Bietigheim-Bissingen Steelers Hockey Game! (February 23, 2007)

Complete Set of Photos

In the neighboring city of Bietigheim-Bissingen, there is a minor league hockey team that I learned about recently. They play in the 2nd national league and play in an area and the end of one of the S-Bahn lines here in Stuttgart. I was really itching to see a hockey game, so Olav (Norway) and I went to go see one of these. He had never been to a live hockey game before! Once again, like the Fasching parade, I forgot my camera, so I'll just fill in some stock pictures from Google! (BB is on the right with the yellow helmet)


The team from BB is called the Steelers. One interesting thing I noticed right away is that teams here are sponsored by a lot of companies whose logos are on the jerseys and such. Imagine a NASCAR race car, but as a hockey jersey! This team, being a good Stuttgart team, was sponsored by Porsche! The team we played was called the Landshut Cannibals, from a town in Bavaria. BB won, 4:3, in the last second (I mean, the LAST second!) of the game.

I found it weird that many things were still in English. The team names, for one, where both in English, as was the big scoring thing hanging from the middle of the arena.

Hockey is not very popular here in Germany (definitely not like in Sweden, Finland, or the Czech Republic), and it showed. The arena this team played in was essentially a skating rink with a greater than normal amount of seats and the teams were obviously minor-league. But, in conclusion, I was satisfied! I scratched my hockey itch, but still wish I could get live Red Wings games over the internet here! There is a way to do it, but it requires a lot of finagling and I haven't figured it out yet!

Fasching Parade (February 22, 2007)

Complete Set of Photos

Pretty much every country has some form of Carnival, like Mardi Gras in the USA, or Carnival in Brazil, etc. Germany has Fasching, which is technically a couple of months long, but it only really celebrated for a week in February. There are huge parades in certain cities, like Cologne and Mainz. There is even a day, left over from some tradition, called Weiberfastnacht. On this day, women can (and do!) go around with scissors and cut off the ties of men!

Stuttgart is not one of the big Carnival cities (it's more in the Rhine area), but there was still a pretty good sized-parade that went through the whole downtown area with a few thousand people watching it. After my C++ course, Isaac, Gonzalo (Chile) and I went to go see it. I forgot my camera, unfortunately, so all the pictures were taken by Isaac Smith.

Weather in Germany (February 18,2007)

Well, I don't know what everyone else was doing on February 18th back in the States, but here's me in Germany:


That's right, napping on our couch, outside, in shorts and a T-shirt, in February, in Germany! It was around 50F or so and it was really sunny, so it was very comfortable to lay in the sun. I had an ice cream bar later too!

It's been very warm the whole time I've been here. We had only one snowfall where there was actually more than a centimeter of snow, and that was in January. We had maybe 9" of snow and it was all melted a few days later. Other than that, it's barely hit freezing here. Baden-Württemberg is, as a rule, the warmest region of Germany, but there should still be some snow! This kind of puts a damper on my skiing in the Alps plan, because to find snow there, you have to go really far away and to a high elevation.

Sometimes, I check the weather back home, and I've seen as much as a 20C difference! I'm enjoying the warm weather here though - I get to ride my bike around alot. I go exploring in the woods nearby (lots of paths and lakes) and sometimes at night I ride around the deserted streets of Vaihingen. It's very fun!

P.S. Sorry about the units! Of course, they use metric units here, and some I try to convert to English. It's cool though - I'm actually pretty much programmed into metric units already!

Things about Germany I find interesting

After being here for about half of my stay, I have had time to notice many things that I found interesting. These are in no particular order and I'll add to this list as I find new things to share.

• In movie theaters, your ticket assigns you a specific seat
• You can buy beer in theaters and McDonald's, etc.
• You can drink alcohol outside, walking around the city
• The drinking age is 16 for beer, 18 for everything else. You're never carded.
• You get your drivers' license at 18, though
• There are small-children-accessible cigarette machines everywhere
• The Simpsons are really different!
• Doctors have public hours where you can walk in without an appointment
• There can be nudity on TV and in serious magazines
• They only have one commercial break per 1/2 hour TV show, but it's a really long break.
• When you come back from the commercial, they replay the last 30 seconds or so as a refresher
• Gas here costs about $5.75+ per gallon, converted (update in July: more like $7 a gallon now)
• Almost every car is a stick shift
• 19% tax is built in to every price you see at a store/restaurant
• Germans won't line up to get on a bus, etc. They form a big blob.
• If you go to a restaurant and all the tables are occupied, you can ask the person at a table with free spaces if you can sit there and you can share the table. I had this happen to me once at a two-person table. Some other guy sat down at my table and we ate our whole meals without saying a single word or making eye contact!
• There's a brand name of American Food products (white sandwich bread, peanut butter, hot sauce, spare ribs, etc.) There are also American ethnic sections in the supermarkets!
• There are also American Sports sections in stores (that means football and baseball stuff)
• They eat carp here
• There's a different dial tone/ring on the phones
• There's no separation of church and state. On government forms, you put down your religion. You can take religion classes in public schools too.
• Churches are supported by money that the government taxes church members. They do offerings too though.
• In the US, they have Taco Bell, the ethnic food of the largest minority. In Germany, they have Döner Kebabs, which is delicious Turkish fast food.
• Non- guide dogs are allowed inside malls, department stores, and other places
• Stop lights are drag-race style: They go from green to yellow to red like in the US, but then there's the yellow again before the green, so you can get a head start!
• People will actually wait for the green pedesitrian crosswalk light. If you walk on the red, sometimes people will even yell at you!