Random Saturday - How could you?

We spent almost 34 years together.
I thought you were the one constant in my life.
You would always be there for me.
I counted on you day and night.
True, you weren't bright enough for everyone, but you were for me.
Then you left me, though, without a warning.
You were just gone and left me behind, in the dark.
I guess I should have been prepared that this would happen eventually, but I felt preparing would have looked as if I didn't trust you.
And then I just couldn't turn you on anymore one day.

We had a good run together, though, didn't we?
Farewell, little fluorescent tube. I'll miss you.

Random Saturday - To brick or not to brick

Lego was the topic of another random Saturday seven years ago, but back then I only spoke about and showed my London bus.

You've also seen a picture of my Lego Snowglobe as part of my hallway Christmas decoration.

There's more. Not much. Lego is and always has been very much a matter of money and space both of which I prefer to spend on other things, no matter how tempting some of the projects may look like (I'm just saying cat).
There are stories, however. Of course there are, after all this is random Saturday. Old ones, new ones.

I couldn't tell you the exact age at which I got my first Legos. Back then, all of us siblings got one basic set which consisted of one baseplate - still the thicker ones then - and a bunch of bricks. We threw everything together in order to have more options for bigger projects. Basic set also meant basic bricks which we named after the number of bumps on each one (no idea if that was some official naming, but we added the Swabian diminutive -le to the numbers, so maybe not).
What I remember best was building tiny house models with limited wall height and no roof, tiny because the baseplates were small and because we didn't have that many bricks. Also no roof meant we could play in them by using the smallest bricks for the people living in the house.

Years later, my little brother had five boxes (four of them had been a lottery prize, size A to D) of Märklin's (the company is known among model train collectors and is located in my town) own brick version - the so-called Minex bricks (Märklin used the name Minex for several products, also metal construction sets or trains). You could do a lot with five boxes and the bricks were much easier to take apart which could be both an advantage and a disadvantage, but I remember having a lot of fun with those.

Afterwards, bricking (as I've heard it being called in Germany) wasn't really a topic for me anymore for many years - until one year my pal gave me the Yellow Submarine from the Beatles movie to cheer me up in a weltschmerz phase.
We spent a few evenings both working on our projects, having something to eat and drink, laughing a lot, always under the strict supervision of Ponder.
It was a lot of fun although it's amazing how many mistakes you can make on a piece that doesn't even look that difficult on the outside.

For my next birthday, he gave me the London Bus.
That really brought back memories of my first London visit (unfortunately there were only two) together with a friend and her five year old daughter. On the first day, we did bus hopping, randomly changing buses seeing where they would take us.

Again we started to work on our projects together, but then life happened and we finished them on our own. That's when I found that I wasn't made to be a lonely bricker. I gave up eventually and had to motivate myself hard to finally pick it up again. That's why it took me five months to get it finished! It's so cool.

Two more projects we did together again was the living room from The Big Bang Theory and the Santa Snowglobe (the weirdest snowglobe ever) which had been an extra gift with an order.

There's one more piece that has been waiting for me to work on it. It has been around for several years and I think it's really time to get started on it - the Lego Art set "The Beatles". With the box content you can make one of the four portraits and my first problem was to decide which one to make because, let's get this clear, if I make one I'm not going to rip it out again to make a different one.
To be honest, I wish the portraits were old black and white ones, but that can't be helped, can it?

Once I decide, I might turn this project into small WIP posts to motivate myself, so I won't give it up.
Which portrait would you choose IF you like The Beatles at all?

I am not affiliated with Lego in any way, except playing with it every, now and then.

Random Saturday - Diaries

A while ago, I saw an Instagram post with a few pictures in which several people had shared bits of their teenage diaries. It made me cringe, not because of what they wrote, but because I had come across my own diaries the other day when I looked for something else.

I got my first diary when I was 12. During vacation, I spent a few days with my closest school friend and we were out and about a lot. One day we walked to the next little town to visit another school friend and on the way we discovered the window of a little shop.
I wonder if those kind of shops still exist in some villages and small towns. It's practically one room where you can get about anything, from pencils to magazines, glasses to figurines, lottery tickets to diaries.
Yes, there were diaries in the window and we spontaneously decided to give each other one because that's what best friends did instead of buying their own.

