A trip to the nearest post office can rile me these days, and plenty of other people in Germany too. It starts with the walk. In a bygone era -- 10 or 15 years ago -- five minutes were all I needed to hoof to the branch up the street. Now I've got to hike to my district's main office, a good 20 minutes away, where the line is often longer than a good Christian's patience. Finding a mailbox around town can be trying as well.

The beginning of the end of the old days came in 1995, when Deutsche Bundespost, Germany's former state-owned mail and telecommunications monopoly, split into three stock companies: Deutsche Post, Deutsche Postbank, and Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Post went public in 2000. (The German government, its largest shareholder, has a 31-percent stake.) Since profitability started trumping service, the company has slashed branches, mailboxes, and staff.

And the cost-cutting ain't over yet. Deutsche Post announced recently that it planned to sell about 700 of its remaining 800 independent outlets nationwide to retail partners such as bakeries, supermarkets, and newsdealers by 2011. It said that the some 3,000 employees at the affected outlets would keep their jobs and continue to provide postal services under the new proprietors, though. Great. I'll have whipped cream and a dozen stamps with my apple strudel, bitte.

The German mail giant has also raised postage, which was already high. A standard letter (which weighs up to 20 grams, or about 7/10 of an ounce) to the United States now costs 1.70 euros. By contrast, a first-class letter from the U.S. to Germany costs $0.90 so long as it weighs no more than 1 ounce.

The last time I got riled at the post office -- the last time I was there, incidentally -- was when I mailed my 2007 income tax return to an IRS center in Texas a week ago. ("April is the cruellest month...") Postage for the return came to 4 euros, or $6.27 at the day's exchange rate. Ouch.

Deutsche Post also gets me riled with its big jumps in postage from one weight class to the next. A so-called compact letter (up to 50 grams, or 1.77 ounces) to a destination outside Europe costs 2 euros. A letter weighing a single gram over 50 costs twice as much. Over 100 grams (or 3.5 ounces), postage jumps from 4 euros to 8 euros. Even if the euro and U.S. dollar were at parity, we're talking steep postal rates here.

By contrast, the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency of the U.S. government, charges $1.80 for a first-class letter to Germany weighing more than 1 ounce, up to 2 ounces. Postage is $2.70 for a letter between 2 and 3 ounces, and $3.60 between 3 and 4. That's reasonable. With gradual increases you don't have to worry that an ink blot will double your postage.

Then there's size. A standard letter in Germany, which costs 0.55 euros to send to a domestic destination, has a length between 140 and 235 millimeters (5.5 and 9.3 inches), a width between 90 and 125 millimeters (3.5 and 4.9 inches), and a thickness up to 5 millimeters (0.2 inches). A letter just a tad longer or a tad wider becomes a "large letter" (Großbrief), which costs 1.45 euros. A letter just a tad shorter also becomes a "large letter." Verstanden?

E-mail is such a wonderful thing.

One of my wife's cousins, now working in Sweden, commiserated with her recently on the phone. My wife lapped it up. Having lived in Germany for almost five years now, she's solidly in Phase II of what I've come to regard as the Three-Phase Expat Acclimatization Process: Phase I is Attraction, Phase II is Repulsion, and Phase III is Equilibrium. Remember, you heard about the 3-PEA Process here first.

The cousin spent a few months in Germany some years back, and he's glad, very glad, to be outta here. The Swedes are more relaxed and tolerant of foreigners, he related, and aren't forever talking about money.

An obsession with money is usually ascribed to Americans. To be more precise, Americans are absorbed in making money or, if need be, borrowing it. Germans' great preoccupation with money, however, is focused mainly on saving it -- and having the grasping state redistribute as much of it to them as possible.

It's remarkable how exercised Germans can get over essentially piddling amounts. Germany is a wealthy country, and German politics often seems to be a never-ending chain of drawn-out disputes over who cops a few more euros from the treasury, be it in the form of child-care benefits (Elterngeld), subsidies to first-time homeowners (Eigenheimzulage), subsidies for private pensions (Riester-Rente), subsidies for business start-ups (Gründungszuschuss), tax deductions for commuters (Pendlerpauschale), or whatever.

Germans' abiding love of penny-pinching was encapsulated in the advertising slogan "Geiz ist geil!" (loosely translated: "Stinginess is cool!"), which has become a mantra of sorts over the past several years. The slogan was launched by the German electronics retailer Saturn to plug its low prices.

