Laundry and Hiking

Definitely on a learning adventure.  It's Thursday.  I decided that I needed to do some laundry and I wanted to find time for a hike.  First, the laundry adventure.

There is both a washer and a dryer in the common room of our guest house.  They are each about half the size of an American appliance.  And they are full of incomprehensible options, some that even Google Translate does not understand.  The main choice you get is the temperature, with options of 30°, 40°, and 50° (Celsius, of course).  There are other things like "Automatic", "gentle care", etc that seem to control washing times.  And there are two soap dispensers labeled I and 11 (yes, a capital I, and then eleven, though I think the right interpretation is one and two).  I found a reasonable wash cycle, at least by the second load, and apparently I am pretty close on the amount and selection of soap additions, as the clothes seem to be clean but not overly soapy. However, the clothes come out closer to soaking wet than spun dry.  Some extended work with Google Translate helped me find a 6 minute spin cycle that runs separate from all the other cycles. You wash the clothes on whatever cycle you like, and then reset the dial and run the spin cycle.

There is a drying rack in the common room, and after taking to a Canadian who had more experience than I did with the appliances, I decided to use that for at least the simple things, but I thought our pants and Mr. R-T's polo shirts would look better from the dryer.  Even with them spun dry, I could not find a cycle that would dry them.  It would run for about 25 minutes, declare victory with items too wet even to iron dry.  I did one pair of jeans on the 'jeans' cycle for 5 iterations and now it is hanging up to finish drying.  It being a hot day and the common room having direct sun, I think most of this will dry by nightfall, but just barely.  It's clear that doing laundry is going to require a bit of planning, and we shouldn't launder anything we are going to need to wear in the next 48 hours.  (Maybe more if we get a rainy streak.  I have no idea how that impacts the drying, but it can't help.)

An interesting wrinkle.  German washers and dryers don't turn themselves off at the end of the cycle.  You have to do it manually.

Next the hiking.  It was lovely.  I was worried about my late start, as the high today is predicted to be 86°; but it was easily 10 degrees colder in the woods. What was billed as a 6.6km (4 mile) hike ended up as 6 miles, in part because I found the hike startpoint in a very roundabout way.  I have a page called "Wanderwege in Duisburg" (Hiking paths in Duisburg) where this was very loosely described.  Once I found the path (it sent me to the zoo parking lot, of which there are several. It was the third one I encountered. They don't show up in Google Maps satellite view, because they are all completely tree-lined.)  The trail was on lovely wide tree-filled paths (see picture right), except for when it took bike paths and a few times a sidewalk.  Maybe half of it was close to the highway or railroad tracks.  A few hills (fitbit gives me 200ft of vertical), but mostly just lovely, well marked trails.  This one was called the A2, and every time I was concerned I was on the wrong path, an A2 sign came to my rescue (see below).  There are lots of other paths marked on the trees, so next time I'll try something new, not covered on my sheet.  But I'll bring a peanut butter sandwich or something -- I was relieved to recross my steps about 1pm, as I was getting hungry.

We are heading for Amsterdam in the morning, so no more news till Monday.

(Oh, and as you can see, I have figured out how to get pictures off my phone, but I haven't completely mastered getting them positioned in Blogger yet.)

Observations on German Life

Whew!  What a day.  I just had a few things to do, but between forgetting things, getting lost, and not understanding the culture around me, I ended up walking 10 miles.  I had to go to the train station to get tickets for our visit to Amsterdam this weekend, then to the main shopping district to buy some real coffee mugs (the dainty tea cups we have in our apartment aren't good for anything), then go to the grocery store to get supplies for tonight's dinner.  Despite the very good map I now have, I got lost (including walking through the train tunnel multiple times to find a bathroom and to find my way under the freeway).  It was partly construction, and partly my confusion that I knew I wanted to go west, but I thought the train tunnel was going north.  Ah, some day I will develop a sense of direction.

At least the weather was beautiful.  In the mid 80s, very sunny.  In stark contrast to the earlier weather. Tuesday was overcast all day.  I understand morning fog and incipient rain, but the idea of a day that is just dreary gray all day -- apparently I am too much of a Californian to remember that these days are common in most of the world.

