Do German teenagers masturbate together?

A German (who shall remain anonymous) in San Fransisco told me that it is normal for German teenage boys to masturbate together. No one else I asked in SF knew anything about this so I took the opportunity to ask a few Germans about this at a party on Saturday evening. None of them had ever done this (they said) or heard about it. So I think that we can conclude that this is not normal.

Negation in German

For a long time I have been told that "nicht" should go as close to the end of a sentence as possible but no closer. Yesterday we were given the rules for this and I found out why no one wanted to tell me them before. Here they are (translated roughly into English):

• After a dative phrase: Das Buch gehört mir nicht.
• After a definite object: Ich suche die Schlüsel nicht.
• Before an indefinite object: Ich habe nicht eine müde Mark gesehen.
• Before the second block of verbs:
• the participle: Er ist gestern auch nicht gekommen.
• the infinitive: Er kann nicht kommen.
• the prefix of a separable verb: Er macht das Licht nicht aus.
• Before a prepositional phrase: Ich interessiere mich nicht für Grammatik.
• Before a locational phrase: Sie wohnt nicht in Berlin. Sie schaut nicht unter das Bett.
• Before a qualification: Er ist überhaupt nicht dick.

And there are exceptions, of course. Are these meant to be helpful? I think that doing it by feel might actually have been better.

Packing groceries at the store

The little supermarket near me has a clever setup that I haven't seen before for separating groceries while one customer is packing their groceries into bags at the same time as another customer's groceries are being rung up. At least, I haven't seen this in the US.

Prepaid cell phone plans in Germany

I got to Berlin today.

Since I'm going to be here for a while it seemed worth the effort to find a decent prepaid cell phone plan. A friend suggested Simply, which has pretty good rates for voice. The problem is that they say that they charge for data per minute (9c per minute). I have no idea what this means for a device that is always on the internet. They also mention WAP enough times that I'm not convinced that they support anything but WAP (but I don't understand all of the German on the page). T-Mobile is just as confusing but charges more.

Eventually I stumbled over this post on mTrends, mentioning AldiTalk and Simyo, two German MVNOs that have cheap data available on prepaid plans. They both charge 24c per MB in small increments but Simyo also sells a 1GB-in-30-days plan for €10. This settled the question for me. Of course, I'll see how well this works once I get the SIM in a few days.