Germany Under the Microblog

The German Triangle (in USA)

2011-09-09T02:20:00.000-07:00

The German Triangle, consisted of Cincinnati, St Louis and Milwaukee, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the Midwest of North America in which a large number of beers (along with pickles, brats and sauerkraut) have disappeared. Some people have claimed that these disappearances fall beyond the boundaries of human error or acts of nature. Popular culture has attributed some of these disappearances to the paranormal, a suspension of the laws of physics, or activity by extraterrestrial beings.Though a substantial body of documentation exists showing numerous incidents to have been inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have gone on record as stating the number and nature of disappearances to be similar to any other area of the earth, many have remained unexplained despite considerable investigation.

Enter the German Triangle on your own peril.

Starbucks Is For Girls Only In Germany

2011-08-30T02:14:00.000-07:00

I would say Starbucks is for pussies only in Germany but it will hurt some people's sensitivity, so I say it here now, instead of the title. How considerate of me.

But I've observed, there were no boys or man in the Starbucks at the corner of a mad-busy intersection in the city for the long time that I was there that one day. And I (hastily, but willingly) concluded that Starbucks is really just for girls in here, isn't it.

Where do all the men go?

Oh yeah, they go to work.

Germany is more traditional than you think in terms of family values, I tell you. At this hour of the day, the streets are occupied by mothers and their children (and a large quantities of bums regardless of age, sex, addiction and color. Okay, there is some imbalance of the colors.) This would never happen in Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany

2011-08-30T02:12:00.000-07:00

...like anything is ever available in Germany.

The Postman

2011-08-30T02:05:00.001-07:00

I don't like the postman talking to me.

I don't like anyone talking to me, in fact.

Especially when I've no idea what they are talking about.

And ya, I'm going to stop shopping on Amazon.de because I don't want to talk to the postmen. (Notice, it has now gone plural!) The postmen always think I'm so nice and they LOVE to ring my bell and knock on my door and knock on my window and once one even shouted in the front porch to get my attention, to take in some packages for my neighbor (and a short unwilling talk forced out of me). I hate to pretend I'm not at home, but I hate to be a nice person.

If you would love to be a nice person, you can do that for your neighbor and lonely postmen all you want. I don't.

And hence, this is the three-quarter of the year resolution : no more Amazon shopping for me.

Dawn of the Dead

2011-08-30T01:50:00.001-07:00

Frankfurt is one hell of a center-stage for the likes of Dawn of the Dead movie.

My boyfriend agrees with me.

Especially in public transportation. WHAT THE FUCK.

Thousands of zombies (druggies, poor people, homeless people, unemployed people, students who never graduated.... and druggies, mostly) crawl and sprawl and spawn inside the damp, stinky train stations.

My friend once told me Frankfurt was the most insecure area in Germany. Back then I still have my head in the clouds and didn't believe him. I so wish I had listened to him and took a hike from this city in the back of his car.

Give me back all my tax euro! (And stop paying Greece, Italy and Spain my hard-earn money.) It will be enough to polish the Hauptwache nice and clean and free of pathogens and pathogenic virus-carrying birds and rats and other unseen animals lurking in the train station for a month.

Seriously.

I feel sticky just by standing inside. And I almost certainly reduced my life expectancy by 5 minutes for every second I'm there. God knows how much germs I'm breathing into my lungs in a second.

No, It's Not Plattenbau

2011-08-30T01:39:00.001-07:00

I was mad. I was beyond mad. --- When for the hundredth time someone said with an evil sneer accompanying that highly insinuating word, Plattenbau, to my face, I almost exploded.

The whole Hong Kong lives in skyscrapers. When you guys travel to Chicago, you pay 30bucks to just go up the damn building only just slightly taller than where I live. When you go to work, you pride yourself for sitting behind one of those floor-to-ceiling glass pane, and yet, you tell me, I'm living in a Plattenbau and the entire Hong Kong is full of Plattenbauen because (and the inappropriate innuendoes about the East Germany, USSR and Communism coming out of their stupid out-to-be gaged mouths) , basically because I'm Chinese and you want to fuck with me?

I could not believe how naive some people are. I thought you mentioned "Germany" somewhere in all that, why don't you first take care of your sorry fucking ass and learn your lessons from the history books before you start slashing your tongue on other people's politically neutral living circumstances in another country? Do you always need to take other people down with you because you cannot face the truth of what happened?

My Hong Kong friend from Darmstadt sympathized with me. He said, he always retort that they still live in Bauernhof. NICE! A slap in your face to all you Schwein auf dem Bauernhof.

Most Underappreciated Players in Schalke 04 - Uchida Atsuo and Manuel Neuer

2011-08-10T18:52:00.000-07:00

I recently Liked the facebook page of Schalke 04. Apparently that was an unofficial fan page and it has 300,000 fans already, making it one of the top 50 fan pages in all of Germany.

