Saxony

I spent the weekend in Saxony (Dresden, to be precise), but was disappointed not to see a single person wearing or carrying a seax (the type of knife that gave the Saxons their name).

aviva_m facepalmed when I told her this, but papersky would understand, I feel sure...

German road rules

In the UK, all road intersections have, at the very least, white lines painted on the road indicating which road has priority.

In Germany, that's only the case for major intersections. Minor ones have the rule of what I will always think of as priorité à droite, after the language I first encountered it in.

Unfortunately what that means is that, when approaching a crossroads, you need to look right, to see if there's any traffic you need to give way to, but also simultaneously look left, to see if there's any traffic you'd come into collision with as you ventured out onto the road.

I think this road rule was invented for chameleons (which can move their eyeballs independently)...

Germany: like the UK in a timewarp?

Various things one observes living in Germany, such as the tobacco advertising, the majority of people cycling bareheaded, the complete lack of automated checkouts at supermarkets, etc, etc (no doubt I will think of a better example the moment I hit "Post"), make it feel a bit like being in the UK twenty or thirty years ago.

This feeling is only compounded by the presence here of branches of Woolworth's (closed in the UK 2009) and C&A (closed in the UK 2001)...