Our Home

We are still in the process of fixing up our house.  And by fixing up I mean buying more (mostly used) furniture and cleaning the basement.  But, without further ado, here's the latest pictures of our place.  Disclaimer: The only rooms that are done are upstairs bathroom, our bedroom, .... oh wait, nevermind they all still need help!  Luckily some are just some final touches. 

Den.  This room is still missing a couple of pieces of furniture.  Between the bookshelves we want some sort of dresser to put some of our board games in.   We also need to do something with that small table in the corner.  I think I want to move it somewhere else & put a recliner there.  And we are going to change the smaller pictures on the wall as well.  We got some cool looking wooden frames for free (from the same place we got our free kitchen table & free but super ugly table chairs) that we want to put some of my pictures up.  We also just got this cool Canvas on Demand picture (from the Little Rock Groupon).  Its a 16x20 picture that I took the day Todd proposed of some lakes with low clouds.  They made it into a canvas that has the picture wrapped around on the sides.   I paid something like $40 through Groupon while it normally cost about $115 (or something like that).  Another great thing about them is I bought the groupon while still in Little Rock, but didn't order my print until the beginning of June.  They printed and shipped it here in about 2 1/2 weeks!!

The area that our kitchen table is in still needs one piece of furniture as well.  I really really want to buy a German Sideboard (hutch/buffet) to put where that little shelf is.  Lastly, I still need to decide if I want to the same curtain fabric on that extra window.  I can't figure out if that would be too much green in there especially with the tablecloth that I love so much.  (Thank you Ben Busler for the tablecloth!!)

The office/sewing room.  This could be a third bedroom, but for now we've decided against that.  I need somewhere to expand my creativity!  Or better yet, copy patterns and made things.   For this room we are still in need of a shrank and maybe some more shelving to store my ever accumulating fabric.  (My mom has a bumper sticker in her sewing room that says "Whoever dies with the most fabric wins.")  Also, notice that we are calling this an office, but we still haven't set up a computer in there yet.   Eventually we'll get there.    

Cowboy wants to learn to sew!

Full Bathroom. This room is pretty much done.  I just want to add a couple of candles by the bathtub.  We bought both of these cabinets from people leaving Germany.  It seems thats really the way to do it around here.  

There's that silly toilet again.

That's about it with the exception of our bedroom being pretty much done, minus a putting up a few pictures.  But, its too much of a mess right now to take any pictures.     Once we get a few more rooms done or updated I'll be sure to put that up on the blog as well.  

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!   Tschuss!

You say tomato, I say tomato... ??

After keeping my eyes peeled for the last (almost) 3 months I was thinking to myself just the other day that for the most part we have figured out the main differences between living in the U.S.A. and Germany.

In my opinion here are what I think are the biggest differences .... in no particular order ...

1. Toilets - I haven't got a clue why, but Germans (maybe all Europeans) have them built into the wall!!  Instead of pushing a knob on the tank to flush, you push a button on the wall.  To make it even more strange alot of them have 2 buttons - a large and a small.  Hopefully you can figure out what the different sizes are for ....
Oh yeah, not only do you pay for all the waste water you use in your home when you flush the toilet you also have to pay to use the WC in public.  {WC = Wash Closet}.   It all seems a little silly to me.

2. Recycling - I thought Todd and I were pretty good when it came to recycling, but I don't even think we did half of what the Germans do.  Its mandatory to recycle.   I've heard horror stories of throwing too much recycleable stuff in the trash and the trash collectors not picking up your trash for weeks at a time to teach you a lesson.   Who knows if its really true or not.   Whether we want to or not, we have to pay for 3 separate garbage can size bins (for outside the house) - 1 compost, 1 paper, and 1 trash.   For all the plastics, aluminum, tin cans, etc. we put in a yellow bag altogether.   I think we have more plastic than anything else, including the trash!   Finally that leaves us the glass, just in Molschbach we have 2 different locations (that I'm aware of) for recycling glass - brown, green, and clear.   To make everything even more completed they have a really weird schedule for pick up for specific items.   For us every Monday, unless its a holiday, is compost pick up.  Other than that we have no idea when things are getting picked up so we just copy the neighbors when they put their stuff out at the bottom of our hill.   Turns out that they picked up paper on Saturday .... yes, on Saturday!!   We didn't know it, so we still have a full bin of paper.  Maybe next time.

3. Semi-trucks - This might just be me, but I think they look so funny .... Instead of having a bulging nose (front end, whatever you want to call it), the fronts are completely flat.  See picture below.