There's nothing wrong with frugality, of course -- quite the contrary -- so long as it's not taken to extremes (the meaning of "extreme" being highly subjective). But it often goes hand in hand with a certain small-mindedness.

One of my first memories of Germany was a display of frugality. The year: 1976. The lady of the house where I was staying, in Freiburg, dropped an egg on the kitchen counter. Rather than wiping up the mess and pitching it, which I, a continuously well-fed American, would have considered normal, she carefully collected the innards on a plate. I was struck by her behavior and put it down to wartime want.

Fast forward about 20 years. Then with a job in Moscow, I was subletting my Hamburg apartment to a young German carpenter. Part of our deal was that he pay for his telephone calls and I pay the monthly fees for both the telephone and the connection. During one of my visits, he offered to replace the telephone with one of his own so that I could save some money. I thanked him but said that the amount wasn't really worth the bother. Not worth the bother? he said, surprised. Why, in the space of months I could save enough for an ice-cream cone...

Seen from a foreign perspective, the size of Germans' concerns over small sums seems more than a bit excessive. In an interview several years ago with the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, German rock singer-songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer, who lives in London, described a TV show he'd watched back home in Germany about a German company: "A woman was sitting in a big, beautiful office that in England five people would be working in. She looks into the camera and says, 'My paycheck is for eight euros less. Now I have a crisis,'" Grönemeyer was quoted as saying.

"If someone in England sat in front of a camera and claimed a crisis because of earning 10 pounds less, the person would be institutionalized."

The postman rang our doorbell last week and asked me to deliver a letter.

It was addressed to the people living in the apartment on the other side of the staircase. The name tag on their mailbox happened to be missing, and they weren't at home.

"Just drop the letter in their mailbox," I suggested. "It's the one closest to their door."

"But there's no name on the mailbox," the postman objected.

We live on the ground floor of a three-story building with six apartments in all. Six mailboxes hang in the stairwell on the wall opposite the entrance. With six names attached to six doorbells outside, and five names attached to six mailboxes inside, it didn't take a genius to deduce whose mailbox the nameless one was. Besides, the postman had delivered letters to their mailbox before. And if the name tag was gone because the neighbors had secretly moved, how was I supposed to hand them the letter?

This wasn't a matter of logical reasoning, though. This obviously was a matter of rules. And the rule that our postman dutifully upheld must have been something like "Achtung, Mail Carriers! It Is Verboten To Drop Mail Into Unmarked Mailboxes!" Discussion was pointless.

"All right, I'll take the letter," I said. After he left, I dropped it in the mailbox.

Germans have loosened up somewhat in recent decades but remain notoriously rule-bound, conservative, and poor at improvisation. Another current case in point: A street parallel to ours is being widened. The public buses that normally use it have been temporarily rerouted onto our street, which also enjoys bus service. Although all of the buses clearly have the same destination, namely the district center and train station, some elderly German women who live on our street let the irregular buses pass and wait for the regular ones.

Meanwhile, at the intersection near the spot where the road work is going on, people still wait for the traffic light to turn green before crossing the street. This, despite the fact that the area is closed to traffic.

Pedestrians zealously obeying traffic lights (not all do), even in the dead of night with no cars in sight, is probably the most cited example of Germans' often blind adherence to rules. I myself am more obedient to traffic lights in Germany than those elsewhere -- when a child is around, always, so as not to set a dangerous example, and sometimes to avoid Germans snarling at me. A few months ago, my wife and I were on our way home from a visit to friends. It was late. We had to cross a one-lane street. Not a car far and wide. The traffic light was red. On the other side of the street, a punkish-looking young woman with a German shepherd stood waiting. We crossed, naturally.

"What do you think YOU'RE doing?" the woman erupted. "A fine example to children THAT is!"

I pointed out that the hip-high fella at her side was a dog.

"But it COULD have been a child!" she snarled.

Discussion was pointless.

You know your time is winding down -- if you're in my modest price league, anyway -- when you need a new watch and wonder, "Could the next one be my last? Will my mortal ticker stop before the timepiece needs replacing?

Thus preoccupied, I glumly set off for the watch shops in my neighborhood.

I went first to the place where I'd bought my latest -- now dearly departed -- model. The shop is solidly German, and run by what appear to be father and son. While the latter waits on customers, the former, a loupe over one eye, is often hunched over a balky mechanism in back. The two know their watches, and the prices on the tags are what you pay -- Germany isn't a bargaining culture, after all. You can bet they set their prices carefully: low enough to attract buyers, high enough for a decent profit.

