behind at our villa in Tubli – to be packed up later, which didn’t occur until October 10.

After we landed at the Frankfurt Airport, we had to juggle our luggage and pile into a train for Wurzburg. Welcome to Germany, and welcome to the life of expatriates.

Unlike Bahrain, finding a house is a formidable task in Germany. There is no housing boom with opulent villas geared for the wealthy and those expatriates with a bountiful housing allowance. Yet the prices are just as high as Bahrain and, as always, rents automatically increase by $300 monthly – once it’s obvious the interested party is an American. The game is the same everywhere.

We finally settled on a three-story house in the country, about 15 miles from Wurzburg. The farming village we know call home is Ilmspan, which boasts a church and two guest houses – more aptly described as inns that feature home-cooked food, beer and wine, and rooms for overnight lodging. A guest house is across the street from the church, with a sign advertising beer is served by the establishment – another major distinction from Bahrain. Germans do love their beer, and if this helps commune with God – so be it.

Little by little our household is shaping up, and it seems we are not quite refugees anymore. For instance, last week movers arrived with a 1,000 pounds of items dubbed as an “express shipment.” Forget clothes and cooking items. This delivery consisted primarily of electronics: computers, a television, a CD-DVD surround-sound system, and a microwave – plus bicycles. The computers are certainly important, yet the Armed Forces Network (AFN) decoder is highly coveted now that we are in Germany. This is our only chance at American programming. Among the reasons for selecting this house is the availability of a special AFN satellite on the roof – guaranteed to help lure Americans to this site and pay the high rent. No problem.

The “express shipment” was packed the same day as our household in Bahrain – October 10 …. however, these contents were shipped by cargo plane to Ramstein Air Force Base – which is about two hours from Wurzburg. Our main car, a 1999 Mercury Sable, is due here November 24, and the rest of our household items should be in Germany just before Christmas. Both these shipments are arriving by boat.

I’m still too new to this experience to offer any meaningful insights yet. However, this is what I’ve noticed so far:

- most Germans do not speak English. If you approach a German and ask: “sprechen sie English?” – most will respond: “nein.” However, if you simply say: “do you speak English?” – most will try and be obliging.

- Germans do seem to have a fetish about cleanliness and order. The government is very hardcore about sorting plastics, metals, glass and paper for recycling. In fact, there is a color-code for specifically bagged items. Starting in January, there will be steep fines if items are mixed. On Saturdays – in the villages, folks of the older generation may be seen vigorously sweeping the sidewalk in front of each respective residence. Yet, for all these anal qualities, Germans have no problem permitting accompanied dogs into restaurants.

All of this is in stark contrast to Bahrain, where every bathroom provided access to that strange little hose by the toilet so people may cleanse their genitals – and especially douche their asses, before entering the mosque and praying to Allah. Yet people discarded all manner of rubbish in the streets, nearby vacant property and straight into the ocean. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a Bahraini adult behind the wheel of a luxury car, the vehicle occupied by children, pull up to the edge of the Arabian Gulf in a residential area and toss bags of fast-food trash and other garbage into the water. After dark, small tanker trucks used to pull up near the shoreline of Tubli Bay – where we lived, and dumped human sewage into the ocean. The smell was absolutely putrid. However, the Bahraini attitude about tossing trash out windows of cars or even villas is that this created job security for their Muslim brothers, the lowly Pakistanis.

Not so in Germany, where everything is very tidy and proper. In Wurzburg, there are two Wal-Mart Super Centers. This is fairly nauseating, but such is the reach of American culture. Here, a familiar American product featuring a middle-aged, white bald man with an earring is not dubbed Mr. Clean. He is Mr. Proper.

- on Sundays, Germans do not work. It’s shut-down day. Stores are not open, not even Wal-Mart. It’s taboo – allegedly, to perform yard work or even wash a vehicle. Leisure activities only. In Ilmspan, people go for walks in the countryside. Near our property is a paved one-lane road that winds to the rear of the house and then up a hill and leads to who knows where. I have embarked with the hounds and attempted to pursue the path – but after a mile or so, I turn back toward home. Otherwise, it’s common to see folks on horseback trotting along even more obscure paths through distance fields.

At the foot of a slope, not far from our house, is a sizeable stone statue of Jesus nailed to the cross. Such an appealing image: a Western-looking man in a skimpy loincloth just dangling in the excruciating image of crucifixion [the ancient Romans did have a certain flair for torture]. I thought Ireland and Mexico had an abundance of Roman Catholic imagery incorporated into the landscape, but Germany has its share, also. And, I have no idea if we live in a Catholic or a Protestant region. From the north-side of our house, we can see the onion-domed steeple of a church in nearby Schonefeld [German for beautiful field]. And, stepping out into the street that leads from our house and onto the road out of this village, Ilmspan’s onion-domed steeple is clearly visible.

