She was so helpful! And I couldn’t believe all the money I was going to save by getting not just the internet, but also online TV, an iPad, and the family extra sims. How lucky I was to get all this before Christmas when they were just making all these savings available to a few select customers! I had spent two hours in the telekom shop, my head was spinning, and I was frantically calculating the exact amount of all the money I was going to save buying all this stuff. – Then, I don’t know whether it was exhaustion or suspicion or a combination of both, I decided I was just going to get the internet for our new home in the Forbacher Strasse and that was that. I decided not to save all these hundreds of euro by spending money on purchasing stuff we didn’t need, didn’t want, and could’t afford.

Why did this story come back to me, almost a month after it happened? Why tonight? Well, I just listened to the RTE news reporting that the CRC saved 1.4m euro by spending a quarter of a million on a retirement package, according to a former chief of the CRC. Amazing. – Although, I knew that something like this was coming. Because: the true scandal about the sad CRC saga is not that 233,333 santa bears had to be sold to pay for the 740k retirement package, but that nobody on the CRC board apparently thought that any of this going on was shameful. They thought they were saving money!

They live in the same world as James O’Reilly who says, and what is worth: probably believes, that you can cut out almost a billion euro from the health budget without this having any impact on the health services being delivered. – It’s breath-taking. Infuriating.

Pádraig is getting better and is well on the road to Eilbek. The nurse today remarked on “Was ist das bloß für ein langer Lulatsch!” – she had seen him for the first time and was trying to come to terms with his length. And I had a flashback to a time almost 40 years ago, when someone had called me for the last time “ein langer Lulatsch”. Words, like smells, music, or pictures can bring back memories you didn’t even know you still had them in a flash. We didn’t manage to talk to an Arzt today, they were all busy, but everything looked almost perfect: he opened his eyes when we arrived and seemed to take in at least some of what was going on around him. We left him with a friend reading (old) Irish poetry to him. When we came back he was at his most relaxed for a long long time. Incredible what old Irish poetry, read out by a nice, sympathetic voice can do to you! Forget about acupuncture or traditional medicine! No contest!

I went for another walk around the ‘barrio’ and took a few pictures: people doing ‘Durchlüften’ and ‘Durchzug machen’, ‘wie es sich gehört’; foot paths kept without proper pavement to make room for the trees; and adds for neighbourhood  social schemes. Germany the way the Germans don’t even see it anymore because they are so used to seeing it every day.

And then, tonight, again, ‘rush hour’ in the UKE at the end of the visiting time. If you ever were in Beaumont at 8pm, at the end of visiting time, you’ll remember the queues of people trying to pay for their parking tickets, trying to get on the bus, trying to get past all the other hundreds of people trying to get home. Germany is different.

 

 

Today’s German Music Tip
Hamburg, Atlantic, Alster, Udo, Die Bühne ist angerichtet, MTV Unplugged 2011. Egal – I like Udo Lindenberg.
What’s hot
Zen
What’s cold
Perfektion
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Glückspilz, Lulatsch

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