Our garbage obsession

Do you remember a few posts ago in which I gave a detailed description of the "garbage" process? Well, our 'magic' garbage card finally showed up. It will allow us to take out our garbage, 10 Liters at a time, for disposal. It has been really nice to be able to take it to school in the interim, but we are official now! Oh, did I also mention that the card is only good while we live here at Bläserstraße 58 - we will need to turn it back into the Rathaus when we move... which will be this weekend! Yep, you got it - we where here in our current apartment just long enough to receive the card that we now get to turn in. The funny thing is that we will get an actual garbage can at our new apartment on Hauptstraße, but we will likely have to wait about a month for it too... It's not wrong, just different...

So, we will most likely be moving over this weekend. We have an appointment tomorrow (Saturday) at 17.00 (that translates to 5:00PM) to meet with the management folks. If we can get the keys right away, we will try to get our things moved over in the evening - we don't have a lot with us, so that should be easy. Our plan is to pack, clean and recycle tomorrow in anticipation of the move. We also don't know when we will get internet access at our new home, so it may be a few days before we can post again. We hope to have pictures of the new digs soon so you can see where we will be living for the next two years (Hint: It is bigger than a breadbox but smaller than our last home). We are so looking forward to getting settled.

I will also start teaching classes on Monday. I just got all of our lab computers ready today - it took much longer than I anticipated, so I should be ready to go. Please pray for our health (we have some scratchy throat stuff going on) as we get ready to go to the next stage! We really love these kids. Hope to blog at you soon...

Peace, grace, joy

The view is wonderful

Last Sunday, Delynn and I went up to the top of the hill just west of Weil am Rhein. It has a beautiful overview of the town with miles of hiking and bike paths that wend their way through forest and meadows. We got up to the top in the late afternoon and got these snaps.

The first picture shows the town of Weil am Rhein in the foreground, with the red tile roofs (about the bottom 2/3rds of the picture). The city off in the distance is Basel, Switzerland - that is how close we are to the Swiss border. This is our home - it is kind of hard to show but both our current apartment and the school can be at least partially seen in this photo - both are located near the bottom of that forest area that cuts through the picture between Weil and Basel.

The second picture is from the other side of the small ridge of the town of Lörrach. You can't see everything because the town stretches quite a ways up a valley. Lörrach is about 2x the size of Weil am Rhein and it has the Milka Chocolate factory. Yes, if you have ever tried Milka chocolate, it might have come from the town next door. (I hear that they make the bar chocolates...) Delynn just took a Milka bar from our stash - she must have caught my thoughts. Mmmmm.

I love how this part of Germany reminds me so much of the Pacific Northwest . I mean, this picture could have come out of the coast range somewhere. Right after we took this picture, we walked down a path to a more secluded area of the park overlooking Lörrach. We passed by a small group of people who were fervently talking in a foreign language (uh, that would mean, not German, not English, not French, not Swiss-German - and oh yes, Swiss-German is very distinct from German). We stopped nearby to take some pictures of sheep. Okay, so one does some crazy things when in a different country but the sheep didn't appear to mind... As I listened more closely, I realized that they were praying aloud and that they were speaking Polish. It was so cool to be able to reach into my memory and pick out some words and expressons! It appeared that they were praying for the city and the people of Lörrach. Well, once we figured that out, we decided to reverently make our way back from whence we came. As we passed by the group a couple of them politely nodded to us. I think I surprised them when I greeted them with "Dobry Wieczor" (Good evening) because they smiled when they responded in kind. Not wanting to disturb their prayer, we continued on our way, basking in our own communion for the wonderful day God had given us.

Carl is now Ned!

For all of you who know my really good friend Carl Wilson or have been praying for him through our prayer requests to our church family, I have wonderful news. He had his CT scan just this morning (Pacific time) and he has no evidence of metastatic disease! As you know, they discovered that he had stage 4 colon cancer just about a year ago. What you may not know is that survivability is incredibly low - less than 10% if I recall correctly (Carl: you can correct me if I am miss stating the facts). Anyway, the current term for remission in medical parlance is "No Evidence of Disease"or NED. So, after all those years of my carpool buddies calling me Ned Flanders, we now find out that it is Carl who is NED - and I couldn't be happier!!

We are jumping for joy and giving the thanks and glory to God for seeing Carl, Heather, Paige and Hannah through this chapter. Please keep up your prayers it takes 4+ more years of being called Ned before you can be called something else: Cured.

Just to Clarify . . .

