Category: Around the world

A friend was in the hospital and would actually be one of their patients for about 10 days. I really hate being in the hospital so I asked for the name and address of the hospital so I could send some flowers.

I don’t think that Mikhail has a problem with bringing flowers to his wife but I was a bit surprised when he asked that I don’t do that. His explanation was that in Russia that flowers are more representative at funerals, and that is not a happy thought. Instead I sent a card.

It was years ago and to be honest even if it was yesterday I am not certain I properly do credit to the sheer size of Oktoberfest. My buddy Greg thought it was a great idea to go there and tip a few. To be honest, I thought it sounded like a great idea. Greg had friends in Munich so we had someplace to crash or the night and if you are visiting from out of town that’s the trick.

We started out the day by going to the Hofbrauhaus. We had something to eat and of course a Maß of beer. A Maß is a pretty big “mug” of beer which is 1.069 liters, 2 ¼ pints or approximately 36 ounces. Little did I know at the time that this wasn’t even a warm up for the rest of the evening.

We did a little a little bit of sightseeing around Munich, not too much as Greg was quite familiar with the city and our goal was to hit a beer tent. That wasn’t much of a challenge and as we went early we ended up in a nice tent with space for all of us. It doesn’t take too many beers before you want to start singing along with the songs being sung in the tent. Not only that but you will want to stand on the benches and pretend you have rhythm.

I didn’t have all that much in the way of rhythm but by this time I was also losing the ability to stand up straight. Ok, it wasn’t the standing that was so much of a problem as the falling down on the other people. I do feel quite sorry for that elderly german couple who was sitting on the bench behind us. I don’t think they were upset the first time I well, sorta sat down on his shoulders, but they were upset by the third. But in order to continue to play with with the others and so I didn’t really fall on someone we spent more of our time sitting down.

It seemed like a great time, and I am sure it was, but all good things must come to an end. I suspect it was well past that time for me as my buddy did make some comment that I didn’t look too good. I guess that was one of the reasons that we didn’t go on any of the rides. I was too busy trying not to spill mustard on myself while eating to bother with the rides.

Despite how bad I looked it was still way too early to call it a night. So my buddy Greg took me to the best place he could think of – a local English pub. He pretty much sat me on a stool with a soft drink and told me to stay there while he had a few more. Well, I have no idea how long we were there but it must have been a quite while because eventually I got myself another beer.

I guess I was tired, but I was feeling a bit jealous on that Monday morning about eight. The weather was cool but not cold and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was the kind of day that makes you really not want to go to work. The train was stopping in Manheim on its way to Munich. I cannot say with 100% certainty it was American solders but it was a fairly large group of guys probably about 25 – 35 in age with short hair who all looked pretty fit and spoke English.

They were obviously up for a big day, it appeared that each of them were drinking a one liter can of beer. They were not really drunk, yet, but it appeared that they had started before getting on the train. In its own way it was all fairly funny. They were all having a good time and from what I could gather most of the train was living vicariously through them.

I was a bit of disappointed when I had to get out in Stuttgart and the party train kept going.

It was a fairly embarrassing incident. I didn’t see that the recruiting agency was not a stable partner but a liability waiting to happen. Eventually it did happen and the company went into insolvency proceedings. My attorney was setting my expectations to receive very little if anything at all. Not only did this make me quite angry, it was money that I needed to pay the rent.

I was speaking griping about this issue to my friend who came up with a rather unique solution. There are firms in every country that will try and recover money that is owed, and in this case it was a company that was in Moscow that also had offices in Germany.

I had already started with legal proceedings, but I was intrigued by their web site. Below is a translation of some of the sentences from their web page.

Specializing in money collection in the traditional Russian style. Our close work with government agencies has proved very effective in all eastern European countries

Through our corporate network it is possible to obtain a variety of information that allows us to track the debtor anywhere. Various methods such as letters and surveillance are effective no matter where they are located. We offer a particularly unique and close working relationship in Russia. There we work almost hand in hand with the state authorities (FSB and Russian militia) to process your claim.

I was very very close on a couple of occasions to have this highly regarded collection firm take my case.

It isn’t the typical bachelor story where you take a peek into the bathroom and it appears that all sorts of fungi and molds have taken over most of the flat porcelain surfaces. Nor is it a story about there being only three piles of clothes in the closet, one definitely dirty, one somewhat used and the rest unfolded but clean clothes. It doesn’t even have an anecdote that ends up with the only thing in the refrigerator being a couple of bottles of beer and a some olives.

Nah, this is a short story about a couple of Minnesota bachelors and their struggle against the elements. It isn’t any real secret that Minnesota gets snow and cold every year between October and March. To be honest, it was a surprise even to the residents when it started snowing on Thursday and really didn’t stop until about Saturday.

The result was actually a lot of snow. The official numbers put it about 22 inches for this one snow storm. To complicate things this was the first snow storm of the winter. Neither the city nor the state were really ready for this. Initially I thought that my apartment complex was just a duff organization that was not able to organize the shoveling of snow. Yet after a while it became apparent that this was no ordinary snow storm and our cars were not going anywhere, perhaps not even to work on Monday.

