Frankfurt expats

I came across this in a website about expat community in FFM. Though a little outdated, from 2004, I thought it was insightful nevertheless

Expats in Frankfurt number around 7,300. This figure only includes foreigners who live in the city of Frankfurt and originate from countries where the official language is English, i.e. UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The total population of Frankfurt is about 650,000. This means that the expat population makes up just over 1% of the total.The number of Frankfurt residents who hold no German passport is 165,000. This is nearly 26% of the total population. The majority of these foreigners are, in decreasing order of size: Turkish, Italian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin.The following data on expats in Frankfurt is valid as of 31.Dec.2004:

American: 3,292
British: 2,694
Irish: 459
Canadian: 353
Australian: 294
South African: (estimate circa 150)
New Zealander: (estimate circa 80)
Cypriot: 1

Note that the above figures are only for the city of Frankfurt am Main itself, not the surrounding areas in Hessen or the Rhein-Main region. Many expatriate workers make a daily commute into Frankfurt from the neighbouring cities.

Why queue for an iPhone? I'd rather wait in line for fashion week tkts

What is it with all these nerds and queuing up for an iPhone. To get one people wait in line for days practically. And then what do they do when they get their phone? They certainly don’t call anyone because they are so tired from standing in the cold on the pavement they go to sleep. I can understand it is something special but seriously… that much? The same goes for the Wii. Harry Potter books I can excuse. It’s literature and its educational so why not? I can understand people queuing up in an airport at Christmas for a flight home… but that’s so you can get out of the airport and into your comfort zone. We all know that airport food has severe side-effects and the toilets in the airports aren’t particularly sanitary, especially if the flight before you was RyanAir from Birmingham to Ibiza (Gah – help!).
I can understand waiting in queues for Olympic tickets or perhaps Milan fashion week. Sports in important and we all need to make an effort to look good so why not be the first to see the latest trends. But 27 hours in line for an iPhone? Who are you going to call? Ghostbusters? You can do that from a pay-phone? Your Mum? Does she want to talk to you? Me… don’t bother… I’m in the queue for fashion week and can’t talk now!

Why I hate the suburbs excpet one...

So meeting a friend for coffee or lunch is a whole torturous scenario. I live in the centre. This way I am as close to civilization as possible (i.e. the shops, the bars etc) so I expect people to share this mind-set with me. They don’t. Many of my good friends, live in the suburbs. And we are not talking about the inner suburbs like Aglangia, we are talking about Strovolos, which might as well be outer Mongolia. So I take a little offence to the fact that people expect me to drive over there to visit them, especially if they finish work at 2pm and I finish work at 6pm, on a good day (and that’s not including yoga, running, running to Lidl for Coco Pops or running to get new pajamas from Intimissimi). And so I expect to switch. So, one time I could to you in the prairies and the next time you come to me in the centre of civilization. Except it doesn’t work this way. People who live in the suburbs, especially the outer suburbs, seem to have developed a dread of the city and its centre. It’s as if I am asking them to visit me on the higher edges of the Himalayas in winter for tea wearing their swimsuits. It’s Nicosia people, come on. ‘I visited you, at the edge of the world, so now it’s your turn to come to me.’ They seethed with anger. It’s as if I called them country bumpkins, but if you live closer to Larnaca than Nicosia while you are still in Nicosia… come on. Once I met a friend near Metro in Lakatamia. ‘And so where do you live?’ I asked. ‘Right there’ she replied pointing to her car. ‘Are you telling me I came all this way to the middle of nowhere and you live there?’ I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I was too worried about how I was going to get home.
I will make one expectation though. The only suburb I will visit, without throwing a tantrum is Makedonitissa, because it’s not too far from the city and out of all the areas, it’s the best one. Perhaps even better than the centre!

Me in Milano

My first time in Italy was on holiday at the end of the first year at university with my family. Rome, Florence Pisa, and Siena. An Italian trip that showed me all the highlights of the Italian peninsula condensed into a week and four cities. Three and a half years later I was back in Italy for my Erasmus year. I landed in Rome and caught another flight to Milan where after an agonizing hour I discovered my suitcases were lost. But no time to stop there. Onto Stazione Centrale in Milan where I caught the train to Verona, literally within seconds. About an hour and a half later, baking cabin, as it was still warm in northern Italy in September, I finally arrived at the city of Romeo and Juliet where I began my fourth and final part of my journey, and caught a train to Trento. The train made its way from the top of the Po Valley, up up up into the Dolomites where, after seeing mountains jut out of the ground, flanked by tiny towns and budding villages I finally arrived in Trento.

That city was to be my home for the next four months or so. I got out of the station and as if by radar and sans map I found myself in the lobby of my hostel. Finding my friends who were on my placement year, we smoked and had a bottle of wine (that cost a Euro and tasted like cat pee) that we bought from the local supermarket. In fact it was so local, it practically catered to the immediately family of the proprietors.

