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My Lovely Horse posted:You could also go on a guided tour of the VW factory locations in Wolfsburg, Braunschweig or Hannover itself.
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May 14, 2014 19:44
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Badly Jester posted:Way back in the day, I had a teacher who temped at Niederegger during her university days. She wouldn't touch the stuff, and when asked why, she said she'd seen a rat in the factory. What if the rats are what makes it so good? 
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Jun 12, 2014 17:22
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Zwille posted:Yeah, I'm totally stocking up on Levi's and Converse anyway. Jack Purcells in particular are hard to find in size 12/13 here, and American Apparel seems to just price stuff the same except in euros. Levi's are sooooo cheap in the States! As an added bonus, they also carry more sizes, even for their corduroys which do not stop at 34 length, as I had been told in Germany. 
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Jul 9, 2014 16:16
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Honj Steak posted:Yep, der Spiegel got thinner. The only magazine I enthusiastically read and which I look forward to buying every time I enter a train station is the fantastic and often beautiful GEO. I usually buy a Titanic for boring train rides.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:18
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AstroWhale posted:Also the construction work between Zoologischer Garten and Friedrichstraße (no stop at the main station!) and the replacement bus service: Worst thing or worst thing? I'm now taking the U2 via Potsdamer Platz and then the S-Bahn up to Friedrichstraße, because screw taking the absolutely overcrowded REs from Zoo to Friedrichstraße. 
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Jul 23, 2014 13:33
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Has anybody been to the David Bowie exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin? I'm wondering whether it'd be worth the 10€, since I'm not quite sure what exactly they have on display other than his costumes. I do like Bowie though.
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Aug 2, 2014 13:36
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My Lovely Horse posted:"Bowie in Berlin" is kind of a misnomer because his time in Berlin is the theme of one room out of... five or six? There's one room about his youth and early days, early influences and development as an artist, that sort of thing; one about Ziggy Stardust, one about his acting career (a bit sparse, that one) and a few others whose themes elude me right now. There are a lot of costumes on display, the rest is mostly printed materials, photographs and videos. For the videos you get an audio guide that automatically plays the sound for any video you're close to. That's very cool when it works but I had trouble getting the right soundtrack to play sometimes and flat out couldn't manage to find the right spot to stand in for a few. Mhmmm... That sounds kind of interesting, though I'd have to see if I can find a day during the week then, I suppose. Thanks!
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Aug 3, 2014 12:50
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citybeatnik posted:Son of a bitch. And here I was pondering doing the insane thing and taking the lines up to Denmark to see my friends there as well. Don't worry too much and just keep an eye on the respective news outlets and news of the appropriate train company. The DB-run S-Bahn in Frankfurt went on strike for a bit on Monday but has been running normally since. The (Lufthansa) pilots were on strike on Friday, but that usually is announced in advance as well. I took a S-Bahn to Frankfurt Airport yesterday, and had absolutely no problems in terms of strike (or flying, for that matter). Plan in advance, book your things normally, and just keep an eye on how things are developing. You are probably not going to see a multi-day strike without any kind of alternative means of transportation available, and if you are in a city, you can always take buses or a tram if available.
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Sep 7, 2014 19:24
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posh spaz posted:Good for the strikers. I'm glad people are willing to fight for their livelihood in Germany. Making a decent wage is way more important than the vacations they disrupt. I'd normally agree with you (and that's certainly the case for many of the people working for the railways), but what the Lufthansa pilots are fighting for couldn't be further from a "fight for their livelihood". Essentially, they are fighting for really rather early retirement without any pay cuts and for higher wages. Mind you, they aren't exactly badly paid to begin with, quite the contrary. Their strikes seem a lot like attempts to safeguard their various entitlements, and people who are a lot worse off are understandably not all that sympathetic to their demands. This is a bit akin to the IG Metall -- the main union representing heavy industry, which in Germany also means automotive industry -- who have been fighting hard to keep their 36 hour weeks, which is ever so slightly upsetting for many others who have lost fights for even 40 hour work weeks, with many having to work somewhere between 41½ and 42 hours, and with less pay. citybeatnik posted:Part of what's concerning me is the fact that I booked my flight with Lufthansa a few months ago, is all, through a travel company. I'm sure that things'll still work out but it's just making me slightly nervous. Are you flying from within Europe, or are you coming from the States? Either way, don't forget that you have quite strong rights as a flight customer and that Lufthansa usually takes quite good care of people who have booked flights with them. It would probably be a bother if you get caught in a strike, but you will be able to get there eventually!
