Susan and Amrit come to Germany

Over Columbus Day weekend, we hosted our first visitors from the States.  My step-mother (Susan) and my brother (Amrit) flew from Raleigh and spent the weekend with us.  We had lots of adventures despite the fact that they were only in the country for five days.  A summary of their trip:

Wednesday afternoon: RDU to ORD

Wednesday night: ORD to FRA

Thursday morning: Tina and Calvin pick them up at the airport

Thursday afternoon:  Amrit sleeps on the couch

Friday during the day: Tina leads a tour of downtown Wiesbaden while I was at work

Friday night: Drive to Ramstein Air Force Base for dinner at Macaroni Grill.  While we were down there, I  also did a test drive of the 1998 BMW that I ended up buying the following week.

Saturday: Nerobergbahn.  Amrit and I stayed up late to watch NC State football lose to Duke.

Sunday: Church, dinner at home

Monday: Rüdesheim, Assmannshausen.

Tuesday: FRA to DFW to RDU

I uploaded lots of photos to Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/pnarula/SusanAndAmritComeToGermany.  Here are some group photos:

Oscar starts Kindergarten

We had hoped to enroll Oscar in the local German school in our town but the school was already full when we went to register in July.  They could have found him a spot in a different school but we didn't want to have to travel far for school so we enrolled him at the local Department of Defense school instead.  Most of his classmates have at least one parent in the military.  Maybe next year we will explore the German school again.  But for now he will remain at the DoD school.

Oscar was excited to start school.

We drove Oscar to school on the first day.  Some days he rides the bus but we are trying to minimize that (more on this in a moment).  Calvin also liked coming to Oscar's school (with his favorite hand blanket, of course).

A picture with dad.

And one with mom.

Waiting for the bell to ring.

 Oscar likes his Orioles backpack from the Junior Orioles Dugout Club.  We got a bunch of 50th anniversary pins in 2008 and I added a few of them to his backpack.

 

 
Oscar is really excited about riding the bus to school but we are less enthusiastic about this.  To understand our hesitation, you need some context.  The elementary school, middle school, and high school are all right next to each other.  Also, the high school students generally do not drive because a requirement to get a driver's license issued by the Army is an existing license from the United States (the Army license is respected by the German government; getting a license from the Germans is possible but it requires passing a much more difficult test and it is also quite expensive).  Because the high school students generally do not drive, there is no on-site student parking at the high school.  The result of all of this is that all of the students from all three schools ride the school bus if they don't have somebody driving them to school.  And since the schools are all co-located, there is only one bus for all three schools.  So Oscar (age 5) rides the bus with middle school and high school students.  Because the language on the bus leaves a lot to be desired, we have been trying to drive him to school and/or pick him up in the afternoon.

Recyling in Germany

One of the things we discovered when we moved into our house is that the Germans really like to recyle.  It fits right in with other European values like small cars, efficient appliances, and public smoking.  Well, maybe not public smoking.

We have four bins for our family's waste products -- one for paper products (Altpapier -- "wastepaper"), one for packaging (Verpackungen -- wax-coated milk cartons, ziploc bags, saran wrap, styrofoam packaging, plastic, etc), one for products that can be composted (simply called "Bio" -- the brown bucket), and then the gray bucket for all other household trash.

The Bio is collected every week.  The rest are biweekly (every other week).  I initially thought that the "everything else" bucket wouldn't be big enough for us since our garbage collection in Maryland was semiweekly (twice a week).  I guess what I have discovered is that in Maryland, we would take the trash out twice a week whether it really needed to go out or not.  Now we only take the trash out when it really needs to go out.  And of course, the fact that we are recycling a lot also means less garbage overall.  We did a fair amount of recycling in the States, but we also threw away a number of recyclable items because Anne Arundel County wasn't able to process them.  That doesn't seem to be the case here -- the Germans recycle everything that can be recycled.  The result of all of this is we don't have as much garbage as we used to.  We could probably go three weeks between pickups and be fine.

