The Cost of Things

Laundry: €6 for a wash and dry
Expensive!

Cell phone plans: I get 200 minutes, 200 text messages and 1 GB of internet data transfer €14.80/30 days - all taxes and fees included and no contract!
Cheap!

Train: Round-trip ticket (as mentioned in previous post) for work €15.40
Expensive!

Cable, Internet, Phone package: Basic cable channels, all-inclusive internet, and all of Germany phone calls: €35/month
Cheap!

Real Estate Agents: This is why it's so difficult to find an apartment. Owners hire real estate agents to rent their apartments and the agents charge 2.38 months of rent + 19% VAT (tax) commission to the renter
EXPENSIVE!

Flights: Round-trip tickets to England for Christmas, €127 with all taxes and fees included. The flight is only 1 hour 15 minutes, but you couldn't find a flight from Chicago to Miami for that unless you took a trip back to the year 2002.

CHEAP!

Used furniture: Special days during the month are allocated for people to put their unwanted goods on the curb with a sign for others to take (for free).
CHEAP!
This was our first free piece of furniture:

This was our recent find - a TV!:

ChocoArt

The old town of Tubingen, our new neighborhood, turned into a carnival-like experience as their famous chocolate festival began. 

Here are some pictures from our town during the festival:

Enjoying the second round (of many) of fruit covered chocolate skewers:

It was hard to pull Damian away from this tent:

The buildings were lite with decorative artwork.

We stopped in a local church because we heard beautiful music and found a small, professional choir preparing for an evening concert.

Moving!

It has been very long since I last posted!
A lot has happened since then so there will be several blog posts this week.

One of the biggest and best events was moving. Well, the physical act of moving was AWFUL, but being in our new place is wonderful. Here is what the weekend looked like in photos...

Saturday - spending the day mesmerized at IKEA:

 A map of the 1st floor (yes, you need a map!)

The play areas for children

The children's movie theater

The warehouse to pick up your goods.

The men's bathroom (Damian took this photo, not me) where there is a baby changing station.

Disposable measuring tape, pencils, paper all for your convenience while shopping.

Damian enjoying the first of our two meals at the store. 

Sunday we moved three loads from an apartment on a hill to an apartment that the U.S.would call a 4th floor (3rd floor in most other countries). Here is a picture of Damian driving the rental van.

My legs were still sore three days after the move. I could barely walk up the stairs from the train station on Monday!

Black Forest Cake Revisited

This past weekend, Damián and I went to a cooking class to learn how to make the famous, delicious Black Forest Cake.

You start with the cake base (you can get this from the bakery here so no need to bake it yourself). You then have to take a long piece of string and slice the cake into three sections, cutting the cake horizontally with the string.

Whip up a LOT of cream and cook cherries on the stove with sugar and pudding.

Then, layer:
1. cake base
2. cherry Schnapps
2. cream
3. cake base
4. cherries
5. cake base
6. more schnapps :)
7. cream
8. decorative toppings

Here is Damián adding the cherry layer.

Here is our final product:

As a class, we ended up making 5 cakes - there was plenty of cake to enjoy (and take home)!

Damián did eat three pieces and then we took a 1/2 a cake home. I don't know how we can manage since we have no room in our refrigerator!

Today was a good day

Damián and I signed a lease for an apartment!

We will be moving to the Old Town part of Tübingen on December 1.
It's in the pedestrian zone of the city, a few minutes from the train, the castle, and the market square. It has two-bedrooms and is 75m^2, plenty of room for visitors!

Here are some pictures from the outside:

We will be living on the 2nd floor (3rd floor according to the U.S. tradition of considering the ground floor to be the first floor) of the greenish looking building. The storefront is a family-owned, third generation, optometry office.  The owner does not speak English - Damián said he wanted ways to practice his German!

Everyday, I wake up and count how many more days we have to stay in this tiny studio where we are now. The move cannot come fast enough!

The Fall Holidays

The Fall Holidays

Halloween is not a big deal here. People were dressed up, but I didn't see anyone trick-or-treating in my neighborhood.  October 31 and November 1 are holidays and all of the schools were closed the entire week for the fall break so most people took the long weekend to travel.

Even though Halloween isn't a big celebration, they do love the pumpkin.
Last weekend, Damian and I went to a restaurant and ordered everything from the "Kürbiskarte" aka "Pumpkin Menu"

Yummy!

Halloween celebration in the U.S. trumps that from here, but Christmas may be a different story.  For several weeks, the small grocery stores have slowly started to fill all imaginable free space with Christmas chocolates and Christmas beer. It's often difficult to get through some aisles.

Here is one aisle at the small local grocery store were I go

All of that is Christmas chocolates and there is more than just this in my little grocery store!

Right behind the Santa Claus chocolates, they sell vats (800g) of Nutella!

Here were two delicious Christmas beers that I tried recently.

Germans are so much healthier than Americans yet they have the 2nd highest beer consumption per capita (Czech Republic is first, U.S.A is 12th, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita) and over double the annual per capita chocolate consumption than the U.S. (11.39 kg for Germany vs. 5.09 kg for U.S. http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/17/who-consumes-the-most-chocolate/) 

In a few weeks, Tübingen will be hosting their famous Chocolate Festival and their Christmas Market. I'll make sure to post pictures!

Running

I have to burn off some calories from all of the beer consumption...so I've been doing some running.

Tübingen is just north (20km) of the Swabian Alps so the area is very hilly.  This is quite a challenge for me, coming from Chicago. You can avoid the mountains, as long as you don't live on one, which, unfortunately, is not the case for us.  

I generally head down to the Neckar River and it's tributaries to run where it is flatter.

Those white objects are swans.

There is a sheep farm along one side of the Österberg where the sheep graze on the mountainside.

 A view of northern Tübingen from the Österberg:

 Residents find any available space to create gardens:

The Black Forest

Damian was on a retreat in the Black Forest last week for work. The retreat ended on Friday so I hopped on the train and met him there to spend the weekend hiking and searching for the Big Bad Wolf, Briar Rose, or Little Red Riding Hood. 

We stayed in a town called Altglashütten.

We took our first hike to Schluchsee, the largest lake in the Black Forest.

The next day we hiked up the Feldberg. 

The farthest mountains in the background of this picture are the Alps:

From the top of the Feldberg, we hiked through various terrain...

and then came upon the Feldsee, a hidden lake between the mountains that used to be a glacier.

After many hours of hiking, we stopped at a hütte (cottages that are setup in the forest with food for hikers and skiiers) and ate Black Forest cake. It was delicious, but very different than the American version. This one had amazingly fresh cherries and whipped cream flavored with a strong liquor.

We didn't find any Brother Grimm's characters, but we did come across this fascinating creature... ;)

Sunday, on our way back home, we stopped at the German Clock Museum.  We had to pay some tribute to the history of clock-making while in the Black Forest - the home to the cuckoo clock.