Category: Life In Germany

Cars Go Zoom!

On By StevenIn Life In Germany2 Comments

When I got to Germany back in November, I had a ride from the Munich airport to my hotel here in Regensburg. Along the way, though, I got to see the Autobahn for the first time, and I got to see the German countryside for the first time.

Neither was even remotely what I expected.

The countryside was decidedly more rural than I thought it would be. I didn’t realize before coming here just how much agricultural business goes on in Germany. Outside of the main city areas, it’s pretty much all farmland or forest, with the occasional village in between. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense: How else could a country brew this much beer if they weren’t also farming a metric buttload of hops for the brewing process?

This post isn’t about agriculture though, it’s about cars. While I was on the road between Munich and Regensburg, my eyes were practically glued to the window looking at cars and road signs.

Editor’s Note: One of my favorite jokes about German roadways is one that is only really funny to people who don’t speak German natively: “Where the heck is this town called Ausfahrt?” The reason this is funny is because Ausfahrt means “Exit.” I figured that out by the fourth time I saw it, but I’ve since learned that you can get this gag on a t-shirt over at the Army base. Even the Urban Dictionary riffs on this one:

Biggest city in Germany. Almost every Autobahn exit directs to it.
– Damn, I missed the exit.
– Don’t worry. The next one will be to “Ausfahrt” as well.

It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who thinks like that. Then again, I spent more than two months trying to figure out what the “Einbahnstrasse” signs were all pointing to before my friend Jenny explained, without laughing at me too much, that it means “one way street.”

I think I may have seen too many James Bond chase sequences to have a realistic idea of what the Autobahn would look like, though. I expected it to be wide and flat and fast. I didn’t see stretches of the Autobahn that really matched that description until much later, as it turns out. As I hurtled down the Autobahn in the airport liner van on that first day, I watched the cars that were going past us, and the cars we passed. Some things were completely as expected: Lots of BMW and Volkswagen, Mercedes and Audi. Also present, in smaller numbers, were expected vehicles like Fords and Minis, Suzukis and Hondas, Mitsubishis and Toyotas. And one Lamborghini, just to be contrary. I’ve since seen a Tesla Roadster, but that’s not at all common.

There were also some breeds of car that I’d seen in the past in the US, but not recently, like Renault, Fiat, and Peugeot. But there were also a lot of cars that I’ve never seen in the United States. I’ve learned their names now, of course. Citroen. Skoda. Opel. These three are very, very common here. (And some of the new Citroens are just adorable!)

After observing for a while, I noticed something interesting- nobody here has a huge car. Space is at a premium in all things. Parking lots are small. I haven’t seen anything like a Hummer or a Ford Explorer. I’m sure that larger vehicles might be in use on farms, but not in the cities. With gas prices currently running at the equivalent of eight and a half US Dollars per gallon even for the cheap stuff, this isn’t really a surprise. It’s priced per liter here, but after you convert liters to gallons, and Euros to dollars, it’s not cheap. I saw a Pontiac Trans Am purring down the street last week, and I thought I was hallucinating.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building up a little collection of pictures of official vehicles, because they fascinate me. In the US, most of the official vehicles are common American brands, and that’s to be expected. Here, though, there is an entry level Mercedes that looks like it’s roughly the right class to compete with the Honda Fit. In the US, Mercedes is a luxury car. Here, all of the taxis are Mercedes.

The same thing applies to emergency vehicles. Ambulances and fire trucks are pretty much what you’d expect- a van is a van is a van- the smaller emergency vehicles, however, are pretty snazzy looking. the fire department’s smaller vehicle? BMW.

Emergency medical service? This one is an Audi. The 112 inscribed on the side door is because the emergency call number here is 112, not 911 as it is back in the US. This is also a good example of the German language trying to confuse me. Arzt is “doctor.” The vehicle says notarzt. Which means “emergency doctor,” even though my EnglishBrain keeps screaming “but it says it’s NOT a doctor!”

Last, but certaintly not least, are the Polizei. (And bonus, it’s next to a Skoda in traffic, so you can see one of those as well.) Our frendly neighborhood cops drive BMWs accented with green. I’ve been told by several people that the police are shifting gradually over to blue instead of green to match large portions of the rest of the world, but I haven’t seen any blue on the cars or uniforms yet around town. I happen to think these little hatchback polizei cars are pretty good looking, though.

I wanted an Audi before I moved to Germany. I wonder if I’ll still want one as badly when I get back to the US.

