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random berlin observations thread
1. wow you can just buy club mate in like a normal shop
2. i walked to a used musical instrument shop and it has tons of treasures that greatly interest me and i spoke german to the guy running the shop and i'm having such a good time rn 🥺
3. queer people exist? has anyone heard of this. couldn't be me
4. i am walking So Much, i'm gonna have to revise my daily exercise target, and all these food options probably won't make me gain weight
5. oh nooo, touristy parts of this city are littered with those fucking scam ATMs by e*ronet. i'm lucky i once watched a youtube video by some czech guys who wanted to warn tourists, and yet i still almost got scammed; i tapped through too quick (but i got my PIN wrong lmao)
5½. btw it's suspicious how the machine appears to freeze up just before you enter the amount you want to withdraw; i double-tapped because i thought it wasn't responding, and before you know it i had requested more money than i intended to.
5¾. wasn't sure if free ATMs actually existed in germany but i decided to seek out an ATM run by a like actual bank and Berliner Sparkasse had my back it seems, no charge. thank you Berliner Sparkasse
6. Weißt irgendjemand wo ich eine Geldau-Tomate eigentlich essen könnte?
7. um, are you doing okay there germany? today i got two different ads (one on youtube, one on twitter) foretelling some impending societal catastrophe and telling you to hoard precious items / become a prepper
8. so the government requires me to register my address, but to do so i must book an appointment, and appointments are very scarce, so they release them in batches and you have to rush to try to get them at the start of the day. excuse me but what the hell? this is not a functioning bureaucracy
8½. actually this is like a fun little game for website refreshing enthusiasts. the appointments aren't released in a block at 8am, they drop new ones every few minutes in early hours. there's even a tool that will play a cute little sound when it finds a new one. i will win :3
8¾. update: (link voice) i won!
8⅞. it's actually kind of cool how you have to search all over berlin to get an appointment. it's like an epic quest, requiring rare items (landlord proof, identification, appointment) and travelling a great distance. i have to take the s-bahn, u-bahn and a bus! an adventure
9. zurückbleiben bitte
10. turns out interacting with bureaucracy can be really easy and pleasant if you speak german? i just did the anmeldung it was great. i am sorry everyone i am a fucking unicorn
11. who called it gesundbrunnen and not nordkreuz
12. i love to be asked for my feedback
13. need to get married at the S-Bahn station named Wedding
14. oh my god there is a trans-themed cafe owned by some uhh queer organisation??? 🥺
15. i love to ask questions about life in germany that nobody who speaks german as well as i do would reasonably be expected to need to ask
16. check out daft punk's new single “get lucky” if you have the chance. sound of the summer
17. even a big electronics and home appliance store in a shopping centre will accept cash payments??? this country is amazing
18. oh my god an ATM literally just swallowed my card? not intentionally, it just locked up right after inserting it. well, luckily ATM companies have phone numbers to handle this!!
apparently i speak english with a german accent if that's what the other person does… oops
this is becoming the thread where i declare war on the ATM isn't it
19. it has come to my attention that i have not yet consumed any spezzi despite having now spent five days in germany. i am now drinking one to avoid enforcement action by the federal authorities
20. wow… my euros are signed by super mario himself… i'll do whatever it takes to safeguard them…
21. zurückbleiben bitte
22. Wir suchen ein Drucker mit integrierter Kopier- und Scanfunktion (m/f/d).
oops the object there should have had the accusative
23. this must be one of those Volkseigene Betriebe i've heard so much about
24. Top FIVE THINGS you should NEVER do in a German train station:
1 - Murder. Murder is actually very illegal in Germany. It goes against the traditional German concept of „Privatsphäre“, in which they believe human beings have a right to be left alone. It is a beautiful—
btw my alt text in the last two tweets explains the joke
25. wait if you're in a big city in the right place at the right time, there are not only buskers, but good ones
live music is so cool i wish musicians were real
can't believe i got treated to two and a half hours of excellent live music from two different three-person bands just by standing outside a train station, this city amazes me? amplified guitars and drumkits are not my stereotype of buskers
26. berliners say a word other than kiez challenge [impossible]
27. travelling back in time to like 1972 to show a bunch of West German CDU politicians photos of how the Ampelmännchen has spread to West Berlin in future, and deliberately letting them believe this means the Soviets did eventually take it, just to see the looks on their faces
28. i love the clicking that the street crossing things make. makes me think of swing…
29.
> promised an „u-bahn“
> purchase ticket
> overground
🔎🐱
30.
