Martin & Marseille

I live quite near to a patch of green called the Westpark. It's nothing special, an ordinary city park with a couple of lakes and lots of grass, not something I'd show friends who are around to Munich for a weekend. Mostly residents go there to relax and sit in the sun, as I do sometimes. And yet, I believe it may be used to show some typical German characteristics.

The one thing that marks the place as typical German is, of course, the signs that are all over the place. I've never come across so many signs in one place even anywhere in Germany - it makes me re-think my rules hypothesis. Here's some of my favourites.



These were the first signs to get my attention: 'Tobogganing forbidden' and 'Tobogganing slope (Use at your own peril)'. The reason this caught my interest was the realisation that here people are told things when things are allowed and when they're forbidden. Usually, you'd expect one at put signs up for the other - or not?

By the way, I tried getting the slope on the picture so you could get an idea of the danger the tobogganing here implies. Clearly, these signs are manifested spoilsports - all the interesting signs had the 'Verboten' signs up.



Definitely one of my favourites: 'Model (RC) boats are permitted here'. A sign of German liberalism? Probably not, the second sign already restricts the first: 'Additional rules for the lake in the Westpark. Only boats with reasonable speed are permitted. The use of racing boats, i.e. boats which have the purpose of going a maximum speed, is forbidden. Acoustic add-ons like sirens or music from cassette recorders or similar is forbidden.' A speed limit for model boats?



Of course we can't have that much fun all over the place. It struck me that 'Verboten' must take an important place in tourist guides for Germany. Still, we supply life-belts for a pond which is at best waist-high... I'm not quite sure what the empty signs are for, but I imagine they can be used to flexibly forbid something else. The green sign on the bottom right intrigued me, as well. It doesn't simply forbid people to feed the animals, but with a high biological precision it explains why (e.g.: 'The higher output of excrement of the animals will over-fertilise the water with nitrates and phosphates. This will lead to a negative change of the water quality...' and so on.).



Protecting nature is obviously quite important. Here we're stopped from walking across a wetland - although it looks more like a place no-one could be bothered to mow. I also like the one on the right 'Don't go on the ice or into the reeds - water birds and fish need their peace'.



The grill zone! Everyone understands this sign. There is, however, no sign anywhere saying barbecues are forbidden. I suppose they expect residents to read the Münchner Grüngartenverordnung or whatever, because obviously barbecues need to be explicitly allowed. Don't tell me other countries do it the same way.

The one on the right goes on for ages why we need to be careful concerning all the nature. I've seen signs like these elsewhere - but I get the impression that here, they're actually read.



'Dogs are only permitted on the paths, on a not too long leash.'. I'm surprised the length isn't specified. By the way: when I took this picture, I was standing slightly clumsily on the path, leaning against my bike. Another biker dashed around the corner and nearly ran into me. He started swearing 'Oh putain... quel con!'. I thought this quite an amusing thing to happen as I was working on my former Marseille blog, so I took this as a good sign. I had so much fun in France, I'll take a few 'cons' without being offended . It occurred to me that this guy might be the reason for the sign on the right, for which I had so far not found a use: 'Cyclists, go slowly! Dangerous curves! Take care of the pedestrians.' I tried getting some of the dangerous curves on the picture. This also was the only sign I could find with traces of vandalism, although some others were quite bent.


So, what does this mean? I don't really want to jump to conclusions, but one might interpret this as evidence that German's like their stuff well regulated. Perhaps - and this it not that unlikely - Bavaria is exceptionally German in this respect, although of course they'd never calls themselves German.

Last week-end I moved to Munich. Saturday morning I took the plane from Marseilles, had a brief stop at my parents to have a party with a couple of friends and Sunday evening I was in my new room in Munich. Monday I started working for Rohde & Schwarz, fulltime, after spending several weeks near-holiday to finish off my stay in France. This probably must have been the biggest change-to-time ratio I've ever had and I can't say it left me completely indifferent.
Being thrown from one city straight into another is probably the best way to get differences as clear as possible. And, as I had grown used to France and Marseilles I managed to get a look at Munich which is usually only possible to foreigners moving here.
I must say I really felt like moving a lot more than 1500km or whatever the distance is. In fact, I had to re-get used to Germany. Right at the beginning, there were two things I couldn't get right: traffic lights and cycle paths.
After half a year in Marseilles, my brain had adapted to filter out red lights from my field of vision or at least to treat them as a little warning ('careful, mate, there might be cars dashing out of some roads'). But here people seem religiously to obey the little red man. People who seemed otherwise quite normal and healthy were seriously stopping at an otherwise deserted junction, waiting for Mr Green to allow them to pass the following two and a half metres. The thing is: it is actually quite wise to do so - German drivers will dash across a crossing if they've got the green light. I had grown used to seeing red traffic lights as a kind of suggestion (the first time I hired a car in France I was seriously scared I'd treat the road like I did on my bike), but with an extra bit of watching the road.
Cycle paths, on the other hand, were something faint from the distant past to me. In Marseilles, they just don't exist and I assume no-one saw a point in creating some if half of the city's biking population was moving to Munich end of March 2007. So riding the bike was an adventure every day, involving dashing in between cars and buses, hopping on and off extremely high curbs, doing fast brakes and accelerations and generally living a bit like Tony Hawk (If you want to see a documentary about Marseillaise traffic, Taxi 4 is just coming to the cinemas). Here, I still have to find the road that doesn't have it's own lane for cyclists, but quite often I still speed along on the road amongst the cars making them wish this psychopath would stay on the, hum, cycle path.

