vier Monate (four months)

On March 11, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany13 Comments

Four months ago today, I boarded a plane in Miami to move to Germany. One third of an entire year has passed. It’s kind of mind boggling to me- the time has passed very quickly. I feel like I’ve been here no time at all. And I simultaneously feel like I’ve been here for so much longer than four months.

Since I arrived, I have:

Survived my first three weeks in a hotel.
Found an apartment.
Learned to bank in Germany.
Successfully navigated German bureacracy with help from my colleague Michael – I have a residence permit, permission to work, and a German tax ID and social security number.
Equipped that apartment with furniture, mostly from Ikea, as well as an Internet connection.
Worked a lot. I don’t really talk about work on this blog, but it’s there. It’s what brought me to Germany in the first place.
Survived my first winter in Germany. My first winter anywhere, really- I lived in Florida for my entire life before this, so snow and ice is very new to me.
Learned to grocery shop in a new country.
Learned a great many food words in German, become fairly adept at reading menus.
Tried an enormous amount of restaurants and bars in Regensburg. (Special thanks to Jenny for being my semi-constant mealtime companion. She has really great taste in food.)
Become a regular at an Irish pub. (I’ve always wanted to be a regular at a pub. Neat!)
Learned to navigate the alttstadt (old town) better than some folks who’ve been here for much longer.
Learned how to use the bus and train systems in Germany. Acquired a Bahncard.
Travelled on my own to a concert in Kempten, near the Alps on the Austrian border.
Travelled to Munich to see an Orchestra perform the entire score to Pirates of the Caribbean.
Travelled two Nuremberg twice, once with a friend and once on my own. (The second trip to Nuremberg will be a coming-soon post.)
Met another American blogger who lives in Germany. (Hi, Heather!)
Met a lot of people from at least eight other countries besides Germany and the US.
Had a Russian girl named Elena drink me under the table. (My Russian ancestry cries every time I can’t keep up. Need more practice.)
Learned and embraced a lot of very German customs and behaviors.
Watched The Lion King and The Muppets in German. Also, lots of Big Bang Theory, Futurama, Star Trek, Family Guy, Simpsons, and How I Met Your Mother in German.
Learned a lot of German- still not enough for a conversation, but that will come in time.
Tried very hard to never fit the “stupid American” stereotype.
Discovered the tasty, tasty addiction that is Butterbreze- buttered pretzels.

…and most importantly:

Met a lot of really great people, and even made some friends.

Things that are still very much on my to-do list:

By the time I’ve been here for one year, I want to have basic conversations in German.
I still need to file my German taxes from 2011. D’oh!
More blogging. Always more blogging.
More travel. I still need to see Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Prague, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, London, Cardiff, Barcelona, Berlin, Heidelberg, Zurich, and many other places that I can’t think of right now.
Less McDonald’s. Having two McD’s within a short walk from here is somewhat lethal- when you’re really hungry and/or tired, it’s too easy to slip in for a burger and fries. It’s especially tempting after a night of drinking at the Murphy’s Law.
Acquire a traditional Bavarian outfit complete with lederhosen. Maybe.

I would have gotten a good (centi)grade on this topic.

On February 10, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany7 Comments

One of the things that has taken some getting used to while living in Germany has been the adjustment of various types of measurements.

Twenty-four hour time is more common here than AM and PM. Soon after my arrival, I bought an alarm clock without realizing that the alarm clock is permanently, immutably set to twenty-four hour time. I still have a panicked moment every time the clock reads 0:01 where I think there might be a bomb counting down.

I still haven’t got the hang of weights and distances. Air Berlin’s website refers to their baggage allowances in kilograms, instead of pounds. I learned the metric system in school, but I never really had to use it until I got here. Distance is meters and kilometers instead of feet, yards, miles. My furniture is all measured in centimeters!

One of the things that I brought with me was my grandfather’s old fifty foot measuring tape. I was saddened to realize that it’s useless to me here because it’s was all in inches and feet and has no centimeters or meters. I sent it to my brother for safe-keeping and put a measuring tape on my shopping list.