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Sep 7, 2014 23:27
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Filthee Fingas posted:Hey we're going to Cologne in a couple weeks for 3 days/2 nights. Going to see the christmas markets (probably spend most of the time seeing the sites while getting drunk off mulled wine). Anything specific I should be on the look for (other than the usual tourist spots. Favourite place to eat/drink?) Peters Brauhaus off the Alte Markt wasn't too bad, either, I quite enjoyed the food when we went there with a large group. It was rather lively in there, as well.
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Dec 2, 2014 19:48
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Duzzy Funlop posted:/ninjaedit: It's just that most "bigger" breweries there are utter garbage. Oettinger is terrible, and so are Freiburg/Ganter or what have you. Rothaus is nice beer that is decidedly different (more the Tannenzäpfle, but their regular beer isn't bad either). Freiburg has a nice local brewery called "Feierling" with a beautiful Biergarten, and they do a dark variant over the winter, both of which are amazing in their own right, with the light one being quite sweet and the dark one packing quite a punch. I'm not too sure about the Schwaben when it comes to beer and what they offer otherwise, but that BaWü in general isn't the biggest of beer places isn't that surprising given that Baden is one of the bigger wine regions. edit: Actually say what I mean when talking about Rothaus... Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 21:39
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Smirr posted:Tannenzäpfle is just the name of the 0,33l bottles. It's the regular Pils in smaller bottles. Unless you meant to imply that "regular beer" does not equal "Pils", in which case They have an Export as well which I wanted to set apart from the Tannenzäpfle, but yes, you are right, I formulated that badly.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:53
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Badly Jester posted:Unfortunately though, the smaller breweries usually suck at distribution. If you live in the middle of Hessen like me, you're hosed because you're surrounded by lovely breweries. This town has exactly one bar which takes beer seriously, and even their selection is rather limited (Tegernseer, Schneider Weiße, Riedenburger, Chimay and a few others). Everything north of the Taunus is called "Hessisch Sibirien" for a reason!  posh spaz posted:London Man, let me tell you about all of this awesome
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Dec 4, 2014 14:56
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Drone posted:London is considerably more cosmopolitan than most of Germany, with a few exceptions (Berlin/Hamburg etc). It's true! You can get lots of Belgian beer (InBev) and American beer (Anheuser-Busch). 
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Dec 4, 2014 15:17
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rumtherapy posted:I see that's in the north. I forgot where but I recall a piece of information telling me that the south of Germany is usually more expensive, but then again this is just one Uni and I've got no other basis. Neat info though ,thanks. I have heard very good things about Leipzig as a city to study in, with affordable housing, quite a bit of cultural stuff happening and a decent university. That might be worth investigating. Many of the more traditional places to study in the south (Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Freiburg) tend to be rather expensive.
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Mar 3, 2015 19:41
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Maybe it will become easier to find a decent place to live eventually, then!
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Mar 9, 2015 01:25
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Kommando posted:Is there a German Language standard similar to IELTS for working in Germany? The Goethe Institut exam might qualify. I think they have an academic and a vocational one.
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Mar 13, 2015 01:45
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Senor P. posted:I'm leaving Africa for a week in Germany in April. What all is there to do in Frankfurt? Mahlertov Cocktail posted:I've had this page of museums bookmarked for a while, and I'm sure some/most/all of them are worth your time. I've heard the architecture museum and the Senckenberg museum of natural history are really good - maybe someone who's visited some of the others can weigh in? Otherwise, I'm sure the Goethe Haus is worth a visit, and downtown Frankfurt (e.g. Zeil) is really nice. If you are interested in galleries, I'd recommend the Städel. The Schirn usually has good exhibitions, and the MMK is not bad, either. The Senckenberg museum is really, really nice, and I think they finished their renoviations etc since I have been there last. The Filmmuseum is nice, but it depends a bit what they have as an exhibition at the moment. Do you speak any German? If so, the Dialogmuseum is fantastic; it's essentially completely dark in there, and you will be lead round by a