My search continued at a shop on a choice corner down the street. The proprietors there, a Turkish couple that has lived in Germany for 30 years, moved in fairly recently. I spotted a watch in their window very similar to one I'd examined at the first shop -- same brand, just about the same features. "How much?" I inquired, wanting to compare prices. I must have flinched when the woman presented the tag -- the cost was nearly nine times higher -- because she quickly assured me: "For you, half price!"

Nice try, lady!

Such "bazaar behavior" is no longer unheard of in Germany, which has got a lot more multicultural since the end of World War II. Some 500,000 foreigners were living in West Germany in 1950, about 1 percent of the population. Recruitment of "guest workers" -- mainly Turks, along with Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, Yugoslavians, Moroccans and Tunisians -- raised the number to about 4 million by 1973, according to Germany's Interior Ministry.

From 1973 to 1985, most new immigrants were family members of foreigners already in the country. Travel restrictions were lifted in the former Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s, allowing more than 2.5 million ethnic Germans (including dependent family members) -- chiefly from Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union -- to resettle in Germany between 1987 and 2000. In addition, the number of applicants for political asylum increased dramatically between 1987 and 1992.

The European Union's recent eastward expansion is also prodding Germany, which long sought to protect its ethnic and cultural homogeneity, to open up to more foreigners. Ten countries -- among them neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic -- joined it in the EU three years ago. Bulgaria and Romania entered the now 27-member bloc last January.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, about 6.8 million foreign nationals were living in Germany at the end of 2006, more than 8 percent of the population. Turks were the biggest group, at 26 percent, followed by Italians (8 percent), Poles (5 percent), Serbs and Montenegrins (5 percent), and Greeks (4.5 percent). When naturalized and ethnic-German immigrants are taken into account, however, nearly one in every five persons living in Germany today has an immigrant background.

Foreign influences are increasingly felt. The famously stiff Germans have loosened up a bit. Turkish döner kebap has surpassed sausage with fries as Germans' favorite snack. A bright-robed African in the subway on Monday morning isn't necessarily a figment of delirium tremens anymore. It's now common to hear Russian and Polish on the street, and stores have taken to stocking the better Russian vodka brands.

Alas, the trains in this country aren't as punctual as they used to be. Heading home last weekend from a visit to a friend in Westphalia, for instance, I learned upon arrival at the station in Münster that my train to Hamburg would be coming more than 60 minutes late. Fortunately, I only had to wait 15 minutes or so because I caught another train going to Hamburg.

It was running 75 minutes late.

Germans eat a lot of sauerkraut. A lot of Germans have GAS.

GAS is short for Glance Avoidance Syndrome. Don't bother looking it up -- it's not a recognized medical condition. Rather, it's a cultural quirk that many foreigners in Germany remark on with puzzlement. When a German encounters a passing acquaintance on the street, oddly often he or she will pretend not to notice. No polite word of greeting. No smile. No nod. Not even a look in the eye acknowledging the other person's presence.

More diffidence than disrespect appears to be behind this behavior. Or maybe it's part of the German penchant for compartmentalizing: A passing acquaintance who's, say, a co-worker is identified with the workplace and isn't acknowledged outside it. I still haven't quite figured things out. In any event, it's disconcerting. It's also all the odder -- or isn't it? -- considering that Germans will greet perfect strangers when entering an elevator or a doctor's waiting room.

Weggucken ("looking the other way") may be a national trait. It seems to me that Germans do it more than most other nationalities, for example when a fellow passenger is harassed on the subway. German Jews, no doubt, could say something on this subject.

Years ago I performed an unscientific experiment: I stared at individual strangers -- Americans, Russians, and Germans -- to see how they'd react. My findings? Americans typically said "hello." Russians stared back. Germans looked the other way. What lesson can we draw from this? Perhaps that Germans react the most sensibly when stared at by some wacko.

Pass the sauerkraut.

"Why didn't you tell me that everyone would be naked?"

The shocked speaker of those words, which I bet have piqued your interest, was a middle-aged Russian woman from Riga who's a friend of my wife. Her nationality is relevant because Slavs, like Yanks and Brits, not to mention Islamic fundamentalists, tend to be high on the international prudery scale. Germans are low. It was a German man, the operator of the establishment that made our heroine blush, to whom she directed her question. His incredulous answer:

"Lady, it's a sauna!"

