Category: Life In Germany

Like a shark.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany5 Comments

I’ve heard it said that the first person you meet when you go abroad is yourself. I’ve found this to be kind of true for myself. I’ve learned some things about myself that are no surprise at all, but some of my epiphanies are… not what I expected. Here’s a few of them:

I learned that music keeps me sane.

I already knew this to a point- I knew that music is hugely important to me. I have a freakishly diverse taste in music and most of my friends will agree that if the tv is off and I’m awake, I pretty much always have music running.

What I didn’t really grasp fully was that without music, I get cranky. Really cranky. When my mood is very very high, it can settle me down. If my mood is very very low, it can bring me up.

I’ve commented before that music is often the impetus for a new trip for me, so it serves to keep me exploring as well. Between now and the end of the year, there are four concert trips on my calendar, with another two on my “thinking about going” list.

I’ve learned that I’m pretty relaxed about public transportation.

I haven’t driven a car since last November, and I’m pretty ok with that. I’ve really enjoyed the planes, trains, and bus rides that have made up my experiences in Europe. Even when I’ve gotten turned around, misdirected, delayed, and mildly lost, I’ve kind of had fun.

In addition to that, I really love riding on the rail system here. I’ve been on ICE trains hurtling along at speeds upwards of 250 kilometers per hour- it’s fast, quiet, and very comfortable. There are power outlets on the train, so I can watch a movie or read or listen to music without worrying that I’ll run out of battery before I reach my destination. Most of the trains even have a little cafe/restaurant car called a Bordbistro where I can get a drink, a snack, or a full meal. And best of all, there are no flight attendants telling me that I can’t get up to use the restroom when we’re leaving the station.

Trains are good.

I learned to spot more things that give me headaches.

I’ve had headaches at a mild migraine level for as long as I can remember. I’m always looking for new triggers because having headaches this often sucks royally. I knew that McDonald’s french fries are typically a trigger for me. I think it’s the high sodium, but I’m not positive of that because other french fries don’t necessarily affect me the same way. I learned very recently that Currywurst has the same effect on me as McDonald’s french fries- a near instantaneous spike-in-the-eye-socket of a headache. I’ve also had headaches triggered by the weather patterns that come off the Alps, but I’m not sure whether it’s low pressure or high pressure or both that does it. Speaking of pressure, I’ve learned that any ICE train ride of more than about three hours will trigger a massive headache that makes me useless for most of the rest of the day.

I’ve learned that I’m a pretty adventurous eater… to a point.

When I was in Hong Kong a few years ago, I tried Fugu (blowfish), kangaroo meat, jellyfish, and Thousand Year Egg. None of them bothered me in the slighest, but as soon they brought out the duck with the head and neck still attached, I got pretty squicked out.

On a recent trip to Berlin, I tried the Pferdfleisch pizza. That’s horse meat. It was a little like salty bacon, to be honest- it’s not a flavor I would seek out, but it wasn’t bad. Two days before the horse meat pizza, however, I was at Dult with Jenny and Robert for dinner. Robert purchased a cooked and breaded fish for his dinner, but the thing was still mostly intact. It had a head, a tail, and a spine. That just grosses me out.

I’ve learned that I have to keep moving.

This was a difficult realization for me. I’ve always felt like I was more or less comfortable in my own skin, but then I started to notice certain patterns in my own behavior. If I don’t have very specific plans- somewhere to go, something to do, or someone to see- I tend to isolate myself. My personal inertia can easily keep me stuck in the apartment for a day or an entire weekend. I might be able to peel myself out for an hour or so to get some food, but that’s it. If I don’t have plans, I won’t go anywhere. When I feel like that, I don’t get anything useful done at home either. Homesickness and loneliness can be insidious that way.

I read once that sharks have to keep swimming or they’ll sink to the ocean floor. Without the forward motion to keep water flowing over their gills, some species will even die. That’s kind of how I feel these days, like I need to keep moving or I’ll sink.

I tried to stay put for the month of August, and I made it one weekend before I made plans to leave town again. Two months ago I thought I had locked in all my travel plans through my end-of-the-year US trip, but since that time I’ve added four more small trips, and I’m considering several more.

