Got It All Together Enough to Rant a Little

This blog was initially begun to keep everyone updated on our lives here in Germany. Ironically, I only posted once, today now being my second post.

Cousin Sarah, Uncle Jerry, Cousin Jason, and the distant relatives in Chicago finally got it all together, and Tricia, Caitlyn, and I are all here in Germany together.

Of course, Germany is great! It's just a little...correction, A LOT, different than the states. T-Mobile is the only phone company in the entire country, so if you want a cell phone, land line, high speed internet access, or even a pager (Who uses pagers anymore?), you are forced to go through T-Mobile.

Oh, sure, they have different names: TKS, Deutche Telekom, Only Choice in the Country, Verizon Who?, and Plural, just to name a few...but they're all from the same parent company, T-Mobile.

You can't get angry with them, scream at their customer representatives over the phone, tell them you're switching to a different service, and slam the phone down on its receiver unless you don't want to have phone or internet connectivity for the entire three years you live here.

(Clarification: If you bought your own satellite, you could connect through SATCOM, but it's probably easier and a bit more cost-efficient to just deal with whatever T-Mobile gives you in the way of telephone/internet service.)

7:00PM.

That's the magic time for seemingly all Germans to shut down their lives. (Frankly, that's probably why they lost the war. 6:30 rolls around and they're settling down for the night.) It's rare that you find any store open past 7:00PM, be it gas station, restaurant, or even your friendly T-Mobile customer service department.

So, if you're planning dinner for tomorrow and you need tomato sauce for the spaghetti, don't expect to be able to just run out to Wal-Mart right quick and be back in less than 30 minutes. For one thing, Wal-Mart already tried to establish itself in Germany, but was kicked out for attmepting to remain open for 24 hours and for paying its workers too little. (Strangly enough, the richest, most powerful nation in the world is okay with both these ideas.) And secondly, you're not going to find a German store open within, well, within the majority of the country.

And don't bother getting up early to go get that tomato sauce either. Most German stores open around 10:00AM, a few opening at 9:00AM. So, you may have to push dinner back a couple hours, but you'll eventually be able to get that tomato sauce...that is, unless you're looking to shop on the weekend. Don't even get me started on the weekend schedules!

But hey, we're in Germany, the heart of Europe! What's not to love? Thousands were mercilessly slain here by the Germanic Horde. Thousands more were murdered during the Crusades for not becoming Christians. Then there was World War II, what Germans like to refer to as "a slight misunderstanding and conflict of ideas"* where millions of Jews were killed in cold blood and thousands upon thousands of troops died, fighting for what they believed in. Yes, this is truly a country full of history, some great and some not so great. I say again, what's not love about living in Europe?

(You think I'm ranting now!? Rumor has it I'm getting an all-expenses-paid trip to the Middle East. Just wait 'til that one....)

*The Germans don't really think this way.