BadDoggie

I spy, with my Doggie eye, someone who ain't never dealt with Chinese people beyond restaurant and market staff. Germans are beyond British levels of private, polite, and reserved in comparison. woof.

Insurance is normally an all-or-nothing proposition, and that's expensive. I was able to separate the piano from all the other 20' container contents and  only insured it. For air freight of almost totally replaceable household goods I didn't bother -- it was extremely unlikely that damage to the level of the insurance amount could occur. Air freight is normally insured for the flights from take-off to landing by the carrier under different regulations, but you need to check regulations and their terms. Air freight insurance generally covers everything outside of an airplane.   woof.

You got really, really screwed. The equivalent volume in air freight shouldn't have cost you 10K. Air freight is a bit more difficult since they palletize everything and secure with nets -- saves 2½ tons of unnecessary weight. I'm going to guess you didn't tell them to ship with no priority, going on "space available". It also sounds like they delivered the box via road or rail from California to an East Coast port instead of just dropping your box on any ship eventually hitting Rotterdam or Hamburg.   The phrase you want for customs is "household goods -- used". Don't mix shit, Towels go under "linens"; anything from dining rm & kitchen "kitchenware", also "clothing - used", "furniture", and so on. You can make a detailed list for yourselves to help with the unpacking (serious advice here) but customs doesn't give a shit. They only want a box number (you must mark each box with a sequential number!!!) and general codified content description.   Weight doesn't matter except if you're shipping entire boxes of solid materials like steel plate, glass, paper, etc. Standard moving boxes are normally assigned a "volume-weight" of 12½lb./ft³. This only matters for any movers consolidating for you. If you go the "Imma do it all by my big boy self, warnings the experienced people have given me be damned!" route, you'll basically be paying for the total volume of packing & unpacking the container at both pick-up & delivery fat each end.   If you bring in movers to help pack, the more you pre-pack yourself, the better.  Otherwise be prepared to bring a lot of boxed air with you. It adds to the volume which is what they charge by.   The closest most inexperienced people should ever attempt is contacting a freight forwarder, getting them to engage customs clearance, and then unless you really want a work-out loading & unloading yourself (and have time to get the permits for the container taking up street space) you arrange for companies to do the pick-up, loading, delivery & unloading. Or you bite the bullet and pay out the wazoo. There's enough info here and in older threads for you to at least get the price from astronomical down to only exorbitant. woof.

Nobody ever performed CPR on the Dead Sea.    woof.

You'd shit your pants (again) if you saw what Adobe Acrobat Pro can do. Unfortunately, the shitheels at Adobe now not only won't let you buy it outright anymore, they try to force you onto the even shittier "DC" version, all while demanding ever-more exorbitant prices as other companies are offering more of their once exclusive functionality. This dog's recommendation: find and old CS5 or CS6 CD/DVD & license (sometimes included with "B-Ware" machines). I highly recommend it if you do a lot of documents requiring editing, extraction, Bates numbering, versioning, secure signatures, and other advanced abilities like that. Great for legal matters.   woof.

Watch the video I linked which explains it all. Your clothes don't get an initial short run to get most of the muck off… unless you set your machine to do a pre-wash, in which case most of the soap from your pods washes away with before the main cycle drain & refill. Unless you have a super-complicated machine (complicated? in Germany??) made to take pods and powder/liquid for pre-wash, which you probably don't. What a fucking waste of money to save four seconds of pouring powder into the normal panel drawer cup(s).   woof.

Suddenly I'm feeling a little more myself. Kinda like getting through that first Maß before really being able to deal with all the fucking noise and tourorists at the Wiesn.    woof.

Tabs are fine -- the secondary stuff survives the first short clearing-off wash. and the pellet is supposed to make it through to rinse. Powder & Klarspüler & salt if you have hard water (yes, that means MUC even though it's fucking feathers compared to Regensburg's liquid chalk) seem to be best overall, with tabs second, and fuck pods. woof.

With five chords: G, D, C, & G/C you've got about half of popular rock. Add in the super easy A/Am, E/Em (the minor is just not holding one of the major's strings) and you've broken the 75% level. More than enough for a campfire.   What does the KID want to play? That's what's important. Piano is excellent because not only do students learn to read music in a way that's more transferable to other instruments, piano is normally taught together with basic music theory which is a lot more important than kids realize. Unfortunately, most teachers don't make any effort to show why it's important and useful, let alone try to make it fun.  Guitar is always good and popular and unlike a piano, fairly easy to take with you and entertain at gatherings. Trombone is the loudest acoustic instrument, while the fingering across all other brass is more or less the same. Drums require a lot of practice to be able to keep different timings with each of four limbs, and the electronic sets these days are pretty good for practicing without making tonso much noise (make sure to splurge on mesh heads for at least the snare and "floor tom"). Woodwinds are fairly easy to pick up while violin and viola are complex and requires dedication to make any progress.   What's most important is that the kid wants to play that instrument. If s/he don't, you'll both be wasting time and money. You have to want to play an instrument just to suffer through the constant practice that becoming even somewhat passable requires. woof.

