Oh, wie schön ist Panama -or- Our Trip to Panama



















Here are some pictures from our trip to Panama today, an adventure playground right around the corner from our house. It's a fantastic place, and must be visited often on orders from the boss, Wilhelm. Amazingly, after 10 months living in the United States, we returned to Dresden and asked him if we should visit the animals, meaning Panama. We were already on the street where Panama is located, and he showed us the way to the animals! We are talking about a child who was 2 when we left Dresden and 3 when we returned.























The chicken with the feather pants is one of our favorite animals here.












































































A baby goat! A while ago when I first saw the babies, they were only as big as cats!



















And the horses. Sometimes we see these guys being ridden around the Neustadt. That always makes you do a double take!

There's also other neat stuff here: equipment for climbing, great sandboxes, even a big wooden ship to climb and play on. We wanted to go on the ship, but then some big kids from the school next door got to it first and were being rowdy, so we hung out with the chickens instead. They even have a place for bonfires and offer lots of activities and classes for older kids. It is a nice place where city kids can have a bit of country!

On another note, I was just thrilled today to find out that the German children's book by Janosch that inspired my title is also available in English--the Trip to Panama! I'm ordering it right now! And probably the German version, too.

Has spring sprung?

In the last couple of days, it hasn't been unbearably cold and ugly and gray and snowy, it has actually been above freezing and all the snow and ice is melting away! Just when it felt like winter would never end, maybe it has.



















Here are some little plants coming up in our garden. They are some kind of spring bloomers, we'll see what they are. The lady who lived here before us planted them!
















































Here are a couple of views out of two of our twelve windows. I was motivated by the beautiful weather today to wash the windows, and while doing this, started wondering how many windows we actually have here. We don't live in a typical apartment, it's actually a little one-storey addition onto a freestanding house, not a rowhouse like across the street. It's more like a little house all our own than an apartment. Here we have 50% more windows in this place than in our old place, which was 25% larger.



















This may look like a little junkyard, but it is actually a part of the property we are renting. It doesn't look like much now, but we are going to put a greenhouse on it! It's right outside one of our living room windows.
























Here is our terrace/garden, also not typical for apartments in our neighborhood. We have a separate entrance from the rest of the people living in our house, which is neat. It is great not only for our famous grill parties, but also as an open air playpen for the kids and bunnies!



















Speaking of the buns, here is their habitat. This photo was taken just after it was built in September. This view of the garden is basically just a shot in the opposite direction from the one above.



















Here's a shot of Knuddelhase and Cream last fall, when they were just wee babes...



















...and today, all chunky with their thick winter coats.











































These are two of the three windows that I didn't wash today...I ran out of steam before getting to the kids' room. The car window and the Lorax window are more or less finished, but I still need to make pictures for the third window in the kids' room. The plan is for the last one to be a Miffy window, whenever I get around to it.

The helicopters.

Today is the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden at the end of World War 2. This is a big anniversary, drawing Neonazis and their opponents right smack into the middle of the city and into my neighborhood. The Neonazis wanted to march, but according to news reports, their opponents have successfully blocked them with a sit-in as well as blockades made of flaming trash cans. They blocked the train tracks, the tram lines, everything. The police didn't make them move to protect the Neonazis constitutional right to have their march or demonstration or whatever they had planned. Cool!

For pictures, go here and click the arrows on the right to go through the gallery.

Or you can also go here, and see a couple more pictures. The top photo with "Lola ich liebe dich" is right on the corner of my old street. Glad I don't live there any more!

Although it makes me pretty happy that the anti-fascists have blocked the Nazis, and it's all nice and warm and fuzzy that 15000 people showed up in the city center to form a human chain of remembrance, I am freaking sick of all the police helicopters flying over surveying the situation. They started yesterday evening, and have been flying over all day. It's worse than the stupid blimp that flew over every evening before the new mall opened up in September.

