House Hunting in Germany at a Distance, aka Mission Impossible

June 5, 2014July 24, 2014 ~ travelsandtomes ~ 10 Comments

If you are considering house hunting at a distance–a considerable, oceans-apart distance–just stop right now. It is impossible. We’ve spent weeks trying to do the same. And we should have known better. We did this years ago before moving to England, and I found the perfect house. A beautiful, stately, Victorian row house that was huge and elegant. We didn’t put the money down, but we booked an appointment to see it within a day of landing in the UK.

What we saw online looked vaguely like this:

And the angels sang.

What we saw in person looked more like this:

Only smaller.

(The angels broke into a mournful dirge while I wept.)

It was still adorable, but any hopes of getting our four poster bed through the front door were futile.

Nevertheless, we’ve tried to peek at houses online again before this move to Germany. Just to get a feel for what will/won’t be out there. We’ve been told that the housing market is tight where we are moving. We’ve been told, leave furniture at home, the houses are small and there are no closets. We’ve been told, no worries, there are plenty of large, great houses. We’ve been told dogs are no problem. We’ve been told dogs may be a problem. The sky is blue; the sky is orange. Take your pick. It’s truly impossible to do this at a distance.

Nevertheless, we look at online ads.

Here’s what we hope to browse through:

But you wouldn’t believe how many German sites post mostly these photos:

This worries me only slightly less than it baffles me. If the owner is proud of his bidet, I’m happy for him. However, I can’t understand why we are shown so many bathroom photos and so few living room photos, so few exterior photos. Does that famous German orderliness beget a national obsession with bathrooms? I’d rather not think about that. And I’m sure there is a simple, and more appealing, reason for all of these bathroom photos.

My theory: it’s a sign from God that house hunting at a distance is a potty-brained idea. *Sigh.*

So, here’s the plan. We wait until our feet are on the ground in Germany in mid June, and we scramble as fast as we can to find a place. It’s worked for us in the past–here’s hoping the luck holds.

Throwback Thursday: In Alabama, Lovin’ the BBQ, Hatin’ the Spiders

May 29, 2014June 1, 2014 ~ travelsandtomes ~ 1 Comment

We will soon bid a fond farewell to Alabama and begin waking up to glorious German mornings. So before we begin the tales of our travels in Germany, it’s time to collect a few thoughts on what we’ll miss, and what we will not miss, about Bama:

I will NOT miss the Black Widow spiders. Horrible! And everywhere! Terrifying little beasts. (Can you tell I have spider issues?) They overtook our patio furniture and moved into our mailbox last year when we left for 3 weeks of summer vacation. After that, I took to wearing big, yellow dishwashing gloves each time I’d go to retrieve the mail. I’m sure the neighbors talked–but I don’t care. I was doing my best to keep up the eccentric Southerner image and warding off Black Widow bites at the same time. Seemed like a win-win situation to me. All the same, I can happily live without Black Widows.

I can also live without the summers that continue into the holiday season. No living nativity should include Baby Jesus in a sunhat and swim diapers. Not that Bethlehem is known for its blizzards… but…let’s save that digression for another day. I’m just saying, September really ought to be the outer wall of summer, after which Mother Nature should change out the seasonal scenery for you. Any less than four seasons, and the climate is veering off toward abhorrent. (Any more than four seasons, and it gets pretty weird too.)

And, no, I won’t miss all the giant trucks that never sound like they have mufflers. Which is funny, because they do have mufflers. (Thanks to their monster tires, you can actually look up and see the mufflers looming overhead when they pass. Maybe they are just decorative mufflers. Or maybe they are really extra sound pipes, like a church organ. Clever… but I still don’t get it.)

I WILL miss the BBQ from Dreamland Barbecue. And the banana pudding. Yum! Some of the best BBQ ever–right up there with Stamey’s BBQ and Chandler’s Beef BBQ in North Carolina.

