October 20, 2006
Hello, Tom
I spent a month in Germany, Holland and France, the primary goal being to attend the "giant" Friedrichshafen, Germany ham radio convention and flea market on Lake Constance at the Swiss border. I had heard that in previous years, there was a great deal of ex-Warsaw Pact communications gear there, so I wanted to snag some.
My base of operations was the home of some friends, near Dusseldorf. That's in the northwest end of Germany, in the Ruhr industrial corridor.
During my stay in Dusseldorf, I took side trips to Holland and Paris. The entire time I was there, the temperature was typically a searing 80-95 degrees, in many cases a record for those countries. This was aggravated by a complete lack of air conditioning in most places, and a complete lack of bathing or deodorant on the part of the local population. Amsterdam was a bit of a disappointment, unless one seeks endless porn shops and opium dens. It was also chock-full of Muslims, with an occasional Dutch native making an appearance. I had come down with strep throat from the flight, and tried to buy some Amoxicillin from a pharmacy in downtown Amsterdam. "Oh no, the pharmacist said. You must have a prescription for that!" "What?" I said, "I can buy all the hashish and heroin I want at the shop next door, and it's perfectly legal, but I need a prescription to buy an antibiotic? Incredible!" Other than endless canals and buildings which appear on the verge of structural collapse, Amsterdam is unremarkable except perhaps for the dismal quality of service in restaurants and cafes and the miniscule portions served at sky-high prices, by people with a "couldn't care less" attitude.
Paris was great. I stayed at a friend's apartment which is a penthouse with a view of the Eiffel Tower. It is very easy to get lost in Paris, in less than two blocks, but if ever there were a place to be lost in, Paris is it. No street is straight and the city is laid out like a giant snail shell in one dimension. The Metro is easy to use, although somewhat dirty and very dated looking. For a day or so I wondered why "Sortie" had so many stops on the Metro until I was told that it means "Exit." In a technical scheme beyond my comprehension, the Metro consists of two rail systems, one Using rubber wheels and the other conventional train type wheels, on the same tracks.
I went to some of the flea markets but they seem to be primarily clip joints for tourists. Went through the Louvre, without the need to pay as my friend is on the board there. Less than 10% of what the Louvre owns is actually on display while the rest, some 350,000 objects, is in the basement. The basement is something like the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, piles of crates and rack shelving.
One unusual aspect, which I was duly informed of, is that in Paris, the garbage is picked up every day. In other words, there is an armada of garbage trucks endlessly rumbling up and down the streets emptying large dumpsters which are parked permanently on the sidewalks.
After Paris, I took the train to Friedrichshafen. This was no easy task because the trains usually run late and therefore I missed my connection at the forgettable city of Ulm, Germany. It seems a common cause of late trains is suicide attempts by persons jumping onto the tracks, and it happened twice during my stay. Fortunately my German was good enough that I could make some calls and reschedule other connections, and take one of the later trains. The pay phones in Germany generally require a phone card although ones at large public venues still take coins. Or rather voraciously eat coins. A call to the next city will eat several Euros worth of coins.
In Friedrichshafen, I had a nice hotel in a small outlying town in the hills above Lake Constance, although without a view of the lake or the Zeppelin Works which is still based there. The ambience might have been better had I not been there right in the middle of the World Cup Soccer championship, which meant that all of Germany was full of soccer hooligans clogging the streets and practically rioting.
The flea market lasts three days and is inside a convention center, taking up three halls. The fare was similar to what one would find at the electronics flea markets in this country, but with primarily European offerings. The public is not admitted until 9:00 a.m., so you gather by the thousands in the lobby awaiting a Le Mans start when the gates open. I wound up being sardine-squished into a group of ham radio enthusiasts from Spain along with a contingent wearing orange shirts with the words "Macedonia" emblazoned on them in large block letters, none of whom were speaking English, making for a lonely wait. It's annoying to see the sellers all milling about in the halls, trading among each other, while everyone else waits outside to be admitted.