It sounds really impressive. Of course, out of the other 49, they could all be soccer team fan pages but the likelihood of it is as low as I'm a dolphin. So my guess is, it is quite a well-loved team across Germany.

Uchida has very consistent performance in the last season. Schalke 04 won a few titles here and there, and made it into games with Bayern together as the only two teams left in the later stage of UEFA Champions League as far as I remember. Unfortunately Neuer is gone. He got a downgraded to a AA+ by one of the German newspaper. (I must say I loved the parallelism between Neuer and America.) and so is the team, ranked last out of 17 teams after just first week of the 11/12 season but stats from this one week can skew the outlook. They rank 26 in the UEFA board after Bayern, Bremen and Hamburger at the moment but just last month they won the Deutsche Meister. I have hopes.

A Little Family of His

2011-08-04T09:58:00.001-07:00

One of the guys I dated briefly in Berlin seems to have found himself a little family, in the short time we've stopped seeing each other.

He has given me some wonderful memories, but not unlike the many others whom I have kissed. Each of them are so very special to me. We weren't meant for each other, none of us were. And that always came to me as an afterthought, except this one. I knew back then we weren't meant for each other. It was an almost, almost painless separation. And thank God for the expensive Deutsche Bahn fair, crappy T-mobile internet connection and being denied a mobile phone contract as a foreigner, I could not as much as put up a fight for this one.

When I saw him in a photo taken with his Brazilian girlfriends and her two young daughters, all hugging and smiling, I felt that I have never made better decisions in my life that made me sadder.

Oh yes I did. But that was another story.

And boy, do I have stories.

Emotional Premium

2011-08-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

I was, to be honest, quite happy to abandon this little mind-dump of mine last October. Yet almost a year later I was back to the same place, updating the Microblog for a, hopefully, new wave of readers that I will gain after I re-inject some life (not just any life, but my very own precious) back into Germany (Under the Microblog). C'est la vie, und so ist das Lebens.

How does it feel, you might ask, to come back to Germany after an exciting year doing all sorts of nothingness that amounts to absolutely no earthly good? I must say the answer is less than satisfying for anyone who comes here looking for some assurance on the glorious prospect of living in Germany. ---- I feel sick. Ground-splitting-right-between-your-groin-while-on-stilts kind of sick.

Perhaps somewhere in my head I am blaming the country, the source of my personal misadventure, and its people the culprits of the great May 21 of my life --- A beautiful lie, a series of unfortunate events outside insurance coverage. What a high emotional premium I paid!

However, I realized something. --- This is A way to pursuit happiness: to accept, or even invite, constant suffering in exchange for once, twice, or none, but explosive when it occurs, rewarding dream-come-true moment. People who hold this alternative, but no at all uncommon take on life, performs short-term rites and make long-term decisions that ruin their lives in majority opinions because they look down on regular, steady results, and put their money on rare, unpredictable once-in-a-lifetime event that would generate disproportionate reward and take them out of their misery once and for all. They are not the ones that pay regularly to their retirement mutual funds account. --- They don't need a retirement mutual funds account.

So out of chaos there is nevertheless a pattern. May my random-walkings (again) in Germany bring many happy tidings.

Totally caught Schalke 04 in their wildest activity --- bowling!

2010-10-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

In Schottenhamel, Shot to the Himmel

2010-10-14T02:11:00.000-07:00

200th Oktoberfest, Munich, Germany

We tried on Saturday and we tried again. On Sunday afternoon we finally managed to squeeze into the Schottenhamel. Schottenhamel tent was the one where the Major tap the first barrel and naturally the fullest, and most definitely one of the more beautiful one! I was definitely impressed.

If I can tell you I could recount every thing clearly in Oktoberfest then I would have done a lousy job enjoying Oktoberfest myself. The experience is beyond words. You've really gotta see it for yourself. We met so many people from German teenagers who just done their Arbitur to wandering Swiss who stole our umbrella, to crazy Italian who took off their pants and showed their XYZ proudly, to Finnish drunks who can't stop talking about Nokia, to hungry Canadians spotting funny hats, to Dutch doctors, to Italians who can't keep their hands to themselves and more. We were in the Loewenbrau, then the Hacker Pschorr, then another sekt place with heater! (It rained, can you believe it!) The best part still have to be the finale at the Schottenhamel tent. --- The singing, the dancing, the talking to strangers, the being ogled at, or ogling at others...Oktoberfest is not all about beer, nor October itself. It's about celebration of communal spirit against most inhibitions in life (note I didn't say 'every' inhibitions, considering that the Germans are still quite conservative in some fronts). The German reunification too, came right at the end of the Oktoberfest which extended the celebration of its over-arching message, one-ness. Yes, when you let a Chinese keep talking about Oktoberfest, it is going to turn Zen-like at some point.

So we're a step above going to the Hofbrauhaus tourist tent from last year. Next year, we'll try even harder, right, my friend? Let's get a table now.

Little Piece of Paradise in the Rheingau

2010-10-14T01:22:00.000-07:00

Restuarant in Ruedesheim, Rhein, Germany

Delicious grilled pork chop, meshed potatoes and sauerkraut, folk music, waltz, songs from the 50s, polonaise dance, drinking games, embarrassed tourists from Japan, enthusiastic seniors, hand-holding Germans swaying to their favorite party music --- the joyous party, as if celebrating for certain occasion of a member amongst us like in Weddings or adulthood ceremonies, laughed , at each other and themselves, to their hearts content along with unpretentious, sympathetic violin and flute music, drinking sweet white wine that warms their cheeks and hearts, to nothing but life. Celebration of life, an important part of living, the art of appreciating one's time on earth before the bucket has been kicked, was easier wish for than act upon.

Again we are told to be one year older. Yet we are not one year older for we have been aging every single day. The celebration of 'still holding up', 'not yet dead', or better 'doing fine' and 'absolutely blessed' as we are now should continue, for without hopes and joys, we might as well, quite literally, nail in the coffin of life.

Black joke aside, being positive is king but being ambitious and risk-taking are the characteristics that will distinguish ourselves in the next year and the years to come from ourselves from the past, so our lives will not flint by us in wishy-washy fashion that we would look back disagreeably, rolling our eyes and shaking our heads like shoulder pads, ponchos and platform shoes and say, 'What the hell was I thinking?'

Boobs and Beers! OKTOBERFEST Pre-game Talk.

2010-09-24T01:51:00.000-07:00

This year, 2010 is the 200th anniversary of the Oktoberfest. Because of the wonderful experience from last year with my two surprise beauties by my side, one from Florida and one from New York, celebrated my birthday Bavarian style with some locals who were friends of friends of friends that happened to be around (no doubt they would stick around for the fest) that exemplified the true essence of the festival --- in front of a Mass of beer (or more) everybody's your friend --- I'm going to revisit again this coming Saturday and Sunday for an even wilder, newer experience in the biggest German fest of the decade.

Last year we visited the tourist-tent: Hofbrauhaus. This year I'm all set on the Augustiner and a few others my friends from Munich have recommended. The full report will be provided here in about a few days. Also looking forward to is the train ride that would be sure to filled with near-drunken attendees, men in hot leather pants, my boyfriend's amused expression at big chested women in Dirndl and my Asian female friend's first full Mass of beer. Not to forget the delicious oven grilled whole chicken that is the only thing one can order in the festival. Also featuring dancing on benches to cheesy German drinking songs and bad techno music after twelve. After twelve? Yikes. This might be a bit of a problem.

Not only is the actual fest closes at twelve, for security reasons, since there is an unspoken competition amongst the men that they had to drink one more mass than their neighboring table-sharers and the fact that indeed this is the time of the year to go all out, public transportation (forget about driving or hailing a taxi...) after midnight will proven to be difficult to go out of town. --- Hotels all around Munich city or Thereasawiese have been completely booked out. Any leftover rooms in Messe (exhibition centers) or airport area are either for strictly, lonely singles (a rule that the Germans really enforces when you book a single room!) or double rooms in strange, Feng-Sui-or-Arabian-Nights-gimmicky or lack-of-any-gimmicky-hospital-looking hotels that costs at least two hundred Euro. And if that's not shocking enough, the Bahn hotel, the convenient "facility" in which one doesn't book a room at unless one absolutely has no interest in sight-seeing or personal comfort that is located in the Hauptbahnhof (main station), the last time I checked, on a Tuesday before the 2nd weekend of the festival, costed 400 Euro. FOUR fucking HUNDRED EURO! We modest pheasants of the modern world are proud to say we are being extorted less than other people, some other people, by a margin of two hundred Euro by living ten minutes away on the S bahn line east of the Munich city center. We could almost give ourselves a gold star for that. Would be nice, of course, if the whole trip is not half of my whole month's intended expense, of course.

The Little City of Duisburg and the End of Love Parade

2010-07-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

Proverb 22:3 -- "A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it."

Before the accident at the Love Parade 2 days ago, most of the rest of the world has never heard of the little city in Northwest Germany, located in the Ruhr area, Duisburg. The Sun, for example, a tabloid from the UK, spelled Duisburg as Duisberg. Duisburg is about 12.2km from Oberhausen, where the famous Octopus the Paul predicted the loss of the German National team in World Cup 2010.

Gory and horrifying pictures of people at the Love Parade in a massive entanglement of bodies, legs off the ground, hands on someone else's faces, belongings trampled on the grounds, and people dangling from a staircase were shown in news videos. Those of us who were not there, called, texted and wrote to people we knew who might have joined the festivities that hosted 1.4million people from around the world this year.

If you take a look at a video recorded in the tunnel on the day, it appeared that most people in the tunnel were still walking in a good pace, singing typical party songs and cheering. Not sure whether the sound of the whistles in the background were from polices or party-goers, but as it could be interpreted either way, it could be that the people in the tunnel was also clueless. What I saw was not a sudden spur of panic for the people inside the tunnel, on the contrary it appeared that it was the people at the breakage point between two sections of the covered tunnel wanted to get out, and started climbing up, and some quite unsuccessfully, while people at the back kept pushing up, following the lead of the others blindly. On the other videos and pictures, especially documented well by bild.de, showed the one staircase on the side of the tunnel where most of the 19 , current death toll, people who died in the Love Parade met their demises.

Stampede accidence is hardly a rarity. Alone in Germany, you have, the last time I counted, 91 festivals throughout the year, the more traditional ones would be Fasching/Carnivals, Oktoberfest, but ear-drum damaging, vein rupturing, ecstasy infused electronic, dance music festival such as the Love Parade, created in 1989 in Berlin originally as a kind of peaceful demonstration, especially after cynics have written off about the existence of it, had attracted even more audience, giving cities big headaches as to how to do proper crowd control and illegal drug abuse crackdown. People under influence of hot weather, lousy party songs, lots of beers , anxiousness to go in after all the traveling and waiting, and effects of all of these magnified by drugs or drugged-up individuals (don't tell me you didn't expect this) , if not stupid young, women in next-to-nothing and happy and carefree adults who didn't want to grow up and get a life, those who willowed in the embrace of strangers, lovers of the same transcendental (I must say there were good Djs out there) music and a sense of belonging in something cool the size three times of Woodstock in the 60s, bad things are bound to happen.

There is a bible saying that I found to be very true. My teacher used to repeat it every time he heard some non-nonsensical, wacky accidents that could have been avoided, yet kept happening, in various parts of the world, as if humans never learn. It was from the Proverb, 22:3 "A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it."

World Cup in Germany

2010-07-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

Couldn't have found a better time to be in Germany than during the few weeks of World Cup (the Weltmeisterschaft in German). Whilist it certainly was no comparison to the last World Cup that Germany was hosting, the German team (die Mannschaft) has certainly sparked a new wave of enthusiasm in the summer of 2010, following the UEFA European Championship games where Bayern Munich got 2nd place, lost to Inter Milan in May, just a month ago.

At work, emails were distributed about company site viewing locations and time tables. On the way to the cafeteria, a huge 2 meter by 1.5 meter tall table was put up in front of the twenty some coffee tables which would then be occupied by waves of lunchers everyday for after-meal discourses on statistics, favorites and odds. Pools were taken for the final 16s and subsequent games betting anywhere between a mass of beer to double, triple digit (and possibly more) figures.

Around the country, public viewing sites were set up in the speed of lightning. Stalls selling world cup merchandise featuring not only Germany but other European and African countries' iconic colors or symbols popped up on the streets. Merchants calling on top of their lungs over the sounds of Vuvuzela on the streets, taking advantage of the souvenir craze as they rightfully should . Interns and assistants of financial service institutes around the financial district in Frankfurt were dispatched to occupy seats for their managements few hours before the game during office hours. Almost everyday during game times, most of the outdoor bars and restaurants in the Bergerstrasse were filled with happy audience, wearing flags and flowers around their necks of their national colors. In Frankfurt's Opern Platz Festival, supporters of various national teams aggregated for the opportune cultural fest where you would meet fans from the other sides, whose loud and pompous parade after a winning game would provoke local Germans along the way to grit their teeth.

To one surprise the Germans are incredibly orderly party-goers. Some pushing and shoving are unavoidable in public places but never was there any accident or situations where one might feel uneasy or endangered. Perhaps it was the 4 rows of police officers standing warningly near the city center at the Hauptwache station, but perhaps it was because Germans, as with many Europeans, were experts in celebration and beer-drinking.

A few German friends have expressed to me their disappointment in this year's team performance after losing the game with Spain, same as previous years. This year was the first time in many years where they stopped feeling ashamed of their national team as they made it into the quarter finals. I could hardly reconcile this sentiments with the amazing game stats of the team. Fresh young players, great team work, tight organization, and having many great team-playing star-players such as Mueller, Podolski, Klose... The only flaw would be the lack of experience and individual players' skills. Yet, I have to say Germans having high standards, in soccer and in everything else in life, is nothing new.

'Schland Gets the Bronze!!! Germany's World Cup Glories (and Agonies)

2010-07-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

The young German team's excellent performance at World Cup 2010 in South Africa came to a halt playing against the Spanish team in what the Germans called "Achtfinale". Whilst it was heartbreaking to the Germans and German national team fans around the world to see them lose, it was not without forewarning. For example, the Oberhauser Zoo's Octopus the Paul had predicted the results just as well as what one can deduce from the game statistics of the Spainards since the European Championship --- not a single goal against them. It was also not difficult to see that average technique of each individual team members was at a higher level than their German counterparts.

Nonetheless, the German team has earned themselves the third place in World Cup 2010 while upkeeping some excellent record-breaking numbers. Here and there, media complied world cup statistics and here are a few about the German team that is worth sharing:

Average age of the 2010 German team is 25.0. It is the 2nd youngest team amongst the 16 finalists, second only to Ghana in their group, group D, which has an average of 24.1.
Thomas Müller has earned himself a 100% goal accuracy, scoring 5 goals in total during the world cup. An impressive record. Thomas Müller, currently at age 20, is the only 20 year old to score than many goals in the history of world cup, following Pele, in 1958, then at 17, to score 5 goals only in 8 international tournaments!
Germany's coach Joachim Loew didn't stop wearing his "lucky blue sweater" until the playoff for 3rd place through out the world cup games.
Germany scored a total of 16 goals in the world cup.
Expectation for Mesut Oezil grew since his goal shot the German team into the final 16s. A local newspaper has once published a digitally modified photo of the German team with all players' bodies topped with his face! All 11 or so of them. This showed a great deal of trust in this young 21 year old Bremer midfield player that had showed no fear in the latest games against some very experience players such as Messi from Argentina.
The Germany team did not have one single goal against them in the 2nd half in the world cup till the game for 3rd place against Uruguay.
The German squad's nickname is Die Mannschaft, which means, literally, the Team, in English. Not much of creative genius.
Adidas has been their longstanding sponsor since 1954. Considering that Adidas is a German brand (founded by Adolf Dassler in 1924) , this makes sense. Argentina, Mexico and Japan are also sponsored by Adidas.
Between 1950 to 56, Germany had 3 National teams, namely West Germany, East Germany and Saarland. Now there is, of course, only one.
Germany has won the World Cup 3 times. They beat Hungary 3-2 in Switzerland, 1954. They edged the Netherlands 2-1 in Germany, 1974. And they defeated Argentina 1-0 in Italy, 1990. They have won runner-up 4 times and 3rd place now the 4th time.

XXX in Germany

2010-05-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

At the moment I am stuck at the Mercure Hotel (which is like a European equivalent of Holiday Inn) in Duesseldorf right off the Hauptbahnhof next to the Red Light District.

And that just does it --- I have no more doubts about the fact that in Germany, the two places one and the same. Come to think of it, I have "visited" quite a few Red Light District around Germany...including recent intrigue "O-burg" (Oranienburg, Berlin) women in flaming red and pink plastic bodysuits which, when my friends and I tried to get money out of the ATM right around that area (for less exciting pursuits) eavesdropped, get paid approximately 3 times more an hour doing their thing than us, two pretty well-paid Engineers. And of course I just had to ask my friend to reconsider his career choice.

Here I Come Again, Düsseldorf!

2010-05-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

Can't believe how psyched I am about Düsseldorf!

Düsseldorf is like the embodiment of good weather, delicious food, bottomless beer drinking, poised people and luxurious lifestyle. I really like that about the city. Can't wait to go visit the Ufer on Saturday morning and people watch, then go hang out at the art museums there. Should be quite wonderful.

Beautiful Ruhr / The Part of Germany that Reminded Me of What I Love About Germany

2010-04-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

The Tetraeder

"Quiet, humble, yet not bashful..."

You brought wonders to my world.

I was going through some significant lulls in my life in Germany when Easter came around. My dearest called me up out of nowhere to ask if I wanted to go on a motorcycle trip with him after about a life time of not talking. He wouldn't tell me where we were going. I could only say yes. Not that I would know where he's taking me to anyway.

When I saw him, I could not believe how much I have changed after months of struggling to internalize my not-nearly-perfect experience for the past couple months in Germany. I was on-edge, skeptical, self-pitying and angry, to say the least. I felt like as if I was the character in Paul Auster's books. A recurring character that, under different names each time, seems to appear stories after stories, books after books. --- Lonely, alienated people, starving, shocked and scared but in denial of his/her plight for he/she would not admit defeat, forever lingering in the darkness hoping to catch a glimpse of excitement, adventure in other people's life. A character that if he/she cannot battle fear, he/she become a part of the fear. --- I was that person, standing in front of my dearest again, he who seemed to have been unchanged by time, still fun, sane and sensible yet apathetic to me worse than ever before, I found my new self unacceptable and almost disgusting in the face of such stability and tranquility that seems to waft from him and his surroundings . Very quickly, I was readjusted to the peace around me. We went from town to town from West to East of the Ruhr area. Small town, big town, small city, big city...I quickly found solace, in his company, in the Ruhrgebiet.

The reason why he took me there, was because Ruhrgebiet is the 2010 so called Culture Capital. In the European world is a big deal.