Under The Dom

On By StevenIn Life In Germany1 Comment

I’ve put up external pictures of the Dom before.  Here’s one to remind you before I continue with the post.

The Dom, sometimes known as the Regensburger Dom or the Cathedral of St. Peter, is well known as an example of pure German gothic architecture.  It was completed in 1634 except for the towers, which were finished in 1869.   The Dom is so integral to the identity of Regensburg that pretty much all of the touristy stuff (postcards and so forth) show the cathedral spires along with the Stone Bridge.  This town loves the Dom so much that they even made a chocolate version:

In addition, the Dom is the home of the Regensburger Domspatzen, literally “Cathedral Sparrows.”  The Domspatzen is the oldest boy’s choir in the world, founded in 976.  It’s also a boarding school for young boys.  The Domspatzen is quite famous, and has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II.  (Both of those events were in the 1980s though, so it’s obviously not the same kids.)   Here’s a sample performance-

I digress wildly.   The original point I intended for this post is that I finally had a chance a few weekends back to go inside the Dom and look around.  The interior contains a lot of interesting sculpture, an small catacomb, and a pretty huge pipe organ.  It was also considerably colder than the temperature outside-  I’ve been told that it’s always that cold inside the church.   Here are some pictures from that day:

Stop! Gummi Time!

On By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

Those who have known me for a long time know that for most of the last twelve years or so, I used Flintstones chewable vitamins.  I wanted to take a daily multivitamin, but I cant stand the pill form vitamins I’ve tried, and the Chewables seemed like a nice compromise.

(And before you protest that Flintstone’s Chewables are for kids, I will inform you that they are often suggested by doctors for pregnant women who can’t stomach neonatal vitamins without nausea.  If they’re good enough for pregnant women, they’re good enough for me.)

When I got to Germany, I found that it was difficult to easily find the sorts of things that I used to just walk into Walgreen’s for back in the US.  The brands just aren’t always available.    When I ran out of my Flintstone’s, I had to decide what to do about my vitamin intake.  This is what I decided on:  Gummi Bear vitamins.  I eat a few of these every day.  It’s fun.  And tasty.  And it’s theoretically healthy, too.

Please pardon the downtime.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

A quick explanation for why the blog has been down a lot over the last few days.

On Monday, I discovered that my WordPress installation had been hacked again.  I spent a few hours cleaning things up, and then I got really frustrated with the Sisyphean nature of the whole process.  Because of that, I decided to move my site from a self-hosted WordPress installation to WordPress.com servers, so that constant vigilance against hacks and software updates would be Somebody Else’s Problem(tm) for a change.

The annual fees for WordPress.com hosting were, I thought, well worth the one night a month I would gain in not having to clean out my blog’s infection and reset everything.

The last two days during which the blog was completely down were due to a failure in my nameserver change from Dreamhost to WordPress.  This failure is ongoing and Dreamhost support is working on it-  I’m actually using an http cloak to load the WordPress site directly without properly mapping the domain name.  It’s a kludge, but it will at least bring me back up for the time needed to resolve the real problem.

As a nifty bonus though, WordPress.com hosting does a few things natively that it took me several plugins to get working on the self-hosted variety.  Things like the direct connections to Facebook and Twitter to notify of new blog posts.  The only functionality I lose is the LiveJournal crossposting, and I have a different solution for that once this is all sorted out.

The downtime is not the fault of Dreamhost, although their initial communication infuriated me because they misread my question three times.  The downtime is also not the fault of WordPress, although their documentation could be a little bit more clear.  The real fault for the downtime is a combination of my poor understanding of DENIC’s strict rules and an as yet to be determined problem with Dreamhost’s third-party registry vendor, Logic Boxes.  That support request is ongoing.

Technical Note (If you’re bored by the technical stuff, skip this paragraph): DENIC, the registry for .de domain names, has very, very strict rules about things.  It requires that you have a valid zone file on the name servers you want to change to, and this was not clear to me at first.  I realized yesterday, after I discovered an “unexpected RCODE failure” on their nameserver check at http://www.denic.de/en/background/nast.html that I needed the zone on WordPress servers to make this happen.  WordPress is used to this, and they get support requests to create zones manually all the time, so this was a piece of cake to fix once I knew that it was needed.  However, the nameserver change is still not going through because the Dreamhost panel thinks this domain name isn’t registered.

In any case, there may yet be some additional hiccups to the DNS here, but once this is all sorted out I’ll get back to posting about life outside of the command line.