The Eternal Struggle for Kitchen Appliances and Internet in Germany

Last week, Kata and I were living out of suitcases in her old flat, because there's no internet or fridge at our new flat. It's not for lack of effort. Appointments were made. Orders were filled. Money was exchanged. For some reason, German businesses behave in much the same way that German bureaucracies behave: slowly.

Our life has been forced to adjust to this glacial pace as we await a few necessities of modern life, like our fridge.

Things are a little different in North America, where appliances come with your apartment. In Germany, there is no kitchen: no counters, no fridge, no sink. Just a few pipes sticking out of the walls and floor.

Many would consider us lucky to have a new, furnished kitchen with our newly renovated apartment, but we still had to search for a fridge that fit in the cozy space that is our kitchen.

We found one the right size and price online, but had to wait 10 to 11 business days for its arrival. Life without food refrigeration sets back your food options a century, so we held off moving into the new flat.

The 11 days elapsed with no fridge. I called Saturn (a European equivalent of Future Shop) to find out what is going on. "Don't worry Herr Marshall," I was told, "the fridge was not in their warehouse but it will arrive this week."

The week goes by and I'm a little impatient. I'm thinking about demanding a refund. "Well Herr Marshall, we have a special team awaiting its arrival at our distribution centre and it will arrive this week." If a special team is going to take care of things,I think to myself, then I won't demand a refund.

Friday comes around and no special team has appeared on the doorstep of the flat we haven't moved into. I call again. "Herr Marshall," they say, "we will not be able to deliver this fridge, but you can choose another one and it will come early next week."

By this time, I am weighing my options. We can demand a refund and go to a competitor, but we won't receive a fridge for a few days because most stores only stock the display models. We are also moving into the flat that weekend and leaving for vacation the week after, so timing is crucial.

Whether we like them or not, we have to stick with Saturn. We choose an alternative and wait. 

Monday arrives and with it an email saying our replacement fridge is not in stock, but they suggest another fridge, which is available.

Up until this point, I made every attempt at not yelling at the customer service people. They didn't cause this problem. They don't manage Saturn's supply chain. 

They are just a cog in this soul-less machine that makes every effort to avoid supplying a product that I paid for. I was in the right: I was told it would arrive and it never did, so there was no need to yell.  It was a miscarriage of capitalism. Every time I called, I laid out my situation rationally..

But a month waiting for a fridge frays one's nerves. I started yelling, in English and in Shitty German. Then I yelled at their manager. When I was told the fridge that I didn't even want wouldn't arrive that week – so no fridge before we left for vacation – I yelled some more: What about that "Special Team?!?"

In my haste and anger, I accepted the third fridge they offered after only checking its dimensions so it would fit into our kitchen.

The next day I received an email stating the fridge would arrive the day before our vacation between 10am-2pm. I worked from home and waited. Noon came, then 2pm came, no fridge. I called the delivery company and they said, "It's coming at 3pm, Herr Marshall."

The fridge arrived, bundled up in cardboard and wrapping and plastic. I hastily signed the forms the deliverymen handed to me and began tearing the packaging away so I could plug it in and get to the office.

The packaging came off and revealed a built-in fridge: A metal box with screw holes and sharp corners, made to be put into a cabinet. Every fridge we had asked for was a smooth-surfaced, free-standing fridge.

Faced with a vacation to next day and the prospect of fighting a bureaucratic business for another month, we accepted industrial-styled fridge and moved on to solving the internet...

Our fridge, while we waited for our fridge.

Sitting atop styrofoam
with its screw holes and  jagged edges,
I think we're beginning a fridge trend.

The Damned German Internet

Before all of this Kata had nice things to say about Vodafone in Germany. Now? Not anymore. As I write this, there is no internet in our new apartment. 

An appointment was made weeks ago for the internet guy to visit and install the internet. He arrived punctually and went about checking every outlet for a signal with his internet tricorder thing. He went to the cellar to jiggle a few cords, then returned to stare blankly at the outlets. He told us to call an electrician to fix the wires and departed.