For the last week or so, the temperatures have remained below freezing. For this life-long Florida resident, this is a very new experience. I now know that these two temperatures are identical:

The one on the left is 0 Fahrenheit. The one on the right is negative 18 Celsius. (Technically, 0F is -17.7777778C, but let’s not quibble over .0000002 degrees.)

I’ve had to mentally map certain temperatures to one another. For example, 32F=0C. That one’s easy to remember, since it’s the freezing point of water. Below 0C means snow instead of rain. Or sometimes if it’s really close to 0, rainflakes- snow that becomes water as soon as it touches the ground. -11C and 11F are also a nearly identical temperature.

When I started to write this post, it wasn’t intended to be about measurements or weights or distances, it was about what happens when the temperature drops below freezing for a sustained amount of time. This stuff gets everywhere:

That schmutz you see on the floor of the bus? It’s s a combination of streusand, streusalz, and mud. Streusalz is the salt they put down on the roads and sidewalks to keep the snow down on major pathways, and streusand is a sort of gritty gravel that they put down to lend more texture to snow and ice so that you have more grip.

So now people walk around in the snow and salt and grit, and it tracks everywhere. Spend five minutes on the bus and all the snow on your shoes will melt down into this gritty nasty mud that you see in the photograph. The gravel is all over the carpet under my desk at work. It’s also tracked into my front hall at home. The floors of the train station are horribly nasty right now. All of my shoes have little tiny stones in their tread.

Honestly, I’m looking forward to warmer weather just so I can keep my floors clean.

It’s The Little Things

On December 25, 2011May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany5 Comments

I was talking with my sister yesterday via the miracle of inexpensive international calling that is Skype, and I was telling her about some of the smaller differences between Europe and the US, things that are just interesting to me because they’re different. To someone who’s been in Germany for more than a year or two, these are the kind of differences that probably don’t get much notice, but to me, they’re huge and fascinating. Here’s a few of them.Plumbing:

toilet flush — That little button on the right side of the top is the flush control.

Urinals and toilets here are different. Not so different that it’s difficult to use them, but even just the flush mechanism. In the US, there’s typically a handle that pulls up a flapper inside a tank. The mechanics of it may be the same inside the tank, but here the flush button is usually on top for tank styled toilets, and it if you press the button the other way, it will stop the flush. There are also toilets where the tank is set into the wall, and the flush button is a big panel- I haven’t the foggiest idea how that works, but I’ve seen it in several places. Heck, even the stall doors in public restrooms are different here. They’re more private than in the US, and there’s a little occupied/vacant indicator built into the door handle. I think that’s kind of nifty.

Phone jacks:

Phone jacks in the US are a tiny little modular affair, less than half an inch wide. Here’s what they look like here in Germany:

Door knobs:

While interior doors aren’t much different, front doors here have a tendency to have a knob that does not turn. The entire purpose of this knob is just to have something to grip in order to open the door. The actual latch part of the assembly is built right into the keyhole. The lock is different also- the normal setting is locked from outside but not from inside. There’s a keyhole on the inside of the door too, and from either side of the door you can extend the deadbolt halfway with one turn of the key or all the way with a second turn of the key. I had to go through the settings with the door open so that I could see the deadbolt positions before I fully understood the door lock.

Windows:

This is my favorite difference so far, when it comes to normal house stuff. The windows here are just cooler, no pun intended. In the US, windows usually open via an upward or sideways sliding motion, or they can be tilted up with a hand crank. Not so, here. The window handle has three positions. In the downward position, the window is closed. In the horizontal position, you can open the window inward. The third position is the one that made me go “Neat!” – when you flip the handle upward, you can tilt the window in so that it pivots on the bottom two hinges. This gives you ventilation without having the entire house exposed to the rain or wind or snow, not unlike a car sunroof, but done vertically. From left to right, these pictures are closed, open, slanted open:

The best part of the windows here though is that it’s very common for there to be external rolldown shutters on very window. In other words, the windows have built in shutters on the outside of the building that you control from inside. Here’s the shutter on my bedroom window, and the strap mechanism that’s used to roll it up and down: