Hamburg

We traveled to Hamburg this weekend to visit G's family and go to an aquarium.

On Saturday however we went to Eutin to go to the Deutsch Bank office to add V to the account. V headed to the grocery store before it closed for the weekend and I ran to work to get some bank account forms I needed and we planned to meet at the train station. On the way I ran into a coworker, B, when I explained why I was in a hurry and what V was doing she told me that they have just changed to summer hours and the grocery store is open on Sundays as well now (I suppose to get ready for tourist season). Then V and I met at the station and bought two tickets. We have since learned about the different types of tickets and it is often cheaper to get a "small group ticket" if more then one person is traveling (now I realize why people ask me where I am going at the station, they want to split a ticket) we got one for that day to go to Eutin, and I bought a "state" ticket which allows up to five people to travel anywhere within the state, in this case including Hamburg, for a day on the weekend (for our trip the next day). It is a short train ride to Eutin and when we arrived M realized she had left her bag (with a pink scarf I bought for her in Cairo) hanging on the back of the bench at the train station in Ploen. We took a chance and didn't immediately go back to get it. (It was half an hour before the train back and then another half and hour for the returning train.) It started raining as we walked to the bank and when we got there we found that it is closed all day Saturday and Sunday. We were hungry and wanted to get out of the rain so we stopped at Knaacks and I ordered for everyone in German. There was also a market on the square so we walked around the market a bit before returning to the train station. Along the way we also stopped off at a shop and they had school backpacks, T is starting school soon so we got him a backpack. It is one of the square German types with dinosaur theme (what else) and lots of reflectors. At the station we just missed the return train by minutes. Eutin must he halfway between Kiel and Luebeck because both trains meet there at the bottom of the hour. We waited at the station for an hour and caught the next train. When we arrived back in Ploen M's bag was gone; we assume stolen. Overall it was a frustrating day but we did get the backpack for T.

On Sunday G had invited us to his house in Hamburg for dinner in the afternoon. We rode the train to Luebeck and got off at the station to switch trains then when we saw the sign realized the same train continued on to Hamburg so we rushed back on. Along the way I also realized that I had left the directions to G's house on my desk at work, but I figured I could remember what they looked like. We also realized that our watches were an hour off and that the time had changed and we were later then we planned. The Hamburg station was very large and we spent some time walking around looking at it and got some snacks.



Then we found the metro to go up to G's neighborhood. It is near a zoo so we took the metro to the "tierpark". At first we waited on the side going the wrong direction but we sorted it out and switched sides. The zoo was advertised with giraffe riding.



At the tierpark stop I remembered something about crossing a park, then we saw the road name and I looked for the approximate number of his building and found his last name listed outside one of the buildings. I could have been much harder but today for a change we lucked out and essentially walked straight to the house without the directions and just my memory of what he had written, and only 1/2 hour late because of the time change. The kids played



and we ate dinner there. We had a lot of the same furniture because we both bought from IKEA. Then we walked back to the zoo. One of G's daughters, D, rode her bike and T borrowed it and zoomed around on it.



I was impressed because it has been a very long time since he rode a bike. We got tickets to the aquarium part of the zoo and they had a room with ring tailed lemurs running around.



One even climbed on M as she sat on a bench (and looked for some candy in her pocket?).



The kids ran through the rest of the exhibits and played and it turned out to be a very nice day.

Licht

Last night while walking home I met one of our neighbors, K. She saw me from her balcony and went inside to meet me in the stairwell and introduce herself. She spoke excellent English and was just back from the hospital (I didn't ask what for). While she was talking to me I noticed she was apparently dusting some plastic flowers she held. She showed me how crowded things were in her apartment; she apparently has lived there for a long time and accumulated a lot of stuff.

When I got up to our apartment I wired up some more light fixtures and picked up some bulbs to put in them during my lunch break. We now have at least one light hooked up in every room! I didn't expect it but being able to flip on a light in each room makes it feel a lot more homey.

Nummern

In addition to the well known differences with the metric system and Celsius temperatures used here, there are many more differences to the number system in Germany that I have to learn and get used to.

First of all, time is almost always given in "military" time, but I have yet to see a 24 hour clock on a wall; they are all 12 hours like in the US. It seems odd to meet people at times like 16:30. The dates are also different. Here the day of the month is written before the number of the month, like 28.3.2008. For more than half of the month this is fine, but in the first two weeks it can confuse me.

Also, the 1s here are written like 7s and the 7s have a slash through them. This created a problem last week. At my job we have to keep track of a large number of stocks that are labeled by number (with a "backwards" date below). My technician is German and we are in Germany and we need a standard so I've tried to use the German standard, but I make mistakes. The biggest mistake is correcting things that aren't mistakes. So in copying the number I "corrected" 7s by adding a slash through them, but these were actually 1s. So we had to backtrack once we realized this and correct them again before we lost track.

Also, commas and decimal points are interchanged, as in the date example I gave above. 1.630 here is one thousand six hundred and thirty, not one point six three (the later is 1,63). And, a long - appears to mean zero, so prices can be marked as 1,- euros, which means one euro even without any cents (not one thousand euros).

Another thing, that is not really different from the US but I am not used to it, phone numbers start with a "+", which I am told means a zero. It's because there are so many international phone calls here, all these little countries are crammed in together, that they start phone numbers with the international code (+49 is the German one). Perhaps the EU will adopt a common calling code?

And finally, the last one that comes to mind, in spoken German a number like 48 is, literally translated, eight and forty, which often sounds to me like 84, because I am still learning the German names for numbers. For a small number like 48 this is not so bad and I am starting to get the hang of it, but for reading off a long number, like 728431, they will say two and seventy, four and eighty, one and thirty, which so far invariably results in me writing down the wrong number, but eventually I may get the hang of it.

Junk Day

Yesterday evening there were piles of junk placed out on the sidewalks in various places (chairs, boards, darts, boxes, ...), and people digging through them and carting stuff off. V has heard about this and said it must be the junk day when, in the next morning, they come along and pick up the junk that is left out; sure enough, this morning it was almost all gone. It is supposed to be monthly, so next month if we need to get rid of anything I know how to do it.

Yesterday I also took the kids to town for lunch to give V a break. Evidently it was also market day and they were just packing up in the square from the morning. We will have to try to go to it next week. T had enough saved up for a Star Wars Lego set he has wanted and M had some money so they went into a store to by things. I forced them to buy it themselves and waited at the front. T did very well and asked "Sprechen Sie English" and "danke" to the woman at the cash register. M made up for not speaking with her charm and bought a small puzzle. They both said "tschuse" as we left, which the woman thought was charming.

Today there was a fresh coat of snow on the ground, about a half inch. In the afternoon we went to the Rathaus (courthouse) to register at our new address. I took all of our passports and they filled out the forms on the computer. We are now all officially Ploeners. On the way back I introduced the kids to a Turkish man that lives in Ploen and I have talked to from time to time. He is very nice but doesn't speak a word of English so talking to him forces me to practice German.

Easter

Good Friday and Monday (today) are official holidays here in Germany so there hasn't been anyone at work, since Thursday. On Thursday morning everyone at work had a small bar of chocolate from the "Easter Bunny" on their desks. In the spirit of things I have spent a lot of time away from work this weekend as well. This has made it harder to update this blog because we don't have any internet (or phone) connections at our apartment yet.

On Saturday the grocery stores were open in the morning so we grabbed some food then we rode the train back up to Kiel. We did some shopping in the mall near the train station and ordered a washing machine (to be delivered tomorrow on Tuesday), it is one of the Euro style tiny ones, to go in our tiny kitchen, that will only do one small load at a time. Then we walked across town to the IKEA in Kiel, it was pretty cold and windy at this point. (As an aside here, the weather is very changeable lately, just today it has alternated between sunshine and show showers every few hours.) We picked up some light covers, light bulbs, light fixtures and cables (another aside, new apartments here in Germany come much barer then in America; we don't even have light fixtures on the ceilings, just bare wires sticking out, so we have to hook these up ourselves), drying racks (for laundry), coat hangers, ... and walked back. Most of the rest of the time I continued to put together furniture. V and I now have a bed, two clothes racks, a dining room table with four chairs, two sitting chairs, a side table, a small couch, several small rugs, the kids each have a rug, mattress, laundry bin, and M has a side table; plus we have a general laundry basket and a drying rack.

