So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye…

Well, our bags are packed (full of way too much chocolate) and it's time to say goodbye. Joel and I went for our last run this morning and then I spent the day packing and taking a last walk through the city we’ve lived in for the last 6 ½ weeks. I realized that I’ve never been gone this long from Colorado in the 26 years that we’ve lived there. It’s been a great experience, but now I’m ready to go home. When we first arrived, autumn had just begun, and now we’re well on our way to winter. This is how I know that a significant amount of time has passed--on our first day, the courtyard outside our hotel looked like this. 

And this is what the courtyard looked like 6 weeks later.

Here are some other ways I know I’ve been here for a considerable amount of time:

• My German has progressed enough that this week I made it through a two-hour dinner with a German friend speaking only German. I’m still far from fluent, however, as was abundantly clear when we went to see a version of The Magic Flute on Monday that had a lot of narration. I was only able to follow the gist of it because I knew the story already and was basically useless as a translator for Joel.  
  
  
  
• I’ve been around long enough that I’ve started to blend in. Evidence? The nice frau in front of me in line at the grocery store today, who assumed I was German and started talking to me. Fortunately, it was the kind of talking that only required a smile and a laugh, and an occasional “Genau” (“exactly”--Germans use this word in almost every conversation). After 6 weeks of being forced to preplan what I might need to say at a store or a restaurant, I won’t be surprised if I start making conversation with perfect strangers when I’m home, just because I can. 
•  I said goodbye today to the exceptionally clean Isar river and realized there were no leaves left on any of the trees. In just 2 months, I saw them through from green leaves to their raucous bursts of color to the barren branch phase. It is beautiful in a different way now, with branches like black lace reflected on the water. 
  
• I now think it is normal to see lots of people smoking on the streets. I don’t know if there really are more smokers, or if I just see more of them because I’m primarily a pedestrian here and people can’t smoke in indoor public places like restaurants, stores and trains. I will NOT miss this.
• I also think it’s normal that people strictly obey the walk/don’t walk signs at crosswalks—Germans aso very obedient. This sign reminds people that it’s important to set an example for the children.
  
• And it’s also normal to stand on the right side of an escalator and leave the left side open for people who prefer to walk on an escalator. The Germans are very efficient about this.
• I’ve learned to expect potatoes of some sort at every meal. However I rarely eat potatoes at home and can’t wait to be reunited with my Nutribullet and start having my green smoothies again for breakfast. And I am overjoyed to be able to cook in a real kitchen again very soon, where cooking Thanksgiving dinner for my family will be a delight.

 After so many huge changes during the summer, it was nice to think of our room at the Residence Inn as our home and we were able to settle in and let the dust accumulate in the corners of our minds, so to speak. I know the city and the transportation system and when I come back, it will feel like visiting an old friend, which is just how it should feel when you’ve lived somewhere this long. We have just 3 more weeks before we will be able to move in to our new house and finally begin the next phase of this empty-nest life. Bring it on, baby.

Life on the 5th Floor--Ordinary Days

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the difference between living in Germany and being a tourist in Germany. The key seems to be that when you live in a place, you necessarily have to have the mundane parts of ordinary life because not every day can be spectacular and amazing just because you’re living in a foreign country. It's frankly just too tiring, both mentally and physically. Think about it--if you had to put as much effort into planning every day for two months the way you do when you are planning a vacation, you would collapse into a heap of exhaustion every night. Of course, even an "ordinary" day here usually requires a great deal of walking (as mentioned in last week's post), so collapsing is a common occurrence here.

Likely these thoughts have come to the foreground because I came down with a cold last week and so spent a couple of days resting so I could recover faster. Thursday and Friday last week were basically spent napping and watching Netflix and crocheting hats, in spite of perfectly amazing blue skies and 65 degree weather which I could only enjoy from my windows.

Because I didn’t have the energy to put into planning a weekend outing, we decided to pay someone else to do it, so on Saturday we took a day tour to Neuschwanstein and they took care of buying the train tickets and told us where to eat and narrated the history of the beautiful castles there and King Ludwig II’s tragic life. Joel and I had been there before--over 10 years ago--but we didn’t go inside the castle at that time (choosing instead to rent bikes and ride through the picturesque countryside), so this was a good trip to take under the circumstances. It was a beautiful, short-sleeve kind of day and we thoroughly enjoyed the trip.

