Just Observations

 By the end of 2025....I will have wrapped up four segment periods of Germany-time...adding up to around 32 years.

Twenty observations:

1.  My skeptical 'index'?  Hyped up and I readily admit that my internal 'index' pings a minimum of ten times a day. 

I'm not saying Germany drew me to be this skeptical on things....but it helped.

2.  I've reached the point where a 30-minute train delay doesn't really bother me. Course, in July, and a train-air-conditioning unit is marginally working....the 35-C temp gets me pretty negative.

3. I've reached a point where I note at least one-third of German beers as crap (like Bitburger and Astra).  

4.  Whenever a German politician says he can fix a problem....I tend to want to hear the solution in detail, and three-quarters of the time....I find the solution lacking.

5.  The difference between a left-of-center and right-of-center German politician?   Millimeters, at best.

6.  Trying to compare a Starbucks coffee with a regular German bakery shop coffee?  No real difference....other than Starbucks being 200-percent over-priced.

7.  Amazing to put on my 1984-hat and walk around in 2025....seeing constant help-wanted signs everywhere you walk today.

8.   With all that hype around 1990 about the Cold War ended....it's just odd how bunker-discussions started back up in the past two years, and how nation-wide warning Apps/sirens started back up.  On any given evening on public  TV....someone is pumping up chatter of a possible Russian invasion, and how the German Army can only fight for 7 days before they run out of bullets.

9. It's interesting how German public TV (with its tax) lingers on, while the bulk of the under-25 crowd has zero interest in viewing.

10. In 1978, you hardly ever saw a beggar or homeless guy on a German street.....while in 2025.....you can probably count more than 200,000 existing in Germany today.

11.  You can engage on 500 different German 'what-if' historical situations, and get a hour-long talk going in any pub or beer-garden.

12.  Germans are the least-likely conspiracy theorists in the world (my humble view).

13.  In my 30-odd years living around the US/Panama....I've seen various instances of food poisoning. From my German era....not a single case. You just can't eat a bad bratwurst.

14.  It's an odd place where you could be sitting on a German city bench, and have two guys approach....flashing a badge, and trying to set you up to be taken-in/robbed by fake-cops.  

15.  In 1980s Germany, you could have asked about such-and-such regulations to cover X-situation, and be told it's 3 lines of text.  2025, you'd be told it's seven pages of text.

16. Something historically that you come to realize....that the German dog tax is presently 215 years old.

17.   After you've driven at 210 mph on the autobahn for 20 minutes....you get over this speed 'thing'.

18.  The wildest accident I've witnessed over the years....at 6AM in the K-town region....on some road to work....I came upon a German garbage truck that had suddenly encountered a huge wild boar and it'd collapsed the whole front axel of the truck  about three minutes before I came up on the truck  (could have been me). The three guys were standing there shaking their heads, with one guy gulping down a Jagermesiter bottle to calm his nerves.

19.  For every German who professes some authority or knowledge of modern fashion....there's another German living in 1970s/1980s style clothing.  Its hard for a sixty-year old German to clear a closet. 

20. I was in a German language class with a Ghana-guy, and one day for break...we engaged in a talk about complicated German rules.  He was asking if there was some 'gain'. I had to pause over this and eventually countered....this was a Roman thing....where they (the Germans) complicated things so much....that Rome collapsed. It's a BS-answer, but it could be one of sixty reasons why Rome did eventually collapse.