One of the more amusing customs I’ve seen since I moved to Germany is the usage of the word Mahlzeit. Loosely translated, the word means “meal time,” but it’s used in a few different ways. Some people use it as a greeting even away from food, but I haven’t seen that as much.
The most common usage, and the one that I see every day, is that when someone goes to eat lunch, most people who see them say ‘malhzeit.’ This seems to happen any time in the afternoon, and I’ve seen references that say that any meal after about 11am but before late afternoon qualifies. Once you get to early evening, it shifts to guten abend.
The first time I ran across this, I was mildly incredulous. When you leave the office to get some food, it’s not uncommon for everyone in the room to say mahlzeit to me. The person leaving is supposed to say mahlzeit as well. When someone else is leaving, everyone says mahlzeit to them. When you’re already sitting and eating, people who wander into the kitchen to get coffee also reflexively say mahlzeit. I’ve had days where four or five people have walked by and said mahlzeit in a row- the desire for privacy is actually a pretty good incentive to leave the office for lunch.
Some, just to be contrary, say ‘guten appetit.’ I always want to say “marsite,’ which sounds similar enough that most people wouldn’t notice, but references pool decking instead.
I’ve always wanted to see Europe. Lots and lots of Europe. Up until I moved to Germany, however, I had never actually been to Europe. When I was given the chance to work in Germany for Mr. Company, one of the biggest draws was that I would be here for a long period of time- exploring Europe from Europe is a great deal simpler than trying to do it in a series of shorter trips from the US.
To add to my wonderment, Regensburg sits on a major rail line. The Regensburg Bahnhof is a five minute walk from my apartment. From there, I can be to Munich in just under 90 minutes. In five hours I can be to Vienna, Salzburg, or Prague. In less than seven hours, I can reach Berlin or Zurich. In eight hours, I can reach Amsterdam, Budapest, or Paris. If I have ten or twelve hours, I can reach Venice, Rome, or London. That’s just rail- if I take a 75 minute train to Munich, I can hop a flight to just about anywhere in no time at all.
I just got my BahnCard, too. The BahnCard system is a wonderful boost to someone like me. For a yearly fee up front, you get a percentage of all of your rail travel discounted within Germany. The BahnCard 25 is less than sixty Euros up front, and is 25% off your rail for that year. The BahnCard 50, which I purchased, is 240 Euros per year, but it provides a 50% discount. I’ve already made back 20% of the expense, and I just got the card last week. There’s also a BahnCard 100, which is an obscene amount of money up front, but BC100 holders do not pay anything additional for their German rail travel for that year. It’s the Black Card of the EuroRail system, literally- it’s actually a black card. Regular BahnCards arrive in a flat white envelope, but the BC100 arrives in a presentation box, pictured below. (And shamelessly stolen from http://blog.mahrko.de/.)
To add to the seven layer burrito of awesome that is the BahnCard, RailPlus is automatically granted on every BahnCard, which grants 25% off of ticket prices for another 24 countries. From here, I can start planning on little rail trip weekends whenever I feel like it.
This blog is clean of malware. However, that wasn’t the case last night, so if you saw weird behavior when visiting before today, that may be why. And if you see weird behavior moving forward, please leave a comment and let me know! Here’s what happened:
Last night, while I was preparing the bus post, I noticed that sometimes when I went to the main site, I would get redirected to some spammy rr.nu domain. I thought it was a fluke the first time it happened, but then it happened two more times. Around this time, one of my friends was encountering Google warning them away from the blog, like so:
It turns out that at some point in the last few days, stevenglassman.de was hit by malware. I believe most of the changes were from February 21st, but it might have been earlier. I’m not certain of the point of entry, but a lot of things needed to be updated, so it might have been as simple as php injection. When I noticed this, I did a reinstall of all the core WordPress files, and I also reinstalled the theme that I’m using. This killed off most of the badness, but I was still seeing spammy rr.nu links at the bottom of every page. In addition, something was generating a .logs directory which contained a list of the spammy links. When I deleted that directory, it came right back.
Ultimately, I did all of the following-
Deleted all of the themes except the one I’m using.
Removed ALL of the plugins except for Akismet (anti-spam) and Jetpack (statistics).
Removed Jetpack and installed it fresh.
Changed my MySQL password.
Changed my web user password.
Changed the blog password.
Disabled FTP for my web user entirely. (I never use it anyway; I rsync or scp files.)
Went through individual files all over the server and pulled out obfuscated base64 code that was designed to cause more mayhem.
