A Life Changing Deployment

Ten years ago today I was sent with my Air Force squadron to a super secret squirrel base in the middle of the Israeli desert for the majority of the month of August and it was the single most life changing trip of my life. I saw and heard a lot of things that reminded me of very unsavory parts of my life prior to that while also seeing and hearing things that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

Before leaving Germany we had to attend a mandatory briefing in which the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations ( OSI ) told us to take the batteries out of our cell phones and place them on the desk in front of us. The briefer then went on to talk to give us a briefing telling us of the hazards in the area. The strangest part of what he relayed to us was that we had to be extremely careful about where we discussed any information that was sensitive in nature because the Israelis are the forefront at collecting intelligence. We were told to never speak about sensitive information in our quarters or any other place other than a huge 10' X 8' vault that we flew in with us.

I left Germany towards the end of the first week of August 1999 flying on a military C-5 cargo plane and arrived on an airstrip in a desolate looking surroundings. My flight was the second of two flights so we were met on the tarmac by our comrades who had arrived the day prior in old Chevy pick-ups painted light brown. We loaded our bags up into the bed of the pick-ups and then jumped into the beds ourselves and headed off to our accommodation.

Our accommodations were large aluminium cans that held 6 of us in 3 bunk-beds if I remember correctly. I don't remember them having AC and it was very difficult to fall asleep at night because it was so hot. The flight training we did with the Israeli Air Force ( IAF )was pretty mundane. It was actually so easy compared to the amount of flight training we did in Germany that I don't remember too much about it.

The life-changing events on this trip took place away from work but not necessarily away from the base we were deployed to. Because the work was not time consuming we had a lot of time to mingle with the IAF members around a small mini-mall type of building that had a bakery, a small convenience store and a arcade/pool hall type place.

The Israelis were very keen to speak with us but for the most part the Americans didn't want to hang out and talk to the Israelis. Not sure if the OSI briefing before we left had put them off or if it is just a normal American tendency but I would say that there were only about 5 of us that really hung out and spoke with them in great depths.

I can't say I had any special feeling for or against the Israelis at that point in my life. I really didn't understand why they were fighting with the Palestinians nor did I really care. But that was soon to change.

I remember a few of the conversations I had with some of the IAF members and it is was very strange. I felt like I had been transported from the year 1999 back to the Alabama or Georgia of the 1950's. The outright racism and hatred for the Arabs as an ethnicity is/was no different to what some white Americans in the south of America felt about black Americans. I had experienced some racist speech from my paternal grandmother who was born in 1921 and lived in Florida. I remember when she had to have an operation done and they were telling her about a blood transfusion she made a point to tell them that she didn't want any coon blood.

I got the same types of speech from the Israelis I spoke with. In fact, I put the the blood transfusion question to them and one told me fiercely that he would 'rather die than take the blood of an Arab.'

We were allowed off of the base a few times while we were there. A couple times we were allowed to drive the 20 or so kilometers to a nearby town that had a McDonald's and another time to the small city nearby named Be'er Sheva that had a large mall.

We also has the opportunity to go to Jerusalem one Saturday which was a really special moment for me. It was such a wonderful experience being able to explore Jerusalem and Bethlehem (after making it through the Israeli checkpoints) as an 18 year old. To crouch down to enter the manger turned church where Jesus Christ was purportedly born. To see the Mount of Olives, the Wailing wall and the golden domed mosque in the skyline of the city was inspiring.

And on the following weekend while the majority of the squadron went to party in Tel-Aviv to part in the discos and on the beaches myself and a small group of maybe 9 others went on a trip to the Dead Sea. We drove down some winding type roads with markers on the side telling us how far below sea level we were with each drop.

We drove along the coast of the Dead Sea and pulled into a parking lot where we got out and trooped up the side of Mount Masada. We walked around for about an hour and half exploring the mountain top before descending sown in some sort of cable car for a small fee.

