Author: Steven

It’s a bad, bad day to be a necktie.

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany4 Comments

Just before the end of January, I was in the grocery store with a friend when we passed an aisle filled with costumes-  the exact same sorts of costume gear that you would normally see in a Target or a Walgreens just before Halloween.  Naturally, I asked what the deal was.

It turns out that there’s another holiday here that involves dressing up.  It’s called Fasching, and it’s this month.  Fasching is Carnival, a.k.a. the local version of Mardi Gras, and it happens roughly seven weeks before Easter.  It spans several different days, with a variety of different events.

The Thursday before Ash Wednesday is known as “Weiberfastnacht”, or “Women’s carnival night”. On this day tradition dictates that women are allowed to cut off the tie of any man within reach.    The women are also allowed to kiss any man they like, according to some versions of tradition.  (Not one to waste an opportunity, I bought four cheap neckties.  And some ChapStick.)

The following Monday is known as Rosenmontag (Rose Monday). On Rosenmontag there are various street processions involving lots of costumes and carnival floats. Faschingsdienstag (Carnival Tuesday) is the last day of Fasching and when most of the festivities happen. Faschingsdienstag is not an official public holiday in Bavaria, but it’s still celebrated.

The traditional food of Carnival season is Krapfen, or donuts.  They’re available in every bakery, in all sorts of different flavors.  I’ve heard of varieties containing sweets such as vanilla, marmelade, or chocolate.

According to legend, it used to be customary to choose a man  to be the “sacred king” of the tribe for a year. The method of choosing the sacred king was the King’s Cake. A coin or bean would be placed in the cake before baking and whoever got the slice with the coin was the chosen one.  Another version of the King’s Cake story says that it’s just a king for a day scenario.  I haven’t found any reference works that I trust to be completely authoritative so far, but I’ve seen  numerous references indicating that the King’s Cake idea has evolved into the donuts that we’re familiar with today.

My favorite part of this, so far,is the costumes though.  So far today, I’ve only seen three people dressed in costume so far, and two of them worked in the bakery where I get my morning pretzel.  I’ve also seen posters for Kinder-Fasching, which is basically for the kids. (Kinder = children.)  I suspect I’ll see a bunch more costumes after work, but I expect to see more when I go out this evening for my usual bi-weekly Stammtisch.  The word doesn’t translate easily to English, but a stammtisch is just a meeting group. This particular stammtisch is the Regensburg English Stammtisch, which is a group that meets every other Thursday to drink and chat in English.  I try not to miss it because it’s a heap of fun.

Naturally, I’ll have another tie on for that part of my evening.

Grocery Shopping Revisited: Two more things.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany3 Comments

I mentioned in my first grocery store post back in December that I would probably never use the shopping carts here because I can only buy what I can carry home.  That’s not always true, though-  I have friends and co-workers with cars, and I’ve had the opportunity to push one of these four wheeled chaos engines through the grocery store.  The verdict:  I have no idea how anyone can keep these things going straight.  I usually wind up pushing it vaguely sideways.

There’s much more to them than I realized at first, though.  Since I wasn’t planning on using them, I didn’t look very closely.  I did notice that there was never a stray cart in a random place in the parking lot though, and now I know why: They’re chained together.  In order to release a cart, you have to either use a one Euro coin or a plastic disk that you’ve paid for.  This is a pretty ingenious way to make sure that carts find their way back to the right place.

There will probably be a post some time in the near future about how Germans deal with waste, trash, and recycling.  The garbage sorting is pretty impressive, and I don’t think I can remember a time in my life that I have been more aware of how much (or how little) trash I produce.   One of the coolest examples of this is the bottle return system.

I also have a tremendous fascination for the bottle return.  I was not aware of this process when I did the first grocery post back in December, but many plastic drink bottles (and some glass bottles) have a pfandflasche, or bottle deposit.  When they do, you’ll see a little decal on them with a curved arrow to suggest returning the bottles.  At the Kaufland, my usual grocery stop, there’s a guy who takes the bottles.  In the Globus and Aldi locations, however, there’s a machine that will take the bottle in, spin it to see the label,  scan it, and crunch it up.  (This has led to an astounding number of “crunch crunch crunch” jokes.)  I love feeding these machines. When you’re finished, they’ll give you a receipt for the amount of credit you get back, which you then have to take to a cash register to get back.

So far, I’ve managed to lose at least two of these receipts before reaching the cash out register.

I would have gotten a good (centi)grade on this topic.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany7 Comments

One of the things that has taken some getting used to while living in Germany has been the adjustment of various types of measurements.

Twenty-four hour time is more common here than AM and PM.  Soon after my arrival,  I bought an alarm clock without realizing that the alarm clock is permanently, immutably set to twenty-four hour time.  I still have a panicked moment every time the clock reads 0:01 where I think there might be a bomb counting down.

I still haven’t got the hang of weights and distances.  Air Berlin’s website refers to their baggage allowances in kilograms, instead of pounds.   I learned the metric system in school, but I never really had to use it until I got here.  Distance is meters and kilometers instead of feet, yards, miles.   My furniture is all measured in centimeters!

