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I moved back last year to the southern Bavarian small town I grew up in after living in Freiburg in SW Germany and Vienna, Austria for nine years. First the bad: our state politics are awful, at least by German standards. Since the war Bavaria has been ruled almost continuously by the conservative Catholic CSU which always had had a tendency to corruption (due to its long and uninterrupted reign), moralistic rigour (except for the politicians themselves, obviously) and a “beware of everybody non-Bavarian and also everybody who doesn't fit our stereotypes of a true Bavarian“ attitude, but in recent years the massive surge in refugee arrivals has seen the party moving significantly to the right in order to gain that precious xenophobe vote  Also the proximity to boomtown Munich (it's about 50 min away from here by train) has driven rent up significantly here, and the municipal government have been sitting on their asses way too long in this regard, so affordable flats are scarce. Now for the good: we have full employment, as does most of Bavaria. The economy has never been so good as it is now. We've got loads of history in every tiny village (one farm here has been run by the same family for 30 generations or so). Augsburg and Munich are quite nearby, as are the Alps. Italy is only like four hours away. While the proximity to Munich has driven rent up significantly, cultural life here has grown as least as much. Even though we're a small town there's tons to do, there're art galleries, classical concerts by world famous musicians, festivals where indie pop stars from Israel or Berlin play and if you wanna grab a well made cocktail at 11pm then you can do so now! Which is not bad at all for a ~13,000 people non-college town, and back when I grew up here most of this would have been unthinkable. The “old“ culture of the town hasn't been displaced by this, though, and if you want to grab a beer in a traditional Bavarian “Boaz“ (basically a pub) for reasonable prices then you can still do so. Also the city has got an amazing sense of community which is something I really like. Politically most of my area (as is most of Bavaria) votes CSU, but at least here there's next to nothing of the xenophobic slant developed by the state-level party in order to compete with the openly xenophobic AfD, a new party with strong neo-Nazi ties that formed after the refugee crisis. The local AfD chapter is next to non-existent though, thank God, and even most of the local CSU people are really stand-up guys who often are more than a little bewildered by the direction their party's been going lately. I suspect that this might also be connected to the Catholic priests of my hometown (if you're religious in any way in Bavaria and even if you aren't, chances are you're Catholic) who are brilliant guys and have made it a point of being staunchly and openly pro-EU and pro-refugees. I'm not gay so I can't really comment on how LGBT people would fare here, but seeing as how even the most conservative parts of Bavaria now have no qualms about electing a gay Protestant Social Democrat as our equivalent to a county commissioner I would presume that it can't be too bad. There's a lot of outdoorsy stuff that can be done around here, but seeing as this area has been continuously settled by humans for millennia it's not really possible (as it would in many parts of the States, I guess) to “get away from it all“; even in the deepest parts of the forests here you're likely to encounter other people, and the next village or road is never far away. Tl,dr: I really like how my hometown has developed recently and I hope that I will be able to remain here  recent political stuff in Bavaria makes me angry, but not only is it still far from being as bad as it is in many other countries, there are also plenty of signs that show me that at least in this town the attitudes are different.
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Sep 2, 2017 09:14
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N. Senada posted:That is a fascinating entry System. What kind of work do people do in your community? Is it largely agricultural? Are there a lot of commuters who travel elsewhere for work? I'm super curious about your village. Politics aside, it definitely sounds like a place where I'd want to visit/work/live. Yeah, it definitely is really nice here! it has been chartered as a city since its foundation 750ish years ago, so there never was a lot of agriculture in the town itself, but a lot of craftsmen and state administrative staff (it was a border town for most of its existence) instead. There's also some manufacturing here, though not a lot, and a lot of service industry ofc. The surrounding villages are still pretty agriculture-oriented for the most part.
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Sep 4, 2017 22:12
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I Am Crake posted:I live in Leeuwarden, a city in the north of the Netherlands. Do you still have the opportunity to speak Frisian in Leeuwarden or is it mostly relegated to speaking with family and friends at home? What does generally happen to Frisian-speakers once they move out of Frisia, do they switch to full-on Dutch instead or is there a Frisian-speaking community in, say, Amsterdam?
