Wednesday, 23 December 2009

Wound Spotting V

Continuing my unpleasant roundup of which injuries are “in” in Europe.

Nuremberg appears to be home to the non-specific minor face injury with at least four people walking around with surgical tape on parts of their faces mostly around the eyes.

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Tuesday, 22 December 2009

UK Government: “All European Children will grow up to be evil drunks”

OK, so it’s a bit of an overstatement, added with, perhaps, a bit of malicious misinterpretation of the facts, though it’s no different to the shaky evidence that this government report is based on, so I think I can be allowed the exaggeration.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8413559.stm

To distil it down to the nub of the Governments feeling, giving even a drop of alcohol to anyone under the age of 15 *will* turn them into the raging uncontrollable drunk yobs in later life that continue to plague the streets of Britain.

So, what has this to do with Nuremberg at Christmas? Well, dotted liberally around the Christmas Market are stall after stall selling gluhwein, hot mulled wine drunk by almost everyone at the markets. Whilst all the stalls were offering Kinderpunsch (no it’s not child abuse) a non-alcoholic version, it was pretty obvious that a very large number of the Children had been allowed by their parents to have the full-alcohol version.

Given that the Christmas markets have a tradition dating back at least to the end of the 19th century in their current form, if not significantly older, this isn’t a new thing, German children have been happily gulping down gluhwein for a long time, and on that basis one would suspect they are also allowed the occasional drink at home with a meal, much like their Italian or French counterparts.

Yet, there doesn’t appear to be crowds of drunken hooded yobs hanging around on street corners yelling obscenities at passers-by in Nuremberg (or Munich, Berlin, Rome, Florence or Paris either). Those few occasions that you do see a congregation of drunks (outside of Bremen Hauptbahnhof for some strange reason), they are almost exclusively people in their thirties or forties, not gangs of “feral youth” (as the right-wing British press like to demonise them as), and lets face it, following reunification, Germany has enough social problems of its own to deserve a “feral youth”, yet it doesn’t appear to have happened, despite all the youngsters drinking.

Is it just possible, that the real message that the Government is sending out is it thinks all Brits are bad parents and everything they do is wrong. That’s pretty much the message from every other announcement.

Perhaps the real message is that all Politicians should stop taking knee-jerk reactions to every Daily Mail and Daily Express hate-filled campaign against young people. Find things for them to do, give them a bit of respect and dignity, and perhaps they won’t feel the need to hang around getting drunk as it’s the only thing to do. Perhaps, God forbid (and the Daily Mail, which thinks it speaks for God, does forbid it), we should look towards the continent for some ideas.

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Monday, 21 December 2009

The British Disease continues

Today, wandering back to the hotel through the station, I noticed that again the trains were all running with massive delays (actually what I first noticed was the massive long queue to the information kiosk which alerted me to the fact that something might have been up).

I really wasn’t expecting there still to be problems, I would have thought that they could have got it sorted out, but obviously no.

The idea of Privatising the railways in the UK was to make them more responsive and more like the German railways, Deutscher Bahn now even own a couple of the companies that run trains in the UK. Sadly, it looks as though the process is working in the wrong way, and the UK’s inability to cope is now spreading through Deutscher Bahn and back into Germany itself.

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Sunday, 20 December 2009

The British disease is spreading

It’s heartening to know that it’s not just the Brits who can be crippled by some wintry weather in, well winter.

Normally I would have thought that snow is so common in Germany that they would have the infrastructure in place to be able to deal with even relatively heavy snowfall.

So it was somewhat surprising to see that Dusseldorf Airport had been closed for the whole of the day, and when I got to Nuremberg, that most of the trains were running with delays in excess of 30 minutes, in some cases up to two hours late (yes, that’s right, a German train running spectacularly late!)

Of course, the UK grinds to a halt when there is 2.4mm of snow, it was almost 24cm of snow that had fallen on Dusseldorf.

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Glad I chose Southern Germany

For the last two years I have been going to Belgium for my pre-Christmas trip. I had originally been planning to go again this year, but back in February I got an email from Air Berlin with a spectacular offer on flights to Nuremberg just before Christmas, so I changed my plans and decided to go there instead.

And now, as I sit in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport I am feeling very fortunate that I did make that decision

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8422978.stm

If I had gone to Belgium I wouldn’t have been on one of the trains that got stuck for 16 hours, but I would have been caught up in the ensuing chaos, if not on my journey out, on my return.

And if that didn’t vindicate Nuremberg as a destination the fact that all the airlines are merrily cancelling flights to Dusseldorf and Cologne because the runways are closed (and there were people in the queue as I checked in trying to get there to get trains back into Belgium!).

