Keys Corner

In praise of German bureaucracy

John — Mon, 14 May 2012 09:53:25 +0000

We’ve lived in Germany since 1980, and after we had decided to move here from the UK, we did have a few moments of wondering whether we would regret it. the Germans have a reputation for being hardworking and efficient, and of having a well established, efficient bureaucracy. Would we like it?

Over the years, we have had a number of dealings with German bureaucracy – the obvious encounters with the Meldestellen (where you register your current address when you move), the tax office, the vehicle registration office and so on. Normally everything was just for standard reasons, and we were always processed efficiently. In large towns, you sometimes had to take a ticket from a machine when you arrived, to log your place in the queue, but we were always deal with politely and quickly.

On couple of occasions, we had a special situation, and how we were dealt with then impressed us a lot.

The first occasion was when I was mugged about 10 years ago in Barcelona and had my passport and wallet stolen. We had to go to the British Consulate to get me issued with a temporary passport to get home – it was quite a palaver, and very expensive. Nearly a hundred Euro to have a single piece of plain A4 paper issued which entitled me to a one way trip to the UK until a replacement passport could be issued. Fortunately I was able to persuade Ryanair that the paper was a valid passport and they let me fly back to Germany (where I wasn’t checked on entry to the country, because both countries are in the Schengen area), otherwise I had visions of having to fly to the UK and stay for several days while my replacement passport was being processed.

I also went to the German Consulate to report that my Aufenthaltserlaubnis (residence permit) had been stolen. In contrast to the British Consulate we were dealt with in a more friendly manner and much faster. They told me to go to the local council when we got home, and get a new one issued. Which I did – I took a couple of passport photos with me, because I knew the document had a photo on it, and they issued me a replacement while I waited – everything was on the computer already and I didn’t have to fill in or sign any application forms. The replacement was free of charge and took less than a quarter of on hour to issue.

The second occasion when I was positively surprised by the way that German bureaucracy works was this morning. Since Ruth and I both have cars, we decided it would make sense to keep one at our house in Spain to use when we are there. So I had driven mine to Xàtiva and registered it in Spain – it now has Spanish plates and insurance. When I did that, the vehicle registration office in Xàtiva retained the German registration documents (the Kfz-Brief and Kfz-Schein) and told me they would be sent to Germany and the vehicle would automatically be de-registered here. Well, that was in March, and nothing happened back in Germany. In particular, I never got a refund for this year’s road tax which I had paid.

So today I phoned the local vehicle tax office and asked what I needed to do (according to their website, I needed the German registration papers, the number plates and to pay a fee to get the car de-registered). The girl I spoke to asked me to send her an e-mail with a copy of the Spanish registration papers, and the date of the change, which I did. An hour later, I got a reply by e-mail saying the car had been de-registered back-dated to March and that the tax office will contact me in a few days about the payment of the refund. Not bad. I had visions of having to go to Spain to collect my old German number plates which are stored in our garage, or (as the ADAC, the German automobile club, had suggested to me) getting replacement documents for the car issued here, before the car could be de-registered!

Maybe we have just been lucky, but we have always found the service by German officials to be much better than their reputation.

Charlie Caper and Erik Rosales iPad act

John — Mon, 14 May 2012 09:05:15 +0000

Impressive act by Charlie Caper and Erik Rosales using 7 iPads to promote Stockholm.

The fifty best restaurants in the world

John — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:15:51 +0000

The Restaurant magazine has published its list for 2012 of the fifty best restaurants in the world. Number 40 is not far from where we live when we are in Spain: Quique Dacosta in Denia. The menu looks interesting.

Nice wild plants

John — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:07:19 +0000

Behind the houses on the other side of the road that our house in Spain is in, lies Bixquert valley. Its about a 10 minute walk from the house into the valley, which runs to the foot of Xàtiva Castle.

I enjoy walking in the valley when I am staying in the house because there is such a variety of wild plants, most of which you don’t see growing wild in Germany. One of the most common plants is rosemary, which grows all over the hill sides, but there are also quite a few cacti as you get nearer to the castle. And a huge number of small plants which I haven’t identified yet, many of which are in flower at the moment. There is also a good selection of ornamental grasses – it’s almost like visiting a garden center – I am quite tempted sometimes to take a trowel and a plastic bag, and take some of the plants back to our garden!

Grasshopper on a metal grid

John — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 22:07:33 +0000

How the Euro Crisis could play out

John — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:31:30 +0000

I came across these two postings on the internet yesterday evening:

Italy – Europe’s Next Debt Casualty?

Using a 2011 GDP of €1.826 trillion from the CIA World Factbook, Italy’s 2011 debt-to-GDP rings in at just over 132 percent, just over twice the European Union limit of 60 percent. Unfortunately, Italy’s debt keeps rising while its GDP doesn’t…

The danger of depression in the Euro Zone in 2012

If the European Leaders and ECB continue the present stupid policy of bailouts, they will eventually run out of money. This will cause a crisis in confidence in the stock market, and the whole system will collapse in an out of control Depression…

[Five short videos, with a total of about half an hours running time. The analysis and predictions in the first four videos seems plausible. I think the proposed strategy for the Euro Zone in video 5 ("work longer, harder") is rather simplistic, although I do think that the criticism of many Europeans' "entitlement mentality" is justified.]

Not that the Euro Zone is the only area with problems which are not as visible as they should be. The UK is not in much better shape either (Read David Kauder’s book “The Greatest Crash” or for a short version, this article in the Daily Mail)

House prices in DE, ES, and UK 1975 – 2011

John — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:50:53 +0000

House Prices 1975 - 2011

When we tell friends in the UK that property prices in Germany have been essentially flat since we have been here (1980) and that we actually lost money on two out of three property investments we made between 1982 and 2011, we usually get a look which indicates that they don’t really believe us.

