Mendelssohn in Berlin

Composer Felix Mendelssohn was a Berliner -- he grew up here in an extremely plugged-in intellectual household. Old Goethe use to drop by in the evenings for margaritas and Trivial Pursuit (well not exactly that, but it was that sort of thing). So since I'm in Berlin now, here is some more about Mendelssohn (continuing the story that was at the bottom of this blog posting, in case you missed it).

When Felix had grown up and become a famous composer, he used to travel to England all the time and hang out with a couple of other German music lovers at Buckingham Palace -- Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. All three of them spoke German at home, although Vicky and Al would never speak it in public, of course (even though this was years before Victoria's grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II started all that "Great War" trouble in Europe). They would pass evenings together making music. 

In Düsseldorf and Leipzig, statues of Mendelssohn stood for decades in front of the town concert halls. But Mendelssohn's grandfather Moses, a famous philosopher, was a Jew, and although Felix and his parents and siblings were all baptized in the early 1800s, as far as the Nazis were concerned Mendelssohn was still a Jew. His "degenerate" music was banned, and in 1936 they pulled down the statues. The Düsseldorf one was melted down for metal but the fate of the Leipzig one is unknown. Both statues have now been replaced.

When I was 17,

instead of composing glorious timeless music, I was reading Mad comics and jerking off. But when Felix was 17, inspired by Schlegel's translations of Shakespeare, he composed this overture (click here). At 3:16 in the piece, notice the "Hee-haw! Hee-haw!" (in the play, as you will doubtless recall, the character Bottom has been turned into a donkey - Ha ha!).

Friday, Saturday, & Sunday, September 30 and October 1st & 2nd

On Friday I took the fast train from Hamburg to Berlin. There were four ladies sitting at a table across from me and they played cards and drank beer and laughed and laughed and laughed all the way to Berlin. They had brought their beer along with them. Lots of it.

In Berlin I bought a 7-day local travel ticket and dragged the suitcase to Jan's airbnb place, on the 6th floor of a modern apartment complex 2 blocks from Alexanderplatz. Jan, a Berliner, is an art student at Humboldt University. His place is full of paintings and smells of oil paint. Dozens of paintings are leaning against the walls of the room he paints in. He speaks Russian, having lived there for several years. Right now he is studying Czech and Polish. The picture is what I see from my pillow - the illuminated Fernsehturm (TV tower) in Alexanderplatz.

Jan is a very nice young man. He obviously cleaned up the bathroom and his bedroom for me (he sleeps on the couch in the living room), but he's a college-student-type mess. I peeked into the living room to see if he was there once so I'd know whether or not to lock the door, and there are snack bags and bottles and clothes and underwear all over the place. I hope he's not depressed or something.

Missus Slade and I have already done the museums and major tourist sites, so I wanted just to check out the city and listen to the Germans talking. I spent Saturday looking at just about every used book at the many stalls of the flea market behind the Bodemuseum on the river, and then spent the whole afternoon at Dussmann's huge bookstore

Friedrichstraße, from the window
of the film & DVD section of
Dussmann's bookstore

on Friedrichstraße. I finally found a book I've been looking for (about the post-war expulsion of the Germans from the east of the Reich). And I had a lot of fun just seeing what was there. It's a wonderful store. I think Germans read more than Americans do.

Sunday I went down to the defunct Tempelhof Airfield, now used as a big big open space for kite-flying, cycling, jogging, skateboarding, etc. This is where planes came and went during the Berlin Airlift.

Lots of info - e.g., pictures of Gina Lollobrigida and Cary Grant arriving there in the 60s for the Berlinale film festival. Kiddies were driving little electric cars around the disused runways.

I came back north and visited the

Invalidenfriedhof, an old cemetery that Missus Slade and I had stumbled on during a previous visit. It's full of military heroes - big shots mostly who were killed in WWI but also some from WWII.  A lot of them even "fell" during the Franco-Prussian War, and even before that. A great place to take pictures.

From there I went to the New Synagogue (info here) on Oranienburger Straße with its amazing Ottoman dome. I knew it had been torched during Kristallnacht and later bombed by the Allies, and only the restored front part and dome remain, but I always wanted to see inside, so I went in. The site is surrounded by cops and video cameras, and there is airport-type x-ray security. 