As exotic as it may (or may not) sound to travel to 3 countries in 1 day, we are generally going to either explore the area so we know what is around us or to look specifically for a product. For instance, we heard one can buy brown sugar in France. So we went to Saint-Louis today, which is about a 40 minute bus/tram ride. We did not succeed in finding brown sugar, but we did find liquid vanilla. However, we brought a bottle of vanilla with us, but no brown sugar. Keep in mind the previous post where we talk about staring at aisles of products trying to decipher them and decide if it's what we need. Today, we spent time trying to decipher 2 languages (French and German) and calculating several currencies. The Euro is about one-third more than the dollar and the Swiss franc is about 60-65% of the Euro. I think you get the idea of why it takes us so long to shop for things! But we are very successful in translating "Chocolate'', so we usually include a purchase of chocolate to help us recuperate from the confusion of shopping!

How did you spend your evening?

As you can imagine, the first week of school is incredibly frenetic. (You might want to look that word up if you don't know it because it describes our week very well). We are so blessed and grateful for starting the school year well. We have children from around the world attending RIA. We have Swiss, American, Polish, Chinese, Indian, Italian, British, Belgian and Canadian children (I probably missed some...). All of the children are so precious to God and to the teachers at RIA - I see the commitment and love every day. The smiles and waves the children give us as they come to school each morning just makes our day! We look forward to building our relationships, both with the children and their parents throughout the year. I just have to learn all of their names... You can see just some of the flags at RIA - they represent the nations that have attended RIA present and past (we have 16 total). We are reaching and teaching the world!

Last week we also met the Oberbürgermeister of Weil am Rhein, Herr Dietz (equivalent to a mayor the US). We got our picture taken with the mayor for the newspaper - I hope to get a copy for the blog, so stay tuned. He lived in the US for a short time and speaks impeccable English. I would love to speak German as well as he speaks English. We learned how he found out about the troubles starting up a new international school in Basel and how he worked through the political process to get the school brought over to Weil am Rhein. Herr Dietz is a great person to have on your side and he actually balanced the budget.

I titled this entry "How did you spend your evening?" because it struck me last week (as I was translating the instructions on Dran-o bottle) how different our life is now... Here is how I spent one evening last week: We walked to the drug store because they have the most bath products - you don't get prescriptions at a drug store, you get them at an apotheke (pharmacy) which is always a different business than a drug store. (Oh yeah, the prescriptions are cheaper too - one of our prescriptions is 20% of what it costs in the states, but I digress...). So, I spent about 20 minutes staring at the men's deodorants section in the drug store, trying to figure out which was an anti-perspirant, didn't cost too much, etc... Delynn and I look a sight in the stores - we just stand and stare at the wall of products, slowly deciphering what they are, what they do, whether we want to eat them... It is quite comical. We then decided that we wanted to walk up the street a 1/2 block to the pizza place. We again enjoyed a nice relaxing meal, seated outside in the blue August evening, enjoying our pizzas together. Ahhhh. Don't you want to just come visit?

We also traveled to three countries this week: St. Louis, France, Basel, Switzerland and Weil am Rhein, Germany. I represented these in the pictures of Delynn in France, the bridge across the Rhein in Basel and our orchid at the apartment (the orchid bloomed this week and is just lovely don't you think?)...

We also went with several colleagues to see the local football team, SV Weil 1910, play their league rivals Wehr! We won 2-0!! Our friend Josie's husband, Jameth Shoffner, is a defender on the team.

Some of our staff family at the football game: Delynn, Kelly (Pre-school teacher) are in the back row, Aubrey (1st grade), Josie (ESL/PE), Jennifer and Cam (Middle-school) are in the front row. The second picture is Josie and Jameth after the stunning 2-nil victory!

I wish that I had hours every day to write all that we experience. I have added a new link for the Neifert's blog. Their blog - particularly the August 25th entry - are recommended to our friends. It really hit home with me as I read it.

Peace and grace.

Basel Sunday, Hot water and the "After" photo

I didn't get a chance to post any pictures last week, so I thought I would catch up. We had a wonderful Sunday - We went to Basel Switzerland with our friends Anne and Allison (fellow teachers at RIA) to worship at their church - the Anglican Church of Basel. We really enjoyed the service there. Afterward, we walked to the pedestrian area nearby and had lunch at Cindy's Diner. So, Cindy's Diner is a Swiss version of an American 50's diner. They serve burgers, sandwiches, fries, pizza, salads but no meatloaf! Can you believe it? It was a hoot to get a curry chicken and pineapple pizza - not your normal 1950's dining fare... While at lunch, we realized that we had missed the next tram/train/bus connection back to Weil, so we decided to go to... wait for it... Starbucks! Yes, Starbucks! They have four of them in Basel and one was just down the way from Cindy's. We savored the atmosphere, the coffee, the espresso. Unfortunately, the top of the cinnamon dispenser had not been tightly attached, so I dumped about two tablespoons of cinnamon into my espresso con panna. Oy, that was a bit too much, but I drank it anyway - it would be a shame to waste...