Most of my life I’ve tolerated Christianity, even professed major tenets. My early upbringing was a cafeteria-styled introduction to the Protestant viewpoint. After my baptism as a Roman Catholic, my mother shopped around Methodist, Presbyterian and even Christian Science Churches. The Christian Science Monitor is a fine newspaper, but Mary Baker Eddy was off-center. And, then, later in life, there was the Roman Catholic Church redux for me.

All in all, however, Christianity is just re-hashed Mediterranean mythology: Zeus/Jupiter fornicating with a female earthling. The supernatural beginning and end of Jesus of Nazareth places him squarely in the mix of other Greek legends. After Saul, better known as St. Paul, had his nervous breakdown on the road to Damascus and became one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the past 2,000 years, the mythology put on a new face. Emperor Constantine really sealed the deal with his conversion in 312, and thereafter emperors were the new popes, and senators were the new bishops.

Yet instead of providing hope and enlightenment, Christianity eventually plunged most of Europe into the Dark Ages. If there was a benefit to the Plague, perhaps it was that people began to realize God and his answer men, the Catholic hierarchy, had no salvation in mind at all. It was a supreme rip-off. What should one expect from a deity who has sex with a virgin earthling, and then sacrifices this son for the sins of mankind? Is this the kind of imaginary friend adults should embrace?

The underlying premise of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Scientists is that God is perfect, and if man is created in God’s image then it stands to reason that man is perfect. Hence, there is no reason for physical illness and addictive traits: alcoholism, drugs, slutty behavior. In other words: it’s all good. [Step into a Wednesday evening prayer meeting of a Christian Science Church and be prepared to listen to testimonials from the believers who will offer astounding stories of faith over reason.] However, if man is really created in the image of God, then God is multicolored and multicultural. God is also heterosexual, bi-sexual, homosexual and even asexual. Likewise, God reflects all political ideologies and therefore cannot possibly be interested in legislating morality. But, of course, in an America based on the 59 million people who voted for Bush, God is interested in a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

At least the myth of a fat man in a reindeer-powered sleigh showing up once a year with loads of presents is thoroughly more cheerful. Santa Claus, like Buddha, is that rare altruistic fellow – except Buddha really existed.

I raise this nonsense about Christianity because I received a recent letter from a long-time friend. He has finally abandoned decades of marijuana and pornography for Jesus. This was bound to happen. I am not without my own obsessive-compulsive traits – just ask my wife, but there’s nothing zealous about my fixations. My friend, on the other hand, has gone off the deep-end. Bible study classes, the whole routine. I have not really seen him since 1981, and that is a long damn time ago. Over the years, he’s re-married and has three sons – all slightly younger than my own. Two of the boys are twins. My friend admits the older of this second set of children is a pure miscreant – much like he was in adolescence.

As a 16-year-old, my friend had already been expelled from a Catholic boys’ boarding school in St. Louis, kicked out of both his well-to-do aunt’s house in Clayton and his parent’s house on Midway Island. He came to live with us in the fall of 1968, yet by early winter of 1969, he had exhausted his good will, dropped out of high school and went to live in a commune on McPherson Avenue – in the Central West End of St. Louis. For a while he worked as a male hustler around the boat house of Forest Park. These were the days when he was Holden Caulfield [The Catcher in The Rye] gone bad, really bad. Luckily, my friend was never arrested.

I can’t blame someone for solace, wherever it may be found. Nonetheless, I preferred the stoned, woe-is-me fellow, who once wrote some mighty interesting letters about his neurosis, as opposed to epistles sprinkled with “the Lord shows me the way.” I like to keep in mind that King James I – who commissioned the classic re-writing of the English Bible – built a beautiful palace for his lover, Lord Buckingham, despite being married and the father of Prince Charles [who was later beheaded as Charles I by those lovely Puritans after his defeat at the hands of Oliver Cromwell]. James I may be the only monarch in history to have both a mother [Mary, Queen of Scots] and a son beheaded. It doesn't seem like God helped the Stuarts much at all.

Perhaps the English have no cause to be squeamish over such considerations in Iraq.

Now that Bush has his Christian mandate he can steamroll through Fullajuh and show the Iraqis the real virtues of both Western democracy and Christian compassion. It’s all so sickening. And the results of the national election in America are the most sickening of all. No surprise that Colin Powell is on the way out; no matter how it plays in the media. And now for the Soviet-styled purges within the CIA – to eradicate disloyal members who leaked embarrassing and unflattering information about Bush doctrine on Iraq and the War on Terror in the fall campaign.

Still no sign of Osma bin Laden? The younger Bush still needs bin Laden at large for the benefits of the Fear Factor. The elder Bush needs to maintain profitable ties with the bin Laden family among the corrupt Carlyle Group. Don’t you know that Hollywood will now turns its back on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 at Oscar nomination time, now that Bush is entrenched for four more years.