We Won’t Miss Pt. 3

And now, the final edition of “we won’t miss.” Enjoy!

We won’t miss the lack of German customer service. I will never forget when we were sitting in Mandy’s diner, a restaurant near our house, and our waitress got mad at us because she brought two servings of an appetizer when we had only ordered one. She insisted that we were lying and we had ordered two. She didn’t want to take it away or take it off our bill. She was so rude, and it infuriated us so much that we can’t bring ourselves to go back. Too bad that was the only place we know of where we could get jalapeno poppers. Gosh, I love those things. And no, the commissary does not sell them. Speaking of the commissary…

We won’t miss the inability to go to other grocery stores. Sure, we can go to the German grocery store, but then we are paying extra (because it’s in Euro) for the same products. Sometimes I get so fed up with the commissary. Their produce is far from fresh, and oftentimes, their chicken expires within 1-3 days of the purchase date. In fact, I have brought chicken home that expired THAT day. Ugh. Oh, and I won’t miss paying exorbitant prices on our groceries. I had my mom check it out, and we are almost paying double on our milk price to what we’ll pay when we get back. That’s just ridiculous, especially since pregnancy gave me such a hankering for milk.

We won’t miss my cell phone contract. We never even went near the monthly minute limit. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what I am allotted. I just know that we pay far too much for what we use. It comes out to about $90/month and I use less than 200 minutes/month. It’s an iPhone, so I have unlimited data usage as well, but most of the time, I’m on our home network, so I’m not even accumulating data usage. Bah.

We won’t miss having to pay bill at the bank. That’s right. We cannot pay for my iPhone online. You have to either have a direct debit set up from your German bank account or go to the bank and pay directly from your bank account. We did not like the direct debit option, because it didn’t give us a chance to review the bill first. So now, we have to go to the bank once a month, deposit money and then go pay our mobile phone bill at the machine in the lobby. It would not be as much of a headache if the banks had good hours, but they don’t. They close at noon at least one day a week and it varies by branch. They are closed for an hour and a half or so around lunch time. And they are closed by 4 or 4:30 in the afternoons. They are also closed on Saturday. When, pray tell, do Germans make it to the bank?

We will not miss dealing with two currencies. It has made budgeting rather difficult, and it gets a little tricky with our cash budgeting since the amounts we need each month vary with the exchange rate. It will be nice to only have to withdraw one currency type each time we go to the bank.

We will not miss paying for parking everywhere. If a store has free parking here, it’s a major advertising point. Only really big stores like IKEA and OBI (the Home Depot equivalent) have free parking. The new mall in Mannheim doesn’t even have free parking. With nearly 82 million people in a country the size of Montana, I guess space really does come at a price.

We will not miss having to spend thousands of dollars to visit our family. Once we’re back, they will just be about an hour or so away by car. Here, however, we have to take off from work (read: lost money), buy plane tickets that are usually in excess of $1000 each, pay someone to watch Béni, and pay for the normal expenses of being on vacation (rental car, eating out, etc.).

And last but not least,

We will not miss being in the Army!!!