We strolled around Basel with Anne and Allison, (that's Delynn, Anne and Allison in the the picture) enjoying the sunshine after so many days of rain and grey weather. We came home, enjoyed a nice relaxing afternoon and then went over to Diana's home (our school director) to celebrate her birthday. At RIA, we tend to make a pretty big deal of birthdays since we are so far away from families back in North America. Tomorrow evening, we are holding a "Mexican Fiesta" to celebrate our friend Josie's birthday. Delynn and I are suppose to bring cheese, but it is amost impossible to find chedder cheese in Germany - and you can't have a Mexican Fiesta without chedder cheese. We have looked high and low for it and may need to find a substitute... Maybe a nice brie?

Did I mention how hot the water gets here? Water right out of the tap can reach temperatures of up to 95 degrees centigrade. For those of you that slept through science, water boils at 100 degrees C. One can literally brew tea directly from the water coming out of the tap. We have to be really careful. It also seems like the water goes from normal warm to skin-searing hot by turning the taps about two millimeters - very tricky, especially in the shower... (Thanks, I'm healing nicely...) Speaking of showers, most German showers don't have a shower head coming out of the wall like we did back in the US but rather have a hand-held shower head with a holder stuck to the wall. It works just fine as a shower head, but it is just another curious difference.

I also wanted to share a photo of the media center as it looked at our open house on Thursday evening. Lots of people put in a huge amount of effort to get the MC ready to show our parents. We still have hundreds and hundreds of volumes to catalog and integrate into the library, but I think it looks just great (compare to the photo posted back on 4 August!). Delynn put in lots of hours sorting and shelving - she was a real trooper. We will officially open the library on September 3rd, but school opens on Monday and all of the teachers are all looking forward to a great year!

Thanks for reading - we love an miss you all. God bless you all and we thank you so much for your prayer support - it truely makes a difference in our lives every day.

We had a question from a good friend about the definition of "busker" from an earlier post. (Thanks for the question - we are happy to answer any questions we get). A "busker" is someone that plays music or sings for tips, usually at a street market or in a subway station or in a pedestrian zone where people walk by. We have heard some really outstanding music by buskers in many cities across Europe. They can be surprisingly good.

New Realities II

We just got home a while ago from our day. It struck me that another interesting reality difference is how much longer it takes to get daily living accomplished. It is not a bad thing - just different. For example, this afternoon we left school at 4:00pm because we needed to get to the bank before it closes at 4:30. As you know from our blog, we have to go to the bank so we can pull money out of our US bank account from the ATM, walk into the bank and deposit the cash in our German account so that we have Euros for the rent, utilities, etc. (We really need to come up with a better system, but that will happen later).

Back to the story - we wanted to go to the department store to look for some Allen wrenches, so we walked downtown and looked around a bit. We then stopped by the store that carries our breakfast cereal (Muesli) and started back toward our apartment. Along the way, we stopped for dinner (more about dinner later). After dinner, we walked to the REWE (grocery store) to pick up groceries. After getting our foodstuffs, we lugged our 10-12kg (22-26 lbs.) of items home to arrive at about 8:30. Granted, dinner takes time, but that is 4 1/2 hours to get done what would take an hour or two back in the US...

Anyway, about dinner. We had a nice dinner at the Crystal restaurant. This is how international things are in Weil am Rhein. The restaurant is in Germany, owned and run by a Turkish family that specializes in Italian (and Turkish) cuisine. How cool! There is also very little "fast food" in Germany. It takes at least - at least - an hour and usually longer for a meal. Like most restaurants, there is lots of seating out front, which is where we sat as the sun worked its way across the western sky. It was quite relaxing. Delynn mentioned that after only two weeks here, she is feeling very comfortable living and calling this home. And that is were we are.

God bless you and keep you.

