Die Hard Three

Today I went to Potsdam and let me tell you this place is awesome. What I enjoyed most was the names of all the shops.

I took all these pictures during my six-hour walking tour of the city. They also had this amazing windmill – there were a bunch of Dutch people that lived here (back when windmills were in fashion (the first time)) and I guess they got tired of making their flour by hand.

The most depressing part of the day came when my tour guides and I (Nina und Urte) sat down to discuss retirement options for citizens of the German republic. It’s completely messed up. They have to wait until they are 67 to be able to collect their pensions. And this I don’t understand completely (and I’m going to try an get more information tomorrow) but if you’re collecting government assistance and you own a house, they make you sell the house. More to follow.

Does this even need a caption?

Clara, can you translate this for me?

Time for???

No caption

Also no caption.

No orange?

Shopping here is Germany is a very exhausting experience. This is because they have lots of cool stuff over here that in Canada is either not available or prohibitively expensive. It’s interesting to note how there is an asymmetrical relationship between the two continents. It’s quite common to find European design stores in Canada for kitchens, bathrooms, (i.e. Ikea, Jysk) but I’ve never seen a non-Apple “made in USA” shop over here.

Here is how I categorize things when I’m shopping in Europe.

Audio Visual Components – don’t really pay attention

Very rarely is there a TV or stereo that one cannot get in Canada. The electronics companies have done a good job making their products available everywhere. Case in point – TV sizes in Germany are measured in inches. USA! USA!

Appliances – try to avoid at all costs

This is easily the most frustrating shopping experience. The European appliances are really slick, super-advanced, and reasonably priced. The problem is that they all run on 250 volts and it’s almost impossible to get them work in Canada. The counter-top depth fridges with the matching cabinet front panel are a source of personal frustration. Note: Ikea recently started stocking in North America dishwashers with the cabinet face.

Look at this dishwasher. I want one.

Kitchenware – am obsessed with

Specifically the pots and pans with the removable handles. I’m not sure why but this technology has not caught on in Canada but it’s very popular over here. Just think how much more room there would be in the sink if all those pots were handleless.

I *hate* round frying pans. So much wasted space.

CanCon Alert – Neal Young, Old Man. Yesterday I heard Southern Man. I wonder why this hotel likes Neal so much… Oh yeah, I’m staying in a hotel for 4 days while they do some repairs on my apartment.

Power tools – same as appliances

Bathroom fixtures – I think you know

The cool thing about bathroom fixtures is that they are easily adapted to work with the North American plumbing standards. Or so I keep telling myself.

Pretty neat, eh?

Windows – Oh yeah, baby

These are pretty straightforward. If your wall has a hole in it you can use a window fill it.

Just like in the Simpson's

Electrical things – 250 volts

Again, the different standards mess everything up. Wouldn’t you like to go back in time to when the engineers on both sides of the Atlantic were deciding what voltages to use and tell them to get their act together. I hate them so much.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a whole bunch of minor adventures that did not make the papers. For your reading pleasure, here they are

I find Segways just hilarious.

GOB

I went to the Italian Science and Technology Museum in Milan

Man *may* have not been meant to fly - but he definitely was not meant to hover.

I lived for two weeks on a street that had “beer” in its name.

True story.

For some reason the city of Berlin has little Tron tanks stenciled all over the windows of the subway cars.

Very strange.

Visited a Soviet monument to World War II. Was incredible. See for yourself.

I’ve always wanted to go to an Uber 30 party.

Sadly I have not yet gone.

This was hilarious

And still is.

Dawson? Really?

The fourth city on your list from that timezone is Dawson? Honestly Berlin, sometimes…

If you ever screw up at work, just blame it on the guy who can’t speak English.

Ah Tibor, how many times have you saved my ass.

This guy went to the Sabres/Kings game and bought a 200 euro jersey.

Aussies are just mad!

Walking home one night I met this guy and he had this massive camera and he was taking these really cool pictures that I will never get to see because they take forever to develop.

