We hear a lot about the British health system from our various relatives in the UK, and it is not usually positive. In particular, getting x-rays done seems to involve lots of waiting to get x-rayed and further waiting to get the results. I don’t mean a few hours, but rather, days or more . . . → Read More: Praise for German health service
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We went to the Nacht der Museen (Museum Night) in Frankfurt yesterday. This annual event is always well visited, and is a good way to see inside the 47 participating locations in Frankfurt. The tickets cost 12 Euro for unlimited visits to any of the museums last night. As well as being able to visit the regular exhibitions in the museums, the organisers also lay on special events for children and a wide range of musical performances for the adults. You can get an idea of what was on offer here (zipped PDF file, 3.3 MB). It’s impossible to visit everything in the time (19:00 hrs to 02:00 hrs), but we enjoyed visiting the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, the Museum der Weltkulturen and the Museum für Kommunikation. Using the waze desktop maps There is a new social mobile application on the block – waze.com. You can download the application onto your smartphone (Apple, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian at the moment, Blackberry is coming shortly) and use the free software as an on-board turn-by-turn navigation system. The maps are . . . → Read More: Help fill in the blanks on waze.com The German Post has implemented some innovative services which either haven’t been copied abroad, or only took off in other countries quite a bit later: Wal-Mart gave up trying to compete in Germany in 2006, unable to compete effectively against Aldi and Lidl. Nonetheless, I was surprised to read in the latest Harvard Business Review (link to a summary of the article), that six German “hard discounters” (their term for discounters like Aldi and Lidl) are in the top ten global players. Between them, these six make $178,6 billion annual revenue out of the $220,2 billion that the top ten make between them. That is pretty impressive. Since the German telecom has been calling our fax number and then disconnecting after 1 second for the last several weeks, I set up a re-routing in our Fritz!box router of calls originating from their number back to their own call center. The calls continued, so today, I have blocked their number . . . → Read More: I have blocked Telecom’s number 08003009920 The Eschborn-Frankfurt City Loop is the new name for the 190 km long bike race “Rund um den Henninger-Turm“, which had to change its name after the last race in 2008 when the sponsor, the Henninger Brewery, dropped their sponsorship of the race (which has been run annually since 1961). It . . . → Read More: The Eschborn-Frankfurt City Loop
Unsuccessful print using Adobe Acrobat Reader The German Post and their parcel service, DHL, have a great internet service – you can print your own stamps online (Just don’t try to use the internet address printed on the stamps – it doesn’t exist! It seems to have been a temporary glitch – the . . . → Read More: Adobe, Mac and the Post don’t get on I don’t like sitting in a smoky restaurant or pub and intensely dislike having smoking in my house. So you might think I’d be upset at the “smoker’s victory” being reported by the local and international press. The constitutional court has ruled that the law in some German states, prohibiting smoking in one-room establishments, . . . → Read More: A smoker’s “victory” in Germany? We visited a friend in Rostock from Thursday until today. It is a really lovely town – it has been nicely renovated since the reunification in the early 1990′s and is a very pleasant place to live. The historical building style uses bricks very effectively – and many of the modern buildings in the . . . → Read More: Rostock |
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