Indeed. Why would anyone NOT be naked in a sauna? Would you take a bath in your swimsuit or wrapped in a sheet? The presence of both sexes doesn't make a scrap of difference -- in Germany, at any rate. Strange though it may seem, nude males plus nude females doth not necessarily an orgy make. Or even sexual arousal. The doings in a mixed German sauna are as chaste as in church.

OK, I admit that it took me some getting used to. My first months in Germany were an eye-opener. There I was, a red-blooded American twentysomething in Freiburg. A young fellow countryman told me about a mixed sauna that he'd seen, where everybody was naked and there was no sex whatsoever. Frankly, I thought he was bullshitting me. Come on then, I'll show you, he said. So I went. When we arrived, the sauna happened to be empty. But the solarium...

I'll never forget what I saw in the solarium. An attractive woman, wearing nothing, was lying face-up on a table. Her knees were immodestly parted. That's not what amazed me most, though. What amazed me most was a man, also wearing nothing, sitting in a chair a few feet from her, facing the space between her legs.

The man was engrossed in a newspaper.

I saw other things in Freiburg that you don't see in Ohio. A topless woman watering her garden. People sunning themselves in their birthday suits. Later, in West Berlin, it was the same. In the summer I'd sometimes go to Halensee, where a broad lawn loved by sunbathers slopes down to the lake. Some people wore bathing suits, or just the bottoms, or nada. You'd look up and, hey, a whole lotta jigglin' (and danglin') goin' on. In the beginning, I kept my jewels covered, like the bug-eyed Turkish guys.

Lesson No. 1 for foreign males in Germany: Just because a well-proportioned, unaccompanied female is lounging in the buff within arm's reach, and perusing an erotic novel, for godsakes, doesn't mean that she's approachable. Believe me. Proceed with caution.

Organized nudism originated in Germany (Germans are great organizers). The first known nudist camp opened near Lübeck in the early 20th century. Germany's best-known FKK spot (FKK is short for Freikörperkultur -- "free-body culture" -- i.e. nudism) these days is probably Munich's English Garden, a large park in the center of the city. On warm summer days, textile-free folks wander the paths and sit in the beer gardens. The number of nudists in the park has decreased in recent years, but it remains a magnet for tourists from buttoned-up countries.

The broadcast headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a nonprofit radio network funded by the U.S. Congress, were on the edge of the English Garden before moving to Prague in 1995. A friend of mine who worked there said the view out the window sometimes distracted staffers from their job promoting democratic values and institutions.

Nudists, however unconsciously, promote a democratic value too: equality. Stripped of their clothes, princes and paupers look pretty much the same. The fashionistas of the world are powerless when they're buck-ass naked. I'm not a comfirmed nudist, mind you, but I'm perfectly at ease in a mixed German sauna. So, now, is my Russian wife, who quickly overcame her fears she'd be stared at. She's been stared at only once -- when she wore a felt sauna hat.

She hasn't worn it since.

The other day I had work to do in Flensburg, a northern German town of some 86,000 souls that is hard by the border with Denmark. When foreigners hear "Flensburg," they generally think of ...

... nothing.

The natives, on the other hand, tend to cringe, much as Americans do when they hear "IRS." The reason is that Flensburg is the home of Germany's Federal Bureau of Motor Vehicles (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt), which keeps a register of drivers' traffic violations. Points are given for each violation; if the sum hits 18, it's auf Wiedersehen to the ol' driver's license.

Flensburg holds no fear for me, though, since motorized I'm not. To me the town is rather attractive -- it wasn't blown to bits by Allied bombers -- and interesting in many ways. Flensburg is the center of Germany's Danish minority (and headquarters of the European Centre for Minority Issues). It was the Nazis' last seat of government (led by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz after the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels and the fall of Berlin). It was the site of the world's first sex shop, in 1962, and is the base for Europe's biggest erotica-products retailer, Beate Uhse AG.

Flensburg is also where Flensburger Pilsener, aka Flens, is brewed. The beer is best known for its bottle, which is sealed with a rubber-ringed ceramic cork attached to a flippable clamp. Corks were used to seal beer bottles before the bottle cap was invented. In May 2003 in Berlin, Germany's then foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, served Colin Powell, then U.S. secretary of state, Flensburger Pilsener in the bottle. (Powell is said to have fond memories of the quaintly corked beer from his military days in Germany.) Three months earlier, before the U.N. Security Council, Powell had presented allegations of Iraqi WMD.

Now THAT was a real corker.