Ruhrgebiet is a place more prominent than the rest of Germany of the "empty nest" phenomenon after industrial bloom after WWII, and decline of labor intensive activities in the last twenty years. It was teeming with rusted copper structure, abandoned warehouse, disused coal mines, evacuated Nuclear plants, empties fuel storage and more. But what is more prominent is the sentiment of hard working, single minded determination and indifference to change in the atmosphere. All these what would have really been "ugly" parts of the old industrial Germany were ingeniously turned into beautiful art galleries, design museum, art museum, science museum, astronomy museums, exhibition hall of modern life, forums for voice of Germans from small cities and town. Beautiful sculpture stands alone on the artificial mountain from the material dug out from the coal mines which turned into a park overlooking the Ruhrgebiet, as a quite, humble monolith, showing the world what we can achieve, if they are willing to slow down and listen to the stories of the small people below with big and dirty jobs that fueled the economy of Germany for the past decades.

I was very moved by my visit. The Tetraeder is really just as beautiful as the Eifel Tower in Paris. The Eifel might have been a feat in 1800s architecture. But the Tetraeder, and the Gasometer, and the Zollverein, and many more historical monument of industrial Germany that I have not seen, were definite feats of human struggle against nature, of determination, of just getting your hands dirty and doing what you gotta do, for yourself, for your family, for your country, and most importantly, not shouting to get credit or recognition and be complacent about one's place. It is the whole biblical idea of serving others that I witnessed and felt strongly over my visit. The quiet, humble, yet not bashful craftsmanship and leadership of the German people in technology, in Architecture, in engineering, in art, in social science and many many other disciplines, I found out, is what I really like about Germany.

It's always helpful to witness something bigger than oneself. Then one would realize that, oh yes, there really are things much more important, much more unfathomable, much more challenging than the difficulties one is facing. Looking at the ruins of the houses of Kings and Queens, touching the rusted turbines of the steam engines from the war, staring down at the world around us that is toiling ahead into another day from the top of the Gasometer, one cannot help but re-prioritize things that are important to oneself in life.

Take it easy. Take it easy.

Don't Put Your Money In Deutsche Bank, because you might just not be able to use it!!

2010-04-20T12:05:00.000-07:00

My favorite part of the letter is..."We would further point out that"...Basically, your business is NOT WELCOME here! --- Deutsche Bank

I thought I would let things go until this afternoon, I received the funniest, rudest letter from the most hypocritical bank in the entire world, Deutsche Bank. (The reason I said hypocritical is, the other day I visited their website, their homepage was the picture of a South American looking female, and it said "Respect." on the picture. RESPECT....)

This is my story...

I was traveling on business in New York about two months ago. I have moved to Germany not too long ago for my job and have a bank account there. My DB Visa card somehow only work sporadically in the States. For example it would work in taxis but not in shops. So I called Deutsche Bank.

And of course, I had a "fun" conversation with a German service representative at the 24hour help center located in Germany. I asked the guy if it's okay we speak Engish and he said to me "This is the Bank of Germany. Only German is possible. English is NOT possible." in fluent English. And wanting to hang up on me. ---- What kind of customer service rep denies people service? I told the guy I am paying a lot for your service (The Visa Gold card costs about a hundred Euro a year , as opposite to nothing in the regular card). And he repeated that service was not possible because I don't speak German.

At that moment, I was in New York for the first time after I moved to Germany. I was feeling extremely dispirited after the calls that charges something like 20Euro cents a minute and did not help at all from my New York hotel room. It was SUCH a huge contrast between the customer service in New York and, what, the biggest financial city in Europe. You could say I was a foreigner in both places, but I was treated in one place with open arms and the other a shut door.

I was utterly shocked at the lack of professionalism by the customer service representative. I am not perfect myself and I won't blame a person for not speaking a language. But I would expect him to at least try to help me by transferring my call to someone else, or say sorry, and continue in German, because I can understand and speak a few German words. But instead he denied me service. --- I have lived all over the world coming from Asia , and then many years in United States, and I know what is normal and what is not. As the biggest bank of Germany, I expect a certain level of quality for the service they provide. So I complained to the Deutsche Bank US call center in New York.

The customer representative of the call center in New York has sympathy for me. But they cannot do anything and they don't have direct access to my account nor are they capable of handling a complain about the German center. The lady told me to call Ireland Deutsche Bank to complain the next day.

I didn't want to spend too much money on this. So I wrote an email directly to the contact page on the website. I got one or two feedback emails from them but they looked like system messages. I received a letter of "We are processing your complain" some time later back in Germany. I know most likely no one looks at the complains so I just put it out of my mind.

BUT this afternoon, there's a letter in my mailbox. And here it is. I have never received a more HYPOCRITCAL, RUDE, UNPROFESSIONAL letter before. Who would have guessed, they really want to impound on me, and many many foreign investors and private customers form all over the world that,

"IF YOU ARE NOT GERMAN, SERVICE DENIED."

Are People Supposed to be Afraid of German Soliders??

