Saaga

Normally they say it doesn’t really snow around here, but that is not entirely true. It has snowed a bunch of times this winter, but it is rarely cold enough for the snow to stay on anything that isn’t metal. So rather than rarely snowing, a more accurate description is that the snow doesn’t last long.
Enter -8 degrees. It snowed a few days ago, but because it has been so cold the snow is still on the ground and this morning I saw the last brass monkey heading out of town. I am on playground duty today and the best part is that it looks likely to warm up to -3 by lunch time and although I am on before that, it should have risen to at least -5 for my lonely vigil.

The German gas/electricity man needs access to your home to check the meter. Generally this is in the basement of the house because if it was outside it would mean that you would not be inconvenienced. Every employer knows that you need to be home for the two designated hours for the meter check, but it still seems to cause some concern when that time rolls around again. The sensible way to do it would be to have a few ‘meter check days’ per year that you could stay home and wait for the meter man. On those days you could also organise all the other things that seem to impossible to have delivered outside of business hours…furniture, white goods, anything to do with Deutsche Telecom.
I know that delivering stuff on the weekend sounds like a good idea, but you can be arrested here -–looks over shoulder– for even suggesting that sort of thing. The only positive thing is that when they say they will be arriving between 2 pm and 4 pm they will definitely be there within that time frame.

The Australian system, which seems to extend past the delivery service and into trades, essential services and infrastructure as well, would be considered a weapon of mass destruction over here. Because when the BLOKE on the phone says,
“No worries love, I’ll have the boys round on Tuesday between 2 pm and 4 pm.”
Frau Niedermeyer organises to have that time off and sits at home waiting to have her tap fixed. When the plumbers do finally turn up at 9 am on the following Thursday, they would find that Frau Niedermeyer has already passed away from something resembling shock

Don’t worry, I’m not actually sad, but S.A.D. is the (appropriate) acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a psychological condition where people get really depressed in certain seasons, normally winter.

I’m not like Steve, I’ve actually been enjoying the weather here. Sure, it’s cold and not always sunny, but the way I see it, is that we’re here for a different experience, and it is definitely different to Sydney! (As I keep saying to Steve - at least it’s not as cold as Russia!

Anyway, both my parents think I’m nuts, but there you go - I like it here!

Until today… I was wandering around the apartment around 4.30pm feeling a little bit down. After a while, it occurred to me that I would feel better if I wasn’t walking around in the semi-dark and turned on the lights*. Voila! Goodbye S.A.D., hello light!

*I would like to point out that our apartment doesn’t have great natural light at the best of times and that it was rainy and overcast today. In Düsseldorf’s defence, the weather has been really nice (i.e. cold but with blue skies) lately. And the days are getting longer. It’s light at about 8.10am and stays light until after 5pm, so not much different to Sydney in winter really.

-4 Celsius is not my friend
On Sundays there is rarely anything open aside from restaurants, cafes and pubs. This not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that all you can really do on a Sunday is eat and drink…not even video shops are open. Sometimes there are flea markets open however and so off we trekked into the bitter cold of lunch time in January. The market was of course closed, so while waiting for the tram back, we decided to explore the graveyard that was nearby. The graveyard was kind of dull. It was very well tended (but not beautiful) as I expected and there were far fewer zombies than I had hoped.
After my face froze completely off to land with a splintering sound at my feet, we decided to head home. As the doors of the tram closed on the bleak, windswept necropolis and the heating began to take effect, I could literally hear the slight crackling sound of my skin defrosting. Eerie.

The music round is also not my friend.
We have a team for table quiz on Sunday nights at our local Irish pub and we normally get a top five finish out of the 16 or so teams that play. However, if there was not such an emphasis on the music round, we would get a top three place (with more than the occasional win) every week. I understand that music is a solid part of any good trivia competition and me not recognizing the works of ‘Cool Moe Dee’ or ‘The Four Tops’ is entirely my own problem. However, why the music round is worth double what all the other rounds are worth I will never understand.
Further, I am not sure why music just can’t be part of all the other rounds like all the other different branches of trivia are. There is no Science round. There is no Geography round. So why does music get to have it’s own round? It really hampers our team and it is very frustrating to be in second or third place when the guy reads the scores out before the music fiasco begins, only to have slipped a couple of places afterwards.
I am going to suggest that they have a ‘European Military History 1795-1815’ round and see how that goes. Might give our team the edge we need.

