Weekend Photo Challenge: The Reveal

Vorbau: (n), buttress, projection, front end, front building, etc, etc, etc. Or, could also be interpreted as “balcony.” And therefore we have…

Constructive construction?

While perhaps shoes or dry-cleaning services were a more obvious answer, the closest guess goes to JoSch, who thought it might have something to do with construction machines.

In fact, this lady these ladies are advertising for a company specializing in balcony renovation, and building facade repair. While the jokes may be a bit obvious… it clearly gets attention so well played!

Sunday Snapshots: Praha in Spring

Prague, 2009

April 2nd, 2009, lives in my mind as an Epic Prague Day. Friends from our TEFL course had passed around Europe and returned to Prague before flying back to the U.S., and so we took the chance to make the most of our time left together.  That meant doing one of the boat tours on the Vltava, feasting our way through the Easter market, buying beers to take on the spider bike, and convincing our spider bike driver to take us on an extended off-tour excursion as his punishment for picking us up late.

Then it was more wandering around the city, including this walk through the park filled with young and old (and a couple taking their cat for a walk); while we soaked up the Czech sunshine, eventually finding our way to a cozy pub that didn’t mind indulging some silly Americans, flush with sentimentality for the end of our time together for the evening. I miss those crazy kids.

Weekend Photo Challenge!

Some days my commute is more… colorful than others.

I’ve seen this ad a few times over the last few weeks, and I thought it was perfect fodder for a photo challenge. So if you, lovely reader, think that you are a marketing genius, please leave a comment telling me what exactly is being advertised here!

Subtle.

The answer will be revealed on Monday, no prize unless you’re counting bragging rights and virtual high fives. 😉

With that, I’m off to enjoy the sun… happy weekend all!

Sunday Snapshots: A Little Light

Prague, 2016

Nearly six years ago when I left Prague, the main station was still very much a work in progress. Its Art Nouveau interior still shone through a layer of grime that was slowly being scrubbed away, along with numerous other renovation projects. Now when you hop off the Deutsche Bahn express bus that runs between Nürnberg and Praha, you enter a pristine dome that absolutely sparkles. If you’re lucky enough to land on a sunny day, take a few minutes and pause to enjoy the view!

Sunday Snapshots: Nürnberg Rooftops

Nürnberg, 2014

Many people will say that the best view of Nürnberg can be seen from the SkyBar in one of the movies theaters in town. Those people are wrong, unless you enjoy overpriced cocktails and abysmal service. Save yourself €10,  buy a bottle of whatever you prefer to drink, and head to the top of the Adler Parkhaus. It’s a bit less trendy, and there aren’t any chairs, but there also aren’t any surly waiters. Just watch out for cars on the way up and down… city center parking garages don’t leave much room for error!

Bonus tip: it’s currently Italian market time on the Fleischbrücke! The spring edition is on this year from March 15th-25th, and again in April from the 20th-29th (closed on Sundays, of course). Longtime readers will know that the Italian market is one of my favorite things that happens in the city, so if you are like me and need to stock up on cheese and vino, don’t forget to stop by!

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Customer Service Stress

A major complaint I hear quite often living here is that the customer service is total crap. Do they kiss your ass every time you walk into a store? No. Has anyone ever been openly rude to me? No. Have I waited what felt like a thousand years to get help in stores and restaurants? Absolutely yes. So while I don’t consider myself to be one of the foreigners here who has a major problem with German customer service*, there are moments when it does scare the bejeezus out of me. This is a story about one of them.

BV and I had gone into the Karstadt department store recently to pick up a few things, and a brightly-colored spring sweater caught my eye. Since I still had a few gift cards floating around my wallet, I decided to go ahead and get it. We checked out with my sweater, and then proceeded to hunt the store for men’s socks, before checking out again and descending to the U-Bahn level to exit the store.

The bottom level of the store is the food section, and as it is at the U-Bahn level, it sees a fair amount of foot traffic. BV and I were eagerly debating what our planned dinner order would be (we were marking the end of vegetarian January/February by going out for Greek), when we heard peep peep peep as we went through the doors. We stopped, turned around, peep-ing again, and paused in the entryway. There’s no security in most stores here, and people continued to go on about their business around us. The store employees in eye/earshot didn’t blink at all, and then we heard more peeps as other people went in and out. We figured at that point that the metal detector was faulty, and since we had receipts for our purchases, we headed back out the door.

The next day I pulled out my new sweater to try it on with a few things and, you guessed it, the friggin’ ink tag was still attached. Sonofabitch. For two reasons, really.

1. This means an extra trip into the city, because I’m usually carrying around enough stuff to class that I don’t really care to add a shopping bag to the mix and…
2.  I can’t do this by myself. My German is serviceable under benign circumstances but just the thought of trying to explain this to a cashier was enough to scare the crap out of me. Did I have receipts? Yes. Did it warrant a lengthy explanation? No. But the American in me would like to give some kind of a justification/story to explain myself more. And my German is not good enough to do that and I didn’t want to cause a scene somehow. Or get arrested.

That meant when poor BV came home, I got to tell him that we were going to take another trip into town at some point because of the aforementioned reasons. He wasn’t thrilled about another extra trip either, but he completely understood my reasoning.

Cut to us on the S-Bahn a few days later…

BV: Yeah we have a receipt, but what if they think that we bought one and paid for it, but stole this one?

Me: Oh my God I didn’t even think of that! Why would you say that? Don’t put thoughts in my head!

We walked back into Karstadt, peep-ing again on the way in, headed to the nearest Kasse, and waited to hear our fate.

When our turn came, we stepped up, BV pulled out the receipt and the sweater, showed her the ink tag and…

Cashier: Oh mein Gott,(continues in German) sorrysorrysorry, hate it when that happens, etc.