4. Meals - Germans do their meals alittle different over here.  I think breakfast is pretty normal.  But, lunch and dinner are completely opposite of us.  Lunch is usually a larger meal while dinner is a lighter feast.   Its pretty standard for dinner to consist of bread, cheese, and meat plates.   And I can't forget they they drink beer with every meal.  Well, maybe not every meal, but it sure does seem like it!

5. My job - I knew eventually I wouldn't be using my college degree (i.e., when we have kids, I'll hopefully be able to stay at home), but I had no idea it would be this soon.  And when I mean no idea it would been this soon, I'm not referring to being pregnant in the least bit.  Instead I'm talking about working 8 hours a day taking care of other people's kids.   I never would have thought.  Now don't get me wrong, I like the kids, they are great.  I just didn't think I'd ever be working in childcare.

6. Radio/TV - I was a little surprised when I heard a song by Pink over here.  I had no idea that she dropped the F bomb until then.  Clearly they don't censor music over here.  Also, we are forced (unless we want to pay tons of money) to only have AFN for our television.  For those of you that don't know what it is its Armed Forces Network and it pretty much sucks.  American shows come on days late, if at all.  Its maybe 20 channels and half of them aren't even good.  Its also been pretty difficult to catch up on all my tv shows over here.  One would think that you could just watch it on the internet, well, Germany doesn't appear to have contracts with these American stations, so I'm not allowed to watch.  As a solution (because I don't want to spend my whole paycheck buying shows off iTunes), I've downloaded a hotshield which is supposed to give me a different IP address.  I've found its kind of hit and miss with that.  So I've resorted to watching through sidereel.com.  It takes a while to download, but it does the job.  Which reminds me, our internet isn't slow, but its not the greatest in the world either.  We were told by the internet people that our house happens to have the fastest internet line in all of Molschbach!

7. The Autobahn - Driving on the Autobahn is great.   I really like it.  Especially the open roads, not that I've done the actual driving on any of them, but I've sat in the passenger seat.  The thing that is still a bit hard to do is long distance travel because instead of having signs that say North, East, South, & West its only listed as towns/cities.  So you really have to know which way you want to head.  Shortly after we got here we purchased a Garmin GPS which has been a real lifesaver.

8. Rolladens - whoever invented this things are genius!  Instead of blinds on the inside of the window, they are heavy duty blinds on the outside of window.   I love these things!!   When shut, there isn't an ounce of light - perfect for sleeping.  Too bad we don't have them on our windows in the bedroom.  

There are over on the right side of the picture - one is completely down and the other is up

9. Bratwurst - I have no idea why, but German bratwurst are just so much better tasting than the ones in the US.   Its true when you hear someone say Germans know brats (& beer).   The weisswurst are just so dang delicious and they melt in your mouth.   Another thing that is better is brats are served with a kaiser roll instead of a bun.   A wurst, crunchy roll, and a beer ... what could be better?!

10. Beer - Germans know beer.  Come see for yourself!

From our German neighbors

I must say that I really don't miss the USA.  I do miss the fact that I can't call my family at anytime (mostly my mom to ask her about something related to sewing).  And I miss weekly shopping at Target because its just not the same online.   And the fact that there are Walmarts everywhere, I absolutely hate having to go to the BX for everything.  And fabric is everywhere back home, not so much here.  Last, but certainly not least I miss our friends.    It might seem like that's alot, but honestly I wouldn't trade anything for our chance to live over here.   I'll eventually re-unite with Target, Walmart, Family and Friends.

My Little Rant

If you don't want to read about my lastest complaint, then please skip to the next post.

I just wanted to do a little complaining about the people who lived here prior to us.  To keep them anonymous I'm going to call them Family XYZ.   Here's how it all started ...

We recently went to a birthday party for our (German) neighbor.  While we were there we learned a bit of sucky information about Family XYZ.   Just to be more dramatic I have these mentioned from crappy to most crappy.

1. The night (yes night) before the movers came for Family XYZ's stuff (they were moving on base) they decided to throw their furniture out the window.  Now, I have no idea what furniture this was, but clearly this said furniture didn't really mean a whole hill of beans to them.  According to Freddy (husband of birthday neighbor) they were either throwing their stuff off the 2nd story balcony or possibly even out the windows on the 3rd floor.   I haven't the foggest idea why they would do that, but it now helps us understand why Todd was mowing wood clips in our front lawn.