Do they look familiar to you? They were from Shanghai und I was surprised how many people seem to be looking for them.
There were two sizes, this is the "Shanghai diary 112" (the other one was 110), they came in all kinds of colors and different motifs. They also had notebooks and even recipe books like that (it said on the spine what it was).
They had lines, the left pages had an orange edge with a sun and flowers, the right ones had trees and mountains in pink. At least, that was the case for all of mine, maybe there were some with other pictures.

From the age of 12 to 24 I had three of those diaries and filled about two and a half of them. I wasn't a very regular writer and there were huge gaps at times.
It was so surprising to find them because in my memory I had disposed of them a long time ago. That was not the only time my memory had failed, it seemed.

I started with the one I had abandoned because it was the shortest one. It was from the time when I was training as a librarian and then began working which was also how I met my ex. So yes, it was all very much pink glasses and love songs in the air back then 😉, but there were no surprising memories, so the shredder did its work.

Then I turned to the first one because I figured there would be a few things in there I didn't remember and I was right about that.
Early teenagehood was a relatively carefree time. I wrote mostly about friends, what we did, what we ate, what we bought, where we went. The rest was filled up with talking about school and that once again I hadn't practiced enough for my violin lesson.

The second diary, however, is full swing puberty and it was downright embarrassing to read about my being awkward (that's a euphemism) and pining for one or the other boy (or young man as I grew older). Reading it made me cringe so badly 😂
Some of those memories had been shoved into a small cabinet in a cobwebbed little corner of my mind and that's where I decided to put them back into.
Just imagine I'll get famous after all - stop laughing - and someone pulls out that diary after my death, I would roll over in my grave! Okay, I wouldn't want anyone to read it, famous or not.
So yeah, into the shredder it went.

There were some redeeming features, though. I stood up against racism (for a friend), I was not self-centered (or infatuated) enough to not contemplate the state of the world (and of course worry about it), and I was there for friends. 
It was a relief to read I wasn't a complete idiot, just a teenager.

After abandoning my diary at 24, I never picked one up again. I have always been terrible with even keeping up notebooks and calendars, so it's more of a surprise I even wrote that much.
The only thing I regret in that regard is never trying to write a dream journal. My dreams are wild, but hardly ever embarrassing, I think they would have been a much more fun read - most of them, anyway. I'm not going to start that now, though.

Do you (still) have a diary or your diaries from your past?

Random Saturday - Words

This post was inspired by the September 10 on the 10th post on Marsha in the Middle about words ending in -ber.
I didn't participate in that one because I couldn't find it in me to look for ten words for my English and my German blog each because they obviously couldn't be the same except for the four last months of the year.
I only realized that, however, when I had already started looking for -ber words and got a list of both English and German ones some of which were completely new to me.

Picture from pxhere

"Reihenschieber" = "row slider"
A hand cipher system developed in 1957 and used by the German Bundeswehr until the early 60s to encrypt high-grade messages.

"Schlammfieber" = "mud fever"
A different German name for leptospirosis, a disease caused by bacteria often spread by rodents which explains one of the English names - "rat fever".

"Hellschreiber", also called "Typenbildfeldfernschreiber" (you have to love German words)
A facsimile-based teleprinter developed patented by a German named Hell in 1929.

Hellschreiber in
Bletchley Park,
public domain via
Wikimedia Commons

I doubt anyone would have believed me if I said these were among my top ten favorites of -ber words.

I also learned a few fun names of villages in Scotland and Wales (and will forget them again right away, I'm sure) - Ballintubber, Knockentiber, and my favorite Penrhiwceiber. Guess which one is in Wales.

Have you ever had "bonnyclabber"? The Free Dictionary tells me it can simply mean curdled milk, but also "thick, soured milk eaten with cream and sugar, honey, or molasses". My mother used to like "Dickmilch". I haven't had it in ages, but I think I need to get myself some just so I can say I had "bonnyclabber" which sounds so much more fun than just "thick milk".

Picture from pxhere

If you wonder what this post is even about except being proof for my "jumping spider mind", it's about words and language.
Aren't words fascinating? How they roll off your tongue, how they twist your tongue, how one single word can evoke memories, emotions, scents, images? Where they come from?
Or how about writing down a short, really familar word and looking it for a while? Have you ever had the feeling that it suddenly looked very strange and made you wonder how anyone came up with it?
Or have you said a word out loud before and wondered if that is even right because it suddenly sounds weird (which is something my sister happened to do in a call just when I was at this point of the post)?

That's probably one of the reasons why I like to read to the cats and prefer to do it in English than the familiar German, to savor new words or sometimes learn to pronounce words I already know because I never thought about it before when just reading them.

