Moving In: Are We Having the Fun Yet?

As promised:

Shopping with Germans: It’s absolutely exhausting. My first impressions of the German people are… well, they have excellent formal manners. They are not an overly friendly people, however. Granted, we are Americans, here with the military, occupying their country for no reason other than it’s convenient for certain things and we like it here. I will give them that, and allow them a certain amount of stink-eye per capita. But I almost want to edge toward the word “hostile” at times—there is a chilly vibe emanating from these people. At best they will ignore us completely, and at worst… “the German Stare”. They like to stare. Drive past their house, where they’re smoking on the steps? The Stare. Walk into a store with a group of kids speaking English? The Stare. Smile at an old person walking on the street? The Stare. It’s kind of unnerving. But back to the shopping. We went to Ikea last week, which is of course a slow shuffle around miles of show floor and then a period of wandering as one peruses the self-service section. When shopping with Americans, who I don’t think of as being the politest of people, there’s a lot of personal space, a lot of “excuse me”, “pardon”, and not cutting people off. We value not cutting people off. Germans stroll around wherever they want without warning, with or without carts, no matter how close they are to you or if you are going in a different direction. They will stand shoulder to shoulder with you if they want to look at what you are looking at. I know the personal space thing is common in a lot of other cultures, but the people darting every which way and constantly feeling like you’re either in the way or watching out so that you’re not going to be steamrolled by bargain-hunting Europeans is really tiring. And one of the first phrases I was determined to learn was how to say “excuse me”, because I say it all the time. As it turns out, no one says it here so it’s really a non-issue (“pardon” will suffice should it become necessary). Of course, this is a few weeks’ worth of observation of our tiny corner of Germany. I hope that six months from now I’m thinking to myself “I was so wrong! What a warm, huggable people these Germans are! That tight-lipped smile they give that reminds me of when my grandma is angry? That’s an offering of friendship!” I’ll keep you updated on that.

Who Lived Here Before??: I miss my house in Texas. If it hadn’t been located in Texas, it would have been almost perfect. Everything in that house was clean, organized, spacious, and carefully tended. (Exceptions=  dining room chairs, the yard.) This house… I look at this house and wonder what kind of people lived here and what on earth it looked like when they did. It’s reasonably clean. Not up to my standards of clean, but it will get there. I’m perpetually armed with Clorox, Q-tips, and a lot of old rags. When we moved in, the fridge smelled overwhelmingly of cat pee. I scrubbed it out with bleach and steel wool but I noticed yesterday that it seems to be coming back. CAT PEE. What does one do to a refrigerator to make it smell like that?? As for the rest of the house…  I understand that many people, especially in the “I don’t care anymore” period of moving out of a house, do not take the time to clean the tops of the window and door hinges or the inside of the electrical outlets. I’m on it. No, this has more to do with the decorating. 

There are nails and screws and holes in a lot of wacky places. One wall of the living room (a wall, by the way, that appears to be an afterthought dividing the living and dining rooms and possibly not actually attached to the house on all four sides) has a flowered, shimmery, almost holographic wallpaper. The other side of the weird wall is papered in a textured putrid green paper. It appears that there was at one time a wallpaper border going around the top of the dining room, based on the way the paint has been ripped off. On the weird wall, this border would have been located right under the Styrofoam crown molding. (We know it’s Styrofoam based on the piece we found on the floor). The kitchen is painted with the same blue paint as the outside of the house, and whoever did the painting (as in the rest of the house) was obviously exceedingly drunk or physically impaired in some way, or maybe both. There is paint slopped everywhere, and the paint underneath isn’t actually covered in all areas. The wall is textured, and it has that look like someone ran a roller over it once and didn’t care than the yellow underneath is still plainly visible. Someone had a serious thing for putrid green, because there are several shades of it in the house. In the entryway, I can see that it’s covering a terra cotta color. In the master bedroom, another shade of it covers lavender (visible for six inches around the light fixture and in one random corner where a few feet just went unpainted). The kids’ rooms are white, but I can see where the white paint covers a mind-boggling shade of reddish fuschia. The upstairs bathroom is, of course, putrid green. There’s a huge plastic potted plant in the corner, which I wouldn’t mind except that it smells dusty and unpleasant and I’m not sure how to get rid of it. Despite the bathroom being bigger than the living room, the shower is like 3x3 and the folding door likes to randomly unfold and hit me in the butt while I’m in there. I read a lot of murder mysteries, and I assure you that surprises in a room where I think I’m alone are not welcome. The downstairs bathroom has a toilet seat with holographic fish on the lid. Outside there are a ton of flower pots and planters (cool!) with a lot of weedy deceased-looking plants in them (ugh).  There’s also an Easter bunny and Halloween pumpkins out front. I realize I was spoiled by moving into a brand-new house last time, but really. This house was evidently decorated by knackered Brits and I didn’t see that coming. Tom did say that there's a lot of weird stuff in the attic, so I imagine I could have an adventure one of these rainy afternoons.

