We won't be deported!

When you move to Germany you have to register with the local government office and then you have to also get Residence Permits.  They want to make sure you have an address here and a means of supporting yourself.  When we got here a nice man from Microsoft came to get all the documents to do that for us.  I hadn't pulled out all our birth certificates or our marriage certificate (They did email and tell us that we would need those, but only once.  That's not enough is it?)  So they were on our sea shipment which would take about 6 weeks to arrive.  So he got us registered but couldn't do the Residence Permits for me and the kids.  Eric could get his Temporary Residence Permit and Work Permit just fine.  We also couldn't get the better tax withholding rate or the Kindergeld ("child money", a monthly tax rebate for having children) without the Residence Permits.  So I apologized and he said to let him know as soon as that sea shipment arrived.

When it got here I found the birth certificates but couldn't find the marriage certificate anywhere.  We went back and forth by email with the man to see if they might accept anything else in place of the marriage certificate.  He checked with the office and they said they definitely needed the marriage certificate and "your wife and children can remain in Germany until January 30th without the Residence Permits"  !!  So I tried to order copies on-line but there was a problem with my shipping address and my billing address being different so I had to call them.  Then I got cut off when my phone ran out of batteries.  Oy! Finally I got that ordered and paid for express shipping.  After Christmas I realized it hadn't come yet so I checked on it.  I guess they made a mistake and forgot to send it express so they refunded me some money.  It still got here before work started again after Christmas so that was okay.

So I emailed the guy and said I had everything and he could come get it.  Eric is leaving this Saturday for the US and the week after that he'll be in Poland and the week after that he'll be in Romania so it had to be done this week because he'd need his passport for the rest of the month.  (They have to have your passport while they process the Residence Permit.)  The guy never responded so I'm panicked and emailed someone else in the office.  He had been on holiday and been delayed coming home.  Finally he came tonight to get all the signatures, certificates, passports and pictures and he says he can have Eric's passport back by tomorrow, Friday, so he can leave on Saturday.  Whew!!  Mine and the kids passports won't be back until Monday so I hope I don't need them before then.  (We actually use our passports a lot as ID.)

Going Shopping

Shopping in Munich is a little different than shopping at home.  The shopping carts are chained together and you have to put in one euro, or something the same size, to unlock one.  The coin stays in the cart and you don't get it back until you return the cart and chain it up to the row of carts.  Then your coin pops back out.  Sometimes a quarter will work, but not at all stores.  I now have a round piece of metal the same size as a euro with a hole in the middle that I can hook onto my keychain and take off whenever I need a cart. 

The two grocery stores we go to most often are very small and have a limited, sometimes different selection of food and other items.  They always have bread, milk, eggs, and all the essentials (including a huge selection of chocolate) but then other things are there only when they've acquired them.  At one of the little stores they have a separate butcher shop and bakery inside the building.  When I need a lot of household goods along with groceries I go to a store called Real, which is more like a Fred Meyer.  It's a little more expensive than the other two mostly grocery stores, but more convenient when my list is long.  It also carries all the varieties of things so you can have a bigger choice. 

If you buy fruit or vegetables that have to be weighed, you usually have to weigh them and print out a sticker to put on the bag before you take it to the checkout.  I didn't know that at first and I tried to buy bananas.  The checker held them up and started talking and I didn't understand a word.  Luckily a lady behind me spoke English and told me what the problem was.  I didn't buy them that day and I have avoided buying anything that is not prepackaged for a long time.  I've finally figured out how to do it and which stores I have to do it in.

The checkers sit on a chair while they're scanning and they are fast!  They don't bag for you and in fact they don't provide bags for free.  If you want you can pick up some bags and buy them each time you go, or you can bring your own.  There's usually not a very big area of counter after the scanning place, so you have to be putting your stuff in bags pretty fast to stay ahead of the checker.  If they have to stop and wait for you to clear the area before they can scan some more they are not happy.  Sometimes I have so much stuff that I'm not even finished putting it all on the conveyor belt out of my cart before they've had to stop scanning and wait.  I have to hurry and get my cart down to the other end and start putting everything back in.  There's no way I could bag it right then so I always put it back in the cart and then bag it at the car. 

