On September 27, 2009, the Federal Republic of Germany will vote for their 17th “Bundestag”, i.e., its federal parliament. Due to my absence on the actual election day, I went to the ballot today already for early voting. Here is proof:

The staff were very helpful and interestingly, there were actually a lot of people asking for absentee ballots.

Another observation struck me as odd while reading the ballot: Of all people, the direct candidate of one of the nationalist parties^*) is a “Fremdsprachensekretärin”, or certified multi-lingual secretary. Yup, a foreign-language secretary by day, moonlighting as a xenophobe. Life’s ironic.

^*) whom I didn’t vote for, just in case that was unobvious.

Just recently, my fiancée Tara joined the blogging community with her first own blog called “Domaine de Tara”.

She started off with a nice little article on the hunt for American-style brown sugar in Germany. It also includes a yummy recipe for baking Oatmeal Walnut Chocolate Chunk Cookies which — in spite of the sugar-related difficulties — turned out more than delicious.

Her future posts are likely going to be about food (both her passion and profession) and German strangeness she’s just bound to stumble across every once in awhile…

Feel free to visit her blog, say hello, and maybe even subscribe to the RSS feed. Have fun!

The photo is from a trip we took to Provence, where a winery coincidentally carries my fiancée’s name.

photo credit: daklebtwasTomorrow, June 7, 2009, the people of Europe elect the next European Parliament. Perhaps less well-known, this date also coincides with the local elections in the state of Baden-Württemberg, so besides the European ballot, I will also get to vote for

• the local town council
• the city council of the city my home town belongs to
• and the district council.

While possibly not the most influential councils of all, the number of elections at once is quite impressive. What makes these elections the most fun of all though, are the concepts of “Kumulieren” and “Panaschieren” that I’ll shortly explain to you here.

Let’s assume there are three active parties in this election: A light blue one, a pink one, and an orange one. For each of these, you’ll receive a ballot containing their designated votees, along with the instructions telling you that you have, for example, 10 votes at your disposal.

Imagine you like the pink party the most. The easiest way to handle this is to take the pink ballot, fold it, and drop it into the ballot box. You’ll automatically have given each of the people on the ballot 1 vote. But we are in Germany, and we find “simple” boring, so let’s spice that up a bit.

It just happens that you like one guy in the Pink party, Paul Olitician, more than the others. After all, whenever you meet him at the bars, he buys you a beer, and to return the favor, you listen to him explain his political visions in detail. The perfect symbiosis, if you will.

In that case, you can go ahead and “accumulate” up to three votes on Paul, and then spread the remaining seven votes across the other candidates on the ballot. You may end up not having enough votes for each of the party members on there, but that’s fine, as one of them is your former high school teacher whom you didn’t like very much anyway. The process of giving a person on the ballot more than one vote is called “Kumulieren” in German.

But then, just before and you are done giving away all your votes, you realize there are empty lines left on each of the ballots. Also, you notice your neighbor John is a candidate for the light blue party. You don’t want to vote for them as a whole, because you still like the pink party better, but you would like to vote for John. After all, you are still grateful for that one time when he heroically kept you from falling off the ladder when he caught you stealing from his cherry tree.

Luckily, the second concept called “Panaschieren” comes in handy. You manually write John’s name onto the pink ballot, allowing you to give your remaining votes to him.

After you’re done, you fold the ballot, stuff it into the envelope and drop it into the ballot box. With a strong feeling of accomplishment, you head to the bars. To discuss your successful voting with Paul, and to get rid of that horrific taste the envelope glue left in your mouth. You secretly promise yourself, next time you’ll vote for the party to introduce self-adhesive envelopes to the German election system.

Google Calendar has a new feature that many international Mozillians may like: It can now display more than one time zone at a time. In my case, lining up the Central European and Pacific time zones next to each other comes in quite handy:

Of course, when entering a new event, it does not seem to allow selecting the time zone this refers to quite yet, let’s hope that’ll be fixed in a future iteration.

photo credit: cubicgardenIn an interesting NY Times article (via Kottke) one can read how US magazines like The Economist are raising prices, counter-intuitively leading to higher sales and much higher revenue:

The Economist is leading the charge on expensive subscriptions, and its success is one reason publishers are rethinking their approaches. It is a news magazine with an extraordinarily high cover price — raised to $6.99 late last year — and subscription price, about $100 a year on average.

Wait a minute, 100 dollars for a yearly magazine subscription are expensive? Clearly, the US has different standards as far as that is concerned.

