Saaga

It’s funny how when you open the front door onto the cold, dark street, ready to trudge off to work in that bleary eyed, been awake for half an hour and forgot to shave kind of way and you make the discovery that it is snowing, all of a sudden the day doesn’t seem so bleak.
Then you walk for ten minutes through the stuff on your way to the train station and your opinion does a back flip that would impress a conservative Australian politician.

I am very fond of noting the orange Germans that I pass on my travels, for it is not the standard ruddy complexion that borders on orange, it is as if they have been painted by some small, yet powerful robot that is obsessed with painting things orange and goes by the name “The Phantom Oranger.”
Then I discovered that it is the sun lounges that are responsible. I can understand that some people want to look tanned. I don’t really agree with it, but still it escapes me why they would want to be orange. It looks silly and will prove dangerous when a giant version of whatever kind of animal (Possibly fruit bats or wasps) that eats oranges comes to town.

I thought I’d better make this post quickly or it would be totally out of date and irrelevant as winter is now pretty much upon us.

I’m finding the experience of actually having 4 distinct seasons quite novel. It was amazing how in Autumn how suddenly the leaves turned orange and starting falling. There were massive piles on all the footpaths and roads for days. There aren’t many places in Australia where there are so many deciduous trees, and even where there are they are too confused by the mild Australian weather to really get into the spirit of autumnal leaf-dropping.

Now we are pretty much into Winter and it is quite chilly. Amazing fogs some days and other days it has been quite nice and sunny but still cold. All very interesting for me (weather geek - it’s currently around 4 degrees).

One of the questions that people have asked me is whether I think living in Germany is more expensive than living in Australia. I thought about it and my gut instinct is to say that it is about the same. To back it up, I did a little study. I got my shopping receipt from the 16th of November and compared the prices of similar products as listed on www.coles.com.au converting everthing into Australian dollars. So here are my results (sorry the formatting is a bit of a mess, I can’t work out how to line things up neatly):

Product * Cost in Germany (AUD) * Cost in Australia
Milk (1 litre) $1.42 * $1.77
Juice (2 litres) $3.10 * $1.59
Tin of tomatoes $0.78 * $0.75
Rexona $3.50 * $3.70
Pasta sauce $2.70 * $2.87
Lettuce $1.58 * $1.25
Toilet paper (10)$3.91 *$6.00
Muesli $4.77 * $7.56
Onions (4 large) $2.38 * $0.80

Total cost in Germany: $24.25
Total cost in Australia: $26.70

This comparison isn’t very scientific and doesn’t take into account different earning power in different countries. Also we do pay more rent here, but it seems to be better value for money as the apartment is really nice and also bigger than the one we had in Sydney.

So it seems my gut feeling was right at least for the basics. I would be interested to hear about a comparison with the UK or other countries.

It just started hailing! Little ice balls the same size as the end-knobs on the four-colour biros. Winter is definitely coming! But this is pretty tame hail compared to what we are used to in Sydney!!

I can’t bloody believe it!!! Australia has (finally) made it to the World Cup!!! This is awesome news - really made my day great and put a whole extra shine on next year’s event. Now we’ll have to try to procure some tickets to watch Australia as well as Germany. Bloody awesome mate!!!!*

* This is probably as Aussie as I’ve ever sounded in my life and probably won’t repeat it, so make the most of it.

I have been following the ‘Intelligent design’ debate raging in the US for the past couple of weeks and I have to say the conservative Christians come out looking stupid. I know it seems hard to believe…me criticizing Christian teachings, but come on, this stuff makes no sense.

Just recently the education board of Kansas has won a battle to introduce new science standards into classrooms across the state. For the most part these new ‘standards’ are about challenging the theory of evolution and seem to be a spring board to move intelligent design theory into the mainstream.

Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations. *1
Where does this lead us?

The prime argument behind Intelligent design is that life is too complicated to have evolved or have started by accident, so there had to be some kind of guiding hand in the design process. Now of course the intelligent design flag wavers will admit that since the creation of all the animals, evolution has happened and accounts for the variation within species and so on. Nice of them to give some credit to Darwin, who is at least REAL.