2.  I haven't posted pictures yet, but the front of our place though lacking in flowers, isn't lacking in weeds aka the jungle.   Once we started working in our yard we noticed there was a lower area that looked like you could plant something there.  Well, turns out Family XYZ wanted to park in the front lawn for whatever reason even though we have our very own designated parking spots about 10 feet below the front lawn.   Anyways, so again according to Freddy, Family XYZ used the car to run over the 2 meter high bushes.  This whole time Todd and I have been talking about how nice it would be if we got rid of our jungle and had some nice bushes or trees there.  We had put off doing it because we didn't want to spend a ton of money for them to die on us (we I have minimal experience at keeping plants alive).   Either Family XYZ isn't as good as killing plants as they'd like to be or maybe the garden gods were looking down at us ... a couple nights ago Todd started pulling weeds in the jungle to find that some of the bushes were still alive!!!  Who knew it was possible!!!   [Yes there is a redeeming factor here, but not because of anything Family XYZ did.]

The last one is a doozy ....
3.  Family XYZ had 2 little yippee dogs.  One time Family XYZ left for a trip 6 weeks.  While gone they thought it was perfectly ok to leave both dogs inside.  Normally I agree with that, especially since someone was watching the dogs.  But, turns out the person who was "watching" their dogs only came by the house ONCE a week.  Let me repeat that ... they only came by ONCE a week to take care of inside dogs.   How in the world does this make sense?  I'll tell you how - it doesn't!!   To make the story even better (if that's even possible!) is there was a carpet in the room the dogs were in for the 6 weeks.   When we met up with Family XYZ right before they moved out they asked if we wanted to buy any of the carpets from them, so we looked around and decided yes we wanted to buy a few.   Well, we paid $100 for a carpet that the dogs peed and pooped all over.  I know that carpets can be cleaned, but we soon discovered after we were in the house for more than a hour that the carpet S.T.I.N.K.S.   You might be wondering why we purchased the carpet if it was so smelly, well as I just mentioned we were never in the house for more than an hour and that was with windows & occasionally a door open.   My real problem here is that I don't understand why they would let us buy a crappy stinky smelly old carpet?  Roles reversed, I would have either said don't buy that carpet, it stinks or if you really want it you can have it for free.   How hard is that?!   Because it stunk so bad and we weren't sure if the smell would ever come out Todd spent the day cutting the carpet up to throw away.  You might think I'm over exaggerating a bit about the smell but I'm not.  Todd said that Freddy came over today while he was cutting.   He said Freddy was about 15 feet away and could smell the reeking peed soaked carpet.  



There I'm done.  



I will say there is one positive thing that came from all these crappy things, the neighbors now have very low expectations for us!!!   I think even just attempting to put some flowers in the lawn has already made them like us more than Family XYZ.  I say attempting because we are still waiting to see if round #2 is going to stay alive.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day Dad!!!  You're the best!!

Trummelbach Falls (Switzerland Continued)

Like I said in the previous post we made one more sightseeing stop on the way home.  It was to another village close by called Lauterbrunnen.  (We actually almost stayed there instead of Grindelwald.)   So Lauterbrunnen is the home of Trummelbach Falls.  I had never heard of it, but Todd had come across it while looking stuff up on the internet for this trip.   Here's what the brochure says ....

Ten glacier-waterfalls inside the mountain made accessible by tunnel-lift and illuminated.  The Trummelbach alone drains the mighty glacier defiles of Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau and carries 20,200 tons of boulder detrirus per year.  Its drainage area is 27m sqared, half of it covered by snow and glaciers.  Up to 20,000 liters of water per second.  Its the only glacier-waterfalls in Europe inside the mountain and still accessible.

It was really cool and I've never seen anything like it before.   

I took a lot of pictures here too,  but who wants to look at 100 pictures of water spraying everywhere.  So I condensed for your viewing pleasure.

A random waterfall on the way to Trummelbach Falls

We took the lift up

Grindelwald, Switzerland

Warning: I took over 600 pictures on this trip, so be prepared for a lot of pictures!

We were both lucky enough to have Memorial Day off this year.  It was also our 1st anniversary weekend which made it a double bonus.   A few weeks before we had talked about where we wanted to go - my only preference was the mountains.   It seems like we haven't seen much of them lately and I thought it was only fitting that since we got married in the mountains we should go back there for our anniversary.   So the long process of where to go and where to stay began.  I'd say we probably waited until the last minute to take care of everything, but it seems thats how we do things around here (or at least anything I'm not in charge of).  So after a few days of looking at hotels, reviews, stars, and anything else you can think of we finally decided (by process of elimination) where we were going and staying in one feat.   The chosen location was the Gletschergarten Chalet in Grindelwald, Switzerland.  (On booking.com it had a 90 out of 100 which was the highest rating, it was called superb, and all the reviews said the hotel food was awesome.)

