Reader Requests Answered!! Give the Fans What They Want

Lisa said...

Love the photos and commentary! I'm looking forward to seeing photos of where you've been living. 

August 21, 2013 at 10:20 AM

Previously I teased a future blog posting about our new temporary home. My SIL has politely requested that I follow through so here we go.

The bad first:

The worst part about the new place is that it is near the middle of Freising, which also happens to be the best place to hear all of the bells from all of the church steeples in town. One of them is right outside of our window. The first night, after driving back all day from Nice, we slept with the windows open since it was rather warm again. Saturday morning at 6:00 am, 0600 hours, not only did the bell toll six times but it continued on with a nice little medley that lasted several minutes. Every morning from 6 am to 9 pm we get hourly updates with occasional additional medleys during some of the hours. This happened several nights, but Cindy and I have not heard them the past two mornings. We thought Wednesday morning that maybe we just didn't hear them, but today I was awake at 6 and did not hear them. Maybe it was just for the holiday weekend? Not sure and it is not a huge deal on weekdays when we are getting ready for school, work, and driving duties; but I will be hacked off if it happens again this Saturday morning.

There is only one full bathroom.

Katherine is living, sleeping, and has a closet in the living room. She is fine with it, but it means when the kids go to bed the parents have to go to their room to avoid distracting said kids from going to sleep. 

Katherine's Closet

None of the bad is really that bad. We can make it here for a while. 

The Good:

If you ask Katherine and Cindy (maybe even me) this is the best part of this new location. The guy in the picture behind the counter is a very upbeat Italian individual serving wonderful Gelato. So they have beer gardens where you can bring your own food or order theirs along with the beer. They have regular restaurants with food and beer. They have pastry shops that just serve bread type items. Then you have your after dinner non-alcohol beverages, coffee, and dessert only places like this one. You can sit inside or outside and look through a multiple page menu of desserts and coffee selections at places like this. We just go to the counter and each order our own flavor of gelato and pay our $3 euro TOTAL, for all three. Side note: David does not eat ice cream or anything resembling it. Poor kid is missing out. Our gelato friend is great, very nice, and seems to love what he does.

David is hold Katherine up so she can see in the mirror.........

the result of her chocolate gelato cone eating mess. Not sure if she actually ingested any of it. 

We are in walking distance of just about everything we need. I mentioned the Woolworths, there is a BestBuy'ish place called Saturn, two small grocery stores, a couple of pharmacies, a haircut place, and other little shoe and clothing shops. There are multiple restaurants and beer gardens. This apartment is in the same area as some of the original photos of Freising that we posted previously. It has been fun to walk down the street to pick up whatever we need. Cindy was having trouble finding contact lens cleaning solution. We went into a Apotheke (remember???? kind of pharmacy place) and asked the lady behind the counter where to find it. She asked Cindy if she tried the drugery next door, where we just came from. When Cindy told her we could not find it the lady took us with her to the store, asked a clerk, found it for us and headed back to her store. Pretty cool.

On the right of this little river is the indoor section of a hotel beer garden restaurant that the kids really like. 

This is one of the bell towers close to our apartment.

Down this street a little further is where all of the action is. 

Another bell tower very close to our place. 

We do have a parking space under the building and there is a much better laundry situation. In the basement aka Cellar or the German word keller there is a washer and dryer. They have locks over the electrical plugs to prevent unauthorized use, but I don't have to insert any coins and everything works. The dryer took some figuring out. I thought it was another washer because it had the same pull out part where you would put the laundry detergent, but when you pulled it out there was just a plastic housing there filling in the space. I thought nothing of it and started using it. By the third load the cloths were not getting dry. We just brought them to the room and laid them out on our fancy cloths air dry thing and moved on. A few days later we are talking to our relocation person and she asks if we emptied the water from the dryer. What? It turns out most dryers are not vented like in the US. They pull the water out of the cloths and store it in a........remember the plastic container at the top of the dryer? You have to empty it out every few loads into the sink. 

