Teachers in the Trees

The Friday of our second week of school (October 30th) was a very unique day. Granted, the school has had a unique school year thus far -- nearly an entire new French teaching staff and the same for English (we need a French teacher for the 11th grade, btw -- anyone interested?). Because there are so many new teachers, the teacher board (or something along those lines) decided that the staff needed to spend time together and to get to know one another better.

Solution: cancel school for a day and take the staff on an excursion!

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.
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I'm being serious.

Obviously parents were upset. Older children were pleased. I have to admit that having one less day that week made life better. But, all that is besides the point.

This excursion was top-secret. Only the two teacher that planned it knew what we were doing all day and where. All we were told was to be at school that Friday at 8 AM and to have appropriate outdoor dress.

The bus driver was digging into the secrecy of it all. During the hour and a half long bus ride, he would slow down in front of various spots pretending that we had reached our destination. He also took about three wrong turns...

Towards the end of our drive, consent forms were passed around for us to sign.

This is where we ended up.

Tree Trek is a kind of activity/outdoor camp facility with high ropes courses and zip-lines. Actually, it was pretty cool -- the last time I'd done something like this was back in middle school! Many of the teachers/staff people (there were about 30 of us who decided to go) hadn't done anything like this before. Plus, Mike and I were by far the youngest people there. Many of our teachers are in their 50s. The energy level was high and there was lots of laughter.

We were split into three teams -- Mike and I ended up on the same one. Fortunately, our team got to go first, and were able to do all FIVE courses. They became progressively more difficult and higher. There was jumping across stretches of open air and landing like monkey or spider in a net. One of the later courses involved getting bags of pine cones and stuff across the course.

Some pictures...






















At the end of the day, we took the bus (did I mention that it was a coach bus?) to a nice restaurant where we had a lovely vegetarian meal that also included sundae desserts and after-dinner coffee and drinks.

Not bad for a poor Waldorf school....

Watership Down plus some hedgehogs

This is just behind our apartment... I guess you could call it our yard. So it's the grass, the park, and then school!








The funny thing about the area is that there are HUNDREDS of rabbits around. Or so it seems. On any given day or night, you find can find at least ten or so laying in the grass, running/hopping around, or doing what they do best --- eating. Definitely reminds me of Elarirah, Strawberry, and Fiver...



One night we saw this little blob sitting on the road near our sidewalk. A hedgehog! I don't think I'd seen one before. The poor thing was probably blinded by my flash. I guess they spend a lot of time in the bushes and such. Just a couple nights ago we saw another one ambling around the bushes near school.

An apartment with a view

In August Annette had planned out nearly every moment of our two week stay in Germany. In addition to having living quarters for us, she put together our school schedules – making sure we were put in classes with the good teachers, rounding out our days so we got a complete overview of what the school was like, etc., and when we were home from school and not napping, she laid plans for us to see the interesting sites in and around Wolfsburg and beyond.

So naturally, Annette became superwoman again and took care of all of the arrangements for our move to Germany. What our lives would be like without her, I can’t even imagine. Aside from straightening out paperwork and whatnot, one of the major things she did for us was to find us an apartment.

So...

Welcome to our apartment here in Germany!


You have just walked into our place. Apartment buildings are set up so that each floor has only two apartments, which makes the building seem more private.

To your immediate left is the storage closet. Just past that is the entrance to our living room and dining room. The kitchen is past that and to the left of the bathroom (the door straight ahead). The first room on the right is our spare bedroom that currently contains our desks. Beyond that (and to the right of the bathroom) is our bedroom.



Here is the living room/dining room. Our table is nearly always scattered with school papers and books. The doors open out to a small balcony which hopefully will have some plants and such come spring.






This is the rest of the room. The cabinet next to Mike holds about six different types of glasses. There are lots of windows looking out to the balcony and the rest of the neighborhood of Detmerode.


Another shot of the living room and Mike...










Below are various views of Detmerode from our living room. Our school is the funny slope-shaped roof and the land to the left of that building. You can really see how close we live to work.



The park between our building and the school is nice, but we often find students there during their break times... not so good because they're not allowed to leave school grounds during the school day when they're under 16.







The room next door is our kitchen. There is definitely much more open space in this kitchen than there had been in our previous apartment, but the amount of counter space is about the same. We do have a little dishwasher!

Can you find the refrigerator? (It's sneaky and looks like a big cupboard.)

As you can see, the washing machine and dryer are also here. Convenient, except that it takes forever and a day to get wash done. At most we can do two loads on a Saturday or Sunday because each cycle takes at least an hour and a half, you can only run one machine at a time (you also cannot run the dishwasher while either clothes machines are going), and we can't run them between 1 pm and 3 pm or after about 6 because of quiet hours (and these machines are LOUD -the sound of the washing machine was once likened to that of a jet plane taking off). We do a lot of air drying...

You can't tell in these pictures, but our trash is separated into five different groups in the kitchen. We have one garbage for bio-degradable waste, one for special recyclables that have a specific symbol on the packaging, paper waste, aluminum and glass waste (which later has to be divided up by color), and a garbage for everything that doesn't fall into any of those categories. Germany is very serious about protecting the environment.



These are pictures of our bedroom. There is actually a good amount of storage space in spite of the lack of closets. We each have a wardrobe and then there are two other little cupboards in addition to two small nightstands, one on each side of the beds, with drawers.