My flight, on the other hand, is currently running 7 minutes late on its arrival into Stansted, so I’m hopeful of a, as close as possible, on time departure. Of course, this could be massive hubris and I am about to spend the night camping in Essex rather then in Bavaria!

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Sunday, 19 April 2009

Wound Spotting - Germany


In Warsaw it was knees.

In Granada it was arms

Munich its heads, in particular foreheads and eyes

Several places I have been recently I’ve discovered a peculiarly local outbreak of a particular injury, with many of the locals sporting matching wounds.

In Munich it’s been plasters on the head, or eye patches.

Is it just the laws of averages, or do I bring some kind of horrific accident jinx with me?

Though, of course, based on the last couple of days, they could all be the victims of drunken tourists on bikes, sorry Munich!

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Saturday, 18 April 2009

And which form covers that...

If you thought the Bavarian attitude to drunk walking tours was liberal, you haven’t experienced the bike tour of Munich.

The essence of the tour shortened into a single (long) sentence. Get bike, tour Munich, stop in Englischer Garten and drink lots of beer, cycle back through Munich without killing yourself whilst “tipsy”

The tour was excellent, the beer ditto, the experience of cycling while technically several times over the legal drink drive limit, strangely invigorating, the thought of explaining all this on the Health insurance claim should I need to make one didn’t cross my mind, until I got back to the hotel!

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Friday, 17 April 2009

Pisched tours loves you, your my best mate


If this was Britain the company would have been shut down by now (and the Daily Mail and Express would have launched campaigns to have the proprietor flogged).

If this was Britain it would all end in A&E

If this was Britain the Health and Safety Executive would have stopped it long ago.

But, here in Bavaria, they have no problem with people drinking (partly because, on the whole, the locals don’t appear to have too much of a problem with drink. They might drink a lot, and be in possession of what would constitute a lethal weapon – if you have ever picked up a glass stein you would know what I mean! – but you don’t see people slumped in doorways or passed out in pools of their own vomit)

Consequently, they have no problem with a walking tour that starts in a beer hall, proceeds to a brewery to sample more beer, and then ends in the Hofbrauhaus.

In reality, I didn’t feel that drunk by the time I got back to the hotel, but then we were a quiet tour...

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Thursday, 16 April 2009

It’s childish I know...


The thing that really got me interested in going back to Munich was watching a programme on DW-TV about the Zugspitze, the highest point in Germany.

The scenery was so spectacular, the mountains so beautiful that my mind was kind of made up to go back to Bavaria, and a few months later when easyJet was having a sale I managed to get really cheap flights.

Then I started planning what to do. I’ve already been to Munich twice so I wanted to get out of the city, certainly to visit the Zugspitze, but was that enough to fill the day.

Then I looked at the website for the Zugspitzebahn, the railway that gets you to the summit. Something struck me on the front page of their site. In the top right hand corner was a rude word. Had someone sabotaged the site, was someone having a joke, or, could there really be a place in Germany named after the English slang for an (excuse the Catholic euphemism) act of selfishness liable to damage your sight.

But no, just outside Garmisch-Partenkirchen, overlooking the town in fact is a mountain that rhymes with Bank, just pronounced with a Germanic “W”. (for the obvious reason of not wanting to get my blog blacklisted on every piece of filter software I’m not going to actually spell out the name of this perfectly innocuous mountain!)

And, because I’m the kind of person who has a collection of visits to Hell (or Hel), I couldn’t resist but divert via the mountain and the [Name of Mountain]haus at the summit – queue as many innuendoes as you like.

In truth, the mountain is more than just a curiosity to the English speakers (how many pictures of the mountain name, or the summit house must there be in the world?) The views from the summit are some of the most spectacular I have seen, with the town of Garmish-Partenkirchen at the foot of the mountain laid out on a valley floor, and a small corridor of valley tapering to a point at the foot of the mighty Zugspitze. If anything the views from here at just a little over 9,000 feet are better than those from the Zugspitze 9,700+ feet.

So, Like Hel in Poland, come for the name, stay for the stunning scenery.

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Wednesday, 15 April 2009

"Something spectacular is about to go wrong..."


At the end of my last diary entry (link here) I said that “I’m fearing the worst for my next trip, it’s never been that smooth before, something spectacular is about to go wrong!”

Well, this morning I had to go into work as we were having major network changes taking place and I needed to be there just in case something went wrong. The guys were supposed to be in and all of our PCs down between 8 and 10am, which would have left me with a very tight window if something had gone wrong.

By the time I got into work at 8:30 everything had been done and there were no problems.

I got to Gatwick just after checkin opened to find a massive queue, which promptly moved at such a rate that the people who were waiting in the Speedy Boarding Plus queue to supposedly avoid having to join the big queue, ended up waiting longer than I did.

I walked through security, no problems, into departures which wasn’t particularly busy to see my flight listed as being on-time and with a note saying the gate would be announced at 12:10.

