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Been a while since I was there but I'm pretty sure going out in Heidelberg is aaaall about the Altstadt. There's a great big party at the Thingstätte every May 1st though, you're in a good place for that and anything else that might be going on there.
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Jul 31, 2015 19:11
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Yeah I couldn't afford an apartment in Altstadt. It's only a 5 minute tram ride though from where I am so it's not so bad I guess.
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Jul 31, 2015 19:55
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You can buy tickets on their website but if you want a year pass you probably need to find the rnv kundenzentrum (wherever that is in Heidelberg) and buy it there.
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Jul 31, 2015 20:09
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God they're really not loving around when they say the Berlin Bürgerämter is overloaded. I'm moving to Berlin Aug 21 and was lucky enough to check the website bookings a week ago; still only managed to snag an appointment Sept 24. They don't allow "turn up at 7am every day and hope you get lucky" appointments anymore, it all has to be done through the website - which is constantly booked out the entirety of its 2 month scope. I'm going back multiple times a day to check to see if I can get an earlier appointment (otherwise I'm sitting on my arse for a month with no German bank account, no job, no apartment etc) but it's not looking good. I suppose I could use that time to study German but I'll just be hemorrhaging funds during it.
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Aug 5, 2015 23:34
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Is that to get your Anmeldung? If you keep an eye on the website you can see slots sometimes opening up when people drop out or reschedule. I was able to get mine bumped up three weeks that way.
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Aug 6, 2015 09:53
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If the website that crawls the slots 24/7 and sells them to you for €25 doesn't get to it first.
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Aug 6, 2015 10:09
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Yeah it's for the Anmeldung.My Lovely Horse posted:If the website that crawls the slots 24/7 and sells them to you for €25 doesn't get to it first. Oh man is this a thing? That's hosed, my friend filled out the form the first time so I didn't notice there wasn't a captcha or equivalent. It might be worth paying the 25€ so I can start working earlier but wouldnt it have filled the appointment with bunk data instead of mine? How does it work?
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Aug 6, 2015 10:20
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From what I understand you tell them when and where you'd like to go, and the crawler looks out for fitting slots. Marginally better than the guys who just book a slot and sell that to you on the street, but not really by much. This whole scene of start-ups that monopolize and monetize free common resources can get hosed. They might have come up with a way to block it by now, they're definitely aware of it.
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Aug 6, 2015 10:30
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Can anyone tell me where's a good place to get furniture/housewares in Berlin? I need curtains, and something to hang them on. And maybe a chair. I've been to a Kik and Woolworth but haven't found what I need.
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Aug 8, 2015 23:23
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Is Ikea not an option?
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Aug 8, 2015 23:31
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The only reason to go to both Kik and Woolworth is if you want to make sure you complete your hepatitis collection. Just go to like Jaloucity or Bauhaus or Ikea or any other place where you don't have to fight rats for the merchandise.
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Aug 9, 2015 00:26
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Just go to Ikea. The one at Südkreuz isn't terribly far from the train station (maybe a kilometer?), in case you don't have a car.
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Aug 9, 2015 07:05
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Guys I'm in the Heidelberg area for business but would stay over the weekend and maybe a couple of days next weeks privately. I've done Haupstrasse and Schloss in Heidelberg and was in the Schwetzingen palace already. The things I know I want to do are Hockenheimring and museum as well as Sinsheim museum. Any other ideas what to do in the area, especially on Sunday when Germany is closed and its super hot? Also any cheap places to stay once the employer not paying for my hotel?  Then depending on how much time I have I might go West to check out Nurburgirng or back east through Stuttgart and (maybe) Munich. I'm with my own car, obviously.
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Aug 13, 2015 08:48
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Hey guys, I'm in Germany (near Hanover) until the end of September, working weekdays but with Saturdays and Sundays free. I have a train pass that gives free train travel for 6 days in a month so I was wondering if there were any smaller towns worth a day trip to see. Or maybe I should just visit the obvious cities? I am sadly an ignorant tourist who speaks no German  but hey maybe I will get the hang of some while I am here! (Unlikely)
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Aug 14, 2015 21:05
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Flip out gator posted:Hey guys, I'm in Germany (near Hanover) until the end of September, working weekdays but with Saturdays and Sundays free. I have a train pass that gives free train travel for 6 days in a month so I was wondering if there were any smaller towns worth a day trip to see. Or maybe I should just visit the obvious cities? I am sadly an ignorant tourist who speaks no German What are you interested in? There are quite a few cities and places that might be worth exploring, but this depends strongly on your interests and what you would like to see.
