Bush Arrives in Germany, KFC Closes

Bush is here. The US president’s seven hour German stopover is being treated with all the pomp of a royal wedding. His visit has forced the shutdown of large parts of Mainz, causing economic hardship for many businesses. Is it worth it? Plus, we offer tips on alternative venues for future Bush visits.

Where will the President get his KFC?

Breaking news of the day: It’s getting hard to find American fast food in Mainz on Wednesday. In fact, the entire city center has been shut down, including the fast food chains, due to security precautions for the visit of US President George W. Bush. The left-leaning German newspaper Die Tageszeitung reports that not only Kentucy Fried Chicken, but also the neighboring McDonald’s have shut their doors. No worries, though. The presidential couple won’t go hungry in the Old World. In fact, their menu will include: pike, crawfish, lamb, vanilla crème and baked apples, accompanied by German red and white wines. Who knows? First Lady Laura Bush, who we hear is still looking for a White House chef, may acquire a taste for German cooking. (2:15 p.m CET)

Travel Destinations for Bush’s Next Foreign Visit

George W. Bush is spending seven hours in the German city of Mainz on Wednesday. Here’s our question: Should the city (population 200,000 and a far cry from a tourist Mecca) feel flattered or penalized? Here are some details. In order to accommodate Bush and the army-like security and press entourage that follows him everywhere, the entire city has come to a standstill. Schools, public offices and businesses — including a large General Motors-owned Opel automobile plant in nearby Ruesselsheim — have shut down as have highway, ship and train traffic. This, despite the general economic depression afflicting the nation. Even hospitals have, as much as possible, been cleared just in case of an emergency. The city’s 1,300 manholes have been welded shut, all flowerpots have been removed, as have parked cars and trash cans. Perhaps the only employment spike will come for police: More than 10,000 German officers have been called in from across the nation to make sure all goes well. Cessna flights, too have been grounded within a 60 kilometer radius of Mainz. Even Lufthansa, the nation’s largest air carrier, cancelled 34 flights, inconveniencing 2,300 passengers. All this to accommodate Bush for seven hours as he tries to make up for years of giving Europe the cold shoulder. Our question, again, is it all worth it?

One grocer at Mainz’s open market on the main square told a resident desperate to find a place to deposit his banana peel on Tuesday afternoon, not to worry, "the trash cans will be back on Thursday." Gunther Schnell, who runs a Rewe supermarket placed right in the middle of the high security zone, told SPIEGEL ONLINE he considered staying open throughout the Bush visit, but decided to close when he learned that an anti-Bush protest would be held on a parallel street. He says the closure will cost him €15,000 euros in lost revenues, but that he simply can’t risk the danger to his clients and workers. Analysts cited by Die Tageszeitung say the Bush visit will cost Mainz and the surrounding region more than €300 million in revenue. Clearly, nobody is happy about the loss. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has even taken the unusual step of apologizing to Mainz residents for the inconvenience, saying "When one has the American president as a guest, then one has to be sensitive to the security needs they think they have." Bush, Schroeder insisted, is a "very welcome guest" and asked everyone to "accept limitations that usually don’t exist" in order to further the German-American friendship.

Our suggestion for Bush’s next visit: given the already astronomical costs of moving the president from place to place and the extraordinary security precautions necessary to bring him, wouldn’t it simply be better to limit Bush’s trip’s to the world’s most remote spots? That way, the fewest people possible would be bothered. He could then ask those he really wanted to see to visit him. Here is our list of potential European presidential destinations: Germany’s Helgoland, an island in the North Sea (70 km from land) with a population of 1,650 (likely just about the number in the president’s entourage). Scotland’s Highlands, where there aren’t many people but there is one of the only free-living herd of reindeer in the world. Any of Denmark’s 18 Faroe islands. They’re mid-way between the Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea. An online city calendar for the main city of Torshav shows there are no official events all month. (12 p.m. CET)

Gold? Frankinsence? Myhrr?...