After we had all loaded up into the van our guide drove us a short distance to a Dead Sea spa. I remember going into the Dead Sea and as I had slid down a small drop off up on Masada I had a series of scratches down the side of my shin that stung like you wouldn't believe upon entering the water. They were actually scabbed by the time we left the spa.

Walking out into the Dead Sea is a very special experience. You get to a point where your feet our no longer touching the sea bottom but you are still standing up right. The water is that dense because of the salt content.

Most of the squadron had left by the last week in August but I was due to leave on the last flight out and for some reason to which my mind cannot recall now our airlift was diverted for some reason so I ended up being bored out of my mind stuck on this base in the middle of the desert with no one except an officer and a handful of Senior NCO's.

Upon returning to Germany I started to research about Israel and Palestine and the problems surrounding them. I found out that most of the Israelis were not from the 12 tribes of Judea but were Europeans who had migrated to that part of the world. That is why I saw some Israeli Air Force members who were extremely Arab looking and others who were as pale as a pearl and said that they were originally Russian or Lithuanian.

I guess I was very fortunate to go when I did because a year later the sister squadron at Spangdahlem went to the same location and never got to step foot off base because the second intifada had started up.

The Froggin Alps

Last Friday I flew into Frankfurt-Hahn airport on ol' RyanAir (who did me another solid by the way!!) from Birmingham to go and visit some family and friends. As I believe I have said before Hahn airport is an old American airbase that they gave back to the Germans after downsizing sometime in the 1990's and it is very remote as most American military bases in Europe tend to be.

I landed and raced to be first through customs of course to call my ride and find out that they were still 20 minutes out. As it was coming up to 8PM when we arrived in the Kaiserslautern area and we had a long day ahead of us tomorrow my friend and I grabbed a quick bite to eat from the absolute best Turkish restaurant in Germany and took the food back to his place.

Early the next morning we woke-up and threw our bags into the car and headed out down the autobahn in the direction of Basel Switzerland. For my money Switzerland is the most beautiful country in all of Europe but it actually was not our destination on this occasion. From Basel we turned southwest in the direction of Geneva only to cross the border into France and continue on our way to our Saturday afternoon destination of Grenoble.

I first visited Grenoble back in 2000 or 2001 with my friend Angel and discovered it to be a very cool city indeed. It is said that it is the Silicon Valley of France and has a world-class university all set in some of the most dramatic scenery in France. To understand the grandness of it you need to imagine a capital letter 'Y'. The letter 'Y' is the plain or basin that the city is set across while along the perimeter of the letter 'Y' is all very large mountains.

My friend Tory and I checked into my usual hotel when I visit Grenoble and after picking up my son we were off racing around the hairpin turns heading up into the mountains in the silver Audi A4 that Tory had rented. The elevation on this particular mountain gets up to about 6000 feet (1900 meters) and the views of the city and the river that runs through it are really quite amazing.

We stopped off on the winding road a few more times that we had planned because my 6 year old son didn't really take to the ride too much and felt a little car-sick. After some fresh air and photographs in the much cooler weather (than below in the city) we were on our way through the mountain before reaching the little village of Saint-Nizer-du-Mouncherotte and turning around to head back down towards the city.

After that short trip up the mountain and because of the lack of sleep from the night before we had to crash at the hotel for a couple hours and grab a siesta while my son watched some weird French cartoons. Upon awaking we drove towards the areas largest shopping centre 'The Grande Place' and walked around before dropping my son of back to his mother at sunset and heading with Tory into the city centre so give him a little tour.

The gem in the crown of Grenoble is what they call 'The Bastille'. It is a fortified structure (that some might call a castle in the nontraditional way) on the side of a mountain just outside the city centre and has bubble like cable-cars taking you up to it unless you choose to take the long walk on the marked pathways. The signs say that this is where the French 'resistance' attacked from but I can't help but imagine it is where they hid form the Germans.

As you can see from the weather it was not so nice on Sunday in the Frog Alps. The mountain range you see here is where we had drove the previous day and taken the previous photo of the city from.