In any case, here are my very random observations about the people here:

• There are a lot of Muslim women (probably Muslim men too, but they aren't as identifiable).  Maybe as many as 1 in 10 of the women I saw were wearing head scarves, more near the university
• Probably related to that -- the vast majority of restaurants around here are Mediterranean or Middle Eastern; Turkish, Lebanese, etc.  I thought Germans liked German food, but apparently they have become more open minded.
• I've seen a few Africans, but other than that and the Middle Easterners, the rest of the people seem to be classic Germans: stout, especially if they are middle aged or older, often blond.
• Lots of cyclists doing errands, very few with helmets, many with babies in carriers
• Bathrooms in train stations cost money (1€)
• Lots more smokers than I am used to.  I thought I would sit outside a Backerei (bakery) and enjoy tea and a pastry, but the seats are full of smokers (they cannot smoke at the tables in the buildings, but I wanted to enjoy the sun).  The smokers mostly seemed older, so I hope the new generation has not taken up nicotine.  Cigarettes are sold from vending machines in the street, so there is less effort to keep them out of the hands of teens, I think.
• Germans apparently don't like vegetables, at least the ones I am used to.  I stopped at several produce stands to get a vege for dinner, and all I could find were cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes and onions.  No broccoli, no green beans, no snap peas, no asparagus (I suspect the last has to do with seasonality, but not the others.  Though I have lost most sense of when vegetables are in season in the temperate climates, since we can get most anything from Mexico)
• Lots of places sell french fries, here called "Hollandischer Pommes" (Dutch potatoes, in a bit of a linguistic hodgepodge).  Again, I didn't think the Germans ate fries
• They have human streetsweepers. When is the last time you saw that in the US?  The people doing it looked ethnically German, from which I infer it is a reasonable paying job, not one that is left to immigrants.
• There must be quite an elderly population in this town.  I counted four hearing aid shops in my travels today
• While lots of people live very densely packed into apartments, at least in the part of town I was in, there is a lot more green space -- small and large parks and hiking areas -- than you would see in a similar town in the US.
• Oh, and it's green  -- looks sort of like California in the dead of winter ::)
• And just like the US, everyone seems to have their head in their mobile device, or at least using it with headphones.  

Yes, This is Going to be an Adventure

Well, we made it to Germany.  The flight was uneventful, as was the train trip.  We even managed to get our Bahn Cards successfully (cards that let us ride the trains for a discount.  The senior rate makes it well worth it.)  We are settled in our new apartment, which is less than a block from Mr. R-T's office (he's not going to get much exercise this month.  I, on the other hand...).  Now come the challenges:

Internet connections.  Everyone at this end believed that we would be able to use the university wireless network.  Afterall, it's "everywhere" on campus.  Turns out that our guesthouse has wired connections, but not wireless, and both of us have computers that only accept wireless connections.  I started the day by calling the university IT support, who asked me to bring my computer to the e-desk in the library.  They set me up so that both my chromebook and my phone work on the wireless, but when I returned to my apartment -- no go.  That led to a number of phone calls by our host's admin to discover that the wireless really doesn't work there.  I spent several hours in the library catching up on email and related things, but am feeling very frustrated that I might only have internet after a morning stroll.

The current plan is for our host to find a wireless accesspoint lying around unused, and we will connect that to the wire.  My fingers are crossed that this will work.

Laundry: we have a communal washer and dryer (and hanging rack).  However, looking at the size of the washer, I'm going to be doing laundry every 3-4 days, not once a week as I expected.  One more way to fill my time (how do working people find time to get all their housework done in this country?)

I'll talk more about the challenges of grocery shopping. how Germans furnish apartments. and cooking in a minimally furnished apartment in later posts.  Tomorrow I hope to find time to visit a bit of the area.

Oh, we did find a lovely wine shop that even lets you sample the wine before you buy.  Anyone experience something similar in the U-S- ?

Taking travel to the next level

I talked about our trip to Germany back in a May post, and now it's just about upon us.  We leave next week for a month in Duisburg, Germany (that's their downtown above). Mr R-T is going to embark on a work-related project , and I am going along just for fun.  We have a nice apartment near the university, and I'm going to try to live like a local for the month.

My German is coming along. In addition to the sites I mentioned last time, I have found Deutsche-Welle, which is a German site devoted to helping people learn the German language (I think it is subsidized by the German government).  I'm working on my B2 level course, which is sort of advanced intermediate.  My vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds, but without a German speaker to chat with, I don't really feel fluent.  But I'll be jumping in to the deep end of the pool in a few days.

Figuring out what to bring is my next challenge.  I swear that going for a month is harder than either going for a week or going for a year.  In the former case, there are things I would just live without; in the latter case, it would be worth the effort of finding out the equivalent in the local shops.  Luckily, we are allowed a lot of bags on United, so I think we will be able to fit it all.   Whether we will be able to lug that much on and off trains is a different question. And I'm still waking up in the middle of the night thinking of important things to add to the list.

We are going to travel each weekend.  One weekend will be spent with our host, so I don't have do anything for that.  I have discovered that my Nexus tablet is better for reading guidebooks than my Kindle (I have a relatively old, B&W Kindle), because the books are full of hi-res photos.  Current plans have us travelling to Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Cinque Terre region of Italy, but stay tuned to see where we really end up.  I'm also thinking of visiting a friend in Poland for a few days.

There are other logistics too: letting credit cards know not to freeze our account because we are out of the country for so long.  We have credit cards with chip and pin technology (having been unable to pay a road toll once because that was the only way you could pay, we were thrilled to find these), and the same cards don't charge a fee for currency conversion, a big savings.  Finding cheapest way to get cash  -- my bank doesn't charge a fee at its end, but it doesn't seem to have deals with any European bank networks. Finding a gym or Pilates studio, wi-fi access, bike rental to get to places I can't easily walk to, phones and phone data plans.  And more.

Each day I think of one more think I need to look into. The folks at the University have been fantastic -- they are even lending us a printer for things like printing out directions.

Since travelling is (or ought to be) an important part of retirement, at least in the early years, I'm going to post regular updates about our trip on this blog.  Stay tuned.

Retirement -- a time to travel

Photo by Prateek Bahadur

I've been slow in amping up my travelling now that I'm retired.  Mr. R-T and I have a few trips planned (maybe imagined is closer to reality), but since he is still working, he's not as enthusiastic as I am.  However, this past weekend we found ourselves in Chicago.  We have children (a son and daughter-in-law) living there, and we hadn't yet seen their place and how they were faring as a married couple (if either of you are reading this -- we approve.  Not that you asked our opinion.)  It was just a long weekend -- leave Friday morning, return Sunday night.  Probably not the ideal travel plans; if we were both retired, it would make more sense, both financially and airport-chaos-wise, to travel on Thursday and Tuesday, but we are working up to that.

We got "senior citizen" fares from United, but as near as we can tell, they cost the same as regular fares.   We also got to use TSA-Pre for the first time.  This is the special check-in line for pre-approved folks, where you don't have to take of your shoes, take out your laptop, etc.  In our case (not sure this is always true), we didn't have to go through the milliwave detector either.  It was very fast.  We have been using CLEAR, which is one of the private companies that enable you to bypass long lines (they use fingerprint detection to identify you), but you still have to take off shoes, etc., so we found Pre to be faster (and it didn't cost as much as CLEAR, which we probably won't renew).  CLEAR only works in a few cities, of which San Francisco is one. Of course, which is the least hassle can change as more and more people sign up for either service.

We were in Chicago during the Taste of Chicago, but the newlyweds just wanted to hang out around the house, so we missed that.  I figure they will be there for a while, so maybe next year, I'll get to go.  We did go out for a very nice dinner Saturday night, at Spiaggia,  one of Chicago's Michelin 1-star restaurants (our children are definitely foodies).  Other than that, we learned a lot about their local neighborhood and enjoyed their company.

The best part about travelling while retired is after I get home.  No need to rush around trying to squeeze in three days of errands and chores in the cracks before and after work.  Today I did laundry, grocery shopping, garden work, and other things (even writing for this blog) at my leisure. Always before I dreaded travelling because I knew that when I returned, I was going to have 3-4 days of craziness to get caught up.  When you don't have tons of responsibilities, it can be done in one day.  Who knew?

While I love visiting family, my desire to travel is mostly about seeing places as much as people.  I need to spend a week or more in Chicago to see the sites on my list, and that will have to be done without my museum-hating son.  And there are so many other places I want to spend time in.  It's time to leave Mr. R-T in the lurch.  A similarly retired friend and I are talking about going to Santa Fe, and there are several places along the West Coast I want to take short trips to.  Of course, there are also longer trips to Europe, New Zealand and South America on the bucket list (we had a conversation yesterday about going on safari in Africa, so I think that's going on the list too). Now I just need to make time for these, and figure out how best to budget for them.

If I'm retired, why is my professional life haunting me?

While a lot of people want a soft transition from whatever their career was to their retirement life, I don't.  I'm not sure why.  I loved what I did for a career -- all my roles from academic researcher to UX practitioner to programmer.  When I considered retiring eight years ago, the main reason I didn't was that I was having trouble imagining not doing what I did every day (even though at the time, I was sure I wanted to leave the job I had).  I had lots of ideas of how to do things in a pro bono capacity (many of which I am still aware of, though I think that now more of them would actually come up with at least some sort of payment). But this time around, I'm ready to move on.  I have such a long list of things I plan to do, and I'm not making fast enough progress on them (in my mind), but I still get sucked into things that relate to my professional life.

Right now I am: working on a short article about an interesting methodological 'incident', making final changes to a book chapter, reading the reviews of a rejected conference paper and deciding if there is any value in rewriting it for a different conference, advising a couple of colleagues who have come to me asking  what to do in their current job or what to do in their career, writing some code that will go in the mailman3 open source project, and starting a new electronic community.   I just finished doing a review of a new book for the publisher and in the early spring I reviewed a journal article. That doesn't count several projects I have turned down.

