15 ways you know you gave birth in Germany

Since getting pregnant in Germany, I’ve been thrown into a whole new world that now mainly revolves around boobs, poo and sleep. Along the way, I’ve marvelled at how Germans prepare themselves for childbirth and beyond - although I have to admit, I've never given birth anywhere else. Here are 15 ways you know you gave birth in Germany:

1. Perineal massage
   It starts in the ante-natal class when the midwives give you instructions on how to massage your lady bits. Apparently it’s supposed to reduce ripping. I can tell you that it’s a big fat waste of time if your baby is 4.3kg.
2. New words
   Your vocabulary will expand to include terms like “mother cake” (Mutterkuchen) and “mother mouth” (Muttermund) – otherwise known as the placenta and cervix in English.
3. Thorough medical care
   I often think that Germans have mild hypochondriac tendencies, and you wonder if this accounts for the very thorough - and perhaps a bit overzealous - medical care before birth. I'm not complaining, but most of my UK friends seemed to manage fine on a handful of visits to the midwife. In Germany, I saw the gynaecologist 17 times before birth.
   In the final weeks each one-hour appointment involved checking the baby’s heartbeat, my blood pressure, weight, urine, iron levels and an ultrasound. Everything was noted down in a “mother passport” – a little booklet with my medical records, which I took everywhere with me.
   Once you’re home the midwife visits you for an hour every day for the first 10 days, then up to several times a week until 2 months have passed.
   Actually, what I'm really trying to say is, it's the kind of care that every country should aim for.
4. Ridiculously good maternity leave
   With all these doctors' and midwives' appointments, you need a lot of spare time. Luckily you have that by the bucket-load in Germany, with six weeks maternity leave before the due date and eight weeks after the birth on full pay, then two thirds of your salary up to a year after the birth. This generosity may all boil down to the fact that Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, so they’re doing almost everything to encourage women to get up the duff. Unfortunately, many women are forced to take long periods off work because childcare is about as scarce as the Yangtze River dolphin, especially if you want a full day before the child is three.
5. Hospitals tout for your business
   Apparently childbirth is quite lucrative for hospitals. Before making our selection, we went to several parent evenings where the doctors enticed us with the promise of free taxis and fancy rooms.
6. Induction cocktail
   If you’re overdue, you might try the labour cocktail: a mix of castor oil, champagne and apricot juice. It kind of worked. I got some contractions, but it wasn’t enough to avoid getting induced in hospital.
7. Pain is what you want
   Don’t expect laughing gas to blow your mind during labour. When my husband told Svetlana, our Russian midwife in the delivery room, that he thought I was in lots of pain, her blunt response was: “That is what we want.”
8. Full staff
   In hospital, it’s not uncommon to find 12 people at a time in the room fussing over you.
   The checks on the baby are also very thorough. Our eyes almost popped out when the paediatrician said “Yup, she has an anus” on examining our daughter for the first time. Apparently not all children do!
   This and all future checks were noted in another little booklet, with the child’s compulsory appointments listed for the next five years. Apparently social services come knocking at your door if you miss one.
9. Getting intimate with your baby
   Intimacy with your baby begins with a visit to a “carrying advisor” to select a device to carry your baby close to your body.

   

   Wearing my baby.

   Forget a Moses basket, in Germany your baby will sleep snuggled in a sleeping bag in a three-sided cot next to you so that you don’t even have to get out of bed to feed them – just roll them across the fourth open side.
   Efficient and wholesome.
   If you’re feeling really hippy, you might try one of the naked play dates – better known as Pekip.
10. Breast milk is good for anything
    Boobs are not a taboo – it’s acceptable to whop them out for a feed almost anywhere, and breast milk isn’t just for feeding the little one. We first got a whiff of this in hospital when the midwife wouldn’t throw out the 5ml of expressed milk that our daughter had left in the bottle. “It’s too precious” she exclaimed, and suggested I use it for face cream instead.
    Since then, I’ve squirted it into her bath, and used it to treat her nappy rash, unblock her nose and disinfect her umbilical cord.
    Still haven’t tried it on my face.
11. Potty training from birth
    I was sceptical at first, but if you hold your baby over a pot and let her do her business, she does actually stop doing it in her nappy, which – as far as I’m concerned – is a lot more hygienic. Strictly speaking, it’s not a German thing though, as I think it’s been adopted from Asia.