Because it's mixed, so full privacy these days, though postwar Germany has never really big on the shitty panel dividers.   woof.

Left is handicapped-accessible men's & women's, meaning each stall is a fully closed (floor-to-ceiling walls) room, with shared sinks and dryers. Urinals, if any, are also in full stalls with doors. There's nothing there to indicate it's set up for baby-changing for which there are a couple of signs, either a floating, crooked-limbed stickbaby w/ diaper/nappy or a crooked-limbed stickbaby w/ diaper/nappy floating slightly above a line-table. The right sign indicates an accessible men's room. Labeled like that, the urinals are out in the open and may or may not have divider panels. Again, no indication of baby-changing accessories. There's also no indication for the limitation of the handicapped stalls for handicapped-only via the special key that the disabled can get with proof of their disabled status. All of the train and public transport stations have rooms for gimps; Sani.Fresh is required to make the cans available before the turnstile.  I think it's a one-time fee of €23. That's a a hell of a lot more expensive than the "Radar key" in the UK which only costs a fiver, but they'll sell those things to anyone willing to part with a little print of Churchill on plastic feeling a bit blue.   woof.

It's not so much the dishwasher as it is the detergent. Most are rather harsh, though not nearly as bad as it was many moons ago. Bonus dishwasher tip: Avoid packets like the plague. In short, all the soap gets dumped early on after the short sycle which cleans off most of the solid matter, leaving nothing but a bit of residual stuff on your dishes for the main cycles. That complex detergent door is there and complicated for reasons other than being a minor nuisance. woof.

  Was that an MLM ("multi-level marketing" -- a pyramid scam) or just a regular scam selling worthless shit to a lot of marks for a lot of [Deutsch]Marks? That is, were buyers also expected to rope in their friends, family, and acquaintances to then flog more sets (which they'd get a special "distributor price") in the standard pyramid fashion?   If there were actual MLMs running, could you ping me with any other info and references you have? Even names of people or brand names, anything at all. The Germanistik historian in me is especially interested as this is really the ending of my 1848-1948-ish military history specialty which "ends" on the transition into the Cold War. I also have some other shit on the back burner relating to MLMs, scams, and other interrelated problems.Thanks.   woof.

Maybe you could but it ain't a simple job like fixing a toilet or even reglazing a window. They're a bit complicated (Germany? complicated?), pretty unwieldy, and overall a giant pain in the ass.  These aren't the blinds that go inside to let you walk around your house without neighbors seeing in. These are basically like shutters. They're a series of horizontal slats which fit over a window and can fully seal it. They're operated by a pulley strap inside (or now, often motorized) and roll up for storage above the window in a box mounted above the window inside the wall. They're especially useful for storms but also at night to help prevent heat loss, and they offer some additional basic level of home security.   In my experience the heavier Alu ones seem to work better in particularly windy conditions. Installation aside, the cost of the finished goods is a fairly decent guide to relative quality here.   woof.

What the hell are they going to do with your crap at a port? Ports deal with standard 20- & 40-foot shipping containers ONLY. That's it. You need a shipping company. As long as there's no rush, the magic words you're looking for are "consolidator/consolidation" or "freight forwarder".   A 20-ft container is pretty fucking big and hold a lot of shit, and you have to deal with bills of lading, waybills, customs declarations & paperwork, permits to park that box for a few days at each end, a ramp to get between the street and the 5ft high lip of the container… and that's the short version. Figure out the TOTAL VOLUME in cubic feet/meters of everything you want to ship, fully packed and ready. They don't give a shit about the actual weight unless you're shipping an entire container of nearly solid metal or glass. Then search for the magic words and tell them what amount of crap you've got, where it is and where it's going. You may be able to get a better price if you just get consolidator to carry port-to-port and you figure out the pick-up & delivery yourself, BUT... DO NOT think you're going to be able to go back and forth to collect a few boxes at a time in your shitty little Fiat500. You get one shot to drop it all of and on to pick it all up at the other end.  Pro tip 1: don't rule out air freight. Sometimes there's space on cargo pallets with consolidators, forwarders, and even the airlines' cargo division themselves (*cough*Lufthansa*cough*) and you can get a good deal, with your stuff arriving within days rather than weeks-months. Pro tip 2: Try to find others looking to ship, too. That includes possibly bringing unwieldy shit for friends & acquaintances. That lets you share the cost, lowering yours since price/ft³ decreases as quantity increases.   woof.