das Dorf

I’ve made it to Germany safe and sound. We arrived in Frankfurt Monday morning and then drove to a small town nearby called Eppstein. I really don’t think “small town” does justice to what Eppstein really is. Eppstein and many other places in Germany are technically called Dörfer, one of them is called a Dorf. The real translation is “village,” but I don’t think calling it a village does it justice either. Maybe this is just me, but I think of villages as something medieval or at the very least things that don’t exist anymore. Like with thatched roofs and horse-drawn carriages. Plus I just like using the German word Dorf whenever possible.

To illustrate what I mean by a Dorf and the weird position I think it deserves, let me tell you about Eppstein a little bit. Eppstein is where we stayed for two days after arriving, and it has some sort of training academy for bankers, I think. It’s a hostel with bank logos everywhere, but it’s a nice hostel. The dorf also has a castle and a ridiculous hill to climb in order to reach the castle. There are some really cool cars there and the place is very pretty. Now, when I left Kansas, I forgot to back a belt and have been using a bundle of embroidery floss as a make-shift belt since last Friday. I went up to the ladies that work the front desk and said (in German) “Is there anywhere nearby where I could buy a belt?” And the ladies instantly laughed at me. I was a little bit nervous about this conversation to begin with. For one, my German is rusty, and two I never learned the word for belt, but a friend told my it was “Gürtel” and I trusted him. So when the ladies laughed at me, I thought that Carl had told me something hilariously wrong, like when my mom told me that the past tense of squeeze was squoze (her joke lasted for 15 years though). It turns out that Carl didn’t lie to me; the ladies were laughing because of course there is no place to buy a belt in Eppstein; it’s a dorf. Maybe I could find a belt in Frankfurt instead. I guess I’ll have to keep my MacGuyver-style embroidery floss belt for a few more days.

This sort of shows the weird place that a dorf occupies in geography. Most of the people in a dorf would have to commute to another town for basic services like groceries or shopping or work, but the town itself isn’t necessarily old and it’s not cut off from civilization. A dorf is more like a suburb that lives on its own. Logistically I don’t think this is really that different from American cities. Imagine if you took an area like Phoenix. You have Phoenix proper and then you have the Phoenix metro, which sort of sprawls around Phoenix, but doesn’t really have distinct borders for places like Glendale or Sun City. Glendale and Sun City have center points though. Now if you took out all of the parking lots and condensed the neighborhoods toward the city center like in Germany, the distance between Phoenix and its suburbs would still be the same, but there would be a large buffer between them. This is basically how German cities are arranged, fundamentally the same as American ones but with less parking.