The other day I discovered by accident that the English ebooks I read on Overdrive (other apps probably have the same) have the feature of looking up definitions by marking a word which is for example interesting for slang words.
I can also get lost in etymological explanations in dictionaries. Oh, those rabbit holes everywhere!

I want to apologize in advance as I'm afraid this is going to start a new category on my blog and I'll be back with new words every, now and then. German or English.
(Maybe you should blame Marsha for giving me the idea in the first place 🤪)

Random Saturday - Water

"Can you please just try our mineral water for once?" "Why can't I just get tap water?" "We don't really do that in restaurants here. They usually make their money with the beverages and that means they are not prepared for people asking for free tap water. I'll be honest, I'm a bit embarrassed about asking. They have still mineral water. Couldn't you try that?" "I would rather have tap water."
It was a regular discussion with my friend from the USA when she came here to Germany for the first time many years ago. Why wouldn't she try something new?
We got strange looks, but not always tap water.

Picture from pxhere

The way I was surprised when I first visited the USA in the early 90s for being offered iced water with every meal, my friend just couldn't grasp that tap water in restaurants wasn't something we had - and still don't really have.
In fact, not many people here drank tap water at all back then. We had seen American fridges with water and ice dispensers, but for us that was something very exotic, you couldn't get those easily here at the time. The first time I stayed in my US friend's house, I played with that water dispenser like a little child.

Esme and I loved ice cubes (I still do), she from outside of
the glass, me from inside the glass

That's what I meant by "outside of the glass",
 she liked licking off the condensation 

 
Germans have always loved their water, but that meant mineral water. We have a lot of mineral waters, German and imported ones, most of them in plastic bottles, but also still some in glass bottles (which I prefer), carbonated - medium is the most popular one before the "classic" - or still which comes in third place in Germany (unlike other countries).

No machine-readable author provided.
Rainer Zenz assumed
 (based on copyright claims),
 CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This is the "bead bottle", by the way, designed by Günter Kupetz and produced since 1969 - 5 billion times! This is just a nickname, the official name is really very German, "Normbrunnenflasche" or "Brunneneinheitsflasche" (which could both be translated as "standard fountain bottle").
As a beader, I can't help but love the nickname which is inspired by the 230 glass "beads" which not only mimic the bubbles in the water, but also helps with a safer grip in combination with the narrower part in the center. It works. I like my water cold and I hate smooth bottles with aquaplaning thanks to condensation.
The bottle has won design awards and is so popular that it has even been reproduced in plastic as well.

Actually, my own town has several free filling stations for our local so-called "sour water" which has been a big part of our history, and until a few years ago you could buy it bottled as carbonated water before the plant shut down.
Two of those are next to our local pool and for us kids it was completely normal to go out there when we were at the pool and have a quick drink because we couldn't afford to buy anything. Over the years, some of those stations were closed down temporarily and opened up again, I admit I have no idea what the current situation is.
One of those is the "Brunnenhäusle" (literally "small fountain house") in my neighborhood. It has faucets on each corner and the house itself is a little kiosk where you can get ice cream and beverages, and it's really nice to sit out there.

Many families saved money by filling up their bottles at those stations. Of course the sour water wasn't de-ironed which meant the bottles which kept being reused started looking brownish inside after some time, no matter how much you tried to keep them clean, and it wasn't carbonated which meant if it wasn't cold, it tasted quite flat. Back then, still waters were not popular.
The first documented mention of the bathhouse is from 1404. In the mid-16th century, Christoph, Duke of Württemberg, often visited here because of the water. Other important people followed, but after The Thirty Years' War, interest decreased. In 1839, two physicians bought the bathhouse and surrounding area and opened a hospital there which still exists today.

I have to admit, however, that the carbonated version of our own mineral water was a tad too salty for my taste.
Taste in water is really important for us. We Germans can't just drink any water and like it - unless we are very thirsty and even then chances are we are going to complain.
Water can taste different depending on the minerals, calcium, sodium, sulfate, magnesium, etc.
Water can also change taste. It is possible you have been used to a mineral water and suddenly you don't like it anymore.
It happened to me with my last one (on top of that, they also changed from the "bead bottle" to a smooth bottle!), and since I can't get the one I like delivered, I switched to tap water. That wasn't an easy decision for me. The tap water in my region is rather hard and I had to get used to it first. Some people use filters, I also did that for a while, but then found it didn't make a difference for me, but was a hassle and money I didn't need to spend.
A lot of people here drink tap water now. Not only is it often said that it's our best controlled product, it's also cheaper than bottled water and it's readily available without having to go to the store. For those who can't stand still water - once upon a time I was one of those as well - there are "water bubblers" you can use to make your own sparkling water, as bubbly as you like it.
My town and others have projects to promote tap water, for example by opening filling stations in the city or getting shops on board to offer free fillings.

