Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland

After 5 years of hard labor for little reconnaissance and few opportunities it was time to take off to another place and check if the grass really was greener on the other side. We will come to that in my forthcoming articles called “Learning French with Christian” - but now let’s write an article as a for me final look of those years in Vaterland. Obviously it won’t be the last one as good and bad memories will need to be written over time. I finally took off from East Germany after a well prepared 6 last months. Everything went as planned and I do believe my moves were not understood as such but instead as madness. As usual I got everything under control. I came to Germany with an idea of the excellent organisational skills they were known to have and I literally lived through the opposite. Now, and calmer about it, I can only say that I didn't find it at work but I did find it in some other areas in East Germany. I was surprised to find so many interesting and caring local persons my last two months there. Actually I found more during that period than during all the other months of my 5 years. The main difference? It was at school. Both teachers and employees were nice and valuable. Sadly I think the workplace I was in was just an endless pit of sorrow and incompetence. From top to bottom. There is a lot to tell about it and I will at some point. When it will be advisable to talk about it. At the end, I am happy to have been there 5 years. Well actually 3 years were great, or sort of. The other two were difficult times that I do believe I managed to live through due to my better half and my close friends and family. I did it my way as someone famous sang once. But I wouldn't have accomplished it without them. I closed many circles and started a new life. At the end I changed myself for good but I realized what I lost in the process. After a couple of weeks after these 5 years in East Germany, finding myself in a complete different place, I can clearly see that I had become less human than I am genuinely, less warm and less caring. Yes, 5 years there made me a colder person, but old habits die hard and I am recovering quite good by now. I can kiss and salute my new work colleagues normally everyday with a real smile, have decent food in the cantine, see and interact with most of the locals simply and happily but first and foremost - I am happy. I finish my day with a smile even if I miss my dear friends and family left over there or around the globe terribly.Bonjour Toulouse, O mon pais.

The Game Of The Chicken

In East Germany there is a popular game called The Game Of The Chicken. I knew the game in my childhood and used to play it with dubious results while biking. In East Germany I renamed The Game Of The Chicken to The Panzer Game. Locals are really playful lads and don’t miss an opportunity to play during the day - at work, stores, trains and of course the toughest one: on the streets - ie The Panzer Game. Easy to play, hard to master, you’ll find yourself quickly addicted to the game playing it even without noticing except if you find yourself abroad were the game is quite unpopular and people even excuse themselves when you do end a casual street play.

This sounds interesting you may say, but how can I play? Do I have to be a club member or something? Do not worry avid reader - I’ll explain everything you need to know about the game now. To play you’ll need at least two persons coming from opposite directions in a collision course. The point of the game is to keep on walking straight and oblige the opponent to swerve before a crash happens. In Erfurt I discovered that the city is full of professional players as they do not swerve. On a non-player environment if you find yourself almost crashing both persons will give a step aside and slightly turn their body in the opposite direction in order to make both walkers pass by without problem. In Erfurt I’ve found that when they don’t play, they practice. I cannot remember the many times I crashed because I was just walking slowly, lost in my thoughts, and some “Profi” just ran into me because I was supposed to move aside. The first times I did excuse myself, for me totally normal, though me expecting the same treatment from the other person involved led me to get insulted and blamed for it instead. It seems it was my role to "chicken out". Here it was, the discovery of The Panzer Game.

I don’t know why but many people assume that when they walk EVERYBODY has to give them passage; men, children - even women! Really classy I must admit. Getting a closer look to it I noticed that this situation happened on a daily basis, mostly with older men, but many younger ones were taking over this habit too. Usually I tried to walk fast and just avoid the people passing around if necessary. I discovered that trying to normal giving in a bit aside is not corresponded by most of the people arriving from the opposite side and I ended up most of the time bumping in to a Panzer Gamer who didn’t believe he should move or did not understand why I did not give him a clear way. During my last days in Germany I decided to simply not budge a millimeter and play the game as hard as I could. That day I was walking back slowly to my place on an empty street on a direct straight line. Soon, a Panzer Gamer was ahead, 150 meters from my position. I continued to walk slowly in a straight line while my random opponent was doing the same but at a much quicker pace. I could see on his body language that he was not going to stop or chicken out - neither would I! At 100 meters distance I started looking around and down, sending him enough signals of that I was not aware of his presence. I glanced shortly and saw that he was looking straight ahead as a professional Panzer Gamer at heart he would not have changed his course for anything in the world. At 60 meters, he quickened his pace, I slowed mine down, which probably made him think I am backing off I thought. At 30 meters, we were entering the decision time, I talked with the persons at my side, avoiding eye contact with my opponent, distance was soon decreased to under 15 meters - your call, Panzer One. At 5 meters I almost could feel his arrogance in the air asking himself why I was not budging? BAM!