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Aug 14, 2015 22:44
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Flip out gator posted:Hey guys, I'm in Germany (near Hanover) until the end of September, working weekdays but with Saturdays and Sundays free. I have a train pass that gives free train travel for 6 days in a month so I was wondering if there were any smaller towns worth a day trip to see. Or maybe I should just visit the obvious cities? I am sadly an ignorant tourist who speaks no German There are some nice university towns near there: Göttingen and Münster come to mind. There's also Kassel which is in a nice hilly landscape but I have no idea if the city is nice. Maybe there are nice smaller towns to be found in more natural areas like the Lüneburger Heide, the Harz or the Teutoburger Wald, but I'm not too familiar with those areas. Or maybe a harbour town along the North Sea coast, i.e. Cuxhaven? Entropist fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Aug 15, 2015 |
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Aug 15, 2015 00:04
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There are some nice smaller cities with beautiful centres around there, like Hameln or Minden. Paderborn, Osnabrück and Münster are bigger and also very nice. Bremen and Hamburg are not too far away as well, of course. If you're interested in cars, then there's Wolfsburg with its VW museum, but otherwise the city's deathly boring (or so I've heard). Magdeburg may not be the hellhole anymore it once used to be, but it still doesn't really warrant a drive imo. Friends told me that Kassel as a city has absolutely nothing to offer, but that the countryside surrounding it is indeed very beautiful.
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Aug 15, 2015 09:14
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Also if youre interested in learning a bit of German check out the free interactive course on DW.com. I'm doing it now at an A1 level and it seems alright.
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Aug 15, 2015 12:17
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Flip out gator posted:Hey guys, I'm in Germany (near Hanover) until the end of September, working weekdays but with Saturdays and Sundays free. I have a train pass that gives free train travel for 6 days in a month so I was wondering if there were any smaller towns worth a day trip to see. Or maybe I should just visit the obvious cities? I am sadly an ignorant tourist who speaks no German We use to visit the cathedrals and such. That is if you are into medieval type architecture and such. Also it will surprise you how many Germans speak English. I would suggest learning a little bit of German just to break the ice. Something like 'excuse me, but do you speak English?', 'Hello', and 'thank you'.
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Aug 15, 2015 12:47
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I have a 10 hour layover in Frankfurt, touching down at 11:05 AM and needing to be back at FRA by 7:50 PM. From a bit of reading, it looks like I want to do a daytrip to the Rhine for a boat tour. Maybe it's lame, but it seems to be the standard daytrip. Any opinions or insight into the best way to get there?
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Aug 16, 2015 04:06
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Blinkman987 posted:I have a 10 hour layover in Frankfurt, touching down at 11:05 AM and needing to be back at FRA by 7:50 PM. From a bit of reading, it looks like I want to do a daytrip to the Rhine for a boat tour. Maybe it's lame, but it seems to be the standard daytrip. Any opinions or insight into the best way to get there? Take the S-Bahn from Frankfurt Flughafen Regionalbahnhof (downstairs) to Wiesbaden or Mainz. You are now at the mouth of the Main, which flows into the Rhine. It takes about half an hour from the airport to get to Mainz central station, and vice versa, and they leave every 30 minutes. You can also take a regional train, which is about 5 minutes faster. I have no idea about boat tours once you are there, however, but I assume these things exist. Entropist posted:There are some nice university towns near there: Göttingen and Münster come to mind. There's also Kassel which is in a nice hilly landscape but I have no idea if the city is nice. Kassel depends. While the city might not be quite as pretty as some of the quainter options, you do get the Wilhelmshöhe, which is pretty interesting, including its monument, park and a gallery.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:51
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Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!Hollow Talk posted:What are you interested in? There are quite a few cities and places that might be worth exploring, but this depends strongly on your interests and what you would like to see. I would quite like to see the natural landscape e.g. any sort of caves or forests, nice view from hills etc. Any old buildings or ruins nearby is a bonus. Though I quite like visiting museums and galleries too, especially if there is a special exhibition on or something like that. I had a coworker recommend Hameln to me, sayig there was some kind of reenactment on Sundays, and also warned that Kassel wasn't nice at all, so I guess I will check out Hameln next. Also a harbour town sounds great, so I will check out Cuxhaven as well. And yes, so far I have found that everyone I have spoken to speaks nearly perfect English, which just makes my lack of German knowledge more embarrassing! I have been trying Duolingo on my phone but I will look at the A1 course as well.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:23
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I'm thinking of traveling this year for the sole purpose of going to a Christmas market. I thought Germany would be the best place but most of the searches online are recommending Strasbourg, Switzerland or Austria. Does anyone have any recommendations for a good market in Germany as it'd be my preferred country to travel to or would I be better off going elsewhere?
