Fewer Posts

Things are a little crazy right now, so I'll be moving to a post every other day for a while.

Awesome Bike Ride

We went on a bike ride a couple of weeks ago in the Grunewald area. It was gorgeous and so peaceful. The leaves were starting to turn, too. The first half on the loop was pretty flat, but the second half was near some lakes and was quite hilly. We took these pictures at the top of one of those hills:

Josie and Loki

It's hard to make out what's going on in this video, but Loki is cleaning Josie. Very adorable.

Crisco

Here is it called plant fat. And you buy it by the kilogram.

TJ Maxx's German Cousin

Turkey Time!

We had a housewarming party last week and made Thanksgiving dinner for it. Here's Keith and Josie with our 8.5 kg turkey:

We had 24 people over and made a ton of food and had a lot of fun. At the end, we had just enough turkey for lunch the next day and the only major leftovers came from the chorizo stuffing that took longer than anticipated to cook. There was also a fair bit of pumpkin pie left because people took very tiny pieces since they'd eaten anything like it before. All in all, I think Thanksgiving was a great success.

New Apartment!

Here's a video tour of our new apartment. It's technically a three room apartment (the kitchen doesn't count as a room in that calculation) with a bathroom and laundry room and balcony as well. The way it looks on the video is pretty much how it looked when we moved in. Since then we've changed some of the light fixtures, but we haven't had a ton of time to change other things. The bathroom is really strange. Some day I will write a post devoted to the bathroom. The lack of logic that went into its design really bothers me. Anyway, hope you enjoy the movie!

UPDATE: Sorry that the video was not available for viewing. I changed the privacy setting, so it should be watchable now.

No Internet at Home

My apologies for the lack of regular posts lately. We do not have internet at our new apartment and will not have any until December 5th because Deutsche Telekom has to come out to install something (cable maybe?). I don't quite understand what it is that they have to do, but I think it may be because there has never been internet in our apartment. In the meantime we're tethering to our phones, which is quite slow.

Anyway, I'll do my best to post from work or from here with limited pictures, but things may be a little sparse for a while. Keith made a video tour of our new apartment, so I will try to upload that at work tomorrow.

I miss my TV shows.

Puppy Perch

Josie is protecting us from any rotating advertisements.

Seen in Ikea

Christmas is already here in a big way.

Halloween in Germany

Halloween is a new holiday in Germany, so it's not that big yet. The young people use it as an excuse to party, but there were sadly no trick-or-treaters. No jack-o'-lanterns or decorations, either.

On a positive note, I got the 31st off from work. I work in Brandenburg, which is historically Protestant and celebrates Reformation Day as a public holiday. However, because we live in Berlin, which is apparently without a historic religious preference, they didn't have the day off (or November 1st, which the Catholic states celebrate as All Saints Day). This meant that I had a day off of work where I could actually go shopping. Pretty awesome.

So. Much. Ikea.

Over last weekend, we went to Ikea three times in four days. The first trip took five hours. I did not realize how much stuff we did not have. We got into the kitchen section and realized that we needed everything: plates, silverware, cups, pots, bowls, etc. Plus, we needed lights and tons of furniture. After our first trip, this is what we bought:

This is Keith tying down the back of our "bus" aka Ford Focus that we rented for the move:

On our second trip we discovered that we could get Ikea to deliver our purchases, which we took advantage of on our third trip. I hope that the trip number will not have increased again by the time this posts, although we've been eyeing up the couches in the "As Is" section and almost bought one on the third trip. However, they did not have any more covers for the couch, which is kind of a deal breaker. The couch that was left in our apartment by the previous tenants has a trundle underneath and slips apart as you sit on it...

Welcome to 1989

I was talking to my father a while back about paint in Germany and how there was no paint mixer, just bottles of different colors to hand mix together. He said that when we lived in the old house, the first paint mixer came to the area. We moved 22 years ago. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I saw this in the local Hellweg (basically a Lowe's):

This is brand new and says "We mix any color!" I was here a month earlier and there was a wall set up with different textures of wall paper. (Here, paper gets glued to concrete. If the paper is like real wallpaper, you're done, if the paper is like newspaper, you paint it.)

Can you find Loki in this picture?

Hint: Josie's looking at him.

Germany's Higher Education System aka Why it's hard to find a seat on the 7:12 train to work

Once we get some pictures of the apartment I'll be posting those, but until then I'll write about another topic: why my morning train is so full.

Germany's old education system limited the people who could go to university to those who graduated from Gymnasium (the highest level schools) and did well enough on their Abitur to get into the program and university of their choice. Those who went to Hauptschule or Realschule could also attend university, but only after graduating from a vocational school, work for five years, and then completing upper vocational school.

However, this year, a lot has changed. The Abitur is no longer necessary, German men are not conscripted for 6 months-1 year and lower education has been decreased in length by one year. It's pretty much a perfect storm of overcrowded universities. Der Spiegel has a really interesting article about it here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,792830,00.html.

The effect on my life is that the train to Golm is always full, even at 7:12am.