A frontal shock but we kept walking. After a safe distance of 5 meters away from me he send a “this is not a pinball god damn it!” in the air. I answered by some self explanatory hand language about the possibility of both of us giving space to each other showing him my two hands sliding paralleled. Just saying “Hellllooooo? Can you understand that?” I kept on walking. My last game was a tie.

A Saturday in a German ER

The phone rang. The head character of the day could not move. Literally. He was lying on the floor at his current workplace, aching with pains in his lower back and that to the point of tears. After having made the necessary moves to even reach the phone to call his boss to tell her about his situation of not being able to stay any longer at work, he got hold of me and after several minutes of tries, I got hold of the heroes of today: Saint Michael and the Portuguese Version of Super Mario. One of them with a car, the other with his passing card into the work building where today's central figure was lying on the basement floor where we were intended to pick him up.

Said and done, the male heros of the day helped carrying him to the car and we went to the ER at the local hospital. After having crossed the main gate entrance to the hospital grounds we were explicitly driving around to find the clear obvious sign for the Emergency Room Entrance. To our astonishment, there was not one single of them on the way, passing some curves and other signs, a cafeteria and so forth.

If a pregnant woman would come in to give birth, the baby would be out even before having reached the entrance doors!!! Unbelievable.

One of the male heroes of today and myself, after having parked the car with the head person of today waiting in there, hurried to the main entrance and reception to find out where exactly the entrance to emergency situations may be. Very rightly the accurate Lady there answered "Please go along this corridor here and then the stairs to the first floor. There is the reception for the emergency situations for "Kassenpatienten" - Insurance patients". On the FIRST FLOOR??? Whoever in this world would think of having a reception UPSTAIRS? More rightly for someone coming in with the ambulance they had one downstairs, too (!!!), so since the victim of today could not move on his own and Hero No 1 was very direct to make sure that the personnel got this information they offered to us to move the car directly to the ambulance entrance and for the "victim" to be put on a krankenbed, a hospital bed.

No matter what, we learned the lesson in case you should at some point be bleeding, one should phone a krankenwagen - ambulance - because if you would be taken there by car, you would most probably bleed to death before even FINDING the correct entrance...

Next station: in a short corridor at the ER. Nurses and doctors passed by. One came at some point to ask for the insurance card and then came back to return it. No thank you, no "it may take some time" or even a friendly comment. Nothing. We understood that we had arrived in a bad timing - it was the german lunch break time. Nurses and doctors eased their way into the little room which we understood to be their pause/break/private room. As each and every one of them passed by, nobody even bothered to say a little "hello" or gave a smile in order to exchange some in our sense "normal basics" of friendly communication.

The best came after having waited for around forty-five minutes and that was the ONLY human acquaintance of communication met after the insurance card had been returned to us and just before our doctor arrived:

A nurse approached us with a passing patient on a hospital bed, catching us having some Studentenfutter (Raisin and nuts) at the hour of around 13h30 since none of us had really had anything more than an apple to eat until then... "Was machen Sie???? ESSEN IST NICHT ERLAUBT IN DIE NOTAUFNAHME!!!!!!!... Nun,JETZT ist es ZU SPÄÄÄT..." (What are you doing??? EATING IS NOT ALLOWED HERE IN THE ER!!!... Well, NOW it is already TOO LATE...) Of course, all that was said was said with such an intention of degradation. How about approaching somebody with a more gentler tone? Is there an unwritten law in this world that one is not allowed to eat ANYTHING in an ER? Yes, we do understand if one is to have an operation then it is obviously different... Mamma Mia. There we were wondering wtf we were doing at a place where nobody says hello in more than an hour or even just giving us one little piece of information like "You will have to wait some time now..." Is this too much to expect? A nurse who obviously not was at all on our case and not even possessed even an inch of social skills - especially for an emergency room - approaching us in this way. If her aggravation had to do with that it was because we are foreigners we will never find out, however, it did come to our mind...

Soon after this, a young friendly orthopedic doctor came to us to make sure of what had happened and where in the back the pain was exactly. I was there as an extra interpreter just to make sure that there where no language barrier in the understanding even though the victim of the day understands good german just perfectly. She went to the X-rays with him in order to find out if it was something like the most serious cases like Bandscheibenvorfall (=herniated disc).

When he came back, he was a bit (or actually quite a bit) groggy from some true painkillers. I was informed that he had none of the things before mentioned as far as she could see, however, she prescribed to go to the house doctor again on Monday for further treatment and deciding on what has to be done next, giving us enough painkillers to last the weekend.

