Greetings to my readers

Hello world.

As I've seen that my blog has been clicked even by people from the English speaking world and other countries, I wanted to say "hello" to all my international readers.

My name is Stefan, I'm 41 years old, living in Essen, Germany. 

I started my blog in January 2022, as I had to stay in corona quarantine for one week. It had been my plan to start a blog long ago, but then I had time and thought I could give it a go.

I live in the state of Northrhine-Westphalia, where I was born in the city of Neuss in 1980. 

("NRW" is the largest of 16 states in Germany with around 18 million inhabitants, larger than Bavaria, and I already wrote an article about its prime ministers, if you haven't already read it.)

In 1985 I moved to my current home town. Well, Essen is not a town, it's actually a city of round about 600,000 inhabitants, located in the Ruhr area. Around 5 million people live in that area which is the greatest agglomeration in western Europe, I think. The Ruhr area, or Ruhr region, has therefore more inhabitants than our capital Berlin. It was, for centuries, dominated by industry, pits and steel factories, but now most of the industry is gone, and it's quite a nice spot to live.

I blog about politics, media, society and other stuff like my favourite songs, for example. Mostly seriously, sometimes satirically. 

I passed my "Abitur"(highest final school exam in Germany, comparable to the GCSE/A-levels in Britain, I think) in 2000. A year before, I spent three months in Britain and am very interested in British society and politics, as you've probably realised. But I also like to write about the EU and ECB issues, for example.

From 2001 on, I studied politics, sociology and modern history at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, finishing it in 2008 with a Magister's Degree. You probably won't know what a "Magister" is, it's the same as the old German "Diploma". 

These old degrees, in the meantime, have been replaced by the academic bachelor's and master's degrees that you probably know. (It was the so-called "Bologna process" of the European Union that decided in 1999 to introduce the anglosaxon degrees in the whole EU, replacing the old ones. We, as students, were always told that we were the last ones of the "old" generation.)

My hobbies. Well, I like reading, cooking, traveling and dealing with electronic media. Especially radio is my favourite object there, I used to be a DXer for years and worked for some radio stations and other media in Germany, as you can read in my blog.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment.

I look forward to hear from you, wherever you may come from.