I will definitely miss the neighbors–some native Alabamians, some not. All friendly. All funny. All standing rabidly on one side or the other of the Alabama/Auburn rivalry.

I’ll also miss the way store clerks strike up long conversations with you like they’ve known you all their lives. I’ve a feeling that won’t happen much in Germany. . .and, anyway, it will be a while before my vocabulary isn’t exhausted in a three minute conversation.

Back to things I’m not fond of–I’m not usually a big fan of lists like this: what I love/what I hate about _____. There’s a lot to love about any place. And I’ve never met a place that, no matter how great, didn’t have it’s low points. But, as Melville said, “There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast…Nothing exists in itself.” Life is a study in contrasts, so bring them on! A little sour in the sweet provides the necessary punch.

And punch line. Let’s be honest, it’s those “what I don’t like” lists that provide the laughs. Where would we be without the horrors, the gaffes, the Stinking Bishop amongst the cheeses? But that, my friends, is a tale for the morrow. See you then!

My Name is Mud

May 23, 2014July 10, 2014 ~ travelsandtomes ~ Leave a comment

TandT header travels and tomes — ©2014, A. Stephenson

Ich heiβe Schlamm.

And every German person will know it when I open my mouth.

Here’s the thing: the German language makes me nervous. I’ve traveled in Germany before, and my tourist-German is passable. Mostly passable. When I throw in some charades and a German-English dictionary in pocket. I can do this. Yes, I can.

But I am, somewhere deep down, terrified of the German language. It comes from freshman year German classes at Davidson College. Well, no. . .it comes from my sad and sorry performance in freshman year German classes at Davidson. Out of nearly a year of German classes, there was only one week when my professor complemented me on my accent and abilities. And I was on death’s doorstep with the flu. Strangled by phlegm and fever, but excelling at the guttural language. (Too bad this week didn’t coincide with the German presentation I had to deliver weeks later where I not only didn’t have the phlegm working for me, but I was uncharacteristically gripped by stage fright and began speaking in French…a language at which I am also no genius.)

I know that I can become a competent communicator in German. After all, I learned to muddle through in Turkish, with no previous background. Do I anticipate erudite and articulate? No, I’m being realistic here. But I want to be good enough. Respectful of the country, the culture, and able to move freely about and really talk to people.

But this memory of freshman year German is a problem. Perhaps I’m just not capable of speaking German. Or perhaps I spent too much time at the fraternity court and not enough time studying. Maybe my mind just doesn’t process the German language? Or maybe the way to absorb all of those 1980’s language lab audio tapes wasn’t to sleep through them and trust in the quasi-science of learning by osmosis. Or maybe. . .

Maybe I just need to crack open some books and study again–but then mostly just throw myself into it.

Here’s what I know about myself now that I didn’t really understand before. I can’t effectively learn declensions and conjugations from books and lists. My mind doesn’t function in charts and graphs and conjugations–that section of my brain left on vacation 40 something years ago and it isn’t coming back. What I can do is listen. I like sounds. I like cadence and intonation. I can gather up vocabulary like pebbles by a pond, and once I watch and listen for long enough, I can send them out skipping and skittering over the water gloriously. I will be an eccentric speaker, perhaps–with Frankensteinian grammar–but I will speak readily and joyfully and maybe even, should I be so lucky as to suffer from a cold or the flu, brilliantly.

My name is Franken-mud.

Boxing Up My Life

May 16, 2014May 9, 2024 ~ travelsandtomes ~ 1 Comment

My material things don’t equate my life–let me just say that up front.

And yet.

I’m a magpie. I collect threads and scraps as I move along, and they pad my nest. No, that’s not exactly it. They become the fabric of my nest. The baubles I collect as I keep wandering represent my life. And it’s hard to watch them all be packed up, some to load onto a slow boat to Germany and some to sit in storage for a couple of years. So many of my things feel like old friends, like artifacts of adventurous times, not like run of the mill stuff at all.