One of the things that has to be credited is that we only needed two hours there, as a whole. This is impressive since in an emergency room you never really know how long it may take...

In order to end this coverage on a smiling note there is something yet to be told. While with the doctors and nurses in the X-ray room prepared for it, one of the nurses smiled and showed the head person of the day a metal cover in the resemblance of two ice cream spoons.

As he did not understand what the nurse had ment with what he should do with them, she ultimately took action herself, placing them around the most sacred place of a man as protection during the screening. Fabulous. Our visit of the day could not have ended on a more smiley and groggy note... Let us hope there will not be more of these!

Free

When you grow older you don't grow harder, you just learn to bury things deeper. What you are is still the same, even if you put layers of lies on it. Pain is real and have to be dealt with. Sooner or later. Sometimes we just have to grab what we have and say "fuck it". No more status quo, no more safety, just full throttle ahead. No time to think. Just like in the old days, when every single emotion was like the end of of the world, just like when epiphanies were our daily bread, in a brand new world opening in front of your eyes. Every single day was an eruption of brand new concepts and ideas alike. Everything was boundless and nothing was unreachable.

I recall the wind from the sea bringing me to tears without reason, just because. A smile I saw made my day in a world where I had to give up all that I was for a greater good. And the music. An escape to a Matrix I didn't belong to, a saviour I didn't adore, a moment I was just myself in the middle of the crazy present we call reality. We all have those triggers in us, those little human things that make us more one with whom we really are. Looking no more for what we are supposed to be or do, tonight was one of those nights when tears overcome fear and become freedom providers for a soul which never was captive.

free

Facebook dictatorship

Most of the rich world is on facebook. We all have to be, it's both trendy and useful. We are all a great family connecting and sharing thousands of pictures, feelings, states of mind, informations, games, and all that can be considered as additional trash (stupid games, tests and everything else that you can chose to hide).

Facebook is a great tool to get in touch with friends we actually do care. Those that you remember more than once a year because suddenly their status turned into "single" again. After a while I got myself with almost 300 friends, quite a few that I actually never met or just shared an event or crossed eyes with. In the real world it is enough for acquaintance and will provide a smile, a nod or even a good day if ever encountered again. It may evolve to a real uninterested "how are you?" whose answer is never expected to be more than a "fine, thanks. And you?".

But Globalisation wants to Facebook them as friends. Friends with the apparent similar friendliness level as the ones who were there for you during those not so nice times in life. Or equal in status those co-workers that never said anything to you in the last two years but believe that you should share with him/her the last Christmas pictures with your Aunt Agatha or the last Bachelor Party revival that you hosted for your University mates.

More out of need than boredom I started to do some clean up. I thought it would be ok to start by the ones I never met. Net buddies. It didn't work. Some are actually cool net buddies with whom I shared common interests and keep in touch with. So they had their place within my Friend list. But it was starting and the list grew thin. Then came the list of friends of friends that think that the old proverb "friends of my friends are mine too" (or something like that). Actually some of the friends of my friends are mine too, but not all of them. So here some more were sent to oblivion. Strangely nothing happened so far. Not a single complain.

Starting to feel lighter I kept on going. Where should I continue? Known people or Workplace one? I'm not sure where I could draw a line, so I started to separate those to stay and those to go. I know lots of people I shared some time with in many ways and many forms but it was gone. No need to keep bounds that never existed. Other characters travelled through my life for an amazing short period of time, and unexpectedly, stayed in touch, being the both of us to be blamed. Sometimes life provides some nice encounters. Arriving at the workplace situation it was quite easier. I took off all of those I actually don't really speak with. Still easy and swift. No harm taken.

But the time to face oddness came. What about those friends who were more than good friends and are now completely unaware I even exist. Should I keep them for memory's sake or just accept them as good memories? Naa. Pressing the "unfriend" button. Now it was done. From almost 300, I came down to 150 something. Only one was willing to "friend" me again. But as I recall, we were not really close. Nor did we speak. One complain was heard from afar. But it never came before, in the real life at least. Only the virtual killing of a friendship shook the wounded relationship.

For now I'll keep the numbers as they are, actually I would like more people to do as I do. I may go lower than 100 if I'm lucky.

Being polite

Being polite is a basic rule for social inclusion and acceptance. The respect of others provide a fair ground for a successful interaction leading to the satisfaction of both needs avoiding unnecessary problems.