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Nov 10, 2017 11:41
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The tax (legally speaking it's just a fee, though nobody knows where the difference is supposed to be) is levied in order to finance the public broadcasters (of which Germany has a fuckton of due to its federal structure and history). It used to be that only the owners of those devices able to receive public broadcasting (i.e. functioning TVs and radios) had to pay. The public broadcasting agencies literally had a debt collection agency of their own, the dreaded GEZ, which would literally send people to your house to check if you really didn't own any such device. As the GEZ agents didn't have the legal authority to enter your home and were paid by success rate, this often led to funny/weird situations like GEZ collectors perving through your window or trying to pose as vendors of TV magazines in order to bust you. When the broadcasters started to put their content online as well this led to endless additional headache, because now all computers and smartphones fell (in theory, at least) into the GEZ category, too. Thankfully, this monumentally stupid situation is over now. For a couple of years, the GEZ fee has been turned into a general fee payable by every household, no matter if they have twenty TVs standing around or zero. It's at about 17,90€ per household and month now, I think. I actually don't mind it too much, because even though the public broadcasters have a lot of poo poo in their programme, they also produce a lot of genuinely good content, and e.g. their orchestras and big bands are an extremely important part of the German cultural/musical scene and rightfully are highly renowned all over the world. I did say that Germany has a fuckton of public broadcasters, right? Well, I wasn't joking: TV broadcasts: 3sat arte Bayerisches Fernsehen Nord Bayerisches Fernsehen Süd BR-alpha Das Erste Deutsche Welle (DW) DW (Amerika) DW (Arabia) DW (Asien) DW (Europe) DW (Latinoamérica) EinsPlus EinsFestival HR fernsehen KIKA MDR Fernsehen Sachsen MDR Fernsehen Sachsen-Anhalt MDR Fernsehen Thüringen NDR Fernsehen Hamburg NDR Fernsehen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern NDR Fernsehen Niedersachsen NDR Fernsehen Schleswig-Holstein Phoenix Radiobremen tv RBB Berlin RBB Brandenburg SR Fernsehen SWR Fernsehen Baden-Württemberg SWR Fernsehen Rheinland-Pfalz Tagesschau 24 WDR Fernsehen Aachen WDR Fernsehen Düsseldorf WDR Fernsehen Köln WDR Studio Bielefeld WDR Studio Bonn WDR Studio Dortmund WDR Studio Duisburg WDR Studio Essen WDR Studio Münster WDR Studio Siegen WDR Studio Wuppertal ZDF ZDF info ZDF Kultur ZDF neo Radio stations: Bayern 1 Bayern 2 Bayern 3 BR-Klassik BR B5 Aktuell BR Puls BR Bayern Plus BR B5 Plus HR1 HR2 HR3 HR4 HR Info YOU FM MDR JUMP MDR INFO MDR FIGARO MDR KLASSIK MDR SPUTNIK MDR 1 Radio Sachsen MDR Sachsen-Anhalt - Das Radio wie wir MDR Thüringen - Das Radio NDR 1 Niedersachsen NDR 1 Radio MV NDR 1 Welle Nord NDR 90,3 NDR 2 NDR Kultur NDR Info N-Joy NDR Info Spezial NDR Blue Bremen Eins Bremen Vier Nordwestradio Funkhaus Europa Antenne Brandenburg radioBERLIN 88,8 radioeins inforadio kulturradio Fritz SR1 Europawelle SR2 Kulturradio SR3 Saarlandwelle UnserDing SWR1 Baden-Württemberg SWR1 Rheinland-Pfalz SWR2 SWR3 SWR4 Baden-Württemberg SWR4 Rheinland-Pfalz DASDING 1 live 1 live diggi WDR2 WDR3 WDR4 WDR5 Funkhaus Europa Deutschlandradio Kultur Deutschlandfunk DRadio Wissen DW Radio Amharisch DW Radio Dari DW Radio Englisch DW Radio Französisch DW Radio Griechisch DW Radio Haussa DW Radio Kisuaheli DW Radio Paschtu DW Radio Portugiesisch DW Radio Türkisch DW Radio Urdu (This list also doesn't appear to be fully up to date, because e.g. BR Heimat - a radio station which was started in 2015 - isn't on there. As I said, we've got lots of 'em  )
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Feb 21, 2018 19:13
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