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Aug 17, 2015 19:35
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Dresden is pretty good for christmas markets, though I imagine Strasbourg or Vienna would also be quite nice, tbh. Why the focus on Germany? Have a look here: http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/planatrip/inspire-me/lists/top-8-german-christmas-markets?page=all that are the famous ones I guess
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Aug 17, 2015 20:24
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Flip out gator posted:Thanks for all the suggestions everyone! Externsteine near Detmold Hermannsdenkmal, also near Detmold Wewelsburg near Paderborn
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Aug 17, 2015 21:22
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elbkaida posted:Dresden is pretty good for christmas markets, though I imagine Strasbourg or Vienna would also be quite nice, tbh. Why the focus on Germany? I've wanted to go back and visit again and figured it'd be a good excuse to kill two birds with one stone. Thanks for the link, I've some researching to do before picking a place.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:35
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Flip out gator posted:Thanks for all the suggestions everyone! The Harz area might be a good idea in that case. Places like Goslar or Wernigerode offer a bit of everything, and towns like Wolfenbüttel (with a fantastic library) or Quedlinburg have some nice sights as well. Another nice option is the Brocken mountain, which gives you a nice view (if the weather isn't terrible, which it quite often is), as long as you either don't mind shelling out quite a bit of money for the train that brings you to the top, or if you don't mind a hike. It is also the mythical gathering place of the witches during the Walpurgisnacht.
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Aug 17, 2015 22:37
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Brimmy posted:I'm thinking of traveling this year for the sole purpose of going to a Christmas market. I thought Germany would be the best place but most of the searches online are recommending Strasbourg, Switzerland or Austria. Does anyone have any recommendations for a good market in Germany as it'd be my preferred country to travel to or would I be better off going elsewhere? The one in Nuremberg is rather huge and famous: http://www.christkindlesmarkt.de/en/ (I hate it because I kinda live right next to it and its a logistical horror to live there during the market.) There are also some other nice and unique things to visit while you are there which are quite popular with foreign tourists: http://www.museums.nuremberg.de/ (Look for: Nazi Party Rallying Grounds, Nuremberg Trials, Industrial Culture Museum, the catacombs below the castle hill and the Toy Museum which might sound boring but is a blast for anyone with a pulse and aged above 5 years!)
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Aug 18, 2015 15:38
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Going to be in southern Germany for a week in early September. Any recommendations for a good sim card? Have an unlocked phone, need a couple gigs of data at minimum with some voice and texting for emergencies. Googling looked like getting one before arriving was difficult/impossible, so is the Munich airport the best bet?
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Aug 21, 2015 19:20
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Got 50/10 mbps internet with 1und1 and today it's just not working. It's completely offline. Tried using neighbours wifi and that works fine so there's something with my 1und1 connection. I had it installed just 2 days ago and already it's not working :/ Feels pretty poo poo, especially when I just learned that they do not answer support emails unless they are written in German. I'm not sure how to get help now without asking a German friend to call them for me. Is this common? Seems pretty poo poo if they can't answer support in English.
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Aug 21, 2015 20:39
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Yes, it's common. Look at it this way: English is not a first language for a significant part of the population so there's no need for customer service agents to speak English. I wouldn't expect customer service in the US, UK etc to speak German, either.
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Aug 21, 2015 20:46
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Pixelslol posted:Seems pretty poo poo if they can't answer support in English. Is this for real?
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Aug 21, 2015 21:12
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Yeah, welcome to living in an area with a different native language. Find a local to translate or do it for you, that's how the international students usually handled it. Also a good excuse to make some local friends, which can be hard enough in Germany. At least they don't answer in Obersächsisch or the local dialect of wherever they are from any more, they already learned a standard language! 
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Aug 22, 2015 01:03
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International flyers into Frankfurt-- for some reason, I cannot remember if a person can get to the showers before going to immigration. My stupid memory vaguely says that a person is directed to go immediately to immigration first and wouldn't be able to re-enter the terminal without a ticket, but at the same time I've definitely taken showers at airport lounges after landing in airports. http://www.frankfurt-airport.com/content/frankfurt_airport/en/services/container_services/bathroom_shower.html
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Aug 22, 2015 04:08
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Looks like the RAW-Gelände is the new Görlitzer Park in terms of Dangerous Berlin Areas. I'm not surprised. I went there once in the middle of the day and the whole area around it still felt incredibly sketchy. Much more so than, like, Neukölln at night or the area round the actual Görlitzer Park.