The ticket counter lady heard my accent and asked where I was from, and then she switched to American English. She explained what I wouldn't see because of the torching and bombing, and I said I knew that but I wanted to check it out. I sheepishly said that I thought maybe we (the US) had bombed it, but she checked with a colleague and told me that it was the Brits who bombed it. "So you're off the hook," she said. Ha ha! Whew! There's a nice little museum with artifacts and history and architectural info.

I walked to the Deutsches Theater and bought a ticket for that night's performance of a drama version of Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and I asked for a seat from which I could see the projected English surtitles. The ticket guy also asked where I was from and I told him, but he didn't switch to English. I said I had come here to improve my German, and he said, "Then you mustn't look at the English surtitles!"

I remembered a little Vietnamese restaurant in the area, where Missus Slade and I had eaten, and I couldn't find that one but I found another one and had a big bowl of pho. I figured there's nothing better than watching a German play with a belly full of pho.

I would describe the play (info here) as what the Germans call "durcheinander," meaning all-over-the-place. It was technically well done, and mostly shouted, in Berlin dialect. Even when I could read the surtitles in time, it didn't make much sense, since (just like the novel) the narrative proceeds in a patchwork-collage of impressions. I had read part of it once, but I got bogged. 

The play was up-to-the-minute avant-garde. After the first 25 minutes, which included an extended bombastic soliloquy from a full-frontal nude male followed by THREE instances of energetic simulated sexual intercourse, the nicely dressed lady sitting beside me stood up and crept out of the hall. At the interval, so did I.

Random observation:

I love listening to tiny kids talking on the subway trains. A little girl boarded with her daddy, jumped into a seat and patted the seat next to her shouting, "Papa, platz dich hier! Papa, platz dich hier!" It's so cute. A 4-year-old exclaimed to his mama as they boarded the train, "Wir sind unten!" Then, pointing out the window at the tunnel wall, he asked, "Ist das die Erde?" These toddlers never make a mistake about noun gender! I assume their parents drill them on gender and grammar before they leave home in the morning. That's the only possible explanation.

Wednesday & Thursday, September 28th and 29th

HAMBURG

Wednesday was a long day. First I took a train from Görlitz north to Cottbus, on the single-track railroad north through the woods of east Saxony - mostly beech, oak, and pine. At a tiny burg, the train stopped at the double-track station to let the southbound train go past. 

The train passed a station way out in the boonies of Brandenburg with the sign "Brand - Tropical Islands." Just like that, in English. WTF? So I looked it up later. 

It turns out it's a resort inside a huge HUGE balloon-like structure built for an airship "cargo-lifter" scheme that went bankrupt. It is the 2nd largest building on earth, and the largest without internal supports, located out in the Brandenburg wilderness. It was bought by a Malaysian concern and is now a resort, with the biggest indoor rain forest in the world, a beach, many tropical plants and a number of swimming pools, bars and restaurants inside of it (website here). This is what it will be like for us when we live in a bubble on Mars. 

Why fly to the tropics when you can take the wife and kids on the train from Berlin for a tropical weekend? Pretty amazing.

At Cottbus I "climbed around" (as the Germans say) to the train to Berlin, and there I had to go down to the "tief" tracks way down below the station to find the fast ICE train. It zooms to Hamburg in just two hours. In one stretch is was doing 150 mph. In Hamburg I found the S-Bahn to the Reeperbahn station and schlepped to Axel's airbnb hostel very near the amazing high life of the Reeperbahn. He was at the door to meet me.

He's a big pudgy nice Hamburg guy, showed me everything, and helped me get on his funny wifi. He was effusively helpful, with good English. When I was testing whether I had managed to get on his wifi or not, I went to google maps and randomly put in "Detroit." Axel saw it and said he's been there -- his band played there! At the downtown Ramada on Bagley! They told him if he went outside, not to walk east.

Axel's hostel is a warren of little rooms each with a bed, a TV, and a sink. There are common showers and toilets. It's $35 a night. He said when he bought it 15 years ago it was already a hostel, but he thinks originally it was a whore house, since there are 10  little rooms, each with just a bed and a sink. Makes sense. Plus, it's near the notorious Reeperbahn.

I asked him if there's any area that I should avoid walking in and he said no, everyplace is pretty safe. "Safer than Detroit," he said.

