Parking the German mentality in an American parking spot

I am in the US for work for two weeks, along with many of my colleagues from around the globe, whom I've known for many years.  I went out with the German contingent last night, and we ended up downtown for dinner.  It's been snowy here in the midwest where Benevolent Company J is located, and while the streets have been plowed, it's remained chilly and the snow hasn't budged much, making parallel parking quite an adventure.

When we saw a decent parking spot near our destination, German Colleague 2 hops out to be able to inform Colleague 1 how far away he is from the other cars.  Colleague 3 and I stayed in the car. 

Colleague 1 probably isn't so great at parallel parking in the best of times, and it was a difficult situation:  a small spot with a big American car, leftover snow/slush, and a relatively busy road, so time pressures to get out of the way.  And therefore he botched it, requiring a second and third attempt, and finally, the back and forth to squeeze into the spot due to turning too quick.

As I stood with Colleage 2 at the curb, Colleague 2 remarked, 'he turned in too hard.' 
I answered, 'Yes, I knew each time he was off, but didn't want to pressure him.'
Colleague 1:  'Ah, but H, you must instruct him!  Else how will he ever learn or improve?'

In that moment I was reminded of living in Germany, and how different it was, and how out of place it seemed in that very moment on a US street. 

More Germany: the Turkish market

A few years ago, I spoke about supermarket shopping in Germany, and mentioned that as a vegetarian, I did a lot of shopping at the two Turkish markets in the tiny town of B. While I was there last week, I took a photo of the only one still existing in B:

Now is such a great time to shop in DE as all the local produce is available, such as tomatoes from DE (rather than Holland!).

Above is the fruit side, and here is the vegetable section:

It was very warm in my corner of Germany last week, it felt more like Spain, so the umbrellas were all up to protect the produce from the sun.

Back from a week in Germany

I had a chance to travel to Germany this week for work. It's been announced that Benevolent company J will be moving from the Tiny town of B, so I brought along my camera this week, to capture some images of where I spent so many years.

First though, the trip out of Stansted (STN). I had heard that Airberlin is pulling out of Stansted and expanding at Gatwick. They have already cut down the Dusseldorf route from 3 times a day to 2, and now the only direct cities from STN are DUS, Stuttgart and Muenster Osnabruck. Back in the day when I first arrived, AB occupied 4 or 5 of these counters with a customer service team on-site and automated check-in machines.

Now, they've moved around the corner where they only have 2 counters that are only staffed when their infrequent flights are running and no automated machines or customer service. Of course, I can always switch to German Wings to Cologne, but Company J has a corporate deal with Airberlin; as well I prefer them anyway so I hope they do not disappear completely from STN as it's my closest airport to my corner of Essex.

In case you're wondering where else you can go from STN, here's a photo I took while waiting for the AB counter to open:

Unfortunately, there are no flights to the US, although they've broken into the Asia with budget airline Air Asia. However, from late October, Air Asia as well pulls out from STN and relocates to Gatwick.

Life in Germany: the Department of Order

A short article about Germany's Ordnungsbehörde, or Department of Order. If you're planning to move to Germany, it's worth a quick read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/you-are-here-germanys-anti-chaos-crusaders.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

I personally never met them, but a few work colleagues in Cologne (both German and not), have mentioned experiences with them, mainly those crossing the street (empty or not) against the light, and for bicyclists going through red lights rather than following the rules of stopping with the cars.

Back from Germany

Posting has been a little lax recently, sorry about that. I had a last minute trip to Germany for work last week. I must admit, the weather could not have been more glorious--decadently spring-like in the Koeln/D'dorf region.

Coming into DE, I can choose between low budget flights to Cologne via German Wings or D'dorf via Air Berlin under benevolent company J's travel policy. I loathe Wings to the very core of my being; I put them into the same category as Ryan Air, mainly because of the lingering memories of when they did not assign seats and I had no desire to join the scrum that involves unassigned plane seating and Germans...as well their 'Happy Snack' concept and charging for luggage just irritates me...so Air Berlin with their assigned seating and one free bag is my choice.

