August Break: License Plates

On August 24, 2013August 23, 2013 By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

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

License plates in Europe are kind of fascinating to me. Within the European Union, modern plates (issued after 1994) typically look like the one pictured below, but with a few key differences. They all have the circle of stars that represents the EU, but there’s a letter underneath which represents the source country. This plate is D for Deutschland, naturally. There’s also F for France, A for Austria, I for Italy, and so forth. Plates from Switzerland look different because they aren’t actually EU members; they go their own way.

Here in Germany, the first letter (or grouping of letters) represents the city where the plate was issued. Bigger cities tend to have single character codes, such as B for Berlin, L for Leipzig, M for Munich, and so forth. The R below is for Regensburg. Smaller cities have multi-letter codes. Nearby Schwandorf gets the amusing license code SAD, which leads to all kinds of “sad” plates making me giggle on a daily basis. Immediately after the city code, there are safety inspection and registration stickers, and then some other letters and numbers that are unique to each vehicle.

Do you think I’m a little nuts for being this fascinated by something as mundane as license plate configurations?

Ein Jahr

On November 12, 2012November 12, 2012 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany10 Comments

As of today, I’ve been in Germany for one year of a three year commitment. It’s been a hell of a year. When I posted about being here for four months back in March, I had a few items that I listed as to-do items. Let’s see how I did:

Have basic conversations in German: On a very basic level, I can do this. I can introduce myself, ask where someone is from, and inquire about basic information. I have the vocabulary of a two year old native, but I’ve learned a lot.

File my German taxes from 2011: I did this in late March. In July, the Finance Authority sent me a letter asking for more documentation, and I returned the requested document right away. In October, they finally sent me a followup, and a small refund a few days later. I am now the proud owner of a German Steuernummer (tax ID number.) It only took seven months!

More blogging: I’ve settled into a pattern of posting every Monday. Coming up with ideas for new posts is difficult sometimes, but for the most part I’ve always got something new to say. Sometimes I have a rush of ideas and I post a little bit more frequently, but I post at least one new entry every week, always on Monday mornings. WordPress.com’s scheduled post feature is a tremendous boon for the frequent traveler.

More travel: Holy hell, success! Of the thirteen cities I mentioned back in March, I’ve been to seven of them. This year has been an amazing year for travel. Every new city is logged as a ‘Category’ on this blog. There’s a dropdown on the right-hand column to view entries about them. In 2012, I’ve gone to seven new countries and countless German cities.

Edinburgh, Scotland
London, England (Seeing London has been a goal of mine for more years than I can recall.)
Barcelona, Spain
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Prague, Czech Republic
Vienna, Austria
…and so much of Germany already: Berlin, Bochum, Bruhl, Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Kempten, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, and of course, Regensburg.

Eat Less McDonald’s: Mild failure. It’s still far too easy to slip into McD’s when I’ve been out late or have to eat something after German class. I try my best to keep it to a minimum, but I still eat far too much of this because of the convenience.

Acquire a traditional Bavarian outfit complete with Lederhosen: Yup, I did this.

I originally wanted to list a whole lot of the things that I’ve accomplished this year, but I did that on the Four Months post and again on the Six Months post, so I won’t do that. Here’s a few other highlights that I wanted to mention though:

I Went To WEBMU: WEBMU is the “Whiny Expatriate Blogger MeetUp.” The rules for membership are that you have to live in Germany and blog in English. The people in the group are a heap of fun, and we had a great weekend in Berlin.

I Met Other Bloggers: Expatriate blogging is a very social thing. Between WEBMU and my naturally social nature, I met many other bloggers (and their non-blogging spouses) in person this year. Here’s an incomplete list of them:
Riayn in Hamburg, Heather in Nürnberg, Mandy in Berlin, Sarah in Hamburg, Snooker In Berlin, Ian in Hamburg, CN in Heidelberg, and last but not least, Cliff and Sarah here in Regensburg. (Alex, you’re totally on my “Want to meet this person” list for 2013.)

I Tried A German Theme Park: I went to Phantasialand, a pretty well known German theme park. Living in Florida spoiled me for theme parks, but this was still a lot of fun.

I Listened To A Percussion Show In A Cave: The header on this one is pretty self explanatory. The cave, the Tropfsteinhöhle Schulerloch, is near Kelheim.

