The attack of the Hochwasser

Living along the Rhine has its literal ups and downs. This week specifically saw a pretty dramatic up, as in, the water levels.

Due to heavy downpour in the entirety of central Europe last weekend, every river was running high and pouring all the extra water into the large rivers, like the Donau and the Rhine. I got back from a visit to England on Monday, having not really checked the news for several days, to find that a bunch of ship traffic was waiting on one side of the bridge because the water levels were too high for the huge cargo vessels to fit underneath. This happens with some frequency, since ships are built larger and larger and bridges are not similarly supersized. I figured there had been some rain and the river had gone up a few feet.

Ha. Hahahahaha.

See the bush? That's where the path normally is.

The ducks are having a grand ol' time.

Construction bits moved to the top of the wall

Dirt and gravel dumped in the gap in the wall.

The river is trying to sneak around the gravel!

This entire area is usually construction headquarters.

High-walk.

The fire department helpfully installed this high walk, just in case the river actually made it past the wall that was purposefully built to keep it from getting this far. You know, the construction that woke me up for a month straight when I first moved to my apartment? The huge machines I still dodge nearly every morning on my way to the bus? The wall that has cost the city a great deal of time and money, and means that my lovely view of the Rhine is obstructed by backhoes and mobile offices?

Apparently no one trusts it.

So if the water were to come up as far as the houses, the fire department would bring in steps or ladders and we could all walk high above the river, safe and dry. Then presumably I could enter through my neighbor's window, swim downstairs to my apartment, and...cook? This seems rather unhelpful for those of us blessed/cursed with a first-floor dwelling. This is presumably why my landlady lives on the second floor of her house next door and rents out the first floor.

You will be happy to know that these pictures represent the highest that the water ever came. My apartment is safe, my feet are dry, and the river is slowly returning to its usual place. It's not quite there yet - the path is still underwater, with ducks and swans merrily paddling about - but I'm hopeful that by early next week I can go for my walks along the no-longer-flooding Rhine.

(Hochwasser, literally "high water", is the German word for flooding. Where English-speakers would say that the river is flooding, Germans say that the "high water comes!")

Weekday quiet

It's a recurring, overused, beat-the-dead-horse joke that the United States has a lot of space and Europe does not, comparatively speaking. I'm of the opinion that the difference in space is at the root of many differences, political and personal, but that gets into "serious discussion" territory. Instead, let me show you two pictures.

Picture #1

Picture #2

Two "suburbs", separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously Picture #1 is American and Picture #2 German, as indicated by the space differences. The American suburb has single-family homes, front yards (albeit small ones), trees, and houses set back from the street. The German neighborhood (Europe doesn't have suburbs quite like the States, but this is a reasonable approximation) has a row of houses on either side, all sharing at least one and often two walls with a neighbor. You walk out your front door and there is the street, just a step down. No front yards, no green space, no sprawl. German homes are very compact.

At the end of the street here is a little park and the Rhine River. In the States, where anyone not living in a city has their own green patch, parks are nice but not particularly crowded unless they have a play structure for children. If you want to sit outside after dinner on a nice spring evening, you do so on your deck or on your porch or in your front lawn or whatever. In Germany, where a few lucky people have a balcony, the green spaces are overrun on nice weekends. This past weekend was gorgeous: mid-60s, sunny, hint of a breeze. It's a very pleasant time to stroll along the Rhine, as I and everyone else from the area proceeded to do. And everyone who wasn't strolling was covering the small green space with blankets, picnic baskets, portable grills, and lawn chairs. The sheer number of people here, where usually we have the construction workers and the period person+dog, was a little startling. Certainly there are places in the States that are equally busy during certain times of the year. At home, there's a park where everyone goes to watch the fireworks on July 4th. But I've never seen a public green space quite so full of people, so constantly.

The close proximity of so many people does not mean that we're all friends and hang out and have one big barbeque together. Quite the contrary - Germans are good at pretending like the other people they live so near don't exist. It's probably the only way to get around the fact that you have very little private space. But it was really nice to see so many disparate groups spending time in this green space for a weekend together. Groups of teenage friends, elderly couples, families, and single walkers all moved around one another like currents in the river.

And today? Well, I have Mondays off because I'm spoiled rotten, but nearly everyone else has to work. The park is nearly deserted except for a young mother and her young child, and only a few people are walking their dogs along the river. Everything is very quiet. I'm headed out for yet another walk and bask, all by myself. I think I prefer the quiet, as a ferocious introvert, but there is a loss of energy with the loss of so many other people.

