Beer Countries

It’s common for many Canadians to point out that Europe does things better than us. 

I don’t agree with these views because Europe gets plenty of things wrong, like militant ultra-right-wing politics, loving soccer a bit too much, creating treaties that are supposed to prevent world wars but end up causing them, and burritos – it’s impossible to get a decent burrito over here.

I will admit that Europe gets a few things right, like the welfare state, public transit systems, and alcohol laws. I mention the latter because my home province of Ontario is loosening its current liquor laws. The old law allowed the sale of alcohol only in government-owned stores and Beer Stores, which are owned by a bunch of foreign brewers.

The new law will break the monopoly on the sale of beer and allow grocery stores to start selling it. No, wait, only some grocery stores after the required forms are completed. Oh, wait, the government is still fixing prices, so it’s still a monopoly. Oh, yeah, and it's going to take two years.

Okay, so Ontario is not really liberalising their beer sales, but in two years my fellow Ontarians will be free to buy beer in a store that the government chooses at a price that doesn't threaten the foreign/government stranglehold on the system.

While Ontario is making progress in baby steps, Europe is doing a better job. Even Germany does not have the bureaucratic red tape that Nanny State Ontario has when it comes to beer sales. And Hungary, oh, Hungary. That place is great for alcohol enjoyment.

Let’s take a closer look at three jurisdictions, because there is nothing more fun than comparing and rating countries with militant ultra-right-wingers to see if I will end up getting a molotov cocktail thrown through my window.

Germany

On a Sunday beer walk through a Berlin public park, I saw a man pushing a baby carriage with a beer. If I saw this back home, I would have also been able to watch a mob stone him for enjoying a beer in the presence of his child in a public space. On a Sunday afternoon anywhere, it should be cool for anyone to take their kid for a walk in the park and enjoy a frosty cold beer.

Cold beer is available is convenience stores (they call them kiosks). You can buy it in grocery stores, along with liquor and wine. There are no government monopolies. 

To say Germany is a beer country is an understatement, but to call it a drunken country is an overstatement. While beer is made widely available, drunken-ness is limited to the times and places you would expect drunken-ness. That's why the Dorf's Altstadt fills up with beer drinkers but other districts do not,

In Berlin's parks, along the Dorf's riverfront, and occasionally in the streets, people drink beer without going into Destructor Drunk Mode (but Germany might not be allowed to have a Destructor Mode anymore). 

The point I'm making is that in Germany it's social thing as much as it is a legal one. It makes bureaucratic-loving Germany freer than Canada.

RATING: 3 out of 4 Happy Drunk Marshalls

Hungary

When it comes to booze – and this is will be one of the few times you will see this written – the Hungarian government has got it right. They simply let it be. You can buy beer, wine, and liquor in the grocery stores and the kiosks.

Is it a pretty day out? Do you want to sit in the park and drink a beer? Go ahead! You can drink in the parks, on the streets, here, there, almost anywhere. You can buy beer as early as you like and – save for a few Budapest districts – as late as you like.

Again, this is a social thing. You're welcomed into someone's home with a shot of palinka. You have wine with dinner and sometimes a beer on a patio after work. You can stay out almost all night in the ruin pubs.

All of this makes Hungary a great party place, but it's still a great place to enjoy a few drinks – which is what the true enjoyment of wine or beer, or even palinka, is all about.

RATING: 4 out of 4 Happy Drunk Marshalls

Canada

I'm going to begin this section with a history reference* because it's my blog and I can do whatever I want.

Canada sent almost 10 percent of its male population to war between 1914 and 1918, so the women were left running things. At the time the suffrage movement also advocated for prohibition, so while the war raged women got the vote and then passed prohibition. When the soldiers returned to a dry country, they were like, "Hey, this isn't what we were fighting for." So the Ontario government relented and said, "Alright, you can have your booze back, but it's going to be controlled by us."

That current system is almost 100 years old. The government stores, the foreign brewery-controlled monopoly, and the old timey social attitudes towards alcohol have changed very little. 

The one change since then is that you can touch the merchandise. Before that, you had to walk to the counter and ask for what you wanted, which was fetched from the back and briskly put into a paper bag before anyone could see. No wonder so many East Blockers settled in Ontario: it's central planning in all its un-debaucherous glory.