My friends back home, commenting on the near-constant traveling that I’ve been doing for the last six months, often rave about how awesome my life must be and what an amazing experience I’m having. On paper, they’re absolutely right. Compared to many people, I have a pretty amazing life. Hearing it said just makes me feel worse though. Makes me want to go somewhere else.

Yup, gotta keep moving.

Regensburg’s Greatest Mystery (That I’m Aware Of)

On By StevenIn Life In Germany5 Comments

After I’d been in Regensburg for a month or two, I started to notice certain signs.  I don’t know what precisely they represent or who put them up, and nobody I’ve asked (including the desk clerk at the local tourism office) seems to know.  They look like this.

They’re on historical buildings, storefronts, restaurants, and gates to open green areas. I’ve seen them on hotels, churches, museums, and in one case, on a wall adjacent to a courtyard.

I figured out pretty quickly that the shape in the large square is the outline of the building or park the sign is attached to.   The other shapes are obviously other buildings or parks.  Sometimes, only the right half of the sign appears, but usually they appear like this.

There are different color groupings.  Blue and yellow.  Red and yellow.  Pink and blue. Pink and a sort of sea-foam green.    I think each color grouping is a collection, a set containing one type of landmark, but I don’t know that for certain.

I’ve taken pictures of more than two dozen of them.  I’ve tried dozens of Google searches to find out precisely what they mean, but so far I haven’t found the right combination of search terms to solve the mystery.

I thought for a time that perhaps they were from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre since Regensburg is a World Heritage city, but there’s no mention of them on the UNESCO Website.

In my more frustrated moments, I like to think that they’re actually a dialing address for a Stargate, but I haven’t seen a DHD since I got to Germany.

I probably won’t figure out the mystery of the signs until it’s time to move back to the US.

I blame the heat.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany8 Comments

This week, I made a pretty big mistake.  On Monday, I bought this:

It had been a very warm pair of weeks- at one point, the temperature hit 35 degrees Celsius in the afternoon, which for you Americans is about 95 degrees Fahrenheit.  Since my apartment and my office are both entirely bereft of air conditioning, I was wholly unprepared for this.    One evening last week, it was so warm and sticky that I couldn’t sleep until 2:30 in the morning when a thunderstorm kicked up and started to cool things down slightly.

The portable air conditioner was something that I’d been thinking about on and off for months.  At  just under three hundred Euros, it seemed like a reasonable sacrifice.  I have a fan in the apartment which does great things for making it seem cooler, but it does little to actually cool down the ambient temperature of the apartment.  Plus when you hit the power button, those little shark gill looking flaps in the front open automatically, which is really neat.  I’m a big sucker for “neat!”

Enlisting the help of Jenny and her car, I got the thing on Monday after work.  It took both of us to muscle the thing up into my apartment-  it’s big and awkward so even though I could lift it, carrying it for more than a few feet becomes a logistical impossibility.  Once it’s out of the box, it has nice little wheels to move it from room to room, though.   Once it was unboxed, I set it up in the bedroom, closed the window and the door, and turned it on.  And waited.  Then I waited some more.

After it had been running for about forty minutes, I went into the bedroom to check on it, and I found that two feet directly in front of it were nice and cool, but the rest of the room was pretty much the same temperature.

The reason for this, as anyone who knows air conditioners will tell you, is because I hadn’t put on the exhaust hose and routed the displaced warm air somewhere else.  The exhaust hose that came with this device (not pictured) is wide enough to roll a small honeydew melon through, and this made it difficult to vent the thing properly.  If tried running the exhaust hose out of a doorway first, then a window.  The hose is so wide that in order to vent the hot air, I have to keep the window open so much that it entirely negates the point of having an air conditioner in the first place.   Jenny’s boyfriend Robert suggested duct taping the hose into the window, but that would make it impossible to ever open the window again.

Yesterday, Jenny helped me return the AC to the store. (She’s a very patient friend who is regularly amused by the inability of someone from Florida to cope with the heat.)  I had the thing for less than five days, and by the fourth day, the average temperature had dropped about twenty degrees anyway.   The weather here just isn’t usually all that hot.  I think that’s why this image is so funny:

I think when we hit our hottest days next summer, I’m just going to try putting ice cubes in my underwear or something.

