Store Hours

This is a picture of our dining room with a wood burning stove. There are seats that run along it where you can sit to warm your....seat.

We went to IKEA today which is near Wiesbaden, (a U.S. army base and hospital is located there). The kids couldn't help but notice the Toys R Us right across the way. We saw several things at IKEA that we would like to get, but we need to wait till our container arrives with all our belongings. Our house feels very roomy right now, but that's because it is sparsely furnished. We're actually liking how much easier it is to keep tidy and are starting to dread having all our stuff here. Even though we got rid of a lot and put a lot into storage, we still probably brought too much.

The kids like the IKEA because they can go from floor to floor via slides rather than stairs. Plus we let them get hotdogs.

On the way home, we stopped by the mall so that I could get a cell phone number (it's not set up to call internationally, though) and we needed to shop for meals for today and tomorrow because stores are closed on Sundays.

Until 1996, the government mandated that stores close by 6:00 pm on weekdays, at 2:00pm on Saturdays and they were to be closed on Sundays, to ensure the reduction of working hours in Germany. You can imagine how hard that was on single people or families where both parents worked. I have heard horror stories about people needing to leave work early to go food shopping or about that one Thursday a month where stores were allowed to stay open till 8:00pm, it was a madhouse trying to get shopping done. Plus, you only keep a few day's worth of food in your kitchen at a time. In Germany, people don't "stock up" on food the way we do in the U.S. In fact, our American friend Dina told us that she went food shopping every day on her way from work.

The government has since relaxed the rules and the grocery stores around us are open until 8:00pm and one is even open until 10:00pm, but all are closed on Sundays. Fortunately, bakeries are sometimes open for a few hours Sunday morning so you can get fresh brötchen (rolls) for breakfast. In an emergency on a Sunday, you can get some milk and bread at a gas station, or some people even go to the airport grocery store which is allowed to stay open.

I was nervous about the whole food shopping thing before I came to Germany. You hear about the stores hours (which it turns out is not a problem) and then most Germans have small kitchen and tiny fridges, and even smaller freezers in those fridges. Our generous landlord, however, installed new large kitchen cabinets and a refrigerator the same size as our American one. Even with the storage space, I still go food shopping almost everyday, mostly because I can't come up with more than one meal idea a day. Plus, it's a nice walk by myself during quiet time. So far I have been pretty wimpy and have made familiar foods - hamburgers, shepherd's pie, pasta, frankfurters, etc. But I always have to be sure to shop for Sundays in advance.