Week 3: Our Apartment

Our building from the Outside

We've been settling into our apartment over the past couple weeks. It is a big and airy ground-floor apartment, about twice the size of what we had in Providence. It is a lot of space and currently we have very little loaner furniture, so there are a lot of echoes. We fixed that somewhat on Saturday with a trip to IKEA, but we won't have everything up and running until some point in (hopefully) early June when all our stuff shows up.

Hello-oo-oo

There are a few things about German houses that are different about any house I have ever lived in the in the US (granted, every place I have ever lived has been in New England, but still...):

• Every window has blackout shades, known as rolladens (turns out it is an American company's name). Every house in our town has them on every window. You can see them in the picture of our building from the front. They have been a great help with the longer days lately and will be super-useful in the living room once our projector arrives.
• The houses are all made out of cinder blocks, which I suppose will keep things cooler in the summer. It also muffles the sounds considerably. Despite the fact we have people living both above and below us, we barely ever hear them.
• We have a reverse-bowl design toilet. I'll leave any further investigation of this as an exercise to the reader.
• There are no screens in the windows. This wasn't so much a surprise to me, as no hotel I have visited in Europe has them either, but it is an exceptional difference.

Additionally, not related directly to the apartment, but relatively close, we've found this area is particular about its trash. We have five separate bins for waste in total:

• Trash
• Recyclable plastic and metal
• Paper
• Glass
• Returnables

Here, there are separate days when each of the first three are picked up. Jason has a matrix posted by the door as a reminder of what can go out when. For the trash, we buy a sticker that goes on our trash bin. When the trash is picked up, they scrape off the sticker. For the recyclable plastic and metal, you buy a yellow bag. Paper goes in it's own bin. Glass is walked to a bin at the end of the street, where you separate it into green, brown and clear (god help you if you have a blue beer bottle). Returnables you take back to the grocery store, where they are returned to the breweries for reuse. The deposit can vary--we had some bottles from last week with a 0.50 Euro return and others with 0.10 Euro.

Granted, all of this isn't too different than what we did in Providence. We had three bins in our apartment there (paper, trash and recyclables--no deposit in RI), plus our compost bin, but everything (but the compost, that went in our bin out back) went on the street on the same day every week. Also, from what we understand, the fines are more serious here if you do get something wrong.

Overall, we are settling nicely. I'll post in the future about the town where we live. Next week I am headed on a short work trip to France and Switzerland. In the meantime, enjoy the view from our bedroom window.

Can you find our neighbor's pigeon cage?