A Day Out

I went and spent six hours in the heart of Wiesbaden yesterday (in the shopping district).  Two curious things stood out from this long extended walk.

First, I entered into a store and had to stand there for a while....waiting for my wife in her search for the 'right' clothing.  In through the front door strolls two kids...both around eight years old....unaccompanied.  They proceeded to run through the store, like it was some type of playground.  They eventually made their way to the elevator, and from what I could observe...punched the button for the top of the building where the parking deck was located.  Because of the location display above the door, you can note where the elevator was heading.

Store fronts turning into playgrounds?  Germans would have laughed ten years ago, but you have a number of buildings in the district which have flipped into affordable housing units, with non-Germans taking up residence.  There's no playground for the kids in this whole region of town, and they've started to turn the stores into their playground.  One can sense that this is going to develop into a long term problem and eventually turn shoppers off if a store ends up with a dozen kids romping through and making a nuisance out of themselves.

Second, beggars.  In this six-hour period, I was confronted by five different beggars (they actually came up within three feet of me, and were begging).

If you've ever been to Wiesbaden, one of the charm-points is the cafes and restaurants right there on the sidewalk.  Well....that's precisely where the beggars are making their pitch.  They are anticipating guilt, and people handing over money.

Well, Germans just aren't that guilty anymore, and their patience with this 'new' crowd is growing less and less accepting.  Five years ago, you could have spent an entire weekend in the district, with no beggars.  Things have changed a good bit.  If you go and count the street-walking beggars, and the stationary ones (they've planted themselves at certain points), there's probably fifty to seventy active beggars now in the district, or in the train-station area.

The bulk of these folks....I have my doubts that they are here and registered for possible asylum.  All are male, and usually under the age of thirty.  They skipped the process of registering for asylum because they know that they will fail the test and be sent back to their home country.....so lingering here as beggars is more acceptable.

Something like this in the 1970s or 1980s, in Wiesbaden?  No.  This is something that popped up in the past five years.  The locals seem to be shaking their head because they figure that some social agency would handle these folks, and they'd be 'taken care of'.  So questions arise, and this often now ends up as a topic of conversation.