Mini Castle Tour

A couple of weekends ago Todd and I went on our own little castle along the Rhine tour.  Well, I guess you could call it a tour, although we only saw two different castles.  But, anyways, it was a nice day for a drive so we took advantage.   

A view we passed on our drive - The Rhine River

The first castle we went to was Burg Eltz.   Todd had flown over it and thought it was a great looking castle.  He has named it one of his favorite castles by looks alone.   Unfortunately for us, its under construction or rather restoration.  2011 Burg Eltz has a big campaign called Restoration 2011 (or something like) to try to restore and maintain the castle.  Whether its really restoration or construction, it has a couple ugly eye sores - the huge crane & the side scaffolding. We didn't even bother going inside this castle because we've agreed that we want to come back when they are done restoring it.  Hopefully next summer.   The cool thing about Burg Eltz is that its completely surrounded by woods (the reason why Todd likes it so much I think) and the same family has been living in it since the 13th century or something like that.  I'm not sure how much of the castle they open up for viewing, but apparently the family lives in just one of the wings while (maybe) the rest is open for viewing.

I took a picture of a picture of what its supposed to look like.  

On our way back up to the car we came across this GIANT slug.  I know you can't really tell how big it is, but its the absolute biggest slug I've ever seen!!!

Trying to show the size comparison using Todd's hand

Our second castle for the day was Reischburg Cochem.  This castle is on a hilltop in the town of Cochem.  Its right along the Rhine River with multitudes of vineyards around town.   We actually did the tour for this one.  It was nice, but I must make a little complaint - it was about 5 Euro each and we only got to see about 10 rooms.  It would have really been nice to go up in the tower.  Oh well.  Reischburg Cochem is now owned by the town itself making it just a tourist attraction (as far as I'm concerned).   We did see a bridal party taking pictures there, I'm unsure if they actually got married there or not.

Here's some pictures from the tour ....

This some sort of man-mermaid-antler thing.  I believe its supposed to protect

When this boar was alive it was over 400 lbs.!!!  That sucker was huge!!

Back in the day the king (I think) would make sure to drink wine from this container.  These things would be filled to the top and he would drink that whole amount everyday.

Our guide made sure to point out that these aren't frogs - they are lions with helmets on them

Suit of Armor the castle owned - handmade for some guy over 7 ft. tall 

The wedding party

Just wanted to share a bit of information I just learned.   In German .... Burg = Castle while Berg = mountains.  Now you know too!

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