The electricians arrived and said it's up to the internet guy to actually do something. Their instructions – yes, there had to be two electricians to arrive at this conclusion – was to get the cable company to come by again and do whatever they're supposed to do and then call the electricians to do whatever they're supposed to do.

One electrician returned anyway to drill a hole in the wall and bring a cord down from the attic to get us onto the grid. This gives us the potential for internet, but we still needed an internet provider to provide us with internet.

Vodafone was the internet provider in Kata's last apartment and the plan was to shut off the internet in her old flat and have it activated in the new flat. She visited a store, which led to the previous visit with the internet guy staring blankly at the outlets. 

Of course, having no internet at the new flat didn't stop Vodafone from shutting off the internet in her old flat, which is the one thing they technically did correctly in this whole mess.

We are now using mobile internet while we correct this miscarriage of capitalism.

 Last week, Kata again dropped by a store, which is easier than calling a customer service line manned by robots and German speakers. The store people looked at their computer for about 15 minutes and declared we have internet because the computer says so. Kata, being the internet whisperer insisted we do not have the internet. The store person typed something else and told Kata she would get an email confirming an installation appointment.

As I write this, Kata has not received an email about getting the internet that she is paying for from the internet provider that is not providing the internet.

Germany claims to be the economic engine of the European Union. A capitalist success story. In practice, Germany is feeling more like a centrally-planned communist state. 

How businesses providing internet or kitchen appliances behave so unbusiness-like and avoid providing the products and services they are meant to provide is a question for the ages. In the mean time, Kata has nothing nice to say about Vodafone anymore.

Dorfy Day Trip: The Best Train Station Restaurant Ever

When you're a double threat like a Prince-Bishop,
you get live in a Brühl shack like this.

We all have regrets. They might be decisions we made or errors in judgement that haunt us long afterwards. Yep, I'm talking about train station food.

One of my many train station food regrets were two boiled sausages I bought because I was hungry and couldn't imagine a three-hour trip with an empty stomach. It did not long for me to start imagining how nice that train ride would have been on an empty stomach. 

The sad, week-old boiled sausages. The dry, crusty bread that tasted like diesel exhaust. Yellow mustard somehow made more yellow from age. If some foods can knock years off your life, that meal took a few off mine.

The train station in Brühl is a delicious exception to the rule, which is ironic considering when you pronounce Brühl: you draw out the umlauted 'u' like you're puking. Try it out loud.

You might not have an opportunity to practice saying it though. Brühl is a small village outside Cologne. Aside from the stately homes near the train station – usually these neighbourhoods are for scoring rock or smack, not a 19th century mansion – Brühl's main draw is the Max Ernst Museum and the fancy Baroque palace, with its gardens, Cologne's Prince-Bishop lived in.

After working up an appetite visiting an M.C. Escher exhibit at the museum, and it being a cold, soggy Rhineland afternoon, we went into the Brühler Wirtshaus for a warm snack and cold beer. 

It was crowded and not with the usual desperadoes you might encounter at a German train station. There were old folks and young families, all enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon at the train station.

Even without a reservation – they make those at this establishment – we managed to get a table in this crowded spot and order some beers – Brühl is just outside Cologne, putting in Kölsch country, which is fine by me because it's delicious stuff.

Kata ordered the tomato soup and the a warm pretzel, both of which passed muster with her, since she knows her soup and pretzels. The pretzel was served warm, an uncommon thing at a train station, but also with hunk of garlic butter. This was a first-class pretzel experience.

I got the Currywurst, which could go wrong when you order it in the wrong place. 

In its crudest, simplest form Currywurst is a sliced sausage covered with ketchup and curry powder, often with fries on the side. A nice place, like Brühler Wirtshaus, will blend the curry and ketchup into a tasty sauce. My first brush with it was from a Berlin street vendor, where the Currywurst slinger just squirted the ketchup onto the sausage and then shook some curry powder on top.