blind person. It's supposed to give you an impression what it's like to be blind, and how heavily we rely on our eyes to get around. It's a great experience, but one has to book ahead of time. Other than museums, I would recommend going up on the Maintower, which has a visitor's terrace on top which gives you a nice view of the city. It's also in the banking district, so you get to see some of the skyscrapers. The shopping street (Zeil) is not too bad, and you can get to all of the above locations from there easily on foot (except, perhaps, for the Senckenberg, take an U-Bahn or just walk it either way). The Cathedral is also interesting and located in the city centre. If you like opera, the Alte Oper is quite a nice building, as well. If you like to eat and drink, Sachsenhausen is the typical (albeit somewhat crowded) area to go and have Ebbelwoi (Apfelwein, apple wine), a sour version of cider, though you will also be fine in the Westend and Nordend. Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Mar 16, 2015 |
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Mar 16, 2015 19:27
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David Corbett posted:The climate, the geography, the obvious quality of the food and drinks, the fact that things seemed so much more high-quality and permanent and intentional, the construction (German doors and walls practically blew my mind), the art, the architecture, the pride people placed into their appearance, the highways, the functioning governments, and most of all the public spaces, which were built with purpose and beauty as though they meant something more than just a means by which one travels from one private space to the next. Drone posted:I'm not crystal clear on this, but from what I understand, it's supposed to be pretty easy for citizens of Commonwealth countries to move to the UK. While quite different from Germany, a lot of what you mentioned being smitten about in Germany exists there too, and there's no language barrier. If you really were thinking "long-term", I suppose you could go for UK citizenship, which then grants you freedom of movement within the EU -- provided shitheads in the UK don't get their way and they exit in 2017. These two quotes are mutually exclusive. If you want the quality of life you can get in say Germany, going to the UK won't help. Food, prices and construction cannot compete, though geography, architecture etc. are another matter. If you compare the normal British inner city supermarkets (say regular Tesco or Sainsbury's) with Rewe or Edeka, you will be sorely disappointed. There is a reason we always bring half a backpack full of food back whenever we return to the UK from Germany. It's also more expensive than Germany.  fake-edit: How can people not figure out how to make decent cheese, Frischkäse or Quark?
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Mar 31, 2015 19:52
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In non-UK loathing things, while it's not usually a city that I would think of first when recommending where to live in Germany, Frankfurt might be a good place to have a look if you already work in finance. Since it has many big banks and associated companies, it should be easier to a) find expats and b) get around with English. The city itself isn't actually as bad as some think it is either, there is quite a bit to do, and the nightlife is pretty nice. It lacks a bit on the architecture front, however, thanks to being absolutely destroyed and not rebuilt in its former medieval glory.
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Mar 31, 2015 20:01
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My Lovely Horse posted:German supermarkets are poo poo at any food that is remotely exotic, for the most part. When I went to the UK last year the supermarkets were seriously a highlight of the trip. I consider hummus a staple food and the UK's got my back. elwood posted:You gotta be making GBS threads me. The quality of german supermarkets especially when it comes to service, variety and fresh fruits/produce is way below uk standards. Fight me, irl!  I'm not kidding about the supermarkets here, though. Tesco and Sainsbury's (there is no Waitrose around here) keep discontinuing things that tasted nice and replace them with cheap crap because they are trying to compete with Aldi and Lidl, which they can't because that's entirely their home turf. Also, please tell me how having no fresh meat/fish/cheese is superior when you can get that in every lovely little German supermarket (hello, every Kaiser's, Rewe and Edeka)? Most of the "fruit" and "vegetables" Tesco sells go off really quickly because they are frozen and cold to hell and back. I know not a single (0) non-British European here who doesn't feel the supermarkets are a joke, but I guess ymmv? edit: Also, how exactly do "self-checkout everywhere" and "service" mesh? Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Mar 31, 2015 |
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Mar 31, 2015 23:12
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Last Transmission posted:I was so ready to serve my country. But the meat appraisal returned me as a T3 grade right before it got removed entirely. T5 or go home!