Sunday we went to church in the English-speaking ward here (the last few weeks we went to the German ward because it was closer) and then ate dinner with the woman I had lived with for the summer when I was here 30 years ago. She fed us a wonderfully delicious German dinner, with a chicken knödel soup (a knödel is like a dumpling), semmel knödel covered with turkey and gravy, blaukraut (also called rotkohl, or red cabbage), and green salad, with fruit quark (a creamy yogurt-like food, only better) for dessert.

I have seen most of the major sites here, so I thought it would be good to take some pictures of ordinary things that most people don’t think about until they come here. Here’s a sampling:

• I have seen more mail carriers delivering mail on bright yellow bikes than in the bright yellow Post vans.
  
  
  
• A typical street has rows of 6-story buildings on it. I don’t know if it’s a law, or if that’s just how it’s done here. Even when there are businesses on the street level, there are usually apartments on the floors above. Most apartment buildings have courtyards in the middle (like the one I see from my window) where children can play and it’s generally treated like a communal backyard.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Some of the street signs and general building signs that rely on pictures rather than words were a little confusing at first, like this one that tells you this is a building exit (not that you should attack these people).
  
  
  
• Every few blocks there seem to be playgrounds for the children of the neighborhood. Families are clearly very important.
  
  
  
• Dogs are also very important. They are everywhere and businesses will leave out water dishes in front of their stores and if the dogs aren’t allowed in a store (very rare, but I think most grocery stores don’t allow dogs) they often provide a “hitching post” where you can tie your dog leash. I got to hold and pet a friend’s dog this week (who went shopping and to lunch with us), and that made me miss our own recently-departed schnauzer.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Public transportation is amazing, which is why you don’t really need a car. You can get anywhere in the city by bus, tram, subway (the U-bahn, which is only underground), or train (the S-bahn, which goes both underground and above ground). A bike would definitely be useful here, though. Bikes are everywhere--most of the sidewalks have a lane designated specifically for bikes (and bikers ring their bells--like honking a car horn, but more annoying--at you if you are walking in that lane). Also, there are several pedestrian shopping zones throughout the city where no cars are allowed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Life on the 5th Floor--One Step at a Time

I have a Garmin Vivofit watch that measures my calories and steps each day. I’m a pretty active person, and before we came to Europe, I was averaging 10,000-12,000 steps a day. In the last 4 weeks that we’ve been in Germany, my average step count has increased to over 19,000 per day. I’m putting a heck of alot of miles on my shoes and enjoying every minute of it. We have been here for a month now, and only have a couple of weeks left. Time is passing quickly, one step at a time.

This last week’s routine of going to the grocery store each day and venturing into unexplored parts of Munich was interrupted by a brief trip to Switzerland. Joel had a business trip to another city in Germany, so I decided to spend the time with my brother in Zurich, where he and his family are living for the next 9 months. In years past, I would have travelled by train to Zurich, but there is an increasingly popular and much less expensive way to travel in Europe now--by bus. It cost me 34 euros, roundtrip, to travel there. In fact, it cost me more for two days of transportation within Zurich and the outlying area where my brother lives than it did to get to Zurich and back. We spent the time going for long walks and runs in the beautiful autumn leaves, walking around Zurich and window shopping (alas, I could not afford the sweaters and jeans for 1000 Francs, a woman’s wool coat for 3,000 Francs nor even a watch for a “mere” 145,000 Francs). It was really nice to be around family and I didn’t feel as lonely this week.

I got a haircut last week, which was also out of the ordinary. My hair grows really fast and I knew I would not make it mentally (only women with short hair develop such impatience) another 3 weeks if I didn’t get it cut, so I got a recommendation from one of the front desk workers for a salon near the hotel and made the appointment online. I practiced what to say in German and had to look up some vocab words I wouldn’t normally use (like how to say “I just want about a half-centimeter off the ends”), which was good because they didn’t really speak English. I was a little alarmed at how confidently he started hacking off about twice as much as I told him to take off, but my hair felt much better when he was done and it turned out just fine. I was not brave enough to get my hair colored, however, and will live with my gray roots until I get back and let my regular stylist take care of them. Ah, the vanity of the 51-year-old woman that makes a haircut the week’s highlight.

