Another stereotype confirmed

I've been yelled at for littering (though it had been a while), and I've been harassed by drunks, but I don't think I've ever been yelled at by drunks for littering -- until recently.

It's a complicated story. I was on the bike with Eve on the back, coming home from daycare. She had her prized Montana bear in one hand and an enormous, empty, Gallerie Lafayette shopping bag in the other. (Why, you may ask? Why not? The bag was sitting around daycare, and she grabbed it, and her grip for such things is often like a bulldog's bite.) We had just crossed the street near our apartment and were headed up the sidewalk, when I realized she'd dropped her bear. I stopped, turned my head, and saw a woman stopped on her bike, in the middle of the street, holding the bear and looking puzzled. Cars were coming. I turned to retrieve the bear from the woman, and then Eve dropped the shopping bag. I let it sit, figuring I'd be back this way, but that meanwhile I needed to rescue Montana bear (and, I suppose, the lady on the bike) from iminent flattening.

It was at that point that the drunks started yelling at me. "Hey!" One guy shouted. "Pick up that bag!" I looked at them, a bit stunned. They were the same guys who often sat on the little garden wall, just next door to the liquor store on our corner. They drink beer most afternoons for a few hours and animatedly discuss matters of the day in heavy Berlin accents.

Under the circumstances, I was a bit flustered. All I could say, rather stupidly, I guess, is "it's alright...." That sent one of the drinkers into a tizzy. "What do you mean, 'it's alright?!" I caught about 20% of what he shouted at me, but the gist of it was that I was a presumptuous idiot and better pick up my bag or the consquences would not be pleasant. I rode by them, got the bear, thanked the lady in the street, and, on my way back, rode by them again, at which point they abused me some more with a few incomprehensible or untranslatable or inappropriate to print in this family-friendly-blog curses.

It suddenly occured to me how incredibly civilized "our drunks" are. I've never seen an empty bottle, or even so much as a cigarette butt in front of that liquor store. They drink cheap beer from big bottles, and they're pretty scruffy, but apart from that, and apart from their generally unfailing politeness both to each other and to passersby, you could easily take them for professors from the Freie Universität.