Axel said the harbor was just a few blocks away so I headed in that direction. And WHOA! I found out that I'm right next to Hans Albers Platz! With his statue in the middle! 

I'm pretty sure people who look at this blog don't know who Hans Albers was, but I do because of my interest in old German movies and Schlagermusik. He was a hugely famous singer and actor, a true and beloved son of Hamburg - Hamburg personified. He made over 160 films and was the most famous German film actor of the 1930s and 40s. 

He also had many hits as a singer. Here he is singing "On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight," from the movie of the same name. The clip also shows scenes of the wild nightlife right where I'm staying -- I recognize all the street names. Albers starts singing at about 1:30 on the clip, but at least watch the first part to see what it was like here in 1954 (not 1943 like it says). His singing really sucks, as I'm sure you will agree if you listen to it. (Note the horse having a beer.)

In his Platz there is still a "Kult-Kneipe" (cult pub) with pictures of Albers all over it. He's been dead for over 50 years, and I thought maybe they've milked this way beyond its expiration date, and that nobody younger than me knows who he is, even in Hamburg. But I was WRONG, as I'll explain later.

Here is Albers in his heyday, with co-star Lilian Harvey ("The Sweetest Girl in the World") from the 1932 classic UFA film "Quick". Lilian falls in love with a clown (Albers), but spurns him when he is out of makeup, failing to see it is the same person. Ha ha! What a merry mixup! The whole stinky movie is on Youtube here, for your enjoyment (in German with French subtitles). 

Slade's son has been here in the Reeperbahn area with his band, and he had told me about it. The neighborhood is over-the-top seedy, with dozens of flashy sexy nightclubs, sex shows, sex shops, betting shops, gun shops, and very very many liquor stores and bars. It's also where Beatles-Platz is, since they played here at a few clubs when getting their start in 1960. Everybody here seems so happy! (Not counting the dudes sleeping on the sidewalk with shit stains on the seats of their pants). 

Here are three old dudes almost as old as me (but with more teeth), laughing and yacking and drinking beer off the top of a city trash can.

I bet you always wondered where the Wodka Bomb was invented. Well, here ya go. Reeperbahn, Hamburg.

My hostel room has its window right on the sidewalk, and Axel had left a mint and a pair of earplugs on my pillow. But it's the middle of the week so it's not so bad, and besides, I like the noise. Here are some more pictures of the area

Around the corner on the Platz I saw a bedraggled old lady making mini-pizzas in a wood-fired oven inside a little storefront that said "Pizza 2€" so I ordered two of the veggie ones. They were yummy.

Wednesday I took a tour of the huge complicated harbor on a little boat, watching big cranes load and unload containers from gynormous ships.

As we passed one unbelievably huge self-loading ro-ro container ship, the tour guy said that that ship usually came into port here to load up with "used cars for the Africa market."

The tour boat dropped me off at the Harbor Museum,  a big complex of old-fashioned ships, boats, huge floating cranes, and a big warehouse full of machines and winches and tools and tally-man office equipment and big scales and barrels and boxes and kegs, and sacks of exotic spices and raw rubber, stacked up to the rafters on many shelves. It's all remnants of the way they used to load and unload cargo in the pre-container days. The whole "museum" is being managed and organized and massaged by a bunch of retired port duffers who love this stuff, and it's a huge interesting mess.

I was hungry and there was a sign there for some kind of little gedunk, so I yelled in "Hallo" at the counter and a nice fifty-ish lady came out. I asked if there was anything to eat, and she seemed slightly flustered and asked me if I was a worker on the museum ship. Turns out they really don't serve any food, really, despite what the sign said. 

She asked if she could fix me a nice schmaltz sandwich, and she showed me the schmaltz. It wasn't orange like Spanish manteca - it was just gray fat with onions in it. She said it was delicious and good for you. I said nah. So she said how about a nice frikadelle and some of her home-made potato salad? I said das wäre geil (that'd be cool) so that's what she fixed me, plus a cup of coffee, €5.50. The frikadelle was a hamburger-shaped hunk of tough grisly ground meat, but not un-tasty with mustard. It was fun talking with that jolly lady.

On Thursday after spending three hours in the historical museum, which is very big and thorough, I stopped in at the Hans Albers Cult Pub on his platz near his statue, and had a conversation with the bartender, an older lady (but a lot younger than me). She said Albers used to hang out right there, and she pointed to a wall covered with Hans Albers memorabilia. 