Comparing Munich and Marseilles is quite a valid thing to do. They're both not state capitals (but regional ones), the still rank quite high up (Marseilles is France's second largest city, while Munich should be along the top five somewhere, but on the other hand is number one or two as a tourist's destination) and they are of similar size (both around 1,2 million population). They both start with an M (very important) and they both consist of former villages. The latter is something not apparent on the first sight in both cases, but still very true. I'm not 100% sure about Munich, but I think they have hometown-patriotism quite above the national average, which is definitely the case in Marseilles (which is quite remarkable as in France everyone seems to be mad about living in Paris). So I will be writing one of my last blog entries about Marseille by comparing it to Munich.

Getting here was a bit like moving to France. I arrived at the train station, I was early, I new nothing about the city, I couldn't understand a word people were saying (OK, I'm exaggerating. But the Bavarian accent is still quite a heavy one). I had a room somewhere but I still had to find it.
But much more than that, it was very, very different. Only when driving around these Bavarian streets I realised what a bustling city Marseilles had been. In comparison, Munich seemed to be a quiet little village. On the other hand, the last time I had thought a city was as clean as this was in Monaco. Not only were the Munich street cleaners obviously more effective (less strikes, probably) but also the average Münchner doesn't seem to chuck rubbish everywhere or let his dog crap all over the place, neither of which applies to a lot of Marseillaises. But not only the streets, everything else seemed to be neat and tidy, too. The city layout wasn't as chaotic, the tube stations were clean, the traffic was quite orderly and even the beggars looked more sympathetic and neat.

Tube stations. Or metro, U-Bahn, whatever you want to call them. The minute I stepped into one here I regretted not taking a picture in a Marseillais one for comparison. Karlsruhe only has trams, so my first personal metro system was the one in Marseilles, which consisted of two lines (the red and the blue one). Every station had security personnel with ferocious dogs, and more than once I saw them actually being needed. Stations are rubbish bins like the rest of the city. As they can't afford (don't want) to deal with security more than necessary, metro stops running at 21.00 during the week and 0.30 the week-end. After that it's 6 lines of night buses who get a 5-man police escort since a bus was burnt down.
This all came to me in a flash when I went down the stairs to my first Munich metro ride. Not even a cigarette butt was to be seen, the only thing that I immediately remarked was the sign with the Benutzungsordnung (rules of use). Good old Germany, I thought (by the way, that doesn't contradict what I wrote about rules before). The public transport network is excellent, well designed and goes everywhere all the time. The first time I went to the centre I was actually afraid I couldn't get back home again, but the U-Bahn seems to run long enough. One thing I was absolutely astonished to see were public toilets (free ones) in some stations. This was a concept I hadn't even dared thinking about, but I tried them and they were only one or two notches worse than the ones in my residence. But what I liked most was the sign on the toilet door: Bedürfnisanstaltbenutzungsordnung. I'm serious.

As for the people, I find them difficult to compare. I can't really say if the Marseillais had been a friendly lot or not. I must say I usually experienced a hospitality I would not have expected in Germany, and the mixture of France-Provence-North Africa you get in Marseilles generally provides a friendly and relatively tolerant mix. It happened to me that some kid from the street started talking to me, making sure I had a good impression of Marseilles even walking along with me for a bit before returning to his mates.
For some reason, I was surprised how friendly people in Munich are. I felt like being the 10000th customer when I got some groceries from Tengelmann the way I was treated. There's a lot of greeting and the Bavarian accent even adds some friendliness.

Even the city is friendly. It's obviously beautiful and well looked after. Marseilles has it's nice spots, too - but walk through the city centre and it looks like a dump, rubbish and dog crap wherever you can still walk with all those building sites. There's not a huge amount of green, probably because the mountains, the Calanques and the sea are all so close. Munich has the English Garden, the world's biggest city park (I've been told), the river Isar with it's beautifully restored riversides and lots of other parks.

However, I can see I'm starting to sound like a boring guide book, and I shouldn't: I've probably managed to experience one of the highest contrasts possible without leaving the continent.