The rooms facing the east also have very nice views. There are some homes and other apartments there, but beyond that is a good amount of forest that separates Detmerode from the autobahn that leads into the city-center of Wolfsburg. There are lots of biking trails and space for walks and exploring. We were told that the paths from the forest eventually lead to the main road and that we could walk into the city-center from our apartment.


If you look closely, you can see that dirt has been dug up in various places in the grass across the street. We were told (by various sources) that the digging has been done by wild boars. Apparently they are quite a problem around here - the hospital nearby had to put special grates in the ground to keep them from walking in the hospital area and ruining their plants and such. Annette told us not to go for walks out there too late in the evening, and if it is after dark, to make lots of noise because we don't want to run into wild boars.
















Last, we have our extra bedroom. Before we
moved in there had been two beds and one desk
in this room. Annette had the company change it
so that there are now two desks and one bed. If
we ever have multiple guests, however, we can
always ask for the other bed back. There's even
a wardrobe in the room!

And so concludes the tour of our apartment. There are, of course, more pictures to come. Putting them up has been a very slow process because we still do not have internet or a land line at home. It is standard for the hookup process to take 2-3 weeks time in Germany. Obviously it's been more than that. I won't get into the details now (maybe Mike will write about it?), but it's taking FOREVER.

When one door closes . . .

This is an attempt to record the adventures Vicki and I are embarking upon in our new lives together in Europe. To give everyone a quick background of the events up leading up until today I need to go back a few months, to the end of last school year. . .

I was finishing up my first year in Winona and, due to budget cuts, my position as a middle school music teacher was cut. I had been applying for music positions as they opened up, but unfortunately Minnesota schools across the state were in budget crises. There was a lot of competition (over one-hundred applicants for one position in particular) and the few interviews I received didn’t quite pan out. Of course there are no hard feelings to those who got the positions. There are so many teachers between employment with lots of talent and more experience than myself; I know they are doing good work in those schools.

My time was limited as I was traveling as a counselor with one of Blue Lake’s (a summer arts camp in Michigan that I’ve worked many summers at) international tours. The weeks continued and it was getting to be the middle of June. I had no interviews lined up and it was simply too late to apply for any more jobs that summer. After one last weekend hurrah with friends from Winona, I headed to Michigan and on to Europe.

While in Europe a family Dennis, Carol, Jodi, and I knew from our trip in 2007 surprised us by showing up to one of our concerts. Two years ago, we met the Herths in Wolfsburg and had a wonderful visit at the Waldorf School. Along with many interesting projects at the school and visits in the city, we ended our stay and Joe and Annette’s home telling stories and laughing for hours upon hours. It most certainly ranks up there as one of the nicest stays of the tours I’ve been on.

As I said, Joe and Annette, along with their son Benjamin, surprised us at our concert in Bad Kreuznach this summer. Annette had grown up in this city and they were visiting family while they were on their way south for vacation. They had wanted to see us all again because they had memories as fond as ours from the previous trip. We all went to one of Annette’s favorite restaurants for dinner and had a wonderful evening recounting stories of the trip two years earlier and the one from this summer. The laughter flowed like it had the last time we all were together.

While at dinner I mentioned my being ‘between employment’, the term I preferred to ‘unemployed’. Annette said that was unfortunate, because their former music teacher, Friedrich, just took a new job in Wolfsburg and they had filled his position. Although I have had fleeting notions of teaching in another country, and I have constantly been asked if I was going to teach music in Germany from my two degrees, I was not of the mindset that I would be teaching outside of Minnesota or Wisconsin this year.

After I returned to the states in mid-July, Vicki and I decided to move up to the cities and spend the next year subbing in the Minnetonka and Wayzata school districts. We found a beautiful apartment just a few blocks from Lake Calhoun in St. Louis Park and, for us, it was perfect. Right next to the city, a park out the back, spacious inside, and big bay windows looking out into trees (oh, and a dishwasher and garbage disposal) – we couldn’t ask for a better location or apartment. We walked to the local bakery for bread, to Whole Foods for groceries, to the beach for relaxing afternoons, and to the Caribou where Vicki was going to work as a second job.

Naturally, life never is simple and a week after we moved in I got a phone call which threw the current plan into question. Dennis got a hold of me and told me I need to email Annette because she might have a job for me. I sent off the email and a few days later I got a call from Annette informing me that the person who had accepted their music position bailed on them. They were wondering if I would be interested in the position. After getting a few more details they told me to take a few days to think about it.

I took a few days to think about it, talked it over with Vicki, and we decided it would be interesting to look into this opportunity (believe me, there was a lot of hesitation). I talked to Annette, told her about Vicki and asked if there would be any possibility of a job for her. She said they were looking for a half time English teacher, but couldn’t make any guarantees, as Vicki speaks no German. In the end, we were invited to come to Germany for two weeks to look at the school and have an extended ‘interview’ for the two positions.

We go to Germany; spend two wonderful weeks with Annette, Joe, and their family; go to Berlin; observe; teach; and return to America. They had offered us the music position, but had to discuss with the English department about the half position. Meanwhile, we were undecided. Vicki had a long term sub position with orchestra in Minnetonka and I put myself on the two districts’ reserve teacher lists.

Back home we spent more time weighing out the pros and cons of teaching in Germany and, in particular, the Waldorf School. In the end, we decided that the chance to teach in a foreign country was too precious to pass up – especially with the promise of steady employment for both of us: we would take the jobs if they decide to offer both us both the music and English positions.

As everyone knows, they did exactly that. We decided to split the full-time music position and the half-time English position evenly so we both have .75 time positions and plans were put forth to move to Germany in mid-October.