Snow, glorious snow!

So, President Bush is here to-day. Which means that half of the Autobahns around Darmstadt (which is quite near to Wiesbaden and Mainz, the location of the President's meeting with Chancellor Kohl) have been closed by the German authorities. Traffic mayhem, I say! To add to the confusion, there is a full-scale blizzard starting outside, which means that I should probably get a move on myself and get home. It's the craziest thing: we have no snow for December and January but February has been nothin' but the white stuff! I'm going to hit the road, and yes, I'll remember to wave to W. if I pass him on the Autobahn. Have a good Wednesday!

Happy Valentinstag!

Happy Valentine's Day from Germany! It's a beautiful day here in Hessen: there is the most beautiful, fluffy snow on the ground this morning. Hope it's wonderful wherever you are reading this from, and Glücklich Valentinstag from me!

Retail Madness, thy name is IKEA

M. and I have been to the IKEA nearest to us (which is actually pronounced Ee-kay-ah in German) a few times so far, totally out of necessity. It's not open on Sundays, so getting there with enough time to shop can be a bit of a struggle after work, but trust me: try shopping there on a Saturday afternoon, and you're taking your life into your own hands! Some people in the UK apparently found this out the hard way: check out the IKEA madness

On the Road Again

We're finally getting out and about and made our first daytrip a couple of Saturdays ago to Nuremburg, about an hour drive away, for a little sightseeing. Nuremburg (or Nurnberg as it's known here) has a great street (the Konigstrasse) for shopping of all sorts. The architecture is also really impressive, and it's a pretty place. Which makes the following just that more mind-boggling. Nurnberg is about an hour away from Wurzburg, which gave us just enough time to bone up on some of the history...infamous as it is. There are currently banners hanging from some of the buildings in the main square (the Lorenzplatz) displaying enlarged photos of the city in the immediate aftermath of the Allied bombing raids during WWII: January 2005 is the 60th anniversary. Almost every structure in the area was completely destroyed: cathedrals, homes, administrative buildings. According to one of the guidebooks that always seem to be floating around in the car (hey, when you live here, you need some guidebooks!) the sheer magnitude of destruction experienced in Nurnberg was second only to that of Dresden during the raids. We also visited St. Sebald's cathedral, which had more photos on display, and detailed the painstaking reconstruction of the city post-WWII. It was really beautiful inside, but cooooold: you could see your breath while standing inside the church! Brrrr! This place has nuthin' on Iowa City, IA in the winter: some of the days here have that biting cold quality to them that only humidity can give you. We dropped the car off and walked around downtown and did some actual shopping in a real live department store, which a huge relief given that M. and I have been thoroughly Ikea-ized by this point and the only other store that we've really been to is the PX, which pretty devoid of anything resembling charming retail experience...it falls into the category of "necessity shopping", or as M. and I like to remind ourselves everytime we go there, "Run in, grab what you need as quickly as possible and GET THE HECK OUT OF THERE" shopping because it's always really, really crazy in there for some reason or another. The only snag with our afternoon of shopping and sightseeing was that after wandering around the downtown area we, uh, realized that we couldn't remember where we parked M.'s car. Yes, we did park it in a parking garage, but which one? If you've ever seen that Seinfeld where Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer spend the entire episode wandering around a cement parking garage, searching and searching and searching for their car, you know what I'm talking about. We did eventually find the car: thank goodness that the SmartCars parked on either side were reeeeally short and made it a lot easier to spot! We're just excited to finally be out and about. It's just figuring out where to hit the road to next that's the hard part!

Life Simplification 101

When they say that the Army moves you around a lot, they are so not kidding. Yes, that's right, my friends! I moved again at the beginning of this week, so if you've lost count (and I know I have once or twice) this is move #4 in a little under 6 months! Good grief, I say! There's only so much packing, carting and unpacking one girl can do! The good news is, that barring any unforseen complications, I've moved to as permanent a place as possible: my new apartment! Thanks to all of you who have endured the various ranting and raving sessions that accompany my sheer amazement upon discovering many of the customs surrounding German aparment-dwelling. Some of these customs, in my humblest of opinions, exemplify inefficiency of a degree which simply baffles me. Baffles me! Seriously. You heard it here first! What could possibly be so, well, baffling? Okay, for example, let's talk closets. Americans, well, we like closets. We like them a lot. In fact, we like them so much that we will actually go to such lengths that we will BUILD them into our homes and apartments. Germans? Uh, no. No closets. Soooooorry! How about light fixtures? Nope! What? You'll have to put those in yourself. Okay, so the bottom line is, that like every other good, German economy-dweller, I have an apartment. With no light fixtures. And no closets. So, here's the scenario. The movers brought my furniture in on Tuesday, and I, boxcutter in hand am working LIKE MAD to get to the box with all of my lamps before the sun goes down because....right! I have NO light fixtures! Oh, and did I also mention that in the exhaustion of the move, I accidentally blew up my little boombox CD player? Yup: add it to the 220 volt casualty list! So, like I say, I'm going like mad, just ripping boxes open. Because of the CD player casualty, I'm down to listening to my clock radio for entertainment, at this point, which I must say, added a little something to the desperation of the moment. But, as we all know, the exhaustion of the move sets in at one point or another, and you just have to quit for the night. But, what am I going to do? It's getting dark, and I can't find my lamps. Wait: all is not lost! Why, I have a Mag light! This is going to be a piece of cake! So, just to paint you a picture, it is very, very dark by this point, and I am walking around my new, huge apartment using a MAG LIGHT to find my pajamas and my toothbrush in the sea of cardboard boxes. A few stubbed toes later, I was seriously contemplating pulling my car out into the street, and pointing my highbeams into the living room! So, I'd had a long day, and I thought I'd tell my mom the above story. She laughed and congratulated me on succeeding at really, really simplifying my life. Hmmm, yes. I would agree. When you're down to a Mag light, a clock radio and three thousand cardboard boxes, you are, indeed, a graduate of the school of life simplification!