The Zoo

I have heard talk of how much Dresden has changed lately, and I guess when you are thinking about the new malls, the new bridge that is getting finished and is just waiting to be put onto the Elbe, new supermarkets, fixed streets, and that sort of stuff, a lot has happened. My favorite change, though, has to be the addition of giraffes at the zoo.
































































The giraffe house was under construction the last time we visited the zoo, and now it is completed. I have to admit, I have never been such a fan of giraffes. I had nothing against them, but I have always had more of an affinity to monkeys and big cats. However, on our first trip to the zoo this year, Wilhelm was completely enthused by the giraffes. We went again yesterday, and the giraffe house was again his main focus. Maybe it's because the giraffes are so tall and graceful, maybe it's because they seem quite peaceful, almost floating around on their long legs with their long necks and funny heads on top. On a trip to the Munich zoo when Wilhelm was just one and a half, we were looking at the lions behind their glass wall, and the male lion stood up and approached Wilhelm, in his eyes probably a tender little morsel, behind the glass. Even though the lion wasn't moving quickly, and certainly couldn't get him, Wilhelm screamed, ran to me, and wanted nothing to do with any lions. He recognized that this was an interested carnivore. Perhaps he likes the giraffes because they don't want to eat him.
























The mandrills. I like these goofy apes, especially the baby with it's big, round eyes and crazed expression.



















"Achtung, achtung, er guckt!" (Attention, attention, he's looking!) This is what Wilhelm said when this silly bird popped his head up over the wall. This bird seems to have some psychological damage from living in the zoo. It's main occupation is to run back and forth behind this wall, popping its head up from time to time. Especially funny is when the viewer is eating something, because then it gets very interested, and almost frantic. Wilhelm had a tofu wiener in his hand, and the bird sprinted over to him, much to Wilhelm's amusement, and started stretching its head over the wall. Wilhelm is a bright boy though, laughed at the bird and made a quick step back.

Dresden-Neustadt

This is the place I called home for 5 1/2 years, and now again after a 10 month hiatus in Michigan. Michigan is my home too, it's the place where I come from, but it's Dresden that has grabbed me and isn't letting me go any time soon. I can't seem to break free of this place, and don't really want to anyway. So for the people who haven't been lucky enough to visit us here, or those who have and want to see it again, here's a bit of the Neustadt for you.


















Here's a view out over part of the Neustadt from the tower of the Martin Luther Church.
























That's one of my very favorite walls. It's on Böhmische Strasse by the playground.



















Blast from the past! This was in 2004, when people were already protesting the possible construction of a parking garage on this site. Not to mention the cobblestones hadn't been removed yet and so Kamenzer Strasse was a miserable bumpy mess for anybody on a bike (or in a car). A while later, that little flat building was demolished, creating an empty lot where a bunch of people started to camp out, protesting whatever would be later built there. In 2008/2009, while we were gone, the new supermarket/preschool/parking garage/apartment house was finished on this site. We now live just around the corner from here, and I am so happy to have a supermarket there, this part of the neighborhood really lacked in shopping opportunities when I lived on Prießnitzstraße, so we had to haul heavy backpacks full of groceries and sacks of kitty litter from the Königsbrücker Str. Not fun.


















Yet another of my favorite walls. This one is on Pulsnitzer Str. and this was when it was still fresh and new. Some jerks have grafittied it now. I think grafitti can be pleasing too, but why do it on a facade as nice as this? Why not pick a boring wall from any of the hundreds of others?



















Pretty much at the heart of the Neustadt, and the heart of the BRN--the Bunte Republik Neustadt, a festival held at the end of each June here.


















Parker Louis! This guy has a giant empire of pay parking lots in the Neustadt, and he is a much loathed figure, because he patrols his parking lots and photographs your car if you have not purchased a parking ticket. Then he fines you. But he has to be able to prove who was actually driving the car when it had been parked, otherwise he can't just force the car owner to pay a fine. He's been sued over this a number of times.


















