Settling in

Obviously, I've gotten busy enough that I haven't found time to post.  This weekend we went to Köln, which I will cover in another post (with pictures I hope).

First, I promised some pictures of our apartment.  Here we go:

The kitchen.  You can see that we are pretty much settled in at this point -- using up all the available counter space

The living area.  A nice lamp for when I want to knit 

(though since we can't stream any shows or movies, and there is no English language TV, 

I don't spend much time knitting).

The bedroom.  Typical German coverlet.

My routine (which has me doing lots of walking) involves pilates (at home -- I haven't found a studio that will take me for only a month since everything requires a membership here, and I don't know if I would be able to understand the instructor, especially when holding a strenuous pose), going to the grocery, butcher, vegetable stand and baker every day (while I am trying out various grocery stores, the main one I use is close to the primary bakery I use, but the butcher and vegetable stand are in the other direction, though close to each other), cooking dinner, going to the wine store, going to the laundromat (about 1km away) 2 times a week, german lessons for 2 hours twice a week, german homework, writing this blog (obviously not daily :-), and walking in the nearby woods.

Apparently my German is getting better, as more people are willing to talk to me, not just about the carrots I am buying, and I get understood more easily.  But trying to get a refund for the money eaten by the laundry machines was a challenge. It ate 4 Euro in the washer and 1 Euro in the dryer before I figured out the secret. (you put your stuff in the machine, adjust the settings,  go to a central panel, put in money, get soap if it is a washing machine, go back to your machine, and hit start.  All within a short period of time, which was the ultimate cause of my problems.) I convinced the attendant to give me a refund for the washer money, but it was just too hard to explain what I did wrong for the dryer.   I've also been communicating with our landlady in German, about burned out lights and installing a wifi repeater, of all things, and she seems to understand what I say.

My kitchen here is better appointed than the previous ones -- I have a whisk!  Do you know how much easier it is to make salad dressing with a whisk? and sharp knives! they make all sorts of things easier -- but it's interesting what I miss.  The microwave is right now a bigger deal than the lack of laundry facilities.  I still have to take a lot of shortcuts here, since I don't have a complete kitchen, and a lot of those are best handled in the microwave.  And there are even a few microwaveable dinner items that one can buy in German supermarkets, which would be nice to make on a busy day.

A few random observations on German culture
    - I had a horrible time finding beer in the supermarket today.  There was a long aisle of liquor, from wine to gin, but no beer.  Then I found a bunch of beer bottles by the large fruit juice and soda bottles, but after careful reading, I discovered that all of them were "alkoholfrei" -- non alcoholic beer -- except for the Radlers, which are a combination of lemonade and beer (like an alcoholic Arnold Palmer), which apparently the Germans don't consider alcoholic.  I finally found the beer (in large bottles, not six-packs) where the bottled water was.  
   - I wanted to buy a small container of mayonnaise.  The smallest I could find was a tube (like the tubes of tomato paste you can find at Whole Foods).  I opened it today, and the tube has a star tip, like a frosting tip.  I think it's to make cute mayonnaise decorations on composed salads or deviled eggs.
   - Now that I am competent enough to have conversations with the butcher rather than just grab packages from the supermarket case, I am impressed with both the quality of the meat here (especially the pork, which I seldom buy at home, but which Jay loves) and with how cheap meat is.  Lots of the produce is more expensive here than California (and definitely more limited), and eggs are very expensive (perhaps because all the ones I find are free range, apparently this must be a big thing in Germany), but meat is maybe 20% cheaper than I am used to paying, with significantly better quality.  Too bad it was this week that the WHO decided to tell us that processed meat and red meat are bad for us -- I am turning into quite a carnivore.