Christmas in January

It's time to celebrate! After nearly three months we finally have wi-fi up and running at our apartment. It only took all of six appointments with Deutsche Telekom through the service provider O2; canceling service with O2 because they said DT claimed they "couldn't find our apartment"; signing on with another provider, Vodafone; two appointments with DT through Vodafone (and not only did they find our apartment both times, but they didn't have to schedule the next visit for six days after our call); and a phone call to their helpline. Whew!

I know there are tons of photos to catch up on. We're certainly not done with all the Christmas ones. To ease back into the photo uploading (which should be much easier now that I can do it from home), I bring to you the festivities that had been on display in our apartment building.

Again, apartments in Germany are setup quite differently than they are in the states. One apartment building has several "house numbers" that denote a specific entrance for that building. We are number 17, which happens to be the second entrance of our building. When you enter, you end up in the basement and find the elevator and the stairs. Instead of a hallway, the stairs only go up to landings for each floor. Each landing belongs to two apartments - one on the left and one on the right. Some people make their landing very nice. Since our elevator broke on numerous occasions throughout December, we got to see how some of our neighbors decorated their landing for the holidays.






I have to admit that it was a little strange to be taking pictures of random people's doorways. One picture (not on display here) was a close-up of something hung up on the door to the apartment. Of course the person happened to need to leave the apartment at that moment and opened the door. Mike's reflexes might have been fast enough so that the person didn't see we were taking a picture of his doorway, but we still felt very awkward walking down the stairwell with our cameras out. So it goes.