I have been here in Germany for a week now. My body, forced into a day offset by a third from its regular rhythm, has found back into at least a semblance of day and night; that is always a big problem. Maybe the long day of travel to get here, followed by the long and winding road (or rather rail) after I arrived, made sleep, when it was finally possible, such a welcome refuge that day and night slipped rather easily into their respective slots.
Now, life is quiet, and I have relatively few jobs to do. The start of my visit, however, was a bit different ...
It was Saturday, March 17th, 2012. After a night of hardly any sleep – I woke up at 1:30 AM, thinking it must be time to get up soon – trying, mostly in vain, to get back to that state of blissful oblivion I knew I needed to stay alert during the day ahead, the sweetest sound stirred me awake completely. Could this be? It sounded like a robin! Quietly, I got up and gazed out of the small window. The sickle moon shone a faint light on the red tiled roofs of nearby houses, the street lay deserted, nothing stirred, no sound – no sound, that is, but the sweet morning song of the European relative of the robin, the Drossel. I couldn’t see it in the dim pre-dawn light, but there could be no doubt. What a wonderful way to start this day, any day!
A little while later I heard our friends get up, and a bit later yet the inviting smell of freshly brewed coffee wafted up to me, calling me downstairs to get ready for my day at the market.
Our friends Wilfried and Doris have a chicken and potato farm not far from Kassel in northern Hesse, and every Saturday they sell eggs and potatoes at the local farmer’s market. This weekend Wilfried was extremely short of help; he and his 16 year-old son Martin would have been the only ones manning the stall, and that would have made it quite difficult. Thus we made a deal: my help at the farmer’s market in exchange for my use of their car for the next two weeks – mutually satisfactory, we hoped.
I had never sold eggs before in my life – never sold anything but Bingo tickets as a volunteer, in fact - but Wilfried assured me that I would most certainly be able to do the job. It was reassuring to know that he and Martin would be there to ask if there was something I didn’t know.
He had left at about 6:30 already to set up, and Martin and I followed an hour later. An assortment of stalls lined the market place, from honey and other apiary products to breads, fruits and vegetables, meats and sausages, and other tantalizing products. The warm glow of the early morning sun sparkled on the light grey flagstones and the dark green awnings of the stalls, lit up the amazing array of fruits and vegetables across from us, and came to rest on the flats of eggs Wilfried had stacked already.
Martin and I donned green aprons with the inscription Eier + Kartoffeln frisch vom Bauernhof Koch (Eggs + Potatoes, fresh from Koch Farms), I got a quick refresher of the instructions I had received the night before, and we took up our positions, ready for the first customers.
On the table in front of us were stacks of egg flats of thirty eggs each: from my left to my right, there were hardboiled eggs in blue and green, red and yellow, orange and mauve – “Easter eggs” – a desired item at this time of year: they were priced at 25 €-cent each. In front of them the smallest eggs, laid by the young laying hens, were available for only 5 cents each – most certainly the best deal of the day. Next were extra large eggs for 22 cents, large eggs for 20 cents, and medium eggs for 17 cents. To complicate the matter there also were two stacks each for large and medium eggs, one with brown and one with white eggs. Confusing? Maybe not for the well-rested, experienced merchant, but slightly so for me in my sleep deprived state.
Wilfried had prepared a detailed price list for me, printed out and laminated, yet my biggest worry – apart from dropping a whole flat of eggs and making a huge mess – was that I might not multiply correctly and make a grave mistake – or, less serious, make a fool of myself. Coins, too, were on my worry list: they all looked so similar to my dollar-trained eye, one and two Euros, fifty, twenty and ten cents, and fives, twos and ones. They were all neatly sorted into compartments in the till, however, so it turned out to be much less of a problem than I had anticipated. The bank notes – five, ten, twenty, and fifty Euros – are easy enough to distinguish, thankfully.
Well, there was nothing for it: the customers were starting to arrive, and since I now wore my apron it was my responsibility to fulfill their wishes. This was easy enough as long as there was only one kind of eggs they wanted, but often an order would be, “six 22s, ten brown 20s and ten white 20s – oh, and I’d also like six coloured eggs – no, make it five. Not the mauve, that’s so dull – yes, orange and yellow. Oh, maybe one red.” I’d carefully add it all up (boxes of ten eggs being easier than those with six, of course, at least until I got used to it a little more), and name the price, only to find out that they also wanted five pounds of potatoes. Pounds – careful now! Prices on my list were in kilograms, which meant they wanted only half as much as I first thought. By the time I had figured out the price for the potatoes I had forgotten the carefully added-up price for the eggs again.
There were strong preferences concerning colour, brown being the favourite more often than white, and the size, too, was quite important. Strangely enough not too many customers seemed to realize that two of the smallest eggs cost only half as much as one of the large ones. Four eggs for one – how could you beat that? Yet it were mostly Turkish or Eastern European customers with big families who took advantage of this deal; most of the others seemed to think an egg had to have a certain circumference to be ‘right’.
After a while, it became more routine, and I started to relax, even enjoy myself. The sun was shining, it was warm, and everything sang “Spring!” No wonder people were in a good mood. Nearly everybody was friendly, and nobody got upset if I took a bit longer. It’s easy enough to greet people with a friendly smile, after all, and a smile nearly always will generate a smile in response.
I was amazed how quickly the stacks of flats disappeared, how often Martin or Wilfried had to replenish them from the cart behind our backs. While I took the money for the potatoes I was not responsible for weighing and packing them; that made it easier for me, too.
So the morning went by, and since I was kept occupied with a steady though not too thick stream of customers, I had no opportunity to think about jet lag and lack of sleep, and I functioned reasonably well. Around noon, however, about an hour before the end of my stint as a farmer’s market merchant, I suddenly was overcome by a bout of fatigue so powerful that I could have fallen asleep standing upright in my stall. ‘Only one more hour,’ I encouraged my tired brain. Wilfried, who had inquired about my wellbeing from time to time throughout the morning, noticed what was happening and disappeared for a few minutes. He came back with a cup of strong coffee from a nearby cafe, and I soon felt revived enough to make it to closing time.
By the time it was over, I had, without realizing it, mastered much of the art of selling eggs at the farmer’s market in Baunatal – or so I prefer to think. I wonder what Wilfried or Martin would say if someone asked them when I was out of earshot.
Would I do it again? No question! Next time, however, I would prefer to be fully present for the experience ...
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