"Against exorbitant rent and complete refurbishment...noise and dirt for all"
You can figure out the yuppie part.
This neighborhood used to be occupied in large part by squatters and artists and punks around the time of reunification (1990), but has now become well-known as a "hip part of town" with lots of trendy bars, good restaurants and clubs, and interesting shops, driving rent prices up and a lot of the artists and punks out. The artists and punks strike back.

Look at all those flowers!











































I just took the last of these flowers to the compost pile today...these were all flowers I got for my birthday a couple weeks ago. I don't even want to talk about how old I am, but from the flowers you can see it was a big one. Thanks to everyone for the beautiful flowers! I think the only time I got more flowers than for this birthday was when Wilhelm was born!


















In other news, I have been busy. Inspired by way too expensive mobile lamps at the store, I decided to make this cheap-o 5 Euro lamp into something cool. I decided on planets, and bought a bunch of styrofoam balls last week, painted them up, jabbed in some wire and added some beads, and voila! The kids have a neat planet lamp!
























I was also knitting for a while, but for some reason, I have sort of lost my desire to do this. This was the first hat I made for Friedrich. I also made one for Wilhelm with the same colors, but with earflaps, but it turned out a bit small, and I can't find the picture of it. It will be okay though when it is not so cold outside, but for now he needs a seriously insulated hat because it is cold here!

Holy ice, Batman!

Being away for almost a year, I forgot how dangerous city life in the winter can be. I think this year is extreme, though. We got loads of snow that stuck, it built up on roofs, thawed a bit and refroze, creating giant, scary icicles.


















Thanks to the sz-online for that picture. These giant icicles are not in Dresden, but I have certainly seen many like that on my street and in my neighborhood. The really fun part is that it has been above freezing for the last couple of days, loosening and ultimately freeing these giant icicles, ice chunks, and snowpiles from 5 stories above the sidewalk so that they come crashing down. Here's what happens:

















Thanks again to the sz-online for that photo. This is right in my neighborhood. I have seen several places where these giant chunks are lying on the sidewalk, but fortunately have not been under any falling chunks because I have taken to walking on the street, and will continue to do so until all ice is gone. I've seen ice crashing down right across the street, out my window, while on the way to the bakery today, and amazingly and fortunately, no people have been injured so far. That is amazing. Many cars have suffered though. Luckily we have a parking spot between 2 houses with little or no ice and snow, so no "roof avalanches" should come crashing down on our car.
Yesterday evening I went out with a friend, and as we were saying goodbye outside before heading home, we heard a sound sort of like scary sliding ice above our heads, we jumped and looked up and saw someone rolling down their shutters. We had a good laugh and then we heard the sound again, resulting in another jump and look up, again to realize that it was just the shutters. It seems like someone was having a fun time playing "Jump, foreigner, jump!"

I almost forgot...




















2010 is off to a darn good start...guess who will be playing in Dresden in June??? AC/DC!!!
Guess who has tickets? We do!!!

Happy New Year!

We saw this on our new year's day tour of the destruction in Dresden-Neustadt.



















It seems like good advice.
It seems there was little destruction this new year. In earlier days, we always saw broken windows and damage to cars, this year not even the parking ticket machines were destroyed. This morning we just saw some used fireworks and broken bottles on the streets, but nothing too wild. Not even my former landlord was outside one of the slum houses in his empire repairing damage to his house by disgruntled tenants or feverishly cleaning his sidewalk. Boring new year.

But that is probably fine. Here is a little 2009 of mine in review:

-a baby on the way
-quit my job
-another transatlantic move
-waiting and waiting and waiting to find the right place to live
-got 2 bunnies before we even had a place to live
-we found it! It's great, with a garden all our own and space for a bunny paradise!
-Friedrich arrived, and both of us remained completely unscathed, as opposed to Wilhelm's birth
-Wilhelm started Kindergarten!
-a trip to Gran Canaria to top it all off

There's certainly more, but that's the most important stuff, or so it seems to me at the moment.
That probably doesn't sound bad, but it was a terribly stressful year. This year has got to be better.