(steps into mitte for like five seconds) HAVE YOU GUYS HEARD OF THIS THING CALLED CHECKPOINT CHARLIE??? DID YOU KNOW BERLIN USED TO BE DIVIDED BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION
31. i love it when the train falls out
32. ooh germany also has legally mandated write-only storage devices on cash registers, like sweden has had for a long time. but the swedish ones don't print stuff like „Algorithmus ecdsa-plain-SHA256“ on receipts, ehehehe
33. i love it when something is labelled in a way that, at least superficially, says completely opposite things in each language. „entwerten“ literally means “invalidate”. (but the use of “validate” here is a weird one that effectively also means that)
34. wait if you live in germany dhl will not only actually deliver stuff to your door, but they'll give you real-time tracking to the level of which stops on the delivery route the van has already been to???? are us non-germans subsidising the better experience for germans…
35. love to exist in the totally normally named DACH area: Deutschland, Austria und Confoederatio Helevetica
36. cursed atms update: i found another e*ronet one and this one refused to accept my n26 card but would accept my new bunq card (replacement for one that was eaten) and didn't charge me! now that's… what's even going on here. are they treating me different now i'm “german”
36½. you see, this bunq card was issued after telling bunq i moved to germany, so it might tell the atm i live here. the previous one was issued before that, so it might tell the atm i live in sweden. both are eur cards issued by a dutch bank. so that might cause discrimination
36¾. my n26 card is a eur card issued by a german bank, but that one was also issued when i was in sweden, so that might explain why it was rejected. though this is extremely strange. that atm seems pretty sus to me
37. wait there's… laugencroissants? simultaneously croissant and laugengebäck? nobel prize material
38. okay you want an actual berlin observation? i just walked past a … book store? where all the books are in english? the second labelled category of books i noticed was gender studies. also they sell bagels
39. i have now gotten a youtube ad from a THIRD company offering a coding bootcamp fully financed by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (the pitch is always: “you can get the skills to become a highly paid software dev for free!!!”) that's actually absurd i've only been here a month
39½. wait fuck is one of those companies the same one that does that annoying “there are not enough programmers in sweden” ad also? i'll have to keep an eye out…
anyway uh. hmm. shovelling unemployed people into coding bootcamps when the tech job market is already Bad is. hmmmm
40. einsteigen bitte
zurückbleiben bitte
41. i've been told the brandenburger tor is the symbol of berlin or something so here it is, the picture you've been waiting for, it's brandenburger tor (u)
42. at 00:00 CET on 1 January 2021, after the end of a transition period, the island of great britain and a substantial part of ireland disappeared from the north sea, replaced by dashed-line boxes around miscellaneous colonial legacy posessions
42½. (this is the eu information centre thing in berlin, „erlebnis europa“)
43. okay so berlin has a huge russian embassy right. that's nothing so surprising though i didn't realise it would be so big, it's an entire goddamn 300m-wide city block.
anyway the entire street in front or it is cordoned off! all the way to the edge of the pavement!
43½. so now if you want to walk past that side of it you actually have to walk on the adjacent lane of the road passing by it, which is where i took this picture from. incredible.
the street on the other side is still accessible though.
43¾. a lonely german cop stands and guards the cordoned-off public street in front of the russian embassy in berlin. behind him, the embassy stands lifeless. outside the cordon, berlin continues as lively as ever
44. this is not a photo of the brandenburg gate, it's a photo i took of the sky behind it because, as always, the sky captivates me in a way nothing else can
45. there's this little garden, or lawn might be a more fitting word, in front of the american embassy in berlin. it's mostly grass, but there's a ring of flowers around the outside, and in the centre a huge water fountain spraying, like, at least three times a human height
45½. i don't think it's actually part of the embassy, it's just part of the street in front of it. but, seeing it in the bright sunlight for a moment earlier, that bright green lawn, the fountain, the flag in the background, it just felt quintessentially american
45¾. truly, is there any sight so american as a lawn?
46.
Notausgang
Emergency Exit
(read the alt text)
47. everywhere i go, i see her face (the swedish state)
48. i am outraged… it cannot be accepted that the flag of germany is defaced by the addition of symbols of this illegitimate „republic“, this is secessionist and a further obstacle to reunification
49. here we find a sacred german shrine: the DB cube. travellers come from far and wide to make offerings to it, in the hope the cube will bestow upon them its favour, and bless their travels on the DB Netz. those who disrespect it are believed to be punished with “fallings out”
49½. what elevates this seemingly humble shrine to such great status? the answer is hard to see in the image, but inescapable in real life: the great DB tower in the distance overlooks this tiny DB shrine. one dare not disrespect the gods when they can see you do it
50. having now actually been to berlin's nordic embassies building, i can confirm that hitman (2016)'s concept of the design language of a swedish embassy was on point. very modern; glass, concrete and with wooden highlights because you gotta advertise the timber industry.
@hikari i missed praying to it ONE time and got 3 hour delay
@hikari if you want to graffiti it you have to be really skilled at drive-by paintball gun shooting.
@hikari try the pastrami bagel, if you eat meat. It's great! :)
@hikari Those are my favorite, sooo good! 🤤
@hikari is that where the sausage dogs are from?
@hikari latin jumpscare
@hikari They will still turn around back to the depot at "<5 stops left" repeatedly over multiple days if you're unlucky ;)
Also "DHL" is a pretty big mashup of different services and companies, including like 5 different freight airlines for some reason
@hikari shocked-pikachu.jpg
@hikari oh, amazon uk does this
@hikari In Slovenia, all cash-equivalent receipts have to be reported to the tax authority at the time they're made, and the tax authority returns a signature that has to be printed on the receipt as a bar code (typically QR is used, but some other types are also allowed).