Those four months in Trento taught me Italian grammar, geography and gastronomy, that my favourite coffee was Latte Macchiato (only €0.80 from the café opposite the Duomo and €1.20-€1.80 in Milan), that Americans were smart and more importantly fun, how to drink wine as if it were juice, who my friends were and who weren’t, that you can buy a slice of pizza per portare via, that Italian Churches looked like museums from the inside (and don’t they say beauty comes from within), that jumping into a fountain in the piazza in your underwear with your friends is illegal apparently, as is stealing dustbins from the street and a side-order or fried from a restaurant in Bologna, that ‘ti voglio bene’ means I love you, that the authorities need 16 days just to process a piece of paper, that getting your fiscal code may seem less mundane than originally thought, that travel is paramount for passion and knowledge, that you can catch a train to Venice for the day (€25 return and 2 hours each way) or a Taxi for five from Ljubljana to Venice for about €40, that Innsbruck was only 2 hours away and cold, that Lugano is the best city in Europe and even better with good company, that the Duomo in Bologna was stopped being built by the Vatican in case it was bigger than the Vatican and that Milan is a formidable city.

After I left I did not expect to return to Italy any time soon. I loved the country and knew it well (well… north Italy anyway) but there were so many other places to see and Spain was calling at the time… so I wrapped up Italy and got on with my life, thinking of Italy only occasionally until five years later…Italy was calling me to go back again…

The Establishment and the Mob

Society can roughly be split into two teams; the establishment and the alternatives (aka the mob). Each has stuck to its own kind. Until now. With the growth of gloablisation, the credit crunch, the search for new lifestyles, the lines between the establishment and the mob have blurred to the point of erosion. The result is a hodge-podge of people crossing society’s lines. People who lived in caves until three years ago now drive around in BMW and eat in swanky bar-restaurants (you can find some of these in a place beginning with ‘A’ and ending in ‘O’) and people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth have now gone all hippy and hang out at a place beginning with ‘K’ and ending with ‘A’). Hmmmm…

Thing is, a leopard cannot change its spots. (Tell this to the Nicosia Housewife who can’t get out of her leopard-print leotard). The newly-rich will never become old money so they might as well try stop sending their kids to the posh schools. The establishment will never be able to mingle with the lower-classes (i.e. people who do not own a holiday home in Geneva) and people who emerged from the swamp a year ago will never be able to shake off that stink. So why try? Well because we all want what we can’t have and want approval that we are all encompassing personalities from everyone. Even strangers in remote social groups.

I once read that only the rich can afford bad shoes. This is because the rich are the only ones who do ‘poor’ well. It is easy to act as if you are a tree-hugging hippy when you own the whole forest or want to save the whales when your school serves sushi from lunch. But not matter how rich you recently became, you will never be able to pull off that pedigree you aim for, which takes generations to cultivate. (And leopard-print leggings are not fooling anyone).

One of those annoying people on facebook

I hate these people who add people on Facebook in order to have more friends. Recently a stranger added me (though we had a mutual friend) and I though ‘why not’ and pressed accept. However, there were no photos of himself, no ‘wall’ to write on, all in all… no information. I though facebook was a place for friends. Well if you want to be my friend then show me who you are. To no avail. After asking who he was written in a manner of ‘have we met before?’ there was no reply and so I sent a message saying that I would delete him and wished him the ‘best of luck with all his endeavors on facebook.’ So as you can see, I hate people who add friends to show the world that they have friends.
Nevertheless, due to professional commitments I joined LinkedIn, which is, let’s face it, a professional facebook/resume/CV. Instead of uploading your holiday pics you upload what you have worked on. And instead of braggin about how many friends you have, you brag about your professional contacts and who you know (and who can do you favours). I have become the annoying LinkedIn guy who wants as many connections (LinkedIn-speak for ‘friends’) as possible. How did this happen? Because whereas I have friends in reality who are on facebook, I don’t have that many professional connections. I am after all a BabyBusinessMan, so what do you expect?

Speak Greek

What I find interesting is people’s attachment to language. I like languages; I speak as many as I can to whomever I can. However, in Cyprus this is frowned upon! Speaking in a language other than Greek could have you deported to a Siberia, or another Russian region, like… Limassol.

Recently, I asked a friend (in Greek) if he could do me a favour. His response was a gleeful ‘of course I’ll do it! But only because you asked me in Greek’.

‘So if I asked you in English you wouldn’t do it?’ He smiled. Imagine what he would have done to me if I asked him in… Swahili? Or more shocking… in Turkish! Yikes!

I think Cypriots have a strange relationship with their language. They insist oversees-Cypriots speak Greek yet at the same time do not realize that they themselves pepper their Greek-conversations with words like ‘thank you, bye, okay’ or my favourite ‘sorrrry’ followed by a loud ‘ah’ and phrased as a question. They are constantly placing English words in between Greek words.

The problem is not that oversees-Cypriots do not speak Greek. All do (albeit at varying degrees of fluency) and all try! And when oversees-Cypriots do try and speak Greek to a fellow Cypriot, we are answered in… English. This not only embarrasses us, but it also implies that we are illiterate buffoons who can’t even properly speak Greek. Eventually the whole conversation becomes so uncomfortable that we give up and end up speaking in Pidgin English so the other guy whose English is so-so can understand. The issue for Cypriots is that oversees-Cypriots do not speak, perfectly fluent, accent-less Greek. The funny thing is, neither do most Cypriots. If you want to speak perfect, accent-less Greek you need to go to Greece. Sorrrrrry aah?