House Shoes

So, here we are then my little Ausländer. Your first day as an aspiring German. You’ll have woken up in your bed, probably because it’s gotten light outside and you don’t have curtains, because curtains are evil and suggest you have something to hide.

Now, you’ll need to carefully make up your half of the bed (you should be sleeping in a double bed made up of two single mattresses and two single duvets). What it lacks in nocturnal romance, it more than makes up for in practicality, the most prized of German possessions.

Now, careful! Don’t step off of the Bettvorleger yet, there is a very high chance that the floors will be ever so slightly colder than you expect! So cold you may go into some kind of morning shock. That’s why you need house shoes! They are requirements of Germanism.

 

I would like to be able to tell you why Germans are so in love with their house shoes, I’ve asked several but still have no definitive answer. Not because they’ve not told me, but because the answer is so incredibly unromantic, so sensible, practical and boring that my happy little barefoot brain has no idea where to store information of that nature and so just gives up committing it to memory.