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| 5th July |
| 5th July 2003 - Latest photos from Germany here. - Latest news & photos from Australia here. - Photos of all things German here. 5th July 2003, Freundlichen Gr��en (Friendly Greetings), Well it hasn�t been a very eventful week so I�m going to tell you all a little bit more about what it is like living in Deutschland so get comfy, pull up an arm chair and crack a beer or a Coke, whatever takes your fancy, and enjoy. Actually the choice between a coke and a beer is made all the easier in Germany because in most cases the beer is significantly cheaper than the soft drink. If that doesn�t entice the kiddies enough then the fact that you can buy beer in McDonalds and Burger King (Hungry Jacks for the South Aussies out there) should do the trick. In fact you can buy beer anywhere in Augsburg, the petrol station, supermarket, corner store, hell there�s even a vending machine in the basement of our apartment building. So, I hear you asking, surely this must be a land of rampant alcoholism and unremitting hangovers, isn�t it? Well surprisingly not, the Germans, while they love their beer, are quite self-controlled about the whole thing. People are free to sit in public places drinking your own beer, and you see the odd person doing this, but you rarely see a group of really drunk people hanging around in public. You can be sure that whenever people do take their beers into public places they will take the empty beer bottles with them because of the recycling program here. When you buy a case of beer the deposit equals 30% of the total cost of the beer. |
| That would be like paying a AUS$9 deposit on your bottles when you buy a case of beer back home. You can imagine that with such a big deposit it changes the whole way you view an empty bottle, you have to hunt them all down and get them safely home after a BBQ. Like I said to Lou, the bottle collectors that dig around in the bins must make an absolute fortune over here. It�s not just bottles over here that they strictly recycle over here though. On every corner you see communal recycling bins where people bring their cardboard, paper, glass, metal, and plastic from their houses. I�m not only a big fan of German recycling but also of their language. What other language in the world has cool sounding words like Schokoladenbananen-kirschkuchen (pronounced pretty much like how it is in written, if you say it right it�s like your voice is on a roller coaster). By the way this means Chocolate-Banana-Cherry Cake. They have some of the longest words in the world because they can just make up one big world by combing lots of little words. As one German said to me you can say a whole sentence in one word sometimes. All up Germany is a very cool place and I�m really glad to be living and working here. Sleek, modern trams roll past the local stop every 5 minutes in the morning to take me to work, everything is spotless, everyone says hello to you and is friendly and there are great places to go on weekends like the lake just on the outskirts of Ausgburg where everyone heads on a warm Sunday afternoon. Lou & I head to the Love Parade in Berlin next weekend, which I�m pretty pumped about. My manager was kind enough to give me the Monday and Friday off; he said I should make a decent trip of it when I told him I was heading to Berlin. We are staying with a local and it�s going to be one big party with 1.5 million people converging on the city for the parade. Lou�s friend Skye is coming to visit us the week after that and then Specko and his work mate are coming down for the weekend at the beginning of August. Specko managed to scam a company funded trip to Germany so he is taking a weekend off to visit which is great. Anyway, I�ve written enough for now so until next time Auf Wiedersehen. Ned. |