Hans Albers Memorial wall, in his Kneipe

She also put one of his stinky songs on the jukebox, just for me (it was "On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight," so I could act real smart and tell her the year and the movie's name). She claimed young Germans ARE aware of Albers, and come to that place to worship his memory. (Hmm. I think maybe not). As I left, she was serving a large group of young French tourists who, I assure you, had never heard of Hans Albers.

I went over to the nearby Greek restaurant and ordered take-away moussaka for my dinner here at the squat. While I waited, I had a long conversation in Greek with the proprietor, a friendly older guy (but younger than me) who was doing sudoku out of the newspaper. He said Greeks have ALWAYS been in Germany -- for work, for political reasons, and because of shipping. He asked all about where and why I was in Greece. I told him we had a son who was born there and he asked if he was still there - a Greek. Ha ha. The guy is from the Thessaloniki area and has been in Germany for 34 years. Before I left, he insisted that I have an ouzo with him.

Random observations:

Hamburg is FULL of black people and brown people, more than any German city I've seen. But I see very few Chinese/Korean/Japanese-looking people.

If you walk into a drug store and ask for a small package of kleenex, they give you one for free.

All the streets of downtown Hamburg are covered with litter. Little street sweepers patrol the sidewalks at night, but the next day they're all messed up again.

 In the open pedestrian areas near the train station, people (men and women mixed) sit in circles on the pavement and drink beer and wine and talk.

People drink beer and eat on the subway trains. People are walking around on the sidewalks with bottles of beer in their hands all the time. Lots of them. Bars and restaurants have signs that say "All of our cocktails can be ordered to go."

Sunday, September 25

GÖRLITZ

Görlitz is the eastern-most town in Germany. I wanted to see it for two reasons. First, my high school German teacher Herr Heuser was from Breslau, in Silesia (now in Poland), and he told stories. As the Red Army advanced through Germany, Breslau was declared a "Festung" (fortress) - the Führer said the people should stay and fight and he wouldn't let them evacuate, so when the Red Army came through they destroyed the city. 18,000 people froze to death and 40,000 civilians lay dead in the ruins of homes and factories. So I was interested in Silesia, and Görlitz has a Silesian Museum.

The second reason is that Görlitz is the only German town of its size (about 55K people) that didn't get bombed during the war at all. And after that, the East German government didn't invest much in its infrastructure. So almost everything you see is unchanged, and the way it used to be.

The downtown is very pretty, with big old kept-up medieval buildings and churches, but outside of that there are streets and streets of empty clapped-out buildings, some even with plywood on the windows. Many of them are decorated with pretty 19-century architectural ornaments, nymphs and pilasters, etc. Lost glory.

Maybe where the kid puked in "The Reader"

So, they make movies here, because it's like back-in-time -- a ready-made movie set. I read that they call it "Görlywood" (ha ha). When I was walking from the train station I think I saw the passageway where Kate Winslett helped the kid puke in "The Reader." According to the IMDB, they've made 44 movies here in recent years, including "Inglorious Basterds." The interior of The Grand Budapest Hotel is an old shopping pavilion here.

Anyway, Tuesday morning I took the train from Erfurt eastward out of Thuringia and into Saxony, through Leipzig (been there) and Dresden (Missus Slade and I have been there). I stayed there two nights.

Near Görlitz, station signs started to be in both German and Polish (the train I was on went on to Warsaw).

I dragged the suitcase a mile over bumpy cobbles to the only non-airbnb place that I had booked on this trip (there weren't any airbnbs here much) -- the Picobello Pension, which is in a beautiful location, right on the bank of the River Neisse, which since The Big One is the border with Poland. There is a footbridge that connects the two countries. There is no sign or marker that tells you when you left one country and went into the other - people are just walking and biking back and forth. In fact, I was just in Poland a few minutes ago, and bought a Polish beer in one of the "Zigaretten" shops that cluster around the Polish side of the bridge like hemorrhoids. I didn't have any zlotys on me, but the Polish lady GLADLY accepted euros. Everybody there does.

By the way, I think they should build a wall, and make Poland pay for it.