It's getting cold in here

Last week my landlady dropped off a bill for miscellaneous costs associated with my apartment. These include things like trash and recycling, as well as any excess utilities I've used over the last five months. I pay a set utilities cost in addition to my rent every month that is meant to cover gas and electricity, but it turns out that I've been using more gas for heating than is covered by these monthly payments.

The thing that startled me about this news is that I thought I'd been using my heat normally. When I'm not in the room, I turn it off.

This is as low as it goes

At night, I turn it to night.

Complete with cute little graphic

During the daytime when I'm in the room, I turn it to day.

Cute little graphic #2

And sometimes when I'm especially cold, I turn it above day for a while.

I have no idea what temperatures these numbers account for

I am not in the room from 7:30a through 1p Tuesday through Friday. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday see me in and out. During the months covered by the bill, I wasn't in Germany for nearly five weeks - more than a month - because I was traveling. And because my heater operates by radiating rather than forcing air, the general room temperature is never what you would call warm. Despite all of that, I managed to use close to fifteen euros extra of heat every month.

The Germans, I've decided, are an exceptionally warm-blooded or exceptionally stoic people. Probably both. Presumably they don't actually turn on the heater a great deal of the time during the winter. Do they use blankets? Bundle up in jacket, hat, and gloves? Grin and bear it? It's a mystery to me that they manage to be comfortable at home if my use of heat is extravagant.

I think my blanket and I will become close friends over the next few months, and I hope that the warmer weather is here to stay. At the end of the day I prefer to be warm rather than save a few euros, but it would be interesting to try staying within the German-approved limits of heat use.

Here comes the sun!

About a week ago, I complained that it was freezing-winter-cold but without any snow.

(To any who wonder if the glamor that is life abroad in Europe ever settles into a same-old-same-old routine, that post should answer your question. I stumble through teaching over three hundred children every week, I conduct my life in a second language, I'm living in Germany, and the best I can come up with is a discussion on the weather.)

I'm afraid the atmospheric-based discussions haven't quite ended.

Today was a gorgeous day. Fifty-something degrees, sunny, a slight breeze, and a whole day to enjoy the outdoors contributed to a very positive mood. I walked to the city center instead of taking a bus and didn't wear my coat because I didn't need it. Glorious.

This evening I came back to my room and read for a while, which is something I love to do and feel very fortunate that I have the time to indulge. After my lovely day in the sunshine I was kind of sad about evening coming and bringing the dark. Winter in the northern hemisphere brings a lot of dark. I'm tired of it. Even in the daytime, winter has this odd blue/grey cast to it. Witness this picture from my previous post:

Very blue

 And this one that I took earlier in the winter:

Grey. Also, snowing. Still.

But spring is starting to make its way forward, and the light changes too. There's a particular time of the evening when the entire view out my window becomes all orange and warm. Directly across the river are some cliffs that turn coppery and even the trees, still bare this time of year, go the cinnamon-brown of melted chocolate instead of the cold grey of a winter storm.

Today, around six in the evening

Forgive the poor picture, and the constant presence of construction equipment. Notice the orange rocks and how the trees look a little pinkish/reddish/brown. If I'm in my room at this time of the day I always stop and just stare out the window for the five minutes or so that it lingers. I feel cozy and warmed. Even when pitted against the glory that is full, sunny daytime, sunset may be my favorite time of day right now.

Of course tonight, walking back from my Zumba class, I might see all the stars over the river and the fortress lit up a little down the way, and then I wonder if a clear night isn't my favorite time.

Breakfast of champions

One of my colleagues is traveling to South Carolina for two weeks during our spring break as part of a teacher exchange/learning program. She's very excited and had a little brunch on Saturday with a number of other teachers to celebrate her imminent departure. We feasted on sandwiches, quiche, Tex-Mex salad, chili, muffins, and apple pie for six hours before taking our leave.

Let me tell you, living in Germany has been great for my listening skills. Ask anyone who knows me - I have opinions on a great number of topics and like nothing better than to bounce ideas back and forth with a couple friends. "Bounce ideas" can easily become "hold forth without interruption" because while I'm as awkward as a dancing elephant with strangers, I get very chatty with friends. And my friends, bless them, are a patient, adult lot of people who politely listen even when they likely have ideas to discuss as well. As I've gotten older and (hopefully) more mature, I've tried to work on the skill of listening. As it turns out, trying to follow a conversation in German is great practice, because all my concentration is taken up in attempting to understand what's being said. Usually I can't mind-translate and then speak fast enough to add much to the conversation, though I can sometimes ask a question. I hope this habit continues when I'm back in the States

Several other teachers had generously offered me a ride to and from the brunch, sparing me a complicated series of bus changes. We met at school and left from there, and I presumed we would return and I could take the train back home.

