Missing Deadlines
Yup, missed the Thursday deadline already. Oh well, at least I’m still writing.
Not much has happened in the past few days. The weather has kept at a nice ~72 degrees all week, and looks like it’ll stay that way for a little while longer, which is good. I have continued to notice, however, that Berlin, perhaps just Germans in general, really enjoy doing things together. Or perhaps I should reword that: they do the same things we do in America, just on a much larger scale. When there’s a protest, it’s like the whole damn city out there marching through the street. When they have some kind of party in the outdoor area of a restaurant, there’s a huge multi-colored tent, waitresses in full Fräulein garb and the Backstreet Boys on the radio. When they have a flea market, it takes up an entire street. The scope of everything here just seems to be much greater.
This holds true as well for the cleaning and recycling initiatives they have in place here. By that I mean, no matter where you are, you’ll find at least two bins, sometimes as many as four, and everyone actually pays attention to them as well. On more than one occasion I have been holding an empty plastic bottle that I have brought all the way back with me to my house because I couldn’t find the right bin otherwise. Also, much like our own recycling system, everything that is able to be recycled (excluding glass) has a “Grünpunkt” (”green point”) symbol on it, which means it can be tossed in any Grünpunkt-friendly bin, and those are almost everywhere.
The other thing that I wish had caught on more in the states is the idea of “Pfand,” which means “collateral” normally, but in this case it’s the name given to money you get in return for returning glass bottles. At most bars, if you buy a drink, they will give you the drink and some kind of pin or button or cap or something. When you’re done with the drink, you bring back the bottle and the object, give them both back to the person behind the counter and usually you’ll get €1 back or so, and they put the bottle in a rack with other empty ones to be recycled. Outside of bars, most bottles can be traded in at almost any convenience store for about €0,15 (in contrast to the $0.05 you get for plastic bottles back home, and not even in every state). All of these things combined means you can actually make a lot of money picking up and returning bottles, which in turn means the streets are a great deal cleaner between the recycling and the idea of Pfand.
The weird side-effect of this is that you can alternatively leave a glass bottle pretty much anywhere that can easily be seen, and a bum or even anyone who just wants to get some extra money will pick it up and return it. This is actually the most viable alternative to bringing it in yourself or finding a proper recycling bin, and people literally do it all the time. So I guess I was lying before when I said the streets are a great deal cleaner; perhaps they’re just as messy but in a more organized way. People tend to leave bottles in clusters, and I always imagine someone looking for bottles happening upon these clusters as though they were treasure.
That’s about it for now. Going to go make use of the rest of the day, it’s a lovely 73 degrees and sunny and there’s no reason to be in here any longer.