This pension is about $35 a night, which is pretty cheap but other than the location, it's no bargain. It's pretty spartan, and I'm on the 3rd floor, which over here means the 4th floor. With my heavy suitcase and no elevator! (I know. It's good for me.)

The worst thing is, there's no free wifi. You have to pay 4 euros for a scratch-off card that gives you 180 minutes of bad wifi. I plan to write a bad review of this place on Booking.com

Silesia is a fat tongue of land that sticks down southeastward from Berlin with its capital at Breslau, now Wrocław. Like most of eastern and northern Germany it was originally Slavic, until the Teutons moved in and took over way, way back in the day. A lot of eastern German town names sound Slavic - they end in -ow and - itz. Actually, the -in part of the name Berlin is the same Slavic ending as on Stalin and Lenin. (I hope nobody ever told that to the Führer - it would have pissed him off for sure).

The Allies chopped off the eastern part of the Reich and gave it back to the Slavs, with the new border running south up the Oder and Neisse rivers.

The Görlitz area is on the west side of the river Neisse, so it was the only part of German Silesia that stayed in Germany. All the rest of it went to Poland. So there is a really good Silesian museum here where I spent a lot of time. Descendants of Silesian Germans come here to see how it was for their grandparents, and sigh over their wonderful lost homeland.

The Soviets expelled the German Silesians, who had lived there for centuries, pushing many of them through Görlitz. And they moved Polish, Ukrainian, and White Russian populations westward into Silesia, to take the ousted Germans' jobs, shops, and farms. They called it "population transfers." The museum has lots of pictures and artifacts and text about it, in German and Polish.

There are tourists here, but as far as I can see they're all Germans. You can hear Polish spoken in the streets, and also Greek. After the Greek civil war of 1949-50, 14,000 Greek Communists (the losers) were brought up to here and settled on both sides of the river by the Polish and German Communist governments.

Also, I saw a family of orthodox American Jews (I heard them talking) - with kippas and tsitsis and everything - walking in the main Platz. I wanted to ask them if they had some Jewish connection with Görlitz - maybe related to murdered pre-war Görlitz Jews - but I didn't want to embarrass them or me. I chickened out.

Monday morning I rented a bike and rode all over town, enjoying the many pretty old run-down buildings. Then I spent the afternoon riding around on the Polish side, which is not very different except it doesn't have a historic core, since the core was on what's now the German side.
The picture is my bike on the "Peace Bridge" across the Neiße to Poland.






This is a doggy toilet facility in Zgorzelec, Poland, which is the name of the Polish half of Görlitz. I like the way it actually show's the dog's anus. In case you still didn't exactly get what it was for.

Friday & Saturday, September 23d & 24th

ERFURT, THURINGIA

It's Oktoberfest in Erfurt, and apparently in the whole country. (I guess it's like when our stores put out the Christmas stuff in August). 

Every town's main platz is laid out with carnival rides, games of chance, and food stands.

A wooden rollercoaster. Umm, I think not.

And what would Oktoberfest be without churros??

It's nice to be in a town with just Germans in it. Germans everywhere. Nobody offers to speak English. I heard almost no foreign languages at all. I've seen only a few tour groups, and they were all Germans. The one I saw at the old synagogue was probably Jewish Germans (yeah, there is such a thing).

The old synagogue escaped destruction because the Nazis didn't know it existed - it had been sold centuries before and turned into a Gasthaus and dance hall. Now it's been discovered and turned into a museum, and it houses the Erfurt Treasure, a hoard of coins, goldsmiths' work and jewelry hidden by Jews in the 1300s during the Black Death pogroms (they had been poisoning the wells, so it was said). It's pretty amazing.

I have been in five cities, and have only seen TWO street cats. Lots of people are walking tiny dogs on leashes, but cats are scarce. This is a funeral home in Erfurt for dogs. Presumably also for cats, if anybody ever had one. Your pet will rest in a rose garden, it says.

On Saturday, I took a 20-minute train ride (€4) to Weimar and rented a bike. It was hard to find a bike rental because it's Saturday and they close early. By the way, you don't "rent/mieten" a bike here. You "borrow/leihen" one. They look at you funny if you say you want to rent one. (?!)

I was finally directed to where I might find one, in a sort of cave around a corner managed by an old man. He was closing for the day, but he sighed and told me to come on in. He gave me a bike to test, and then he took my passport info (but he didn't keep the passport), and said when I was finished I should just lock the bike onto his gate and put the lock key in his mailbox. Merchants here all seem kind of lax and trusting that way. It cost €9 for the day.

