I’m on an August Break from my regular blogging schedule. Here’s today’s picture.

A big chunk of my limited social life takes place on Thursday nights.  There’s a regular Stammtisch that I attend.  Tisch is German for table, and one of the many meanings of Stamm is regulars.  In other words, Stammtisch is a word which is loosely based on the idea of a table of regulars.  In America, this would just be called a Meetup.

Mine is a bunch of people who meet regulary to drink and socialize, and I’ve made some very dear friends through this group.  Included in the lower half of this photograph are the kick ass Converse boots (and left knee) of Cat, one of the just mentioned dear friends.  This photograph was a happy accident, by the way-  I accidentally start the camera on my phone quite often, and I usually wind up with pictures of my pocket lining, or of artful blurs.  Sometimes the camera records a happy accident, like this kind of nifty shot of a regular Thursday evening Stammtisch.

Thursday nights are also the one night a week that I’m almost always in the Altstadt, which gives me a chance to walk past this view.  It’s easy to get jaded, but this set of buildings is amazing, and I try not to take the scenery for granted.

Have you ever been to a Stammtisch?  How about a Meetup? What kind of group was it?

I’m on an August Break from my regular blogging schedule. Here’s today’s picture.

Submitted without much comment, really.  I haven’t seen any of these movies, but I kind of want to because why not.  Also, it cracks me up that they’re not The Smurfs in German, they’re Die Schlümpfe.

Did you collect Smurfs when you were a kid?

I’m on an August Break from my regular blogging schedule. Here’s today’s pictures.

Drinks in Germany are kind of segregated.  Many offices and even some private homes use a drink delivery service, so it’s not uncommon to see trucks like this on the street:

In larger grocery stores, drinks take up an entire very large section all their own.  There are even special drink stores, called Getränkemarkts.  You can buy entire cases of beer, or individual bottles.

There are many types of water available.  Many Germans prefer their water with carbonation.  I don’t care for it that way.

Despite the tremendous amount of beverages available, there aren’t usually that many kinds of soda around, at least not in the stores I frequent.   Coke is always on hand, though.

One of my favorite parts of the drink market experience is the bottle return machines, or, as I call them, the ‘Crunch Crunch Crunch’ machines.  I’ve spoken before on this blog about the concept of Pfand, which functions as a bottle deposit in this environment.  Basically, you keep your empty bottles and return them to the machine.  The machine has a tiny conveyer belt inside-  it scans the appropriate bar codes on the bottle, then whisks them away to be satisfyingly crunched.  You get a receipt for the bottles you’ve returned and you take that to the cash register.

Do you have any favorite specialty types of stores?