So yeah, that means you can get tap water in German restaurants now, right?
Yes and no.
According to the EU Drinking Water Directive, it's recommended to improve access by "actions aimed at promoting the use of tap water, for example by encouraging the free provision of water intended for human consumption in public administrations and public buildings or, for free or for a low service fee, for customers in restaurant, canteens and catering services".
That means you can ask, but it's possible you won't get any at all or it may cost you - and the owner decides how much.
According to a survey in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, Germans still don't like to ask for tap water in restaurants.
I guess the reasons are that people want to treat themselves when going out, they think prices are too high for tap water - we all heard one or the other story - or they are simply not used to even think of asking.

By the way, water in restaurants ... did you know there are water sommeliers, about 500 in the world? They often work in the hotel and catering industry and recommend the right water with certain food or offer water tastings.
There are few schools where you can study to be one.

Tired of water yet? 🙃 No worries, I'll let you go now. Thank you if you made it to here!


Sources:

1. Sabine Riker: Das Wasser, das Göppingen berühmt machte. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, August 15, 2019 (in German)
2. Olivia Logan: How many people dare to order tap water in Germany? On: I Am Expat, June 13, 2025
3. David Hahn: Darf Leitungswasser etwas kosten? On: Südwest Presse, December 6, 2024 (in German)
4. Directive (EU) 2020/2184 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2020 on the quality of water intended for human consumption

Random Saturday - Travelling books

In my post about "Little Nicholas" a few days ago, I said that my personal copies of the books had a story of their own.
Here it is.

The year is 1994 and it's two days before my birthday.
We three sisters happen to take the same train home after work and my oldest sister has my birthday gift in a bag which she just picked up from the book store on the way to the train station.
The commute from Bad Cannstatt is about 30 minutes. We talk, we laugh, we get off the train ... that's when my sister notices she has left the book bag on the train!
It's too late to hop back on, so there are only two things to do now, 1. go to the service center and try to have them contact someone, 2. hope that no passenger grabs the bag and decides these are nice books to have.

Losing or forgetting something on a train is a game of chance. Some people will give it to the conductor, so it ends up at the railway company's lost and found (and in an auction if no one claims it), but some go the "finders keepers" route or at least contemplate it (I've seen it myself), and some just ignore it.
The service clerk told my sister they would contact someone at the end of the line and have the train conductor check the train in case they hadn't already found the bag by themselves.
If the bag were there, they would then take it back on the next possible train and drop it off at the service center where my sister would be able to pick it up the next day.

Luck was on our side and my sister picked the bag up the next day.
To celebrate it, she drew a little picture in each book to tell the story.

From left to right - my sister A., yours truly, and my sister B.
There's a lot of detail, from A.'s braid to my long hair worn open
and B.'s bob, but also A.'s typical backpack, my shopper and
B.'s purse, and of course the book bag saying "Stehn", a book
store that doesn't exist anymore today.

What I love most about this picture are two things.
There is the company Hengstenberg which will be 150 years old
next year and produces vinegar, pickles, mustard, etc.
Nowadays there are only offices in that building, but it's still part
of the region's history.
Also, this is still one of the old trains. It's actually possible that we
did ride on one of them because the new double-decker trains
were only just introduced around that time.
Can you see us in the last window?

 

Oh no! We got off the train at home, but the bag is still on there!
Our shocked faces never fail to make me smile 🙃

Tell me without words how the books went back from Geislingen to
Göppingen. Did you notice the speed lines?

The service center of the Deutsche Bahn (which also doesn't exist
anymore because they lost the contract for this line some years ago
and because they expect everyone to be their own service people,
anyway) on the day before my birthday. You can tell from the
clock A. and I took our usual train at the time and oh what
a miracle, it was on time, too!

I think the drawings really make these books extra special. Do you think someone in the future will be holding them in their hands eventually, wondering what all of that was about ...

Random Saturday - The new flatmate

Warning: Spider pictures and more!

