Kaska's snap shots

'Mehrica

This year's 4th of July I spent with my friends from 'Mehrica. We talked a lot about the USA during the evening. For a few years I have been friends to some Americans living in Germany. They are good, sophisticated and smart people. They gave me many new perspectives on the country.

When we talk, we talk also about cliches of Europeans and Americans, how the see each other. The 4th of July discussions inspired me to look among my pictures for elements that we, Europeans, tend to see as typical American.

Some Sports are definitively very US-American. And from the European point of view we are not able to practice them in any other way but the American one. Here the stadium of Hanover hockey team called... the Indians! Yes, right, the team is called Hanover Indians. In the middle of Lower Saxony. True story.

While Hockey is americanized, there is hardly anything more originally American than baseball.

This baseball equipment is being kept in a glass cabinet in a designer furniture store in Hanover to symbolize the comfort of a well designed armchair.

We Europeans have a big trouble to get the rules of this sport. As the Americans do not really completely get our soccer game. As I have been told, partially because men in soccer tend to be theatrically hurt which does not comprehend with the American male prototype. I do get this part of the story.

The album cover has been redesigned into a menu card in a restaurant in Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein.

Talking about American men, hardly anything is so symbolic to us Europeans for the American way of life as the Western genre and all the cowboys in the movies. We dig their style. They've got the whole cowboy thing goin'. (Who does not recognize the movie reference now is apparently not a golfer).

We do have our own bisons in Europe. If you want to see a wild European bison in free nature, go to Poland to Bialowieza forrest. Or you can see the animals in a kind of European safari "Wisentgehege" in Springe, close to Hanover (see above).

American way of life sells in Europe.

A street sell of "works of art" in Hanover.

The one below is accepted as a real work of art:

Exhibition of pop art in the Kunsthalle of Hamburg.

Cars seem to stand for 'Mehrica.

Old timer show in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Würtemberg

The old timer collection by Volkswagen, Wolfsburg

I have never ever been to the US. It is very Polish-unlike. Polish share an unexplicable attraction for the USA. Not like the rest of the world who is rather very critical of the Big Brother.

Cadillac for sale at the road between Cracow and Tarnow in southern Poland.

A certain Polish fascination of America comes - among others - from the fact that every Polish family does have relatives in the USA. They emigrated to the States "in the quest for bread" as we solemnly call it in Poland. Those who returned tell the other fellows legends about this "country of milk and honey". Many, to emphasize their worldly experience bought an American car and brought it along. Soon after driving it in Poland for some time, they discover that they cannot maintain it as there are no car parts available for the vehicles.

Some buy a Cadillac out of a sentiment for Elvis. The king is really cult in Poland.

Who cannot afford a real cadillac, they can have a ride in a miniature model at a shopping mole like here in Cracow's district Pradnik Bialy.

And if you are lucky, you will meet Elvis in person in my aunt's garden too.

My aunt is the chairwoman of the Elvis Presley fan club of Cracow.

It will get more absurd from now on: this plaque marks the address of the Association Promoting Polish-Hawaiian friendship by the name of "Baywatch", spotted in Cracow, Jewish district.

Television and movies are the most efficient tools for spreading of the American culture.