Had I not made it clear to people that I wasn't just retiring to work part time or work pro bono, there would be several more projects on my plate, more on the practitioner side than the researchy things that dominate the list above.  I'm sure this varies as a function of what one's area is, but I also think that this would be true of any area where consultants are common.  My father retired 30 years ago as an OSHA safety engineer (about as different as you can get from my career) and had a similar experience.  Of course, unless you really take a consulting career seriously, your expertise decays pretty fast in this day and age, and for him, at least, the opportunities went away in about 3 years (he wasn't trying at all to keep his knowledge up to date).  I hope it's faster for me.

I do enjoy these projects, though they tend to engender more guilt (and more date-driven deadlines) than most of my other projects, which is one of the things I want to get away from.  Maybe I do want this professional identity to stick around more than I publicly admit.  Or maybe I just can't say no....

Keeping Active: Take 2

Now that I've been at this retirement thing for almost four months, let me give you an update on how this exercise thing is working out.  The previous post on this was Taking Better Care of Myself. Overall, I'm pretty happy with being able get in significant exercise every day.  I've lost 20 lbs., so it's doing something.  (Haven't been to my doctor in this time, so I don't have any other numbers.  I have lost 2 pants sizes too.)

I've settled down; I'm no longer so rabid about needing to get in my 10,000 steps a day (lots of what I do doesn't involve things my step counter counts, so I'm using other metrics), and I have also quit tracking food input for a while.  I'll probably have to go back doing to the latter eventually, as the things I was concerned about -- fiber and protein -- have probably not increased enough. But it was beginning to feel a bit OCD when I was tracking things that carefully.

I have settled into an exercise routine.  I spin two days a week, do yoga and pilates each one day a week, work out with a trainer once, hike once a week, do a 3-or-4-hour 40 mile-with-hills bike ride once a week (my  attempt to push myself), and do a more social bike ride once a week.  (Yes, that's eight days a week).  That's kind of the baseline.  This week I'm hiking three different times (the first ended up as an 11.5 mile hike covering 2000 ft of vertical, but some of that was an unplanned detour).  I skipped my serious bike ride this week, in part because I decided that I wanted to bake bread (more on that in a later post), which conflicted with the meeting time for the biking group I was joining, and in part because my muscles were hurting everywhere (so I did an extra yoga session and pilates instead and called it a day).  Other weeks have led to extra bike riding (I did a 100km ride about 3 weeks ago) and a few times my busy social schedule has interfered with all this exercising (it's supposed to be fun, so when it's less fun than something else, out it goes)

This feels really good.  I highly recommend it to all new retirees, whether you retire at 70 or 35.  I figure eventually I won't be able to do this, and the satisfaction of watching myself get stronger -- possibly stronger and more aerobically fit than I have been in my life -- and of making time to do things I enjoy on a regular basis has been immense.  Since I've had to do 3 rounds of recovery in the last 4 years (two ankle surgeries and a round of chemo), feeling healthy and "younger than my age" is very rewarding (18 months ago I was using a walker and cursing it roundly.  Not much makes you feel older than a walker.  You see 20 year olds in wheelchairs, but not using walkers.) So whatever enjoyable exercise means to you, if you haven't done enough of it when you had work as an excuse (and you know whether that means you, I'm sure), DO IT NOW.

I also highly recommend both yoga and pilates for the ageing body.  Yoga I have done on and off for 20 years, but I'm doing it more regularly now, and really reaping the benefits in overall flexibility and lack of aches and pains (other than those I can attribute to a particular exercise session).  It's also done wonders for rehabbing my ankle.  Even physical therapists don't have exercises to strengthen ankles, but the balancing exercises (everything from Eagle Pose to Vasisthasana Pose) have really made my ankle much more stable and stronger. It's important to find a yoga teacher who doesn't push you to do things that are unsafe, but I can't say enough good about (safely done) yoga.

Pilates I am newer to.  I have been wanting to take it up for several years, but couldn't fit it into my schedule.  The first few times I said to the teacher "this really looks and feels like a medieval torture device" (her answer: "everyone says that"), but I've done about a dozen sessions now, and I can feel that it's doing a lot to strengthen my core, which is important for many things that "go south" as we age.   While I'm getting to a level that I find strenuous (Pilates instructors, or at least mine, start you out very gently, and it was only my progress from week to week that convinced me that this was really exercise), it never hurts (or at least isn't supposed to).

I'll keep posting on how this evolves.  Maybe a year from now I'll be a couch potato, but I doubt it. It doesn't hurt that I live in California, where I can do outdoor exercise year round.  And I'm doing my best to stay out of hospitals and other medical facilities -- starting this from near zero was damn hard, and I'd rather avoid doing that again.