Essential German phrases

The southern German greeting, used all day and by everyone including officials. 'Guten Tag' is not wrong, it just marks you as being from somewhere else.

The rotating cleaning duty in an apartment building — stairwell, pavement, bins, snow. In Swabia it is often written into the lease or the house rules, and it is genuinely enforced by your neighbours.

The basin — the bowl the city centre sits in, ringed by vineyard slopes. It traps warm air, exhaust and noise, and it explains almost everything about living here.

Registering your address with the city within two weeks of moving in. It produces the certificate that your tax ID, bank account, insurance and residence permit all require.

Cold versus warm rent. Adverts quote the cold figure; the warm figure adds heating, water, rubbish and building costs and is what actually leaves your account.

The credit reference agency. Every landlord and every phone contract asks for a Schufa-Auskunft, and a newcomer's file is empty rather than bad.

The public staircases that climb the valley sides. There are around 400 of them totalling some twenty kilometres, and several are the only sensible route between two streets.

'We can do anything except speak standard German' — the state's own advertising slogan, and an accurate warning about what you will hear in a bakery.

A Besenwirtschaft — a wine grower's temporary tavern, open only a few weeks a year and marked by a broom hung outside. Own wine, simple food, no licence needed.

A quarter-litre glass of wine, the standard Swabian measure. Stuttgart is a wine city rather than a beer city, and the vineyards start inside the city limits.

112 for ambulance and fire, 110 for police. 112 works across the EU from any phone.