On Sunday morning we could hear bells ringing in the churches for Easter Sunday. The plan was I fix omelettes for breakfast, then we all go for a walk together to Prince's Island. M thought we said "Princess Island" so she got dressed up in a new pink dress to meet the princesses and didn't want to put a coat on over it later (I only found out why last night when V told me what M said later). But I've gotten ahead of myself. I just finished moving the last of our luggage from our smallest "storage" room and had the kids clean up by putting all the cardboard and wrappers in there from the IKEA furniture. I was halfway through slicing the mushrooms for the omelette when I heard V yelling loudly "help, help, help" from the same room. The radiator in there didn't adjust correctly and was stuck all the way on, so it was warm in the room. She took my pliers (my only tools at the moment apart from a philips head screwdriver) and tried to adjust it. A piece (the air release) bent, almost broke off, and hot water was shooting out the crack. I bent it back so that it was a fast dripping and she got a pan to put under it. A few minutes later "help" again and this time it was broken completely off and she was holding wadded up clothes over it to keep it from streaming all over the place. I knocked on the building maintanence man's door but no one was in the entire building, everyone was at church. We didn't even have a bucket to catch the water in. There was no where to turn it off so I followed the pipes through the building and ended up in the basement where there were finally valves and cranked them shut. I saw two large watering cans down there so I took them back up the stairs and V started a relay with the kids emptying the full water cans in the tub. She also had them bring in the laundry basket and was mopping up water to keep it from spreading and soaking in with the clothes. Turning off the water didn't seem to help at all, the stream was still very strong. I grabbed a plastic IKEA fork in the kitchen, cut off a prong which looked about the right size (they have wide child sized prongs) and had V move out of the way while I jammed it in the hole and hammered it in with my pliers. This really cut the stream of water down. I took over with the water catching and dumping, we could now keep up with the volume, and V ran to find help (remember, in addition to no tools we didn't have a phone to call anyone, and almost everyone was off at church). Down the street at another building she finally got ahold of someone. It was Z we met before and V was in email contact with before we moved to Germany. Z called up the emergency handy man and half an hour later he showed up, turned the water to the building back on (it made no difference, the radiators were a separate system) and called another guy to come. Half an hour after that the other guy came, looked at the radiator and went off to get his tools. All this time Z acted as our interpreter between German and English. By this time the stream of water had slowed down considerably, after several hours of jetting out in our room. We had almost drained the entire three story apartment building of radiator water via our smallest room and the kids bucket brigade to the tub in the next room! (At one point however M threatened to stop working if I didn't promise to pay her some euros! In addition to cute she can be cutthroat.) Finally they were back with all the tools they needed and capped it. We were lucky in that we just happened to move our luggage out of the room moments before this all happened; V was unlucky however in that she scalded her hand with the hot water.

We invited Z to stay for a lunch of omelets. I finally got back to cooking, and after a late lunch we went for our walk. It was cold and late in the day so we took a shorter walk to the kids future school and they played on the playground, then asked to go back themselves because they were cold (it was also going to get dark soon). We will save prince's / princess island for another day.

Berliner

It is a nice sunny day today so for lunch I took T to town (V and M were off shopping).

Along the way we stopped at the fisherman's holding tank and he spotted two sturgeons. He talked the rest of the way about getting a boat and going fishing in the lake.

In town he picked out a berliner for a snack. This is a glazed jelly donut. It gives a twist to the speech president Kennedy gave when he traveled to Berlin in 1963 to protest the Berlin wall and said boldly to the Soviet Empire "I am a Jelly Donut."

When we returned I met the handyman in the stairwell and he had our new mailbox keys and came up and fixed the water in the kitchen (no cold water, V tried to turn it on and water sprayed everywhere, he did the same thing but got it working) and the handle to the balcony. Our balcony is now finished and I left back to work with T standing out on it waving bye to me.

We have arrived!

Just this morning. Need to rest. All is well. More later ...

