arunadasi

i recently did not use a return Ryanair flight so I tried to get the tax back -- they have a page specifically for this. I did not have much hope as they say that they only return anything above the admin charge. As I suspected, there was nothing to return. But it should be different with serious airlines, like the Lufthansa one in the post above this. There's probably a form to fill out online, like with Ryanair.

  Nope, that won't do it! Already at it.  I'm OK, off to Guyana next week. 

My daughter is feeling a bit down due to the  grey Ireland weather. So I promised her a week's holiday (with baby) in November. She was in Lanzarote last February and loved it, and I remember fondly an intransit day in Tenerife many years ago. The temperature should still be warm then. But it's a four hour flight.   Any suggestions for somewhere really warm in early November, and maybe not so far from Dublin?

  I  learn something new every day.

      These days you have to appear in person: they take your photo "vor Ort" as well as your fingerprint. It;s not so easy for my daughter to fly to London and back just for that -- she has a baby and is breastfreeding.    

I understand that -- (though I didn't know she'd have to pay emplyees out of her own pocket!). I still think it's awful to leave the post unattended for six whole weeks.   In fact, I'm even more flummoxed, after reading  your link!  That a country like Germany can't pay for its own Vertretungen abroad, can't pay for a decent office in Belfast.      

  I was flummoxed earlier this year when my entire faith in Germany as the epitome of efficiency was shattered. I mean, surely represention abroad should stand out as a glowing example of how perfectly smooth everything in Germany works.   But not so with the Germany Consulate Belfast. My daughter's passport is about to expire so she needed to apply for a new one. She contacted the Belfast Consulate via email but received no reply. So she went online and discovered that there actually is no German Consulate in Belfast -- there's a German Consul who actually lives in Londonderry which is at the northernmost tip of Northern Ireland. I assume she must have an office in Belfast...   Anyway, my daughter called this consul only to get the message that the consul would be out of office until early September. That's all. No mention of a stellvertetende Konsul or any such thing, or what to do in an emergency. She called the Dublin Embassy -- which is the opposite, a state-of-the-art setup currently undergoing renovations, but super efficient-- and they said they cannot help; her only option it to go to the German Embassy in London.   I mean, come on. Even I, as a lowly social worker in a hospital, had a Vertretung when I was on holiday. I find it super lax. The consul was unavailabke for six whole weeks.   Often these German Consuls are just ordinary people given a Mandat. The German Consul in Guyana for many years was a German expat who ran a furniture store and changed money (illegally) on the sly. A very shady character.   More recently the German Consul in Guyana is actually Dutch. Were I to live in Guyana I'm sure I could be a German Consul (if I were younger maybe). for that matter, I told my daughter she should apply for the job.

  Sometimes it is these Asian and African countries that lead. I believe it was Rwanda that was the first country to ban all plastic bags. I was in Tamil Nadu, India, last year when the ban on plastic came into effect. It was interesting, because I had actually seen plastic bin bags in the supermarkets in December but didn't buy any. Come January, they were all gone, from all the shops. So I googled and sure enough, Tamil Nadu had banned all single-use plastic as of January 1st. Now all of India has banned single use plastic. It was inconvenient at first we we soon got use to improvising, finding ways of rubbish disposal with newspaper etc. I was in Sri Lanka in 2017 when a ban was imposed, or about to be imposed. I remember there were actualy demonstration in Colombo against the ban.   It's easy to dismiss them third world countries, but it's not always fair. I'm always impressed in India at how resourceful people are with what they have. The repair things over and over again before chucking them out. They can make anything. Years ago, my baby buggy lost a wheel during the flight over. I asked around, and in a cople of says some local workman had made me a new wheel out of wood -- and fitted it, and it worked!

  Well, living as I do on the Irish border and crossing it (or family members crossing it) sometimes several times a day, you never know after Brexit. My daughter lives in the north, I (and my son) in the south. We all go back and forth. Son and I are her main babysitters.

Oh, I feel quite at home again after a year! Same old folk with same old bickering! I love you guys! 

  While I agree that it is the way it is and we can't quibble about the past, your comparison really doesn't work. The referendum was "status quo" or "change".  In a general election there is no status quo; there are two candidates. People who don't vote don't care enough and are content  with any candidate. People who don't vote in a referendum are content with the status quo.   But it is as it is and we have to deal with the consequences, that much is true.