Coming into passport control at D'dorf, I still travel under my DE permanent residency permit. Two years back, I tried to get them to stamp me in, but they refused. Apparently, according to the passport guy, they are not allowed to stamp me as long as the permit is in effect. It is the rules! Ja, ok. So every time since I've just shown the residency page and I've been in 12-15 times and no one blinked twice.

This time, I was in the foreigner queue with a real stickler. I counted 30 EU'ites passing in the EU queue while I was #3 in the Auslander queue. The passport guy was questioning the American in position #1 about what he was doing on this trip to Germany and where he was travelling to onward, and why was he not stamped out of Germany on his last visit (he left from Germany to Belgium by car), and on and on...

The main queue finally ran out of EU people so that guy took person #2, and I got the stickler. I hand him the passport and he scans it and then looks at his screen. I imagine my German travel history now looks questionable at best:
-2003-2009 - a variety of trips in and out, with Germany obviously as a base
-2009 - permanent residency, and then a lot of time out of Germany, once I moved to the UK.

I see him scan and then squint at the screen.
He looks through the passport, page by page, passing all of the expired DE permits and the current UK one.
He looks up at me, and I give him an appropriate German scowl.
He looks once again at the screen.
Apparently he decides that I'm not an easy enough target as he hands back my passport through the slot with a 'Danke schoen'.

At the end of the year I need to renew my passport early in order to be able to get my new UK work permit sticker in Feb 2012 as my pass expires in early 2014 and the new sticker needs the passport to be valid for six months beyond the next permit expiration. So the work permit will go to Feb 2014, therefore the passport needs to be valid until Aug 2014, else they will limit the work permit and charge exorbitant fees to extend it again. My cheapest option is to renew my passport early and not be limited by the UK then.

As a result, as of Nov of this year, I will lose my free access into Germany, until I can claim UK citizenship in Feb 2014, right after getting permanent residency here (assuming that all laws remain as they all now.)

How much do I dread that gap year of 2013 and travelling to DE??

The plastic bag vending machine at Stansted

Forgot your plastic ziploc bag for your carry-on liquids? No problem, for 1 GBP you can get one from the vending machine in Stansted.

• Kinda clever to use a design similar to a kiddie gumbal machine, like the ones you often see that cost two quarters in the US or 1 GBP here.
• Kinda highway robbery, 1 GBP (1.20 EUR/1.58 USD), for a plastic baggy. Especially so, when you consider that more often than not I've forgotten to put an item or two, such as my eyedrops, contacts, or blistex into the separate plastic baggy, and I've never been called out on it.

When I was in Germany last month, they didn't even bother to ask people to show their plastic bags or to separate out their liquids from their hand-luggage. Everything went through the x-ray in Frankfurt and the very serious Germans took a long time to look at my backpack on the screen.

Herr X had something identified on the screen and Frau Y asked if she could search my bag. However, my bag has many zippers and she was not finding what she wanted, so I peered over to see what they spotted. In my 'school' section, I carry a small metal pencil sharpener, it is encased in a metal capsule to catch the shavings. I pulled it out.

Ach so! says Frau Y, and holds it up for Herr X.

Herr X: Ach so! Eine kosmetisch yadda yadda.

Yes--my 'cosmetic pencil sharpener' and I have spent over two days here, that was long enough, thank you.

And they didn't give a rat's behind about all my liquids like my hand sanitizer, eyedrops, contacts etc. rolling around in the various pockets, sans plastic bag. But all that brainpower was working hard to confirm that my pencil sharpener was authorized to travel internationally to the US.

Thoughts on Berlin and the German language

Visiting Berlin is always an odd experience for me; I wonder if I had lived in Berlin rather than on the Western side, would I have liked DE more? Visiting there, I see a few things that I find to be universal to DE--old men picking plastic bottles from the garbage bins, students trying to hustle a place on someone's weekend group travel ticket, and the same chains like Rossmans, etc.

The part that always baffles me...when I go to Berlin (and anywhere else in DE) I attempt to live the culture and rough it out in German. In Cologne (near where I was), the constant irritation was that people would switch to poor English, even when my German was passable. I ended up in plently of conversations where the German person was speaking to me in passable English and I was responding in passable German. Back and forth we went, German/English/German/English.