She took the ink tag off, folded my sweater up, handed it back to us, and went to a cabinet in the corner. We thought maybe there was a “whoops something happened” form or who-knows-what, but she came back with two chocolate hearts (Lindt, not some crap chocolate), handed them to us and apologized profusely for making us come back.

All that stress for nothing.

To be fair, she did ask us if the alarm had gone off, but BV explained that we had heard it go off with other people as well so we just assumed it was faulty. So could I have explained that myself? Debatable and I’m glad he was there just in case.

However that means perhaps it’s time to set myself a new goal. To not only be able to survive a normal interaction in German, but to be able to get my own damn ink tags removed without fear of a panic attack. That seems reasonable, right?

 

*I highly recommend spending a few years in Prague. Those customer service people HATE EVERYONE. Germans seems positively cheerful in comparison.

Sunday Snapshots: Out and In

Cologne, 2017

March is a bit thin on the ground when it comes to travel pictures, so instead of delving into the archive today, these photos are from last weekend.

An old friend of mine from college was traveling through France and Belgium with her mom, and she was lovely enough to work a day in Cologne into their short trip. BV and I doubled down for the trip, and stopped by his grandma’s for a visit before heading to Cologne on Saturday night.

The only other time I had been in Cologne, it absolutely poured rain. That theme continued on this trip, with a *slightly stressful* drive into the city in the midst of a spring storm. We arrived much later than planned, ran out into the deluge to try to find a restaurant that would still serve us dinner, and were rewarded by both a silent city and an epic view of the Kölner Dom* lit up at night.

Thankfully by the next morning the rain had passed and we had blue skies for the majority of the day with my old friend. We took advantage of the weather to explore more of the old city center, the lovely walk along the Rhine, and a short dip into the cathedral itself. Sunday is not the best day to visit if you want to see the entirety of the church, but at least we got in the door. Besides, if they’re traveling through France, they’ll be cathedral-ed out in a day or two anyway, right?

*Cologne Cathedral

Sunday Snapshots: Spring Chicken

Franconia, 2012

Literally.

Visiting the Villagers is lovely this time of year. And even though they’ve left this sunny homestead for a valley nook in the Oberpfalz, we’ll still find the occasional chicken scratching around the house.

Sunday Snapshots: At Two Birds

Prague, 2009

I love these decorations over many doorways in Prague. Because let’s be honest… building numbers are boring.

A Few Thoughts Around the Playground

I’m currently between some classes and have had much more free time for long, meandering walks around the village. On most of my walks, I end up going past the playground of the elementary school in the neighboring village. I have a major love for most of the German playgrounds I’ve seen, and this one is no exception.

I grew  up going to a school that had a pretty epic playground. It was mostly built out of wood and old tires, and thus is one of the many playground that has now been deemed a complete deathtrap. Most of the places I see now in my friends’ Facebook feeds are 100% plastic, or whatever other artificial material is now deemed a ‘must-have,’ lest the Kinder injure themselves on anything natural. Splinters, run away!

The playground that I walk past laughs at such notions. Behold, one small corner….

So many rough edges!

In addition to being covered in trees, brush, stones, steps, and all manner of tripping hazards, there is at least one small pond with a railing-free bridge, and one of these bad boys…

Via Pinterest

Yep, an insect hotel. Can’t imagine too many public schools in the U.S. with open water on campus, or ones that encourage bugs to shack up.

But up until last week, these were just idle thoughts. Then I saw other things.

Thing Number One: a mom (who I had seen earlier on my walk, pushing her stroller with two twin girls all dressed in pink), holding her girls balanced on the ledge of the tower in the above picture. They weren’t infants, but they were certainly big enough to squirm the wrong way and fall out of the tower easily. Why were they up there, you might ask? Well the train was coming through, and they wanted to wave, of course! I thought it was cute, but since parents in the States can’t let their kids play in their own backyards unattended, it looked like something that CPS might get a call about if we were in a different country.

Thing Number Two: next to the elementary school there is a smaller building that houses a Kita, or nursery school. They also have a sweet little playground full of wooden toys, and yes, more water. There’s also a nice terrace and last summer I often saw the kids playing or snacking outside. Last week we had a few relatively nice days (nice for February, that is), and on one of them, I came around the corner and saw something funny out on the terrace. At first I thought it was just a big basket, but then I got closer. Not just one basket, but three, and two large pillows next to them. They were full of blankets, and yep…. sleeping kids. Five kids, napping away in what appeared to be dog beds out on the terrace.

For the record, I’m on board with this. It was a warmish day, the kids were piled up with coziness, and let’s be honest… who hasn’t looked at their dog or cat curled up in their bed and thought, ‘damn, that looks cozy!?’ But the part of me that has read far too many STFU Parents columns immediately thought… a Sanctimommy would lose. her. shit. if her Child (capital C) had to sleep in a bed for a DOG. If the kid climbed into the dog’s bed in the house? Oh so funny! Put a whole album of it on Facebook immediately! But if the school that she PAYS forces her Child to sleep in a Dog Bed! Aw, hell no.

I have no idea if this is standard practice at the average Kita, but I do love how much time the kids around here seem to spend outside. They run, they play, they get dirty. Heck, some friends even sent their kids to a so-called ‘Forest Kindergarten,’ where they spend the entire day outside, rain or shine. They did have a small shelter in the woods, but according to VillageGal, she only saw it in use once, when there was a freezing rain thunderstorm. It all just seems so much healthier, and less sterilized than so much of what school in the U.S. seems to have become.*

 

Editor’s Note: shortly after I published this post, I saw this article pop up in my New York Times feed. It is completely relevant to what I wrote here. Enjoy.

 

*Disclaimer: I am not a parent, I do not want to pass judgement on how people choose to raise their kids, these are just some observations I have had recently.

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