  I always believed that those who didn't vote at all are actually clandestine remainers. Surely if the non-voters were pro-Brexit they would have made the effort to vote for it -- not voting means they were basically content with the status quo, and simply weren't interested in change. 

I really do believe that there is a certain type of mentality that does or can do extremely well in the German system; that is, there is compatibility. And the parents of such children get very defensive and protective and genuinly believe that the kids who don't do so well -- it's their fault, the parents should have tried harder, this and that. I do admit without reserve that it was not understanding the system and how it works that caused some problems for me. But in the end I think there was a basic incompatibility.   I had a similar conversation recently with a German friend of mine from way back well; we met up again after about 30 years.  She was very inflexible in her arguments that the German system is fantastic and that an "allgemeine" education is the best; that is, the kids should learn all subjects up to Abitur and be good at all of them because that's the only way to make them fit for Uni and the world.   I prefer a mix and match system, the way it was for me in the UK, and which is truly the best for some pupils. I would have totally failed in the German system. I needed an education in which my strengths (English language, foreign languages, arts) were reinforced and I could withdraw energy from the subjects I truly, genuinly couldn't come to grips with - which was mathematics. So I managed to scrape through British O levels with maths, and then drop it completely at age 16, and concentrate on language and do well in those subjects. My friend was appalled. It seems she would have preferred me to fail completely at keeping up in certain subjects, and then learn a trade -- which would not have worked at all. With all due respect for trades -- I'm far too impractical and clumsy to go in that direction! But now my friend considers me badly educated.   I think my son could have shone in the German system if only he had been allowed a little more freedom to do things his way, and not to toe the line, and if I had been more aware of my own role. My daughter is like me in many ways; totally incompatible with the German system.   I suspect that the Chinese and Singaporeans are even more rigid than the Germans, the parents even more pushy. In some ways I admire this way of doing things; they do achieve results. But finally, it's not for me.   I have to say, that the British go far too much in the other direction, thus you get what they call the Mickey Mouse degrees and lowering of standards so as to support the weak students, so that more students can be winners. My daughter went from an average British Uni to TUM, and she says the difference was like day and night. TUM was much, much, a hundred times better, and she enjoyed it, even enjoyed the pressure -- as an adult she was far more capable of adapting than she had been as a child. She has a very low opinion of British unis and the study ethic of students there, who, she says, were more into partying and getting drunk and getting laid than in studying.

      No. Both my kids had only ONE teacher for the main subjects (Maths and German) all through primary school. My son's teacher absolutely hated him; I'm not exagerrating. He had had a brilliant teacher for his first year, he adored her and she brought out the best in him, but she left and her replacement was a horror. I could tell some stories about favouritism... he had her from 2. Klasse to 4. Klasse and she gave him a Realschule recommendation. The other teachers -- I don;t even know who they were, they were minor.   I removed my daughter from the Grundschule in the third year and put her in the Waldorfschule. She learnt nothing there and the bullying was even worse than in the Grundschule. Again, it was just one teacher the kids had for the first 8 years (I think!) of school.    This is all in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Even when my son returned from England, having done really well at school there, top grades, the Gymnasium principle wouldn't accept him. He actually said I was trying to sneak him into the Gymnasium through the back door. Even though he had, in effect, repeated a class (left at the end of 4., returned after a year to enter the 5.)

  If I could do it all again, knowing what I know now, I would. I was too compacent; I didn't "get" the German system, buy also, I believe, there's a certain type of learning it's really suited for, and neither I nor my kids could ever have thrived. I would have ended up in the Hauptschule, I'm certain; both I and my daughter have more "soft" strengths, artistic, creative, that don't count for much in D. And my son was too individualistic. He figured out ways to calculate things not using the given system; he'd get the right results in maths, but he had to show how he did it, and never could. He'd write marvellous stories, and be told he used too much imagination. Things like that.   I was interested in following what they learned, but actually sitting down and practicing with them -- I never did that. I think there was a certain mental incompatability with the German system. All three of us did well in the UK (in my case, also Guyana) system. I also much prefer all day school -- slower, more time for everything. But -- well, it's all over now. Thank goodness.   My granddaughter is also having problems in Austria, it appears. Her mother has decided to homeschool her. I'm not sure it's the right decision. She's here right now and obviously very, very bright but I can't see her thriving in a German school, and I assume Austria is similar.