At the Playground

Today is David's first day of work. My first day at home alone.

Some workers come to do some odd jobs around the house, like fix the dishwasher and put in new lights. They speak no English and I speak only a little German, but we manage OK.

Penny, our relocation agent stops by and I asked her to show me how the washer and dryer work. She oohed and aahed over the new front loading machines our landlord got for us and translated the settings for me. She reminded me, "And don't forget to empty the water reservoir out of the dryer when it finishes a load. " Excuse me? Empty a water container? In the dryer?

There are two dryer systems in Germany, one like the American system (a heater heats the water in the clothes and the water passes though an exhaust vent in the form of steam to the outside) and the other, like ours, where water is drawn into a large reservoir. It probably holds almost a gallon of water. That would come in handy for watering flowers during all our months of drought in Atlanta!

Our dog Guinness and one of the workers walk into one of the glass doors.

During quiet time, the kids obediently keep quiet inside and I walk to one of the three grocery stores located only 5 minutes away. As a going away gift, my friend Valerie gave me a Pride and Prejudice canvas tote bag. She knew from experience (she and her husband Jim lived in Germany for three years when they were first married) that I would need a shopping bag. Here you pay for plastic bags at the grocery store, so people bring their own canvas bags or even baskets. It's saves money and it's less wasteful, but, hey, I re-used every one of those little plastic bags from the supermarkets back home in the U.S. They were handy.

The kids like going to the park and always stop to say hi to the chickens along the way. The chickens come running to us in such a comical fashion. We never feed them, though, much to their disappointment and I'm waiting for one of my kids to pecked as they can get rather peeved at us.

The playground has the tallest slide I have ever seen and the kids carry sand in their shirts up to the top and pour it down the slide to make their descent even faster.

Graffiti is everywhere.

 Leg placement insures that Becca doesn't go flying across the park.

It also has a zipline which I have never seen in an American playground.

I'm brave and decide to try to cook wienerschnitzel. It's a bit overcooked, but OK for a first try.

David brings home a rental car for me to use -- a little tiny Ford Fiesta. Who cares how little it is, it's automatic!

But I need to learn stick eventually. David has tried teaching me a few times, but I'm nervous and jumpy and it's not going well. We also found that Germany does not recognize our Georgia driver's licenses, so we will need to submit to the notoriously difficult German driving tests within the next six months -- notoriously difficult even for Germans. We will need to take lessons at a driving school, so maybe they'll be able to teach me stick.

We use our new dishwasher for the first time. We use the little tablets of detergent and need to put rinsing agent and salt into little containers inside the dishwasher. The water here is so hard that you need to buy special salt for your dishwasher (they don't have water softeners). The only thing I notice is that when I go to empty the dishwasher, it smells a little funny. I told David that it reminds me of a not-so-clean beach. This is probably one of those things we won't notice in a few weeks (I hope).