    

    The thermos flask means we always have warm water to clean her bum

12. Virgin wool and heat lamps
    The nappy changing routine involves a changing table kitted out with a heat lamp. If your baby has a sore bum, you will probably blow dry it and apply some unwashed virgin wool – it allows the air to circulate and the natural oils moisturise the sore spot. It does actually work.
    You’ll probably try reusable nappies at some point too.

    

    Tear a bit of wool off and slip it in the nappy to treat a sore bum.

13. Baby heat pads
    If your baby has colic or too much gas, you might try rape seed heat pads – put them in the microwave for 30 seconds and place them on your baby’s belly. Another favourite cure is a baby massage.
14. Quark and cabbage on your boobs
    Ok, so they do white cabbage to soothe engorged boobs in England too, but I’m pretty sure they don’t use quark, which is the messier alternative.
15. Paperwork and perks
    One word of warning: if your baby is born during carnival in the Rhineland it may be weeks before the local bureaucracy has stopped dressing up like clowns and you’re able to register the birth.
    There’s a lot of form-filling after the new arrival, but there’s one thing that comes automatically without any extra paperwork: the baby’s tax number for life.
    After all that admin, you’ll be rewarded with EUR 184 per month in child benefit until she’s at least 18 – maybe longer if she goes to university. Plus you’ll get a German passport for a bargain EUR 13 – eight times cheaper than the UK one.

I saw a naked man

I saw a naked man this morning.

As my head dipped under the water and popped back up again swimming a length of breaststroke in the Melbbad open-air pool in Bonn, my gaze locked on to a smooth bottom. I noticed that something was hanging loose between his legs.

His penis continued to dangle around as he slowly pulled his grey boxer shorts up.

He was just on the side of the pool getting changed and it didn't seem to bother him one bit that we'd all just seen everything. In fact, it didn't bother anyone.

There was no giggling and pointing at him - it was like he didn't exist.

To be fair, I see nakedness every time I come to the pool in Germany - but usually it's the women in the shower, a closed space. This time it was a man out in the open air.

I've also seen naked men before - at the sauna. Everyone goes naked into the sauna in Germany: young, old, saggy, droopy, wrinkled, hairy, shaven. I've seen it all and learnt a lot: I never knew balls could drop that far!

But today, as the morning sun hit the arch of his back and the birds cooed, I was surprised. This man had just upped the game in my perception of German attitudes to nudity.

In fact, I think that the Germans' relaxed approach to nakedness is actually quite natural and healthy.

It's something very intuitive and de rigueur, rather than shameful and brazen. What's surprising to many foreigners is that there does not seem to be a whiff of sex in the air when Germans go naked in public.

Usually the only naked people we get to see are models and film stars in magazines with their blotches and rolls of flab airbrushed out. Seeing other mere mortals disrobed makes me realise that my body isn't so bad after all, and it also gives me a taste of what my body might look like in years to come.

In terms of my own body image, living in Germany has been a very positive experience.

It also makes getting changed at the pool much easier... no huddling under a towel and trying to get dressed without exposing any of your bits, as is the custom in Britain. You can just whip it all off and get on with it.

Acts of kindness

"But it's such a beautiful sound, for a young girl like you," reasoned the salesman, who had a mustache that went from ear to ear, braces and a red silk scarf tied around his neck.

The white Dutch bike - a Gazelle - looked great with its long sloping crossbar, big wheels and elegant curving handlebars, but you'd be able to hear the creaking saddle for miles.

'My old one was a creaker,' I thought to myself, 'And I was sort of hoping that I might be able to ride in a more dignified manner with my new one.'

As I was mulling this over, I suddenly felt a hand go into my bag. I looked up and his whiskers were twitching; his eyes glistening.