Most food places put a little effort into their Currywurst. There's a place in the Dorf that sprinkles gold dust onto theirs. Another outdoor patio spot on the Rhine serves so-so sausages with an amazing ketchup. The train station Currywurst in the Wirtshaus Brühler had the whole package: a decent sausage, fried crispy on the outside with a dose of ketchup that was actually spicy (German spicy is usually mild by North American standards).

So if you ever find yourself in Brühl, ask yourself why. If you know the answer, then hit Brühler Wirtshaus for the best train station dining experience ever.

Have you ever met happier people about to eat at a train station?

Omnibus Blog 3: Mostly Politics

Once again I am cramming several posts into one awesome Omnibus Blog! This time it's all about politics.


Karneval's Political Parade Floats

Karneval is a time for debauchery, but on Rose Monday, it becomes a time for parades. During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, people mount the floats and toss beads and doubloons to the crowds below. In the Rhineland, they take on a political bend.

Tsirpas takes aim at Cyclops Angela in 2015's Rose Monday parade.

In what is my favourite Karneval tradition, the parade floats become gigantic, 3-dimensional political cartoons. This float was applauded by the crowd (this was shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris).

Some floats make fun of topics of the day, like the one above of a cycloptic German Chancellor Angela Merkel and slingshot-wielding a Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsirpas. One of this year's floats pissed off the new Polish government, which is too angry at everything to realize that when you complain about satire about you more people pay attention to that satire.

Many floats target political extremism of Islamic terror groups like ISIS or the increasingly hateful far right-wing fringe of german politics, like the Alternative for Germany or, as shown below, the National Democratic Party of Germany. 

These are all things worth satirising and demonstrates that politics belongs to the streets just as much as the legislature.

Trump got the Karneval treatment this year.

The float that angered the new Polish government.

Canadians, please remember NDP in Germany stands
for the National Democratic Party of Germany.

Britain out? Scotland in?

Reading the news lately you would think the European Union is in a lot of trouble. This isn't new. The EU feels so precarious at times – staying together it seems with nothing but hope, a tangled bureaucracy, dental floss, and chewing gum – that it's natural to see every problem as a crisis that will tear the whole thing down.

As of this posting, a British exit from the EU is one such possible problem being blown into a crisis.

During last year's UK election, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on the country's EU membership. Doing this helped him placate his increasingly anti-EU base and arguably win the election.

Using that as a bargaining chip, Cameron negotiated a settlement that allows UK exemption on stop paying welfare and child care benefits to migrant workers and special protections for City of London financial sector.

Despite the lack of political or economic sense to leave the EU, the concessions might be enough for the UK's eternally-angry Euroskeptics or for EU Parliamentarians, who vote on them as well.

Many EU member states already resent the UK's special status and take umbrage to the settlement. And Eastern European member states, where many of those migrant workers come from, are not liking this either.

Now, a referendum on joining the EU in Denmark was narrowly defeated in 1992, which put the whole EU at risk of not being formed at all. A special agreement was reached to gave Denmark exemptions for military independence and keeping its currency, the krone.

The UK's case is a little different. Denmark's referendum threatened to kill the EU before it even began. Britain's exit is an unprecedented problem, but it won't imperil the EU – it's just not so good for the continent's economy.

The tangle doesn't end there. Scotland, which held a referendum on its own independence and voted it down by 10 per cent, is mostly pro-EU. The Scottish National Party also holds the majority in its parliament.

If the UK left the EU, there'd certainly be another referendum on Scottish independence, with EU membership as a central issue in the very near future. If Scottish attitudes toward the EU remained the same, Scotland will vote for independence and likely join the EU shortly after.

This would be a double-whammy for the UK: Exit from the EU closes off a market of 300 million people to its exports and leads to the independence of the region with all the UK's oil and whisky.

In the long run, the EU comes out as the winner. It loses its loudest whiniest, grumpiest member state, which wants the economic benefits of being in the EU without the obeying its rules, while getting a new member with a healthy economy and great whisky.