EuroYankee

I’m sure all of my regular readers have thought at one time or other, “What this Web site really needs is a superhero; one that resembles the author in both muscle mass and disposition.”

May I introduce EuroYankee. Some of you may recognize him as resembling a certain professional wrestler that hung out with me at the Spokesman-Review. The toy was given to me by a former editor after I wrote an article on boys with body image issues. Apparently, playing with action figures sporting impossibly huge muscles and slender waists makes boys feel inferior and then they grow up to become professional cyclists. Or so the story goes. I have a further connection to this figure as well: during my university career, I reviewed a professional wrestling match that came to town featuring the-wrestler-who-strongly-resembles-EuroYankee. I even got to go backstage and see the wrestlers in all their greased-up glory. Fabulous. So I thought he would be a good model for larger-than-life cross-cultural understanding.

 EuroYankee finds endless entertainment in the window displays of the neighborhood undertaker. Currently: get buried Egyptian Pharaoh style. Too weird. For one year they did a “seasonal” display. The fall hedgehog motif was my favorite to date.

Not long after mentioning that Reese’s Cups remain one of the unfindables in Germany, they show up in a grocery store downtown. One package, one Euro. The list of unfindable American foods keeps getting shorter.

The entryway to our apartment building got tagged recently. I can never decipher English tagging, so I’m not even trying to understand this one. Graffiti and stomping parked  bikes seem to be the favorite pasttimes for hoodlums ’round these parts.