"I didn't see that," he said, looking around cheekily.

In my bag was a yellow bottle of grease.

"Just put it on the springs under the saddle and that should sort it," he told Daniel, who was just as surprised as me that the salesman was stealing from his own shop.

"Now, let's find you a bike lock," he continued. "You should bargain a bit when you go to buy. Get the manager to throw the lock in for free," he said. And I was half-expecting him to slip it into my bag too.

This was the first of a long line of acts of kindness that I've had over the past few months.

From the receptionist at the swimming pool lending me her own personal towel when I forgot mine to the woman in the bakery giving me a free cookie, just because I stood and chatted to her for a while, and I think she liked me.

Germans have even been kind recently despite me breaking the rules. (See my earlier post "Ordnung muss sein" about why they really don't like rule-breakers).

Last week I was cycling to work on the pavement-cycle path along a busy main road when a policeman with a thick square mustache stopped me.

"Uh-oh," I thought, getting ready to pay the fine. I knew instantly it was because I didn't have my lights on.

But he turned out to be quite jolly and just told me to be careful and remember next time.

The same day, Daniel returned to his parked car to find a couple loitering beside it.

"You can't park here," the woman said. "This is a doctor's parking space."

Daniel had broken the rules and normally I would have expected the Germans to get a bit hot under the collar about it.

Daniel apologized and said he would move it straight away to the spot that had become free in front of him.

"No, no," the man said. "We'll push you."

At first Daniel protested, but the couple was already behind his car. They told Daniel to release the hand brake and rolled him into place.

I told an American friend about it, and she said she often has these experiences: "They feel sorry for me being a clueless American," she explained.

But Daniel says it's more about the part of Germany that we're in. These are typical Rheinlaender.

I noticed it first when I went into cafes in Bonn, and the strangers at the table next to me would wish me "Guten Appetit". Coming from London when only weirdos speak to you, I was totally shocked by this familiarity.

The German stereotype for someone from the Rhine region is a merry sociable drinker who talks a lot in a funny dialect. This is a region where Carnival isn't just a week-long excuse to binge drink. It's a way of life where boisterous pantomime-like characters go to events over most of winter to dress up and sing silly songs.

The warm-hearted Rhinelaender is one of the many reasons why I love living in Bonn.

Germans don't seem to mind being ripped off

Most of the time, I gloat about how much higher my standard of living is in Germany and about how much cheaper things are here.

My flat is twice as big and twenty times nicer than the one I had in London, at half the price.

But all this smugness evaporates as soon as I begin my journey home.

I have this slightly OCD fear of being de-hydrated on the plane, so I have to fly with a bottle, but to do so at Cologne-Bonn airport requires me to swallow my Yorkshire penny-pinching pride and be totally ripped off.

The last time I flew, I went around every shop to figure out what's the best deal. Incidentally, staff at the restaurants were generally quite embarassed about the high prices and were fairly encouraging about me making a complaint.

"German customers don't like it either," one cashier told me. "But they just get grumpy and do nothing about it."

For anyone who's interested in getting a bargain, here's the result of my research. To make it more useful I've written in brackets the cost for the average mouthful, which is apparently 30 ml.

Sion
1 litre Volvic: EUR 4.25 (13 cents)

Leysieffer
1 litre Volvic: EUR 4.95 (15 cents)

CAFETIERO
0.5 litre Gruene Quelle: EUR 2.90 (17 cents)
0.5 litre Evian: EUR 3.20 (19 cents)
0.5 litre Bonaqa: EUR 3.40 (20 cents)

Travel Bar near gate B50
0.33 litre Bonaqa: EUR 3.20 (29 cents)
1 litre Volvic: 4.25 (13 cents)

Vending machines and on Germanwings flight
0.5 litre Bonaqua: EUR 3.00 (18 cents)

So if you want to get your money's worth on a per mouthful basis, you have to spend over four euros for a bottle, which to my mind is excessive.