Ontario still has a long way to go, hopefully people tell the government that right now they are not going far enough.

RATING: 3 out of 4 Angry Drunk Marshalls

*Special thanks to Prof. George Warecki for sharing that gem during a lecture in his Canadian History class at Brescia College. Isn't kind of freaky that I remember that?

A Tree Grows in the Media Harbour?

Media Harbour at dusk, taken on one of the nights I was able to leave 'early.'

Spring has come to the grey, dark Dorf. The last few days the sun has been staying out most of the day, instead of the few seconds it takes for the sun to jump from behind one cloud before hiding behind another.

If you're like me and have the luck (or lack of it) to be working in an office with windows, it's a great feeling. You look outside, you see the sun, you want to get out for a walk and feed your UV addiction and then sit under a tree.

But in my work neighbourhood, the Media Harbour, that's not really possible. I think we can blame Frank Gehry for that one. Well, no, not really blame blame him, but he started this.

He designed the first set of fancy wavy modern buildings here, which inspired more people to plop more fancy glass buildings here. Frank Gehry knew how to design a building, but you can't apply that design to a whole neighbourhood. 

That is what was done with Dusseldorf's Media Harbour, which is now lined with modern or post-modern or post-post-modern (is that a thing? I think that's a thing!) buildings with wavy lines or glass covered everything or old brick industrial facades or coloured alien people festooned on them. 

The architectural weirdness of the Media Harbour.

These smart designers thought of everything to make the buildings, and the area, look cool – and it all does look very cool – except for adding a few trees for actual, natural coolness.

Picture this. It's a beautiful sunny day out. You walk out of the office and go to the lunch place with the fancy salads. You get those fancy greens to go with the intent to sit beneath a tree or on a park bench and munch on your arugula and goat cheese and read a book. 

But you look around the harbour for a spot.

Where do the media workers eat? On the shadeless wooden bridge thing.

Sorry. Nope! You're going to be enjoying spring's return on Dusseldorf's version of the Concrete Beach. You will be eating on the shadeless wooden bridge thing or on a bench in the cold concrete shade created by one of those po-mo glass slabs.

It wasn't always like this. Two colleagues have pointed out, with sad mopey faces, the spot used to be a great beach bar. Now, it's its place stands the heap of black glass and steel that is the Hyatt. 

A beach bar! That is exactly what this neighbourhood needs. But someone has decided a building should go there and here I am willing to settle for a park. 

On the bright side – I see the bright side because it's spring and I am feeling less pessimistic – there are slivers of green not far from here. 

If you walk for about 10 minutes, you find some park and some benches on the river. If you go 5 minutes more – which requires more time than I have during office hours – you will find a strip of beach along the Rhine. It's no beach bar, but it's a relief to see that the media sprawl has left some nature untouched.

The beach, in not so spring-ish weather.

Dorf Domicile Drama

There are people who love looking at apartments.They look longingly at real estate websites and Craigslist at available apartments. They bookmark their favourites -- or pin them to Pinterest or whatever the kids are doing these days. They click through the photos, pausing to imagine themselves in the apartment, with their furniture, throwing their housewarming.

I am not one of those people. I don’t like shopping, not for shoes, not for pants, not for Ikea furniture, and definitely not for apartments.

This is why, despite very few hiccups, my Budapest apartment search was such a blessing. I talked to a real estate agent, who sent a pdf of available apartments, and then we found one. I paid the rent, some of which likely included a management fee since the landlords lived in Hong Kong, and maybe a commission, and everyone was happy.

In Germany, an apartment hunt feels like a Camus novel. The absurdities that people accept as the norm defies the imagination.

Let's say you find a flat through a real estate agent, you pay a commission up front, which can be several month’s rent. All those appliances that are usually included in a flat? Not in Germany. You buy those up front or bring your own. Throw in the deposit, you’re likely coughing up several thousand euros for the privilege of renting a flat.

If you're a normal person, like me, with a normal job and a normal paycheque, there is cause to pause. If you don't have a briefcase of cash laying about, the recourse is trying to reach normal people renting out their domicile without the aid of a real estate agent.
Also not easy, for several reasons.

