Parking regulations

I am often intrigued and sometimes even puzzled by parking regulations in Germany.

There are some quite simple rules, usually involving a think called a Parkscheibe or quite simply a ticket machine.

But every now and then I come across a sign that causes confusion so that I myself become unsure about where to park.

What is really annoying though, is when I sign is quite definite about whether you can park or not, and people just ignore it.

Precisely that is happening in front of our block of flats at the moment on a regular basis. There is a turning circle which you are meant to leave free for other people to turn round in, it being the end of the road (unless you have some form of special permission, eg. the district nurse).

But some drivers are so blatantly ignoring the signs – that they actually park directly under them! Try talking your way out of this:

The last time I looked, the fine for parking here was 25 Euros. I’m sure if the town were to check here a bit more often, they could make several hundred Euros every day!

P.S. it happens in the UK as well 🙂

Please don’t park in front of the sign

A couple of months ago during my visit to Madrid I had an interesting discussion about how bad the locals were at observing parking restrictions.

So when I saw this situation in the UK the other day, I couldn’t resist taking a photograph of it:

The sign reads “No parking in front of gates – delivery access required at all times”.

Comments welcome!

Die Flatrate

A Flatrate is a method of paying for telephone calls or for internet usage.

Generally a flatrate will mean that all calls to a particular network or destination are included in a fixed monthly price. Similarly, all internet usage may be included in that price.

Some flatrates do, however, have restrictions on them such as a maximum amount of minutes or Gigabytes that can be used in any one month.

Generally a combined telephone and internet flatrate will cost between 30EUR and 50EUR, although if you are only staying in Germany short-term then you should check the conditions carefully as most providers will want you to take out a 2-year contract.

To hear a simple explanation and a short discussion in German, listen to the podcast:

[audio:http://www.germanwordsexplained.com/mp3/2008-06-05_flatrate.mp3]
(Press the “play” button to listen to the podcast)

Download the MP3 file | Comment in the forum

Subscribe to the podcast | Listen by telephone

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