YA: I Don't Get It.

I’m sat in bed following my fabulous 8.30 lay-in. Oh yes, 8.30. Three hours later than normal, and let me tell you it’s absolute bliss. The light is streaming through the gap in the curtains I don’t have (so the window, then) and I have very little to do today other than visit the bank, so I though, hey! Why not write another blog?

As not much has changed in my Germany dynamic over the past couple of days, I’m going to keep it short, but I feel there’s just some things I don’t understand about Germany that I have to get off my chest. Firstly, crossing the road. Jay-walking is a crime in Germany apparently second only to murder, or at least you would have thought so given the dirty looks given to you when you try it. Everyone stands patiently waiting for the green man, even when there is no traffic in sight. Why? Cross the road! Nothing will hit you! There’s nothing to hit you! Even more bizarrely this obsession with safety on the roads is not translated to the train, where there is in some stations frankly an enormous gap between the train and the platform. There’s not even any warning signs. No ‘mind the gap’, nothing. So in a country obsessed with trying to stop you getting run over by an invisible bus, they’re quite happy to let you fall down a foot-and-a-half wide gap and get mangled by a train. Mental.

Then there’s the supermarkets. Where is the order in those places? They’re just a jumble sale of meat and exotic biscuits! This is a qualm I particularly have with Norma (similar in the supermarket hierarchy to Asda back home) where they’ve got bottles of vinegar lined up along the top of the freezers for no apparent reason whatsoever. Just make space for it in the sauces section! Kaufland, I have discovered, is a bit more organised, but generally massive, meaning you have to take a compass and a map if you want to emerge with your chicken before a week on Thursday, because nothing is sign-posted and you’ll get lost in the vegetable isle for hours whilst desperately trying to find the cereal.

Something else that is particularly getting my goat is opening hours. It isn’t just the fact that German turns into a ghost town on Sundays and you have to go to a train station to see any signs of life. No, the opening hours I’m having particular issue with are the ones to do with the university. I was under the impression that German university courses were pretty intense, that they had lots of lectures in a day and they generally started pretty early. Why, then, are the offices for the university housing service only open from 10-1 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and then from 1-3 on Tuesdays? Surely no one can go to these middle of the day times (I certainly can’t, what with being at work) resulting in a mahoosive queue on Tuesday afternoons because that’s the only slot when everyone’s free. The Auslanderamt have similarly stupid office hours. It’s driving me crackers.

And speaking of queues, the only decently ordered queue that I have so far experienced in Germany was in the post office. Everywhere else, the bank, the train, the office for Anmeldung, has all been some kind of massive un-ordered free for all, where everyone waits in a higgledy-piggledy order and tries to guess who got there first. Life would be so much easier if you just had some kind of system. Come on, Germans, I thought you were organised.

Hmm, this wasn’t as short as I was intending it to be. I obviously had more to vent than I originally thought. Don’t get me wrong, I think Germany’s a great country. They still do certain things far better than back home (public transport and biscuits to name but two). However I think there’s some things for which I’ll always prefer the British mentality; the German way is just a little too unfathomable.