Cookies for Santa

The boys enjoyed putting out some cookies for Santa.  They did not enjoy watching daddy take some for himself.

 

 

Frankfurt Christmas Market

On December 5th we went to the Frankfurt Christmas Market.  We had a nice time visiting with a friend of mine from high school, eating traditional German food, and walking around the Christmas market.  Photos (with captions) are on Picasa.

 

 

 

 

A visit to the hospital

A few weeks ago Oscar pushed Calvin in the hallway right before we were about to start Family Home Evening. Calvin hit his forehead on the corner of the wall. The gash was deep enough that it needed medical attention that night so I took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. Germany doesn't have Urgent Care centers. So if your child needs medical attention, the options are the pediatrician or the ER.

Here's a photo that I took about five minutes after it happened:

The wound wasn't that bad -- Calvin stopped crying almost as soon as Tina put some gauze on it. And he fell asleep in the car on the way to the Emergency Room. The ER was very English-friendly. The forms I had to fill out were all in English and the doctor spoke English too. We only had to wait about ten minutes to be seen and it only took fifteen minutes for them to treat him. Here we are waiting to be seen:

The nurse glued the skin shut and put three small strips of adhesive gauze across the wound. We were thankful it didn't need stitches. The doctor told me to keep it dry for a week and monitor it for infection. The nurse didn't speak much English but she laughed when I started taking photos -- she chuckled, "Ein Krankenhaus Besuch."

All better!

We were in an out pretty quickly -- I only paid for 45 minutes of parking. The wound started to heal pretty quickly. Two days after the incident, Calvin started exhibiting a pair of black eyes:

Even though he didn't actually have stitches, Calvin kept on calling the tape "titches" and saying that he did not want to take them off. I took him to the pediatrician to have the tape removed just to make sure there were no lingering problems. Right before we went, I took a quick video with the camera:




Thankfully the tape came off without incident and the bruise has started to fade:

Technik Museum Speyer

On Veteran's Day we took the boys to the Technik Museum in Speyer, Germany.  The museum has a lot of old airplanes, a U-boat, and even an old Russian Space Shuttle.  Unfortunately, the Space Shuttle was in a hanger and we thought the hanger was the IMAX theatre so we didn't go inside.  We saw lots of cool things but missed the space shuttle.  I have uploaded some photos to my Picasa web album.

Making Orange Juice

Oscar wanted to know where orange juice comes from.  So we bought a 220V juicer and some oranges and made orange juice.

Oscar broke the camera

Oscar likes taking photos with the camera.  In late August, he dropped our Canon SD600 digital camera while the lens was extended.  After he dropped it, the lens mechanism did not expand and retract properly.  I ordered a replacement lens mechanism on eBay for $25 and completely disassembled the camera to install the new lens.  After I put the new lens in, I couldn't get the camera to power on.  I tried five or six times to take it apart and put it back together but I was never able to get it to power on.  Eventually I gave up and ordered a new Canon SD780IS.  I will sell the old one on eBay for parts.

We really like the new camera -- it takes great pictures and it even shoots high definition video (720p).

Here are some photos of the disassembled SD600.  Notice the broken lens on the left and the replacement on the right.

1998 BMW 520i

The government only ships one car for people that take overseas assignments.  So we shipped the Odyssey and sold the Accord.  We initially floated the idea of getting by with just the Odyssey but it quickly became evident that having a second car would simplify a lot of things.  Things got even harder when Tina was asked to be the Young Women's President (meetings every Thursday) and I was asked to be the Ward Clerk (meetings before church every Sunday).

I ended up buying a 1998 BMW 520i in late October.  I bought it from a German guy that was advertising it on a Craigslist-like website that is for military communities (bookoo.com).  It drives really well and the previous owner was a non-smoker (what are the odds?).  A few weeks after I bought it, I took it up to 190 KMPH (118 MPH) on the Autobahn and it was nothing but smooth.

The car is German-spec so it has some quirks.  Of course, the speedometer only shows kilometers per hour.  This is less of an issue since the speed limits are all in KMPH anyway.  Then there is the radio.  It has a mind of its own.  Whenever a traffic report is playing on a different station, the radio automatically switches to the traffic report and turns up the volume.  It is very annoying.  The owner's manual probably tells me how to disable this feature but it is in German so I haven't tried looking through it.  Finally, I discovered that the idle is not steady when the car is cold.  I'm not sure why it does this -- the engine revs up and then falls back down before revving up again.  One time when it was idling, the RPMs fell low enough to stall the engine.  As soon as the engine is warm, it idles smoothly.  Strange.  Any ideas?

The boys were really excited about the car.  They know that Uncle Amrit has a BMW so wanted to go for a ride in mine.  Then they told everybody that "daddy bought a new BMW."

I have uploaded some photos to Picasa.

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.