Little Differences

Germany is not a particularly big country (ok, it's not Luxemburg size either), so you would expect the people with their one language, one tradition, one culture to be more or less the same. They are not.

And I am not only talking about the still obvious differences between East and West. Yes, they are there, definitely still in my generation though I was 13 when the Wall came down. Different school and kindergarten memories, different holiday locations, different childhood heroes (Krtek and Nu Pagadi for me, can't stand Augsburger Puppenkiste), second anthem in our life - a fact that confuses me as much as our Michael Ballack (one day younger than me exactly) and Bernd Schneider (just pay attention at the beginning of the next Germany - whoever game).

But what I am actually getting at is the differences between two regions of the same "side", barely 250 km away from one another - Hessen (Frankfurt area) and Nordrhein-Westfalen (greater Düsseldorf). I have been living in the former for almost five years now and believe it or not, didn't make a single friend among the locals. And it's not that I am exceptionally unsocial, S., my Hindi classmate from Hamburg and first friend in this hostile city has the same problem. And so does C., a fellow Eastern girl.

Then I met M. (many of you will know her, too), who lives in the latter area, and her friends. They are different from me and from my "usual crowd". Normal people, sometimes crude, unpretentious but warm, affectionate and sincere. It didn't take me long to like them nor them to like me. You might interject that I met them through M. only, that it would be another thing to meet them by myself. I don't think so, they are just what they are, know them or don't, meet them this way or another. Is it the climate? The dialect? The industrial area? Either way, the differences are there.