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Tag: #Fandango
Proof of a Little Folly
I’ve just come home from the post office. Two months ago I ordered a little trinket (a stand for my glasses). Nothing major. I realised it was coming from overseas because it was supposed to take a couple of weeks to arrive. No biggy. The couple of weeks stretched to a couple of months but as I didn’t really need the watchamacallit – no biggy. Then we weren’t home when the parcel, or rather parcelet, arrived and the mailman left a card. It took me a full week to collect it – because I had to go to a different post office I normally go to, one which has opening hours which don’t correspond with my working hours, and to top it all there is a huge building site with roads torn up and strange one-way streets for the duration.
Anyway, I collected it today. And nobody told me before that I had to pay customs on the item. 1.68 € (not much overall but on a purchase price of 9.00 € …). Anyway, that was customs. Add to that 6.00 € “delivery flat-rate”, which I’ve never had to pay before.
So now I have a receipt for a silly purchase which taught me the lesson of not ordering something like that ever again.
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Howyadoing?
Anybody not from the area around Frankfurt would look quite flabbergasted if greeted with “Ei gude wie?” It’s in the dialect of the area. We live barely 80km to the South, we understand the words but would never use them ourselves.
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Times Going By
The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin has seen its share of history. It was built in the last decade of the 18th century. Twenty years later it saw the downfall of Napoleon. The French troops had taken the Quadriga (the four horses and the carriage on top) to Paris and General Blücher found it in Paris and brought it back to its original place.
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 it saw the victory parade and until the end of the first World War only the Prussian Emperor and his immediate family as well as honoured guests were allowed to use the middle passage.
The Nazis celebrated their seizure of control over the German state with a massive torchlight possession through its arches. The gate then was quite heavily damaged during the fights in Berlin at the end of World War II.
On 17 June 1953 it was one of the sites of the uprising in East Germany. From 1961 to 1989 it couldn’t be crossed at all because it stood on the border between the two German states.
Today it is almost a casual place.
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