... to follow up. We arrived in Hamburg late Sunday night and collected all our luggage together, 15 bags in total, and made it out to the Kielius bus just in time to buy tickets. I had to run back and forth to get the luggage stowed in the bottom of the bus, the driver was very surprised at how much we had and asked "Alles?" with a laugh. When we arrived in Kiel we carried everything over to the train station as fast as possible and bought tickets but just missed by minutes the last train out of the station at 11:44 pm. The next one was at 4:44 am so we spent the night in the train station. The kids were wired and ran all over the place. At one point I took them for a walk to show them the ships in the fjord. A nice man that works in the station helped us carry our bags onto the train. At the stop in Ploen we threw everything off as fast as we could before the doors closed. The kids made it off as well! V stayed at the station and guarded the bags while I took the first load with the kids to the apartment; I left the kids there to pick out rooms and V and I carried the last of the bags to the apartment, stored them in our storage room in the basement, and collapsed after we got in.

The last few days have been very busy. I have been building lots of IKEA furniture while at the apartment and getting starting again at work. The kids have been up at odd times so we haven't been able to get much sleep, but things are starting to adjust now.

Stuck in an airport

It looks like my air travel luck has held up. A tornado hit Atlanta with more storms and warnings as we were supposed to fly out. A very dark cloud was coming in fast as we were taxiing, with a tornado warning so we had to wait on the runway for an hour for things to blow over. At one point the rain changed to hail stones (it sounded like gravel dropping all over a tin roof) and the plane shook in the wind as we waited, but we didn't get sucked up in a twister. We finally got off the ground and the kids loved it and were extremely excited. When we landed in Chicago we had missed our connecting flight and I had to spend hours getting us on another flight (more details later ...). We got the middle row to ourselves in the cross Atlantic flight and the kids enjoyed watching movies the whole way on the little back-of-the-seat screens. In the morning I woke up and T was there with his headset on wide awake. He said it was the first time in his life that he had stayed up all night. (M and V were fast asleep.) He was awake when we landed but by the time we taxied to the gate he was completely out. It took 10 minutes to wake him enough to walk and follow me (I carried his bags.) We missed our connecting flight to Hamburg this morning so the kids are both asleep on benches here in Heathrow and we are planning how to get something to eat without any British pounds (I wish they had switched to euros already). We should arrive in Hamburg at 8:30-9 pm tonight, but you know how that goes ...

A bottle of beer

I forgot to mention this in the last post and there is a bug that deletes everything when I try to edit posts that have embedded Google maps, so I'm adding this as a separate post.

On the drive up to NC I also delivered a bottle of German beer to J as a thank you gift for helping us move. This was no ordinary bottle, it was three liters in size. I needed to bring my luggage bags back from Germany to pack more things here to move with us so I was essentially brining back empty luggage bags. This made it possible for me to fill one with the three liter bottle wrapped in some clothes. I was a little worried about bringing it in through customs because I think you are limited to two liters of alcoholic drinks in general; I declared it on the form, but they didn't say anything about it. J seemed pleased with the "beer bath" gift. At some point I would like to get a picture of the bottle (I forgot) and add it here so everyone can get a sense of its scale.

Last full day stateside

The whole family is flying to Germany tomorrow! The kids are very excited. V and I are getting worn out with last minute arrangements. Our packing was 99% finished last night but it looks like our bags won't all fit in the car with us. I'm not sure how we will be able to carry everything on the German side. Today we are making some more last minute arrangements with the bank, backing up computer files, ... There are so many little things that keep popping up out of nowhere. Yesterday I was cleaning up the car and just before walking away I happened to notice my old work parking permit hanging from the rear view mirror. I'm so used to seeing it there that it didn't even register until just now as something that would need to be dealt with. If I don't mail it to them soon after quitting my job they will fine me, so I just now dropped it in the mail. (Just one example of a thousand little things.)

I flew back to Atlanta last Saturday after a very busy few days wrapping things up and packing. W dropped me off at the BWI airport. Upon arriving back in Atlanta V presented me with my social security card that had just arrived (record time for government work!). So the next day we drove up to NC and on Monday were able to get our NC drivers licenses and register to vote. One detail that caught us was insurance. In addition to the social security card, we needed insurance in NC to get the license (so we can vote in NC and trade it for a license in Germany, unlike MD or GA drivers liscenses), but we do not own a car in NC and it took most of the day to find an insurance company that would issue us non-owner drivers insurance. We hopped from company to company, finally got some coverage and made it back to the DMV before closing. The next day we drove back to Atlanta and have been packing and arranging since.