I wondered if I was slightly blowing things out of proportion, but the WH Smith's at London Stansted in the UK offers two 0.75 bottles for £2.20. If you convert this into Euros, it works out as a bargain 5 cents per mouthful - almost three times cheaper than the cheapest gulp at Cologne-Bonn airport.

So why does the water cost so much? I wrote to all of the above establishments asking them and only received two responses.

"We can assure you that the higher pricing structure for CAFETIERO at German airports is not on an "exploitation" of our customers, but is primarily due to the the airport-specific cost structure which is imposed on us. This results in all of our airport locations having a higher price level than, say, our inner-city locations," explained Frederic van de Loo from Controlling in HAGACON GmbH & Co. KG, adding that airports tended to demand higher rents.

Well, this is all very good, but it still doesn't really explain why water costs over six times more than in supermarkets, where a 1l bottle of Evian is typically around 1 euro.

"These prices are normal for gastronomic establishments, compared to retail outlets like supermarkets," Christina Maier, Manager at Woellhaf (which manages Leysieffer and Sion) told me.

Why is that, I wondered, that restaurants and bars charge more than shops? Do they pay more tax or does the water cost more. "No, it's just normal across the whole of Germany for them to cost more," Maier replied.

Maier said she'd review the costs this week and see if they could introduce a 0.5l Tetrapack of water for 2.50 euro (15 cents per gulp), which actually does not reduce the per gulp cost at all!

On the plus side, if you don't mind drinking tap water, you can ask for a glass at either Sion or Leysieffer, Maier assured me.

It seems that as well as well as sky-high water prices, Travel Bar has no interest in customer care.

In an airport where there are no water fountains (as far as I can tell) I wonder, what Cologne Airport is planning to do to protect their customers from being held hostage to parting with up to 29 cents per gulp? It's not like we can bring water in from the outside, after all.

Well, apparently they're quite proud of the fact that they've managed to keep prices to such a level:

" On the air side (past security), there are significantly higher expenses for personnel, logistics, etc. Nevertheless, the airport is of course trying, together with the caterers, to keep the prices for mineral water in a certain range, for example, 1 liter of Volvic costs 4.25 euro including deposit and 0.5 l for 3 euro including deposit," said Hanne Dickmann, from the central complaints department at Cologne Bonn Airport.

Is this really something to be proud of - I don't think so! My point was that these prices are ridiculously expensive. Even buying from a vending machine costs 3 euros. Am I the only one who finds this insanely expensive?

And why aren't there any water fountains? Ms Dickmann assured me she'd ask the responsible department at the airport to look into it.

Pain

"Would you like it with or without a local anesthetic," the dentist asked.

"Erm, you're about to drill into my tooth, gouge out my old filling and replace it", I thought.

"With, please," I smiled, slightly unnerved by the question.

In England, they never ask. Drilling equals anesthetic. Full stop.

In fact, the British National Health Service will jump at every opportunity to offer pain relief.

When I was hit by a van on Fleet Street, London, I got as much laughing gas and morphine as I wanted. It was one of the best highs I've ever had in my whole life and made the whole experience of fracturing my foot and tearing every ligament below my ankle somewhat more enjoyable.

In contrast, when I talk about pregnancy with my German boyfriend, he tells me - based on having watched this German TV show about it - that it's not good to have an epidural, and that when you break something, you should be able to feel what's wrong with your body. That's why Germans don't believe in taking or giving out pain relief.

Do Germans enjoy suffering more, or are they just tougher?

"Aw there weally people who do it without an anesthetic?" I asked the Dentist's assistant, as my lip started to go numb.

The nurse reckoned most people preferred to do it without because the injection could be more uncomfortable.

As it turned out, in some ways she was right. The injection I received made my whole face - from my chin right behind my ears and up to my temples - ache from numbness for a whole day. I wondered whether in Germany they give you a higher dose of anesthetic as punishment for not being tough enough.

As I lay my head back, the dentist asked me if I wanted to listen to music. I had a choice between classical or rock, and I decided that watching the dentist drill the side of my face to the Red Hot Chili Peppers would likely freak me out, so I opted for some string chamber music.

