Thursday night, my husband and oldest son got up at 1:30 AM to watch the Clemson game. It has been a disappointing season to say the least, and being 6 hours ahead of South Carolina, makes watching the games a challenge sometimes. But we are true and tried (and I do mean tried) fans of the Tigers, so I guess we'll keep cheering them on despite it all.
But you may be asking, "How do you watch Clemson football in Germany?" Well, we have a contraption called Slingbox. This is a brand name (just happens to be the one we chose, there are other brands that do the same thing) of a product that allows you to hook up the device in the place where you want to watch TV, in our case Charleston, and then send the TV over the Internet to your computer where ever you are. This has been a lifesaver for us. We can watch the local news, the college football scene, shows that the children would really long for in English, and basically give us a small piece of home and comfort while we are away. Don't get me wrong, we are loving it here; but sometimes even in the best places you can get homesick, and with this technology, it helps us to keep a finger on the US while enjoying the best that Germany has to offer.
However, TV here is rather amusing. First of all, you don't sign up for a cable company and they come set it up; rather, you buy your TV and plug it in to the already live basic cable. Basic cable involves a couple of kids programs, like cartoons or live action shows that are specifically German, but also many of our long-time favorites from yesteryear, such as the Smurfs, Tom and Jerry, and the likes, but all in German. It is actually quite amusing to watch the Smurfs in German. All the voices that you expect to hear come out of each of the characters are different. For example, in flipping channels the other day, I came across The Nanny with Fran Drescher. She has a VERY distinct voice and laugh. The show just lost something not having HER voice speaking when she talked. There are many, many American shows that they carry, like cop shows, sitcoms, etc. that are all voice dubbed, as well as movie nights and such like on our TV. Seeing Richard Gere but hearing something else all together, well, it can be distracting. Other channels are financial, game show only, infomercial or those channels that display stuff for you to buy all day long, and the one English-broadcasted CNN World. We have watched that pretty heavily to get a feel for the economy and election coverage since we just can't understand enough of the local news to know what is going on. And of course, we can also watch our Slingbox to get good ol' American broadcasting.
But the catch on automatically getting cable is that the Entertainment Tax Man comes around. Everything here is taxed in some way because the government is very involved in the services it provides the people of Germany. Health Care, infrastructure, broadcast entities, etc. are all provided to the people, "free". But what this means is that the people are taxed heavily up front to pay for those services. We have been told (it will be a few more weeks) they will come by and inspect our apartment for our entertainment devices to see how many TV's and radios we have. Ironically, we didn't want to deal with the radio, but the alarm clocks only came with a radio component, so we were unable to get away with only having to pay the TV tax. It is a small monthly fee, but it will be required. If you decide to get Satellite TV on top of this, then that is your additional expense.
Today's question for the day is "What is a Wanderntag?"
Word for today is Television: das Fernsehen - pronounced fairn zay ehn.
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