December 25, 2009

Christmas Sausage Party

Merry Christmas from Gran Canaria! We arrived here last Friday after a long drive from Dresden to Frankfurt first in a blizzard, then just in the middle of the night to catch our early flight. We flew on a scary old plane which didn’t sound so good on take off and had a rough landing (the first sign of scariness were the ashtrays in the armrests), but we made it, and hope to fly on a differentplane back.

It’s been an interesting stay, though slightly disappointing. We’ve probably already visited the best 2 Canary Islands, at least for our taste, so we are a bit spoiled: somehow Tenerife and La Gomera

have more character and friendlier inhabitants than Gran Canaria. Anyway, it hasn’t been boring, especially not today. But let’s start at the beginning.

Hooray, palm trees and mountains!

Oh no, el nublo and crazy streets!

We started by exploring the island a bit, with our first goal being El Roque Nublo. This is a cliff in the center of the island that is often enshrouded in fog, as the name says. As luck would have it, it was also rainy and foggy and we saw nothing of El Roque Nublo but its

mantle of fog. The drive was nice, though, as you can see.

I got to see my favorite Christmas decorations in the whole world (at least in the parts I've seen so far). These seem to be loved in each Canary Island we have visited, the Santas and three wise men who seem to be breaking

into many apartments in every town. As a child I always wondered how Santa got into your house if you didn't have a fireplace, or if there was a fire going, since we heated with a woodstove.

We ventured on to Playa del Ingles, a tourist town even worse than neighboring Maspalomas, where our dingy bungalow with a mean cleaning lady who throws things and curses is. From there we had a good view of the Maspalomas dunes and walked along the beach for a while.

There’s Hooters here too! For the uninitiated, Hooters is a bar with crappy food that is famous for the large breasts and skimpy clothing of its waitresses. The Hooters in Bay City, Michigan, has larger-breasted and skimpier-clothed waitresses than that in Playa del Ingles, Gran Canaria, so we didn’t eat there in Gran Canaria.

We didn’t buy this bread, since there are some fantastic baguettes (but a massive lack of pan dulce, delicious

sweet bread which you can get in La Gomera, and which I had been looking forward to) available here, but I do love the name and the packaging. I wonder if they serve the burgers at Hooters on these buns...

Did President Obama decide not to send the inmates from the closed (or closing?) Guantanamo Bay prison to Illinois, but to sell them to Spain to be employed at this restaurant?

We drove to the north of the island by following the road around the west side of the island from

Maspalomas. On the way we saw lots of little waterfalls created by the thunderstorm the night before.

We also saw another result of the rainstorm: fallen rocks! That’s why there are signs telling you not to drive on certain streets in the rain.

Here’s the view from one of the most beautiful places on the island according to our guidebook: Mirador del Balcon. It was pretty nice, and there was a funny guy selling cake in the parking lot who yelled at everybody for parking the wrong way.

On the way we even did something cultural, we visited some caves where the early Canarians lived. These were pretty neat, unfortunately you can’t go into them as our outdated tour seemed to imply.

The last 2 days we’ve been out walking in the Maspalomas dunes. They are quite beautiful, rolling dunes, with a mix of black and light sand, and we had a fun time running around in them. But it got pretty interesting at the end of our walk today, when we wound up in the cruising area of the dunes, which is the area with lots of brushy plants. We were surrounded by naked men, all looking for love! We had read that there were meeting points for men somewhere in the dunes, but were surprised to stumble right into the middle of it (it's not several meeting points, but one huge area) and while trying to figure out which direction to go, to be suddenly and silently surrounded. We weren't alone, there was a couple jogging who jogged into the bushes and right back out... But it was clear to the guys that we (and the other clothed tourists) were there for a different reason, so we were left alone.

A good blog

I just found a funny blog, these kind people commented on Remember White Rabbit:

http://cursesandblast.blogspot.com/

Scroll down to June 30, 2009 and read "German words for English Eyes" and you wil see why I was laughing so hard. Enjoy!

