Monday brings with it a great deal of faffing around to makes sure money is transferred from here to my account in Britain. In Germany there are no queues in banks (or anywhere else that I can remember!) and there is no real way of knowing where to stand and wait. Susi points to a neat line of people. "See they're queueing quite nicely.

There is a big poster advertising the banks relationship with the winners of the talent show Das Duel which I cannot restrain myself from commenting on. "We're the bank that backs a bunch of talentless losers"

I want to know if it is better to be served by a man or a woman, this is because men tend to lecture customers as part of an extension of the German National pastime. "They are working in pairs," observes Susi. "So you can't win."
"Yeah, one can read and the other one can write."
Just to completely squash this predjudiced remark, a very polite bank woman walks up to us and invites us to her desk where she answers all our questions without lecturing us at all.
Susi says that I must write a book about what the Germans have ever done for us.
Beer is top of the list, not to mention bread, oh and the car and possibly engineering. then there is their joint venture with the Scots to produce television (oder Fernesehen auf Deutsch). And really where would we be without television?
More anon