Ha.

In a further gesture of goodwill, these colleagues offered to drive me home, since they were planning to be in the general area anyways. Things got complicated when we realized that, by virtue of never driving in Germany, I have no idea how to get anywhere by car. I can tell you the buses and trains to take, and even recite their timetables, but work to home without public transportation is totally beyond me.

I do, however, know how to get from the center of my city to my apartment. Good. Thanks to highway signs we made it to the city center and went to turn left, when I remembered that the bridge over the river to my neighborhood is under construction and out of order. The bus has been taking an alternate route for the past week, but I could not find that route myself if my life depended on it.

Long story short, three adult teachers and their American assistant drove all through the city and eventually called someone who was sitting in front of a computer to get us across the river. Once there I could direct us, but all told it had been at least an extra twenty minutes of confusing alternate routes to get me home. My colleagues, kind people that they are, insisted they were having a fantastic time being completely lost and laughed regularly at our many aborted attempts to find the right way. And then they refused any money for gas.

tl;dr - take public transportation. Or get a map. Plus, be sure to have very understanding colleagues.

Winter wonderland

Because of my proximity to the Rhine River - about 40 feet from my front door - my area of Germany is not supposed to have much snow. The Rhine, being a large body of water, moderates the temperature and keeps us hovering just under 40 degrees all winter long. In September I was assured that a week of snow was the best we'd ever get.

That's the view outside my window as I type this. See the bits of white? Guess what that is.

Snow.

To be fair, there are no great drifts or howling blizzards. The snow we have is patchy at best and nearly non-existent at worst. But do you know what the weather was doing yesterday? That's right, snowing.

I like having four seasons. I would be horribly bored in southern California where, as I understand it, their only season is "beautiful and sunny, 70 degrees" all day every day. But it's been cold and gray since November and I'm ready for spring to come along. Alternatively, I'll accept a proper winter - if it's cold enough to support snow, then by golly let's have some snow! Great big white drifts of it, flakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes, the whole nine yards. This generally cold and miserable thing? I don't think so.

Kung-fu chicken

I often talk to myself when alone and sometimes chat with inanimate object around me as well. Whether this habit is indicitive of verbal processing or having a few screws loose, I leave it up to you to decide. But that background explains why it's not at all weird that, while making soup, I informed the chicken "you'll need to be torn to shreds in a few minutes." Out of context it does sound a bit odd.

Unrelated to chicken: it was snowing an hour ago and is now raining. I think this weekend is a good one to stay inside.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

On the scale of "Tennessee Christmas" to "frightful," the weather outside is only rather chilly but otherwise pleasant. However, in an unexpected turn of events, we're actually having something of a white winter! Saturday was one of the first truly sunny days we've had in a week and though my fingers protested, I was delighted to run around taking pictures of a rare snow in southern Germany.

Thursday late afternoon is looking a bit snowy

The train station at 7am on Friday has a light dusting

We're on the way...

Now you're talking!

Notice the accumulation on the fountain

At this point (the middle of fourth hour) the rest of school was cancelled because some buses stop running when it snows and the students could be stranded at school. I never did confirm whether these were only the buses that drive along back country roads, or if the German public transportation system is just deathly afraid of ice on the streets. My landlady noted with disapproval that some people use salt when it snows, to the detriment of the environment. I refrained from telling her that salt is de rigueur in the States, at least where I come from.

Saturday dawned bright and clear

Recycling bins with festive caps of snow

The pigeons are cold

Return of the swans

Let it be known: swans are evil. Pictures of swans in the snow are rather pretty. Of course at this point one swan started stalking towards me and hissing, so I backed off. When I relayed this story to my parents, they chided me for reinforcing the swan's behavior and encouraged me to become the alpha swan by standing my ground and hitting the thing when it got too close. I'm not sure its worth the possibility of a bite or buffet. Swans are heavy, I think they could do some damage. Plus, I have no idea about their protected status in Germany - Siebenschläfers are protected, why not swans?

