Germany: The Myth

Good Day Mates!
When I used to think about Germany, it conjured images of cleanliness, precision, and efficiency. Most of this comes from watching Mercedes-Benz commercials and bad guys in action movies. Unfortunately, the real world version of Germans only keeps the cleanliness characteristic. I am going to give three examples of German inefficiency that I personally encountered over 4 days. These aren't the only examples, but the others would just be redundant.

Item 1: Garbage Cans
This is a result of cleanliness, which I can't really knock too much. Germans consider the bathroom the "dirty place" as my friend in Germany explained. So there is only a garbage can in the bathroom. When my wife and I stayed in hotels, it was a huge pain trying to locate the garbage can in the room. If you blow your nose, obviously you must be in the bathroom so you can toss your tissue away. Not only that, it's baby sized. I don't want to touch it, so trying to open the lid with the foot press and throwing my garbage into the little hole was a challenge. I am just saying that maybe a garbage somewhere in the main area of a room might be nice.

Item 2: Driving
So I had to rent a car. One requirement to driving in Germany was a GPS system. You are constantly changing roads and there didn't seem to be an easily understood pattern to the roads. More importantly, German drivers are very distracting because they drive with a singular purpose: to get to their destination as quickly as possible! The highways do not have speed limits, but I like that! The problem is that they drive with tunnel vision. Here's an example. I wanted to make a left turn into a strip mall type area. I went into the middle turn lane, which is often a left turn for both directions of traffic in Los Angeles. However, this middle lane was not for my traffic direction. The car coming in the opposite drives right up to my front bumper and waves his hands in the air as if I just magically appeared there. If I saw someone in that lane, at the very least I would at least avoid the car. It was like they never saw me. That is the tunnel vision that is inefficient. Put simply, you're not supposed to be there, so you're not there.

Item 3: Queuing Up
This one is my favorite. Ryanair gives great discounts on European flights. One of the drawbacks is that there are no assigned seats and everyone goes on to the plane at the same time, unless you pay extra to go first. In Rome Ciampo airport, my wife and I watched people line up for other flights. Maybe a half hour before flights began boarding, people formed a line to get on board. Once they allowed boarding, the process was a little slow, but orderly. We saw this for flights to Paris, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. Finally, it's about 45 minutes until our flight back to Germany. We got on line for our flight. Suddenly people started coming up, trying to fill gaps of space in the line. There was no order. Imagine a ball with three strings attached to it. This was the line. People were trying to find any angle to cut in front of someone else. We had to use our bags to fend off the trespassers! The guy behind us had the nerve to open up a newspaper and start reading as if he was on a park bench. My back is not a table! My wife was very savvy because she raced to the exit rows once we got on. Ryanair has a rule that only English speakers can sit in the exit rows. Score one for us!

The moral of the story is you can't believe everything you see on TV. Oh, and bring your own garbage cans.

I'm a Living in a Box,
I'm a Living in a Cardboard Box!

Germany: The Food

My Fellow Americans,
I recently visited Germany. I thought it would be good to see how the "other half" lives. Man, Germany is pretty rough. I am sure there are great things about it that I didn't have a chance to see, but I can say that 2 of the four cities I visited in Germany smelled like cow dung. So to extrapolate from that sample, 50% of Germany smells like fertilizer. In my estimation, this doesn't provide a welcoming environment to tourists. In fact, that may explain why their language sounds so harsh. I might be rather angry too if everything I said had a feces aftertaste to it.

Surprisingly, I liked the food. I am normally a vegetarian, but I thought, when in Kirchhellen, do as the Kirchhellenites (Kirchhellenans? Kirchhellen-O-bots? Kirchhellen-Scheiße?) do! I rather liked the schnitzel and sauerkraut I had. The sauerkraut did not have the weird, sourly aftertaste that it has in America, could be the lack of putrid smells near American sauerkraut retailers. I also liked the gelato (ice cream) I had. One bite and my head was spinning! Too much flavor! My American senses couldn't process all those natural ingredients! I had to sit down and take a break from it. Woo doggie!

Feed a cold,
Starve a Fever