Off The Rack

by PapaScott on 02 October 2011

Through soft living and not sticking to my gym schedule, I’m carrying 5 kilos more than 3 years ago and the suit I bought then is too tight around the belly. And the suit before that hangs like a tent. Why is fashion so unforgiving? But we have a gala event in Berlin to attend, and Christopher also needs the appropriate attire, so yesterday we were off to Hamburg to visit Policke.

02 01  1I blogged about Policke 11 years ago when I got the suit before that. It hasn’t changed much since then…

Mama was convinced that I needed a new suit for her company Christmas party next weekend (her first formal appearance after maternity leave, although she officially starts on January 2). My main criteria in choosing a profession was to avoid wearing suits. I hate buying clothes, but it’s even worse to discuss or even argue about buying clothes, so I kept my mouth shut (well, nearly shut) and went along with Mama and Christopher to Hamburg early on Saturday.
We went to Policke, an old-fashioned men’s clothier in Hamburg… not chic downtown Hamburg, but the nitty, gritty inner-city neighborhood of St. Georg, located across from a Turkish bank and some porno shops, between a mosque[*] and a Good Templar’s Club. The shop looks like it hasn’t been remodeled since the 1920s, and maybe the staff hasn’t changed since then either. There’s hardly room to move… the tiny rooms are stuffed with suits.
It’s impossible to browse. You are met at the door by the chief salesman, who measures your exact size by eye alone, and are sent to the appropriate room. I told the salesman there I need a dark colored suit for a Christmas party, he picked two out that both fit perfectly and met Mama’s approval. I picked one, and we were out in 15 minutes, paying a least a third less than we would have downtown, and were home before the crowds arrived in the city.

This time the service was even quicker. The first suit tried on fit and was right, so I was done in 10 minutes, and I paid half of what I expected.. Same thing for Christopher: 10 minutes in and out, much cheaper than we expected.

Even more amazing… before we shopped, Christopher insisted he didn’t need a suit and didn’t want to go to any gala in any case. Today he spent 45 minutes trying his new suit on and admiring the look.

[*]At first I was afraid the mosque was the infamous Al-Quds mosque where the 9/11 plotters met, but that was around the corner on Steindamm, a couple of blocks away. The mosque on the same street as Policke is the Centrum Mosque, and tomorrow they happen to be holding an open house.

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The End of the Century

by PapaScott on 11 September 2011

II debated whether to post anything for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I’ve pretty much written everything I have to say about it, either a day later in 2001, or 5 years ago, or even just 2 years ago.

I was an expat American in Hamburg in 2001, the city where the evil had spawned, and perhaps I was much closer to that evil than I really wanted to know. “Amerikaner, wir sind bei euch” (Americans, we stand by you) was the headline in the Hamburg paper the next day, and that was certainly comforting at the time. The only lasting consequence of that solidarity seems to be the military quagmire in Afghanistan.

hhcandles.jpg:

As for these candles at the US Consulate in Hamburg, I don’t think you can even get that close to consulate anymore. The street is closed, last time I was there we had to go past guards in tanks with machine guns to get in. Maybe that’s all I need to say about how the world is different today.

All in all I’d just rather forget that day.

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28 years ago

by PapaScott on 06 September 2011

We had the cheapest wedding meal ever! Details at Young, Dumb and Excited, they haven’t changed much since then.

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Driving the E-Smart

1 September 2011

We’ve had our E-Smart (officially Smart Fortwo Electric Drive Cabriolet) for two months now, long enough to have had some experience with it. In short, we like it even more than we thought we would. You can’t just go out an buy one, however. It’s not available for general sale. We’re participating in a cooperation [...]

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Sanity Time

18 August 2011

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. It’s been over five weeks since my last post… Our summer “vacation” was a busy as we suspected it would be. The restaurant in Rade, the truck stop store without a truck stop, is as busy as we hoped it would be. The self-serve “Easy Order” kiosks are [...]

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Open

11 July 2011

We’ve been open in Rade for over a week, and the good news is that sales are pretty much what we expected and that most stuff works. However it’s been a hectic two weeks, full of major and minor disasters. Construction chaos: Standard construction time is 12 weeks, and 10 weeks would be extremely fast. [...]

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T Minus 7 Days

23 June 2011

The front door already looks pretty good. The lobby needs a little work, though. And this is going to be our McCafé? I’ll spare you the pictures from the kitchen. To us it looks like total chaos. But the construction experts tell us everything looks good for a week before opening. We’re crossing our fingers [...]

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Moving RIght Along

14 June 2011

Things are starting to get serious at the construction site. These pictures are already a few days old. Here’s our opening day supervisor checking out the grand opening signs. From the Autobahn it’s pretty easy to tell what’s happening here. Next week we start moving in kitchen equipment and fixtures, and opening is set for [...]

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Pfingstbaumpflanzen (Pentecost trees)

13 June 2011

I’ve mentioned the Pentecost traditions in our village in previous years. This year there seems to be a revitalized interest in village activities, for example the Dorffest was newly organized and was a huge success with 10x the turnout of previous years. Last week a brochure (Pfingstbaumfplanzen as PDF) was distributed to all houses explaining [...]

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Interior Shots

30 May 2011

We had a chance to visit the new restaurant on Sunday. There’s now security watching over the site, but he was nice enough to let us in for some pictures. Here’s the front counter and kitchen area. Here’s the lobby. The pipes coming out of the floor will be McCafé. Looking towards the front door. [...]