I Drank Beer Brewed By Monks: The Weltenburg Abbey is not far away. The dark beer is delicious, the grounds are beautiful, and the boat ride up the Donau river from Kelheim is picturesque. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

I Watched More TV and Movies In German: I have been trying to learn German, and one of the things that helps this is to use German television, radio, and movies. I’m quite fond of watching How I Met Your Mother and Futurama in German. I also watched The Lion King, The Muppets, Men In Black 3, and Ice Age 4 all auf Deutsch. I was even able to clearly follow the plots of all of them, even though I missed quite a few of the verbal jokes.

It’s pretty hard to sum up an entire year in a single post- that’s what the entire Blog has done. It’s mind-bending to think that I’ve been here for a year already, and that I’m a third of the way done with my time here.

I wonder what my next year has waiting for me!

Doc Holiday or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Urlaub*

On June 19, 2012November 15, 2014 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe4 Comments

By the end of July, I’ll have been to Prague, Barcelona, Amsterdam, London, and Edinburgh, all within a four month span. In September I’m visiting Berlin again, and possibly Vienna. I’m also planning on trying to spend two weeks back in the US much later in the year.

I was talking about my copious travel plans with a friend back in the US, and their next question was “How? How do you have that much time off?”

The answer to that question is very simple- Europeans just have more vacation than Americans. Whenever this topic comes up with friends and family, I say more or less the following: Americans may talk a good game about having a proper work-life balance, but Europeans actually do it.

My benefits at Mr. Company** changed significantly when I moved to Germany. I am officially “localized” here, which means that my US benefits ceased and I was brought into the same package of benefits that our European office uses. This means that my 401k got a giant pause button, for example, and my health insurance switched over to a German health insurance plan. It also means that my available vacation time increased quite a bit.

Germany mandates that employees have four working weeks off, minimum. Plus public holidays. For a five day work week, that’s twenty days off plus the holidays, and some employers give more time off than the mandated minimum. In other words, I have significantly more time away from the office here than I did in the US, despite working consistently longer hours.

I keep a list of things that will suck when I leave Germany to return to the US, and having my vacation time revert back to US levels is definitely on that list.

This weekend on Real Time, Bill Maher did a New Rule about this very topic- I’ve included part of the video below. He mentions in the clip that 138 countries mandate the amount of vacation that employees receive. The US is not one of them. Study after study has shown that people who take their vacations come back more focused and more productive, with lower instances of burnout.

And you know what? It’s all completely true. I’ve taken the time off now, and I’m a believer.

Here’s Bill Maher to preach the gospel:

*Urlaub is the German word for vacation or holiday.

**Any reference to my employer on this blog will be said as “Mr. Company.” The opinions expressed in this blog may or may not reflect the views of Mr. Company. Probably they don’t, because Mr. Company is a multinational corporation and is not, strictly speaking, a sentient entity.

Short Post: Living by sun and wind.

On April 25, 2012 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe1 Comment

I’m sifting through my Berlin photos and getting a post ready about that weekend, but it won’t be tonight, so instead, here’s a short post about some of the interesting energy sources I’ve seen since I got here.

When I first got here, I noticed right away the diversity of power sources. Even on my initial drive into town from the airport back in November, I couldn’t help but notice how many little houses and other buildings had solar panels up:

I’ve also seen some gigantic solar farms, which I didn’t know existed here. For example:

On my trips by train since then, I’ve also noticed something that I’ve only ever seen in Canada until now: gigantic, enormous windmills. I’m told that people don’t like these as much because of the noise from them, but they’re fun to watch, and they’re kind of fascinating to me in a Don Quixote sort of way.

Short Post: Spinat!

On March 20, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany

I’ve done several posts on how the food and grocery shopping experiences here are different than what I’m used to, but I’m still constantly finding more. For example, frozen spinach!

In the US, frozen spinach is typically in a pouch that can either be boiled or microwaved. Here, the frozen spinach is actually in frozen cube form. Pictured here is a sleeve with two cubes of frozen spinach. There were four in the box.

This spinach is also microwaveable, but in this case, you just spoon five or six spoonfuls of water over the spinach cube before you microwave, and then cook it for the specified amount of time. The end result is spinach that only requires a little bit of fork-on-greens action to change out of a cube form into something that is more recognizable as a leafy green vegetable. Here they are in their cooked but still cubed state: