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Getting rid of the evidence
Germany is green, and recycling big-time, but a problems for us is that the recycling facilities are off the main town square, adjacent to flash shops and the longest bar in the world. This means carting a granny-shopping-trundler (a humiliation in itself), overflowing with empty bottles, through the streets to get rid of the evidence of Christmas day. The loud and unmistakable clanking of empty bottles over cobbled streets leaves no doubt of the content of what could have otherwise been an innocent looking shopping trundler.
There is little wrong with having a few bottles, but this is like trying to get rid, discretely, of a small container load, the remnants of Fleur’s pre-Christmas excursion to the exclusive champagne houses of Reims (to ensure quality) and our trips to the local supermarket for 3 euro bottles of Chianti (to ensure quantity).
The recycling facilities are like elevated shutes set into the pavement, down which you can pop your empties, sorted into green glass, brown and white. Like a magician’s hat, the bottles just keep coming, and I half expect to turn around to be applauded by the local shopkeepers, impressed at how many bottles can be produced from such an innocent looking shopping trundler.
Alongside me are local women in their fabulous furs, each with only a few bottles to dispose of, but we find common ground, engaging in broken Germglaise about into which shute should go the bottles which appear neither distinctly green or brown, but possibly either. One each we conclude and I head home to fill the trundler with the bottles we couldn’t fit in for the first trip.
Only this time, I’ll wait until the dead of night.