Supposedly, Thuringian bratwurst is the quintissential brat - all others are fakes. There were several different food stands claiming to be vending the best and the one and only genuine Thuringian bratwurst, without preservatives or flavor enhancers. The fact that they are just chopped up carcasses squeezed into pig gut casings is not mentioned. I had to eat one, though. May God forgive me. With mustard.

It was FUN riding all over the pretty, compact medieval town on a bike. It was sunny and cool and it's such a pretty little place, colorful and full of people and bikes and horse-drawn tourist wagons. And all Germans. It's the town of Goethe and Schiller and Bach and Liszt. It was a hotbed of the German Romanticism movement, with the focus at Jena, just down the road.

Here is Slade with Goethe and Schiller.

I like Goethe pretty much. He's hard for me to read, but I can tell that the German is pretty. Schiller, not so much. In college we had to read his play Wilhelm Tell, which stinks. The only good part I remember is when we were reading parts aloud and when one guy came to the part where Tell shoots the apple off his son's head, and the son says, "Vater schiess zu, ich fürcht mich nicht!" ("Father, shoot! I am not afraid!"). Except instead of reading "Schiess," the guy read "Scheiss," Thus: "Shit, father, I am not afraid." That's all of the play that I can remember.

Shakespeare, Schlegel, and Mendelssohn

In 1826, when the composer Felix Mendelssohn was 17 years old, he began writing music for Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," because he liked the play so much. You've heard the music before; part of it is a wedding march - not "Here Comes the Bride," but the music they commonly play afterwards, when the couple are leaving the church. Click here. 

Probably the reason teenage Felix liked the Shakespeare play so much is that it had recently been translated into German by his Aunt Dorothea's brother-in-law, August Wilhelm Schlegel, a prodigious translator, writer, and foremost leader of the "Romanticism Movement" in Jena. Schlegel's translations of Shakespeare's plays are amazing. If you know German, look at this (from Hamlet's hand-wringing suicide speech):

Wilhelm Jeffersohn Schlehdt (mit
neufundländischer Baseballmünze)
beim Shakespeare-Denkmal,
Park an der Ilm, Weimar, Thüringen.

It's really pretty incredible. Schlegel's beautiful translations are much of the reason that Germans today love Shakespeare so much, and even consider him one of their own. They call him “our Shakespeare.” There are numerous Shakespeare clubs and societies and institutes. Here's a picture of me with Shakespeare, in Germany.

Earlier this year, when we were visiting Seattle, a lady at a used book store tried to sell me an old multi-volume set of Shakespeare in German, in beautiful fraktur typeface and luxury bindings. But they were very heavy, and it's all on line now.

Some random observations

<> Announcement in the Frankfurt Hbf (in German, French, and English): "Attention. Tricksters [that's what it said] are doing their rounds in the station. We advise you to be particularly alert."

<> Most places are smoke-free but there are still lots and lots of smokers.

<> The squirrels are both black and brown, but very tiny.

<> Nobody EVER says hello as you pass them on the sidewalk, or even smiles at you. But a young man on the train got up and helped me put my suitcase on the rack. I guess I look old. 

<> An old couple (60s) was sitting across from me on the train. The old dude had his head on the woman's breast and was feeling her up.

<> In all the formerly East Germany towns, you can see the bathtub ring of Communism.

The grammatical genious of the German mind

After I checked out at the supermarket in Erfurt today, the check-out lady said to me, very quickly, "Brauchen Sie die Quittung?" Meaning to say, Do you need the receipt?

Here's what must have gone through her head, in just a few nano-seconds. This must have been her exact thought process:

"Quittung" ends in -ung, which means it is a feminine gender noun. So the feminine definite article would be "die." But here the noun "Quittung" is the direct object of the verb "brauchen," which would put it into the accusative case. However, the fact is that the definite article for singular feminine nouns in the accusative case is ALSO "die." So that's what I must apply.

And then she instantly put it all together and articulated the utterance. 

This is astoundingly quick logical thinking. This woman, in my opinion, should be teaching linguistic theory in some university. But here she is working as a check-out clerk in a supermarket. I just don't get it.