Buy me a hot chocolate! | About Me
date: Thu Jan 9 22:14:27 CET 2025
It seems that after COVID-19 they just don’t care anymore. During COVID the bus drivers (maybe to do with distancing) stopped enforcing (if they did previously at all) the need to have a valid ticket.
Now of course most Germans are law-abiding, rule-following citizens and always have a valid pass or validate their passes when they get onboard. And while I’ve got a Germany-wide bus pass I never see ticket checkers on the busses or see that the bus drivers seem to care to check or enforce it.
So… if a rule or law that isn’t enforced is it is it really a law?
Note: This is not the case on trains. Regional, inter-city, etc., buy or have a valid ticket else you’ll get dinged.
Yup. Most places still prefer cash. Though it’s getting better. It’s good to carry 10-20 euros with you and 5 or so euros in coins as you never know when you might need a toilet that takes only coins or want a shopping cart that takes a 25-cent piece as a deposit to unlock.
The fees on card processing really does hurt folks. Still I, personally, find paying by card or even better with Apple Pay far more enjoyable. I would even pay extra to have this luxury. Pass 100% of the card fees on to me. Have two sets of prices. One for card payers like myself and a cash one. Double the card processing fee and pass 100% of it onto me. I’d still be happy to be able to use a card at that point. Anyway, yes, it’s still very much a cash-is-king place. Again, I do see it easing just slowly.
There was an effort to have a Germany-wide Electronic Cash system (EC, EC Karte), but I think that’s dying. Some places have card readers that only work with these special EC cards and will refuse to process your Mastercard debit card or credit card for example so it’s best to just confirm.
I often ask: “Kann ich mit karte bezahlen?” (Can I pay with card?) And they’ll sometimes say, yes but “ab 10 euro” (Starting at 10 euros) or “EC Karte” and then you’ll know you’ll need cash or to pull out your EC card.
There’s an Aral gas station near my place. Our apartment is a 30 second walk to it. I go there far too often. They don’t make their croissants or their pretzles from scratch but they do bake them daily. They come by the box frozen, of course, but whoever makes the dough and freezes them does a really good job because while they’ll never put an French bakery out of business, my wife and I have both been to Paris, and these gas-station croissants are really good.
I’m actually quite fond of the pretzels, too.
This has been both a boon and a crutch for us. 7 years in Germany and we still don’t speak the language fluently. It’s a blatant sign of our priviledge: We could easily return home to the states which is predominantly English speaking or emigrate to most anywhere else in Western Europe because of our passpoort and visas and provided I got a good job and visa sponsorship likely be okay not being able to speak the local language.
We do have goals to change that, of course, but 7 years in … the baysian in me thinks it’s not going to happen…
I think if we were to do this all over again I’d have actively sought roles in Amsterdam instead of Berlin. It’s a far more prevalant English speaking place and we liked it a lot when we were there on vacation. We kept thinking: “We could live here … we should have moved here…”
Oh boy this might just be the biggest lie we were told. The city has a number of parks. Most of which are open to the public (as any good park should be) and to dogs. BUT the parks in the city – this oh, so very dog friendly city – dogs must be on leash (that’s fine), but areas or at times when there’s no people around it’s technically illegal for the dogs to be off-leash. And I get that. You never know if a dog is well mannered, well trained, a threat, etc. Some owners do better or worse jobs with their dogs protecting the public by muzzling their dogs if they need to… etc., etc., BUT in a city that supposedly loves dogs and during times where the parks are nearly empty you’ll still have either the Parks Police or the locals reprimanding you or in the case of the police fining you for having your dog off leash or running around.
I’ve been told that – at least the parks located near our apartment – that the parks are animal sanctuaries, that our dogs running around and chasing the rabbits is harming the local wildlife. And when they defecate and I’ve hesitated by a few seconds getting the plastic poop bags out I am scolded that I am ruining the area for everyone else.
“Where will we put our picnic blankets?! Where will we sunbathe? The Horror!”
To which I always retort: “I have a poop bag, I am cleaning it up! Give me a sec”
And: “You don’t see the hypodermic needles on the ground or in the bushes? You don’t see the guy with the metal spoon cooking heroin? Or the unhoused defecating in the bushes? That doesn’t harm the local wildlife? Not to mention the foxes and birds-of-prey that kill untold rabbits? (My dogs might chase a rabbit but I do everything in my power to stop them and they haven’t chased any rabbits of late because in the city we keep them on tight leashes, now anyway)”
The locals will say take your dogs to the Grunwald (Green Forest). It’s a forest of hundreds of acres where the dogs are able to roam free. And we do. It’s just far (5 or more km from us and we don’t have a car here though car-on-demand services are nice) so going by bus is a time sink and it has it’s own risks.
There is a really cool fenced, off-leash park (the only one I know of) at Halemweg that we do take the dogs to but it’s so out of the way that it’s a weekend or after work during the summer only thing.
Ok, I am being a bit dramatic. It might not be that bad. But it’s stereotypically pretty terrible. And it’s probably a good thing. Wait staff make decent wages here and have access to healthcare so they’re not desperate for tips like they might be in the US.
That being said – and some people prefer it this way, that they’re not bothered when shopping – we’ve often gotten the impression that the waiters at busy, highly rated restaurants are tolerating us. It’s just very odd.
Not too many days back we were window shopping and as we are want to do we window-shop failed and I saw something I liked and entered the store. The proprietor was having a conversation with an employee about some holiday the employee had taken and we looked around.
I could tell there was a sale but I couldn’t make out what was on sale or what wasn’t. Either way I was too shy to ask to interrupt or for whatever reason – we were the only two shoppers in the store at the time – I thought we’d get a welcome and here’s what the sale is and “let me know if you have any questions” … we got none of that. So 6-minutes later we left.
I sound high-maintainence I know but this is a trend you’ll notice if you’re coming from a more in-your-face, kill-you-with-over-the-top-customer-service place like the US which is where we hail from.
You get used to it.
I’m probably just a crap comedian (I am) but double-entandres, or sarcasm just doesn’t register here. And that’s okay. English is sometimes someone’s third or fourth language. It’s just even among my coworkers who are basically native English speakers (having spoken it for many years, consume English media, comedy, movies, music etc.,) whenever I am being self-deprecating or come up with something I think might be witty or sarcastic the looks are often deer-in-headlights, things don’t register. I find it funny now. I laugh at myself and just think I might actually not be funny (You’re not.) but, yeah, trying to be funny in the workplace doesn’t work. At least not for me.
Now, now I still have friends there and there are places we do love to eat there … and the Elbe river is beautiful … it’s just on the whole, I found it very difficult to integrate in Hamburg. Even when we tried to speak what little German we knew we got various reactions to the effect of: “Stop, no. Just stop butchering my language. You’re not speaking it right. :Eye Roll: I’ll just speak English to you”
I dunno … given the choice between Berlin and Hamburg I’d choose Berlin every. Single. Time.
Copyright Alex Narayan - 2024