Catching sweets at the carnival procession can be dangerous. Not only are there sweets and other things flying through the air, but if you do manage to catch something it might get snatched out of your hand.

Even if you are only watching the procession go by, there’s no guarantee that your neighbour will not knock you over with their over-sized handbag.

And I’m only talking about the adults!

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ELENA stands for Elektronischer Entgeltnachweis and was introduced in Germany at the beginning of 2010.

Companies now have to report details about their employees on a monthly basis to a new Government agency.  These include their wages, but also the number of days holiday or even on strike that they had.

The German Government has claimed that it will reduce paperwork and beaurocracy for companies, but my experience with the new system this week left me with a different opinion, as you can hear in the podcast:

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Truly German is a podcast that talks about the news in Germany. Sometimes this will by national news, maybe political, but we will also be covering some local topics.

We want to have some fun at the same time, so part of the podcast is our Länderquiz - in which our contestant has to guess in which Bundesland three different news stories took place in.

Will Maria win herself a T-Shirt this week?

The topics are:

1. Election results
2. Döner reward for voters
3. Hessen to relax smoking laws

The quiz covers the following stories:

1. Manga fans meet up
2. Diplomats gather at Schloss Horst
3. The 356th Onion Market

Listen to the episode and contact us if you’d like to have a go yourself!

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