We didn't spend long up on The Bastille as we were hungry for breakfast/lunch and the restaurant up on The Bastille didn't have anything I wanted to try so we came back down the bubble like cable-car and found a nice Lebanese restaurant in the city centre.

We had lunch and then dropped my son back off to his mom before hitting the road again. A seven hour one-way ride to stay 24 hours in Grenoble would have been worth it but the most beautiful and charming town in all of Europe is on the way back towards Geneva so we had to stop.

Annecy is about 40 km southwest of Geneva and boasts the largest Bastille day celebration in all of France, or so I have heard from a frog. Nevertheless, I absolutely adore this town although I must admit on this trip it was the most crowded I had ever seen it. And that was with the weather smelling worse than the formage aisle at Carrefour.

We walked around periodically stopping for coffee when the rain would start to come down especially hard and made our way through the throngs of people for about an hour before stopping off to have simply the best pizza I have had on the entire time I have lived on this continent.

We departed Annecy around 6PM and began our journey back towards Kaiserlsautern. It seemed like there was one gigantic storm cloud over the entire country you and I call Switzerland and that cloud even was generous enough to share itself with southern Germany. We arrived at Tory's house at midnight and went straight to sleep as he had work in the AM and I had a bus to catch back to Hahn.

And here is my (Top Gear) top tip. It took me 6 and a half hours from the time I left my friend's house to when I stepped through my door. It only takes 8 hours to drive from my house in Birmingham to Tory's house in Germany... Airports suck...

A Dangerous 4th of July Vacation

I wrote back in May about how I had been sent to an American base in Italy for Operation Allied Force (OAF) in which NATO aircraft were bombing Serbia for a total of 76 days not to long after arriving in Europe.


Looking back on it, the deployment there was probably my most memorable time in the Air Force. I was young and so new to the Air Force I didn't realize that the state we were operating in was only temporary and acceptable during 'war' circumstances. As it was all I knew I imagined it was supposed to be like it was. A situation where a lot of standards were overlooked or forgotten about because of the pressure involved in 'war-like' operations.

After we were sent back home in late June 1999 we were given what was called CAD days (contingency appreciation days) which were accumulated at the rate of 1 day off for every 6 days in a combat zone with a maximum of 14 days. These were great because they were not charged as leave and were designed to allow families to refamiliarize themselves and single guys like me to travel around Europe.

I think we had attained about 6 or 7 CAD days and then with the onset of the 4 day fourth of July holiday weekend it was a jackpot of time off.

And as I had met a girl while deployed to Italy I had a free place to crash at and it didn't take much for me to convince my best friend Angel to tag along with me. He had just arrived in Germany while I was in Italy but we knew each other prior to that from tech. school where he was about a month behind me. We had the same job and got orders to go to the same base and even the same squadron strangely enough.

As it was a 4 day weekend it was impossible to find a rental car on base on such short notice. My car was barely trustworthy enough to drive to work everyday let alone to Italy. But I had enough courage to drive it to the largest Air Force base in Germany named Ramstein AB where there was some cars available to rent. We picked up an Opel Astra four-door and parked my car on in parking lot close by bought some gas coupons and set off with nothing but a European map to get us to our destination in Italy.


We set off headed towards Munich and planned to head towards Innsbruck, Austria then south through the Alps towards an Italian town named Bolzano and then some back roads towards Pordenone which is about 115 km or 70 mi north of Venice.

We set off on the afternoon of Tuesday the 29Th of June and were thrilled that we didn't have to be back to work until the Monday the 5Th of July. It was a pretty uneventful trip through Germany and until we got to Austria. There was quite a bit of road construction through the Alps and we had to get off the autobahn and use detoured back roads. It was quite a pain but some of the scenery we saw was incredible. I remember being on this winding mountain road and seeing a large Austrian castle on the side of another mountain lit up only by the faint light of the night moon.