Also I found out that a federal government funding agency that has given me grants in the recent past is threatening to fine me a huge amount of money because I am moving to a job outside of the US! (They want me to remain in the US for two more years in the fine print.) This has largely blindsided me so I have been rushing writing appeal letters and getting documentation together.

Tomorrow we are flying from Atlanta (Hartsfield-Jackson) to Chicago (O'Hare) to London (Heathrow) then to Hamburg. We're going through some of the largest and busiest airports in the world! It is essentially the first time the kids have flown (T flew some when he was a baby but he doesn't remember it.) This kids are very excited. I've added our route tomorrow in red to the moving map.

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Back in Maryland

I flew from Atlanta to Baltimore this morning to wrap up some loose ends in Maryland. The flight left at 7 am and we landed 7 minutes early for a change. At the Baltimore airport I hopped a shuttle to the Greenbelt DC Metro station ($3.10 one way) and took the metro and another shuttle back to my old job. I was in my office by 11:30 am, before a lot of other people show up for work.

Also, I seem to be coming down with a cold. It's really kicked in this afternoon. I'm going to try to get as much sleep as possible tonight, but tomorrow I can't stay in as I only have a few days here to work with.

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Social Security Card

North Carolina has a new requirement for driver's licenses. We have to present a federal social security card to get an NC license now. Neither V nor I have one so we went and submitted paperwork to get a card mailed to us yesterday. This involved a minute of filling out the form, then several hours of waiting for our number to be called. While waiting if we sat in one of the seats in front of the closed offices a security guard came over and told us we couldn't sit there. So we stood near them most of the time while the kids played with other kids on the floor. Finally they called our numbers and we turned in our forms and showed them our IDs (passport and MD driver's license). It is supposed to take 10 days to get the card so we may not make it before we move.

We also went to Costco so I could get a free hearing test. I haven't had one in years (I am partially deaf) and wanted a baseline before moving to Germany. I might try to use our European insurance to finally get a hearing aid while in Germany (my various US insurances over the years have refused to pay for one despite saying they cover them in their paperwork).

