Moving on up

This morning my dear sweet husband set me up. He took Claire downstairs for breakfast while Luke and I stayed behind to get dressed. Our two hotel rooms are connected by an inside door that we leave open. Luke was in his bathroom and I was walking into my room to get dressed. I had just slipped my burgundy nightgown over my head when I looked up and saw a Chinese businessman looking right at me from down the hall. I don’t know which of us was more embarrassed. The love of my life had left the door wide open. I could have killed him. I mean, I am no prude. But I don’t want strange men seeing me the way the good Lord made me. At least not first thing in the morning before I’ve had my coffee.

Ah, well. I think it was my mama who once quoted what someone said to her: “It don’t matter if somebody seen ya nekkid. If they seen it before, it won’t be they first time. And if they ain’t seen it before, they won’t know what it is anyway.”

While I’m telling on Dave, I have to tell you a cute one from our first couple of weeks here. Dave saw a pretty fountain flowing from the side of an old building in Waldenbuch. He said, “Look, finally, a drinking fountain.” I asked, “Are you sure?” He said, “Yeah, it says trinkwasser right here. That means drinking water.” So he took a big fistful and gave Luke a drink. Then I looked closer. “Oh no! It says KEIN trinkwasser! That means NOT drinking water!” Well, that will teach us to learn our German!

Today we signed the papers to rent our new house. Well, actually, Dave signed them. According to the Army, wives are incidental. But what else is new? Anyway, we saw our home finished for the first time. The last time the floors were not down, there was no kitchen and the walls were not painted. Now it looks shiny and new and fresh. A clean start. Well, maybe not so clean. The movers are coming tomorrow and it is supposed to rain all day and the landscaping is not finished. MUD. Yuck. But I hear that German movers put down blankets everywhere, so that will be good. If they don’t I will have to whip out my dictionary and give them what for, as soon as I figure it out.

The style is modern, a huge departure from our lovely old Victorian back in Colorado. The kitchen is about a third the size of my Colorado kitchen, but the appliances are jumbo sized for Germans (about jumbo dorm sized for Americans) and the countertops are black granite, which is virtually indestructible (but then, they haven’t met Claire). I can cook a normal sized turkey in the oven and the fridge will hold enough food for the week. But we will have a larger one downstairs for parties and such, provided by the Army. I sort of like that. It will force us to live more simply and not stock up so much.

It is still weird to me that the rooms have no closets. There are no pantries, medicine cabinets, shelves or anything. That is where Ikea comes in. Plus, the Army will provide schranks, these huge ugly particle board wardrobes. That will help.

It has a large sunny loft on the top level. There are four levels. The next one down has three bedrooms together with a full bath. Then the next level down is the main entry, with kitchen, dining room, living room, and another full bath. The bottom level is a finished out basement and laundry room. German houses are almost always 3-5 levels. Land is precious, so they take advantage of vertical space. We have a postage stamp-sized yard, but that just means less mowing. But it is enough to hula hoop in! The other half of our duplex is owned by a guy who works for Mercedes. Hey, I wonder if they have a friend and neighbor discount…

Really, though, it feels good to have a place to spread out. There are three cool playgrounds just spitting distance from our house. The kids are excited about seeing their toys again. I can’t wait to cook. And now, if I want to run around my house naked, I’m pretty sure no Chinese businessmen will be hanging out in the hall.

Lego diving, iron maidens, cheap dates, etc.

Well, the kids and I made it to Legoland and back safely. In fact, the drive was--dare I say it--leisurely. I maintained a steady 110 km per hour (relax, Mama, that is 65 mph, remember) and I did just fine. I love how trucks have to stay in the right lane going slowly like a long train. But of course, on the left people were zooming by me at about 100 mph. Crazy. We were told not to try to drive like Europeans in American cars. Our cars are generally not made for that kind of speed. But I don’t think any car should drive that fast unless on a racetrack. That is my opinion as a mother. Of course, when I was an indestructible teenager with fast reflexes and no sense, I routinely drove 75 to 85 miles per hour on the highways. Stupid stupid stupid. I definitely had some guardian angels looking after me.

Anyway, the kids and I had a great time together. It was a bit of a bummer that a lot of the rides required one adult per child, which is not the ratio we had with Dave in Virginia. But it was still fun. We had bought an annual pass the last time we were there, which is very much worth the money. Also worth the money is the box of Legos we brought home from the bargain tent gift shop. They had mountains of miscellaneous Lego pieces and we dove through them together for over an hour until we had filled our little bucket. It was such fun, like a real treasure hunt. “Look, I found another wheel! Oh wait, here is a starfish. Wow, look, here is a Viking head. Has anyone seen a pirate flag?” It was a trip.

We have tried to enjoy a few family outings around here before we get settled in a house. Last week during spring break we went to Rothenburg, one of the best-preserved medieval towns in all of Europe. Dave and I had been there 11 years ago on one of our trips before children. We once again visited the Crime and Punishment Museum, which was cool but sometimes hard to explain to kids, what with the chastity belts and iron maidens and such. Instead we decided to focus on the funny things like the tickle torture contraption and those used to hold two arguing people together until they could get along (we threatened to buy one from the gift shop).

Of course, we went to the several touristy and overpriced Kathe Wohlfahrte German souvenir stores there. Geesh. Her stuff is not all that special, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was made in China. This place, too, was not kid-friendly. The salesladies stalked us like we were wild thieves, which of course made us very uncomfortable. If one of my kiddos so much as pointed too closely at a cheaply painted Christmas ornament they would reprimand them. Then after that we went to the antique toy and doll museum which, despite its name, is also not a great place for children. My kids were not impressed for long with the glass cases full of old toys. Every time they stomped too hard the glass would rattle and I would get all stressed out. I was so glad to get out of there where the kids could chase pigeons in the town square and be kids. They also loved running on top of the wall that still surrounds the city. Very cool.

Oh, but there is one particularly child-friendly place here. It’s the mammoth Swedish chain store, Ikea. Man, I love that place. First of all, it’s cheap, which is rare around here. They have wonderful toys and furniture for kids’ bedrooms, and they have little play stations with wooden games and puzzles in every department. The best part is that they have free childcare with a ball pit and everything. Luke loved it and came out proclaiming he had met several new friends, though he didn’t know their names. Claire, on the other hand, was mad. The German caregivers apparently fussed at her and she didn’t understand what for and then they fussed again. Okay, so that was bad. But Dave and I really did enjoy the 45-minute date, the first we have had in two months. We held hands and daydreamed about cheap laminate nightstands and super-organized closets until time to spring the kids. Romantic.

But with springtime finally here, we are spending more and more time in the ultimate kid-friendly places: playgrounds. And Germany has tons of cool ones. My kids especially love the hugely tall climbing structures and birdnest swings. There they can really be monkeys. I mean kids.

The world's best loved parasites

Today I was thinking about when I was pregnant with Claire and I read that if I didn’t eat enough calcium that the baby would leach what she needed from my bones. Eeeeuw. That made me feel like I was hosting a parasite. If I didn’t take care of myself, my kids would suck what they needed from me anyway. And guess what? I have learned that it doesn’t stop after childbirth! They still suck every ounce of energy, creativity, patience and time from me whether or not I have it to spare. They can’t help it. They are little kids.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore my children. But with Dave in Virginia this week, my patience is stretched thin. They are wild, whiny (where did they get THAT?) and fighting with each other and they are driving me to a padded cell. Remind me again how I did this for 15 months while he was stuck in the big sandbox (I don’t even like to say the “I” word anymore).

But ya know, it’s hard to take care of myself when--get out your hanky here—the few friends I have made have moved out of the hotel and into houses, I’ve been living in hotels for nearly 8 weeks, I have no house, I’m getting chunky from eating in restaurants all this time (not healthy), my hula hoop is in storage, I’m out of my blood pressure meds and I have to wait for them to be mailed across the ocean, I can no longer use childcare on post except in emergencies (due to the expected influx of 600 families this spring and summer. Thank you, Africom.) and my chocolate supplies are running dangerously low (Get this girl 200 CCs of Godiva—STAT!). Yeah, it bites.

Ah, but back to the kids. I do love them. They can be so sweet that they melt my heart, looking it me with those big blue eyes that they got from their daddy and saying how they love me. Sometimes they are so cute I could eat them with a spoon. Like when Luke says “very” as an adverb (“Mom, I don’t very like it.” Or “I don’t very want to go there.”) Oh yeah, and when he calls Chip and Dale “Chicken Dale.” Or when Claire comes home, as she did today, with a card she wrote for me proclaiming me the world’s greatest mom. That is a title I value more than winning any Oscar, Grammy or Pulitzer. And I treasure it, too, because I know that one day she will be a teenager and I will be demoted to “the meanest mom ever”. That is, if I’m doing it right.

Tonight my job description included “doctor” since I had to perform minor surgery on Claire’s infected and nearly impacted earring with a dental pick and tweezers. I know it hurt, but she is SOOOOOO dramatic. She screamed like I never did even during natural childbirth. All I had was some Neosporin lip gel to put on her earlobes. I hope I did okay. A hug and a story seemed to make it all better.

I guess I played doctor twice today. Luke fell in the park and scraped his arm on a stick in a scummy pond (yikes, speaking of parasites…) but I got him cleaned up. He chose the pink Hello Kitty bandaids. Whatever.

And by the way, going to the park was about the best self-care I have given myself this week. It was sunny for a change and I demanded that we get out with our sandbox toys. Being solar powered as I am, I realize that if I don’t get my sun I get grumbly. Now I understand why Germans love to sunbathe nude in public parks (they have a much freer attitude about nudity than us Puritanical Americans. But that is fodder for another blog). I think it is that they want to soak up sunshine into every pore before the clouds come back again. Which they will. A lot.

Tomorrow the kids really want me to take them to Legoland since Claire is off school for a teacher work day. I guess I will go. It is supposed to be sunny again. I’m not thrilled about an hour and a half on the autobahn, but if it is not wet it should be okay. You know how that autobahn scares me. If my beloved, adorable parasites are well-behaved in the back seat, that will help a lot.

Wish me luck.

Would you like pommes frittes with that?

We swore when we moved to Germany that we would not eat American fast food. It’s not good tasting and it’s not good for us. But we have found that while on the military bases, there isn’t much available other than Popeye’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut or Subway. So we have eaten fast food several times between meetings out of necessity. But off post, we have tried to avoid it when possible. They actually have a KFC and a BK down the street from the hotel. It’s funny to see ads for kid meals with toys featuring Spongebob Schwammkopf (“spongebob spongehead” in German).

But alert, alert: fast food is a relative term. We discovered that when we broke down and went to BK for lunch one day. In the States we order at the counter, step aside to wait for our food and let another person order. Not here. You order, wait for them to process every part of your order, you pay (a lot), and then you leave. It takes a while. The other difference is that when you order by number (menu #3 or whatever) you are usually not ordering a value meal. It is often just the sandwich and you have to add the fries and drink separately. And when you order, you say “cheeseburger” and "Coke" and "ketchup" in English, but the fries are called pommes frites, which is French for “fried potatoes”. French fries. If you say it in French I guess you don’t have to say the word French. The German (and Russian, incidentally) word for potatoes is kartoffel. So here is a good example of how having studied French and Russian helps me learn German (I'm glad it's good for something). Anyway, so you get your pommes frites, and sometimes it advertises that the price includes free mayonnaise (retch, vomit) or ketchup. That is a good deal. But you just get one packet. If you want more it costs 30 euro cents per packet. That is, roughly, 50 cents American. You didn’t know, did you, that when they throw a handful of ketchup packets in your bag at the drive-thru, you are sitting on gold, my friend.

Ah, but the Germans love their pommes frittes. And, who am I kidding, so does our family. We have had them with nearly every meal, even in fancy restaurants. They usually dust them with paprika, which is surprisingly pleasing. And you know, it’s a good thing fries are veggies (and ketchup too, according to the senior Pres. Bush), because you’re not going to see a whole lot of others at restaurants. I mean, you can get a nice green salad, usually served topped with sauerkraut, shredded marinated carrots, and maybe a tomato or cucumber slice. I really like their salads. But at dinner it’s usually a breaded meat, bread, spaetzle (noodle) and/or potato. That’s it. We’re so desperate for green that we routinely eat the garnish (“Dibs on the parsley! Hey, hands off my lettuce leaf!”) God bless the Adkins dieters. Germany is miles from South Beach, and even farther from the Zone. Throw in the usual dinnertime beer (cheaper than the soda or mineral water) and you’ve got yourself a carb-lover’s paradise. I worry about folks with "the sugar". Diabetics would have a hard time eating out here.

Oh, and white meats are hard to find too. You can sometimes find a turkey breast on the menu (called “puten”—the source of many a dinnertime joke) but as the old lady in the Wendy’s commercial could have yelled, “Where is the chicken?” (we’ve already found the beef aplenty). Chicken is cheap. Why it’s not more popular here is beyond me. It’s enough to drive a girl screaming to KFC for a bucket of chicken with pommes frittes. Hmmm, do you think they serve that garnished with parsley?

"Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz"

Yesterday we went to the tiny Porsche Museum, which was neat. They are building a new one soon to compete with the very cool Mercedes-Benz Museum here in Stuttgart. We went there today. It is amazing! Think Guggenheim with a huge 8-story spiral looking down on a massive hall. We saw the first motorcycle, the first Daimler and Mercedes cars, Princess Di’s Mercedes (that she was pressured by the royals to return in favor of a British-made car), war planes, the SUV used in the second Jurassic Park movie, and even the Pope-Mobile! We had a ball. With all of that, Luke's favorite part was being able to climb on a city bus they had on display. Go fig.

It is still so odd to me that you really do see more Mercedes here than any other kind of car, even BMWs, Volkswagens, or Opels. I rarely see a Ford, Honda, Chevy or Kia unless driven by Americans. Because Mercedes is based here, all of the buses, trash trucks, construction vehicles, and such are made by them. There really is something to the idea of excellent German engineering. You can actually get a ticket if your car breaks down or runs out of gas! That worries me since our 14-year-old Mitsubishi Galant has some quirks. But it gets 36 miles to the gallon, which is great! We are lucky that we can buy gas on base for roughly what Americans are paying back home. Germans are paying about the equivalent of $8 a gallon (after you convert dollars to euro and liters to gallons). They think we are a bunch of crybabies.

But American cars are huge compared to European cars. I know an American lady who has four kids and drives a Suburban that she brought over from the States. It’s so mammothly huge that she can't park the thing anywhere but the hotel and on base! What I'd like is one of those little Smart cars. You see them everywhere here. Mercedes makes them (of course). They look like little wind-up toys. It's like they took a regular-sized car, chopped off the trunk and back seat, squished up the engine and viola! Smart. Except it’s pronounced “shmart”. It literally takes up about half a parking space. They make Smart sports cars and even Smarts for four. But Dave wants a Mini Cooper, which is about the second most popular car around here.

I don’t care what I drive as long as I can take back roads instead of the autobahn. I can’t seem to get my GPS to recognize that. Oh, and by the way, I got my German drivers license Monday. I now know that the person to the right always has right of way unless the signs say otherwise, including on roundabouts (think about that one—it means you have right of way coming on, not when you are already on). I know that you can get a ticket if you sit with your engine idling for more than 30 seconds. You are required by law to carry an emergency kit in the passenger side floorboard as well as a parkschein, which is a cool little blue card with a clock on it that you dial to indicate the time you park in the city. The hardest thing for me, though, is remembering to watch signs at all times to see whether or not I have the priority road. That gives right of way, even in situations you don’t expect like coming onto a major street. I’m getting it, though. I just won’t drive with Dave in the car. It makes me too nervous. I really am feeling more confident on the road little by little. But until I feel 100 percent on target, I am glad I have my old clunker instead of a brand new Mercedes. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Alone at last, alone at last, great God a’mighty…

Okay, let me start with an apology to those of you who actually read my blog (hi mom) for my not writing in the past two weeks. We’ve been in class, house hunting, and staying really busy. But the main reason is that I have not had one single second alone except what I have stolen away in the tub. And my laptop doesn’t so much like bubble baths. But tonight my dear husband has taken the kids to Jolo’s for some fun and I have some glorious time to myself without listening to Alice im Wunderland or Zach und Cody blaring in German on the TV.

Jolo’s is kind of like Chuck E. Cheese’s, except without the Chucky. It is basically a big warehouse full of cool climbing structures, bouncy things, giant Legos, bumper cars, a little train, and even a giant crocodile into whose mouth you climb only to crawl out his nether regions as croc poop. My kids love it. And Dave likes that he can drink a beer while watching them play (grown-ups are not allowed on the play equipment or else he’d be in there with them). In fact, all of the indoor playgrounds we have seen have a bar right beside them for the parents.

Today we had a meeting with a really cool builder named Lothar (I think of the SNL skit “Lothar of the Hill People” every time the poor man says his name). We are working with him through an American realtor to possibly build a house for us. Actually, I think the way it works is that he builds the house how he is going to build it and we can just pick tile, flooring, etc. We have certainly come a long way in a month, although at times it has seemed like slow progress. We have looked at homes in nearly all of the major little towns south of Stuttgart. We have considered buying, renting, penthouse condos, doppelhausen (duplexes), row houses, you name it. We were working with a German realtor who was showing us some great houses for rent, but who was adamantly opposed to showing us anything for sale. She showed us a house we liked a lot in the town of Schonaich (“Beautiful Oak”) but only for rent. She told us it was not for sale. Then on our own we saw it advertised for sale and it sold on Easter Sunday before we could move on it. So we were going to rent with this same realtor a house that we saw with her in Waldenbuch. We had given her a list of criteria and this house fit them all in theory, so she was really pushing us to go with it. But something just didn’t feel right about it. So we finally contacted an American realtor who was recommended to us by friends and she has been great. We feel a lot better about our search now. As I mentioned, we are considering renting Lothar's house while he builds one for us a few streets over. We are still researching that idea.

I’ll try to be better about checking in. I’ll let you know when we have a home.