It’s truly amazing being given more than 5 seconds to cross a road. In Sydney, you never manage to get to the middle of the street before the little man starts to flash red. Here, the little man stay green for as long as the cars have a red light. But be warned - as soon as he goes red the cars will be bearing down on you! (But you do get a warning - there is an orange light that comes on briefly between the green and red, so you know to start running!)

It’s an interesting difference in systems. Probably also related to the fact that Germans don’t jaywalk. The fact is that in Sydney your window of opportunity for crossing the road legitimately is SO small that you wind up inadvertently jaywalking most of the time anyway. Here in Germany you are given enough time and the lights don’t take that long to change either…altogether much more civilised, I think.

New years here was amazing and coming from a paternalistic country where so many things are banned, I went mental with the fireworks and glass breaking once I realised I was off the leash. Beer in one hand, 15 cm bunger in the other, I wandered through the old town without raising an eyebrow from the police; even when I introduced said bunger to a nearby rubbish bin.
I put about 10 things on my new years resolution list and the top two I have managed so far; no smoking and no soft drinks. However I tried unrealistically to ban myself from Schweinebrötchen, which I quickly changed to a more realistic once a week policy, which I have now broken twice. I think I am addicted to these things. A Schweinebrötchen is essentially pork and crackling that has been roasted for hours on a spit and then sliced up right there in front of you, put on a bread roll and covered in mustard. Delicious.
I even tried watching the football in a different pub, because my normal pub has the ‘Schweinebrötchen emporium’ right next door and is far too tempting. Unfortunately the new place has ‘Schweinebrötchen R Us’ directly opposite, so that you can see the roasting pork while you mind your own business and try to concentrate on the football.
Curse them all.

When we lived in Sydney the apartment was so old and crap that no-one could tell if we had mopped or vaccuumed, so we didn’t really need to do it that often. Now that we live in a really nice apartment, it seems like we have to sweep, mop or vaccuum almost ever day. I don’t know where all this dust comes from, but it sure likes living in the corners of our flat!

The upside is that when we clean the flat you can actually tell. And since we have a dish-washer, the kitchen is normally nice and tidy (which was never true in Sydney). Due to having the dishwasher, it has taken us more than 6 months to get half way through a 500ml bottle of washing up liquid! I love our dishwasher.

A dishwasher - the secret to a harmonious marriage!

Welcome to 2006!

Fire works are legal in Germany Therefore every single person is legally obliged to buy as many as they can possibly carry (as one of our New Zealand-ish colleagues said gleefully: “I had so many explosives on my body I looked like Osama bin Laden !”) and set them off all around the alt-stadt all night.

Düsseldorf is a big party town normally anyway, but New Year’s Eve, known as ‘Silvester’ here, was bigger than any other night. By 2am the ground was covered with spent fireworks and broken bottles. There were people everywhere, almost everyone was blind drunk, but also mostly very friendly. It seemed like chaos to me (within 5 minutes 2 ambulances had driven past us (in a pedestrianised area) with their sirens on) but the Düsseldorf police reported fewer incidents than previous years and no fights. Only one driver was arrested for drink-driving although they tested over 400.

We started our night in an Irish bar called Fatty’s. It’s a pretty relaxed place and all the bar-staff speak English, so we go there all the time. Around 10.30pm we headed off to an indie rock club called ‘Stone’. We were pleased to see that there weren’t too many people there so we had a few drinks and danced a bit. After midnight the people really started streaming in and the placed was jam-packed by 1.30am. We were getting a bit sick of the crowds by that point and decided to head back out into the chaos of the alt-stadt. The only problem was people (by this I mean Steve) setting off bungers right near us and scaring me all the time. He had a lot of fun, but I got a bit sick of having to have my ears covered all the time.

We couldn’t really see anywhere else to go that wasn’t going to be absolutely packed, so we walked home and watched a few episodes of ‘Little Britain’ before heading off to bed. Not the worst night, not the best night. I always find NYE to be a bit of an anti-climax, so I was just happy to spend it with some of our friends. It was also good to have spoken to lots of people in Sydney earlier in the day.

I hope that everyone had a great NYE and that 2006 is an enjoyable and happy year for everyone.