For example, let's say you're going on a two-week vacation. You would usually call a friend, ask them to drop by the apartment, feed the fish, and ensure the place doesn't get robbed. In Germany, or at least the Dorf, if you go away on vacation, you try to rent it out to complete strangers for those two weeks.

Now, yes, that clogged up my search results when I was looking online and made it the hunt a little more difficult. I'm not going to dwell on that. But let's think about inviting strangers to your home for two weeks while you're in far away in another country. They're sleeping in your bed, stacking your plates and bowls the wrong freaking way in the cupboards, and clogging your shower drain with their hair.

I'm digressing, but, anyway, this phenomenon seems to be common.

While I attempted to search for a place to live in the Dorf, I landed into the cheapest airbnb I could find and lived with a few foreign students for a month.I wish I had stories to tell about cultures meeting in a faraway place, but it was pretty boring. Everyone came in the front door, went straight into their room, and didn't come out unless they had to eat in the kitchen or clog up the renter's shower drain with their hair.

While Kata was preparing to move to the city from Berlin, I had to waded through the apartment sites. Ignoring countless ultra-short-term leases, avoiding scams on airbnb, and, mostly, sending out a lot of emails and leaving a lot of voicemails with little to show for it.

What I finally ended finding was less than ideal. The girl who showed me the place was hoping to hand off her lease. She didn't say why, and I didn't ask, but I assumed it was because the flat was a renovated office in the Altsadt (the party part of town). I should have asked if the roommate, who I hadn't meet yet, was crazy.

With few other options in such a short period of time, we took. Kata and I moved in and we got to experience the loudness of the Altstadt on our first night there. It was essentially a street party down the street from us. 

We also got to meet our roommate, who was a shut-in that spoke little English and was a little crazy. We found out later, he was a lot crazy. More on that after I describe the apartment a little more.

Like I mentioned, the apartment used to be an office and was renovated to be a flat. Well, kind of renovated. The office/flat was equipped with fluorescent lights, power outlets situated at waist-height, a bathroom with only a sink, another bathroom with only a shower, a living room that was actually a hallway, a kitchen with no windows, a– well, you get the point. It was far from ideal. Luckily, I had only agreed to a three-month term, no Forever Lease.

Back to the crazy roommate. This guy was nice and was more weird than crazy. Kata worked from home, so he would be doing his stuff and humming and singing to himself. When I came into the flat, he would scurry into his room like a squirrel. 
Harmless stuff.

Then, one night, he started drinking and didn't stop drinking in his room. After two days, the kitchen counter was lined with empty wine bottles. Once, in the middle of the night, he went running to his bathroom (this one had a sink and a toilet, no shower) probably wanting to puke and screamed, like blood-curdling. I went running to see if he was alright, but he shut the door.

Oh, yeah, we were sort of spared some of this awkwardness because we lived on one end of the flat with our own bathroom and bedroom and a spare room that served as Kata's office. We also had a French roommate who shared a bathroom with crazy German dude (I always forgot his name, it started with a G). 

On my way to leave for work, I saw him in the kitchen and asked if he was alright. He said he was fine. While I was away that day, he came up behind Kata and said he needed help. Startled, she told him to call someone.

Then the guy disappeared. So did the French girl. Both gone without a word. Did they run away together? Is he dead in a ditch? Is he alive? Is she alive?

Kata messaged the french girl and got proof of life. The guy returned, feeling better, apparently. 

It was time to go.

This time, the search was a little easier. A friend from work was leaving the Dorf and offered his big room to Kata and I. That is where I am writing this now. In a real flat, not a renovated office, with a nice roommate, not a crazy one who sneaks up on my girlfriend, in a neighbourhood that knows few parties (although we are facing a busy street, but I'm not complaining).

It took a lousy living situation to remember that I had a great living situation in Budapest. It was not perfect there, but it isn't perfect anywhere. There are degrees of perfection. Budapest was high up there, but are current living situation is a really good one too. 

Kata mentioned the other day the new place feels like a real home. That's all that you can ask for, and it's all you really need.