Our trip started Saturday morning when we started our drive down.   This was both of our first time to Switzerland.  Since we are on the southside of Kaiserslautern the GPS had us taking a bunch of back roads and then with the road construction it ended up taking us through France.   We didn't really want to go to France, but we did it anyways.  This was also our first time in France by accident or on purpose.  On our way back into Germany we go stuck in a stau (german for traffic jam) waiting for construction to let us pass.   We were waiting there so long I was beginning to think they weren't going to let us back into Germany!   We were finally able to pass, allowing us back in Germany.  We were on our way (again)!    

Welcome to France!

This was our view while waiting for the construction - The Rhine River

Once we got the Swiss border, we stopped to get a road/toll pass.  I really have no idea what its for, but it sounds like its mandatory.  It wasn't as soon as we got into Switzerland, but we eventually saw the mountains in all their glory.  Snow capped and awesome.   We finally made it to Grindelwald, our final destination.  This little swiss town is right at the foot of Mount Eiger.   Like I mentioned before, our place was called Gletschergarten Chalet.   Its a B&B owned by then nicest people (who speak good English & French, with their native being German I believe).   We had made reservations for a smaller room - after all we were just going to be sleeping in it, but once we got there they gave us a choice between the smaller room we reserved and a much larger room.  We choose the larger one even though the view on our private balcony wasn't AS spectacular as the small joint balcony.

First sight of mountains

Coming into Grindelwald

View from our balcony

Once we unloaded the car we changed clothes, found a good hiking trail (thanks to the suggestion of our awesome B&B owners), and were out the door!   There was a gondola that we could have taken up the side of the mountain, but of course that wouldn't be hiking.  So up we walked from Grindelwald starting at 1034m to Pfingstegg at 1391m.   Once we got there we didn't really do much, there was a restaurant but we choose to keep hiking.  As soon as we were past the restaurant we came across a little cluster of cows roaming all over like they owned the place.  {Sidenote: we never saw large herds of cattle, only clusters of 5 or 6.}  They all had cowbells on and they were huge.  I never realized how big the bells actually were.  Apparently the Swiss love their cows so much they provided a water fountain for them.  When I say water fountain I mean it in the literal sense.  Like the ones humans use by pressing a button and water coming out, well this one worked the same way.  I'm not really sure what the cows pushed, but when she put his mouth to the fountain water came out.  When she moved her mouth the water stopped.  How cool is that?!  I'm still amazed by this.  It just goes to show how smart cows are ... or maybe how trainable they are.

What you see as soon as you walk out the front door

Looking down to Grindelwald

Living the life in Switzerland

Cow water fountain!!!!

Ignore the crazy look on my face .... 

There was also a summer bobsleding course/slide.  We didn't try it, although it was very tempting.  From there we headed west and hiked across the tree line to Milchbach.  From there we headed back towards the ground to the Hotel Wetterhorn.  There was a bus stop there where we planned on catching the bus, but since we had already missed the once an hour stop it makes there we kept walking.  Missing the one bus that comes hourly seems to be a pretty frequent trend for us.  Sooner or later we'll figure it out, or at least I hope so!   After a few shortcut paths we made it back to our village.

The tunnel Todd wanted to go through

PURPLE!

Our B&B made dinner every night for their guests only.  Let me just say I've never had a better meal at a restaurant/hotel.  It was a four course meal that wasn't super expensive and it was freaking AWESOME!!  Our first course was a cheesy tortellini; second course: salad bar; third course: Sirloin steak in a creamy mushroom sauce, with small fried mashed potato things, spinach, and one other thing.  The final plate was dessert: fresh strawberries with strawberry ice cream.  It was awesome!!  With how delicious the food was you'd think it was some super fancy restaurant in NYC that you have to pay an arm and a leg.   After dinner we had another beer or two and had a nice conversation with an older couple on holiday from Canada.  I say conversation, but it was more like they talked and we listened.  They had a story about everything.  We really couldn't get 2 words in between the 2 of them.  Oh well, at least they were nice.  

Sunday morning started off great, especially since it was our 1 year anniversary!!  We ate breakfast at the B&B German (or maybe its European) style.  Breads, cheeses, meats, & yogurt.  Before we could get out the door the Canadians said Happy Anniversary to us, which was really nice.  We also made a stop at the front desk for another hike recommendation.  We pretty much stuck to the plan the owners gave us, we just changed the directions of a few things.   Our hike was pretty much along the side of Mount Eiger for the whole day.  Here's what we did ....