The Germans are big on Christmas, so I'll share some pictures of Christmas decorations around my city just as soon as I take them on Monday. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

A recycling story

As I mentioned before, Germans take recycling super seriously. When I first came to my apartment my landlady explained the recycling/trash rules, but in the rush of other information, I totally forgot. Two weeks ago my upstairs neighbor, having noticed that I was doing it all wrong, offered to explain everything to me again. Here goes:

All waste material is split into one of seven categories: paper, plastic/metal, clear glass, brown glass, green glass, compost, and trash. You throw things in the trash only as a last resort - if something could possibly go into one of the other categories, it darn well should.

Plastic, metal, and the three glasses should be washed clean of food waste. If, for example, a glass jar has a label, that label should be removed and put into the paper container, because it is not glass. The washed-off food waste should join normal food waste in the compost containers.

Within my apartment building we have communal compost, plastic/metal, and trash bins into which our apartment's smaller versions should be emptied. The compost bin should not have any paper or plastic in it, so no putting food waste into bags to throw away. Compost and trash are picked up on alternating Monday mornings at 6am, so the appropriate bin should be dragged to the front of the building on Sunday night. If the bin is not dragged back into place by around noon the next day, the neighbors get irritated with the eyesore and tuck it away somewhere, leaving us a note detailing where to find it. Recycling is picked up every third Thursday at 6am, and must be put into special yellow bags that one can only get from city hall. If the recycling is not in the yellow bag, the recycling people will leave it.

The glass and paper go into color-coded neighborhood bins that live in the little parking lot next to the neighborhood park. Green glass goes in the green bin, clear glass goes in the white bin, brown glass goes in the brown bin, and paper goes in the blue bin. Some buildings have their own glass and paper bins that get picked up like trash and recycling, but we don't have that. I was chided for mistaking another building's paper bin as the place to put my paper. You only make that mistake once.

In addition, batteries must absolutely be recycling and only an antisocial Neanderthal wouldn't recycle them, but I've yet to find where one does this. I'll have to take them home to my local library's battery recycling bin, or risk being shunned by all upstanding Germans.

Let me tell you, I took notes on this little talk and made a schedule so as to not get anything wrong. They'll make a German of me yet.

A collection of smiles

#1: The buses here are often between two and five minutes late. This is very un-German, and I'm assured that the problem is unique to my city. Very reassuring. Despite (or maybe in response to) the lack of punctuality, German bus drivers have no interest in braking for a couple more seconds while you run onto the bus. Can you tell I have personal experience with this? Today, however, a bus driver waited for me. Thanks, nice bus driver.

#2: Fortunately or unfortunately, the lateness issue is only true of the buses. I've had a few issues with plumbing since moving in to my apartment, so this morning a repairperson was scheduled to come in at 8am. Not my idea, let me assure you. At 7:46am sharp my bell rang and it was the repair guy. This morning I was irritated, but in hindsight, German punctuality really does make my type-A self smile.

#3: Germans are obsessive about environmental cleanliness. Except for the smoking thing. Every trashcan is actually three trash cans: paper, plastic/metal/glass, and real trash, and these are very important - my first day in Germany a homeless man berated me for throwing something in the wrong bin. Sometime soon I'll tell you all the rules governing recycling and garbage for my apartment. It's a serious thing. In fact, most German cities have a dedicated team of people who wander around with bags and those little claw-on-stick tools picking up garbage. These people are dressed head-to-toe in reflective orange or yellow and seem to generally be burly forty-year-old men. Imagine my delight when I passed a toy shop today and saw one of these men happily playing with the "create a path for the marble" toy on display while his cart of garbage-collecting tools waited nearby.

#4: Starting next week I have a new school schedule, since there are more English classes than hours I'm allowed to work every week. This means I had to start saying goodbye (possibly temporary, possibly not) to a couple of my classes. One seventh-grade class greeted my announcement with a collective sad sigh and a round of applause.

#5: My landlady is an amateur DIY-er, even for jobs that maybe shouldn't be done by one's self, like electricity and plumbing. You can imagine, therefore, that prior to calling the repair guy mentioned in #2, she tried to fix my plumbing problems herself. On Saturday I got a knock on my door and she came in to try tightening the washer on my kitchen faucet. When that didn't work she took the whole faucet off the wall and went away to a hardware store to see if she could find a solution while I stood there somewhat dumbfounded. As it turns out, she did indeed fix both my dripping faucet and clogged shower drain. And no, hair in the drain was not the problem. Now I have a bitty plunger I'm only to use on the shower if it backs up again and a new washer on my faucet. Problems solved.

