germany: the customer is always wrong

Hier ist the portion of Team Fulbright: Language Course that actually showed up to this outing. Guess which one is me?

This past weekend we went to Weimar and Wurtzburg. Weimar was the home of Goethe, Schiller, Liszt and Bach. The town was beautiful, having been restored after WWII, but there doesn't seem to be much of a 'city' outside of tourism. So it was actually pretty boring.

I took a tour of Goethe's house - I must say, he was kind of a baller. His house was humongous, with every luxury someone could have possibly wanted back in those days. Other than that, the place was pretty unremarkable - I can report, however, that Goethe had a big thing for Italian art, and had many renaissance sculptures as well as painting.

One thing that I noticed was that the 'gift shop' didn't have outratgeously high prices for souveniers. Everything was reasonably priced (well, reasonable for the killer exchange rate and the fact that everything here is expensive). Still though, I didn't buy anything, hehe.


How they roll in Weimar. Or at least, how tourists roll.

Wurtzburg was the home of St. Elizabeth, before she became canonied. It was basically a series of latin and middle high German books in glass cases, though as a random attraction, in her home castle was the room where Martin Luther first translated the Bible into German, making it available for the common man to read.

I came back the next day and went to a different place to use wireless internet. I sat down and ordered a drink and a piece of pie, and started to set up my computer. But for some reason the connection was faulty (only local instead of internet access) and so I told one waitress (not my waitress, just the first one I could flag down) to hold my order since I wasn't sure if I was going ot stay or not. I saw her chatting with my waitress one minute later, so I thought everything was OK. So I was completely surprised when my waitress brought my order to me. I explained very nicely that I had put the order on hold until I decided if my internet was working. The waitress with whom I had 'cancelled' my order started to get nasty about the fact that the food was already being prepared when I ordered it, and that it was too late. I ordered it, and that was that. So they forced me to pay for their sub-par food, even though it was definitely their 'fault.' At any rate, I am never going back there again.

Although I don't think it was particular to that one shop. I have generally had unpleasant and unsatisfying customer service here in Germany (e.g., not allowing me to return DVDs even though it was their fault for not telling me it didn't have subtitles when I asked specifically before I bought it). It makes me hate shopping here even more (i am still incredibly and irrationally bitter and sad about the exchange rate and the high prices for cheese and produce have been a source of frustration, even still), so I guess now that I officially hate customer service here, I will probably spend less time shopping. which is probably not a bad thing.