God Bless America! (and my German health insurance)

I just got my new travel health insurance card in the mail the other day, and while I was just now sorting out my mail and junk on my table from the week, I read the back of the insurance card. Here's what it says:

"Please inform our emergency service bef0re any hospital visits. This way you can avoid having to pay in advance. Especially in the USA it can occur that your credit card limit is exceeded."

Ha! It's not about having your hospital visit or ambulance ride pre-approved (good luck with that after you've been in a car wreck, for example) as you do on many American health insurance plans. The insurance company is actually warning you that you might have to pay some money out of pocket in a foreign country if you don't let them know about your treatment in advance. I like that kind of insurance! They are concerned about my finances, not just their own!

I live in a madhouse

I am becoming more and more convinced that we have completely lost our minds every day. What got me started thinking this was the birth of my son Friedrich, or more exactly, the way he views the world. He was born with wrinkles between his eyebrows, and he always looks very skeptical. I am sure he could hear through the womb that he was on his way to a darn crazy place, and once he got here, it was crazier than he had expected. Not only do I have a five week old who views the world with great skepticism, but I have a three and a half year old who sings the song "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails while sitting on the toilet. This evening while getting him ready for bed, I walked into the bathroom, and there he sat, singing "Hurt". He has very advanced musical taste. Actually, he listens to the version of "Hurt" sung by Johnny Cash, and can also sing other Johnny Cash tunes, as well as various Beatles hits, songs by Belle and Sebastian, AC/DC, Ton Loc, Coolio and Helge Schneider. This in addition to memorizing five Dr. Seuss books, just about every children's song he has ever heard and most of his picture books. So you see, he doesn't just hear grown up music all the time. I can't even imagine what kinds of fun times we are going to have with these two boys in about 10 or 12 years!

Funny Mistakes

Being a language teacher, and someone who is interested in language anyway, you have an ear for funny language mistakes that may have double meanings. I collect these mistakes. I heard a good one a while ago, and here it is.

An acquaintance was shopping on American eBay, and found an interesting auction. The sellers had translated the sentence "We ship worldwide" into German as "Wir schiffen uns in die ganze Welt ein". My German readers are probably peeing their pants themselves right now, because what this seller actually said in German was not related to shipping, even though the individual words sound like it, but they really said "We pee our pants in the whole world". Even if they didn't get a good deal, the German-speaking shoppers looking at this auction will get a good laugh for free!

Massive lack of updates

I can't believe it, this is the first time in the life of this blog that I posted nothing for one entire month. October 2009 was a blog-free month! Yet it was a pretty good month. The first two weeks were rather taxing, as I was waiting for my baby to come, and after he didn't come for 10 days after his due date, the hospital took some measures to speed him up. My second son Friedrich was born on October 15! So I have been busy with other things, blog writing wasn't on the top of my list.

1083 McKimmy















Look at that, the house I lived in last year is up for sale! Not a bad place, on the water, and in a nice neighborhood with nice neighbors (mostly), but I sure don't want to buy it! I think my favorite memory of that place is when the owners came to get the keys from us and the car was full to the roof with our belongings and we were about to head out on our road trip to New York to catch the plane back to Germany.
It's always funny when you've lived somewhere, and then it's for rent or sale again, and someone new moves in. When I see these places in Dresden, I always wonder "who is living in my place?", especially with my last big apartment. Even though I have a nice place now, I feel I betrayed my old place, with its grand hallway and big rooms, high ceilings and antique doors, by leaving for the new world last year.
Even though I don't feel any remorse for leaving McKimmy Drive, or as if I have betrayed that house (more like it betrayed me for stealing 10 months of my life with its dark walls and loud furnace), let's reminisce a little about the good times there. There were good times? Well, amusing times at least.