And, yes, in the interest of full disclosure, I have too much “stuff” too. I’m not proud that among the boxes being packed up in my house there are “As Seen on TV” products, old DVD’s and VHS tapes of bad sitcoms, some dog figurines…well, it just gets ugly. But let’s focus on the beauty here:

There’s the portrait of Teak, the first dog my husband and I owned–so beautiful and so smart. He was the beginning of a small menagerie of children, dogs, and goldfish who share our life.

There’s the old dollhouse from England, bought at auction. It’s a Tudor, half-timber design, handmade, and sporting a “Toy Town Antiques” sign over the door and a little antique shop in the front room, visible through the window.

There’s the 300 year old walnut chest that may or may not house a ghost. (We call her Emily.)

The church pew from the Ripon Cathedral in our old hometown of Ripon, England (legitimately bought, not carried out of the cathedral–thanks for asking). It is quite beautiful, but impossible to look at without imagining the people who were there before you. Brides and widows. Carolers and clerics. Young, old, rich, poor, inspired, and downtrodden. A microcosm of life on one short bench.

There’s the old pocket Bible from WWII that bears King George’s stamp and message to soldiers in the front cover, and is partially hollowed out in the middle so the owner could hold cigarettes or pass notes. It came from the estate of a former British soldier; he was a POW in the Pacific theater.

The Turkish carpet we bought from a man affectionately (?) known as “the one-armed bandit” in Kizkalesi, Turkiye. He lived in a coastal town not too far from where we lived and knew our car the minute we drove into town for the weekend. He’d flag us down, bring us into his home, close the curtains, and then pull out his stash of carpets, jewelry, and antiquities for sale. All a little shady, but in a seductively high intrigue way. We felt like James Bond in Istanbul, wheeling and dealing. And, yes, he had just one arm. (No doubt, there’s an interesting back story there.)

The list goes on. And on. And on.

Each item is its own story–some love stories, some comedies, some tragedies, some mysteries. Inanimate objects? No way.

Some of it is just stuff. But so much of it runs deeper than that. The artifacts of a life lived and loved. Who could possibly fit that into a box?

Spoke too soon…

April 19, 2014May 7, 2014 ~ travelsandtomes ~ Leave a comment

Here I am starting a new blog and very excited about it–can’t wait to share the joys, surprises, and oddities of our life abroad. I’m excited, but I’m up to my earlobes in moving papers and moving boxes for the next two months, so it occurs to me that I’ve stepped up to the microphone too soon.

Ta-Da! Here’s my blog on living abroad. Only, oops, I’m not abroad yet. I’m still packing. So… Yeh… What to talk about now. . .

Well, for starters, the “place” I am right now isn’t Alabama or Germany. It’s some strange no man’s land that you find yourself suddenly inhabiting when you’re knee deep in an overseas move. My feet are still on Dixie soil, but my mind is racing manically, and exhaustingly, between Deutschland and Bama. Even when I take a moment to calm it and just focus on something relaxing, I find myself conflicted: I start to daydream about how fabulous the Christmas Markets will be in Germany (Gluhwein, and chocolates, and snow…oh my!) and find myself suddenly jumping up for my car keys, shouting, “I’ll be back, I just need to run to Macy’s and see if winter coats are on sale!”

Note to self: mantra of the week = be still and breathe. No doubt, it will be a cyclical pattern: be still and breathe; run out and buy coats; be still and breathe; pack up items for storage; be still and breathe; run out and buy snow boots; be…you get the picture.

And I’ll revisit the blog in between, maybe reminisce about our last trip to Germany. We’ve been there as travelers a few times. In fact, my daughter was born in Heidelberg 14 years ago. We weren’t living there at the time, we were living on the Turkish Mediterranean, but our local hospital had a few issues, so we opted to spend the Christmas season with family in Germany and have her there…but I’ll go into that story some other day. Right now, I have to run off and buy coats.