In Berlin, no one ever switches to English with me, we carry on in German. In some ways, this slightly baffles me, as a major city where they get plently of English visitors and obviously English skills are there, why they don't automatically switch over like they do in Koeln.

One theory: my crappy German is an unfamiliar blend in Berlin. In Koeln there are certain words, phrases, and styles of speaking, and a local can pick out an English speaker after very few words. So there is less hesitation to convert to English, because one knows quite clearly that someone is an English speaker.

A colleague had once mentioned to me that it was clear that I had my 'German education' in the Koeln/D'dorf region, just from the words and sentence constructions and speaking style that I used...

A second theory: Another (Cologne based) German colleague had mentioned--the German mentality is that the best foreign speaker should automatically yield. So if a German speaking English and an American speaking German get together, whoever is the better speaker dictates the language of conversation. Often, the Germans speak better English than the English speakers' German. Therefore, the language conversation should be English in these instances. If a super foreign speaker of German is with the German group, then the conversation flow should be in German.

I was at a business meeting at the Ritz Carlton last week. Since it was the Ritz, I was curious to see how good their English was, so when I needed directions to a DM or Rossmans, I asked in English. I thanked her in German and she answered me in German and then looked at me, as if surprised that she had just slipped into German. Their English is of course, quite good, but it seems very 'school-ish' rather than having any actual expereience.

From Berlin to Brussels

I had the opportunity last week to do a professional related activity (endorsed by work but on my own dime...long story). It involved travels between the UK (Stansted), Berlin, Brussels, and Paris.

Since I was doing this on the cheap, I was doing my best to be clever. After much hemming and hawing, I couldn't beat 25 EUR (that includes 1 checked bag + all taxes etc) from Berlin Schoenefeld to Brussels (main airport), on EasyJet.

the ugly? Not sure if you can read the time in the top right corner of the photo--it says 06.02. Yeah, 6 AM I was sitting at the gate. The gate closed around 06.30, so my (tired) self was at S'feld at 05.30, having already checked in online before leaving the UK and just needing to deposit the bag. I was in good company though, with plently of other cost conscious folks on that bright and cheery AM:

From standing into the self-checkin, bag-drop (not check-in desk--and be warned, if you stood in the self-check-in line not having checked in, they sent you over to the 'regular' line) then standing through the security check line, it took about 45 min or so--so plan to be early...

If you must travel between Berlin and Brussels, I don't think you can do it any cheaper. Lufthansa has a much more civilised flight running at 11 AM or so--for 400 EUR one way. You can get clever and book a roundtrip (with the (illegal?) intention of not taking the return trip) for 200 EUR.

Your other option is a 7 hour train ride between Berlin and Brussels. When I was pricing, that was running over 100 EUR and taking 7 hours. The negative on that one--it's a transfer after 5 hours-ish in Koeln, so you cannot get a real night of sleep and substitute it for a hotel night to cost justify it.

There is a final option, to take the later EasyJet flight around 1930. It won't be quite as inexpensive as the early AM, but it will be your second cheapest option.

If you take the early AM EasyJet flight, a few options out to S'feld, check here for the latest options. The train takes just under 30 min and starts around 0500, add on a few minutes to walk from the train station to the airport terminal.

Your other option (my preferred) book a room at the InterCityHotel Berlin-Brandenburg Airport. IF you book in advance, you should find a room around 50 EUR on hrs or expedia or on their own website. You can take the train out on the night before and then take the 10-15 min walk over to the terminal in the morning. Breakfast at the hotel is 12 EUR and it was too early anyway so I skipped it. Internet is charged at some exhorbitant fee so I skipped that too.

There are some superb walking paths if you walk toward 'old S'feld' (follow signage for the Holiday Inn). You can walk many miles on new paths next to fields, quite nice. In addition, the hotel offers free public transport tickets, so you can come out a day early if you'd like, because you can get back into town with their ticket for no cost, if you don't mind the 30 minute train commute. Recommended would be the regional express train rather than the S-bahn.