However, Darwin’s ideas are criticized as faulty because they can’t explain absolutely everything, yet his theory of evolution has infiltrated all levels of science and is accepted as the most likely answer. In an effort to try and make intelligent design seem like a REAL science its proponents like to compare it with other ACTUAL sciences.
Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences… cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) *2

The decision of the Kansas board of education can only be good for the world because it will lead to other states following suit. In the long term this will retard the intellectual development of the USA and as it descends back into the mire of Christian Science it will be unable to invade countries that piss them off or have oil. Or maybe it won’t be good. The crusades spring to mind. But I suppose by the time the ‘New Crusades’ start they will be a perfect imitation of the originals, as the US will have devolved (no pun intended) back to swords, horses and sailing ships through the help of ignorance combined with conviction.

*1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09kansas.html
*2 http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/

One of the first things that I noticed in Germany is how long the toilet paper is. In Australia, it is normally 10cm x 10.5cm. Here it is 9.8cm x 13.8 cm (don’t worry I didn’t measure it - the dimensions are written on the packaging). 3 extra centimetres!!! If you ask me, that’s just excessive!

When you move to a foreign country you expect things to be different. You prepare (or try to) by learning the language and investigating the culture. But there’s so much stuff that you can’t prepare for and it’s these little things that actually make the biggest differences. This new section on Saaga will introduce you to a few of the little things that we have found to be surprisingly different in Germany. If you have any similar experiences or observations we’d love to hear them, so please leave a comment.

One of the major features of an iron other than being able to heat up, is the ability to stand on its end while you move the item of clothing you are working on. I wonder why the person that designed our new iron instilled it with the desire to fall forward and head for the floor when you set it down. The inability for it to remain upright is difficult to get used to, because it doesn’t always do it and so just when I am ready to throw it out the window, I discover it sitting up nice and straight and so I relent.
The old iron had its own problems as well, the major one being that it was possessed by the devil, which was easy to cope with once you realised what the issue was. It was predictable, because you knew that anything it told you was going to be in some way designed to damn your soul and so armed with this knowledge it easy to avoid any pitfalls. There are many work arounds for a possessed iron, but I usually found that not engaging it in conversation worked best.
I suppose you really are asking for trouble when you only pay 12€ for an electrical appliance that is not designed to trim hair or juice fruit. Thank goodness we didn’t buy that 9€ microwave oven.

Halloween is a pretty big event here in Düsseldorf - I believe this is mostly due to the fact that 1st of November is always a public holiday and that Germans really like dressing up.

My neighbour, Desi, and I got dressed up as witches and, after scaring the patrons at our local bar, headed off to check out the night-life. The first stop was a big mainstream commercial party hosted by the local radio station and the local airline, LTU. There were so many people there and not a whole heap of space. There were no outdoor areas, so we were absolutely boiling. It was so hot that the ice cube in my free cocktail had completely melted in the 5 minutes it took for us to battle our way across the main room.

We got pretty tired of this pretty quickly and headed off to our favourite Irish pub in the Alt Stadt, McLaughlin’s. It’s a pretty small place and it was even more crowded than the previous venue. Needless to say we couldn’t find our friends who were allegedly in there somewhere and we didn’t hang around long either. We were walking toward the pizza place, past a bar called Anaconda, when I looked in the window and saw a bunch of our friends in there! It was really good luck to have found them as it seemed that the entire population of Düsseldorf was congregated in the alt stadt drinking, partying and generally enjoying the last bits of fine weather before winter arrives.

Desi and I got our pizza and then I headed off with my friends to a club at the Stahlwerk (ex-steelworks). The club was pretty cool, like a smaller version of Vortex in Sydney, although on the whole the people weren’t as dressed up. The room had really high ceilings so it wasn’t hot which was a great relief after the experiences earlier in the night. They played quite a lot of good music so I danced quite a bit before leaving at about 2.30am, which was the latest I have stayed out since we got to Germany! I think we’re getting old…