I know it’s not this house’s fault that it doesn’t have closets or storage space. But I am an extremely organized person, and everything in our old house had a place. If I needed something, I knew where to find it. I don’t like seeing everything I own; I like things put away. I hate clutter. I loathe clutter. I like a clear countertop, I like toiletries in the cupboard, food in the pantry. I like my stuff hidden drawers and cupboards and closets. And even the drawers and closets were organized and tidy, since I don’t like opening a door and seeing a disaster. Frankly, I prefer my house to look like no one lives in it. In this house, it is proving extremely difficult to find a place for everything, and impossible to make that place one that I’m not seeing every second of every day.  The clutter is driving me slowly insane. Less annoying though still quirky is the fact that our washer is downstairs and our dryer is upstairs.

Evidently German dryers use a condensing method which does not require outside ventilation, and so our laundry room does not have a way to ventilate an American dryer. German washers are very tiny and take about 200 minutes to complete a cycle. Not exaggerating there, that’s really how long they take. Since I like to wash more than four shirts at a time and more frequently than one load a day, I opted for the American washer/dryer combo (we get issued large appliances rather than bringing our own because of the different hookups). German washers don’t use hot water lines; the machine heats the water. American washers can’t do that so all our clothes have to be washed in cold water. And the dryer had to go upstairs in the giant bathroom, where we could stick the exhaust pipe out the sunroof window. The one benefit to this awkward system is that the clean laundry is upstairs in the bathroom… maybe I’ll just stop putting it away altogether.

There comes a point in every move where the excitement of a new place wears off and the reality of a huge life change really slams you in the face. In El Paso, it didn’t take long and it was a slap in the face that hurt pretty bad. In Killeen, it was a little poofter slap that wasn’t much worse than “I can’t remember how to get to all the lame chain restaurants and ghetto mall”. Germany… to be honest, I didn’t have time to develop expectations. I knew a few basic facts going in, and was leaning on the fact that everyone who has been stationed here has loved it. In Killeen I was able to live completely independently of post, and I loved it. Here we have to be more dependent on military facilities and I do not love it. I thought it would be easier to become part of the community… never underestimate the limitations not speaking the same language will put on a person (seems like a big, fat “duh” in retrospect). Utilities, internet, and phone service all operate completely differently than they do in the States and can be very frustrating. I am scared of roundabouts and the autobahn. I didn’t expect the people to be so… not overly friendly. I thought it was really just the French who were rude… apparently we can extend that to “Germans who live near the French border”.  In essence, my orderly, organized, and comfortable life in which the only serious complaint I had was that I was in Texas instead of Minnesota, has been turned upside down, shaken for change, and given a swirly in a European toilet. I feel like I’ve given up everything—my home, my dogs, my friends, my kids' friends, and a certain amount of my independence—for the dream of affordable European vacations which I conveniently forgot I still have to take with four children. (By the way, those are no joke. Check out RyanAir.com if you want to see some unbelievable plane fares.)

My analogy for this is like when you have long hair and you decide you’re going to cut it all off and get something short and funky and cute. No matter how adorable it is, no matter how much you know you’re going to like styling it and playing with it and being all sassy and bouncy, there is still always at least one moment of panic when you realize you have CUT OFF ALL YOUR HAIR and you can’t undo that decision for like three years.  And then sometimes it’s a bad haircut, and there’s many more moments of panic and maybe some tears, and all you can do is wait it out. I don’t think Germany is the proverbial bad haircut. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I am currently not having much fun and am wishing I was back in my comfortable home with my dogs and my friends. But I’m sure I’m not going to regret being here or having this experience under my belt.  It’s just hard to start over again and again, and every time I say to Tom “no more”. It’s in the first few months of being in a new place, not knowing anyone and restarting your family’s life from scratch, that my dream of a “normal” life and a forever house seems both closer and farther away than ever.