Let me begin by saying I love our apartment here in Hannover, Germany. I love it! My wife did a spectacular job finding us the perfect living space in the perfect neighborhood. I’ve been living here since September and I have no complaints whatsoever. No complaints, that is, except one: the shower.
There is no fan in our bathroom. You see that window in the picture above? It doesn’t open. See that fan-looking hole on the right? That’s not a fan; it’s a simple duct connected to each apartment in our building from the ground floor all the way up to the top. It is the reason we catch whiffs of cigarette smoke drifting into our apartment from time to time. (I suspect it comes from those old, sour-faced cancer-donkeys living beneath us.)
Without proper ventilation, our bathroom fogs up something fierce whenever one of us takes a shower. To compensate, The Wife and I plug an oscillating fan into the wall and set it precariously on top of the medicine cabinet. It doesn’t do much for the condensation on the mirror, but it does a fantastic job of reminding me I will someday be electrocuted as I scrub my pink parts.
Not only is our shower stall tiny, but it has no shower curtain; only the cold, unforgiving sliding glass walls you see in the picture above. Before arriving in Germany, I never realized how much space I really need in order to cleanse my American body. I mean, I knock my elbows into everything. The sliding walls, tiles, mirror, bottle racks, shower handle… I’m like the Tasmanian Devil in there.
And there is this one special moment — it happens during every shower — when my vision goes red and I experience a perfect, poetic sort of blind rage. It’s after I have managed to smash my extremities into every single object around me. After I have dropped my razor for the third time, bent over to retrieve it and knocked a bottle rack from the wall with my forehead, sending my wife’s girly hair products clattering to the floor. It’s right when I am standing back up, about to take a deep breath and count to ten… when I bonk the back of my head against the hot water controller.
Instantly, scalding hot water sears my flesh and sends me up to Rage Level: Bill O’Reilly (Warning, video contains awesome swearing). That’s when I slap the lever back toward cold, which hoses me down with an arctic blast so cold my plums shrivel up and let me know they won’t be making another appearance until spring.
There is one good thing about German showers, however; the shower heads are mounted on handles. I haven’t seen too many showers with handles in the States — mostly in fancy hotel rooms — but Germans love ’em. And I am forced to admit it is quite nice to direct the flow of water wherever I want it, even though the rest of the shower makes me so angry I could flip off a box of kittens.
But let’s not kid ourselves here; shower handles are unnecessary. The only reason Germans like shower handles is because they let you spray warm water directly on your cinnamon ring.
Click here to learn more about the term “Culture Shock.”
For another great article complaining about German showers, check out The Adventures of Heidi Hefeweizen.
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Oh God, My Wife Is German. 
Alternatively, you could have our experience–we don’t have a shower stall, but rather there is a long, skinny bath-tub, where the actual flat surface on the bottom of the tub is not as wide as my foot is long, and the bottom of the tub is about 10 inches higher than the floor outside the bath tub. If you’re not expecting that when you get out of the tub, it’s a rather rude awakening. We have the typical shower/handle thing (without which cleaning one’s body in this country would be virtually impossible). We can’t put up shower doors (because the walls are plaster and they’d fall out). We have instead a shower curtain. However, shower curtains apparently aren’t designed to completely surround the shower area, which means that only about 3/4 of the tub is enclosed by the shower curtain. The long side of tub is along one side of the bathroom wall; at one end of the tub, there’s a tile wall separating the tub from the toilet. However, at the other end of the tub, there is, well, NOTHING (except of course the lavatory). So, we have to carefully position the shower curtain to cover THAT end of the tub (and wet the outside of the shower curtain a bit so it will stick to the wall and make a seal), and then bring whatever is left of the shower curtain around as far as it will go. If you’re not really careful in how you position the shower head, you can make a real mess. And, the space enclosed is so tiny that, in the dead of winter, if your naked body brushes up against the ice-cold shower curtain, you’re in danger of slipping in the tub. When we have guests, we spend about 5 minutes telling them how to use our shower so that they don’t drench the bathroom or meet their deaths in our bath tub. (It’s awkward enough having a dead body in your bath tub, but explaining a dead body to authorities who don’t share your language might elevate the awkwardness quite a bit. And, as most of our guests are from the US, there would be the complicating factor of returning their bodies to the US.)
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Great response! Wow!
I would actually love to see you explain a naked corpse in your shower. :) The ultimate challenge.
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Fantastic! I must say, I hit my elbows every time I took a shower when I was at my gf’s this past month in Mainz, Germay. I love the Tasmanian Devil comparison! :-D What’s even better was that our shower is in the kitchen. Sure, we have a window, but not a smidgin of privacy for washing ye old “cinnamon ring”!
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Baw haw! Even better!
How was the trip otherwise?
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It was great! I hope to write about it soon, but I am dealing with massive, and quite unexpected, jet lag right now. I love reading your posts about your “adjustments” to the European lifestyle. Keep ’em coming!
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Thank you! You too!
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