Portrait of a year in Bonn

Crazy to believe. Our one-year anniversary of arriving in Bonn was on Friday. I’m trying to run through a mental list of all of the things that we’ve done, seen, eaten, traveled to, and people we’ve met since we first set foot in Bonn on March 25, 2010. (Reviewing my Twitter posts helps too.)

Departed Oakland. Arrived, bags in hand. First stayed: Hotel Ibis. First dinner: Mediterraneo. Bonn puns. First apartment (danke, Thomas and Couchsurfing!) in the Bonn Altstadt. Cherry blossoms on Heerstrasse. First outdoor beer of the spring. I start jamming with the Rheinbläser. Eislabor. A weekend in Hamburg. Bonn Capitals baseball games. Rheinaue Flohmarkt. Made American, German (and heck, Danish!) friends. Funnybone Club im Kellar.

Started a German “intensivekurs” at IFS. Global Voices in Santiago. World Cup in Bonn (‘Schland!). Spargelzeit. Our first wedding anniversary! Spent a day biking to Koblenz. Started hosting Spectrum!

Biked into the Netherlands just to watch a World Cup game. Fettes Brot show in Cologne. House-sat in Niederdollendorf. Hiking in the Ahrtal. A weekend in Mainz. Road trip to Luxembourg. Said goodbye to some Bonn friends who left for the US, but made new ones.

New (and totally sweet!) Bad Godesberg apartment. Baking bread. Spiel (we met Klaus!) Berlin. Snow. Maastricht. Liège. Brussels. December in France (and more snow). New Year’s in the UK. Flooded Rhine. Bonn Tweetup. Two weeks back in the 510! Karneval! (Alaaf!) Budapest.

What’s next for the rest of 2011?

Bike trip into Belgium with Nate to check out Val-Dieu. Re:publica in Berlin. Alex visits? My book drops! Readings in NYC. Paris, Geneva, Lyon. Rebecca’s book drops! Nena visits! Amsterdam. Croatia via Kosovo to Greece! Brussels, London. Copenhagen? Xmas back in the 510.

iPhone 4 in Germany: Complexity Abounds

So I get that people want the iPhone. I get that it’s a really sexy, really popular handset. I’m not convinced that I’ll buy one just yet, but I signed up for T-Mobile’s email updates about it, and just yesterday got this:

But seriously T-Mobile (Germany’s exclusive iPhone provider), do you really need SEVEN different plans?

In fact, there’s so many, that they need two pages to fit them all. Here’s the first four:

I won’t go over all of them, but here’s the bottom line:

There’s an inverse relationship between what you pay for the phone and what you pay in a monthly contract.

The cheapest option: €300 for the phone and €25/month, €0,29/min to all German mobiles and landlines, 200MB of data/month.

The most spendy option: €1 for the phone and €120/month, unlimited calls and data.

While I know that AT&T isn’t exactly the most beloved provider, I find it almost offensive that you’d pay €25 or even the next two levels €45 or €60, where you have to pay for minutes/texts on top of the service that you already pay per month. Not to mention that a text message to other providers is €0,19 — that’s more than double what I pay now on Blau.de.

Now yes you can buy the phone unlocked in Germany and use it with any of Germany’s myriad of prepaid mobile providers. Heck, you can even take your existing SIM card, trim it and put it into your new iPhone 4 and/or iPad.

While I do want a new iPhone (I’m still rocking the original 4GB first-gen), I can’t really justify signing a two-year contract at absurdly high prices just to get a phone.

Cyrus on: PRI’s The World (June 11, 2010)

Dear Friends,

My piece on the one-year anniversary of last year’s controversial election in Iran is airing today. In the piece, we hear from two young Iranians who talk about their frustration with what’s happened since June 12, 2009, and from Mohammed Sadeghi, the Iranian-German behind Mousavi’s Facebook page and from Golnaz Esfandiari, the Iranian-American reporter with Radio Free Europe in Prague.

