Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Notes from Germany

First, Karlruhe Germany is great. The people are very friendly and just awesome. The city here is very cool and seems like a great place to live and hang out. Lots of shops and street cages. People just seem to appreciate each other and life. The seem just like i imagined.

I have learned:
iPhone (with which i am writing this, via WiFi) is dangerous for Europe. While it is great that it will seamlessly switch from WiFi to edge in the states, here that costs $. Several times I noticed the "E" rather the wireless symbol. There is no way to just disable Edge. Ouch.

Websites automatically send me to German language pages. I even log in to my normal iGoogle and it's all in German. Weird, really, especially when you've logged into, say Yahoo or Google who I'd have thought would know that I'm normally English speaking. But Blogger and Yahoo email are all in German over here. I even had trouble bringing up the English version of Google since it wants to redirect to the .de site. It makes it tough for Americans who travel to see their stuff.

Euros are expensive - 1.47 $ for a €

Europeans are much more "green" than us. Lots of examples.

Good grief! Trains and trolleys, bikes, scooters and small cars. They do people moving much better.

My manager asked when I wanted the transfer to Siemens Germany. Almost right-very nice here. The lifestyle is much better in many ways to suburban. But there is no place like home... I'm off to Paris tomorrow.

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