Harzer, your next trip in May caught my eye: I am glad to read you are going to visit Zittau. The far East of Germany is still widely unknown even among the West Germans. Make sure you pay a visit to Görlitz as well. It's one of the most beautiful towns in Germany.

Robespierre!

No and no. They focus on what he did in the thirties to restore Germans' self-confidence and Germany's image as a nation to be reckoned with. The rest was just the result of a calculated risk that went wrong.

Ingo:

I have already been to that corner of Germany once before, and agree that it has quite a number of gems worth visiting: Bautzen, Löbau, Görlitz, the Sächsische Schweiz. And the proximity to Poland and Tschechei is also a bonus, now that there are no longer any hassles at the borders.

Harzer

I have a friend there that I met many, many years ago in Phuket after he managed to get out of the DDR, and it is always good to catch up with him.

My rookie mistakes have to do with grocery shopping in Deutschland. It's been a few years, but here's what we experienced.

1. Needing a coin to get a shopping cart (much like the luggage carts at airports)

2. You must weigh your own produce in the produce section and tell the clerk upon checkout how much each thing weighs.

3. You must purchase your own grocery bags and bag your food yourself.

4. German grocery clerks are not very patient or tolerant of people who don't know the rules.

I'm not sure if all of these are still true, but I intend to find out this summer when we return. :)

Hi lvh!

The weighing machine in the fruit and veg department should spit out a price ticket with a gummed back that you stick on the bag with the items in it. Then this goes through checkout in the normal way.

In my experience the plastic bags for this operation are supplied free. Large carry bags needed at the checkout will cost 10 cents each; or you bring your own. And you do normally have to pack your own purchases.

The shopping trolley needs a coin - it used to be one mark - to release it from the line, but you get this back if you dutifully return the trolley to the line. To leave it standing about after you've finished with it therefore penalises you the amount you put in the slot originally.

I don't know that the checkout chicks and chaps are more irritable than is usual back home. A greeting and a smile always help.

Harzer

We didn't understand how much to tip when we were in Germany. As a result, we way over-did it, tipping the 15% we would leave here in the states. Oh, well, the food and service were great in the restaurants we visited, and we'd rather overtip than undertip.

The other thing we didn't know about dining there is that the waiters ordinarily will not deliver the bill until asked. We didn't want to be rude, so we waited patiently for our bill to arrive! The waiter probably wanted to knock us on our heads, until we figured this one out. I think the practice is actually nicer than in the States, because it lets diners take as much time as they need without feeling rushed when the bill arrives. Just another more polite way of doing things than we're used to in our own hurry-up-and-eat culture.

"We didn't understand how much to tip when we were in Germany. As a result, we way over-did it, tipping the 15% we would leave here in the states."

... spoiling things for the rest of us, Maureen.

Harzer

This one's on me.
25 years ago we were in Switzerland, maybe 25 miles from Garmisch, just over the border; beautiful small church in a small border village. For many years thereafter I tried to find the town on a map, to no avail. Its name was "Zoll", and I was puzzled why I couldn't locate it.
Then one day it dawned on me, that was a sign for the upcoming "custom inspection". Duh!!!

I think Zoll is near Umleitung--so many towns named Umleitung.

About 10 years ago I took a group of high school students to Dortmund. The first morning one of the students was in tears because she said the family "stared" at her when she ate, and didn't understand why.
It was the abendessen, with bread and cold meats. So she made an American style sandwich, meat between two slices of bread, and picked it up and ate it with her hands.
She hadn't even noticed that her German family ate one slice of bread with meat on top, and cut with a knife and fork.

Yes, Umleitung is a popular spot - but Zoll has its own unique license plate:

<b>http://i6.ebayimg.com/01/i/03/3f/b2/67_1_b.JPG</b>

I learned real fast, when buying blackberries at a fruit stand on the marianplatz in Munich, don't ever reach for your own basket of barries, because the lady behind the counter, will for sure tell you to never get your own.

Actually, both Zoll and Umleitung are part of Ausfahrt. ;-)

I too had a series of mistakes in a German grocery store but we almost didn't get that far because we did not have an international drivers license. We drove from Prague with Dresden as our destination (the &quot;working women&quot; at the border are another story) and were passed through by the Czech Rep. but the zealous young guard on the German side turned us away (funny because we have a very German last name), then we had to explain to the CR station why we were back again so soon (difficult to explain by pantomime), finally we just plaintively whined that we were American and in this case dumb. We drove another 90 mins and tried again and sailed right through a much smaller checkpoint/border crossing w/ just our passports and US license. Had we been on a strict time line it would have been a disaster!

Watch your language, chtiet, this is a family website!