The film for one shot is like 20 euros.

This is what he was capturing.

Imagine what it will look like with his awesome camera.

This is the tiniest car I have ever seen.

It's the truth.

I did not go to this event.

Also true.

On Friday was out with some friends. We’re walking to the bar and one of the guys (from France) goes into the dep to buy a traveler. He comes out with a bottle of vodka. I thought he was going to get a beer.

Nope. Vodka.

I keep seeing these markers everywhere.

I'm going to find out what they are for...

even if it kills me...

Over here in Europe I sometimes see things that are clearly superior to how they are done back home. And I mean vastly superior. For instance, take the movement of goods using transport trucks. It’s pretty much the same in Europe as it is in North America except for one thing. The trucks are roughly the same size and many of them are built by the same companies – Volvo, GM, etc. But in North America we load our trucks from the back and in Europe they load them from the side.

It’s not very clear from this photo but the side of this truck is made from a heavy, vinyl-type plastic. You can see the clasps just above the wheel.

The truck is green.

Now if any of you have ever worked at a grocery store or had to have all your possessions shipped cross country, you know what I’m talking about. There is an incredible amount of planning involved with loading from the back. You have to figure out your route and pack the truck according to the sequence of your stops. This does not allow for much flexibility in the execution of the delivery.

Plus with side-loading you can load the truck in parallel. This is probably a huge savings in time. To be fair, some companies are taking advantage of this system. I noticed that the delivery trucks for Home Depot are all side loading. The main difference here is that they are usually delivering to construction sites with no fixed loading dock. Your standard grocery store in Canada is not set up to accept side-load deliveries.

Even your vanilla moving truck rental would be much better off to load from the side because it would be much easier to pack the truck efficiently (i.e. with no wasted space). You would place your first items against the long wall and this gives you more options to find the perfect fit for the later items. This would be tricky to implement in practice because your standard house-move is just a bunch of stuff packed loosely into the truck. The vinyl barrier could get damaged if the items shift in transit. Most commercial shipping has the goods preloaded onto pallets.

So I was invited out to another concert last night. The tickets were 10 euros so I didn’t even bother checking out the program. This is Berlin – anything that is in the Konzerthaus (Grosser Saal) has got to be pretty decent. So I thought the concert was at 19:00 because this what I was told when I asked “what time?” It turns out that the concert started at 20:00 and I was there at 18:15 a whole hour and forty-five minutes early.

Here's the promotional poster.

Not to good to be hanging out in the freezing when I’ve already got a cold. But… it turns out that exactly what I did because there were celebrities! Now, I don’t actually know who any of them are so I’m going to get you guys to tell me. Here are the pictures!

I have no idea who these people are.

or these two.

I think she played frightened inmate number two on an episode of CSI Munich.

One of the photographers kept yelling “Your Highness! Your Highness!” Maybe royalty?

Or an just a really awesome nickname.

Did I mention it was about 8 degrees out? This lady couldn’t even afford a coat!

I would have given her mine but I forgot to put on a shirt that morning.

I don’t know what this guy was thinking, bringing two dates to the same event.

It's a receipe for disaster if you ask me.

Easily the smartest person on the red carpet. Sensibly dressed.

These two got into a huge fight right after I took this photo.

He just stormed off.

Being paparazzo is hard work.

I think he's head of the local energy concern.

This lady made fun of my crappy camera.

She was right to do so.

I think she’s big into tennis.

Not table, the real one.

I like her dress.

I was photo-bombed!

Shameful.

There are not enough hours in the day. This lady had to endorse a cheque or something on the way to the show! Apparently it couldn’t wait.

They guy on the left is her accountant.

Last one.. I hope. It's freezing out here.

The show was really good too. The guy on the piano played the Mountain Hall song. Was amazing.

And the concert hall.

I love being in Berlin. At least three or four times a day I get a brilliant, million-dollar idea. Today’s idea is to bring a window with me back to Canada.