As Angel and I were only using a road map to guide us and now we were heavily detoured off our original path we decided to stop for the night and sleep as it has become to difficult reading the map in the car with the interior lights. We awoke the next morning to the sun coming over the crest of the mountain at around 9am and continued on our journey.

We had not been driving too long when we found ourselves on a construction marked dirt road and then at an intersection with no signs or indications as to which way we should proceed. We sat there on the smooth dirt road that was awaiting concrete to be laid on it and we decided that we would go left. Off we went down the smooth dirt road leaving a trail of dust behind us. As the road was so smooth and there was nobody insight I decided to increase my speed and soon was hitting 100 kph (60mph) when I noticed a red BMW a ways back flashing me with his lights.

I told Angel and he looked in the side mirror and said that he thought we should slow down and see what he wanted. I had other thoughts and kept going but noticed he was gaining on us very quickly and I could now hear him honking his horn at us while still flashing his headlights. Angel became much more adamant that we stop to see what he wanted and I finally relented and came to a stop. The man in the red BMW started speaking German to us and I sheepishly asked him if he spoke English to which he said that he spoke a little.

He then carried on telling us in heavily accented and slightly broken English that this road we were driving down was new and the bridge connecting it with the mountain on the other side was not finished and if we continued down it at the speed we were traveling we would have surely driven off the cliff dropping to our deaths.


Sweet... because it was definitely my and Angel's dream to re-enact Thelma and Louise with an Austrian twist.

We thanked the man profusely and he told us to follow him as he would take us back to the main road which we did and soon found ourselves stopping in Bolzano Italy for some food. By the time we set off again it was beginning to get dark and it was not too long before Angel and I realized we didn't have much money left.

The problem was that payday wasn't until the 1st (the very next day) and the rental agency had blocked off $250 on my bank card for the guarantee on the car. But more importantly at the time it meant to autostradas as they are littered with tollbooths and most importantly we didn't have anywhere enough gas to make it to Pordenone.

Off we set through the back-roads of the Italian Alps and of course we managed to find probably the only toll road in Italy that is on a small road and not the highway. We pulled up to it but there was no one there. You were supposed to put the money into an automated system similar to a candy or soda machine and the arm would them apparently lift up for you to continue on your journey.


So we sat there. I was thinking we should turn around and backtrack a little and go around it when all of a sudden Angel jumped from the passenger seat and ran up to the arm, lifted it up over his head and waved me through. He dropped it back down and jumped in the car and we took off.

Not long after that the warning light came on indicating that we were almost out of gas. I knew we probably had 50 km (30 mi) before we would stall out so I told Angel we were going to shoot for the nearest town center and wait until the morning when we would have our pay deposited into our account and then gas up.


We stopped at a gas station in the middle of a small town and decided we would wait there and keep trying our bank card in the ATM on the wall of the station as there was a machine in the middle of the 2 pumps where you could insert some lira and get gas similar to the candy or coke machine. Angel decided for some weird reason that he was going to see if he could get any gas from the pumps now. He took the nozzle inserted it into the slot and pulled up on the handle... And diesel flowed out! A total of 20,000 lire (almost $15) worth of gas poured out into our empty car. All we could think was that someone had put the money in and couldn't figure out how to get the machine to work or tried the wrong pump. I don't know. But we had go-go juice.

Between the 20,000 lire worth of diesel we were gifted and the minor amount we had left in the car we were able to make it to my friends apartment early the next morning. We didn't do to much while we were there in Italy that I can remember. I remember taking Angel to the disco I mentioned in my other Italy post as the absolute most beautiful disco I have ever seen and my friends taking us to another disco that I hadn't been to.

Angel and I also went on the base to buy some gas coupons but ended up going up a one-way road on base and getting pulled over my a military cop and thanking God he didn't give me a ticket as that would have gotten back to my squadron and Italy is quite a distance outside the 6 hour rule we are allowed to be distance wise from the base without being on leave.