Saturday in Lörrach

After a heavy day at school yesterday, several of the staff took off to Lörrach, which is about 10 minutes away by train from Weil am Rhein and about twice the size. Lörrach has a good sized pedestrian area for shopping - Delynn must have passed 3 or 4 yarn shops in the area (oh, the excitement! I could barely contain myself :-)

On Saturday, they hold a quite nice market in a square - I got a few pictures and thought you might enjoy them. One is of a very sweet lady selling flowers, spices and tomatoes. A view of the flowers available and the ever present buskers (I don't know the German term for them). Right before this picture they were singing "Sweet Home Alabama". A woman working in the stall near these guys came up to them and told them something - I think it had to do with the singing interfering with her ability to talk to her customers, so they just did instrumentals. (busy market)

The weather is finally turning sunny this evening. Definitely helps our cloths dryer work better... I wanted to wear a fleece jacket under my rain gear, but it is in one of our boxes that we shipped - we are trying to keep from opening the boxes until we get to our new place next month. We will see how well that goes.

Even with all the good stories here, there continue to be some tears as we progress through our transition. We so much appreciate the gracious prayers that we know are given on our behalf. Please be in prayer for our school as we prepare for open house this Thursday - we get an opportunity to meet our student's parents.

RIA, Recycling and Rain

Can you believe that I am sitting in my apartment, updating our blog and watching "Mythbusters" in German!! What a life! Wanted to give a quick picture of our school with Delynn out front (wave Hi!). This is on one of the nicer days. It has been raining for 3 days fairly strongly - we even heard that the Rhein river was flooding in Basel, Switzerland. When we walk everywhere, rain is a bit more of a pain. This is a much more rain than we are used to in August - it feels more like a bad February or April in Vancouver WA right now. However, we more than make up for the rain with the great group of teachers and staff we have here at RIA. We are meeting every morning for devotions and prayer; praying for the families and the children coming into the school. Dispite the craziness of getting everything prepared, we feel that it is just so right to be here. It's supposed to clear up a bit for the weekend - we might take the train to the neighboring town of Loerrach - they have a nice pedestrian zone and market there on Saturdays.

Last Sunday, we worshiped at the Basel Christian Fellowship. After worship, we (and our director Diana) were invited to a nice meal by Jim and Anita Cooper. He is a retired Wycliffe translator from the US and Anita is his charming Swiss wife. They are a very sweet couple and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. This week we plan to worship at the church where two other teachers go - they live very near us, so we can all go together. There are a few English speaking churches in the Weil/Basel area and we look forward to finding the community God wants us to join.

We also have a picture here of our temporary apartment - we are on the 2nd floor (called the 1st floor in Germany), so not too far up. We will only be here for a month as our permanent apartment will become available on September 3rd. With school and such going on, we are not really sure when we will actually move in. Once we move in, we will have to re-register with the city hall for our new address, get the utilities, garbage, phone, etc. sorted out. Another new reality we have here is that it takes us much longer to get things done. It is a combination of translating everything and learning new ways of doing things. For example, we have discovered that to get monies into our German bank account, we have to withdrawal cash from the ATM from our US account, walk into the bank and deposit the cash. The bank is open late (i.e. past 4pm) one day a week, so we will need to walk to the bank a few times every month to make sure we have sufficient funds for our bills. We could also write a check (but we can't write a check in Euros) or pay $45.00 for a wire transfer. Oh bother.

I also wanted to touch on recycling. The Schwarzwald is very green - in many ways. We think that in the NW that we are big recyclers (and you are, so keep it up), but here in our new home, we take it to an extreme. It is almost a game of "who can create the least amount of trash." Here's how we play. First, we get charged for each time we dump garbage into the dumpster. The dumpster is inside a container that requires a "garbage card" - kind of like a credit card - to open up a small transfer chute that holds about 3 gallons of garbage (10 liters). Every time we use the card, we pay. We don't know how much yet because we don't have garbage card... However, the only garbage for which we are charged is what is left over after we separate out all of the recyclables. This includes the glass (clear, green and brown), paper and cardboard recyclables and also everything that goes into the "Gelbe Sack" (or Gold bag - see picture of the sack in the corner of our kitchen). The Gelbe Sack takes just about everything except food garbage. We put plastic, Styrofoam containers, food packaging, foil, just about everything. We can fill as many Gelbe Sacks as needed and they are picked up for free once a month. The thing is, we need to wash out the packaging before putting it into the sack. Yogurt cups, meat trays, milk containers, etc. You get the idea. In the week we have been here we have not even generated enough garbage to go to the dumpster once (and we have only eaten out two times in the last 8 days)! It is an amazing thing but like I said, it becomes a game pretty quickly.

Well, that's it for today - we love and miss you all. We are so glad to be here, even when it wears us out. What a blessed adventure.

