View onto Germany
Mustard and Gummi Bears
By Karina Alejandra Pasquevich, interview by Katharina Ober
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| Photo: Johannes Rascher |
Anyone who has worked as a researcher in Germany later becomes an unofficial ambassador for the Federal Republic in his or her home country. But what ordinary, everyday things do researchers take away with them when they return home? We asked them for their shopping lists.
I’m rather partial to German food. Things just taste different. Take cherry yoghurt, as a completely trivial example: in Argentina it doesn’t taste so strongly of cherries, that’s why I always eat lots of it in Germany. It’s the same with mustard, or with Kürbisbrot (pumpkin yeast bread), my secret favourite – we have brown bread in Argentina, too, but it’s not as tasty as in Germany. I kept discovering little details like that about my personal menu during my time here in Germany. But there’s one thing I’ve known for a long time: the whole thing about gummi bears. I lived in Germany for two years as a child, because my parents worked here, and to this day our entire family raves about German gummi bears.
I’m a huge fan of the farm shops that you find in the area around Tübingen. Farmers who display their products by the roadside and put a cash box next to them, without any kind of shopkeeper – that would never happen in Argentina. I love that sort of trust in people. When friends visit me, they often don’t believe that something like that could work; that’s happened to me a few times now. So then we got on our bikes together and I had to show it to them.
Speaking of bikes: that’s something I particularly like about Germany, that you can go anywhere by bicycle. I enjoy cycling to work in the morning and getting some fresh air. In Argentina that would be dangerous; there aren’t very many cycle paths, and people aren’t as considerate of each other either. It has become a hobby for my husband and me, and at the weekends we explore Tübingen and its environs. What we take with us to eat along the way? Why, gummi bears of course!
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