Years ago, we visited relatives of the ex. His young cousin (actually we were young as well then) had all kinds of animals - it used to be a farm in a village - mostly fowl, such as ducks in a pond, chicken, pheasants, but also rabbits. When we went looking at them, he suddenly put a white mouse on my shoulder. Of course, he had hoped for me to freak out and scream, but even if had felt the urge which wasn't the case, I wouldn't have done him the favor.
Instead I petted the mouse and told it how cute it was. It was, you know. I think I gained his respect that day, not that that had been what I was after.

I'll be honest, though, I'm not as cool around all animals, at least at first sight. If a spider jumps at me, I will probably jump as well, not because it's a spider, but because I'm startled. I daresay it would happen with any other animal (der Dekan has one or four stories to tell about that).

If I just have a visitor looking at me, however, I can react accordingly. Sometimes, a single stink bug makes its way in through the open window and it will get evicted gently but firmly.
Spiders are allowed to live with me, not having a phobia I do not see any need to burn the house down with them in it.

I think she was
really pretty.

Flying specimen are guided outside as gently as possible although things can get hectic if they are of the stinging kind and a not so little cat is getting excited about them.
Clothes moths and carpet bugs are an exception. Seeing them, I don't even think about my karma and let go of all mercy (although moths have become hard to catch without a trap).

If I don't let the shade down on the window behind my bed all the way - so that I can look at the moon for example - I sometimes get late night visitors, moths and grasshoppers. Ponder was utterly fascinated with them and would keep touching the glass very softly. It was a good thing that there was glass because Ponder may have seemed very friendly, but I've seen him squash and eat more than one spider.

Those stripey bumps - der Dekan.

Der Dekan, too, is interested, but he's more the kind to lurk for a long time and then pounce with feet going in all directions. I have seen him trap visitors in here, but he usually lets them go again, looking after them with eyes as big as those of a child in front of a Christmas tree. He could at least knock them out gently to give me the chance to put them outside, but to put it less nicely, he's absolutely useless in these matters.

Yesterday, however, we had a visitor that surprised me because I had never seen one around here before.
Let me start with this page from one of my favorite books, "Daddy Long Legs" by Jean Webster.
Judy, the protagonist, is in college and writes to her mentor.

That describes it pretty well except this isn't a college.
I was woken up by somecat demanding breakfast at 5 a.m. I had only slept about four hours at that point and wasn't quite my alert and energetic self yet - stop laughing! -, but I noticed something big and black hanging on the ceiling which very clearly wasn't a spider. At closer look, it was a centipede which baffled me, about 2 inch long and way out of my reach.
I would say he had fewer legs than in the drawing, but was fatter.
The next moment, however ... plump! I honestly was amazed how loud that sound was when the centipede fell down right next to me. No cups, no tea table, no hair brush (although there is one on my nightstand). Instead I ran back to my bed for my tissue box for lack of a bowl in my bedroom (note: always keep a bowl and a flat piece of cardboard in your bedroom), but too late, he was already gone. I think he went under the wardrobe and I probed around a bit with a broom, to no avail.
What really bugs me is that I was sure he was just trying to hide from me interviewing him about what he could bring to the household and how he expected to pay his rent. I swear if he throws his shoes all over the place, I'm going to get mad.

While writing this, I'm still completely clueless where he is. He could be anywhere, so I guess we will have to live with him for now. Der Dekan hadn't even noticed him, but if he's to stay, there may be an encounter of the many-legged kind. Oh dear, I hope he's not a tap dancer!

I'm not overly concerned about him, but I don't like the idea of stepping of him, in the middle of the night, for example. I also don't like the idea of the brat trying to chase/kill/eat him and I'm not keen on finding him in my bed (that would be the jump thing all over again).
Is it weird that I wish I had been able to take a picture of him?

Random Saturday - Piggy banks, part 2

Last week, I posted about the history of the piggy bank and said I would write a second post including some memories of mine, so here I am.

The first money box that I can remember was made from wood. I got it from the bank on World Savings Day.
The World Savings Day or World Thrift Day was established during the 1st International Savings Bank Congress in Milan, a day promoting the idea of saving all over the world.
In some countries it has disappeared completely by now, but in others it is still a tradition on October 31st or, like in Germany, on the last workday before because the 31st is a holiday in some regions. Some banks even have a World Savings Week. Nowadays, the focus of the organizers is on developing countries.
It's not a surprise that Germany still has it, after all we always prided ourselves on being the world champions of saving.
I loved the little gifts we got and even today my tape is still in an (ugly) brown tape holder from that time! Back then, the only option for our little money to go was the savings book. My so-called "youth savings books" in the 70s and early 80s had the appropriate colors and hippie flowers. I wouldn't surprise if I still had them around in a pile of old letters or papers, should I happen to find them, I'll add a picture here.