It's a sign of incipient fogeydom when kids' behavior gets really annoying. "Why, in my day..." You know what I mean. Well, maybe I've reached that sad gloaming. And maybe I'm hard on German kids because I happen to live in Germany and see their antics all the time. For the record: A middle school hulks, like an accursed Monkey Island, right across the street.

Sure, I raised a bit of hell in my younger days too. Just normal stuff, nothing criminal or morally reprehensible. Once, for example, a man brandishing a metal pipe and calling me nasty names chased me down the street after I pelted his car with snowballs. I, naturally, ran faster.

I've observed kids elsewhere, mind you, but it seems to me that the German variety can't be beaten when it comes to insolence nowadays. Literally as well as figuratively. Since November 2000, the German Civil Code has explicitly banned corporal punishment by parents. The pertinent passage reads: "Children have a right to a non-violent upbringing. Corporal punishment, psychological injuries and other degrading measures are impermissible." Corporal punishment in West German schools was banned in the 1970s.

Why, in my day, back in the U.S.A., yours truly got whacked aplenty. In school I was paddled at least once, I recall, and at home a leather belt was the usual disciplinary implement. My buddy across the street, by contrast, got his lessons in proper conduct with a wooden spoon wielded by his mom, who was born in Dortmund. This, for me, was the old German method, whereas the belt was in the best Slavic tradition.

I grew up to be, if I may say so myself, an upstanding, if not outstanding, citizen. Nary an armed robbery have I committed. And I bear neither physical nor emotional scars from the periodic floggings that kept me more or less in line.

Every decent person censures physical abuse, of course, which isn't the same thing as reasonable corporal punishment. Opponents argue that smacking an unruly child is not only wrong, but can lead to psychiatric problems as well as violent, anti-social behavior later in life. Many European countries, not just Germany, have banned it. Well-meaning though this is, in practice the prospect of pain -- and not a good talking-to -- is what deters troublemakers. So ist das Leben eben. Leider.

Meanwhile, the monkeys run wild. You can wag a finger at them, but if you grab one you're liable to answer in court.

One of the most pleasant aspects of Germany is Vorweihnachtszeit, the monthlong run-up to Christmas centered on outdoor Christmas markets offering handicrafts, hot chestnuts, ornaments, baked apples, nutcrackers, gingerbread and, this being Deutschland, more grilled sausage than you can shake a candy cane at.

Did I say run-up? Drink-up would be apter. The festive season is fueled mainly, but far from solely, by Glühwein, or mulled wine, literally "glow wine." The wine itself doesn't glow, of course, in contrast with the Birne in a Glühbirne, or light bulb, literally "glow pear." More than a few people get lit drinking the stuff, though. The Christmas markets, with their convivial Glühwein stands, are veritable Bermuda triangles for Germans on their way home from work.

The etymologically minded might be interested in knowing that the verbs glow and glühen are cognates and related to the adjective gelb, i.e. yellow. The enologically minded would do well to know that when a Glühwein glow takes on a yellow tinge, 'tis time to give the ol' liver a rest.

I was trying to enjoy my breakfast. But the radio was on. Listening to German radio seldom makes for relaxed digestion. Either they're rambling on about the latest dispute over economic reform -- here an euro, there an euro, as if the fate of prosperous Germany hung on each and every euro -- or they're rumbling on ominously about the latest danger out there -- real, potential, or imagined.

The lead story on this Wednesday morning was a fire the previous day at the nuclear power plant in Ringhals, Sweden. A plant spokesman said all safety systems had functioned normally, and had triggered an immediate shutdown. At no time had there been a risk of a radioactive leak. "Not serious," the spokesman concluded. The Swedes remained composed.

The German news commentator was filled with alarm, however, not only by the incident itself but even more by the Swedes' lack of it. Alarm, that is. Had something similar happened in Germany, there would have been a huge uproar. The newspapers and airwaves would have flash-flooded with dire warnings, agitated urgings, and agonized navel-gazing.

Why, just Monday a shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste, packed into steel containers, finally arrived at a storage site southeast of Hamburg after a journey that was disrupted by hundreds of German protesters. In 2001, the German government decided to phase out all of the country's nuclear power plants within 20 years. That's too slow for some. And now Germans are worried about wind-power installations, whose low-frequency humming is thought to cause health problems.

