This weekend
So this weekend Brandon and I went on a short trip to some of the surrounding Rhineland. Friday night we went to Frankfurt to meet up with Brandon’s vater who was in town on business.
Frankfurt is not a nice city. It is dirty and scary. This is the only picture I took in Frankfurt. Fortunately for you (depending on the view I guess) I cropped out the prostitutes and drug addicts from the picture.
It’s the Euro sign. The European Central Bank is here or something.
The next morning, we drove to Heidelberg to meet up with some of the Chamberlin’s family friends. Herr Burger and his son were incredible generous and treated us Americans to a great tour of The Heidelberg Schloß, small town Germany, awesome German food, and some German wine tasting. It was a really great day driving through the German country-side (no speed limits) and strolling through small-town Germany (my favorite place in the world).
The Heidelberg Schloß (Castle)
The Lucashof Winery
If the above winery looks like a family’s home, that's because it is. We tasted wine more or less in their kitchen! The mom was serving us samples and the kids were running around in the back room. (Grandma was at the kitchen table getting sloshed!).
The weekend was pretty relaxing.
Dr. Christ, a portrait from The Pharmacy Museum
Boring Stuff (worked related)
Work has been going fairly well. My project has been to help research ways to help mobile browsers view their website. They give me a lot of freedom, and listen to my suggestion, which is awesome to be honest, but sometimes I wish that I had a little more direction. Last year at my internship I at least knew the daily responsibilities that I was ignoring so that I could surf the web.
I work in an atypical German office though. We aren’t very hierarchical, and we don’t keep to ourselves in cubicles. That being said, we’re certainly not as project based as American companies, and you won’t hear any progress reports or updates about the company (no one really knows the status of things except for the owner). We have the annual volleyball (pronounced “wally-ball”) tournament this weekend so I’ll let you know what German company picnics are like- should be interesting. “Oh, I got sand in my lederhosen!”
Boring stuff (opinionated)
There are so many differences between Germany and The United States that I could write a blog entry everyday for a year about them. However, here are a few that I want to bring to your attention.
- I’m going to be losing about 48% of my paycheck to taxes and German social security
- There are probably 3.5 sex shops within 10 kilometers of my apartment (and I’m in the good part of town)
- This includes escort services, “massage parlors” and “same sex gyms”
igus employees are given 2 paid holidays every month, and in July they must take three weeks of vacation at one time
Okay now here are the ones I like:
- Mostly every plastic and glass bottle has a “pfand” attached to it. Basically what this is a percentage of the price that you get back when you turn it in for recycling. So say you buy a bottle of Coke for 1.5 euros with a .25 pfand. It’s really a 1.25 euro bottle of Coke. Next time you go to the grocery store you just load all of your bottles into this machine at the front that prints out a receipt with your total refund then you take it to get cash off your groceries, or cash in your hand. HOW AWESOME IS THAT? I truly think that incentives are a great way to get people to start paying attention to their recycling habits.
- Of course this also causes the streets to be inhabited by bottle collectors. Because you can drink on the streets of Cologne, a lot of people just go around collecting the bottles to get the pfand. In German with as much beer and as many beer drinkers as they have here, you could really make a job out of collecting the bottles.
Similarly, they have recycling bins like this in the airports and train stations that allow you sort your recycling.
The Smart car is a huge hit here. Although I didn’t take this picture, they park like this a lot, squeezing into spots that normal cars couldn’t fit in. They also get hella good gas mileage. It’s a far cry from the Tahoes that seem to reproduce at TCU.
I guess in short, it’s hard for me to see the United States becoming as nationalized to grant so many federal mandated vacation days and high taxes, or to allow prostitution everywhere- but I also can’t believe how far behind we are in caring for the environment. While American politicians are still trying to argue that global warming is a hoax to increase The Weather Channel’s ratings (thank you, Oklahoma’s James Inhofe), the EU is actually taking proactive measures to help limit our footprint on this world.
If you think that little paragraph was bad, just wait until I get back from studying environmental sustainability at Oxford! Haha
I promise my next post will have better pictures.
Nate
UPDATE
Köln has quite a bit of graffiti on it. The sides of buildings and bus platforms are covered in street art. I wish I had a camera everytime I saw a good one (current 1st place goes to a skull and cross bones that said, "The Beach Boyz" underneath it). However, here is some of my favorite public defacings found at The Dom church- one of the world's most famous!
Haha, this one does not surprise me
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