In a New York Times article about the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, they add a schema of a typical section of the German-German border, showing that the “Wall” was not really only a wall, but rather an elaborate combination of measures to keep people from fleeing their own country. Pretty impressive and sad at the same time.

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: larskflemUnter dem Titel “Meine E-Mail-Adresse war zorn@germany” wärmt tagesschau.de heute ein Interview aus dem Jahr 2007 wieder auf, wahrscheinlich in der Hoffnung dass sich niemand daran erinnern kann.

Dennoch ist das interessant zu lesen, und es ist natürlich schon irgendwie cool, was sich aus den Anfängen der Internet-Kommunikation so alles entwickelt hat — freilich wäre es lustig gewesen, wenn die erste E-Mail in Deutschland Spam einer chinesischen Online-”Apotheke” gewesen wäre. Aber die kleinen blauen Pillen gibt es ja erst seit 1998.

Die Karlsruher Informatiker mailen natürlich noch heute — wenn auch ein bisschen weniger “romantisch”: Das Spam- (und Ham-)aufkommen der Karlsruher Informatikfakultät heute kann man sich auch online ansehen.

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.

Fellow German blogger ix got married in Las Vegas recently (congratulations) and faced the problem to have the marriage accepted by his local civil registry office in Hamburg—because only then they would be able to get all the rights and duties that marriage entails in Germany.

So far, so good: Along with a certified copy of the marriage certificate, he also needed to bring an “Apostille”—a standardized transcription of a legal document (in this case: the marriage certificate) to be accepted by another country (in this case: Germany). Of course, one cannot expect the government officials to be able to read the English language, not even when a marriage certificate consists of a quite simple set of information that does not differ significantly between the two countries. So he had to obtain an official translation of both documents from a certified translator, before they finally accepted his marriage as valid.

That the German government is very strict about “our official language is German” is no news to me: Once before I had to provide US documents to an agency and in spite of the relevant passages being very tiny, they demanded to have the whole document translated. Eventually, I managed to have them accept my (and therefore an uncertified) translation, which probably saved me what would have felt like a million dollars in translator fees.

Though all in all, it seems to be a quite tedious process, I now hope to know quite well what needs to be done to have a US marriage accepted in Germany. My fiancée and I will face the same process soon and this way we know what to expect. I’ll make sure to blog about it again when it’s time.

(pictured: “The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563))

Interesting:

In this German video, Susi Neunmalklug (Susie Smartypants) explains the evolution to Mr. Hempelmann (who apparently is her religion teacher).

It is a promotional video for a new German children’s book about the evolution.

(thanks for the link, Zach!)

By the way: After some vacation in Florida (warm!) and Oregon (cold!) I am finally back in Germany. I got one of the last decent flights from Charlotte, NC before an ugly snow storm hit the American Northeast, so I guess I am lucky.

All the things I brought from the US made my suitcases a little heavy but it also came in handy that it is now legal to import 430 Euros worth of stuff to Germany without paying customs, which I didn’t even come close to.

Now I am busy unpacking, and also finishing up my master’s thesis which will be due to be handed in by the end of the month. And afterwards… but that’s another post entirely

Is it time to leave? Again? Yup. The final days of my stay in Pittsburgh have come: My master’s thesis is more or less complete (by the way, it has the nice name “Transaction Management Challenges for Cross-Organizational, Workflow-Based SOA Applications” and spans 104 pages total), so it is time for me to take it back to Germany and finally wrap up that “Diplom” of mine.

It was a fun time in the “Steel City”, I’ve learned a lot both professionally as well as personally and I have met great people who I will really miss. Thanks for making my time in Pittsburgh great, you know who you are!

But I am not quite flying home yet: Before diving back into the “frozen tundra” of Germany, I shall visit warmer parts of this country. I promise I’ll feel a little bad for you, snowed-in readers, while I sit by the pool sipping margaritas!

(Pittsburgh skyline photo CC by-sa licensed by Ronald C. Yochum, Jr. on Wikimedia Commons.)