Nothing I know
gives you that glow
like sweet applause …

Or so the Broadway song from the 1970 musical Applause goes. Perhaps that’s true.

But it’s a different kind of glow you see when you get up to see a sunrise in Florida:

Sunrise, April 3, 2013

That photo is really more in keeping with lyrics from another Broadway show tune:

Morning glow fill the earth
Come on shine far all you’re worth …
Lyrics from the song Morning Glow from the musical Pippin

Now, the day before I took the above photo, I took this next photo just after the sunrise had finished:

Chairs at the sunrise

A nice glow as well, if not quite a colorful. (BTW, neither photo has been adjusted for colors, although this one has been adjusted for contrast).

Now, I was standing behind those wooden deck chairs to take the photo, of course. But if I’d been sitting in on one of them, and only using one hand to take the photo, I would have been all set to applaud the sunrise in the proper German-student manner. You see, here in Germany, students signal their approval and appreciation at the end of every class: by rapping with one hand on their desk or tabletop. The same is true for other presentations – if you’re sitting at a desk or have access to a hard surface, you tap on it at the end of the presentation, instead of clapping. It’s not quite one hand clapping — but it usually is just one hand rapping. It happens to Chris at the end of every class at the university here – and it happened in my German class as well, and in some public speaker presentations I’ve been, too.

Now, my mother and her trivia team actually lost points in a match last week when they were asked the question “In which country do students bang on the tables to indicate their approval in class, instead of clapping?” They assumed that answer couldn’t have been “Germany”,  since Chris is teaching at the university here, and I’d never mentioned that particular cultural difference on the blog.

But the answer was, indeed, Germany. Ah well – it’s just  one those things  I hadn’t gotten around to mentioning yet, I guess. Therefore, I’m mentioning it today on the blog, so others won’t lose points in their trivia games. 😉

Also, make a note: if there’s no table surface available to use, Chris and I have both been told that stamping your feet is the thing to do.  However, neither Chris nor I have witnessed that yet. At presentations where people are just sitting in seats and not at a table,  the audience has just used their hands to applaud. That happened on Saturday after my workshop, actually, which was quite nice.

Anyway, I do think the long, flat armrests on those deck chair would have been suitably big enough to use to signal satisfaction with that sunrise by tapping lightly but firmly with the knuckles of one hand.

Now, I promised my mother I’d blog about the applause/rapping topic on the blog if I could figure out a way to work it into a post this week. But mentally I had planned to talk just about things from our travels, and not about German culture per se.  But,  after careful consideration on my part, in this one post we did wind up with

• Photos from our Florida trip
• German student-life traditions
• Culture practices in Germany in general
• Not one but two of my crazy Broadway show tune references.

But that’s all in a day’s blogging.

Please, no applause. 😉

******

P.S. I actually did a “photo-based-art” variation of that second photo when I was fiddling on my computer today. The changes I did make it look like there’s land off in the distance, but it’s all an illusion – there was nothing but ocean for miles.  Odd.

Chairs at the sunrise – filters applied