Other (more interesting, I hope) highlights from the week:

• On Saturday, the sun came out in the afternoon and so we took advantage of it. We visited the Schloss Nymphenburg and the beautiful grounds all around it. We went back to the park by the river where we had gone running in the morning (when it was cloudy) and took these photos of the magical autumn kingdom it had become with just the addition of sunshine.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• We saw dozens of teenagers on the subway, all dressed up for Halloween on Saturday night. As far as I can tell, they don’t really trick or treat, but they were clearly dressed up and headed somewhere. Halloween has definitely invaded here (all the stores had costumes and decorations for sale) in the last few years--there was nothing like this 30 years ago when I was here.
• I exercised and studied and did laundry and tried cooking a one-skillet chicken dinner with a lemon cream sauce in our tiny kitchen. It tasted great, but I wouldn’t advise any of you to cook with onions and garlic in the same room that you sleep in. Needless to say, we slept with the window open that night and were grateful our clothes didn’t all smell like fried food the next day. I will stick to omelettes, soups and salads for the next two weeks.
• I saw this headline on the CNN app a few days ago: “Thick Fog Shrouds European Cities.” There’s been fog every morning for the last week in Munich and I thought it was just a Munich thing, but then it was the same in Zurich. And apparently London and Paris and lots of other cities across Europe. So I didn’t feel so bad knowing there were countries full of people who had likely all been experiencing morning gloom along with me.
  
  
  
• I visited a couple of palaces last week where I saw dozens of ornately decorated rooms filled with enchanting (and sometimes forbidding) portraits and elaborately, carved furniture and I marveled at the talents that created such beauty. It was also strange to think that these buildings were once someone’s home. But then who am I to talk—I live in hotel. I came away being very grateful I didn’t have to live in a palace, though, and am looking forward to my own new home more than ever.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Life on the 5th Floor--Call me "Eloise"

Living in a hotel is the new normal. I’ve never read the book (though feel I must when I return home), but I keep thinking about Eloise at the Plaza, the children’s book about the little girl that lives “in a room on the tippy-top floor” of the Plaza Hotel in New York City with her nanny and her dog and all of the great adventures she has. My life on the 5th floor of the Residence Inn in Munich is likely not nearly as exciting as Eloise’s (probably because I don’t have a nanny or a dog), but it’s at least eventful enough for me to write about in a blog.

We just finished week 3 here in Deutschland and I’ve been here long enough now to sort of get into a routine. I eat breakfast (usually sticking with Muesli, yogurt, fruit and a sunflower seed roll with butter and jam), I exercise (run or do a DVD workout, or sometimes both--depending on the previous day's level of chocolate consumption), I study my nutrition course I’m doing online, and then I do whatever else I need or want to that day. I have a list of sights that I want to see in Munich and try and do a couple of those each week. And, in true German fashion, I go to a grocery store pretty much every day.

After hiding itself the first two weeks, the sun finally came out and has made a regular appearance each day. The first day it came out last week, I went for a two hour walk around the city just to be outside in the sunshine. It was glorious. The weekend was especially beautiful, with blue skies and the autumn colors at their peak, so Joel and I were able to get out and see a lot of the city, walking 11 miles that day. The leaves were positively glowing and it was hard to resist taking an inordinate number of pictures. We ate lunch in the Biergarten in the middle of the Englischer Garten (their Central Park) and went to the top of the Olympic tower where we ate divine apple strudel in a revolving restaurant that gave us a 360 degree view of the city.