@hikari when the what falls out
@hikari [AU voice]
Was this service reliable?
Well, I was thinking more about the other ones.
The ones that are reliable?
Yeah, the ones the train doesn’t fall out.
Well, if this wasn’t reliable, why did it have 800 passengers on it?
I’m not saying it wasn’t reliable, it’s just perhaps not quite as reliable as some of the other ones.
Why?
Well, some of them are planned so that the train doesn’t fall out at all.
Wasn’t this planned so that the train wouldn’t fall out?
Well, obviously not.
@scarlet what is this a reference to
@hikari Prepare for Vattenfall
@hikari
me debugging renegade vs paragon dialog trees: "oops the object there should have had the accusative"
@hikari we call it Multifunktionsgerät 😄 Sometimes shortened to MuFu
@hikari@social.noyu.me make sure to also hit your schorle quota
@hikari "Geldautomat in der nähe?" More like...Held-out karte better prayer?
Ugh, there was something there to play on words between english and german on hell or held for geld and card/karte being kept back and punnery for being on hold on phone and relying on divine intervention in your war against heaven/ATMs but I just couldn't make it happen
@hikari wait, is that not the case elsewhere in Europe?
ustedes' continent has some strange countries
cash is almost universally accepted in the US and Canada, and is often preferred (some restaurants I've been to recently offer discounts for cash or charge a fee for paying by card)
@flamingspork sweden specifically is a late-stage cashless society. cash does still exist but the average swede never has a reason to use it in a given year and it is extremely common for retailers to not accept cash at all
@flamingspork it was also my experience of living in the uk that, already half a decade ago, i could do all my daily things with contactless payment and only very rarely needed cash. wouldn't entirely surprise me if the uk became like sweden in a few years
@hikari ah
good to know if I ever visit Sweden
@flamingspork if you have a visa or mastercard debit or credit card with no foreign transaction fees, you'll be fine
@hikari I see you've gotten very used to Sweden
@JosJuice i've become swedish… 😱🥰
@hikari In Spain, all cash payments must be accepted. Only high-value banknotes can be limited and only for small payments and if there is a poster saying so.
@hikari On the contrary, quite a few establishments will only accept cash. No cards.
@hikari wait what, there's places where that's not normal?
@hikari Now I am disappointed that apparently there is no S-Bahn station “Hochzeit”.
@hikari some of the signs at the station say Nordkreuz
@hikari
wait for the why until in Berlin Nordbahnhof ;)
@hikari Usually getting the appointment is the trouble. The actual Anmeldung itself tends to be easy going.
@foremostarchwiz yeah tbf they just look at your documents and ask a few questions
@hikari obligatory "did you know that's voiced by a trans woman"
@eta i did not!! wait i might have a buried memory of this
@hikari 🔊 duuu-düüüü-duuuuut
@hikari 🙈
FWIW, unless you need to show the registration for something soon you do not strictly have to rush it. Yes, the law says 2 weeks, but in practice "on the last day of the 2 weeks I got an appointment in a month" (or worse) is fine, they know getting appointments is hard.
OTOH, if it's done it's done and if you have time right now to quest across the city… I've found some nice parks in places I'd never have gone otherwise by walking around after city appointments in random districts 😅
@hikari stonks!
@hikari … during the lockdowns etc Berlin actually temporarily allowed to do it by letter - and then discontinued it, officially because "people are so bad at filling out the forms and including the proper info it was more work to process postal registrations than in-person ones" 🙃
@HeNeArXn this should not be so hard. in sweden you can do it online or on paper (when moving within the country only, of course). mind you sweden does have an official registry of apartments so that might make it easier for them to check addresses are correct…
@hikari you can call them and sometimes get a priority appointment, and no it’s not a good solution. or wait 3 months and go to other side of town.
@hikari Ads on the web are pretty bad, but I feel like German ads on the web are the worst. The only time I still see those is when my ad blocker doesn't work on a particular site for some weird reason, and then I'm always surprised what kind of trash ads are served on legitimate websites...
@hikari I never get these ads but my husband gets them constantly so I’m afraid you’ve hit an algorithmic tripwire
@0xabad1dea i never got this shit in sweden ;_;
@hikari […], dass man Geld nicht essen kann.
@hikari I encountered a Polish zloty-denominated euronet machine in Warsaw and it exhibited this exact same behavior (US Visa debit card) and had the gall to charge 18 PLN for the privilege of getting cash
(a Bank Polska ATM didn't charge a fee on the same American card)
@hikari And to make it worse, you can't use your card in a lot of places in Germany, so you need cash…
@hikari These are not nearly as blatant as the ones in the Czech videos, Germany wouldn’t allow that. But yes, the fee they place on top is hefty.
@hikari walking is one of the big things that makes me want to move to a Proper City again
I love wandering around interesting places when I get the chance