Germany

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Went to Edeka today (Bavaria), saw a few signs saying that some items are not available due to strikes. Anyone has some context?

I got hit with it just now and I was wondering what's going on. Here's the FAQ page: https://www.bahn.de/faq/6-warum-kann-ich-sparpreis-tickets-nicht-mit-lastschrift-bezahlen

Machine Translation:

Why can't I pay for saver fare tickets and a BahnCard 100 by direct debit?

There is currently an increase in fraudulent activity based on so-called phishing emails. As a precautionary measure for your protection, you cannot pay for Sparpreis tickets and a BahnCard 100 on this website and in the app using direct debit until further notice.

One now has to use PayPal or a MasterCard/VISA/etc-branded bank card.

German source: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/deutschlandticket-zusatzkosten-100.html

So I've just got here and read on how waste should be collected separately. What is unclear for me, and can't find any relevant info on, is what bags to use for colecting the waste.

For plastic (yellow bins), is there a particular type of garbage bag that I should use so I can throw away the whole bag including contenta, or do I use whatever bag and just dump the contents and then reuse the bag?

There are paper bags sold (for ex. at Lidl). Can I use those for paper waste and throw away the whole bag + content, or do I collect them in whatever way and just dump the contents?

For compost / bio mass, what should I do? There are "compostable" bags. can I use those, or the paper ones and just throw the whole bag, or do I have to dump the contents?

For the black bin, is it ok to throw the whole bag with its contents?

Idk if it matters, but I'm Bayern

The 13th is exclusive to members of works councils. The 14th is the public portion of the conference.

Hi,

I'll be studying in Germany for the next 6 to 7 months and I'm looking to buy a SIM card. From what I read online O2 offers decent services for the price. I am however very surprised that for €10 their plan only offers 6GB of data.

I could use some help with this, so any recomendation and extra information is welcome :)

edit: thank you all for your answers!

The German government has presented its new citizenship law this Wednesday (23.08.2023). The legislation proposed by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser will make dual citizenship easier as well as naturalization for non-EU citizens.<

The new citizenship plans boil down to these changes:

• Immigrants legally living in Germany will be allowed to apply for citizenship after five years, rather than the current eight; and if they have special achievements this can go down to only three years

• Children born in Germany of at least one parent who has been living legally in the country for five or more years will automatically get German citizenship;

• Immigrants above the age of 67 will be able to do an oral instead of a written German language test

• Multiple citizenships will be allowed

People living entirely on state support will not be eligible for German citizenship. German citizenship will be denied to people who have committed antisemitic, racist, xenophobic or other defamatory offenses that are seen to be "unreconcilable with commitment to the free democratic basic order."

The new legislation will be debated in parliament and could come into effect in the fall.<

Au pair contracts cap work at 30 hours per week, and allow for one-and-a-half days off. Au pairs are to receive €280 ($304) in expenses each month and an additional €70 to put toward German language courses.

These rules are often ignored, au pair advocates say — a thorn in the side of aboveboard au pair agencies.

"Our agencies always insist that the focus of working hours is on child care and that chores be done along with the family," Cordula Walter-Bolhöfer, who works at Gütegemeinschaft Au Pair, an umbrella organization representing 30 of Germany's 100 au pair agencies.

"Au pairs are not supposed to be cheap household helpers," she added.

Lack of oversight

One source of exploitation is the lack of licensing. Since 2002, au pair agencies have only needed a business license to operate, with no additional certification. Other would-be au pairs get connected to host families over social media or so-called "matching" platforms where there is little control.

"When they see photos of nice families with nice children on Facebook, for example, many believe that this is the truth," said Walter-Bolhöfer.

When problems arise in these cases, au pairs have no contact person. That's when someone like Susanne Flegel steps in. She has been running an agency for more than 17 years and helps au pairs in trouble.

"There was a time when we had several calls a day. Politicians claim that these are isolated cases. But they are not isolated cases," she told DW. "When we ask various au pairs, they say exploitation is common."<

I'm not really surprised about the lack of regulation. The au pairs aren't voters and don't have a lobby behind them. On the other hand there's people who don't mind exploiting others. And there's need for help and cheap labour.

The legendary film studio hosted stars including Marlene Dietrich and served as a set for films like Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Wes Anderson's "Hotel Budapest."

Located just outside Berlin, Studio Babelsberg has been under a cloud after the US company Cinespace — a subsidiary of the real estate company TPG Real Estate Partners (TREP) — became the majority shareholder at the beginning of 2022, since when hardly any filming has taken place at the studios.

German film director and Oscar winner Volker Schlöndorff added to those fears as he spoke of the "danger" posed to the studio's existence. He said that since the company Kino Bidco, a subsidiary of Cinespace, became the main stakeholder, there were hardly any films being produced in the historic studios. Schlöndorff, who has also served as the CEO of Studio Babelsberg in the past, warned that the studio could be wiped out of existence.

(...)

Never before in my life have I encountered revolving doors so often as in Germany, and every time I have to use one, I wonder what's exactly the point.

Any ideas? The only think I can think of is that they slow down people on purpose, for crowd control.

Likely also for energy efficiency, but then the double doors system that I'm use to seems more efficient and probably cheaper than revolving doors.

In the more active version of this community, there's a long back and forth of posts between people who need to demonstrate to others that moving to Germany was the best thing they did in their life and anyone who doesn't feel the same is doing something wrong, and of course also the inverse - that moving to Germany was the worst choice they made and that everyone else is deflecting criticism.