2010-04-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

Took an ICE connection towards Dortmund today coming back from a business trip and sprinted into a compartment with a very young German solider in uniform without much thinking. As soon as I plopped myself down, I realized how I should probably not have done that when the chain of passengers following after me seemed to avoid coming into the same compartment despite the empty spaces.

Looking extremely uncomfortable about my sudden intrusion into his ICE compartment that the young soldier had probably from the beginning of his journey "decided" to occupy all by himself sitting in the middle seat of one side with his leg up on to that of the other side, and a duffel bag in matching military camouflage prints thrown on to another one, he managed to divert himself from whatever he felt about me by irritably repeating the folding and tucking of the sleeves of his uniform over and over again.

He stood up abruptly to bang the opened window shut. Judged from his unsteady hands, unaccustomed to terrorizing young woman, and the obvious clues about his age from his looks, he seemed to be in his mandatory 1 year service in the military every young man in the country in good physical health has to complete.

Naturally without any fear for almost anything (almost), I glared at him for an unusually long amount of time for his annoying gesture, and he eventually caved and moved over to the side of the compartment so I can have more leg-room. As a concession, I also stopped glaring at him and fixed my gaze instead on the beautiful sunset outside.

I am just wondering now, are people supposed to be afraid of German soldiers? Or was it just an isolated incidence? Or was that the demonstration of prowess by a young, inexperience boy to a girl of unidentified ethnic origin (lol)? Probably it was a mixture of both.

Germany Is Broken -- There's no safe place for a drug-free, mentally sane, literate and self-respectable individual.

2010-04-01T12:41:00.001-07:00

Germany is broken.

When I say Germany is very broken, I am not talking about the so-called never-seemingly-ending-post-war-reconstructions still going on in various parts of Germany, nor am I talking about the Nazis or WWII that the rest of the world cannot stop making jokes about. --- I am not even sure the majority of Germans and young residence of Germany remember what these words meant except some distant stories about their ancestors that somehow explained why "Overt Patriotism may be a bad thing" (Just might.) The brokenness is not a philosophical concept but something that one can see on the most common streets of German cities, inside public transportation, from the glares of their TVs and on the faces of its people. Solid, tangible evidence of broken families, broken education system, sluggish law enforcement system, the consequences of boorish immigration policies from the ghastly past, the less known side of argument to National Health Care and high tax to the rich which feeds the homeless, jobless yet capable men and women who enjoy their unemployment benefits to the fullness by spending it on beers.

On a warm, early Spring night without rain, the spoiled youth of Germany poured into the streets in herds, chain-smoking, beer sloshing, hallucinogen dealing and flinging their future to outer space. The level of testosterone on the streets sent out an unbearable scent to the sweltering air that made older women coming back from REWE or tired businessmen in suits quickened their steps while averting eye contacts with the "Elites of Germany". They burnt holes into the seats of the tram, painted graffiti on public spaces, hurled insults to curious passerby if not challenged them to a stand-off with their childish, defiance glances. Though most of us could comfort ourselves with the fact that almost certainly in all cases, they delivered nothing empty promises of violence.

Somewhere everywhere in Germany, groups of men and women were piled over each other on couches, passed out on toilet bathroom floors, or beating their heads to the monotonous higher art called techno music, and passing time with hallucinogens that seems to come all too easily in Germany parties and clubs where some even designed their furniture to accommodate these incapacitated future of the country. Doener places business flourished at the wee hours of the morning as a consequence of desperate hungers in consummated youth with bad cases of acid reflux.

In the seedy places on the streets, of apartment buildings, of basements of old abandoned establishments, in the internet and last but not least in the hearts of the wealthy, middle-class Germans, certain crimes of morality were being committed every second. Honesty, loyalty, trust and love were based on trickery, lies, blind faith, or mutual disclosures of equal disinterests in traditional, biblical values. Relationship histories were ill-written chronicles of sexual conquests of proportions no less gory than the invasion of Arabs in Western Europe 700AD.

At home, bored adults were watching spin-off shows from the worst of American media --- Heidi Klum telling girls made out of skins and bones they were far too fat to be Germany's Next Top Model; 15 year old kid prancing on stage on Germany Super Star singing 'Das geht ab' (You dont need to know how to sing per se to sing that song...), in competition with another pale faced blonde hair boy yet to reach puberty who admitted publicly he didn't know whether he loved men or women. --- The next morning at work, these people would share their pointed opinions about these TV personnel in intense fervor with their colleagues in the office, as if they also had a monumental health care reform bill passed just the night before.

Google pulled out of China sparked some minute interests in the German people about foreign cultures. One after the other they repeated their ignorant comments about their foreign counterparts, persevering cultural misunderstanding deeper into the their heads.

There's no safe place in Germany for a drug-free, mentally sane, literate and self-respectable person. I asked myself where did all the true elites of Germany that I have met and was so impressed by gone to?