We walked down to Grund (948m) then headed up to Brandegg (1332m) which was about half way up the mountain.  Next we hiked to Alpiglen (1615m) all the way to Kleine Scheidegg (2061m).  And last but not least to Mannlichen where we rode the gondola back down to Grund.  I must say this hike was awesome!!  For pretty much the whole hike we were surrounded by fields of wildflowers.  These wildflowers were in all different colors - white, yellow, purple, and even blue.  For those of you who don't know me, I absolutely LOVE wildflowers especially blues and purples {My wedding bouquets were supposed to look like wildflowers.  I'm not sure if they did, but I loved them anyways.}  Anways, back to the hike ... 

At each place starting with Brandegg, there was a little restaurant to eat and drink.   Once we got to Kleine Scheidegg it was an even larger touristy place.   This is also the location where you can catch the Jungfrau Cogway to go up to the Jungfraujoch.   Its 3454m above sea level and the only way to get to it is by cog.  Its been labeled "The Top of Europe" because it is located between the peaks of Monch (4107m) and Jungfrau (4158m).   I think it might be the highest cog station in all of Europe.  This is one of the main reasons why we went to Grindelwald, but in the end we didn't end up doing it.  It was SUPER DUPER $$$$ - we are talking something like $150/person (probably more) for a 50 minute ride on a cog through a mountain tunnel that you can't see through.  The only views are once you get to the top and once you get up there you have more touristy things like a restaurant, souvenir shop, etc.  No trails or hiking or anything else we might be interested in so we decided not to do it.   Another thing is that most people don't even hike up to Kleine Scheidegg - they ride another train (which you have to pay for separately).  I think out of all the "hikers" we saw that day there was only 1 other person hiking up (and he looked a little crazy-eyed).  All the rest were headed down.   

I told Todd I wanted to frolick through the meadow, so I did.

There's a tiny airplane in this picture ... can you find it?

It was super cold, but since it was so hot out it felt really nice

All in all it took us something like 3 1/2 hours to get up to Kleine Scheidegg.   Once up there we treated ourselves with lunch.  Todd got a draft beer and some cheesy German dish while I got a weiswurst (white brat), french fry/hashbrown thing, and a draft beer.  Turns out we totally got played by ordering the draft beer - it was MGD.   BOO.  I don't even drink that stuff back in the states!  Not to mention it costs us more a German beer would have.   Lesson learned.   After lunch we hiked on over to Mannelichen.  From there we had the best views of the mountain range.  We were surrounded by snow capped mountains.  Once we were done on top we headed back down to Grund by gondola.   Just when we thought we were done with the hiking we missed the only bus for an hour that was headed to our B&B.  Clearly we need to work on how to ride a bus and learning bus schedules!  It probably took us another 30 minutes to an hour to get back to our place.  The one cool thing that happened on our walk back ... I saw a guy wearing a #2 UnderArmor Shirt clearly representing Cam.  I shouted out "War Eagle" and got one back in return!

My lunch and crappy MGD

Kleine Scheidegg with Jungfrau Cogway behind us

Silly Toddy.

Eiger Dreams

We were getting fried by the sun.

Top of Mannlichen

When we finally made it we jumped in the shower to get ready for dinner.  While getting ready Todd discovered they had left us a little bottle of champagne, a note, and some chocolate.  It appears someone had told the owners it was our anniversary.  I suspect the chatty Canadians.   Instead of opening the champagne, we opened the bottle of wine that TJ had given us as a wedding present.  The wine came from a winery in Estes Park and was personalized with our picture and wedding date on the bottle.  Even though it was over a year old it wasn't too shabby.  {Obviously we didn't try to bring our wedding cake topper with us to Germany.  We ate that about 6 months after our wedding on our last night in Cheyenne.}  After a glass of wine we went down to dinner.  They had saved the best table with a view of Eiger for us and decorated it with rose petals.  We ordered a bottle of red wine to compliment our (once again) delicious dinner.   The second night dinner was more traditional Swiss food.   First course: White asparagus in a cheesy cream sauce; second course: salad bar; third course: Rosti (hashbrowns) and some other things that I've forgotten; and fourth course: custard.   After dinner we went back to our room and finished our bottle of wine from TJ.

We got more than a little sunburnt

Our view as we drank our wine after dinner

We slept in the next morning, ate breakfast, packed up, and headed out the door  We made one sightseeing stop to Trummelbach Falls (see next post) and then headed back home.

It was an incredible trip and I would go back in a heartbeat!!!