At 12:10 the gate number flashed up and I wandered down, sat at the back of the gate room and awaited the hoards as I was in boarding group B I was going to be one of the last to board, so I was preparing for a cramped flight in between a warring couple (see the Ryanair flight back from Verona last May!).

They announced boarding I looked up and there was virtually nobody there, I got onto the plane and, as nobody was sitting there, bagged seat 1A

The plane pushed back on time, had a quick taxi and a smooth flight

10 minutes early I was off the plane, through passport control and my bags were already on the belt.

Straight onto a waiting train at the airport station, a quick change onto a tram in the city centre and then into my hotel.

The only possible thing that could be considered a problem is that the room is shared facilities rather than the ensuite I thought I had booked, but that’s hardly a spectacular failure.

Of course, I could have spoken all too soon...

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Thursday, 31 July 2008

Small victories are always the sweetest


There has been a quiet war being waged in Europe. It’s been between the “faceless bureaucrats” in Brussels and the German Capital, but at the same time it’s been a war that all of Europe could have been effective by, if the Germans had lost.

Brussels had the, in reality, eminently sensible idea of standardising all European traffic signals so that they all looked the same and there would be no confusion.

But, this threatened an identity that had slowly been asserting itself. Western Germany had always used what is politely described as “Euroman” the Red and Green Men at traffic lights. Euroman is pretty similar to the ones used in the UK. Eastern Germany had a more cheerful character with a jauntily cocked hat and a look of speed in green mode. Since the fall of the wall “Osties” the identity that former East Berliners, and East Germans, started to describe themselves as, have held onto the figure. In Berlin it was always a way of telling where you where. Did the little green man have a hat – Yes, you were in the former East Berlin, No, you were in the West.

But the EU rules would have done away with the Ostie man and given then “Euroman” instead.

After years of fighting this it looks, at least in Berlin, that a victory has been won. Not only is the Ostie Green Man still in place, but also all new traffic lights in the city carry the charismatic crossing device. He can even been seen on that most Capitalist of places the Kurfurstendam.

Perhaps this is the new threat from the East, and it is still Red (apart from the ones that are Green)

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Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Relentless Change


This is my third trip to Berlin. I originally visited in February 2004, again in Feb 2006 and now again in July 2008.

The thing that keeps striking me about the city is how much it keeps changing. Spaces which were the wasteland of the old death strip at Postdamer Platz in 2004 became home to gleaming office blocks and parks by 2006 with only a few vacant lots. Today, even those lots have gone, as have some of the buildings put up by 2004 to be replaced with even newer even shinier buildings.

Across at the Huptbahnhof the story is the same. In 2004 there was just a small S-Bahn station called Lehrter Stadtbahnhof. This was surrounded by acres of wasteland and a drab and frankly scary looking bit of the river Spree.

In 2006 construction work on the Hauptbahnhof was nearing completion (it opened a few months after I visited and just a couple of weeks before Germany hosted the World Cup, the absolute deadline for the completion of the project), but the site was still a mess.

Today the stunning station with it’s graceful glass roof and cavernous interior is surrounded by parkland, the area to the Reichstag a green walkway through the city, and the Spree with cleaned bridges and walkways boasts riverside bars and even a beach.

Meanwhile in London plans for a Beach on the Thames have quietly faded away since the change of administration at City Hall. It took nearly eight years to get, nowhere.

Come on London, If Berlin (a city that is almost Bankrupt because of all the rebuilding costs) can achieve all this so can you!

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Friday, 25 July 2008

European Harmony, We all agree the Germans are obsessional


Whilst waiting at Gdansk station I was able to earwig a conversation that was going on between two friends.

Based on the accents, she appeared to be Polish, and he was probably French. Together they were chatting away in their shared mutual language of English (it’s a hard life being a fluent speaker of the worlds Lingua Franca).

They were discussing the inevitable delay on his train out of Gdansk (his was even more delayed than mine). She was saying the effectively anything less than 15 minutes late was on time, and that they only normally announced delays to trains once it had passed this time, but you should only worry if your train hasn’t arrived within an hour of its scheduled time.

He mused on the decline of the French railways and how their trains were always running late, and then he mentioned the Germans.

They both agreed that the Germans were obsessional with time keeping, to the point of madness, and that Germans would go nuts if their train is more than a minute late.

Having been on a German train that was running late I am happy to say that the Germans don’t go mad, they like their English counterparts, just grumble about how bad the service is, and it never used to be like this.

But it was interesting to see that even in this time of European Union and Harmony the old divisions are still there. The Poles, French and Brits united in a conviction that the Germans are obsessed with time keeping. Now where did I leave my umbrella and cricket bat, it must be time for a cup of tea!

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