A broad abroad

I flew back from So. Germany on Thursday (and, boy, are my arms tired! Har-har). All stale jokes aside, I started coming down with a cold the day before my flight and had to spend the nearly 11 hour journey with a partially plugged up nose and pounding headache. It was not ideal, to say the least. Now home, it's been a real humdinger having to contend with both cold symptoms and jet-lag--am I falling asleep midday from the cold or the time change? (I've also stopped and started this blog entry since Friday innumerable times. -usually too befuddled by illness to continue writing in one go.)

On this trip, the first Euro-visit since 2016, I stayed in places I've been visiting since the 90s: Tübingen, Stuttgart and Konstanz; and traveled to one new city: Nürnberg. The pandemic brought changes to DE as it has here and everywhere else, of course, but I suppose I hadn't expected the changes to be so stark. 

Some of the things that jumped out:

*Arbeitsverstärkung gesucht/Wir suchen Dich! Help-wanted signs abounded both in Stuttgart and Nürnberg. A dearth of available workers has meant that there seemed to be many employed in the service industry who didn't speak any German and were being communicated with by other staff members (and some guests) in English. 

*loads of litter in the streets I've experienced DE over my visiting the past 25 plus years as a much tidier place than the California Bay Area, where I live, save for this last visit. Bins weren't full and the pedestrian zones were awash in discarded fast food packaging, bottles and cans. It was a weird sight.

*men collecting plastic bottles in heavily trafficked areas This one super sucked to see. The men out with bags are recycling were young and old, native and not. Bringing bottles, both glass and plastic, back to the store in order to collect the deposit is still common practice in Germany, so why so many bottles aren't being returned is a bit of a wonder.

These new wrinkles aside, it was a pleasure to return to So. Germany after what felt like so long. Halfway through the trip, I met up with my buddy, Mike, a fellow Californian and German nerd to do some traveling together. We purchased the somewhat newly introduced Deutschland Ticket and hit the road. At 49 euros a month, one is able to travel with this ticket on any form of transport sans the IC and ICE trains across the whole of the country. I'm very glad we took advantage of this offer as it saved us both the headache of constantly having to purchase travel tickets at each new leg of the journey and a wad of cash. 

Some pictures from the trip for your viewing pleasure:

2023 or 1972? Groovy U-Bahn stop, Nürnberg

Dürer squirrel, Westfriedhof, Nürnberg

Chagall stained glass and dude, Zürich daytrip, Fraumünster

Flower balls in Konstanz, Altstadt