It wasn't until about 2-3 months ago that someone told us we needed something called a parking disc:
It seems that whenever you see this sign:
It means that you have 2 hours of parking, and that you need to use the parking disc to show when you arrived.
We've used this particular parking lot and these spaces for 6 months and never gotten a ticket, but that streak ended yesterday.
On the plus side, we had a parking disc in the car. On the minus side, we didn't use it because we didn't notice the blue thing with the P under it on the sign.
Ah well. The ticket is 10 Euros, and as with all things German, we must do a bank transfer to pay it.
Turns out the rules for using a disc are pretty generous. If you arrive just after 3:pm (say 3:03, you can set your parking disc to 3:30). I guess you round up.
What's to stop someone from creating a device that updates itself a half hour at a time as time passes?
Visitor Problems.
Today, we had Robin's sister Connie come to Germany. Rather than spending 200 Euros paying for a couple of us to take a train to Frankfurt, meet Connie and then have three of us take the train back, we decided to use a local cab company to drive her from the airport. It costs 200 Euros.
We run into a problem with first (or second) time visitors where it's not easy to communicate with them at the airport. Most (80%?) of US phones don't work in Europe where we use GSM. And if they do, call, text and data rates are outrageous.
You can use a pay phone at the airport, but it costs upwards of 10 euros per minute with a credit card, and it's hard to understand if you've never seen German.
If you have a phone that can Internet, you can use public WIFI at the airport, assuming it's working, and communicate via Whatsapp or FB Messenger, but that's not always available.
Often when they get here, they just don't use their phone, except for via Wifi, but with Connie's arrival, we're going to buy a cheap phone and a local pay-as-you-go SIM card for her (and others to use) while they're here., For data, we can set our phones to tethering and they can connect to our phone hotspot.
The problem there is if they forget to disconnect (or we forget to disable it), and the guest streams Hulu all night on the hotspot instead of Wifi.
In any case, we still don't have a good solution for visitors when they first arrive. Maybe we mail them the temp phone? With Deutsch post being so terrible, I have no idea how long it would take to get to the US, if it gets there at all.
We've had terrible luck with normal DP. Sending a letter is 7 Euros + to the US, and takes 2-4 weeks to get there.
The most reliable way is to send it via 2-3 day, but that costs 50 euros.
We'll sort it out, but it's another couple of things I learned in Germany this week.