My money box got broken soon, so I can't show it to you, but I found that exact kind on eBay, in different shapes and with different images, mostly from fairy tales.
While the shape I had is there, the image is not, I'm pretty sure I had Snow White. Who knows, though, maybe it will turn up eventually?
In the bottom it had a metal disk with a keyhole unlike other piggy banks which had - as mentioned in my first post - to be actually broken to get to the money.
Another possibility was having a box which could only be opened at the bank, in the early days bank staff even went to the costumers to open the boxes there.

I still remember that we had a savings cabinet in elementary school. It was smaller than this one in a German pub and stood in a corner of our classroom, probably on a table.

Public domain, picture by Willy Horsch
(via Wikimedia Commons)

I don't remember if bank staff came to the school to open the cabinets, count the money from the little inserts behind the individual slots and add the amount to the "school savings book", but I guess that's how it must have been. If you look at my own book, though, it doesn't seem to have happened very regularly.
I wasn't very good at saving, only once - shortly after my birthday - I had a veritable fortune on my book which I withdrew quickly.
Excuse the look, it's over 50 years old. Also I noticed again that not only my name, but also my address at the time had been filled in incorrectly.

By the way, "Sparefroh", the little guy with a coin for his torso, was an advertising figure which was invented in Stuttgart in 1955 and was obviously still around in the 70s although I can't remember it from anywhere else but my savings book.
He got much more popular in Austria where he is still used today in modernized form.

For those who want to collect money boxes possibilities are endless and it is recommended to restrict yourself to a certain look or material unless your space and financial resources are also endless.
There are the simple piggy banks you have to break - unless you are professionally trained like me at putting a knife through the slot and carefully guiding the coins out -, or those with a key that you or the bank has.
My small size Drumbos (which I wrote about some years ago) would have to be used with a knife.

Collectors also distinguish between "still banks" without mechanics or "mechanical banks" which do something if a coin is thrown in and which are especially sought after in the USA. The first ones were for example made from tin, in the USA also from cast iron.
Hundreds of variations were produced, with music, with counting mechanisms, or with movement.
There are also the vending machines like my Stollwerck "Victoria" (which I wrote about here) which "sold" you chocolate or candy.

My own favorite piggy bank was my safe, though. No idea where it went to, but it probably didn't survive my greedy children's hands trying to get to the Pfennige inside.
As I didn't own any kind of piggy bank at the moment, I treated myself to one for my birthday (yeah, I make the weirdest birthday gifts). The safe from my childhood was grey, but I think I can live with a little color change.
I'm sure my money will be totally safe from burglars now 😉

Sources:

1. World Savings Day and the Piggy Bank. History and curiosity. On: UniCredit website, October 31, 2023
2. Spardosen. Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, Spardosen aller Zeiten. On: Kreissparkasse Köln - Geldgeschichte (in German) - also follow the different links at the bottom for more detailed articles and pictures of different kinds of money boxes
3. Jörg Bohn: Spardosen. On: Wirtschaftswundermuseum (in German)

Random Saturday - Piggy banks, part 1

This post was inspired by another daily thread in my jewelry forum. "Did you have a piggy bank? What did it look like?"
Now doesn't that sound like another great rabbit hole? Because, you know ... I actually had more than one over the years myself. You probably did, too?

Where do piggy banks even come from, though, and why are they called that? After all, not all of them actually look like pigs.

Let's have a look at the history of the savings box, money box, whatever you want to call it.
Would you have thought that they have been around since ancient times?
I found two different informations for the oldest known money box in the world. The first one is on one called a "Thesauros" (or "Naiskoi" according to one source) which is in the shape of a temple and was found in Priene, an ancient Greek town (today on Turkish land), dated to the 2nd century BC.

Money box held at the
Antikensammlung Berlin,
picture taken by Marcus Cyron,
CC BY-SA 3.0
(via Wikimedia Commons)

Another source, however, says that the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had an even older one in their exhibition in 1990 although it's not clear if it still exists now.
It was found in a private residence in Babylon and was dated to the end of the 4th or beginning of the 3rd century BC. It was thrown on a potter's wheel and looked like an amphora with a slit cut in at the side.
Those easy to make money boxes, which were popular around the world and are still made, had to be broken to get to the money ("break the bank"). You can find a picture of it here.

