The real thing is the real thing!

I love Eng­lish. I dare to say things in a way I won’t say in Ger­man. In Ger­man I would have said: “Die Real­ität ist das Wahre!” The real­i­ty is the truth. pfff…

I am famous for quotes like that: once I said: In the night the stars shine. And it became a title of a CD.

But “The real thing is the real thing!” was a quote from me of the NYT.

Lan­guage
The price for the most heard word goes to “Awe­some” — I can’t hear it any­more. I heard it every­where. I was lis­ten­ing quite often to radio shows while I was on the road and as you know in the mean­while — 4000 Miles … Some peo­ple (not the jour­nal­ists) say it almost in every sen­tence. But most of the time in Cal­i­for­nia only once in Cana­da where a jour­nal­ist inter­viewed a musi­cian and every­thing he said, she com­ment­ed with: “Awe­some”.
While the Cana­di­ans must have ances­tors in Vorarl­berg (a lit­tle state in Aus­tria) who are known to add “odr?” which means “or?” at the end of many sen­tences. If you are not used, you will just think, why in gods name, should I agree any sen­tence. But in Van­cou­ver Island (and also in the radio) they use “right?” or “aeh?” in the same way as our peo­ple from Vorarlberg.

Many peo­ple said to me that my Eng­lish is quite per­fect. It start­ed in San­ta Bar­bara where a man who was mar­ried to a Ger­man woman could­n’t hear my Ger­man accent. But I was asked quite often if I am Scot­tish. Nev­er been there… but also Aus­tralian and New Zealand accent was heard. I don’t think that Trent’s ances­tors are influ­enc­ing me. I am def­i­nite­ly sor­ry, I can’t dis­tin­guish the accents. I just don’t under­stand some­times noth­ing but that’s it. When I became tired, my Eng­lish got some Ger­man words in the mid­dle of sen­tences. One lady — she was brought up in Switzer­land with a Ger­man moth­er and a Aus­tri­an father — had still a strong Ger­man accent although she lives since 30 years in Hawaii but she could­n’t speak Ger­man hard­ly any­more. I met more peo­ple than I expect­ed who spoke a lit­tle German.

The Radio Shows
As I was mov­ing all the time, I had to scan fre­quent­ly. The pub­lic radios remind­ed me to our Aus­tri­an “Ö1”. They had very good shows, very good jour­nal­ist and it hap­pened not only once that I not­ed the show that I could down­load the poad­cast soon­er or lat­er for free which I can’t do in Aus­tria. I have to buy it. The local sta­tions filled with nation wide dif­fer­ent radio shows. The sta­tions with talks and inter­views had no music which I like because it was clear what I had to expect and I got it. This is dif­fer­ent to ours. Some­times it was some­thing like the obit­u­ary of Colum­bo, Peter Falk. But also about ille­gal immi­grants, pol­i­tics, books. I was impressed about the fan­tas­tic knowl­edge of journalists.

Music that I like was more dif­fi­cult for me to find. Close to LA I had a nice Jazz radio sta­tion but then I switched to clas­si­cal music and I heard the Volk­sopern orches­tra, the Phil­har­moniker play­ing Bach and Mozart. A lit­tle touch of home. I liked it.

The more north I came the less sta­tions I found but the strongest were the reli­gion ones. Peo­ple, I don’t have any­thing against reli­gion but I don’t like to fright­en peo­ple with hell, dev­il and strict rules. I believe in free­dom which is also an impor­tant part of the Unit­ed States.