The bunnies
One of our favorite, and only, pastimes on McKimmy Drive was to go down the street to the west and view the bunnies. These were not just any bunnies, but bunnies escaped or set free from someone's bunny farm on the next street. They were precious dwarf rabbits, black, spotted, brown, cream, steel gray, and they had lots of precious bunny babies starting in early spring. The flip side of this coin, however, is that the neighbors loathed these bunnies. Often one would disappear, and we would hear sinister laughter and things like "Got 'im!" after a gunshot. The sad end of another bunny's life.

Crazy Dave
One evening we went to visit the bunnies, and were accosted on the way home by whom we later dubbed "Crazy Dave". Darkness was beginning to fall, and Crazy Dave ran out to the street and started talking nonstop to us in his drunken slur. He wanted to know everything about us, because he and his parents-in-law had been observing us for months, as neighbors will. He also told us all the details about his "f)§/king crazy" parents-in-law and his "beautiful" wife. Then he proceeded to take my husband to the barn on one side of the street to the men, who were drinking hard liquor and talking about cars or something, and me to the other side of the street to the house, where the women were having a party, because I "had to meet them". What kind of party were they having on this Friday night in rural Michigan? A sex toy party. Come to find out, Crazy Dave's "f)§/%king crazy" mother-in-law was practically a colleague of mine, working in the same school district. Oh boy oh boy oh boy.

Fish bread
While living in this house, we always saved old bread to feed to the fish in the pond across the street or in the lake. These bags of bread deposited in various places around the house came to be known as fish bread, and Wilhelm would seek them out, and we would find him gnawing on hard chunks of bread at various times of day. When asked if he would prefer some fresh bread, he would always refuse, insisting on eating the stale fish bread. Fish bread has come to be one of his favorite snacks, and is best when it is aged at least a few days so it is nice and hard.

Trailer Park Boys
It was during our time on McKimmy Drive that we first heard of the show Trailer Park Boys from Canada. We instantly became obsessed, got the movie and all episodes of the show, and watched them from start to finish a number of times. In a lot of ways, this show reminded us of our current situation, and for added entertainment value, we would sometimes go drive through Lakeview Village, Beaverton's trailer park. Watching this show was at least for me a way of forgetting that I had to go to work the next day, and a way of forgetting everything, just switching off and forgetting. I'm glad I don't need that show now any more, and that I can deal with reality where I am now much better.

And with that, I wish 1083 McKimmy Drive all the best with its new tenants or owners or whatever, and may I give them one piece of advice: tear the place down, landscape and build something new!

The brothel at the end of my street

Well, okay, to be honest, there is not a brothel actually on the street that I live on (as far as I know...) but there is one opening up at the end of the street you look down from my front windows. Heh heh heh.
The responsible, grown up, parent of (almost) 2 children part of me says "What's happening to the neighborhood??" And the other ridiculous, silly part of me is sort of thrilled to live so close to a brothel. Well, "massage parlor and escort service" is technically what it's called.
The thing that's really hilarious about the whole grand brothel opening is that it seems it is being done to spite someone. You see, the now brothel owner bought this little house and garden between a row house and some storage garages, fixed it up and rented out the front part of his garden as parking places to make some money. He built his parking places a bit too big, though, and crossed the property line to the property belonging to the garage owners. Garage owners tore out his paving stones and also decided to tear down the garages to build a new row house, a shicky-mickey passive house or low energy house. Little house owner's revenge on passive house builders? Open a brothel. According to inside sources, this guy has basically said screw those people building their passive house, we'll see how high the rent for those apartments is with a brothel next door! He has decided not to move into his little house, but has already put up a sign for "Candy's Massage Parlor and Escort Service". In German, of course. I love it.
In other brothel news, I heard a pretty funny story. Someone I know knows someone in the Czech Republic who teaches the ladies of the night at a brothel there English. First of all, the idea of an English class for prostitutes is just fantastic. But that's not even the funny part. This brothel in the Czech Republic is making a killing one day a week by offering men free or reduced admission (I can't remember which), as long as they sign a waiver that any and all acts that they commit while in said brothel may be broadcast on the internet.