Auf wiedersehen, Pet

1974

            Yes, it was like the TV programme.

  This trip to Germany in 1974 (I think!) was my first trip working abroad. I went with my mate, Bob, he knows who he is if he is reading this, down to Stuttgart in southern Germany to fit out a restaurant on the top floor of a large department store.
  Our brief was to meet the German agent in Stuttgart main railway station car park (first German word to learn, 'hauptbahnhof') at midday, so we set out from England on the ferry, drove overnight down to Stuttgart, found the station and parked up in the car park.
  We must have sat there for three or four hours with nobody making contact, and Bob was getting a bit impatient, "Fuck this for a game of soldiers, let's turn round and go back to England", he said.
   I was just about to start the car when there was a tap on the window, it was the chap we were supposed to meet.

  Moral of the story, make sure you both wait in the same car park, there were two at Stuttgart railway station.

  The first day at work was a bit of a disaster, we lived in a guesthouse on the north west outskirts of Stuttgart near the Porsche factory, and decided to drive into the city centre. Being winter the weather was freezing with a nice layer of snow on the roads, so far, so good, but we had got about halfway to the job when, yes, you've guessed it, the engine boiled over. Anyway, we got to work a bit on the late side, made our excuses, and started work. (second German word to learn, 'frostschutzmittel'). Ever since then we would get the tram to work.

The trams were a bit of a beast, they stop for nobody, the first day we were driving in the city I nearly wrote the car off. I wanted to turn left, so I straddled the tram tracks waiting for a gap in the traffic. When a gap appeared it was a race between the gap and the tram, luckily the gap won and we cleared the tracks just in time. Brown trouser time!

 

  Working abroad for the first time is a bit of a culture shock, even on the Continent, which is only across the water, going to work at seven o'clock in the morning a lot of the Germans would stop off for a couple of quick ones to keep out the cold.
  At work, us Englanders would go for a cup of coffee and a roll, but the German lads would be queueing up for a crate of beer, the foremen on the job would disappear every other day and in the afternoon would be found in their office, pissed out of their heads, but that was just the way of life. So, when in Rome ...............

1976 

My second trip to Germany was to Bremerhaven, a port on the north west coast.We sailed from Harwich at night, the ship broke down somewhere in the North Sea, (call out the AA!)  but we got there a few hours after we were supposed to.

We worked in a factory, which among other things, fitted out mobile banks in Mercedes vans for the Natwest bank in England 

To get to work, we had to get there at 7.00 in the morning. We had to drive through the red light district , which was still in full swing at that time in the morning, people falling out off the bars, pissed....... we didn't do anything like that, being English and respectable.........ha  ha !..........