One of the things that I brought with me was my grandfather’s old fifty foot measuring tape.  I was saddened to realize that it’s useless to me here because it’s was all in inches and feet and has no centimeters or meters.  I sent it to my brother for safe-keeping and put a measuring tape on my shopping list.

For the last week or so, the temperatures have remained below freezing.  For this life-long Florida resident, this is a very new experience.  I now know that these two temperatures are identical:

The one  on the left is 0 Fahrenheit.  The one on the right is negative 18 Celsius.   (Technically, 0F is -17.7777778C, but let’s not quibble over .0000002 degrees.)

I’ve had to mentally map certain temperatures to one another.  For example, 32F=0C.  That one’s easy to remember, since it’s the freezing point of water.  Below 0C means snow instead of rain.  Or sometimes if it’s really close to 0, rainflakes-  snow that becomes water as soon as it touches the ground.  -11C and 11F are also a nearly identical temperature.

When I started to write this post, it wasn’t intended to be about measurements or weights or distances, it was about what happens when the temperature drops below freezing for a sustained amount of time.   This stuff gets everywhere:

That schmutz you see on the floor of the bus?  It’s s a combination of streusand, streusalz, and mud.  Streusalz is the salt they put down on the roads and sidewalks to keep the snow down on major pathways, and streusand is a sort of gritty gravel that they put down to lend more texture to snow and ice so that you have more grip.

So now people walk around in the snow and salt and grit, and it tracks everywhere.  Spend five minutes on the bus and all the snow on your shoes will melt down into this gritty nasty mud that you see in the photograph.  The gravel is all over the carpet under my desk at work.  It’s also tracked into my front hall at home.   The floors of the train station are horribly nasty right now.  All of my shoes have little tiny stones in their tread.

Honestly, I’m looking forward to warmer weather just so I can keep my floors clean.

Down To Kempten

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany4 Comments

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I took some time off work for my first solo overnight out-of-town journey by train since arriving in Germany.

It’s been pretty cold for the last few days, with the temperature staying well below freezing.  This has the benefit of giving us more sunlight, though, so the train ride was populated by views like these-  fields of snow, blue skies, and the occasional road or small town.  I love the blue skies though-

Near the end of the trip, I was further south, near the Austrian border, and in the Alps-  much more snow, more white, and more trees covered in white.    At the start of the trip, however,  there was a lot of green in the distance, as in this photo.

So much snow…

At the midway point, I had to change trains in the Munich Bahnhof, which is the central train station for the city.  The Munich Bahnhof is, to date, the coolest thing I have seen in Germany.    When I was walking between my trains, I saw all the trains lined up at their platforms and I couldn’t help but think that this place reminded me of spacedock from the Star Trek movies.

The stopover in Munich also gave me a chance to get a fresh butterbreze, or buttered pretzel.  I am addicted to butterbreze- they’re my crack.  One more train ride and I was in the little town of Kempten, down south.  My purpose for the trip was a concert, but first I had to get to my hotel near the concert venue.  Both locations were a little bit more than a kilometer away from the train station, so I went on foot.  This allowed me the opportunity to laugh heartily at this store:

Apparently, the idea of “US Streetwear” here is synonymous with gangster rap- it was sneakers, sweats, giant hats, and gold bling.    The entire store was unintentionally hilarious.

My hotel was roughly 150 or so meters from the concert venue, and both were across the street from a shopping mall-  this gave me the opportunity to get some food before the show and to people-watch, which is always fun.    The hotel, The Hotel Am Forum, is a nice place with a very friendly staff.  When they saw me struggling with the German, they immediately switched to very good English.  The rooms were clean and well maintained, and the hotel had a nifty floor structure-  you go up a spiral staircase to get to your room:

But all of this is set-up for the reason I went to Kempten in the first place.  I was there to attend a VNV Nation concert at The bigBOX Allgäu.  I was originally not sure why they chose Kempten instead of, say, Munich for the show.  However, the bigBOX turned out to be a pretty excellent concert venue.  The bigBOX has an upstairs for super huge events, and a downstairs area for smaller shows like this one.

When I got to the bigBOX, a question I didn’t even know I had was answered right away-  what do a few hundred concert-goers do with their coats during the show?  In restaurants here, it’s not uncommon to have coat racks or hooks near your table for you to hang up your coat while you dine.  In a place like the bigBox?  There’s a garderobe (wardrobe) with an attendant-  for one Euro, they will hold your coat and give you a numbered chit to retrieve it after the show.  This is a brilliant and elegant solution-  I had assumed I’d just have to hold onto my coat for the entire show, and I’m glad I was wrong.

I’ll conclude this post with three pictures from the show.  VNV Nation puts on a great live show.  They truly enjoy playing for their fans, and it shows.  I’ve seen them about half a dozen times, but all the other shows  were in Florida. This is more or less what they look like.