mainzigartig

When I last sent things to the USA, only online franking was permitted. Shipment through shops is allowed again but as you experienced at much higher rates.   One thing no one mentioned is that shipping to America now is extremely slow and your package may get converted from airmail to seamail without advising you and without any rebate for the much slower, cheaper service. DHL just pockets the savings. My sea mail DHL packages took 3.5 months to arrive, and one of three packages was completely lost and I'm still waiting for the federal postal arbitration to get through their massive DHL/Post backlog of cases. You can order "express surcharge" on some packages but there is still no guarantee they will not get seamailed, again with no refund of the express surcharge. So don't ship anything that has any kind of priority behind it, for that you must use the very high rates from UPS or similar. It's awful now.   Meanwhile, America to Germany shipping is somehow relatively normal, and from Japan to Germany completely normal. Screw DHL.

Is the market in Berlin really so bad now that you have to sign a contract for almost four years to get a place?   Otherwise, follow the other folks' advice.

  That page is amazingly detailed but I would never have looked there because putting a sticker on your car is not fucking tuning. It is rather interesting and bizarre that the same sticker is somehow a Beleidigung if I just pasted "BMW drivers" next to it. Thanks! It also answers some other things I've wondered about in terms of blocked vision and so on.   I'll print up a T-shirt and every now and again feel a Kreislaufstörung and need to open my jacket...

I went to a bar once in Stuttgart. Everyone was a male who worked in the automotive industry. I've been to Stuttgart a lot and I don't think it's a bad as the reputation, but that said, I'd like to post a simple, direct question: Do you like Germany? Or do you like Berlin, despite it being located in Germany? From your posts I got the feeling of the latter. If you don't like/love German culture, you will not be very happy in Stuttgart. I think that's the question you should ask yourself.

So there's a few old threads here about giving the finger being a terrible Beleidigung and leading to a fine from the police, but if that is true, why do I see a decal of someone giving me the finger on a car literally every day? Is this somehow freedom of expression? Can I take a decal of a minion flipping the bird with me wherever I go and show it off whenever someone cuts in the line at REWE, and avoid the dreaded Beleidigungsbußgeld and associated Strafverfahren? I'm honestly pretty curious about this.   For those of you who haven't seen these, get out of Prenzlauer Berg, Schwabing, Blankenese, Westend, or whatever uptight suburb you live in for a day or two. Try the "new federal states".

After many years of getting it from people who have access to military shops, I just get Brennspiritus now. And a cheap bottle of Korn if I need to disinfect something I'm going to eat.   Also, don't buy anything at toom. Crap shop, in my opinion.

We had a baby at the start of the first wave and Grandma has never seen her child and missed his entire babyhood as he is now firmly a toddler...at this rate maybe she never will as the EU is so far behind the curve on vaccinations that resistant mutations will be here by the time they get 33% vaccinated and Japan (where Grandma lives) hasn't even started and hopes that if they close the drawbridge long enough corona will somehow go away without them ever having to shell out for imported vaccines. How they will hold the Olympics is a mystery...maybe Japanese athletes only?   We moved to Halle not too long before the first wave and know nobody...no Krabbelgruppe and all support resources are closed...just us and the Hebamme (who is wonderful)

I've got a story for ya...my last landlord kept 10% of the deposit for possible payments to the Nebenkosten, which is not allowed but I decided not to fight it as the amount was roughly similar to what I owed for Nebenkosten in other years. So this year the Nebenkosten should have been finished and I contacted the landlord in the spring...he said he was trapped in Iran and couldn't do anything. He was Persian, but