For several months, one topic has been in the news regularly in Germany: Google Street View.

This has several reasons, but to put it bluntly: Google didn’t ask permission.

Germany has some very strict privacy laws, many of which come as a result of the country’s recent history.  Those residents that lived through the period of the GDR are especially aware of people knowing too much about them.

There are, for example, rules on how photos of people can be used, and until a few years ago, you needed special permission to take an aerial photograph.

But whilst these situations are fairly clear cut and something that every photographer here needs to be aware of, taking a photograph of a building is different.

Many people take the opinion, that you need permission to photograph and then publish pictures of someone’s home.  On the other hand, I know of experts who say that this is not the case.  If taken from a public area, ie. the street, without any form of technical assistance, they say it is not a problem to take that photo and publish it. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I visited the KiKa Summer Tour in Wiesbaden with my daughter.  This was our third visit to one of the tour events, having visited Wiesbaden and Cologne in previous years.

With temperatures forecast for around 30°C it was the perfect day for it, even though there was a chance of thunder storms in the afternoon.

Juri and Singa welcome the cast onto the stage

The amount of attractions laid on had either increased in number compared to the event two years ago, or were spread out more.  I certainly felt that there were not as many people there as there had been two years ago, but maybe that really was due to having a larger area and two different stages.  Certainly the queue to climb up “Bernd das Brot” was not as long!

The audience in front of the main stage

In fact, the queues are the worst part of the day – that being reminded with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) hints that KiKa is funded by the license fee.

Everything else is well done for the children.  There is an area in front of the main stage where only children can enter.  On entering, the mobile phone number of one of their parents is written on their arm, so that when they want to leave, the crew can contact someone.  Obviously the phone needs to be turned on and audible for this to work!

But this year, for the first time I saw the security crew making sure that the smaller children got to the front of that area so that they could see, and also that the children were offered water to drink whilst they were in there and out of the reach of their parents.

The active stage

The smaller “active” stage is lower, so that the children really can go almost up to close to it.  At one point, a number of children – including my daughter – were allowed onto this stage to dance!

And dancing certainly was the order of the day.  We danced to the A-E-I-O-U song a total of 4 times, with my daughter having the slight advantage that we had practised the steps together the previous day!

Towards the end of the afternoon with less than an hour to go until the finale, the thunder finally arrived and aptly interrupted the Tabaluga show, whose cast were slightly caught off guard by the fact that it wasn’t their thunder sound effect!  It rained for about 10 minutes, and then stopped for all of the stars to gather on the main stage for one last dance.

The summer tour is well worth a visit.  On the way home my daughter cited dancing on the active stage with the presenters Juri and Singa as her favourite part of the day, with meeting Juri himself (to have a CD autographed) coming a close second.

If you ask for a “Spezi” in a restaurant in Germany, then the most probable drink that you will be served is probably going to be a mixture of cola with orange lemonade.

However, the term is actually a registered trademark: Spezi® and belongs to an organisation called the “Spezi Markengetränkeverband Deutschland e.V.” which is a collection of 13 breweries that produce a drink by the same name.

Breweries?  Yes, not only was I not aware of the trademark until recently, but even less did I suspect that the drink used to be a type of beer.

And yet the product is familiar.  I have drunk products labelled as “Spezi” in the past, probably not realising that I was drinking something special.  It’s even a slightly different mixture, as it contains orange juice.

However, other products on the market using the orange lemonade recipe, “Mezzo Mix” for example, which is produced by Coca Cola, are still referred to colloquially as “Spezi”.  Not by their manufacturers, of course, but by the people buying and drinking them.

Some restaurants even mix it themselves from Coca Cola and Fanta, or Pepsi and Miranda, and write it on the menu as “Spezi”.  I wonder how many of them have no idea that they are using a trademark without selling authentic product?

There are also regional names in some parts of Germany for the mixture of cola and orange lemonade.  My favourite has to be “Kalter Kaffee” (cold coffee), but particularly confusing is the fact that it is apparently called “Diesel” in Cologne – anywhere else that refer to a mixture of cola with beer.

Spezi on the other hand can still mean a drink mixed with bier in some areas, or even with spirits.

So what does the unsuspecting tourist do when they want to try this particular German drink?

Ask the waiter would seem to be a reasonable suggestion if you are visiting someone new, unless the menu specifically refers to the trademarked drink.