Earthen pots used in Nepal,
picture by Krish Dulal, CC BY-SA 3.0 
(via Wikimedia Commons)

Over time, money boxes have come in all kinds of shapes and materials, but where does the pig come in?
The oldest piggy bank in Germany is from the 13th century (again there are different opinions about it, in this case about it actually being a piggy bank or just a pig sculpture). 
Then there's the information about one from 1576, but it rather looks as if that story had a satirical background and was then passed on as truth.
Pigs have been a symbol for luck and wealth since ancient times. There are different theories about the reasons. In German, we still say someone "hat Schwein" for unexpected luck, literally "has pig". So it makes sense that a pig would be used for amassing that wealth by saving.

Verified piggy banks from the 12th century were found on the island of Java although these are really wild boars.
I wonder if this one from the 14th/15th century broke from age or if it was broken to get the money out ...

Majapahit terracotta piggy bank,
Trowulan, East Java,
picture by Gunkarta, CC BY-SA 3.0
(via Wikimedia Commons)

In Stuttgart, there's a Pig Museum with over 50,000 items which is an interesting mix of history, art, and kitsch.
Yes, I've been there myself before and was very glad they also had a vegetarian option in the restaurant there.
Of course they also have a few piggy banks behind glass.

Where does the term "piggy bank" come from, though? It's often used for savings in general or for money boxes that don't even have the pig shape.
I wish I could tell you, but again there are different theories. Was there really a clay called "pygg" used to make dishes and pots in which Western Europeans collected their money, so eventually potters started to make "pig banks"? 
Was the word "pig" used for earthenware in general?
So how did the pig get to Germany, for example, where the word is "Schwein"? Did the Germans just translate it? What about the alleged first one from the 13th century then? Which was there first, the "Sparschwein" or the "piggy bank"? 
Is it true that German immigrants helped to make the pig shape popular in the US?
Merriam-Webster tells us the word "piggy bank" was first used in 1917, the Oxford English Dictionary gives us 1913.
Will we ever know? Is it even important?

There is so much more to the history of piggy banks that I decided to stop here and write a second post about this in which I will also be sharing some of my own memories which got triggered thanks to this post.
The post can be found here once it's live.


Selected sources:

1. Spardosen. Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, Spardosen aller Zeiten. On: Kreissparkasse Köln - Geldgeschichte (in German)
2. Twisted tail: The great piggy bank mystery. On: BBC. StoryWorks
3. David M. Robinson: Some Roman Terra-Cotta Savings-Banks. In: American Journal of Archaeology, 28(1924),3, pp. 239 - 250 (open access)
4. Hans Graeven: Die thönerne Sparbüchse im Altertum. In: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 16(1901), pp. 160 - 189 (in German)

Random Saturday - "Poesiealbum"

The other day I rummaged through my book cabinets. Where was it? I was so sure it had always been right there. Which cabinet or drawer or "safe spot" had I absent-mindedly chosen this time?
I'm talking about my "Poesiealbum", literally "poetry album".
I don't know if you have ever heard of this tradition which has been around for centuries, mostly in German and Dutch speaking regions of Europe.
Thank you to my friend (one of my sisters couldn't find her album, either, and my friend saved the other one having to look for hers) who was so kind to send me pictures of her album to illustrate this post. Of course I edited out the names and location.

The tradition started with the "Stammbuch" or "Album Amicorum" in the early 16th century in the circle of the Wittenberg reformers. Followers of Luther and his associates asked them for handwritten notes to remember their connection.

"Stammbücher" could be books, often theological ones, with added empty pages, but also loose leaves which could then be bound into a Bible.

In the beginning, this tradition was not restricted to academic circles, but to Protestant ones. When it was mainly taken over by the academic community with students collecting notes by fellow students, but also professors, it spread to other countries and also among Catholics.
For some time, it was also adopted by nobility where guest books had already been a custom.

Usually, those albums were used during times of study or travel and ended with the start of a profession. They were kept not only for sentimental reasons to remember friends from that period, but also for references that could be helpful.

While the tradition had mostly vanished in academic circles in the early 19th century, the middle class, which had started taking it over in the late 18th century, kept it alive. Now also women and children collected inscriptions by family and friends and the "Stammbuch" became the "Poesiealbum" which also meant the type of inscriptions changed and were frowned upon by "opinion leaders in matter of artistic taste" who found them too trivial.