The carts have all four wheels that can go in any direction.  So you can slide it sideways just as easy as push it forward.  At first I thought this was great, but it turns out they're really hard to maneuver when they get full. You're trying to turn a corner and the back wheels are sliding out the other way.  It has taken me this long to get the hang of how to maneuver those carts.

One time I was in the baumarkt (Home Depot) checking out.  I had bought some little hooks that you put into a bag yourself and just buy how many you need.  I couldn't find anything to write down the bin number so I memorized it.  When the checker got to that I told her what the bin number was.  She said "Nein, nein" and rattled off a long explanation.  I finally figured out you had to weigh the bag back where you got the items.  So I had to leave Miles in the cart in the checkout line and go back to where I got the hooks and find the scale and figure it out.  A nice man who spoke English showed me how you put the bin number in the scale and then it tells you how much it costs.  So I memorized that number and ran back to the checkout line.  I told her the price and she said "Nein, nein" and pantomimed printing a sticker and putting it on the bag.  So I paid for everything else, left my cart nearby and took Miles with me back to the scales to do it again and this time wait for the sticker to print.  I guess that man wasn't so nice after all since he didn't show me that part of it.

Some other different things:  milk comes in liters, eggs come in packages of 10, cream and sour cream come in plastic containers that look like yogurt containers, there is no cheddar cheese except at the big store in slices, I can't find any Cream of Chicken soup.  Some things look so different that I can't recognize them.  I'm constantly using the handy program on my phone to look up German words in the grocery store.  (By the way, the word for cell phone is Handy.)  One thing they do have is lots and lots of mix packets for sauces and soups, a much bigger selection than I usually found at home.  So I have been able to create good dinners with some meat, cream or water, a sauce mix and a vegetable. 

(One time I got a packet for a chicken sauce and went to the butcher to get the chicken.  I didn't know how big a kilo was in relation to a pound so I guessed.  Since a liter is smaller than a gallon and a centimeter is smaller than an inch, I assumed a kilo was smaller than a pound.  So I asked her for 3 kilos of geflugel (which means poultry and I thought it meant chicken) and pointed to my sauce packet which called for 1/2 kilo (I didn't notice that at the time).  She looked really confused!  But after pointing at the chicken and reaffirming that I wanted 3 kilos she weighed the chicken out  and put it in three huge packages.  It was enough chicken for at least three meals!  It turns out a kilo is much bigger than a pound.)

It seems like every time I go out to do something I run into something that is done differently and I've done it wrong.  Most of the time people are very nice, but not all the time.  It's been frustrating and exhausting and I've had to fight the urge to say to myself that the way we do it in the US is so much better and why don't the Germans do it the way we do it.  I have so much more empathy for the people who come to Kirkland from Asia or Latin America and don't understand the language or the customs.  I hope when I come home I can be more aware and more helpful.

2010 is Here!

We've just come in from our balcony and upper windows where we watched fireworks all over the city.  Our neighbors were shooting fireworks and everybody everywhere was shooting fireworks in their neighborhoods.  We got a little package of fireworks at our grocery store and lit them when it first got dark so our little kids could watch, but it looks like the rest of the neighborhood just kept their little kids up until midnight.  It was amazing!  We started watching at 11:50 pm and it's now 12:15 am and no sign of letting up.  From inside the house it sounds like we're getting bombed.  It's just continuous.

This is a cool picture because you can see a reflection of me taking a picture in the window of the house next door.  This is right at midnight with neighbors down on the street setting off fireworks.

So here we are in 2010 wishing our friends and family who are still in 2009 a Happy New Year!!