It seems easy and productive that way. And it is, most of the time. Unfortunately this last week was full of those little moments. First I had a little taste of politeness taking the tram. Mornings, 7h23, the tram is full of people. Elderly people standing by, while youngsters are sitting as nothing was happening around, listening to any kind music. This is actually acceptable as I have no idea of the level of fatigue of all commuters, but what really pisses me off is people leaving their bag packs or anything else on the seats while many other human beings are just standing around. It´s rude and egoistic. This morning I had also another good example: a guy was occupying almost two seats, I seated in the space left but he didn't budge! I don't understand that need to occupy all when the tram is at full capacity. I had a similar situation the last Friday. I was the one occupying the space of two persons in a front to front seats. Putting my legs at maximum range, letting the space in front not free for other legs. No problem I thought. The tram with three wagons had only two more persons in it. 'Til I reached the Haupfriedhof Station (Graveyard Station). Then, only one person came in. Wanting to sit right in the place where I had my legs! Wait a minute? Why this specific place? Well... I couldn't believe that one but I moved my legs off the grid, allowing this fair lady to sit correctly... Going on...

Last week we had a team issue (well one of many to be more precise) regarding a difficult situation: eating at the work place. Yes, it can be an issue. Two weeks ago a complaint was verbally filled in an open team meeting regarding this topic. As most of colleagues eat at their table, bringing a mix of smells not very appealing for other colleagues and use the working floor as a normal dinner and chat room, even bringing friends over (!) disturbing the peace of some of the other colleagues (in which group I put myself). Those lunch at work colleagues are the same one claiming that we need five minutes away each hour from the PC vicinity. But they stay 45 minutes for lunch. As being polite is part of being human, I was expecting them to change for another room (like, humm.... lunch room?) or at least to discuss it. Of course in East Germany open discussion seems not be allowed so nobody complained. During the meeting. But they kept to bring food and acting as they were in a café in the same room as their working colleagues. Bollocks. One week after, another colleague still believing in a possible dialogue sent an email to all colleagues and managers to request an apparently difficult definitive answer (yes or no). No one answered. Wonderful internal communication. One more week passed by. Then in a team meeting it was definitely decided by the High Command that it won't be allowed to eat. 'Til an email was sent a couple of hours later allowing it in the second room where, apparently, all are OK with keeping the lunch system. Fair enough. If all are really ok with it.

Smugglers

Arriving at a German Airport from abroad is always a thrill. Besides the mixed feelings of coming back home where it almost never felt like it, one thing keeps the adrenalin pumping. Smuggling food. Each trip is a further pushing off limits, one kilo codfish and one cheese are nowadays a kilo of cheese, three kilos of codfish, three sausages, four bottles of wine and going up. The starting tiny luggage is now almost obsolete and needs an update to appreciate the full twenty kilos maximum allowed (as I will NEVER fly "low cost fifteen maximal cargo person" except in case of emergency).

Sometimes I feel like a "guerilla" passing thought the embargo of a country at war or alike (Cuba, North Korea and Auslander in East Germany knows what I am talking about). Why punishing us with limits to the food we want to bring in? Colouring the Wiener Schnitzel pommes combo is such a crime? I risk a fine for bringing food which will allow me to endure the weeks away from those I love. What would be here in Kalte Deutschland if I can't have my thursday Mcvities cookies? Or my once in a month codfish dish?

As a smuggler the second hard time after the passing at the the "nothing to declare" zone is the rationing. As the next trip may be far away in time, each smuggled good has to be divided fairly in parts to hang on till next trip. Those succulent cookies are to be eaten on Thursday only, with an Italian coffee (smuggled too) and or a Port Wine (yes, this one too). This leads me to the next point: Sharing. Sharing with friends is a way to diversify the type of good and to keep the stock up. Trading fish and port Wine for Italian Coffee and olive oil or french cheese and pâte de fruits. Import/export is a luxury in tiny Thuringen, as prices for normal goods turn into caviar like priced goods. Today I just came back from Italy with five liters of olive oil and around three kilos of coffee (and more, but I don't want to catch the attention of the Zoll Polizei). Damn, it felt good to enter the at the Hauptbahnof feeling finally safe from prosecution. Next Friday, France. Then, it will be a long winter...

Travellers Friendly Reminder

If you travel in Germany get ready to pay for everything. If you need to urinate you'll pay at least 50 cents for using the toilets in many mauls, train stations and other public places. Airport still seems to be free zones so enjoy them! If you need them for something else, you'll even have to pay more. So travel light and be aware of too much beer drinking!

Back to work!

Amazingly, things have not changed a bit.

Except for this weird occurrence. My empty water bottle, used for daily refuel and as main drinking (no, it's not coffee) has been removed. Stolen for the "Pfand"? 25 cents??????

Wacken 2010

Damn. I can't believe I didn't got a ticket for it. First time I'll miss it in four years in German soil. The Biggest Metal Open Air Festival which delivers. Damned ticket... For 2011 I'll be there.

5 days till it begins for 80000 Frantic Metal Heads:

\m/