They changed even more, however, especially after the "Poesiealbum" mostly became a thing in elementary schools.
The inscriptions could be anything from single poetry verses, quotes, advice, adminitions, religious or secular, but in my time many of the little poems - some of which turned up regularly with some classmates using the same one for everyone's album - were confirmations of everlasting friendship or they were humorous, sometimes both.

Here's an example for the first one :
I sincerely hope that you will not forget me so quickly, and I wish you something special, stay just the way you are!

I can't remember the first ones I wrote, but I got bored of the usual quotes or proverbs after a while, so instead I took poems by a German humorist, for example the one about why the lemons turned sour. From what I read, that's not something many children did.

You usually wrote on the right page and the left page got some kind of picture.
Very popular were "Glanzbilder", literally "glossy pictures" (in English "die cuts" or "scraps"), of kittens, puppies, birds, flower bouquets (sometimes in baskets), angels, even better (and more expensive) if they had glitter. You can still get these today, by the way. When we did a kind of "Poesiealbum" for a retiring colleague, I got some for the nostalgic feeling.

My godmother put a pressed flower in my album, safely covered with adhesive foil.
There were also a lot of drawings, though. Or a mix of glossy and hand drawn pictures. I used to do bad illustrations myself to go with the poems chosen by me, for example lemons with stick legs.

When I look at album pages others share, they all look so familiar to me.
We still had lessons for "Schönschrift" = "beautiful writing" in our early school years - I never got a 1, which was our best mark, no matter how hard I tried - and of course that was expected from us to apply in the albums as well.
Therefore, a lot of those pages could be right out of my own album, down to the embellishments, the dog-ears hiding "secret" little messages, the pencil lines to make sure all lines were straight (sometimes erased afterwards, sometimes not, sometimes badly) - and the typos!
Of course we wrote with fountain pens back then and every, now and then see letters erased with what was called "ink killer" for example (and which came back again after a certain time) or are crossed out.
If you had a "Poesiealbum", you had to live with all of that because you had absolutely no influence on what the others wrote, how beautifully they wrote or not or how messy it got.

I had almost forgotten about this kind of pencil "rubbings"!

My album is quite messy which isn't entirely the others' fault.
I had reserved a spot for my mother and one of the coveted glossy pictures. A classmate thought it was meant for use and glued it in. I ripped it back out which of course looked ugly, so I glued the pages together.

Those who have been following me for a while know about my difficult relationship with glue ... yes, it looked terrible and also I felt really guilty for hiding my classmate's inscription that way. Brigitte, I'm so sorry, I was only 6 and overcome by emotion when I did that.
By the way ... my mother never got around to actually write into my album although I had found a note with a draft once (I knew she didn't want to because she didn't like her own handwriting), so all of that had been for nothing.

I'm always amazed how beautiful and clean older albums look, stunning handwriting, sometimes with drawings, really pretty.

Picture via pxhere

Interesting is also that there are actually books like that in 19th century US America, probably introduced by German or Dutch immigrants.
They didn't catch on, though, and were replaced by the more popular yearbooks.

The "Poesiealbum" finally got a successor, the so-called "Freundschaftsbuch" or "Freundebuch" = "friendship book" or "friend book" which is funny because that's what the old Latin name means.
It doesn't take us back to those old times, though.
The "Freundschaftsbuch" looks like a lot like a collection of questionnaires with pre-printed categories - name, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on. I'm not a fan, so I'm not even going to say more about it.

Of course I still haven't given up hope that I'll find my album soon, then I will share some of it (not the glued pages!) in an extra post. As we like to say, "the houses loses nothing", it must be here somewhere!


Sources:

1. Werner Wilhelm Schnabel: Das Album Amicorum. In: Album : Organisationsform narrativer Kohärenz, ed. by Anke Kramer and Annegret Pelz. Göttingen : Wallstein Verlag, 2013, pages 213 - 285 (in German)
2. Antje Petty: "Dies schrieb Dir zur Erinnerung ..." From Album Amicorum to Autograph Book. On: Max-Kade-Institute for German-American Studies. University of Wisconsin-Madison
3. Stefanie Bock: Das Poesiealbum: Eine evangelische Erfindung. On: indeon, August 16, 2022 (in German)
4. Peg Frizzell: My Cherished Poesie Album. On: FanningSparks