Those of you who are paying attention know that I am planning a renovation of the second-floor bathroom (hence all the talk about toilets). As it turns out, to get the new configuration to work I need to put the shower in front of the window. This is not ideal – showers should not be exposed to windows like that. So I have decided to replace the window with a smaller one. And since I am over here in Germany and I have the time, I’m going to investigate the possibility of bringing one with me (or at least the hardware that will enable me to build my own). 4HWW people pay attention.

On Day 23 I was shopping in the mall when I happened upon this one of those temporary “stores” in the middle area between all the fixed stores. Their specialization was the installation of windows and doors. So I got talking to the guy and he was showing me all their latest technology – some very cool stuff.

As previously mentioned, I love the windows here in Germany. They are much different from the ones we have in Canada – specifically how they open. I could write for pages or I could just show you some pictures.

It works like this: each window has a handle that has three positions

Down is closed.

Down!

Middle is open all the way.

Middle!

Up is open at the top.

Up!

But the best feature of all is how they close. There are between four and six individual locking points distributed around the perimeter of the window. This ensures a complete seal every time the window is closed. Very nice.

A perfect fit!

So the dude at the mall tells me where I can find a company that specializes in window hardware. He gives me a name and a cross street (all of this is conducted in German). So this morning, after a quick Google search, I’m out the door to try and find the window place. It’s tucked away in some industrial street near Heinrich Heine Strasse U-Bahn station. I never would have found it without help.

None of the staff speak English, but I have enough vocabulary to get by. The guy behind the counter prints out all the hardware I will need to build my own window. He tells me they have all the parts in stock and all I need to do is bring him the measurements – height, width and the position of the handle. Sweet.

Guess how much for all this?

Now the only question I have is: can one buy pre-cut wood for the frame? Cause that would be super-sweet. And I need to come up with a plan on how to implement this.

Oh and btw, there are thirty unique parts for the hardware – how much do you think this is going to cost? I look forward to your guesses.

I went grocery shopping on Saturday – and what an experience that was let me tell you. As I had just moved into my new apartment I figured I needed to get a few things. I forget why, but tops on the list was tp. So anyway, there’s this discount grocery store two block north of my apartment and I head over there to check it out. I had made a basic list of things I needed

• pasta (2)
• pesto (1)
• tp (10)
• bananas (6)
• yoghurt (4)
• something to add to the pesto-pasta: meatballs (1)

Now I figure that excluding the second bag of pasta there are five meals here – three banana-yoghurt late-morning snacks and two meatball-pesto-pasta suppers. And the total cost for all this was a 7.60 euros. Subtract the second bag of pasta and tp and you’re down to 5.16 euros or $7.18 CAN.

Now maybe I’m losing my mind (I don’t have any receipts from Loblaws with me) but isn’t yoghurt in Canada is about fifty cents for one hundred grams? Over here it’s like thirty cents Canadian for one hundred and fifty grams. And this leaves me with two questions:

1. Why is food so expensive in Canada?
2. What the hell did I have for breakfast this morning?

To be honest I’m worried most about the meatballs and pesto. So far so good but there’s still a few hours left. I’m going to work my way up to vegetables if I don’t experience any major problems. In the meantime, tonight is döner night! Seriously I found the best restaurant ever. It warrants its own post.

I’m fascinated by the sidewalks in Berlin. I’ve become very familiar with them because of all the walking I’ve done during my time here. Aside from admiring their beauty, I’ve mostly been wondering if they are better than the ones we have in Ottawa. I don’t think this is an easy question as there are many factors that have to be taken into account. And while I have not done any formal research, I have had a lot of time to think about the problem. Here is what I have so far:

The requirement is to provide a system that will enable pedestrians to safely navigate the city on foot. This system must be cost effective to install / maintain and it must not drastically alter the aesthetic of the city.