To avoid a blow-by-blow description (which no one wants or has time to read), here are a few highlights of the last week:

• Visiting a new grocery store is always exciting. Today I went to an organic grocery store where I saw Sauerkraut juice and Potato juice. Yes, you heard me right. I did not buy any.
• I went to our friend’s apartment last week and we made pumpkin soup from scratch, using a cantaloupe-sized pumpkin that did not require peeling, and chocolate chip cookies (her request). It was nice to cook something besides omelettes and soup from mixes--I miss having a real kitchen with an oven. But on the other hand, I get to eat out and taste amazing foods, including potatoes prepared in an incredible variety of ways and authentic Italian pizzas baked in wood-fired brick ovens.
• I know most of the hotel desk workers by name now and I’m getting used to walking the equivalent of two miles up and down the stairs on wash day (the laundry’s in the basement). This is why we are building a one-level home.
• I am alone most of the day, and sometimes (though not all the time) I feel lonely. Which, under the circumstances, is perfectly natural. So I’ve been trying to just acknowledge that feeling and accept it (sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't). When so much of my life up to this point has been focussed on serving others, it’s really strange to not have the physical ability each day to interact with close friends and family. I do what I can through emails, Facebook, texts and phone calls, but the distance separating me from loved ones feels like a tangible thing.
• A couple of afternoons this week I mixed my cultures by bingeing on some Netflix series (American) while crocheting hats (German). Since I can't quilt while I'm here, I've had to make do with crocheting, which is fine because I’ve seen a lot more yarn stores here than fabric stores. The fabric I have found was super expensive--18 euros a meter (about $20 a yard)--so I didn’t buy any.
• We spent a lovely evening with the family of one of Joel’s co-workers at their house. The have 3 small children who reminded us so much of our 3 children when they were small. Except these children spoke German. But they were just as excited to meet new people as ours were back then. They all understood English (even the 3-year-old) because their father speaks it to them all the time, and the oldest (10 years old) spoke pretty good English, which impressed me because English is a really hard language to learn (so many dang exceptions!).
• We ate dinner with one of my friends that I met 30 years ago when I lived here in Munich for a summer, working in a grocery store selling fruits and vegetables. I realized we were the same age when we first met that our children are now, and felt suddenly confused, because I don't remember getting older and yet, here we are, more than twice as old as we when we first met.
• We went to a street fair on Friday night where there were booths selling all kinds of things--soap, socks, scarves, lederhosen, dirndls, pots, pans and beautiful dishes for the kitchen. There were also delicious foods, as well as many dogs, including this little lederhosen-clad fellow:

He didn't look very comfortable, though.

I love the sound of church bells here. This was at the street fair.

Beautiful trees and cheesy grins on our Saturday of sunshine

Leaf-strewn sidewalks

The Biergarten by the Chinese tower (no idea why there's a Chinese tower 

in the middle of the Biergarten, but there you have it)

A stream running through the English Gardens

Radiance!

The best apple strudel I've had yet on this trip, 

surrounded by a delectable pool of vanilla sauce. 

The Olympic tower, built for the 1972 Olympics

View from the Alte Peter church tower in the downtown

The glockenspiel on the Marienplatz

Life on the 5th Floor: The Weather

Perhaps for my American friends and family, I should have called this blog Life on the 6th Floor, because Europeans number their floors differently than Americans. In America, the ground floor is the 1st floor, but in Europe, the ground floor is level 0. In any case, there are 93 steps from the ground floor to the top floor, and I try and climb those at least 2x a day (to counterbalance the pastries and chocolate--there is no scale here, but so far, my pants fit the same). Since I'm living in Germany now, we'll go with the original title.

We should start with the most important thing first, and that is the weather, of course. I have, for some reason, become obsessed with the weather. I check the weather app first thing in the morning, and often check the weather of all the places where I have family living so I can imagine what kind of a day they are having. Perhaps this also goes back to German 101, when one of the first phrases I learned was "Wie ist das Wetter heute?" (what is the weather today) and so I equate the weather in Germany with something important like "Wo sind die Toiletten?" (where are the toilets).

The weather here was exceedingly dreary and cold all week and the lack of sunshine was a real downer for this Colorado girl. I did not realize how much I depend on my daily dose of sun until it wasn’t there all week. However, when everything seems gray outside you appreciate intense colors more. I climbed up a church tower to get the views depicted here, in spite of the rain.

When the sun does appear, the green grass and the autumn leaves really glow (these next ones were pictures from today--the first day that I actually woke up to sunshine since arriving here).