Notice that none of our buckets take glass.  We have large bins for glass recycling a few hundred feet from our house.  There are separate bins for white glass, green glass, and brown glass.  These glass recycling bins are shared with everybody in the neighborhood.  Because recycling glass is noisy, this is only allowed between 8AM and 1PM and between 3PM and 8PM.  Of course, glass recycling is prohibited on Sundays and holidays (but you didn't need me to tell you that, right?).  If you were not aware, Germany has federally-mandated "quiet hours" from 1PM to 3PM every day and all day on Sundays and holidays.  You aren't supposed to mow your lawn, wash your car, or do things that might disturb your (presumably slumbering) neighbors during these times.

A quick trip to Friedrichsdorf

On Stake temple day in August, I took the boys to see the LDS temple in Friedrichsdorf.

The detached spire is to the right. The inscription above the entrance reads:
Das Haus des Herrn (The House of the Lord)
Heilig dem Hernn (Holiness to the Lord)

A crack in the wall

About two weeks after we moved into our house, we woke up one Saturday morning to a small crack in the wall in the living room.  German houses are not constructed out of wooden studs and drywall.  Instead, the walls have a concrete base and then a plaster coating is applied on top of the concrete.  In our situation, the plaster coating had become separated from the concrete base.  Initially, the crack was only a few inches long but when I pressed on that part of the wall, I could feel the wall bulging away from the base.  So we called the landlord.  He came over and agreed it needed to be repaired.  So the next day a plaster guy came by the house.  At first he started picking at the wall with a small putty knife.  Then he got a hammer and an even larger putty knife.  Eventually he was removing large sections of the wall at a time.

By the time he was finished removing parts of the wall that had become separated from the base, the crack had grown to become a rather large hole.

Next up was patching the hole with plaster. The plaster comes in bags of powder and has to be mixed with water to the proper consistency.  Then it is applied with a trowel.

Once it has been applied, the plaster is smoothed with a straightedge.

Next the rest of the wall got a topcoat of plaster so that everything would look the same after it dried.

All done with the topcoat.

We had to wait for it to dry.  Here it is about an hour later -- the topcoat is starting to dry but the plaster is still wet.

It took about three days to dry completely.  Each day the plaster guy came back to see if it was dry.  When it was finally dry, then the landlord came over and painted it white.  The whole process took about a week.

Some photos of our house

Our house is not a single family home.  It is the middle unit in a three-unit row house.  So there are two end units and then we are in the middle.  Both of our neighbors on the corners are also Americans.  So much for German neighbors.  I asked our housing guy why the Germans aren't interested in renting this place and he basically said it is because the rent is too high (rent + utilities exceed $4100 per month at the current exchange rate).  Any German that could afford to rent this place would want to buy it instead.  Of course, the money is largely irrelevant to us as long as the total cost stays under our annual living quarters allowance.  Our landlord has another house that he also rents to Americans.  He seems to be keen on this because he knows the Americans mostly don't care how much it costs (as long as the total cost is less than their allowance) and the rent will always be paid on time.

Our place has four levels -- a basement, a main level, and two upstairs levels.  Here are some photos of our house.

Kitchen:

Dining Room (I am standing in the kitchen):

Living Room:

Small back yard (not big enough for a garden):

Bathroom (we have two and a half but this is the only one with a tub):

Bedrooms (we have five; only two are pictured):

The boys are in the bedrooms on the third level.  These have limited standing space for an adult because the roof is directly overhead.

The stairs are not kid friendly:

Laundry room in the basement:

Location Location Location

An old adage says the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location.  Our house is nice but the location is not.  And that's a real bummer.  We live near the top of a hill on a pretty busy street.  At the top of the hill, the street dead ends into a T and traffic must either turn left or right.  There is no traffic signal at this intersection -- just a one-way stop sign.  Traffic on the cross street has the right of way and does not have to stop.  As a result, traffic on our street is often backed up down the hill.  Most nights I have to sit in this traffic before I can pull into my own driveway.