New Realities

It is now Saturday - the first real day off Delynn and I have had off in months - with the house sale, moving, packing, storing, moving, selling cars, traveling, etc. We decided to walk to France (just because we could!), do some wash and take care of our Kehrwoche duties. We have been working hard all week at RIA, preparing to get the school ready for the little ones. We received a incredible gift from an international school in Lyon, France that closed a couple of years ago - their entire library, teaching aids, overhead projectors, calculators (all manuals in French of course!) and boxes of misc. items. We are so grateful because this increases the size of the RIA library about 3 times. God is good. Now we need to go through the boxes to sort, distribute, store, dispose of the many, many items. The picture shows Delynn and Anne (a friend of our director) in the "before" state. Actually, this is better than it was earlier in the week and doesn't quite capture the total number of boxes in the entire Media Center. The Media Center at school will become my responsibility - it contains the majority of our computers and the library.

In between registering with the state, (we now have nice new residence visa pages in our passports - yeah!) and starting the process to get our drivers license (we found out we need something to prove Delynn's maiden name - like our marriage certificate), we have been at the school every day since we landed, helping to get things ready for opening. I have made the acquaintance of a handyman the school often hires, Herr Minke, while assisting him in various and sundry projects around the school. We have moved appliances, desks, shelves, play equipment, erected basketball hoops, fixed multiple things and spoken a lot of German. It is a real work-out speaking in a different tongue most of the day and I love it! I get about 60-80% or more what is going on depending on the context. It is a wonderful challenge. Herr Minke taught me a saying: "Geht nichts - nichts geht", which very roughly translates to "nothing's impossible".

Since it is washing day, I thought I would include a picture of our clothes dryer. This is another reality for us: the picture shows the output of three loads of wash from our washing machine - did we mention how blessed we are to have our own washing machine? Each load takes about an hour to 90 minutes, depending upon the setting, so laundry is a somewhat different process than back in the US. Another blessing is the nice balcony we have in which to dry our clothes.

In the Schwarzwald, there is also a tradition that dates back to the 15th century - about the time Columbus set off for the new world - where cleaning laws were enacted to keep the people safe from refuse piling up in the city. Every two weeks, the home owners or renters had to haul all of their nasty stuff outside of the city walls (except during wartime). This tradition has evolved into the so-called Kehrwoche or "weekly cleaning". In apartment buildings, there are usually two apartments on each floor of the stairwell. For the "little clean", the occupants take turns cleaning the stairwell between their landing and the landing below. We clean the windows, sweep, mop and clean the stair rails. Then once each week, the occupants trade off the "big clean" duties - since we have 8 apartments, we get the "big clean" duty about once every eight weeks. This duty includes sweeping and generally cleaning all of the common areas of the building. Since it is done every week, the amount of work is fairly small, but everyone pitches in to make it a better place to live. I think there is a lesson in there for all of us.

I think that I will wait until next time to update you on the game of recycling. We like to think that we recycle in the US, but you will truly be amazed with the next post.

Blessings to all our friends and family who read this posting.

We have arrived and are registered

We just got our Internet going at our apartment (temporary apartment until September); it is 5:16am and can't sleep for the jet lag, so here is my quick update. Please attribute any miss spellings to the early hour.

We arrived after a very smooth flight in Zurich Tuesday afternoon. Our director, Diana del Rio, met us at the airport and did an admirable job keeping us awake until about 10pm the first day. We got to our temporary apartment - a very nice 1st floor (2nd floor in US) apartment with three bedrooms, kitchen, bath and terrace. This apartment will be for the single educators after they arrive and we get moved into our permanent apartment next month.

To an American, the practice of registering with the government is a bit strange. Sure, we do a change of address form at the post office, change utilities and stuff like that. In Germany, our first full day after arriving we were at the Weil am Rhein Rathaus (city hall), registering our presence, pursuing our work Visa paperwork and getting our all important garbage card. The next big item was to open a German bank account. Another small difference is the use of checks in Germany - very seldom does one write a check. We didn't even get a check book... Instead, when we do something that in the states would take a check, it is either done on-line or a direct transfer is made.

Anyway, we also viewed two apartments for rent and will make a choice tomorrow (today actually). We will update very soon with more on the new apartment, the school, shopping, the media center/library (my domain), etc. I will try to get another couple hours sleep before Thursday (we will be working at school today to clear out the main atrium).

Updated 4 Aug: I added a picture from our plane ride. This is Mt. Rainier out of our window just a bit after leaving Portland.

Peace and grace to all who read this entry.