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

NYC – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

You can also likely find it on your local public radio station, and The World’s site later in the day and also on my site if you miss the broadcast.

Also, don’t forget about The World’s Tech Podcast, hosted by my friend and colleague, Clark Boyd from The World’s tech desk at his new home in Brussels, Belgium.

Lemme know if you hear it!

[audio:http://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/061120105.mp3]

How to get free 3G mobile Internet in Germany

Step one: Order a new free SIM card from NetzClub, a new MVNO from O2. Select the “Handy Internet Flat” option. The catch is they provide you with free Internet in exchange for text advertising.

Step two: Buy an O2 Surfstick. I bought mine directly from their website for €34 shipped. It’s unlocked. It comes with an O2 SIM card, and five free days of 3G access — otherwise it’s prepaid €3.50 per day (midnight to midnight).

Step three: Download the O2 Surfstick software.

Step four: Put the NetzClub SIM into the Surfstick. When you launch the Mobile Partner Manager software, leave the O2 default configuration there and click “Connect.” Boom. You’re online at 3G speeds. Based on a Speedtest.net test from my apartment here in Bonn, I get 2.5 Mbps download speed.

Bonus step: Use your Mac to share the WiFi connection with your friends using these instructions.

NB: According to Phone Guide Germany, NetzClub has a monthly limit of 200MB per month, although on the website I can’t find where that limit actually is. But I haven’t given NetzClub any credit card info so far. That said, I’ve only downloaded about 30MB.

New Year, New Job

So it’s a new year, another birthday, and vacation is sadly over — time to get back to a regular working schedule and real life.

But this year is different, given that five months from now, my wife and I will be moving to the birthplace of Ludwig von Beethoven and the former capital of West Germany: Bonn, Germany.

Late last month, I accepted a position as the new host and producer of Spectrum, a weekly 30 minute, international English-language radio show broadcast by Deutsche Welle English, the English language service of Deutsche Welle, the German public radio network. You can think of it like the German BBC — 100 percent publicly funded, and broadcasting in various languages over shortwave, FM re-broadcasts and Internet. I hope to use the skills that I’ve learned working with PRI’s The World, NPR, CBC’s Spark, TVO’s Search Engine, and BBC’s Digital Planet to take Spectrum to the next level. My focus will be especially on Germany and more largely, other science and technology innovations in Europe. (Tere, Eestlased!)

In case you saw some of my tweets a few weeks ago referencing Bonn, I was over there in December to meet the rest of the DW English crew (including the head of DW English, Kristin Zeier), do a little work, and generally see if I’d be a good fit. In the end, I decided to take the position because I think it will be a professionally engaging, and ultimately, a fun job.

In the meantime, Rebecca and I have been taking German lessons at the Gerlind Institute here in Oakland, which has been great so far. I hope to have at least an advanced beginner level by the time that we arrive in Bonn. (Ich hoffe!)

We’ll be in Bonn for at least two years (perhaps longer?), and hope to use our vacation exploring new regions in Germany, and the neighboring countries that we didn’t make it to when we were in Europe in 2008 and 2009, like Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and other countries especially in central and eastern Europe. I especially look forward to eating at Peshku in Pristina (Kosovo) with Balkanophile Nate Tabak in Fall 2010 or Spring 2011.

If anyone is interested in renting our 650 square foot, one-bedroom cottage here in Rockridge (North Oakland) starting in June 2010, please contact me directly.

Otherwise, I welcome any and all tips/suggestions for living in Bonn/western Germany, traveling in Europe, and learning German. Also, come visit us in Bonn!

Thanks again so far to Kristin Zeier, Felix Leder, Tillmann Werner, Steve Paine, Tim Wojcik, Kate Bowen, Holly Fox, Courtney Tenz, Mark Mattox, Stephanie Siek, Sean Sinico, Sam Edmonds, Barbara Gruber, Trinity Hartman, Andy Valvur and everyone else that I look forward to working with at DW who will help us make this transition just a little easier.

Tschüß!