Guten Tag, wie geht es Ihnen?
Dennis started teaching this AM so I took the car, a Ford Focus,
out to check out the lay of the land, to check my German map reading,
and to see if I could figure out the road signs. It’s great driving
a stick shift again! The roads are good, although crowded, and well
marked. I drove west to Grob Gireau and then drove into downtown
Darmstadt. I was supposed to meet up with a young guy named Brend
to be shown the area this PM but he got sick and couldn’t make it.
Brend works for Allsecure GmbH, a former marketing partner of Snare
and now of CA.
Darmstadt was heavily damaged in WWII, just as this whole industrial
area was, and many things of historical interest were destroyed.
Darmstadt could be any medium sized US industrial city. The only
real difference is the architectural style. There is more use of
very straight, square lines, you won’t see too many buildings with
curves. The other major architectural look is the traditional look
used primarily on stores of the timber and brick exteriors.
English is spoken everywhere! This is probably because there are
many US military establishments in this area. I even found a commercial
US radio station run by the US military. This makes it very easy
at the hotels and restaurants. The one place you won’t find /English
is on TV, except the Sky Network of 24-hour news coverage out of
London. This is funny in that 50% of the German programming is old
US shows with the German dubbed in: Matlock, Star Trek, Tool Time,
etc. My favorite is to watch the old Cosby show with German dubbed
over.
German roads and speed limits are interesting. There are heavy
fines and license suspensions for speeding in posted areas, but
if there isn’t a limit posted, the speed limit is 100 k/h (62 mph)
for 2-lane roads and no speed limit for multilane roads.
There is and interesting new car over here. It is called Smart
and is a cooperative venture of Mercedes and Swatch, the Swiss watch
company. It has a top speed of 80 k/h (about 50 mph) and appears
to have had the back cut off from it. I am including both a picture
of the car and of the “display case” that is used to show them.
The display case is an outdoor glass rack that the cars are stored
in.
For dinner tonight we went to Speyer near the French border. Dennis
and I were with Ingmar and Erica two other AllSecure persons. The
restaurant was in an old building located adjacent to the cathedral
or “dom”. This is a very large and old cathedral and the remains
of 8 Holy Roman Emperors are in the crypts under it. Unfortunately
it was too dark for pictures.
I am including the pictures of the hotel and of the Smart car.
Marty
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