We didn’t have any food and we didn’t live in the big city. We lived about a mile from the town near us and as a couple of bachelors we didn’t really have much in the way of food in the fridge. So without much planning we walked to town and the hardware store was closed, as was the restaurant, actually everything was closed except for a small convenience store and Little Caesars pizza.

So we did the only thing we could, we had pizza and bought some frozen pizzas and a case of coca cola. We only got enough to last the weekend as we felt certain that we would be dug out by then.

I remember when they instituted id cards entering some of the print laps at work, which was not the largest change to building security, but I felt it to be a bit stifling. I griped about it to my coworker. Well, Martin pretty much put everything back into perspective. It seems when he was much younger his job was working at a special Russian government research facility.

That was a serious place, where not only do you need to go through a special gate with a guard to let you in, but the entrances and exits were posted with armed guards. The guards were also located in a lot of other locations around the campus. Another difference between my situation and the research facility was if my badge gets lost I will get a stern talking to and then I get a new badge, if someone from Martin’s facility lost their badge they couldn’t leave the grounds until it was located.

The badges were kept at the entrance and given to you when you got there and taken away when you left.

I like to think that I am fairly technical and by extension reasonably clever, says the software developer. I can install Windows operating system, Linux, or even both of them side by side on a computer from scratch.

It took me a while to realize just what my problem was with the public transportation ticket machine in Stuttgart, Germany. The thing is that the machine has two numeric keypads, and when it is asking you for input you are expected to know just which one it is talking about.

It turns out that the machine manufacturer was either fairly clever or extremely lazy. The one keypad exists for answering mundane questions regarding your travel plans while the second one can only be used during payments.

I can only imagine that this did make the job easier for the manufacturer. They simply purchased some sort of payment subsystem from another company and without any integration popped it directly into the ticket machine. It is good for them, and it is tolerable for the locals, but a gigantic pain in the lower backside for any visitors to this region.

I was visiting my in-laws and so we also brought a USB stick full of photos of our daughters. Well my brother-in-law didn’t have any program for manipulating photos so I downloaded my favorite open source package from the Internet and installed it on his computer.

Installing a program is usually a matter of a double click, accepting the End User License Agreement and accepting the defaults. Well one of the question asked if all the photos from the computer should be added to the photo album – without really thinking about it I pressed ok, It was only when some of the “other” photographs that the brother-in-law had on his computer started flashing by that I had a chance to regret this decision.

I will never be able to un-see those images and now have learned a bit about about my brother-in-law that I never wanted to know.

Laura is a young adult and was moving out of her folks place into a new place across town. Germany is not like some other “housing” markets. It is often the case that when you get a new apartment the person who has to renovate the apartment is the new tenant.

However, depending on the degree to which you plan to renovate it may be a costly venture. This is one of the reasons why people in Germany don’t tend to move very often. I was speaking with my friend Martin about how the process was going when he told me about their initial visit after the renovations were completed. Laura went into one of the rooms and it simply did not seem quite right and it took a while for her to determine what the problem was.

The landlord had hired a couple of very clever handymen who were tasked with replacing the windows in the bedroom. The windows were actually directly next to each other but they were different heights. They didn’t actually bother to ask if this was correct instead they put in two different size windows. Martin did speak with the person who did the renovations to get this oversight corrected. The walls were painted, the windows corrected, the wardrobes built, then correctly built. It looked like everything was just fine.

This is Germany so the kitchen was just as empty as the living room. Laura and Martin went to Ikea to purchase a counter top and cabinets for the walls. I am not sure how long it took to assemble, but from looking at Martin it must have been all weekend. To the best of my knowledge everything was done and Laura should have been doing the unenviable task of unpacking and putting things away.

We were both sitting at our desks and it seemed like Martin was doing a lot of talking on the telephone about Laura’s apartment. Later in the day when the phone calls slowed down I found out that there was one more little renovation detail that was causing complications. Laura reported that the water pressure seemed to be getting less and less with each day. When the renovations were done molding was placed around the rooms where the wall meets the floor. It was a small decorative touch that in this case was the root of all the problems.

In the kitchen there was a small pipe in the wall at this junction and when the molding was attached with small thin nails, several of them actually punctured the water pipe. Thus the water was slowly leaking out of the pipe into the wall.

The problem was caught before it became a big problem for the building, but this unexpected damage did create problems with the renovations specialist.

I really don’t know how sex education came up but at a bar-b-que the topic came up and apparently what I experienced was the gold standard.

I don’t remember sex education in high school very clearly, but I do remember that the teacher actually asked the class if we should split into two groups. In retrospect considering the topic I guess that perhaps a mixed class might make more sense.

A friend of the family had gone to a catholic school and from I heard they learned about sex education slightly differently.

• Don’t let a man touch you.
• He will hurt you, give you diseases,
• He will leave you and you will be pregnant.

That was it. Learn these three rules and you know everything you need to know. I don’t think that this is entirely accurate but it certainly would prevent diseases and pregnancy.