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Status Report Rade

24 May 2011

The new restaurant in Rade is set to open in 5 weeks and 2 days. Here’s the inviting front entrance area. We have a lovely, sunny patio with 70 seats for your dining pleasure. From the patio you can enjoy this fascinating view of the LogPark and the Autobahn A1. Should you prefer, you can [...]

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We Have Walls

17 May 2011

Here’s a couple of quick drive-by shots of the new restaurant. You can see just how close to the Autobahn and how visible we are going to be.

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The Plan Doesn’t Come Together

4 May 2011

Over Easter vacation our son flew to the US for the first time alone to visit his grandparents. It was only for a week, we drove him to Amsterdam (5 hours each way) so he’d be able to fly non-stop and not sit in a strange airport by himself. Turned out he loved it, one [...]

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Groundbreak

30 April 2011

We’ve been keeping a secret for the past several months, and it can now finally be revealed. We’re pleased to announce that construction has begun for our 4th McDonald’s restaurant! It will be located on the Autobahn A1 at Rade, the first exit from Hamburg heading towards Bremen. We expect to open at the end [...]

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Road Construction

21 April 2011

Normally our village is pretty quiet. We only have 4 streets, none of which are paved, a couple dozen houses, and no shops at all (no bakery, no post office, no grocer, no gas station) other than a bio farmer who sells asparagus in the spring and Christmas trees in December. This is the usual [...]

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Quiet Week

14 April 2011

It’s going to be a quiet week for us next week, the week before Easter. Not that we don’t have enough to do, we have plenty of that. But our son is going to be away the entire week. He’s flying by himself, for the first time, to Minnesota to visit his grandparents. We noticed [...]

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Accidental Shots

10 April 2011

We had sponsor tickets for yesterday’s HSV match against Dortmund (we applied for the tickets last summer, so I obviously knew in advance that Dortmund would do well this year). I couldn’t connect to Twitter in the stadium, so you’ll have to take our word for it that we were there. The sun was shining, [...]

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Green Card

30 March 2011

My wife had incredibly bad luck with her green card. You may recall that she arrived in the US with a fiancée visa which, once the fiancée bit is consummated, so to speak, entitles one to permanent residence and a green card. The physical card was the problem. The INS managed to misspell her name [...]

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And the winner is… Latin

28 March 2011

For those following along with the “which language will Christopher learn in the 6th grade” contest, we have a winner. A full week before the deadline, he declared his decision for Latin, and we turned in the form to the school today. Our preference was for French, and we even tried using to some reverse [...]

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Lingua franca

23 March 2011

In the Gymnasium schools in our state, students start learning a second foreign language (after English) in grade 6. The schools we looked at all offered a choice from Latin, French and Spanish. The public schools all required a choice upon enrollment in the 5th grade, over a year before the courses would actually begin. [...]

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Music Snob

27 February 2011

The past several weeks our son has been obsessed with classical music. I suspect it has something to do with the music instruction at his new school. It doesn’t come from us. Our consumption of classical music is close to zero. My wife currently has Rihanna and Katy Perry on heavy rotation in her car. [...]

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Seven Squared

9 February 2011

Time to turn the calendar once again! And since The Economist recently declared that life begins at 46, things can only keep getting better, right?

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Save the World

5 February 2011

Thirty years ago, I entered college with a mission: I was going to Save the World! I was fresh from a summer in northeastern Brazil as an AFS student and had experienced what the difference between rich and poor really is. Coming from the richest and most powerful country on earth, I was going to [...]

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Stranded!

16 January 2011

Last Tuesday we accepted delivery for the Volkswagen Sharan that we ordered 6 months ago (with a lot of extras but without the automatic doors like in the cute commercial). It will be my company car for the next three years. Our family isn’t really big enough for a mini-van, but there are times we [...]

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Back in Black

12 January 2011

One of the several good effects of our son’s new school is that he has developed an enthusiasm for music. We didn’t take him to any special music classes earlier (it’s something we didn’t think of, since neither of us did it as kids, maybe that was a missed opportunity), but with his very first [...]

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Extremism in Defense of Liberty

10 January 2011

Yesterday we attended the New Year’s Reception given by the mayor of Buchholz. It was a typical political meet-and-greet event, with all the usual suspects in attendance: the county commissioner (Landrat), 2 members of the Bundestag, 1 member of the Landestag (Lower Saxony Parliament). There was shake-hands with the mayor, a glass Sekt, live music [...]

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Brussels Sprouts with BACON

6 January 2011

OK, it’s not really bacon, just low-fat diced ham, but this recipe from our My Line fitness program has become our favorite way to eat Brussels sprouts, even as a main dish! The original recipe is metric, the American equivalents are approximate. 500 g (1 lb) Brussels sprouts 1 onion, chopped 1 Tsp olive oil [...]

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Grocery Shopping

5 January 2011

With my wife and I both having busy and hectic schedules (well, hers is more hectic, mine is mostly pushing paper), coordinating grocery shopping is a constant challenge. We have a completely low-tech method of compiling a grocery list: a piece of paper tacked to the side of the refrigerator where we note the staples [...]

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Christmas Card

24 December 2010

As usual, I prepared our Christmas greetings for our friends and relatives in the US at CardStore, which lets us upload pictures and prepare a text and saves us the trouble of filling out envelopes and paying international postage. Also as usual, PapaScott readers get the inside scoop first… 2010 is ending for us the [...]

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Starting Over

8 December 2010

Five years ago I wrote this: It was 25 years ago Wednesday Thursday that John Lennon was killed. Has it really been that long? It’s an event (like the Challenger explosion) that I remember vividly and that changed how I felt about myself and the world. I had just started college, I was working at [...]

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