A long return via New York

Well I finally made it, more than 24 hours after I expected to arrive. Everything went smoothly at first. I made the 1 am train, then the 3 am bus (the bus station was deserted until 15 minutes before the bus arrived then a flood of taxis came from out of nowhere and dropped a crowd of people off that were heading to the airport). I got the the airport in Hamburg, checked in, got my boarding pass, went through security, bought some bottled water for the trip, went to my gate, they started boarding, I got my seating ticket, got on the bus to the plane and headed across the tarmac. The bus stopped just outside the plane but didn't open its doors. We waited. Eventually they made an announcement that the "cabin wasn't clean" yet and that they needed some more time. We waited. Then they said there was a "technical difficulty" and we went back to the gate and walked back in off the bus. We waited there for half an hour then they made an announcement that the replacement part was coming on a plane from Amsterdam and that we would have to go out and collect our checked bags and go to the KLM airport office to reschedule. I went down to baggage and waited for my bag to appear. Other people collected theirs and went out to get in line. I waited, and waited, finally there were only two other people waiting with me, then it was down to me waiting by myself, finally my bag appeared with the extendable handle newly broken off, and I went up to get in last in line for rescheduling. The line moved very slowly and I was in it until noon. I overheard the people in front of me and the person two people in front got the last seat out that day. When I got up there they said the best they could do was route me to JFK in New York then on a flight from there to Atlanta the next morning. They told me to talk to the KLM office there when I arrived to get them to arrange a place for me to spend the night (they assured me that KLM would pay for the hotel room, no problem). I had to throw away the bottle I had bough inside the airport to go back through security. I got another bottle of water on the inside then they had an additional security screening just before the gate so I had to throw it away. On the other side was a coke machine which I refused to buy anything from on matter of principle. So in the afternoon I flew from Hamburg to Amsterdam, then got on the flight to New York. The flight was delayed for a long time before departure because two people that checked in bags didn't show up for the flight so they had to unpack all the bags, get theirs out, then repack everything. When we arrived in New York it was close to midnight and blowing snow outside. I went to the KLM office and there was no one there. I asked a security guard that worked there and she said they had all left for the day. I went down to the information office and had them page someone that worked for KLM. I waited there for an hour and they paged them 5 times. No one showed up. Finally they called and talked to someone on the phone and said they would be right down. No one showed up. For those that have heard about my experience in the Addis Ababa airport with Emirates Air last November, this should sound familiar. I waited 30 minutes and they called again and no one was there, evidently they had left for the night as well. Another guy that was also on the flight from Amsterdam was in the same position as me, he was heading to Patagonia, so we agreed to split a room for the night and try to get our money back from KLM in the morning. We took a shuttle to the Ramada Inn near the airport and were able to get a discount "stranded passenger" rate. When we got up to the room I was out and went straight to sleep. In the morning we went back to the KLM office and again, no one was there. I talked to people from Northwest (that works with KLM) and they said they wouldn't be there until 2:30 in the afternoon, because that was when the flights arrived from Europe and I would have to wait until then to get help from them--there was nothing they could do. (I'm sure that some of these people also worked for KLM and just changed uniforms when their shift came on, that's what the Ethiopian Air people did with Emirates Air in Addis, but what could I say?) My flight was leaving in an hour with Delta so I had to go to make that connection. I went to the Delta terminal, got in line, waited my turn, talked to a ticket agent and they looked at the ticket KLM had written for me the day before in Hamburg. They said something about how I probably couldn't get on the flight (was it full?) and told me to get back in line and talk to another agent! Then she left the desk. I couldn't believe this, but I knew not to make trouble at a US airport so I got back in line and waited. I got to another agent and at first she said that I couldn't use the ticket because it was only good for one day and I should have left yesterday, I asked how this was possible because I arrived at almost midnight the night before. Then she switched gears and said that I could only take carry on bags. I held up my large moving suitcase and said "you want me to carry this on?" and she said that I couldn't get on the flight and that I had to talk to KLM. So what else could I do. I walked off to kill some time until 2:30 when they came to the KLM office. In the next terminal there was an Air France desk so I asked next door when the people from Air France would arrive. (Air France partners with KLM.) They said they should be at the desk. I explained no one was there. ... same old story. I called V to explain that I wouldn't be arriving on the rescheduled flight, was waiting for someone from Air France or KLM to show up and went to a dining area that overlooked the Air France ticketing area so I could keep an eye out. I had just got some food and sat down to eat when they paged me over the intercom by name to go to the Air France desk. I asked a woman that was sitting next to me to please watch my stuff and ran down there. No one was there. I even went down another level to the baggage check and no one was there. I went to the neighboring ticket booth and they said they should be there because they just paged some one. I explained that was me. ... I waited as long as I dared then had to go back to my food and luggage. Fortunately the woman was still there and my bags had not been destroyed while I was gone. I sat down to finally eat a much needed meal. Later I went back to Air France and waited ... finally a woman appeared that was setting up the desks. I asked if she worked for Air France, yes. I explained I had been paged and need to get a new ticket for Delta. She went back into a door and two other women popped out. I explained that I needed the ticket and that I had been paged and waiting. They explained that they couldn't see me because they were back in the office (then why had they bothered to page me?). They paged me because V had called to arrange another ticket with Delta. Then I needed to convince them that yes indeed the Delta agent had refused my ticket. Finally they wrote out another ticket to arrive at 3:30 in Atlanta (At this point, if I had just waited in Hamburg and went out the next day I would have arrived in Atlanta faster then coming through NY). I called V to tell her so she could pick me up and went back to the Delta terminal. This time they accepted me and let me check my bag (wonder of wonders!), and I went to the gate 2 1/2 hours early to camp out until boarding. The rest of the trip back went smoothly. The kids were happy to see me and came running out of nowhere and V had my new glasses for me.

Whew ...

Now it's time for me to get back to work.

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