Garbage

I've been planning this post for awhile, taking all the pictures I would need to illustrate it fully.  I thought we recycled a lot in Seattle but the Germans have us beat.  Maybe it's only the Munichians, I guess I don't know about all of Germany.  In our front yard we have a special area, kind of like a shed, with doors on our side of the fence and doors on the street side of the fence.  Inside it we have three containers (pretty small), one for biological (yard waste, compost), one for paper and one for garbage. 

When the garbage trucks to come to empty the containers in my front yard they just open the door, take out the container to empty it and then put it back. I don't have to put it out on garbage day or anything like that.


Around the corner are some huge containers that the whole neighborhood uses for plastic/styrofoam, white glass, brown glass, green glass and tin/aluminum.  I regularly see people, even little kids, carrying a a sack or bucket to the recyclers and then walking home again.

In Munich you can recycle anything plastic: shrink wrap, candy wrappers, meat wrap, anything at all that is plastic even if it is contaminated by food.  You also recycle plastic bottles, but you do that by taking them to any store and returning them for a credit.  Styrofoam, even styrofoam peanuts, can be recycled with the plastic.  The milk comes in cardboard cartons with a plastic spout and lid.  Since it's got plastic on it you recycle it with the plastic. ( I was cutting the spout out of the carton for awhile so I could put the carton in paper and the spout in plastic. Then a nice neighbor told me what I should do.)  (By the way milk is sold by the liter, that's approximately 1/4 of a gallon, and we used to buy 8 gallons of milk per week in the US) You can also recycle anything paper, even if it has food on it, like pizza boxes. 

When we moved into the house there was a unit under the sink that slid out and had three kind of small compartments that I figured was for sorting recyclables.  It probably is for that but I was emptying them several times a day. 

So now I use those for biological, tin/aluminum (including tinfoil) and glass, since we don't have much of that, relatively speaking.  I quickly had to buy a laundry sorter with three compartments to sort the plastic, paper and garbage.  (What could possibly be left to go into the garbage, you might ask?  I don't know, but it always fills up.)  I empty those about every other day. 

It's good that there is so much recycling because the garbage container is so small we'd never fit a week's worth of garbage in it otherwise.

So here's the good part.  The "plastic" bag fills up fastest.  When the "paper" bag fills up I take it into the front yard and put it in the container.  Same with garbage.  But when the "plastic" bag fills up I usually throw it in the garage until the next time I'm going out.  Often I end up with 4 or 5 bags of plastic when I finally go around the corner to the big recyclers. 

This is after I've emptied three bags already

The openings on the big plastic recycle container are about as big as a soccer ball.  I usually can't compress my bag of plastic recyclables enough to fit through the hole so I have to stick my hand in the bag and pull things out to put them in the big container until what's left in the bag is small enough that I can compress it and fit it in.  Remember that all plastic is in there, like the yogurt containers (unrinsed), the cream containers (same size and shape as yogurt containers and unrinsed), the supposedly empty milk cartons, etc.  In other words, it's not all dry and it's often sticky. 

And that's not all.  I've managed to set up sorting containers for all types of recyclables in the kitchen, but what about each bathroom and each bedroom?  When I'm so carefully sorting everything in the kitchen how can I just bring the other garbages down and throw them carte blanche into the garbage?  I have to stick my hand in those too and at least give it a good faith effort at sorting! 

So anyone who is jealous about us living here and being able to visit castles and such, just think about what we have to do to recycle.  Plus, if we decided to just forego the recycling we'd be creating enough garbage to fill 6 or more garbage containers a week and our neighbors would not think well of us. 

PS.  I just found out today there is a recycling inspector that comes around and checks to make sure you're not putting recyclables into the garbage!

You know you're an American when:

Boy, I haven't posted for awhile.  And I promised Kris I would be regular.  We went on a vacation, just Eric and I, the first week of December.  We had planned this vacation before we knew we might move to Germany.  So we found a couple in our ward to come stay with the kids and we went on the vacation pretty much the way we had originally planned it.  