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Aug 23, 2015 21:17
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Looks like I missed out on the Neo-Nazi revival while I was over in Munich - i got dirty looks from folks before they realized I wasn't Turkish/Middle Eastern, but at least they didn't show up and try to burn my hotel down. How wide spread is that stuff and how much of it is being over played here in the States?
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Aug 25, 2015 20:47
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No idea how it is represented in the States, but in my impression it's like this: When you look at the statistics of the last couple of years, there was a clear trend visible: the overall number of people with (openly) right-wing extremist leanings was constantly shrinking, especially in terms of party membership; the remaining number of people in turn radicalised themselves even more. During the last years this trend was reversed, however: new parties and platforms like Pegida (a movement of regular demonstrations, calling itself "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident") and the AfD ("Alternative for Germany", a new political party) sprung up, and the number of violent crimes with a right-wing background increased dramatically. While I don't think that the "established" parties like the NPD or the Republikaner didn't manage to get too much out of this process in terms of new members etc., the aforementioned new movements like Pegida and the AfD received substantial support - initially by a troubling amount of people, most of them far from being your typical Neo-Nazi and instead being merely "concerned citizens", although both underwent a process of radicalisation during the last year or so. The largest support for these movements can be found in Eastern Germany, especially in the state of Saxony, it appears (Pegida sprung up there, for example) - but the states of former West Germany grapple with this problem as well. In sheer numbers, it's quite alarming: violent crimes for example increased by 23% from 2013 to 2014 and the number of attacks on refugee homes by 120%! It's still not like this happens every day, but still often enough that politicians should be quite worried. The most infamous case of right-wing extremist crime was probably the series of murders committed by the NSU (National Socialist Underground) who, in the time from 1999-2007, murdered ten people and were likely responsible for at least five terrorist attacks. There are several reasons for why that is, I think. It probably boils down to a combination of these factors: the global recession, the refugee crisis (which will probably only get worse in the coming months and years), the Euro crisis which saw a lot of people going "drat southern Europeans receiving our hard-earned money for doing nothing!", and, it seems to me, also the Russian attack on Ukraine - for plenty of nationalists, Russia seems like an ideal place what with the authoritarian government "gettings thing done", and cracking down on what many of them perceive as moralic aberrations like homosexuality and so on. It also gives people an easy opportunity to think that they have it all figured out, as right-wing circles have had an intense dislike for the US for decades, and a non-communist Russia seems like the logical choice to support. Oh, and then it's probably also the internet - it's never been so easy for people to debate and communicate. Something like Pegida wouldn't have spread as fast as it did without online resources to organise all these events and to get the message out. On the other hand, especially the refugee crisis also tends to bring out the best in people, with a ton of them volunteering and refugee centres even in areas the most plagued by right-wing extremism being full to the brim with donated goods and so on. This (understandably) doesn't receive as much coverage by the media. tl,dr: a significant segment of the population is supportive of authoritarian, nationalist or even openly extremist politics. While it lay mostly politically dormant throughout the last decades, the developments of the last years have given them the incentive and the opportunity to become more active - which, for some, also includes turning to violence. (This is all only based on sporadic reading of the news and wiki, so please correct me when I'm wrong!)
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Aug 25, 2015 22:37
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Most of the more radical stuff has happened in smaller towns in the east. In East Germany there has always been a relatively small but dedicated scene of neonazis around. In rural regions they have a constant influence, which might not be really visible most of the time, because normally things kinda go their way. Nobody cares too much if the car of a left politician is keyed in some village or kids have to avoid certain clubs if they are known to be antifascists and so on. But this kind of stuff enforces a certain worldview and now in a time of crisis suddenly a lot of stuff is happening which conflicts with this and large groups of people get angry and the more radical ones use that to start violence (or commit crimes like arson). Hard to predict how far it will go. I hope if the government slams down on this hard, a good portion of the troublemakers might just walk away from it and accept that crossing this line of open racism and attacks on people this is something that they shouldn't gently caress with. But the neonazi/xenophobic undercurrent has been there in the small towns of the east for 30 years now and it's not going away anytime soon. Not sure what is going on in the rest of the country, but this is the perspective of someone growing up near the place where the recent riots occured.