It think that about sums up the why and the how. Now the system in question will include crosswalks and signal lights and all that stuff, but this does not interest us – right now. Today we are going to focus on the physical sidewalks – specifically the German “decision” to use pavers / stones and the Canadian “choice” of concrete slabs.

Note: I put “decision” and “choice” in quotation marks because I do not think the city planners actually sat down and weighed all their options. All of this happened so long ago there was probably a convention in place for some similar requirement and they simply modified it to address the new problem. And once they started doing it that way it just stuck. There would have been changes over the years but they would have been incremental improvements on the existing system. There would not have been a complete overhaul – the sunk-costs would have been too high.

Now, I don’t have any pictures of the Canadian sidewalks so we will have to make due with my drawerings. Back home sidewalks are made of concrete slabs that are about 1.5 m x 1.5 m. I’m not sure of the thickness. Each slab is poured on site and separated by an expansion joint to prevent damage from changes in temperature. I figure they need to be rated for about plus forty to minus forty degrees Celsius – welcome to Ottawa. Some times the slabs go right to the curb, other times there is a section of grass separating the two.

In Germany they have a similar system but it’s way different. The main waking area is made of two types of pavers. The centre is all squares and the edges are house-shaped. Between the sidewalks and the buildings / curbs there are these cube-shaped stones.

I’m going to list the things I’ve observed about the German system and contrast it with what we have back home. I would like to preface all this with the following: in the past year or so the sidewalks in front of my house had to be dug up twice – once by the phone company (about 10 slabs) and once by the gas company (two slabs). It’s my understanding that this is a common occurrence. Many utilities that were once above ground are now buried. As we start to see fibre-to-the-home, this will happen even more. The point is that sidewalks are not fire-and-forget – there is a lot of maintenance involved.

1. Re-use-ability of the Materials.

The removal of a slab sidewalk is a destructive process – the slab cannot be reused. The paver sidewalk is made up of many small pieces and can be disassembled and reused after the job is complete.

2. Appearance

This one is tough because it’s subjective. I think pavers look nicer but that’s just me.

3. Ease of Maintenance

To remove a slab you need many men and much equipment – a jackhammer to smash it up, a truck to haul the pieces away, and if the pieces are too heavy you will need a backhoe to lift them. To rebuild you need a cement truck and often times good weather – pouring cement in a rain storm can’t be good for the finished product.

Contrast that with pavers. A single worker with a few simple, manual tools can remove an equivalent sized area with much less effort as well as reassemble everything when the work is done.

The tools

Depending on the complexity of the job, a wet-saw might be needed. Even so, you could fit all of this gear in the trunk of your Volkswagen Golf.

He said it would take him less than two hours to complete this section.

4. Use-ability (personal preference)

As someone who used to skateboard, I hate the expansion joints on slab sidewalks.

With pavers it is possible to have an almost continuous smooth surface for unobstructed ollies and kick-flips.

5. Reliability

Even with expansion joints slab sidewalks are prone to cracking.

Because of their smaller size, pavers are much less likely to break then their larger concrete cousins.

6. Initial Cost

I have no idea which costs less for the initial installation. I would be interested to know the following:

• which takes longer to install – my guess is pavers because they are installed by hand

These guys were working on this job for a while (weeks)

• which uses more manpower – my guess is again pavers for the same reason
• which costs more to install – I think slabs because more equipment is needed and the cement has to be mixed on an as-needed basis. With pavers you can have a centralized factory making the bricks and after that it’s just shipping / and storage. With cement you have all this plus the added cost of the extra step of mixing the cement. Plus there could be delays if all the cement trucks are rented for the day. And if you are working on a busy street you have to put the cement truck somewhere.
• which costs more to maintain – slabs no question (see the above sections on Maintenance, Re-usability, and Reliability)
• which system is more efficient with with non-standard installations – I think the pavers / cubes system is more flexible as less specialization is required.

Pretty neat, eh?