I believe we left back for Germany on the Friday evening and didn't have as many problems going back like we did coming. Although we were amazed to find out that we were supposed to have a road-tax sticker for driving on any Autobahns in Austria and would have received quite the fine if we were pulled over or found out by the police.

A few weeks after returning I was called into my section chief's office and asked if I knew why OSI (The Office of Special Investigations) would be calling me over to see them. All I could think of was that I had been out of the 6 hour rule distance and maybe that cop had reported me. So, I told the section chief I had no idea why and then stopped off for some lunch before making my way to the OSI building.

I was sat in an interview room and importantly was NOT read my rights. I was asked if I had been traveling anywhere over the past week by the agent and told him that yes I had. I had travelled down to see Munich. He asked me about my driving habits overall and then specifically during that trip. I told him that in general I drive fast when there is no limit on the autobahn but obviously follow any road signs indicating speed limits when I come across them.

Apparently a woman had reported my licence plate as a car that had run her off the road somewhere between Mannheim and Munich. I have to this day no idea and never drove that erratic but I wasn't sure if that was all they had or not. So I told them that I wanted a lawyer and off I went never to hear anything about it again...

10 year anniversary pics

As promised...

Since my laptop was being repaired and I couldn't post any photos from when I first landed in Germany with that particular blog I will post them now...

The view from my dorm, building 177 room 301 on Spangdahlem Airbase Germany. All those semi-circular concrete structures are called Hardened Aircraft Structures (HAS for short) and house F-16 or O/A-10 aircraft.



The room was about 12' by 10' and I had it all to myself. I did though have to share a toilet and shower with one other guy.



Here is the other side of the room and the sink and mirror area right before the bathroom door. As you can see I didn't have much to bring with me at 18 years old.



The said bathroom area that I had to share.



An old German village that I took my first drive off base through.





The office where we were when we weren't working and weren't supposed to be as opposed to where we hid when we were supposed to be working.



An organized tour that we had to take when we first arrived to the closest city named Trier. Yes, that is a monkey on some sort of musical instrument.



This building in Trier is actually a McDonalds...

My 10 Year Anniversary

Yup, 10 years ago today I landed at Rhein-Main Airbase on a military chartered civilian aircraft that departed from Atlanta. Rhein-Main was located on the south side of Frankfurt International Airport and has since closed and been swallowed and redeveloped by the International Airport. The only building I still recognize on a regular basis is the large old hangar that Lufthansa Technik now operate out of. I tend to always taxi right by it when I fly from Birmingham International to Frankfurt International.


I remember stepping off the large passenger plane and walking across the tarmac into the arrival terminal and having to show my military ID and orders to some guy before being able to go and get my luggage. In the luggage hall there were all kinds of signs talking about how your bags could be searched and that this item and that item were not permitted.

Typically when you arrive like this you are met by your prearranged sponsor who would either sign out a vehicle from motor pool to come and get you or drive their own personal vehicle.

As I was arriving at a time when the squadron I was assigned to was deployed to Aviano Airbase in Italy to bomb Serbia I had no one there to pick me up and I had to take this navy colored school bus from the terminal to Spangdahlem Airbase on my own accord.

I do not remember the exact details of how I figured out which shuttle to catch but I do remember it weaving in and out of Army installations throughout the Frankfurt area before hitting an open stretch of autobahn.

I remember being amazed by the scenery and landscape as we drove down the autobahn. The hills and villages are really unique sights compared to what you generally see when driving down American highways.

We eventually left the autobahn around a large town named Wittlich and took some really windy and narrow roads towards Spangdahlem Airbase.

About 2 and half hours after we left the arrival terminal we pulled up to the main gate of my new base and had our military IDs checked before proceeding to billeting AKA the base hotel.


I went inside the hotel and used a phone to call my shop to announce my arrival. They sent over 2 young airman like myself, both of whom I recognized from tech school and they drove me to the dorm manager to get me a set of keys for my new place.