A civilized way to endure pain, I thought.

As the violins were swamped by the roar of the drill, I considered the incongruity of it all. On the one hand, Germans preferred to endure pain without pain relief, but on the other hand, they had a much greater tendency to be complaining hypochondriacs.

Germany has the biggest market in the world for medication to treat "circulation problems". You know, when you stand up too quickly and get a bit dizzy, Germans will rush to the doctors!

It seems that each country has it's own 'pain focus'. Germans are more likely to complain about their hearts, the French about their liver and the Brits about their intestines.

Perhaps by suffering the pain without any relief, Germans continue to justify their frequent visits to the doctor.

One thing's for sure, British stiff-upper-lip stoicism gets you nowhere. If you don't complain about pain, you won't receive much treatment in the German health system.

Ordnung muss sein

I stood on the supermarket forecourt gawping for a good twenty seconds after the stranger strode over to the bicycle, booted it to the ground, lifted his bike over it and cycled off with his rust covered jacket flapping in the wind.

He hadn't heard my friendly quip and seemed utterly enraged that someone had blocked him in.

It was the second time that day that I saw a German get annoyed by rule breaking. The first time was just a few moments before.

"I'm sorry, I've had it for a long time and I kept forgetting," I stammered to the supermarket cashier, as I attempted to iron out the piece of paper.

She raised an eyebrow as I handed her a faded crumpled receipt for the empty beer bottles I'd returned to the machine over 3 months ago.

In Germany, the shops pay you to recycle. But there's a system. You return the bottle to a machine, take a receipt and collect your money at the cash desk before you leave. I hadn't done that. I'd returned to the supermarket over and over, and each time I got to the cash desk, I'd forgotten to surrender the receipt. Through my forgetfulness, I had broken the rules.

"It may not work," I said, nervously trying to pre-empt her rage.

The bar code on the scrunched up paper didn't work, and the woman’s frizzy greying hair seemed electrified with annoyance. She raised another eyebrow as she stabbed the reference number into her keypad. Maybe she was irritated because I was costing her time. Maybe she was incensed that for 3 months, two weeks and four days, I had forgotten over and over again to do this. Or maybe it was my nervous apologetic tone that she couldn't handle. After all, wouldn’t a German be more mater-of-fact about this?

The pensioner who had gone before me snatched his last jar of pickled gherkins and muttered something under his breath. Either he too was fired up about the non-conformity of my receipts or he was relieved that I'd given him enough time to bag all his shopping before the cashier started racing my groceries over the bar-code scanner.

As I left the supermarket, I walked into another uniquely German uncomfortable situation.

I fully admit I'd realised when I chose the parking spot for my bike that it might be controversial. It had been an opportunistic decision - I'd seen a space beside the stack of carbonated water bottles and gone for it. As I parked it, my hairs stood to attention and I almost expected a comment from someone nearby about what a thoughtless place it was to park my bike.

But no-one decided to get involved in my business that day.

On my return to the scene, I notice a middle-aged man had parked his heavy Dutch bike even further into the supermarket's pavement displays of special offers.

I was relieved, and decided to offer up some jovial camaraderie.

"It looks like there's a bit of a traffic jam here at the moment," I said with a smile, gesturing at the bikes on the curb which were blocking us both in.

Before he could reply, I watched in slow motion as he forced the offending bike to the ground, lifted his bike over it and cycled off without a word.

I stood for a few moments in utter disbelief. It was only later that my boyfriend Daniel explained this mysteriously violent behaviour.

"Germans don't like it when people break the rules or when they disrupt the order."

This same fear of chaos and desire for order is what drives Germans to buy a train ticket, even though there are no ticket barriers to check up on them. It's what stops Germans from crossing the road on a red light, even when there are no cars.

Instinctively this characteristic feels sinisterly militaristic and I wonder whether it dates back to a Prussian addiction to rule making. But perhaps it's what also allows Germans to have a transport system that's based on trust. One thing’s for sure though, it's non-negotiable: Ordnung muss sein.