Tootling Around on Reddit — Shashlik in Hand
Memories of Christmas Markets, Our Landlord, and Living in Germany
I like to tootle around on Reddit. This morning, I discovered the sub-Reddit r/Germany, which sounded interesting. It started off with a shish kabob at the Nürnberg Christkindlesmarkt, which is the Christmas market. The person asking the question had added a picture, so there was something to talk about, and asked what it was. They’d had this food six years previously and could not remember what it was called for the life of them. It’s shashlik in German.
What was interesting about this whole post was all the people on Reddit who almost got into fisticuffs about exactly what this food was. The dispute was between Shashlik and currywurst. I was reminded, much as I loved our time in Germany and pretty much all of the Germans I knew, that a saying used to bounce around, “All Germans were traffic cops.”
I had to laugh because that was what seemed to happen in this innocent enough post. I went on to read a few other posts in the subreddit, just in case the responses in the Shashlik post were an anomaly. Still, it kept cropping up whether someone…