A pivotal part of diplomatic protocol is to offer heads of states gifts when they come to visit. A special guest like George W. Bush and his wife Laura (who made Bush swear before she married him that she would never have to give a public speech) requires unprecedented measures. But what to offer? For Laura — a former librarian who has made a point of hosting literary circles at the White House — a gift idea was easy. Today, the First Lady will be presented with the world’s smallest book, which will come in a tiny gold and leather case. The book, a mere 3,5 millimeters in size, contains the Lord’s Prayer in seven languages, including English. And Bush? What should the land of Goethe and Schiller offer a cowboy of a man like Bush — a man who openly admits he does not like to read? Handed such a tough dilemma, Germany’s official present-searchers outdid themselves this time. They came up with a copy of an 1884 share printed by the short-lived Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. The group — which for a while was on the stock market — was formed by 21 men who lived near Mainz and organized the 19th century immigration of thousands of Germans to Texas. Those hardy Germans largely founded the Texas cities of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. (1 p.m. CET)

Skeptical Germans

Although Bush has certainly mustered his best Texas charm for his European trip, skeptical Germans don’t buy the act. According to a survey published Wednesday in the news magazine Stern, 80 percent of Germans don’t think the Bush administration will pay more attention to European opinions when it makes foreign policy decisions. Only 16 percent said they thought Europe would now have a greater say. Four percent said they didn’t know. (10:50 a.m. CET)

How to do Germany in Seven Hours

Even in little Mainz, seven hours is not enough time to see all the major sites. What is a president to do? Luckily, being the most powerful man in the world, he’s able to get some pretty good advice on what to see and do. Since President Bush has to attend to business events like, you know, meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a lot of the responsibility of sightseeing has fallen to Laura. Here’s a quick look at their tight schedule on Wednesday:

10:45
When President Bush runs off to meet Schroeder at Mainz’s baroque electoral palace, Laura Bush and Doris Schroeder-Koepf tour the Roman-Germanic Museum, built in 1852 and covering the period between the Stone Age and the Middle ages, roughly 2.5 million years.

12:45
Lunch in the Great Hall of the Palace. Other guests include Christian Democratic Union leader Angela Merkel, the head of Daimler-Chrysler, Juergen Schrempp, and for some reason, Thomas Gottschalk (a late-night talk show host on the level of the late Johnny Carson or David Letterman — he lives part-time in California, so maybe that got him the invite).

2:25
Bush meets with young, important Marshall fellows in a closed-door session. Laura visits the historic Mainz cathedral, a massive red sandstone structure in the heart of the old city with stained-glass windows by artist Mark Rothko.

3:35
Picking up where the Roman-Germanic Museum left off, the Bushes visit the Gutenberg Museum, a special request from Laura, to see one of its two copies of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bibles, widely considered to be his masterpieces.

5:00
The couple goes from there to Wiesbaden to visit the American troops stationed in the city, followed by an evening flight to Slovakia. Another day, another country. (10 a.m. CET)

The Wiesbaden Warriors Welcome Laura

Laura Bush’s official visit to Germany actually began on Tuesday, with a trip to schools in Wiesbaden and troops in Ramstein — but her presence, fortunately, wasn’t as economically disruptive as her husband’s. Her trip must have seemed oddly familiar: Despite being in Germany, she was surrounded all day by good-old red, white and blue Americana: cheerleaders and marching bands. The streets in the neighborhood of Hainerberg Village in Wiesbaden, where she went to speak to students at General H.H. Arnold High School, are all named after US states, and the school, fittingly, is on Texas Street. A large sign in front of the school declares it "Warrior Territory," after the school’s European champion football team, the Wiesbaden Warriors (which also explains why so many students were wearing jackets with big Ws on their arms). And since it was a pep rally, the First Lady gave the students, sons and daughters of US soldiers stationed there a pep talk: "You don’t fly jets or wear uniforms, but as the children of our military, you serve, too. The courage with which you do so is an inspiration to us all," Bush said. To top off the visit and give it even more of a typical American high school flair, Diana DeGarmo, runner-up in the US television show "American Idol," also performed. (9 a.m. CET)

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343310,00.html