Overall our situation is better than the place way down in Munich. Cindy's office is close by and the school is about 20 minutes to get there and parked. I am getting around without using the car GPS navigation, at least to the places I have been to before. Tonight we stayed home and I cooked some Viennese style brats and some bacon wrapped pork stuff that was good. The kitchen is functional and our frig/freezer space is slightly better. 

Next topic:

Donald Ferguson said...

John do you want me to send you a couple fans to get you by till winter?

Thanks for the offer Dad. We had some fans but they are 110V, not the 220V that is required here so we put them into storage. The first temporary space had some fans that we borrowed from the font desk. Well, once we got back from Nice it was warm again and all of the stores were still out of fans. Cindy discovered a wonderful thing though. There is an Amazon.de, the Amazon.com for Germany. I signed up for my prime membership, turned on my browser german to english automatic translation and found three vornados with 220v plugs. They arrived Tuesday and we are putting them to good use. I am excited to have Amazon available without paying international shipping charges and I am happy to have my fans. 

Next topic:

Meme said...

So glad to hear the start of school went smoothly! Tell us more about the curriculum and about the other kids-- mostly German kids or a mix of many nationalities? Guess English is the spoken language at school, but will they be learning German? And do all grades get to use the computer lab?

Let us know how the house hunting is going.

August 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM

Should have said next topicS I guess. 

The school is going to be great. I don't know all of the details of the curriculum yet but we are excited about some of the things we have heard. The school does have a brand new director of curriculum who just started two weeks ago. Not sure how that will impact this year, we will see. We do know that both kid's have German language lessens each day. David has two days of double lessons so he will be getting up to speed pretty quick we think. The hours are 9am to 4pm for both kids Monday through Thursday. They have a school wide assembly every Friday afternoon and get out at 2:15. There are some upcoming parent meetings to learn more about the grade specific curriculum. Here David is in the last year of the primary school and we be in middle school next year, as opposed to Allen where middle school starts at 7th grade. It will be good for him that he will have gone through the transition, but kind of stinks that he will be the youngest level, a "freshman", two years in a row. 

We think the enrollment is about 50% German and a mixture of expats from many other countries. There is a lot of UK influence on the staff, at least it seems like it from the people that spoke during orientation. One of David's classmates told us he knows English, German, and Polish. Another girl in his class is from an experienced expat family from the US that moved here from Malaysia. It is strange to see 18 year old kids walking into the same school as pre-k little ones but they seem to make it work. 

It is an English speaking school and the classes are taught in English. They do test the kids out for how advanced their German is and divide them up into beginner, intermediate and advance classes within the same grade level. 

I knew Meme would be excited about the Apple computer lab. As far as I know it is for all grades. I failed to mention in the last post another contrast that we noticed. Right there in the main hall of the 15th century castle there was a thin screen Apple monitor and a WiFi access point mounted to the wall. The labs were really impressive and the equipment very much up to date. Our kids are probably pretty advanced for their age so I think they will enjoy using the lab at school. 

And finally, house hunting. Well it did not go so well for the one that we had the high hopes for yesterday. Many problems that allowed us to quickly eliminate it from consideration. It is possible that I buried the lead story for this particular posting, but there is some great news. We have asked for a lease agreement and we are excited that we have decided to move forward on a different house. After seeing the dud house we made arrangements to go see this one that we really liked but could not remember some finer details. After looking again we decided it had everything we wanted. The only downside is that it is still occupied and we cannot move in until October 1st. That is only about 40 days away believe it or not, so we think it is worth the wait. 

As usual I am leaving with a teaser for the next post. The full story behind our search for our new home and pictures coming soon. 

Thanks for the questions and I hope you are satisfied with my answers. Sorry if I missed any other questions this time around, I have been at this too long tonight. Thanks again for all of the great comments.