You Go Nate!

FROM PRUSSIA WITH LOVE

Sybille has kept me very busy this week. And now I finally can get around to the blog.

Staying with Sybille and Wolfgang has been very pleasant and helpful German-wise.

Here are a few tidbits:

-Lunch is usually the main meal. Breakfast and dinner are usually bread, cold-cuts, and cheese.

-S&W, and the Germans in general, are very environmentally conscious and conservative. Whenever S&W are not using a room, the light is turned off. Everything is recycled. Organic and fresh foods are very popular. There are wind generators all over the country generating clean energy and killing birds.

-In some places on the Autobahn there IS a speed limit.

-Wolfgang’s record on the Autobahn with a motorbike is 280 kph (180 mph).

-Some things are important; some things are not: S&W drive a Mercedes and a BMW, but they don’t have a clothes dryer or a microwave. They love to travel: Iceland, Sicily, Scotland, California, but they are always on the look out for the cheapest gas (and at nearly $7 a gallon, you can’t blame them.)

-S&W eat their meals with a lit candle and the radio on. (With the regular light on as well, of course.)

-They have a nice HD TV and stereo system, but the radio in the kitchen is no newer than 1989. (If it aint broke…)

They are very generous, have a great sense of humor, and are very family oriented. There is much to admire here.

On Monday Sybille and I drove to Rostock, the nearest big town, located on the Baltic Sea. I tagged along as Sybille visited some of her clients and we saw a few sites. Each evening after dinner is TV time. Wolfgang flips between news and sports channels and sometimes we watch a home movie from one of their motorbike trips.

Every morning since Tuesday I walk to the local elementary school where there is an upright piano. I can play from 9:30AM to 11:30AM while the room is vacant. The first day I did this the teachers brought all the kids in for a short recital. I was a bit rusty, not having played too much in the last couple of weeks, but it was fun.

One of my “duties,” while staying here, is whenever Sybille and I go somewhere I am the chauffer. On Wednesday we drove to the town of Putlitz, about an hour and half south of here. Putlitz is where my Great-Great Grandmother was born [UPDATE: no she wasn't. She was born in Berlin, but her father was born in Putlitz], and is in the area where many generation of my ancestors lived. Sybille is from Putlitz, and one of her brothers still lives here and works with textiles and upholstery.

I visited Putlitz in 2000 with my brother, mother, and grandmother, but it was still great to go back. It is a very small town but its signature landmark is a high tower that once was a part of the medieval wall surrounding the old town. This tower still stands next to the lazy-flowing river and is surrounded by ruins of the old wall and a nice grassy green.

Downtown Putlitz:

The Tower:
L-R: Sigrid, Arnulf, Sybille, Nate Dawg

On Thursday Sybille had planned for me to go with her son Gunnar and his family to the town of Wismar for some swimming. I didn’t expect I would be swimming here and so my swimsuit is packed in my other suitcase in Munich. Sybille said it would be no problem, I could wear one of Wolfgang’s suits. I had four to choose from. Three were speedos that were all too big for me (one with roses!) and the other was an old-fashioned, one-piece bathing suit that Wolfgang got in Iceland. It fit, but I wasn’t about to wear that thing in public. I tried to get a picture with me in the suit, but no matter what it looked fruity. So here is the suit….

So I packed the best-fitting speedo and the jumpsuit and away we went to Wismar. Gunnar and his wife live in a nearby town with their two-year old son Elias. Elias and I are technically of the same generation of Schumachers. We are sixth-cousins! [UPDATE: we are fifth-cousins! We have the same Great-Great-Great-Great Grandparents]

Wismar is about an hour drive to the north and west. The pool place was huge. There were several pools, a big kiddie area, a hot tub, and several decent waterslides. Luckily, when we arrived they sold swimsuits. So I bought a swimsuit more like I was used to at home. (The last thing I would have wanted was to go down a waterslide with a loose speedo.)

We swam and played for a few hours. Here is a video clip with some more information about the city of Wismar. If the audio is hard to hear, use your imagination…

After we went schwimmen, we went to the main part of the city. The buildings were mostly quite old with the signature Hanseatic architecture found in many of the coastal cities of this region.

It was great to walk around and get some good pictures.

On the way home, Elias was supposed to nap but he kept wanting to play “Boo!” where I would hide behind the carseat and then pop out and say “boo.” This went on throughout the drive home. When I would stop he would make a sad face and say, “boo, bitte… boo, bitte”

I had a nice dinner with Gunnar’s family and they were eager to help me with many of my German questions as I went through one of Elias’s books on choo-choo trains.

Today I went with Sybille again to Rostock to run some errands. While there, we found the LDS Church. The plan is for me to take the train to Rostock on Sunday so that I can attend.

This week I spoke with another English school in Munich. The phone-interview went well and she seemed optimistic to take me on once I can interview in person. The good news is that they offer a free-lance contract at this school. Inlingua, the other school I interviewed with, also offers a free-lance contract. If I can get a free-lance work visa then I will actually be required to have a contract from two different schools, so it would work out schwimmingly if I could work for both schools. They are both not taking on new teachers for a couple more weeks still, so I will hole up here for a little bit longer.

S&W have a daughter I didn’t know about! (Because I never met her the first time I was here.) She lives with her husband and daughter in a town near Cologne on the Rhine River in the western part of Germany. I spoke with her on the phone (she speaks great English) and she invited me to stay with them for a few days as well. I have three more trips on my Deutschebahn Rail Pass, so hopefully I can go there before heading back to Munich.

As soon as I get somewhere with a good WLAN connection I will upload more pictures from Putlitz and Wismar and wherever else, to Picasa.

That’s the long and the short of it. Don’t be afraid to leave a “chip in” or two in the comments section. It’s fun that way.

-Nate

ps. Here is the "Danke Schön" video I made for Arnulf and his family for taking me to Wismar: