Back in Germany again

After nine months of silence on this blog, we are back in Germany again.  We've been here for a week, and will stay until the Thursday before Easter, when we go first to London and then to Italy.

I didn't post anything the first week, because we didn't have working internet in our apartment until Friday and then we left for a weekend in Hamburg.  So here is a short summary of our adventures in the first week.

We weren't off to a running start, with broken internet (the router needed to be reset, but it wasn't a user accessible function) and no light in the kitchen.  Since sunset is about 5:30 here, it's a little hard to make dinner in a dark kitchen.  We repurposed a bed lamp, but it hasn't been great.  Finally we got the guy who does these things in today (he wasn't responding to mail last week -- he arrived to fix it about 20 minutes after we left for the weekend, but wouldn't come into the apartment without permission, sigh).  Today he replaced the broken undercounter light, but the above stove light apparently was disconnected because it is a shock hazard, and they will have to special order a new one (they apparently don't make this one any more).  If you want to take odds on whether it will arrive before we leave, you need to know that I'm taking the "No" side.

I've been off doing my usual errands -- grocery shopping, laundry (Jay was in Vals d'Isere skiing for a week, so he had accumulated a lot of laundry), looking for random housewares, getting train tickets.  (We are now officially "real Germans".  We decided that there was never enough space on the common room clothes drying racks, so we bought our own.  Now our apartment looks like a typical German one, with clean clothes drying in the living room :-)

Today I had my second encounter with the German police system (regular readers of this blog will remember I got my purse stolen a few visits ago).  I was walking along, somewhat lost in thought, looking at two guys in motorcycle leathers standing by their bikes.  Didn't pay attention to the words on their jackets.  It was time to cross this little residential street that had a traffic light, and there was no traffic, so across I went, not even noticing the light.  Turns out these guys were cops, and they were rather offended that I would cross against a light right in front of them.  No chance of a warning (should have tried to play the "little old lady" card, but not sure it would have worked).  They asked for a credit/debit card and charged me 5 euros on the spot.  At least it was a lot cheaper than it would have been in the US, though I'm trying to think if I have ever heard of anyone ever being stopped for jaywalking in the US for anything but crossing a multi-lane, very busy street. 

I did not think to ask to have my picture taken with these guys.  Sorry, folks. 

I have resumed my German lessons.  Tonight's homework is to make up punchlines to a set of jokes I have been given.  The jokes are understandable -- they don't depend on word play or cultural oddities -- but you try to think up punchlines to jokes in English.

I'll cover Hamburg in the next post.