The highlight of the week was a spontaneous trip to Salzburg on Friday. On Wednesday, our friends, John and Marj Hasler, who are on a mission in Innsbruck, contacted us to let us know they would be in Salzburg for the weekend and invited us to attend a Mozart dinner/concert with them on Friday night. So Thursday we found a place to rent a car and contacted the Gasthaus just outside of Salzburg where the Haslers were staying and left on Friday afternoon. It was an hour and a half (rainy) drive from Munich. At the dinner, there was a string quintet and and two singers who dressed in period costumes and performed beautiful Mozart pieces between courses in the Baroque room of the St. Peters Stiftskellar (one of the oldest restaurants in Europe). It was fun to get out of the city and great to see friends from home. The music was simply sublime--especially the soprano. We especially enjoyed our Saturday morning run through lush green fields and autumnal trees surrounded by majestic Austrian alps. When the Gasthaus owner told us there was a two-hour wait on the autobahn to cross the border into Germany (because of all the refugees coming in), we decided to drive the back way across the border which took us through Berchtesgaden, so we stopped briefly to see the site of Hitler’s hideout during WWII. The sun was out all morning so it was a beautiful drive and we could stop and take pictures whenever we wanted.

 The view from Berchtesgaden

Only those of you who have seen the movie, Inception, will understand this next part. We started the month of October with most of our stuff in storage, living in our friend’s basement. Then we packed up some of our stuff and went “down a level” to live in a hotel in Munich, and then last weekend we packed up a few things to go down one more level to a hotel in Salzburg--a vacation within a vacation within a vacation, so to speak. If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it and you’ll understand how we felt.

My German is gradually coming back to me, which is reassuring. I read all the signs I can, I shamelessly eavesdrop on the street and in the subway, and I find that words and phrases come more quickly now and it feels less like I’m digging them out of a very deep hole in my brain. As any traveler knows, the post office is always the real test of language skills, and I was able to successfully go to the post office this week and ask for a stamp and understand when he told me how much it was. It felt like a real triumph, especially when I think back to the time when I was 18 in southern France and left a post office in tears. I do have moments of panic when I’m forced to say more than a few sentences, however, and have to curb the impulse to turn and run away. But I can carry on extended conversations in my head, so I guess that’s progress. Here's a great little title from a German hymn book (a great way to practice German too)--it means "Somewhere the Sun is Shining" (and it goes along with the weather theme):

Surprisingly, our little hotel room still doesn’t feel too small. It’s really easy to keep clean--dishes take about 5 minutes (because there are only about 5 dishes in the kitchen); laundry takes a couple of hours to do (and is expensive to use their machines--16 euros to wash/dry 2 loads!), but not long to put away because we only have one closet; and twice a week housekeeping comes and cleans the bathroom and changes the linens. So pretty posh living, really.

Time is still funny--it slips away and drags at the same time. Two of our 7 weeks are gone. I try and get out for at least a little bit each day, although the weather last week just made me want to stay inside most of the time. I’m still averaging about 15,000 steps a day though. At home, mornings were my most productive time to make phone calls, check email and get things done. Here, however, if I have any phone calls to make to the US, I have to wait until night when it’s day there, so my “productive” time to do things like that has shifted. I can still do emails in the morning, but won’t usually get answers until late afternoon or evening. I also miss my family more in the mornings when I know I can’t just pick up the phone and call them without waking them up in the middle of the night. 

We have been grateful for the few friends that we do have here. We spent a lovely evening with our former exchange student and her family this week. We have been really lucky to be able to maintain these relationships that began 6 years ago.

After being so sick the first week, I have definitely been hearing the siren song of European chocolate and pastries this week (let’s blame the weather again, shall we?). I feel like I’m more on track to healthy eating this week though and was able to resist eating any of the following items and to be content appreciating them for their beauty instead.

There seem to be a lot of colds going around. I hear people coughing on the streets, in the stores and on the subways, and our friends have also been sick. Then Joel woke up Sunday morning and was definitely sick, so I went to church by myself and he spent pretty much the entire day in bed, finally getting up and showering around 4pm. Which was good, because he had to go back to work yesterday. He’s doing much better today. Thank goodness for the myriad of herbal teas around here--the peppermint tea has been especially helpful. 

Your German vocabulary word for the day is "Abenteuer," which means adventures. Stay tuned for next week's Abenteuer!