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Apr 13, 2015 16:17
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Cicero posted:Going on a trip to Europe with family (wife and three year old son) first half of July, first Copenhagen, then Munich, then Lübeck*, and I'm looking for things to do in Munich (suggestions for Lübeck and Copenhagen are welcome too). My wife is big into (classical) music things, as she's currently doing a master's in french horn performance, and obviously kid-friendly stuff would be good. So far for Munich all I have planned is maybe doing Mike's Bike Tours, and wandering around the area we'll be staying at (we're staying with a friend who lives near the park that used to be the old Munich airport). Mhm, not sure about child-friendly things in Copenhagen, or rather, what would be particularly interesting for a three year old. Tivoli is kind of cool, but he is probably not quite old enough for most (any?) of the rides. There is always the beach on Amager, I suppose, which is really rather nice, especially if you get decent weather. Depending on how much time you have, Dyrehavsbakken (Bakken) is a nice, very old amusement park slightly north of Copenhagen. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot on in the concert house, and the Royal Theatre hasn't put up its shows for July yet. Museums etc. are probably only mildly interesting with a small child, but if you want to see something, the National Museum has some neat things about Vikings etc., and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek has some of the big impressionists, as well as an overall very lovely building, and some awesome Rodin sculptures. It used to be free entry on Sundays, but it seems that has shifted now, and Tuesdays are free. Other than that, if the weather is halfway alright, you can probably spend quite a bit of time simply wandering around. Rosenborg Slot and Amalienborg are within walkable distance from each other, the former has a pretty surrounding park, the latter is the queen's residence and next to the harbour. If you keep walking from there, you can have a look at the Little Mermaid, and the Kastellet on the way back into town. Christianshavn is another nice area that is pretty nice for a stroll, though depending on your leanings etc., you might want to skip Christiana. I don't know whether Copenhagen's zoo is interesting or whether it is worth a visit at all. If you have any more specific questions, let me know, and I'll try to help. Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Jun 2, 2015 |
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Jun 2, 2015 02:21
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Randler posted:Are there any German telcos that aren't total scumlords when it comes to terminating contracts? O2 (née Alice née Hansenet) were quite good, really. You could essentially just log in online and there is a section where you can terminate your contract. They then call you back to a) confirm that you indeed want to cancel, b) that it was indeed you, c) to try and get you to stay with them. Since I could simply tell them that I would leave the country, selling me internet was not in the cards, and it worked flawlessly. That was a good experience. They also handled outages really well, and you got nice people from Hamburg on the other end of the customer support hotline.
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Jun 16, 2015 21:15
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Randler posted:This is the first time I hear a positive opinion about customer retention calls. It took all of one minute and cancelled my internet correctly. 
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Jun 16, 2015 21:30
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A LOVELY LAD posted:We got super delayed when we were heading to Binz from Hamburg and I spoke to the ticket lady and she gave us a form to fill out on the train, somehow the train managed to arrive less than an hour late tho I'm assuming it missed a load of stops etc. Wait for one of the three existing inhabitants to die!  fake-edit: Immoscout24 is another portal that might work, and there are currently 4 things on offer, so it might be worth checking there every now and then: http://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/S-T/Wohnung-Miete/Rheinland-Pfalz/Donnersbergkreis/Kirchheimbolanden?enteredFrom=one_step_search
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Jul 10, 2015 21:00
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A LOVELY LAD posted:Cheers for that! Well, you also have 140€ in utilities, so it amounts to 540€ total, +35€ for the parking space. But yeah, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, so you get more for your money. It seems to be pretty much halfway between Bad Kreuznach and Kaiserslautern, with ~40km to drive into either (less to reach their suburbs, I suppose), and ~30km to Worms.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:12
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Zwille posted:From what I hear all the cool people are from Darmstadt anyway. Sounds about right. Darmstadt
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Jul 11, 2015 14:18
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Pixelslol posted:I live in Berlin and I just moved into a new apartment and need to get myself some Internet. I don't really want to bind myself to some provider for 24 months as I don't know if I'll stay here that long. Do you guys know any provider that offers per month subscription (I guess not) or at least 12 months only? I just saw that O2 now has a bandwidth limit. On regular DSL.  That crap needs to die.
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Jul 27, 2015 14:43
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Randler posted:Yep. Though to be fair they communicated it well in advance and they way they implemented it won't affect the majority of end users. (That might change in a few years.) Oh, no doubt (and I am in no way affected), it's just that Hansenet/Alice used to do monthly subscriptions without minimum length and without any caps, but it figures that those terms were just a bit too consumer-friendly for Telefonica.
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Jul 27, 2015 20:00
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Randler posted:I care a lot about what I can put on my business cards, so that is probably how it will end. The easiest way to get your message across is obviously by setting alight his rubbish bin, standing on top of it with a megaphone and telling him about your demands before finalising the act by providing him with a hardcopy of your concerns, delivered directly to his desk via the patented brick-through-window-delivery method.
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Jul 28, 2015 22:57
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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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but hey maybe I will get the hang of some while I am here! (Unlikely)
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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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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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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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elbkaida posted:This whole fear of the unknown or not being used to different people is definitely playing a part in what is going on and is probably what the majority of people in Pegida rallies etc feel like. There is a big step from that to actually setting fire to buildings or getting into fights with the police though. That comes from a mindset of harassing people you don't agree with until they go away because everybody else will just accept it and look the other way. That's certainly true. However, I also feel like this is somewhat exacerbated by the fact that people like Schäuble, von der Leyen, Friedrich and de Maizière (and also Schröder as Familienministerin) have been hellbent on equating left-extremist and right-extremist violence, to which I always reply that while the former means cars, tires and barrier burns and that stones are thrown, the latter means that houses and people burn. Totally the same thing. Already in the 1920s, Kurt Tucholsky and others pointed out that Germany has been systematically blind in the right eye, and that leftist extremists historically got harsh (up to the harshest, i.e. capital) punishments, while right extremists managed to get away. It doesn't help that people like Filbinger (aka Marinerichter Filbinger) were allowed to be regular politicians after the war, or that somebody like Oettinger could try and tell people that said Filbinger was, in fact, an opponent of the Nazi Regime. The same is probably true for significant "de-nazified" groups post-WW2 in government, jurisprudence etc. As long as something like the NSU can happen as it did, with such half-arsed responses and thorough failure of most involved institutions, people can be reasonably sure that nothing too serious will come their way even if they do become violent.