Most of what was there was at or well above eBay price levels. I never saw anything, regardless of how miniscule or trivial, priced at less than 1 Euro. There were few ex-Warsaw Pact radios and one reason is apparently that the price of fuel had gone so high during the summer that many Vendors decided to forgo the trip. I managed to buy a Soviet R-326 HF portable communications receiver, in unused condition, from a fellow from Hungary for 90 Euros, which is a good price. His German was as poor as mine so for some reason we were able to communicate flawlessly. Before that I had bought a rare Czech military "EKB" portable HF receiver with some accessories and manual for 70 Euros, and that was the extent of my purchases. I gave up on the third day of the flea market after finding that the same vendors were there each day, in fact fewer as the time went by, so there seemed no point to spending the Sunday there.
I pitied the people who arrived without cars, by bus, because there was no place to stash purchases other than a row of pay-lockers along the wall, none of which were larger than a cubic foot, and incapable of holding much of anything. Not to mention that they are all taken within the first five minutes.
A second meeting hall area was filled with new equipment displays and booths manned by radio clubs of assorted nations, all of which were handing out tourist type brochures from their national tourism boards. The most comical brochures were from Lithuania, which seems to be the new brothel of Europe. The pages of the "Vilnius" city guide were filled with directions to assorted "anything goes" strip clubs and bars, most offering "limo service from airports and train stations" and "any type of woman desired."
I rented a VW Golf station wagon in Friedrichshafen , and my plan was to drive back across Germany after the flea market. That was an adventure in itself. The Autobahns are generally well maintained and far better than freeways here. Trying to find the Autobahn from Friedrichshafen was stressful; this consisted of traveling down what appeared to be farm roads and dirt trails which almost came to a point, then widened out again and eventually, through some miracle, I found the Autobahn to Munich. The Autobahn in southern Germany looks much like the freeways in Washington and Oregon. There are even the obligatory McDonald's and gas stations at regular intervals. The city streets are quite another matter. Poorly marked, poorly laid out, poorly maintained was the norm. Munich was a mess, there had been soccer riots the night before and the streets were full of broken beer bottles and police riot vans packing up and moving on to the next soccer venue. The police were at my hotel searching for anyone who might have just come from Stuttgart, where apparently a soccer riot a day or two before had left numerous people injured.
I went to the Deutsches Museum, somewhat of a disappointment at least as far as the telecom wing. The museum is huge, built on an island in the middle of a river in downtown Munich, and contains a full sized submarine, trains, many aircraft and so forth. The telecom section was rather bleak, as far as the radio aspect. The telephone section was fairly well done, however the exhibits were rather old and threadbare, as well as a bit dirty, and presented little other than German technology. There is a simplified display of a working Strowger switch behind Plexiglas, and you can dial one desk phone and watch the switch step and ring through to an adjacent desk phone. The "mobile telephone" display consisted of a glass case with a sad assortment of 1980's German cell phones inside. The ham radio display was a small side room with perhaps a dozen or so examples of common radios and some homebuilt Frankenstein sets from the 1940's and 1950's. I have more ham radio items in my attic alone than this museum has on display. In fact, there were better examples of some items for sale in the Friedrichshafen flea market than what the museum owned. There was no display of military communications at all. When the temperature in the museum started to get near 90, I gave up on further exploration.
Nightly TV in Munich is dominated by advertisements every few minutes by a character calling himself "Mobile Pimp" who apparently provides you with pornography or something stronger should you call him from your cell phone, and after about 9:00 p.m. German TV features at least one channel of pornography stronger than anything in this country and featuring just about everything other than child exploitation. That must be some fault of George Bush as well but I was unable to work out how.
My thoughts of how uncrowded the Autobahns were, evaporated the following Monday when I discovered that large trucks don't travel on the weekends. They make up for that on the weekdays. Trucks by the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, as far as I could see. I was passing them at the rate of one every few seconds. Most of Autobahns are smooth and well maintained, but you go through regular construction zones where there will be signs saying "SchadenstraBe" which literally translated means "sad street" and actually means "rough pavement."
Sticker shock at the gas station...working the math out, unleaded regular was about $ 6.47 per gallon! The VW Golf gets pretty good mileage, and seems a nice car, but is quite underpowered. Drivers in Germany appear better than here and are more courteous. No seniors in the fast lane driving 35 MPH, no punks passing everyone on the right and weaving through traffic, no tailgaters. In the cities, traffic lights are very poor and signage is minimal. At intersections, there is usually one small traffic light, and if you pull forward to the limit line painted on the pavement, you can then no longer see the light, which is over your roof!