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Aug 25, 2015 22:41
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elbkaida posted:Most of the more radical stuff has happened in smaller towns in the east. In East Germany there has always been a relatively small but dedicated scene of neonazis around. In rural regions they have a constant influence, which might not be really visible most of the time, because normally things kinda go their way. Nobody cares too much if the car of a left politician is keyed in some village or kids have to avoid certain clubs if they are known to be antifascists and so on. It is probably worth highlighting that this is not exclusively a problem in the East, however. Rather, this is a general division between rural and urban spaces, as various places in Bavaria, but also in other areas of Germany, have a distinct problems with right-wing groups, parties, rallies etc. There are theories that increased contact with "foreigners" (this is not exclusive to migrants, the same can be said for queer people, people with a "migration background" etc.) will ultimately lead to a reduction in sweeping prejudices, because you get more examples of positive or, at the very least and even more likely, neutral situations where it's not an issue. It is telling that people in a city like Dresden were up in arms about "islamisation", but people in a place like Frankfurt or Berlin were less so. Part of the reason why this is more prevalent in the East, however, is certainly the fact that the GDR was overall quite homogenous and had few "foreigners". However, I would not call this a "Neo-Nazi revival", since this only has partially to do with people who fancy National Socialist politics etc., but I would call this a resurfacing of a general right-wing current that has never been uprooted in Germany, and that goes back further than 1933. Currently, it's refugees from various warzones (that we helped to uproot and destabilise in the first place), but before that people riled against Polish and Romanian people, and before that about Turkish people coming as "Gastarbeiter" in order to fill the low-skilled, badly paid jobs that ultimately fueled Germany's economic resurgence from the 1950s onward. The whole debate, alongside more physical escalations, betrays that many in Germany have never properly come to terms with the fact that there exists more than one way of being German. Whenever people ask e.g. Turkish people to integrate more, what they really mean is that they want them to assimilate themselves. Do we offer voluntary Turkish or Italian classes in school? Do we teach all children anything at all about non-Western history, and more specifically "oriental" history? Of course not. Germany has never understood that integration means an actual amalgamation of various cultural practices and structures, rather than one group completely relinquishing their own culture, experiences and ultimately cultural memory in favour of completely adopting another. What you currently see in rural areas is a more severe form of this misunderstood notion of what it means to be German. They perceive German culture to be as uniform and as homogeneous as they experienced it in small, established and mostly homogenous villages and towns, where -- save for some class differences -- people shared most of their experiences and practices. If they now encounter "foreigners", especially refugees, they can only see the differences between "us" and "them", since they never got to know the de facto diversity in German society. This is not unlike the divide in acceptance of everything queer (LGBTQ) between more rural and more urban spaces, where you are much more likely to encouter queer people in the big cities, where it becomes, in turn, less noteworthy. If you walk through a village in Saxony (as a local) where everybody used to be white, and you all of a sudden see a woman with a headscarf, you will very much notice her presence. If you walk down the main shopping street in Frankfurt (again as a local), you might notice somebody in a full burka, but you probably won't pay special attention to the many women wearing headscarves, because they are a common side and simply a normal part of living in that place. It's a question of familiarity, and especially the lack thereof. Add to that the more general anxiety about social decline, the developments of the financial market, social security and the state of Europe today, as System Metternich already pointed out, and you can add this defamiliarisation to that pile of social anxieties that drive people apart and split social groups and socities.
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Aug 26, 2015 12:31
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Hollow Talk posted:It is probably worth highlighting that this is not exclusively a problem in the East, however. Rather, this is a general division between rural and urban spaces, as various places in Bavaria, but also in other areas of Germany, have a distinct problems with right-wing groups, parties, rallies etc. There are theories that increased contact with "foreigners" (this is not exclusive to migrants, the same can be said for queer people, people with a "migration background" etc.) will ultimately lead to a reduction in sweeping prejudices, because you get more examples of positive or, at the very least and even more likely, neutral situations where it's not an issue. It is telling that people in a city like Dresden were up in arms about "islamisation", but people in a place like Frankfurt or Berlin were less so. Part of the reason why this is more prevalent in the East, however, is certainly the fact that the GDR was overall quite homogenous and had few "foreigners". Remember that the anti-immigrant law in Switzerland passed only through support from rural areas and failed in the cities where the actual "foreigners" live.
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Aug 26, 2015 12:54
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