Separately, there are four different buses that stop right in front of our house.  Each comes once or twice an hour.  When it rains, people wait under our covered porch so they don't get wet.  They leave so much trash on the sidewalk (cigarettes, coffee cups, soda bottles, general trash) that the landlord has been forced to hire somebody to come and clean it up on a daily basis.  Thankfully that cost is built into our rent.  On Saturday nights, the drunks get off the bus and make lots of noise.  For a rental property, it will suffice.  But I wouldn't want to live in this house for the rest of my life.

Here is a photo of the bus stop taken from the guest bedroom on the 2nd floor.

Moving Day

After 32 nights at the Hyatt in Mainz, we moved into our house on August 4th.  Somebody from church watched the boys while the household goods were being delivered.  That was a big help.  A few days before we moved in, the movers placed a "no stopping" sign in front of our house.  This was rather humorous to us because the house is right in front of a busy bus stop.

 The movers arrived with our stuff right on time.

In the States, our stuff was loaded onto a huge 18-wheeler.  In Germany, they use smaller trucks and make multiple trips. We had seven "crates" of stuff.  The truck could only hold four crates so they unloaded four creates in the morning and then came back after lunch (and a trip to their warehouse) to unload the other three.  Here's a photo of one of the mover guys opening one of the crates.

Everything in the crates had a numbered tag on it.  The numbers were placed on the boxes in Maryland.  My job at delivery was to check off each box as it was unloaded from the truck.  At the end of the day, the movers expected me to sign a form saying everything was delivered.  Of course, this sounds like it shouldn't be a problem but in practice it is very hard to keep track of everything.  Several boxes came off the truck with no labels; others had already been checked off when I went to check it off again.  The experience was confusing and stressful.  While I was doing the inventory, Tina was telling the guys where to take each box. Here is a photo of me with the clipboard, checking items off the list.

When we were done, there were several items on the list that were not checked off but all of the expensive stuff had been delivered so I figured the rest were just oversights or mistakes.  In time, everything that was packed did turn up.  We are not aware of anything that was stolen by the movers during the moving process.

One curiosity is that our mattress and box spring (queen size) would not fit up the stairs.  So they had to come in through the window in our bedroom.  Fortunately there is a balcony so the window is actually a door.  The guys did a nice job lifting it up and over the balcony and sliding into the bedroom.

The movers were very nice.  A few things were damaged in transit and we are filing a claim for those.  Overall the move was very successful.  We know people who have had horror stories with moving ($20k worth of damage, entire crates that get left behind in the States, etc) so we feel fortunate to have gotten through this without much difficulty.

After the movers left, a German neighbor brought us some flowers from her garden.

 

Hyatt Regency in Mainz, Germany

We spent 32 nights at the Hyatt in Mainz.  Tina was pretty sick most of the time we were there -- throwing up several times a day and generally feeling like a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy.  The morning-sickness-that-lasts-all-day did eventually go away but that didn't happen until we had moved into our house.

We had two connecting rooms at the Hyatt -- one for the boys with two twin beds and one for us with a king bed.  The rooms were on the smallish side but I had negotiated free parking, internet, and breakfast into the price.  The all-you-can-eat breakfast was fantastic.  Unfortunately, I don't have any photos.  Just picture fancy German meats, cheeses, croissants with jelly from Vienna, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the best herbal tea you've ever had in your life, balls of chocolate that you dissolve into heated milk to make hot cocoa, and more.  So good.  Did I mention it was all-you-could-eat?  Regular price is something like €30 per person.

Here are some photos of our rooms.  The shower was one of those fancy "rain from the ceiling" shower heads.

Rainbow on the Rhine

Sometime during our fourth week in the hotel, it rained really hard for a few minutes and then the sun came out. I took this photo of the resulting rainbow on the Rhine.