The blogster noticed it some time ago but didn't feel like mentioning it: lots of Middle Eastern males doing event security in Germany.
While noticeable, it didn't seem eventful until pretty recently.
Back in the costal U.S., event crews are a mixed bunch anyway, consisting of people of all shapes, sizes, ethnic backgrounds, and gender. Over here, you still find 99% white at small local events, but once you get into the cities and the airports, the folks who work as security guards for a living are more of the almost stereotypical mix of minimum wage workers.
In this regard, New Year's Eve (NYE) 2016 in the city was a blast. Venturing out of the mountain compound into the big city on NYE makes for some of the easiest driving you will ever have in Germany. If there is no snow or ice - which there was not this year.
The country roads are deserted, the freeways have traffic so sparse that you can even use the high beams. With a stereotypically sober blogster driving, early champagne en route was part of the entertainment offered in the vehicle.
The city public transport agency was proudly running buses and trains all night.
But in typical German fashion, nobody published the schedules and the routes in an easy to find location on that German internet thing.
So, the blogster ventured downtown with the vehicle. The few other cars out there drove so cautiously, you could have thought you are in Utah. Finding parking was so easy that a confused blogster scouted the vicinity of the parking area for some well-hidden but rigorously enforced signs that forbade parking on NYE.
On a normal night, the sight of a pedestrian shining a flashlight up and down the street could well have alarmed German residents. But they were either already out celebrating or tipsy at home.
With parking done, we made our way on foot into the depth of a German inner city, into the heart of the pedestrian zone.
Bars and restaurants along the way were filled with German couples and groups of people dining and drinking. Groups of people were crisscrossing the pedestrian zone, and a bored traffic warden was happy to explain how to get to the main event on a downtown square: turn left, follow the street, and in about 300 meters, you'll see the security fence and lots of people.
And he was right.
Standing in a short, kind of clustery line, the blogster looked at the security folks. All of them Middle Eastern, likely the children of Turkish immigrants. The website had announced that no fireworks were allowed in the square, and that visitors would be checked for fireworks.
Yes, you read that right: fireworks.
No mention of guns, knives, glass bottles.
Males got a pat down. Women's purses were inspected.
That was it.
The blogster, of course, started to wonder: Are any of the Germans going through Middle Eastern security voters of the "populist right" AfD? Or even closet neo-Nazis? How much outrage could one generate with a photo of an all Middle Eastern security crew patting down middle aged or elderly Germans who just want to get into a German square and celebrate a German New Year's Eve?
But everybody was nice. Just nice.
The only harsher sounding words were between the Middle Eastern crew chief and one of the Middle Eastern patters downers in a language the blogster did not understand.
Once inside, there was music, there was fun, there was dancing - under the artificial lights.
The music on offer consisted of some really old German hits and lots of American music. Which the band obviously preferred because their energy level went way up when they launched into, say, a super long rendition of Sweet Home Alabama.
Shortly before midnight, we ventured out of the safe space to a park where fireworks would be happening. By then, attempting a conversation with a few of the security guards had shown that several didn't speak German, so, yes, they were probably recent refugees from Syria, Iraq, or somewhere near there. One woman seems to have been a native.
There were a couple of thousand or so people in the park, and they were packing all sorts of fireworks in quantities that would drive officials in American fireworks-free zones crazy.
Continuing with some brazen racial profiling, the blogster determined there were dozens of nationalities there. Some with booze, some without. But most with fireworks or at least sparklers for the not so noisy ones.
The first rockets started going up about twenty to midnight. And around midnight: pandemonium, smoke, and laughter.
Not s single policeman, no city workers.
Just several thousand people setting off explosives and having fun.
A group of head scarf wearing middle aged women was experimenting with small firecrackers, and they had so much fun that the blogster stopped and watched a bit.
The quality of the fireworks is not far from professional, at least as good as the official Irish Paddy's Day ones - sorry Dublin.
Fast forward a day to the gnome.
The gnome is in a small German village up in our hills. It was a small terracotta statue in someone's front yard, with a small body and a huge head. The head was shattered into small pieces, the trunk lay on its side.
Quick on-the-spot forensics revealed the presence of "big bang" cardboard wrapper pieces.
There are no refugees in that village.
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