Oh, I know --- America.

Long Time No See.

2010-04-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

Hey, I am back. Apparently people read this, as I have found out recently, not just from friends but also visits from Google and Yahoo! all around the world based on my Google Analytics account which I have left abandoned to its own device for a few months after I installed it. Guess I will just, keep writing.

Robert Harris - FATHERLAND / The Germany Would-Have-Been

2009-12-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

Finished reading "Fatherland" yesterday. It was one of the more important books I've ever read. (BTW a friend told me it was made in to a movie some time ago, if you are curious but lazy.)

The book is about what would the lives of the German people, and the rest of the world be, if Germany had won World War II. You have to give the guy credit. It is an extremely complex project to take on, to have to create the history for a country (and the rest of the world accordingly) for 30 years. And Robert Harris have woven the facts and his imagination in one seamless fabric. --- It was an absolutely excellent narrative about a once loyal German soldier and detective Xavier March (...the Savior?) discovering the biggest, most well-covered genocide in the history of mankind and coming to confront not only his superiors, the system, but also his own personal beliefs and values. (Naturally triggered by the encounter with a beautiful, remarkable young American women called Charlie who is 25 year old. --- My age. Yes, I did pretend to be her in my head throughout the story.)

I was, to be honest, struggling to keep my eyes open given how late I stayed up trying to finish the last two chapters (So it was past one. Yeah, I'm old.) and I admit that I skipped a good amount of descriptive in order to find out what happens at the end of the story. The ending was to my surprise extremely unconventional. Not so much because it was simply different from the typical picaresques Hollywood-movie happy ending, but that it made you really feel like you are the protagonist himself. A person who has blind spots. A person who's discovering the true meaning of friendship and animosity. A real person made out of flesh and bones, not just some fictitious composition of awkward movements and lines. A person who knew what hopelessness is but even more so what hope means, which is shown in the way how he believed that his lover (an unlikely American journalist of 25) had escaped the border control into Switzerland successfully with all the confidential, tell-tale evidence of the Nazi's crime . The outcome was, although tragic, as it has to be as the way how the history of these men have been written, satisfying. The truth, however hard to accept, brings us peace in the end. When Xavier March found the remnants of the concentration camp by the wasted train tracks that used to traffic thousands of unfortunate Jewish men and women to their Final Solution, everything became clear to him, and to me. The author did not draw out the ending of the American Journalist explicitly but it was better that way, because all of these, eventually, were fictional. Germany did not win the war. Kennedy was assassinated. And the world knows about the Holocaust.

The world is an ugly place. These ugly things try to hide themselves hoping to slip through time unnoticed into the forgotten void. But no bad deed goes unpunished. And the world is not the same because there are people who lives to expose the truth, to bring forth history such that it can be our guiding light in the future.

After I read the last sentence my mind was totally hung up with the image of Xavier March, wounded, stranded in the darkness, alone in an abandon landscape, one of the many places where concentration camps were set up for unimaginable magnitude of horror, which he had finally verified to be true with his own eyes, while on top of him, the SS' search helicopter's rotor blades above him spinning in deafening terror and men in that despicable uniform yelling, "Don't move! Or we will shoot you!" that actually meant to shoot you regardless. --- Somehow, compare to all these, my personal problem seems to trivial. Unworthy of even an ounce of my emotion.

Politics change the lives of people. So does natural disaster (talk about running out of petrol-based fuel and global warming) and last but not least, mythical, higher power who vowed to destroy the decadent earth on which Epimethius had brought forth contents of the Pandora's box (talk about the Apocalypse in 2012 )...no one can predict their own future. We don't even know if future can be used with the possessive pronouns. However, Present, the "Now", is ours, in our own hands. Slipping through our fingers as it may seem sometimes as sand in our palm, "Now" is always more valuable then the "What-might-have-been" and the "What-If". Sand may slip through our fingers but it will leave a warm, layer of dust in your palm. --- The memory that we once have had it. --- Is that not what we all are living for? If all of us shall weep for we cannot take what treasure, friendship and lovers we horded with us to our graves, then we shall weep night and day.

Enough with the prose. --- No one weeps night and day. No one wants to weep night and day. That's what cowards do. The courageous take life in stride, with his chin hoisted and chest up.

The Best Ever Firefox Add-On For People Learning Foreign Language --- Inline Translator

2009-12-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

I don't know who developed this, the guy's username is in Korean but whoever he is and whichever translator he is actually piggybacking on with his Firefox add-on "Inline Translator", it was awesome! I can now read news in German, French, Japanese, Arabic for that matter because of this. I am using this tool to help me learn the language and it is better than the German teacher whom I am paying some hundred Euro per lesson for (without the sense of humor and warm, gentle smile. But eh, human contact is over-rated.) You can download it here, of course it only works if you use Firefox.

Here is the link to this amazing add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9842