Well, above is the Economist chart for the three countries which particularly interest us: Germany, Spain and the UK. You can click on the image to go to the Economist web site and change the parameters to display the countries and years that interest you. I think the only country with a worse property price performance than Germany over the last 35 years was Japan.

Our house in Spain is on Google Maps

John — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:45:06 +0000

I was just playing with Google Maps, and discovered there is a photo of our house in Spain in the satellite view now. Seems to be from the second half of 2011 (despite the image date in Google Maps being 2012):

Our house in Spain - end of 2011 - still in construction

Fallas in Xàtiva

John — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:45:23 +0000

We’ve had glorious weather the last couple of days, but yesterday evening it was drizzling and grey when I left to see the final night of the Fallas celebrations in Xàtiva. The fallas, or monuments, (made of wooden structures covered in papier maché and painted) had been erected in the squares and on street junctions by the casal fallers – the teams from the different districts – who compete to make the most spectacular monuments. Most teams make two monuments – a small one and a larger one. The monuments get burnt accompanied by lots of fireworks and firecrackers between about 21:00 hrs and two in the morning.

The final monument to be burnt is the prize-winner, at two in the morning. I didn’t hang around that long as the weather wasn’t so pleasant, and I was on my own – Ruth was in Germany working. As you can see, I did get photos from quite near to the burning figures – I found out why everyone else was keeping a bit further back when the first one set alight. The flames are hot and smokey and the figures are stuffed with powerful bangers which throw debris quite a distance! The fire brigade attends each burning, just case the flames threaten to engulf the surrounding buildings.

Sunday afternoon in Xàtiva

John — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:29:22 +0000

It was a pleasant sunny Sunday today and I took a walk around the town. It was warm enough that quite a few people were taking a coffee or a beer on the street, otherwise the streets were quiet.

Tomorrow is the last day of the Fallas in Xàtiva (the last night is called “La Cremà” – “the cremation”), with the burning in the late evening of the papier mache “falles” (these are satirical larger-than-life figures built over the course of the previous 12 months, representing some aspect of the theme which has been chosen for the fallas each year). The falles have been erected in the last 2-3 days at most of the larger crossroads in Xàtiva, so at the moment getting around by car within the town is quite difficult as many of the roads are impassable.

There’s no tomorrow

John — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:55:38 +0000

The above is a “must watch” video. It shows in 30 minutes why we are almost certainly going to be grappling with huge problems in the very near future due to the ongoing exponential growth (in use of resources, in finance, in the number of people in the world). Its the best and most succinct report I’ve ever seen on the subject. Not very encouraging. Nonetheless, thanks to Edgar for sending me the link.

A couple of differences between Spain and Germany

John — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:48:54 +0000

There have been a few surprises since we took over the house in Spain. In general, I should explain, apart from the climate, Germany and Spain are surprisingly similar – they both have well developed bureaucracies, supported by high levels of taxation; there is generally little corruption (don’t lump Spain in with Italy, when talking about corruption to a Spaniard – he will be most insulted). The exception being some provincial Spanish governments, which in the past have been accused of taking bribes from property developers to grant planning permission. And in my admittedly limited experience, the quality of service in shops and from tradesmen in Spain is much better than their reputation (and better than in Germany).

Of course, we knew the Spanish don’t have the same variety of bread and rolls that you can get in Germany, but several other things we take for granted in Germany don’t work the same way in Spain:

The postal service doesn’t deliver everywhere.
When the house was nearing completion, we wanted to be sure that if any of the service companies (electricity, water, insurance) that we had signed up with sent us a letter (a bill, for example), that it wouldn’t be returned to sender. I had to nag Enrique and Pepe repeatedly to organise a letter box on the outside of our garden wall, next to the entrance gate. Finally, after several weeks and a lot of nagging, it was installed and we sent ourselves some test letters to see how long post would take from Germany. None of it arrived.

Some time later, when I was at the house, I spoke to Annette, the woman who sold us the land. “Oh, I don’t think the post delivers here” she said. “I get all my post delivered to the office in town”. Annette lives about 3-4 km from us in the next village. A few weeks later, when we were both in Spain, we went to the post office in Xàtiva, who confirmed that they really don’t deliver to Bixquert, which is where the house is. So we have rented a post office box in Xàtiva, It’s neat business idea of the Correos (Post Office) – don’t deliver the post, and charge over 100 Euro a year to rent a PO Box from them! So we have to remember to collect the post occasionally when we are in Xàtiva! When I told Pepe that we’d had to rent a post box, he didn’t look in the least surprised, and just said “I thought that would be the case” – which was why he hadn’t rushed to mount our letter box!

It’s a bit strange, as the neighbours opposite us on the other side of the road also have a letter box at the entrance… and they are locals! We don’t live more than 5 km from Xàtiva post office, so it’s not as if we were in the middle of nowhere.
The courier services don’t always deliver to your door. It depends which company you use.
In Germany, we got rid of our coffee machine – we never drink coffee at home, and whenever we offered it to guests, the coffee we had was stale because we never use it ourselves. But when we bought the house we thought we really should be in a position to offer visitors a decent cup of espresso and I ordered a Nespresso machine from amazon.de (which was a lot cheaper than ordering the same machine from amazon.es, even though we had to pay the delivery charge from Germany.)

A couple of days later, I had a phone call from MRW, who is amazon’s delivery agent in Spain (like DHL is in Germany), in high-speed Spanish, to say that I could collect my coffee machine. Fortunately I was in the car with Pepe at the time, so I passed him the phone, and he got directions to their office! It seems they only deliver to the door in large towns, not in the country. On the other hand, when I ordered some coffee capsules for the machine, Nespresso used a different courier, and they delivered right to the door.