The Germans, in short, are worrywarts. You've got to give them credit for admitting it, though. This past August Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, ran a cover story titled "Lebensgefühl ANGST." The topic is a German evergreen. In this case, fear of an attack by Islamic terrorists -- a botched plot to bomb German trains had just been uncovered -- was the proximate cause. But the magazine noted that whenever "a new monster" turned up on the globe, "the Germans are the first to buy pills, organize disaster conferences, and whine. The reasons for whining are virtually interchangable."

Reasons have included the bubonic plague, the arms race, AIDS, cuts in Christmas bonuses, acid rain, global warming, mad cow disease, stray meteorites, George W. Bush, bird flu, genetically modified food, insufficiently recycled trash, the hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer, overpopulation, the low birth rate, and excessive worrying.

Germans' hair-trigger anxiety often makes what would be a molehill elsewhere into a mountain of a scandal. Acting on an anonymous tip a few months back, German authorities found spoiled meat at a meat factory in Bavaria. Word got out, and the German media promptly frothed at the mouth. No one had gotten sick, much less died, and it was unclear at first whether any spoiled meat had even gone to market.

This obsession with safety has become a running joke between me and my Russian wife, who is still getting used to German ways. Lower anxiety in other European countries is one of the attractions of traveling for us. So there we were in Amsterdam recently. On a bridge we passed a group of Germans, who were commenting on the structure.

"Sie ist gefährlich!" ("It's dangerous!") said one, with Teutonically furrowed brow.

My wife and I looked at each other and laughed.

Germans' eagerness to display their national flag, which seemed to come from nowhere during the World Cup in Germany and continued even after all the foreign guests had gone, has now, pardon the pun, flagged considerably. Here and there a black, red and gold banner is still draped from a window, or, less frequently, fluttering in miniature on a car. But the streets are largely back to their earlier, non-partisan look.

Many commentators, both German and foreign, taken aback in June and July by the unprecedented swells of flag-waving Teutons, said the Nazi-traumatized country had gotten over its fear and loathing of patriotism. "Gone, finally, is our strained relationship with our own nationality," wrote Hauke Brost, a commentator in the mass circulation tabloid Bild.

If Germany has indeed returned to "normality" -- that is, to "healthy patriotism" -- then what's a "normal," "healthy" attitude toward the flag? Is it flying them on flagpoles in front of home after home, on building after building, and -- separation of church and state be damned -- even inside churches? Is it pledging allegiance to "one nation, under God, who's on our side and will help us bring light to the benighted"? Es war einmal: "Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen." The Germans learned a lesson.

Some commentators didn't buy the breathless pronouncements that Germans' patriotism had risen from its wheelchair. It was more a case of "partyotism," they said, and all those German flags, all those faces painted in the national colors, were mainly World Cup party accessories. What were the German hosts supposed to do, anyway, with all those foreign fans waving foreign flags in their faces? Just sit there? The World Cup was a golden opportunity for Germans to break postwar taboos: wave the German flag, chant "Deutschland, Deutschland," and vow to kick Poles' butts, if only on the playing field.

German retailers -- out to make a killing, naturally -- were loaded with black, red and gold paraphernalia. The weather was unusually grand, Germany's team went on a surprising roll, and Germans bought scads of the stuff.

Since the World Cup ended, left-wing extremists reportedly stole and burned thousands of German flags to make the streets "deutschlandfrei" again. The GEW teachers' union continued its attacks on Germany's "nationalistic" national anthem. And German politicians -- citing, among other things, Germany's Nazi past -- rejected an appeal by Israel for peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.

No, Germany's "strained relationship with its nationality" isn't gone. Going, maybe, but not gone.

"I wouldn't want to fight with him on Majorca over a sun lounger!" remarked German sportscaster Florian König during RTL Television's broadcast of today's World Cup match between England and Ecuador (England won, 1-0, by the way). He was referring to pug-faced English striker Wayne Rooney -- "that pit bull" -- after Rooney tried to bull his way through two Ecuadoreans to get to the ball.

What does that short sentence tell you, Sherlock? Firstly, that Germans love to vacation on Majorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean. And secondly, that Germans often have disputes over sun loungers.

Due to a quirk of evolution that's never been fully explained (at least to me), Germans habitually lay claim to public sun loungers with their beach towels, thinking this gives them the right to frolic in the surf for as long as they like and then return to reserved seats. It doesn't matter how crowded the beach is. As Germans tend to be early risers, this means that the best loungers are often taken by the time tourists from other nations arrive. Not everyone smiles indulgently at such possessive behavior. The English -- God love 'em -- are particularly apt to remove the offending towels, sit down, and face the wrath of Teutons unlounged.