So goes Deutschland... so goes the Union.

Yesterday afternoon a present arrived in our mailbox- our new subscription to Wire. After searching magazine stands and record shops for three weeks in Berlin, we were unable to locate our beloved monthly. We decided it was finally time to cough up the sterling and pony up for a subscription. Good choice. Our first shrink wrapped parcel arrived from their shipping facility in Switzerland. Suzanne has a good strategy, read a little bit each day so as not to run through the whole magazine at once. They sent us two months worth of issues to last until next month. They must know. For those of you keep score at home, we opted for the extra issues in the gift choice since we already have all the Wire Tappers volumes (Thanks Michael Breiner!)


This afternoon we brought our empty bottles back to the market for refund (or Pfand as the German goes). The bottles refund between 8 and 25 cents, depending on a scale we have yet to figure out. You simply feed the bottles into the machine and it prints you out a slip with a total amount. I have been able to figure out that water bottles are worth 25 cents while the beer bottles are worth 8 cents. The soda bottles are somewhere in the middle, but I'm not exactly sure where. The redemption machine figures that out. It's good at it. It speaks German and unlike me, can probably understand its own screen. Anyways, yesterday, we caught a funny article about a crazy Lithuanian recycling/refund scam. Apparently, the steep deposit amounts that Germany places on its bottles not only encourages recycling, but also has developed into a cottage industry for Eastern and Central European counterfeiters. The so called Leergut-Mafia has apparently been manufacturing fake bar codes, placing them on Lithuanian bottles and driving them over the border to redeem at various German supermarkets. German authorities estimate that Leergut-Mafia has cleared over €30,000 !

In other German news, it has been reported that Jurgen Klinsmann has been tapped to head up the US soccer program. Word travels fast to Germany, with the news information service of the U-bahn, the Berliner Fenster, reporting on the latest about 'California Klins.' Will the Jurge be able to field a team that can produce more than an own-goal in the 2010 World Cup? (The US also scored one goal that was legitimately theirs.) Time will tell. In the meanwhile Joachim Löw has quietly moved into head coach job here in Germany. Watching the "Deutschland: Ein Sommermaerchen" film it was easy to see that during this past summer's World Cup, Löw could pretty much see that it would be his team by the fall. Klins to the US, Maradona to Honduras, who will take Sven Goran Eriksson?

Enough football/soccer news. One final thing, during the writing of this post Suzanne has been on the couch with the beagle, watching one of her favorite movies, Reality Bites, in German. It doesn't get much better than that. (Sue adds: I knew it would pay to memorize the whole movie!) I guess tomorrow we try and find "Dumb and Dumber" in German.