How to Build a Bed

Imagine the "How to Train Your Dragon" soundtrack playing in the background of this whole post, because a) it was on for the whole bed-building process and b) everything is more epic with the proper music choices. You may also substitute the "Lord of the Rings" or "Pirates of the Caribbean" soundtracks if you prefer.

Last week my Mom came for a visit. It was really fun to show someone else around the places I've gotten to know and try new things with her - for example, we discovered a new part of the old city and ate at a simply fabulous Italian restaurant. She flew in Saturday morning, slept most of Sunday, and went with me to IKEA on Monday morning. Why IKEA, you ask? Because I really need furniture. See, I arrived in Germany in early September and spent the first two weeks living in my contact teacher's guest room. My attempts to find a nice shared apartment close to the main train station ran up against the propensity of every German under the age of thirty to smoke like a trucker, and so I temporarily moved into a one-room apartment in one of the city's "suburbs" while continuing to look for a permanent place to stay.

A dozen apartment-viewing appointments later, I was ready to move in to any non-smoking apartment that would take me. Some prospective apartmentmates lit up in the living room while we were chatting. Seriously. I don't breathe well around cigarette smoke, so the lack of it was quickly becoming my only criteria for an apartment. By the time we got to early November, the settler in me gave the rest of me an ultimatum: find a place within a week, or decide to stay where I was. I chose the latter. Up until now I'd been sleeping on a camping mattress borrowed from my landlady, with the expectation that I would move out in a few weeks and didn't care to carry a bed from one living space to another. With the decision to stay, it was time to find something slightly more elevated than my foam pad. And while I've struggled to find some things here in the past, I knew that IKEA was the place to go for furniture.

Mom and I caught the appropriate bus out to a gigantic warehouse of a store, typical in the States but very unusual in Germany. Once there we weighed the merits of a bed versus a couch-convertible-bed and estimated the size of the furniture versus the size of my room. In the end, we left with a single bed frame, a mattress tightly rolled up into a compressed cylinder, a bunch of 2x4s to use as a foundation for the mattress, and a "clothes valet" meant to hold the next day's outfit. I meant to use the last one as a bitty closet, since I don't have enough space for a normal wardrobe setup.

I had presumed that, lacking a car to carry off these purchases, we'd take advantage of IKEA's shipping services. Mom's "old bones" protested the idea of waiting for a comfortable bed and we wrestled all the components on to the bus instead. Regrettably I only had my cell phone to take a picture of that spectacle. One box was seven or eight feet tall, while my mattress roll was too thick to carry under one arm. We'd briefly considered the idea of buying an IKEA rolling dolly for ten euros, before remembering that I had nowhere to put a dolly for the next seven months. So with frequent stops and some huffing and puffing, we got the furniture components on to Bus #1. Bus #2 was a little more complicated, as it runs on the normal commuting route between the center of the city and my area of "suburb," but several nice people helped us to hold the pieces for the short ride. Home at last, we took out the instructions and discovered that IKEA is fabulous. Their furniture is designed to have all components in the package, including the tools necessary to put them together. No need for extra screw drivers, nails, hammers, or pliers. It's a beautiful thing for a temporary guest like me.

The boxes, minus the mattress

See, for a rolled-up mattress, you gotta unroll it first.

 Maximum fluffiness is apparently achieved after three days. Mattresses, you can't rush them. I can report that mine feels no different now than it did last week Monday.

The mattress waiting to fluff. With instructions.

Frame, built.

Slats, laid down.

Not-quite-fluffed mattress, placed.

Sheets, put on.

Look, a it's a real bed! I call it Pinocchio.

Except seriously, Pinocchio is a really creepy film. The cat is cute and I do love Jiminy Cricket, but the island of boys turning into donkeys was the stuff of my nightmares. Along with Ursula. Ursula is scary.

That whole setup took maybe a half-hour or forty minutes, which I found pretty good for first-time IKEA furniture assemblers. Within another ten minutes we had my closet all set up too.

We're so good at this game.

And yes, I have a Hawaiian-print skirt. It was, in fact, my first skirt since about age seven that was shorter than my ankles. Ah, youth. Now I am happy to report that I live within the realm of "somewhere around the knee" for all my skirts and dresses, though I've never tried a miniskirt before. I think my thighs might get stage fright. They're rather shy that way.

With the addition of a toaster oven provided by one of my colleagues and a monthlong bus/train ticket, it's like I really live here! Such a nice feeling. I also bought a rug for the bathroom.