I have to admit that I don't get it. To me it feels very obvious that living everywhere require making trade-offs and that the balance is very individual.

I don't see for example why I should gush about Germany at every turn or try to prove that someone is objectively wrong if they find Germany unliveable for themselves. At the same time, I don't understand why someone would find it sensible to tell me "leave if you don't like it" when I express a criticism. A place doesn't have to be perfect for me to want to live there. It just needs to give me a more favourable balance of pros to cons.

So, we are a younger community here, with less historical memes and reflexes. Perhaps that can be some sort of reality check for me. Do you feel strongly that moving here was great or horrible for you?

I may sound like overgeneralising but this question has been in my head for so long.

I realise a lot of restaurants (even bars) in Germany are either playing music so loud that you have to yell to talk, or people round tend to speak really loudly as if they were sharing their conversations with the entire room, or both. If it is a Brauhaus, I understand, people are drinking. But even in cafés, or other supposedly quieter places, the volume climbs up quite quickly and naturally.

Another thing is when I am abroad, this effect also happens the other way round. You would easily find out German-speaking tourists since they speak really loudly. And when you notice so, they do not seem to care about how loud they have been either.

Am I just too sensitive?

Women are underrepresented in Germany’s armed forces. A new package of legal reforms hope to change that, as the country looks to sharpen its military edge.

A little off topic but TIL that GDR's armed forces allowed 'full participation' right from the beginning in 1956. Though women weren't drafted they could join voluntarily and serve in medical and rear services.

Like it says, I took the Einbürgerungstest this past weekend. The questions are a mix of things that feel pretty obvious (which war lasted from 1939-1945) and things that require memorization (Which chancellor was responsible for the Ostverträge?). In a lot of ways, it feels like another language exam: if you understand German well enough to understand the questions, you can probably pass.

We officially had an hour, but I was done within 8 minutes, and I wasn't the first :).

One step closer to citizenship!

German butchers make different cuts of beef, so it's not always easy to shop for an American recipe. I'll be using this diagram for the weekend shopping. But if you know a better source, please paste it in a comment.

The fields are not accepting the inputs (even the topdown menu options are not accepted).

I can't send the form through ELSTER and Finanzamt tells me that they only accept it through ELSTER.

What I do now?

In support forums people naturally only share negative experiences because making a post to say "things worked out more or less as I expected them" is weird.

It does seem though that some people do not correct for that negativity bias, so I'll just share today's experience that left me thinking "boy, Deutsche Bahn definitely has a room to improve on this area but even if their processes are inefficient, they did offer us the solution we wanted!!11elf"

Me, a friend and a dog have a trip abroad coming up, and we have booked our two-way tickets through bahn.de but with paper tickets (because dog tickets were not normally available as eTickets when we first booked).

Very recently the situation changed so that we had to return to Germany on different dates and so we wanted to modify the booking so that one of the return Sparpreis fares and reservation are cancelled and refunded.

The bahn.de website would only allow us to cancel the entire journey (all individuals, both directions). That was somewhat inconvenient but taking a trip to the Central Station was also an opportunity to go out of the house a bit anyway.

At the Travel Centre, the worker initially told us that our request is possible, but then she noticed that the system wouldn't let her made the modification to the booking. At that point, after consulting with her more qualified co-workers, she let us know that we cannot modify the booking in such a targeted way because our booking through bahn.de was done through a different DB subsidiary than the subsidiary they work for. That is ridiculous.

The two workers then told us that what they can do for us is cancel the entire return leg of the journey (for all three) and they will post a refund request to the other subsidiary on our behalf. Then, we can on the spot re-book our new return tickets on our new desired dates. That works for us, but we did remark that someone without the financial buffer to wait for the refund while also buying new tickets would be under a lot of stress at that point.

During the rebooking process we did feel a bit left out of the loop because we expected that now we would be paying last-minute Flexpreis fares and there was a financial boundary we didn't want to cross, but at the end of the process we were offered Flexpreis fares at the price of our original Sparpreis tickets, so we did not suffer any financial consequences (although we expect that the refund will be reduced by 10 EUR for the administrative fee as the terms and conditions for Sparpreis tickets clearly mention). It appears that the Travel Centre had access to a contingent of cheaper Flexpreis tickets that aren't available on bahn.de - perhaps exactly for situations like ours.

The two workers were extremely patient with all our questions during the whole process since we wanted to get every detail correct during the destructive operation of cancelling the tickets and above all make sure that the dog doesn't end up "having" to take a different train if we couldn't rebook on the original connection. The main worker helping us even thanked us for our attention to details, because --I think-- she almost did make a mistake at one point during the rebooking but we caught it early (she didn't outright admit it though).

So, what's this pointless non-rant about? I guess it's that DB's corporate structure and processes are unnecessarily complicated and the people who are trying to help you have to jump through a lot of hoops to offer you the solution that they also recognise you should get.

We were lucky to come across two workers that took all the time necessary to get us to where we needed to be at the end and do so without directing their frustration at the utterly broken process towards us for asking them to carry out. Honestly, I don't think we'd have the patience for this if it was our job.

We still think that at every step of this non-ordeal, DB Corporate could have made very simple business decisions that could cut the effort required down.

And I still think that it's just weird to make posts to say how things are "mostly okay, but could be better".