Playground and Market Etiquette

Every day, Dave and I turn to each other and say, "This is heaven! It's going to be hard to leave."

That being said, there a couple of cultural things we have yet to get used to.

After multiple trips to local playgrounds, we are figuring out the culture of the swingset set. When German kids want a turn on the swingset and all the swings are busy, they just go up to the swings as if they are going to walk right into the arc of the swing. They stand there, in your personal space, chancing death by swing, until you are uncomfortable enough to get off. Yesterday, one little three year old did this maneuver, and added to it a little ditty, which sounded like a German version of "eeny, meeny, miny, mo," whereby she pointed at Sam to indicate he was the one she chose to evict from the swing. This would not fly on the Butler Elementary School playground.

The other thing that gets us is the way people shop in the market. I personally enjoy going to the grocery store and selecting what I am going to purchase. I look forward to it, even when I need to do it with four kids tagging along (which thankfully, is rare, at least back home). There does not seem to be any enjoyment going on in the German grocery stores we have shopped in. The shoppers are all business; you'd be hard-pressed to see anyone smiling. It makes it kind of stressful to shop. We have decided the next time we go to the market, we are not going to let the negative vibe rub off on us. There can be enjoyment out of choosing which wurst you are going to cook for dinner tonight, gol' darn it!

Here are Sam and Katie devouring the Schinken-Fleischwurst we had tonight.

We all walked to the university this morning with Dave. The entire university is housed in one huge building, an homage to 1960's architecture. There are about 17,000 students there. It's actually pretty cleverly built, but it's somewhat of an eyesore, all glass and aluminum. The central hall of the building has a bunch of shops - post office, small grocery store, bookstore, etc. Sam and Katie each chose a book to purchase. Sam chose Raumfahrt (Space Travel) and Katie selected Cinderella Maskenball.
Sam's latest insight from watching TV - Sponge Bob (who he never gets to watch in the US because we don't have cable) is known as Sponge Bob Schwammkopf.
For Uncle Steve: here is the research Dave has done so far. He is very diligent about it, experimenting every night. He has ranked the local brews for tastiness (they are all pilsners). He has also "sampled" Warsteiner and Becks, but they are available in the states, and thus are left out of this ranking. Here we go: 1) Krombacher 2) Veltins 3) Detmolder 4) Braumeister.


For the other moms out there, when we were planning this trip, I was worried that maybe all German kids are potty-trained by the time they are one year old, and that I wouldn't be able to get diapers. Not so - there are Pampers galore available, though it's much more fun to buy the German brands and take a chance on what we are going to get. Since I only know about 1oo words of German, I am taking that risk with everything I buy. So far, I have been able to find everything we need babywise. I must say, German strollers put our Graco to shame. The wheels on the German strollers are like offroad wheels - much larger in diameter and made of plastic components like our run-of-the-mill brands.


This blogging thing is dangerous - I should be working on some mathematics right now, but instead, I'm writing this newsletter (as Dave's mom calls it. That's fine by me because I don't like the word blog. Blech.) It sure is fun though.