Automation is cool.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany3 Comments

This may be one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

Most train stations have a room with lockers where you can store your luggage for a few hours. Köln’s Bahnhof has a row of automated machines that fill the same role.

It’s coin operated. You select either ten or 24 hours and pay accordingly, then you put your bag in a metal cube and a conveyer belt whisks it away to the underground land of gnomes and cookie dough. When you come back later in the day, you give the machine your magnetic stripe receipt and it retrieves your bag from the Keebler Elves and sends it back to you via conveyer belt.

This is so cool that I may need to lie down.

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This post is trashy.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

Let’s talk about trash.

Back in February, I talked a little bit about Pfandflasche.  The bottle returns are just one tiny piece of the enormous tapestry that is German waste separation. When I moved into my apartment, I was given a garbage pickup schedule for all of 2012 and a roll of green garbage bags, which I’ll explain in a little while.

Here’s a cartoon from The Oatmeal that pretty much sums it up. (Editor’s Note: You should follow that there link to theoatmeal.com; it’s hilariously funny stuff.)

Ok, so maybe it’s not quite as involved as The Oatmeal would have you believe, but it’s pretty close.  Most German households have at least three separate waste bins.  Some have more.

Here’s the sorting bins that I have:

  1. Paper.  Any paper, cardboard, non-glossy packaging materials, receipts, newspapers, and so forth.  This goes into the green bins downstairs for regular pickup.
  2. Packaging Material.  This is anything with the  Grüne Punkt (Green Dot) logo, which is the signifier of packaging that conforms to the rules of the Green Dot system, to comply with the European “Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive – 94/62/EC.”   Manufacturers have to pay for the privilege of using the Green Dot, and they’ve reduced their packaging as a result. The whole system is hugely complicated, but to the consumer, it just means, “Hey, this thing is recyclable.”  This is the stuff that food comes in, mostly, but any consumer item can fit this classification.   Also, there are lots of packaging materials that can be put in this bin, even without the Green Dot.  These items get put into yellow or green plastic bags for separate pickup.  In some places, the yellow and green bags are separate subcategories, but where I live they’re both the same thing.
  3. Everything Else. This is restmüll, the rubbish that doesn’t fit into the other recyclable categories.  This is food waste and other types of household rubbish, and it goes into the grey bins downstairs.  The grey bins are the closest thing to a dumpster that I’ve seen in Germany, and almost everything that goes into them ultimately gets incinerated or placed in a landfill.

While I only have the three categories listed here, some places in Germany have brown bins for “bio” waste- in other words, anything that could be composted.  Some places use blue bins for yet another category.

The pickup schedule is pretty tight- there’s one pickup of the green paper bin each month, and two pickups per month for each of the other categories.    The bins can fill up pretty fast in between pickups.

On top of the garbage categories I mentioned here, and the Pfand that I spoke of, there are also places to drop off glass bottles and jars.  The glass collection points are also subclassified-  there’s individual slots for green, brown, and clear glass.   There are separate dropoff locations for batteries and light bulbs; they go into little bins in local stores that are designated for just that purpose.

This level of trash separation is even present in public places.  For example, these are from train stations:

So what do you do if you have something that falls outside normal day to day household waste?  What if you want to get rid of a mattress.  Or a refrigerator.  Or an old computer.  What then?

Well you go to the Recyclinghof, of course!  A Recyclinghof is a drive through facility with enormous bins for different types of stuff.  Old televisions, computers, mattresses, furniture-  you name it, there’s a category for it.  There is staff on hand to help you sort your stuff into the right bin.   Here’s just a few of the labels.

This stuff is literally hauled away by the truckload.

As you can imagine, this level of trash sorting is somewhat overwhelming for a newly arrived American.  It took me a while to get the hang of it, and I’m still not entirely sure that I’ve got all the details sorted out.

One thing I have noticed though- doing this level of sorting has made me significantly more aware of the waste I produce.  It’s also reduced that waste by an order of magnitude.   Since I moved into my apartment, I probably only generate enough trash to take out once or twice a month, not counting emergency evacuation for stinky food waste.   Back in the US, I was taking out a load or two of garbage per week.   Every week.

That’s quite a difference.