Talk Talk Talk

The first time my two new housemates and I hung out, Thursday night, the conversation turned to sex, and (amazingly) not at my initiation. Coming from Berlin, I am finding such differences even more piquant. My companion on the Berlin-Paris night train, a German man, very interestingly explained to me that the only 3 respectable topics of bourgeois conversation are the German language, travel, and history, preferably German! Well that rules me right out for two topics, with the additional problem that my conversational abilities in the German language extent to roughly whether I liked my kebab at the local Imbiss or how many meters I swam at the pool. I do have to add that a) I started it all by asking exactly why I seemed to be virtually invisible to German men and b) the only reason he and I were able to have this conversation at all is that he is not straight.

Of course I am not particularly interested in bourgeois company, but other than the anarchist kids at the squats in Kreuzberg, for which I am just too old, I never did identify any non-bourgeois groups of Germans! Rather a problem, that. So I set myself to thinking what our top 3 topics would be, those of us in the U.S. intelligentsia, but before I weigh in, I’ll invite my new readers to post their opinions. And getting back to my current housemates, when I posed the same question to them, hurray, sex came out in the top three, along with gossip, and current events. HA! I am SO IN.