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.

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.