Grocery stores, and stores of any kind, are all closed on Sundays in Germany. That means should you need bread or milk (or, mainly, beer) you get them at the gas station, most all of which are mini-markets as well.
Germany seems to be in the middle of a baby boom. Women with strollers everywhere, pregnant women at every turn. Maybe to replace the people dying of lung cancer.
Of things about Europe which I really hated--the main thing was smoking. Nearly everyone smokes, and smokes a great deal. Germany is the worst. It's like America in the early 1950's. No restaurant is safe from a blue haze of cigarette smoke to ruin your meal. Most people in their 20's are chain smokers already. The most amazing thing was seeing cigarette vending machines out on the sidewalks and at street corners in suburban neighborhoods. And finding, in the candy sections of grocery stores, little packages of candy cigarettes with the German label saying "Junior's First Cigarettes." It almost felt like I was living a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
I frankly found many Germans to be unblemished by the slightest manners as far as social interactions and table etiquette. On several occasions I was treated to lectures regarding how all of Germany's troubles over the Past fifty years were directly the fault of the United States, with the more recent troubles the exclusive fault of George Bush, all of which I should be ashamed of. I was a guest in their country so it wouldn't have been Polite of me to point out that perhaps if they hadn't invaded Poland, none of these" problems" would have occurred in the first place.
Sadly, most of the German woman I saw were obese, often morbidly so, didn't shave their legs or armpits, smoked, had bad teeth and gums, no neck, faces like shaved pit bulls and mean, rude manners. The women in Paris were far better. Most of the women in Amsterdam were either Muslims in some degree of appropriate dress, or looked like filthy heroin addicts who lived on the streets. The view improved in outlying cities of Holland, as did the attitudes.
The primary drink in Germany is beer, and lots of it. It costs less than water. Everyone consumes great quantities, only interrupted by another cigarette. Since I don't drink beer, that left me scrounging for Coca Cola, which arrived in tiny Tabasco-sauce sized bottles at the equivalent of $ 5 each, invariably delivered by an annoyed waiter.
I hated the food in Paris, but maybe that's just my taste. Standard fare would be rabbit or some sort of sheep's jowl, or in any case, something weird or unusual. One restaurant was serving crab to the diners at the next table and when the waiter brought it, I could smell it from ten feet away as it approached! No septic tank or boat bilge ever smelled worse. I came close to vomiting just from the smell. It couldn't possibly have been fresh. The rule for seafood being: if it smells, it isn't fresh. Yet they ate it with gusto. It was worse than anything I ran across in all of Asia. The thing always missing in European restaurants is ice for your drink. There's never any ice. It is simply not available, in fact they don't understand what you want. Not a problem in normal weather but when it's in the 90's day after day, a cool drink might be nice.
I tried to use my international phone card to call home from the hotel outside Friedrichshafen, but it wouldn't work. Why? Because the town had only a rotary dial exchange! What looked like a touch-tone phone was actually just a pulse output keypad. Trying to dial the card access numbers resulted in a dropped call accompanied by a stern German warning about a dialing verboten numbers. You could hear the kerchunk-kerchunk of the stepper switch in the background of the call audio.
I made it back home with my radios, without incident, although the plane was delayed an hour in Atlanta while Delta Airlines waited for a "Danish girls? soccer team" to trickle on board. Those folks then wandered all over the plane while in flight, jabbering in their own language and ignoring the attendants' insistence that they sit down. I was treated to the shrill, nonstop babbling in Italian of some teenage girl in the seat behind me, apparently unrelated to the soccer team, which went on for almost four hours without any pause. I can see why some air travelers are moved to violence.
Oh yes, there were German tourists on the plane, who rudely pestered the attendants asking for double and triple portions of the meals, a different seat, and so forth. The head stewardess told me that the Germans are the very worst passengers - - they all hate them. There is an area where the attendants sleep on overseas flights, behind a curtain. She told me that the Germans will go over and pull back the curtain, wake them up and demand more food, drinks, etc., despite there being other attendants still on duty.
I guess those are the highlights. This was somewhat the trip from hell but I did get some interesting stuff and Paris was a great experience.
More later..
Geof Forrs
Geoff Fors in China (Mark van der Hoek in China)