Unfortunately the photos I have of this are all on my laptop at the Mac shop...

My Apprentices

I dropped off my younger brother and sister to the Birmingham airport this morning so they could catch their flight to Boston via Amsterdam. They arrived about 12 days ago and boy, if ever there were 'house cats' these 2 are them. They are not the type to travel outside of their element for too long. It is funny how siblings can be raised in the same environment but be so different than each other.

I am not hating on them for not liking the food in the UK as the pickings are definitely slim when it comes to locating great food but these 2 had issues almost everywhere we went even while on the continent. If it wasn't McDonald's or pizza they were looking at it as if it was meant to eat them and not the other way around.


We were able to acquire cheap flights to Frankfurt Hahn and then make our way across to Paris before flying out of Charles de Gaulle airport on this past Wednesday night. As well I took them to Stonehenge and briefly stopped through Salisbury and Bath since we drove all that way to see rocks in the middle of an English field.

I have previously written about my experiences with Ryanair and this one-way flight to Frankfurt Hahn was probably the worst flight experience I have had with Ryanair. It seems we were fortunate to be in the midst of a stag party en route to somewhere and they were just plain out of control on board and the flight crew did nothing but facilitate them in getting even drunker on an 11AM flight.

We landed at Hahn and caught a bus to Luxembourg city where my firstborn son lives with his mother and stayed there in a hostel for 3 nights. I had never stayed in a hostel before as I believe they would disagree with me. In fact unlike my sister and brother I have never even been inclined to see a scary movie that involved a hostel so my expectations were pretty low.

They should have been lower. Really. Much lower.

I do not ask for much from a hotel when I stay in one. I mean clean linen/towels, an electrical outlet to charge my phone and laptop and decent shower. I can deal without TV/cable, a refrigerator or a nice view. This hostel had none of these things except clean sheets. And we had to go fetch those from reception. I had to borrow some towels from my son's mother because the hostel charged for them. They also charged for soap and I am really surprised they didn't charge for toilet paper although I am sure they tried but realized it was to the benefit of their cleaning staff to not do so.


The 'shower' was especially noteworthy for its terribleness. I have been in rain storms that got me wetter than this little spout coming out of the wall in the bathroom. And even better was the squeegee you had to use afterwards to steer the water on the floor towards the drain. Or maybe the the best part was that the bathroom lights worked on a motion detector and when you closed the cloth curtain to enclose you in the corner the lights would magically go off making you wave your hand outside the curtain trying to get the lights to switch on. You decide.


Anyway Luxembourg is a really cool city to explore and in my view maybe the most underrated capital city in all of western Europe. I wore them out with a lot of walking up gorges and down valleys and my brother got really cool blisters because he thought it would be gangsta to wear some heavy Timberland boots.


We took a short train ride to the nearby German city of Trier as my brother felt like he was missing something from the last time he was there and I stopped by there. Apparently he was. The crowd of people was especially strong for some reason on this particular Saturday and all the Germans seemed to be competing in an event to see who could irritate us the most by stopping in front of us or creating a wall of humans walking at a snail's pace.


They succeeded fairly quickly as my brother takes to people about as well as British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith takes to answering questions about her husband's taste in pornos.

We left Luxembourg train station on a TGV train heading to Paris on Monday afternoon and made it to Gare de l'Est in slightly more than 2 hours. I had booked a hotel in the area near Jardin Luxembourg on the south side of the river Seine and after staying in a hostel it seemed like a chateau.


My brother seems to have this notable ability to act as a magnet for weirdos. He was approached by one particular nutter who seemed to admire his aggression and made some gorilla motions while using both his hands to indicate on himself that my brother had huge nuts. And the guy who was in the middle of the subway train with a bag full of the type of stuffed dolls you win at carnivals. He had characters ranging from Superman to Homer Simpson and was performing a play with them. Unfortunately my French is too poor to understand the storyline between Homer and Pokemon.

