Back in Germany again

I've decided to start writing this blog again, as sort of a retirement travelogue.  (I clearly wasn't able to keep it up during my normal life -- too busy doing things to spend time writing a blog.  As Calvin and Hobbes would say ¨The days are just packed¨.)

We are now back in Germany, this time for almost 7 weeks.  And we have been here for 10 days already, so if you are expecting daily posts, perhaps it's time to reset your expectations.  To justify my procrastination, it takes a lot of time to get settled in a new location, and we are in our second location, packing for the third one.

While we have an apartment to store our stuff between trips (in the same International Guesthouse in Duiburg as last time), we are all over the map.  On this trip we visit Duisburg, Bielefeld, Oldenburg, London, Heidelberg, Bamberg, Paris and Brittany/Normandy (for a bike vacation).  Just arranging tickets is a half time vocation, and then finding a grocery store, figuring out where and how to do laundry (more on that later), figuring how how to use the kitchen (or where to eat out), etc takes up a lot of time.

My German is much better than the last trip.  I've been using duolingo to work on vocabulary and grammar (I recommend it; it has its quirks, but I learned a lot from it), but didn't have real opportunities to carry on conversations in German.  I'm sure I sound like either a hick from the sticks or someone mentally slow, but I can make myself understood -- I even had one conversation on politics that went ok.

This time I have figured out how to upload pictures to my chromebook, so there will be photos -- I just have to remember to take some first.