In comparison, German magazine subscriptions are almost ridiculously expensive. The weekly, renowned news magazine Der Spiegel weighs in at a whopping 182 Euros (that is, over 240 dollars) for a yearly subscription, followed by its biggest, more conservative “rival” Focus with 153,40 EUR (just over 200 Dollars). Similarly well-known magazine “Stern” is slightly cheaper at 145,60 EUR (193 USD), a year’s worth of the (monthly) German Cosmopolitan is comparatively cheap at 29 Euros (about 38 USD), compared to 15 dollars in the US. Playboy, in turn, costs 58,80 EUR (78 USD) a year in Germany, while in the US it’s available for just 12 dollars.

For each of the examples, comparative magazines are multiple times as expensive in Germany than in the US. Sadly, that results in the fact, that not too many people I know subscribe to magazines: You have to be a particular fan of a specific topic and a determined reader to spend several hundred dollars a year on a magazine subscription. Instead, if I lived in the US, I would surely subscribe to a handful of magazines to read whenever I feel like it, and not feel bad if I don’t read every page every week.

It’s clearly a question of value: I don’t think that a magazine for under a dollar per issue is priced right. However, when I sometimes buy a German magazine for close to 5 Euros and I notice that — just like US magazines — easily half the pages contain ads, I wonder why the European ones have to be so much more expensive. Likewise, when I read that I can get an “amazing” 20 Eurocents or so off when I subscribe for a year, it’s not much of an incentive for me to actually do so. Even if I regularly read this magazine, I’d be saving that money when I refrain from buying the one or two times that I don’t have time or do not feel like reading.

In short, I feel like the solution should be somewhere in the middle: At a price that appropriately values the amount of work put into creating a magazine, while keeping magazines what they should be: a commodity, not a luxury.

photo credit: digitalbearIn the light of Sunday’s free SMS frenzy at German phone company T-Mobile, I tried to set up Twitter so it sends messages to my cell phone — considering receiving SMS is free in Germany in general, that looked like a good idea. Here is what Twitter told me *after* I sent the confirmation code by SMS:

Of course, they couldn’t have figured out that they don’t like my cell phone number before I had to send a for-pay message to their German message service.

The same thing happened to me with Twitter in the US already as well. I am a “pre-paid” customer there, and I was similarly told that I am unable to use Twitter on the phone in the US.

I seriously wonder what I’ve done wrong to be excluded from Twitter’s phone service in *two* countries. What’s going on?

In a few weeks, my fiancée and I are going to move to Munich. We are going to live in a quarter called Sendling.

A U-Bahn stop in the neighborhood is called “Am Harras” and curious as I am I wanted to know what it was named after. Luckily, there’s always Wikipedia. The German Wikipedia page on Harras reads (my translation):

In 1856, the former Löwenhof castle was torn down [...] and a remaining part of it was purchased by Robert Harras who opened a café there. It became a popular destination for people in Munich. The café was torn down as well in 1903, but the name remained as the name of the square located there. In 1930, the intersection was named after the café owner Robert Mathias Harras.

When I asked other people, one initial thought was that the name could be from Carl Zuckmayer‘s 1946 play “Des Teufels General” (The Devil’s General), about a German air force general under the Nazi regime, both working for it and openly opposing the Nazi party. But, while this would have made sense, it turns out the square has been called like this much longer already, and the fictitious general and the former café owner have nothing in common but their last name.

Photo: Harras post office, in a building from the 1930s. CC by-sa licensed on Wikimedia Commons.

I hereby admit publicly: I love espresso. I firmly believe, all a young coffee bean hopes for as a child is to end up as a delicious little Italian coffee. Needless to say, one of the hardest decisions for me to make when thinking about our kitchen setup was, what espresso maker to get.

Now we recently went to Italy on vacation and as usual I admired the baristas and their fabulous espresso makers, and so we ended up asking one of them where to go to buy a good espresso maker. And a decent tamper, and — for my parents — a good coffee mill. Like most Italians he and his fellow bar owner felt honored and delighted to give advice and gave us the address of their commercial coffee maker vendor, along with this note card:

It reads: “From Luca and Fabio. Treat them well.” Very nice!

There, I bought one of the most beautiful espresso makers evaar:

The “La Pavoni Europiccola” does not have an electric pump and thus works mainly with the pressure generated by the steaming water as well as the force from the operator’s arm pressing the handle down. On the one hand, it is hard to generate a constant quality this way and, due to temperature variations, it is quite hard to make the first coffee in a batch “just right”. On the other hand, with this machine, drinking espresso is celebrated rather than rushed, and each coffee becomes its own little “piece of art”.

While I am still figuring out the “tricks”, so far I really dig it. And one thing’s for sure: This is one damn cool kitchen accessory.