Eric and I took an overnight train from Munich to Paris and that was really nice.  We had a small, but bigger than we expected, sleeper cabin with two beds and a sink.  We slept all night while traveling, had showers on the train before we got there, and arrived ready to sight see all day.  The first day we saw the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower at night all lit up.  We spent the whole second day in the Louvre.  (That was absolutely my favorite of the whole vacation.  We could have spent another day in there.) 

Notre Dame in Paris

Me and Mona at the Louvre

The next day we were joined by Eric's mom and her husband (who speaks French and is not afraid to drive in France) and we visited several smaller towns and saw more Cathedrals (two more Notre Dames and some others) and walked through many Christmas Markets.  That was fun!  We eventually moved into Germany and joined up with Eric's brother and his wife and toured the military base in Stuttgart.  (Eric's brother, Ryan, is a contractor for the military).  Then we picked up the kids and we all went to a military resort in Garmisch, Germany, called The Edelweiss Lodge.  It was nice to speak English all day and buy things with dollars!

What was surprising to me was how I felt almost relieved to return to Germany from France.  French is so lilting and beautiful and German is so gutteral and choppy in comparison, but I understand much more German then French.  And the Germans (in general) are so rule and tradition oriented while the French are not.   I have gotten used to all the unwritten rules that everyone follows on the Autobahn and the U-Bahn (Subway), for example, that I was a little peeved that the French weren't following the rules!  Silly, eh?

I learned that Notre Dame means "Our Lady" in french, referring to Mary the mother of Jesus, and that many cathedrals are named Notre Dame.  I had no idea there were more than the one in Paris!  Also I was struck by all the art we saw in the Louvre and in the Cathedrals depicting scenes from the life of Jesus and the apostles and saints.  So many of the paintings and sculptures of the Nativity showed Mary and Joseph dressed in very fine clothes and in the attitude of worshipping the baby Jesus.  They were all beautiful in their own way but I was so glad to see, sometimes, ones where Mary and Joseph were shown dressed in simple clothes and holding and cuddling the baby Jesus.  Also, there were so, so many paintings and sculptures showing Jesus dead on the cross or dead in the arms of Mary looking fragile and gloomy and not many of him alive and looking strong and loving.  I loved seeing it all but I really developed a preference for the more realistic Nativities and the ones with Christ alive. 

So what I started out intending to write about is from when we first got here.  We got into our house on a Friday and on Saturday we went to a store to buy a washer and dryer.  First of all we couldn't get enough cash.  They didn't take our American credit card, we didn't have our Eurocards yet and we could only withdraw 300 euro a day from the cash machines.  Of course all the German banks are closed on Saturdays.  So we withdrew on Eric's debit card and my debit card, on Eric's credit card and my credit card and we still had to borrow some cash from Ryan (Eric's brother) to be able to pay for the washer and dryer.

We found a salesman that spoke English and he was telling us all about the washers and dryers and how the higher the spin speed on the washer the cheaper it is to dry in the dryer, etc.  (First of all I should write that the place where the washer hookups are in our house does not have room for a dryer by it.  Many Germans don't have a dryer, they hang everything to dry.  Also, the German washers and dryers are pretty small capacity.)  After he went through all these energy efficient features Eric said "We don't care about energy efficiency, which one is the fastest at drying?"  The salesman looked slightly scandalized and said "Oh, are you Americans?"  It was so funny!  So I reassured him that we did, indeed, care about energy efficiency.

One last thing.  Dryers in Germany aren't vented to the outside so you can plug them in at any outlet.  Since all the electricity is 230 volts you don't need a special outlet for a dryer.  They are condensation dryers so they work by somehow extracting all the water out of the clothes and collecting it in a container that you then empty after every load.  And it takes almost 2 hours to dry a load.

A mime in a town called Colmar in France.  When we dropped coins in his can

he came alive and kissed our hands, etc.