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Aug 27, 2015 12:30
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Gold and a Pager posted:For years, I had a credit card through my local Sparkasse but then I realized how much money I had been "wasting" on bank fees each month and switched to comdirect (you could also switch to DKB and have basically the same deal). My comdirect and Sparkasse credit cards worked the same way. The limit isn't too high (€2,000) so you can't go too crazy (or maybe I'm too poor to get a higher limit) and the full balance is deducted from my bank account at the end of each month, so it's more like a charge card that a true credit card. IKEA takes cash and EC card, and nothing else.  More generally, in order to get a "real" credit card, you will probably have some sort of monthly/yearly fee (though have a look, some companies waive the fee if you spend more than x amount or some such). I have a British (Lloyds) and a German Visa (comdirect), and they are both debit cards as far as I am aware. Comdirect only switched to monthly billing in November, it was weekly (  ) before that, and when I initially got it, it was still an instant debit card. However, you can essentially "preload" the comdirect card by putting money into the "credit card" sub-account, which then raises your limit to how much you put in there. So if you need to cover a bigger amount, you can do it that way and be sure that it will cover that. Their telephone support is also really nice, I had to do the preloading on short-notice once (it usually takes a day or so), and they managed to get it all sorted in ~15 minutes after my call ended.For what it's worth, the comdirect one is also officially called a "Visa" card, while the Lloyds one has "debit" printed on it. So comdirect might be a good option (and I have never had problems or complaints with them). So it might work for what you want it for? I am not sure.
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Feb 5, 2016 15:50
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citybeatnik posted:Hey y'all, I'd say Checkpoint Charlie = Kreuzberg > Eichkamp. Reasoning: Checkpoint Charlie means somewhere around Friedrichstraße, which gets you very close to the Museumsinsel, Unter den Linden etc., and it's easy to walk places. Kreuzberg is nice, but also quite hipster-ish, and some bits of it are a bit annoying to get to, though it is overall really rather central and very, very popular; the U-Bahn will probably be your friend if you go this route. Kreuzberg is also nice for food, probably better than the Friedrichstraße area, although there are some nice-ish options towards Bhf Friedrichstraße and a bit beyond, and it's not far from there to Mitte. I don't know about Eichkamp, but the Grunewald is quite nice yet slightly out of the way, especially since I don't know how far you would have to go to get the S-Bahn in the first place. This is by far the farthest out of your three options, and you wouldn't have a whole lot that you could simply walk to from here. If those are your options, I'd pick #1 or #2 (or look for Charlottenburg towards Charlottenburg Palace, which is a very lovely area).
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May 23, 2016 22:24
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citybeatnik posted:Thanks for the feed back! I'm leaning towards option 1 now, since while the idea of hanging out with an older german professor and his family over breakfest like i would at the second option is cool it's also off in the middle of nowhere, and option 3 is currently booked (but they'd let me crash on their couch). Option 1 seems to be a pretty chill couple that's willing to be a tour guide if required and, well, i'm from Austin so i'm okay with hipster-ish. Even if i'll apparently he crashing on a futon. Whoops, I got confused with the numbers and actually meant I'd go for Checkpoint Charlie or Kreuzberg, but it seems you got what I meant!
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May 23, 2016 23:56
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Zwille posted:Huh, didn't know that was an option. Neat. Do they offer unlimited free ATM withdrawals too, like other online banks? Comdirect is part of that CashGroup thing, so you can get free ATM withdrawals with their EC card from Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Postbank, HypoVereinsbank and some more. They also offer free *international* cash withdrawal via their Visa card. The latter used to work in Germany as well, but they more recently switched that, so now you need to use the EC card. I used a comdirect account for years to get free ATM withdrawals while living abroad, and that always worked really rather well. You don't need another account with its parent company (Commerzbank).
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Jul 27, 2016 16:01
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