Didn’t get a lot of sleep.
By the time all of this was done, the spam link finally stopped appearing at the bottom of every page on the site. The .logs directory stopped being regenerated. I haven’t lost any of my posts, and everything else seems to be intact. However, I’ll be re-setting lots of tiny things over the next week or so, reinstalling Wordbooker and lj-xp (my crossposting plugins), and so forth.
On the plus side, this clean start gives me the opportunity (I choose to call it an opportunity) to work on some design elements of the blog that I’ve been procrastinating.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging about life in Regensburg, Germany.
When I first found out that I would be moving to Germany, I was convinced I would need a car here. One of my co-workers spent a few months here doing pretty much the same job that I’m doing now, and he rented a car for the duration.
The more I researched the area and the more I learned about life in Regensburg, the more I realized that I didn’t want a car here if I could avoid it. While I do have an International Driving Permit, I didn’t want the expense. To own a car here means insurance, a probable car payment, winter tires, fuel with a hefty per-liter price- no gallons here. On top of that, I would need a new set of skills- there are road signs here that I’m not familiar with. The traffic patterns are different. The stop lights are set before the intersection instead of across it, so that’s another thing to get used to.
I could have had my car shipped over here, but that would have cost thousands of dollars for a vehicle that’s already six years old. Her mileage is low, but I don’t know if the cold would have agreed with a car that spent its entire life in Florida.
For those rare occasions that I might need a car for other reasons, there are always options. When I got my bed from Ikea back in November, I rented a van at an hourly rate with which to transport the bed and a co-worker did the driving. If I find a need for a car for a longer journey, there are many car rental places around such as Europcar.
Goodbye, little blue friend.
When I left the country, I handed off my car keys to my brother and gave him instructions to offload the car. I’m going to be here for a few years and it made more sense to sell the car than to try to store it. This week, my car was successfully sold back in Florida. I’m sad to see the Civic go, but it’s better this way. I last drove her on November 11th, the morning that I left the United States.
That’s also the last time that I’ve driven anything though, and for the most part I don’t miss it. For the last three months, I’ve been a regular rider of public transportation. I’ll talk more about the awesomeness that is the German train system in a future post; for now I just want to talk bus riding.
Before I took the bus for the first time, I nearly had an aneurysm trying to read the bus schedule. The way the schedules are formatted is extremely easy to read, but only after someone explains it to you. Without that explanation, it’s easily the most confusing document I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t had a headache already today, go look at http://www.rvv.de/Linie-9-Haltestellenfahrplan-ab-11.12.2011.d1757.pdf. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
In my time here, I feel like I’ve already become a veteran bus rider. I’ve run full-tilt for a bus, only to see it pull away from the curb at the last minute. I’ve been on a bus where someone very close smells like they just ran a marathon through a sewer. Oh, the joys of public transportation.
Those frustrations are small, though, compared to the benefits. The bus system here is excellent and I take that to and from work every weekday. I’ve also learned to find my way around to a number of great specialty stores for home goods and the like. The first time I was on the bus ride home from work and I saw the blue flashing lights of a traffic snarl, I just leaned back, sighed happily, and turned to the next page on my Kindle book.
Each month, I go to an automated machine to get my monthly ticket. I pay a fee of roughly fifty Euros a month for unlimited rides within zones one and two. Zone one is the city center of Regensburg, and zone two contains several of the surrounding towns, including Neutraubling, where the office is located. That’s a small amount of money compared to what I paid back in Florida for gasoline, insurance, and so forth.
There’s several different types of vehicles in use here- some of the more frequented lines like the 1 and the 11 to the University have double-length buses with an accordion thing between the sections. It’s really pretty astonishing. There are certain buses that are red and seem to be affixed to specific lines, and others that are yellow- I’m not sure if there’s a specific reason for that, or if the colors represent anything other than the region the bus travels through.
I’ve also found that the bus lines have their own personalities. It’s hard to describe, but they really do. I even have a favorite bus line, although that might change over time; I’ve only actually been on five or six of the different lines. There are three that will take me to work. There’s one line that runs hourly to Ikea- pretty handy if you want to go eat meatballs on a Saturday afternoon.
I just realized that I wrote an entire post about buses without including a picture of a bus. Here’s one of those nifty double-length accordion buses I was talking about to make up for that.
This picture makes me laugh so much, for one reason:
The presence of the warning sign on the glass partition- “Caution- Glass!” – means that somebody, probably several somebodies, have already walked into it. Heck, I almost walked into it myself, and I saw the sign.