We walked around and hit the normal tourist areas for a couple days and I even (for some reason) took them to the one tourist area I have always avoided. The area between Sacre Coeur and Montmarte is particularly seedy. I never get used to seeing sex shops next to the post office.

On a positive note I did have the best pizza I have ever had outside of America. I highly recommend Cafe di Roma on the Champs-Elysees although to eat on that road one must apparently be prepared to part with €14.20 for a 1 liter bottle of Pepsi. On a plus note they did give us some ice for free.


We eventually got tired of the bad weather and headed to the airport early for the 2100 flight to Birmingham on FlyBe.

And then I had to deal with the fish incident... Seems there are as many nutters in Birmingham as there is in Paris.

5 Cool Things about Germany

I was fortunate to live in Germany twice for a total of around 5 years. Once when I was actually in the Air Force and the other time as a contractor for the Department of Defense.

When I first arrived in Germany I absolutely loved it because of its novelty of it. It was completely different in almost every way that you could imagine to America. Then as I travelled to neighboring countries I kind of forgot about what Germany had to offer even though I lived there.

Upon returning to live in Germany after being away for about a year and a half I quickly remembered what I had been missing.

My list of 5 cool things about living in Germany...

1) The cars and the driving -- What came first? The touring car or the or the impeccable highway system? I don't know but either way the Germans have mastered both a long time ago. Okay dude, your Mustang is fast off the line but how do you feel when a BMW 520D (yes, diesel!) station wagon full of kids passes you on the Autobahn at 160 MPH around bends to boot? Where else do you pass police cars on the highway going over a 100MPH and not think twice about them.. Nor do they think twice of you?

The thing that is awesome to me about driving a German car in Germany is that people do not look at you so pretentiously like they do in other countries. Whether it is a BMW, Mercedes, Audi, VW or Porsche they are driven by everybody and anybody. These brands are seen in Germany the same way Chevrolet or Ford is seen in America. To me that is cool.

2) Turkish food-- Where to begin?! I guess the classic Döner kebab that tastes best in Germany (and I have tried it in Turkey...) Think of it as European fast food. Typically the place you order it from has a window on the front of the shop and you stand on the sidewalk and tell the guy what you want. About 60 to 90 seconds later he hands you your sandwich. Depending on where you are it will cost you anywhere from €3.50 to €5.00 for one. They have been in the news lately, as some 'news agencies' like to report the obvious as news.


3) Location, location, location -- Where I lived was 4 hours to Paris; 3 hours to Munich; 5 hours to Zurich; 3 hours to Brussels; and 6 hours to London... Enough said.


4) German mentality -- The Rule of law. Germans live by it and seem to love it. I have been yelled at by a German (who was actually obstructing traffic to yell at me) for riding a bike on the sidewalk and then an hour later for not having a headlight on the front of my bike and a flashing tail light on the back by another German. I once got pulled over on an access road between two highways by an unmarked German police car. He didn't stop me for driving 140 MPH in a 50MPH zone. No, that is understandable as it was a only a half-mile stretch of straightaway connecting two separate highways. He pulled me over for passing on a solid lined road...

There is no litter. People think nothing of keeping their trash in their pockets until they come across a trashcan. It seems to be a religion here in the UK to dump your trash wherever you please.

When you live in a place where people have little or no respect for the law it makes you appreciate a nation where the people comprehend the reasons and benefits for the whole of society in following them.

5) The American bases -- It is perhaps the most remarkable thing to me that I lived in a foreign country where you are surrounded by a new culture and language but have any 'touch of home' that you desire at your fingertips. I lived on base and off base in Germany and saw the positives and negatives of both but crossing back and forth between the two was truly something that made my stay in Germany much more enjoyable.

Want some Lucky Charms, Snapple Iced Tea and Hostess Donuts? Go on base and get it at the Shoppette or Commissary!

Want some Punica multi-vitamin juice, fresh Brotchen and Milka chocolate? Go off base and get it at Real or Toon!