7. Other

There are many other factors that would need to be investigated if the German system were to be implemented in Canada. The main thing I can think of is the pavers would have to have the surface roughed up. The ones over here are pretty slick. This would not be good in the Canadian winter. Or spring. Or fall. Maybe the summer. Also Canada has more extreme temperature and weather. This would all have to be tested.

Another problem is that the utility companies are the ones that spend the most money digging up the sidewalks but it is the city that decides on the type of sidewalk. Like I said before, it’s a complicated problem.

Anyway, I for one, am very excited to visit another German city. I’m really curious to know if this is just a Berlin thing. As soon as I get to Hamburg I’m going to check if they have the same type of sidewalks as we do here. I can’t wait.

Looks like Munich has a similar system but without the house-shaped edge pieces.

I wonder if it is possible for a word to mean its opposite. It would kind of defeat the purpose if you ask me. But the reason I think that such a word exists is that languages were not really designed, they just kinda morphed into being. English is full of ambiguities but never just in a single word. An example from the always good Matthew Good.

I will make you a weapon.

Does this mean “I will make a weapon for you” or “I will turn you into a weapon”?

I’m sure in all the languages of the worlds at least one of them has a word like that. And I don’t mean like “aloha” or “shalom” which are both a welcoming greeting and a departure salutation. The people who came up with those words were confused. I’m more thinking of a word like “install” or “activation” something along those lines. I bet you German has one because in German one can simply take words and glue them together to make a bigger word. For example

The black belt ceremony was boring.

would become

Die Schwarzegürtelzeremonie war langweilig.

It’s really a great language, one can have lots of fun with it. Anyway, if anyone out there has such a word and you feel like sharing, I would love to hear it.

like the ashtray / garbage can combinations they have over here - and yes, the garbage is on fire

Over the past decade or so as I traveled around the world I noticed some things that make me question the massive investment we (society) make in our armies (and to a lesser extent our navies and air forces, but mostly our armies).

I thought of this while writing this post. The radio is on and within ten minutes they play Born in the USA (Bruce Springsteen) and American Pie (John McLean). That’s a lot of songs with a country’s name in the title – and there is nary a German-language tune to be heard. I guess my question is: would it have been possible to achieve the goals normally accomplished militarily by using culture?

I’m not going to claim to know what those goals are (does anyone?) but some of the things I have observed make me wonder. For example:

• Once I met a guy who was from Kamchatka (Risk anyone?) and in the eighties he was one of the operators of the electronic wall that was set up by the Soviets to block American broadcasts of rock and roll music (there was some funk mixed in there too). I don’t think he really deserved his employee-of-the-year award because he was making recordings of the music he was supposed to be blocking and he was distributing them to his friends and anyone who he could trust. It’s difficult to believe but, Guns ‘n Roses is the reason communism collapsed.

• Slash’s contributions during the cold war were significant, but he was no Larry Haggman. You see, in Romania, the state controlled the media and the only western show they were allowed to broadcast was, for some strange reason, Dallas. Instead of the people being disgusted by the decadence of the West (the goal of the broadcast) they were enchanted by it. In fact in one of their first acts of freedom, the people of Romania built a theme park replica (full size) of the Ewing Ranch. It must be true cause I read it on the internet.

• In 2008 I was at the Holland Heineken House during the Olympics in Beijing (I love the three dotted letters in a row – one day I’m going to start a band and we will be called “Beijing Hijinks”). Actually I was there many times during that trip, and each night the bands (from Holland) were mostly playing English songs. And the crowd made up almost entirely of Dutch people just loved it.

• I was in Utrecht this year for Queen’s Day (a must-do before you die, btw) and it was pretty much the same thing.

• During my three visits to Japan I spent a lot of time singing Karaoke. Each place we went to had phonebook-sized books full of songs – again mostly English.

I’m not suggesting that armies are not needed, just that there might be more cost effective ways to accomplish ones goals – whatever those goals might be.

Baby, we were.