Give it time. This is only the start of something that no country on Earth is prepared to deal with, and it’s only going to get worse. If a country like Germany can have a whole region trashed by something like this, a country like e.g. the USA, whose infrastructure was crumbling to begin with, where no one even starts thinking about resiliency until things start falling apart, that country is extra screwed.
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It kind of gets forgotten, but “Alter” is an abbrivation from “Alter Freund” (old friend). Similar with “Dicker” (Fat person) which is very common here in Berlin and is abbrivated in the same way, meaning “dicker Freund” and what is fat or better thick is actually the bond of friendship in this context.
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He’s saying ‘Alter Schwede’ I think.
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I can’t tell, even on a 17" screen.
Is…is that a person in a chair getting swept away by the current?
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Yes it’s really bad. It feels eerie to see that where I live (150km more to the South) there’s no indication of this at all, you can just see the Rhine flowing strongly and nothing more.
On site, it’s surreal, it’s hard to believe how bad it got:
to the point that at first it was difficult to understand what one was looking at.
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The Rhine flows north and west… You better believe the waterboards downriver are all at red alert.
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There’s part of me which still struggles to understand how so many people died. This kind of crystallised it, the fact that people are being helicopter rescued from a three storey building, and you can see the damage on the middle floor.
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For me it’s things like this:
Wait just a bit too long and you are stuck in a situation that is completely outside of most people’s experience. “Getting hit by stray construction waste container” is not really a danger people think about a lot and that’s just one of countless ways to die in that street.
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Passt scho, Alter.
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I think the article makes a good effort, but ignores the thing staring me in the face: that Schwede is a way to nerf Scheisskerl. Think of it like how in English, you might say “Oh sheee…eepdip!”
Doesn’t hurt that the Swedes were known in southern Germany for being ruthless buggers under their king, Gustavus Adolphus during the 30 Years’ War. Especially in Bavaria, where Swedish troops were feared for the pillaging and plundering of an already starving populace.
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Huh, I’ve never heard that theory. Makes sense, though.
My dad, who is culturally protestant but spent significant time at an impressionable age in Upper Bavaria as a Wehrpflichtiger and as a mountaineer sometimes uses Sack’l Zement as a clear variation of Sakrament…
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Just dawned on me… what’s worse? The word ■■■■■ or feucht?
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The former, apparently, as feucht can also mean damp. Feuchtgebiete means wetlands, but is also the title of a coming of age novel.
And to me, it has more onomatopoeia. Just saying it suggests a sort of dampness, of mmmoissstness.
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