deblog

After three recent trips to Germany I feel ready to play God and pass judgment on Germany… Ok, maybe not but I will at least share some opinions I have formed….

• Berlin is smelly and dirty….
  The area Jason lives isn’t horrible (kind of near the south edge of the city) but overall it just seems dirty. I  always get to a point where the smells and sounds just overwhelm me in a bad way…
• The history is cool.
  The number of truly old buildings and the history behind them is amazing.  I especially love little (often) unnoticed things such as the stumbling stones around Berlin.
• Public transportation rocks!
  The amazing system of U-bahns, S-Bahns, Busses and street cars makes getting almost anywhere in Berlin easy.
• Stairs suck!
  This is the downside to most of the public transportation, they almost all involve great amounts of stairs… stairs that you can’t use the railing during because the railing is filthy and has probably been peed on.
• Rural Germany is gorgeous.
  I found that I really love areas other than Berlin.  The small villages are beautiful… I could even see myself living in a city as big as Magdeburg (despite Jason’s nickname of PCC for it).  There is just something about the filth and smell of Berlin that turns me off… The Dresden area is beautiful… Jason said the Bonn area is similar as well.
• Lots of skinny people…
  Not really a plus or a minus…. I guess more of a plus, but it is definitely easy to tell who the fat American tourist is on the S-bahn…   I have to say I saw the “natives” eating a ton of McDonald’s and other bad food… but their regular food is much healthier, lower in preservatives and much more fresh… Poland noticeably has more fat people… I felt like I was back in WI when I was in Poland…
• Screens on windows serve a purpose…
  The Germans should look into that…

In my dreams I kept combining Guys and Dolls with South Pacific, which resulted in some great lines, such as:

There ain’t a thing that’s wrong with any man here that can’t be cured by putting him near a girly, womanly, female, feminine, permanent craps game in New York!