berlin!

while we were in zurich, i got several phone calls about jobs that i had applied to, so we decided to take a detour on our way back to solingen and stay overnight in berlin, so i could go to some interviews. we stayed in a really clean and fairly cheap hotel/hostel called A&O, which had free breakfast. it was fairly quiet and the room was nice, although the elevator didn't work past the 6th floor. it wasn't too far from downtown (we managed to walk to the middle of the city that night in about 40 minutes).

altogether, i had three interviews. the first was in a real estate financing office as a bilingual secretary/project manager, and although the people in the office were super nice, it was a little over my head. i thought i did pretty well until they asked me to translate some real estate documents which i didn't even really understand in english. alas. it seemed like it would have been really well-paying but sort of boring, so i wasn't too disappointed when i got an email yesterday saying that they picked someone else. the second interview was with a tutoring school, and it was pretty cool. i liked the school and the lady who runs it, and she offered me a freelance contract. the only problem is that they don't issue contracts for visas, but it would be great as a part time side job. the last interview was with a language school- it was supposed to be for a receptionist position but she got excited that i had so much teaching experience. i didn't do super well on the grammar questions, mostly because i don't really know the names of grammar tenses: that's not something we focus on when teaching public school ESL. still, she wants me to come back for a second interview (after i study grammar tense terminology) next week. that school does help with visa paperwork, which is cool.
i have two more interviews next week as well- one with a kindersprachschule, a language school for kids, and one as an english-speaking callcenter agent. the call center thing isn't super exciting, but i really want to stay, and i am pretty suer that that job will give me a letter to complete my visa paperwork, so i guess we'll go back to berlin again- i'm hoping that after this, maybe i'll have a job. . .that night we went to a really neat thai/viet restaurant and sat in these excellent chairs. it was really fun, even though the waitress spoke practically no german and just a tiny bit of english. she got excited when i tried out my two sentences of vietnamese! i told her that i want to visit vietnam someday and she thought that was really cool. i hear that it's such a beautiful country.

that night we took a night train back to solingen- the earlier evening trains had long layovers and we thought this one would be nicer, because it was a much shorter trip, even though it left at 12:23 pm. the unfortunate part is that we didn't know that you need reservations for night trains, so we had to pay on the train (we didn't find this out until we were about to board! it was crazy). there were two polish or maybe russian or maybe italian businesslooking guys who lost their tickets, so we all looked together for the onboard ticketman. the train employee selling tickets was nice, and he found us a sleeper car by ourselves. i've never slept on the train before- it was excellent. and cozy. we got back at about seven in the morning, took the bus home, let ourselves in, and went to sleep. anna, fred & regine are on vacation in sardenia for fall break, and won't be back until the 11th, so we're watching the house for them.

xoxo!!!

aha! schlossburg, zurich

many things have happened since i last wrote something here.

to begin with, i've posted all of our pictures in this web gallery collection, so that you can have a more um whole & rounded view of our complete experience. i'll keep posting a few pictures here on this page, but it takes forever and i can only do a few on each post.

the last thing i wrote about was going to Köln, i think. the next weekend julie & johannes came to visit, which was very neat: they went on the norway trip several years ago and i really like them. johannes brought his very large dog over, which was awesome: i wanted a very large dog, but phil says i don't walk fast enough. apparently this is important if you want to have a very large dog. anna came home for the weekend again, which was very cool. she doesn't live very far away, so she comes back often, and regine is helping her with her master's thesis, which she has finally finished & turned in to be printed (!!!).



saturday we went to schlossburg, which is the local castle. (local castle!). there were lots of people dressed up like it was the middle ages doing some kinds of demonstrations, which was neat. the castle has a museum and it is also used for events (dinners, luncheons, charity stuff, business stuff). because it has practically always been in use, it has a lot of renovations and modern adaptations, but it has a really interesting collection of old stuff from all around solingen. the awesomest part is that it has a skilift (seilbahn!) that you can take up to the top (it is on a hill). this is also the scary part.




that tuesday we left for zurich. we decided to get eurorail passes after we started looking online at train tickets (because passes are actually cheaper if you plan to do a lot of traveling & you don't want to book tickets weeks in advance), and therefore had to wait til the fedex man delivered them. the city is beautiful! phil was super excited about sarah's school, which is all hightech and has lots of cuttingedge research. sarah and rene have a very cute apartment. they're only a few tram stops from downtown zurich, and it was super easy to get around the city.

zurich is very clean. we mostly took only the trams, which are like streetcars, i suppose (i'm not sure what the english word for it is, but they run on tracks in the road and they are connected via a ladder-looking thing to electric cables suspended above the streets).

the first day we were there, these girls stopped me on the street and talked to me in some weird language, so i asked them if they spoke german, which seemed to puzzle them. they were actually speaking swiss german, which i cannot understand at all. (i thought it was czech; i told rene and sarah this and they laughed so incredibly hard: apparently the swiss really dislike when you ask them to speak german, because they think they are speaking german). anyway, they turned out to be from a local free daily publication and they wanted to take my picture to put in their style section! it was really funny; they asked me all these weird questions about what stores i got my clothes in (thrift stores? katie's closet? i don't really remember?) and how much they cost. i'm not really sure when i will be in the paper. unforunately, that means rene has to read blick, which is not exactly top-notch literature. i'll keep everyone posted, if i ever show up.

we went to some really interesting museums in zurich, including the swiss national museum and the kunsthalle, which has a lot of very fantastic and international art. we got a 72 hour pass for all transportation & museums, so we took this really beautiful (although cold) boat tour on lake zurich, which was stunning. this nice but crazy old guy kept talking to us in the swiss dialect (switzerdeutsch?!) i think he was trying to tell us what to take pictures of. or what we were looking at. it was hard to tell.



altogether, it was buena! i have a lot more to write but i think i'll put that in a different post, for convience. xoxo!

schokolade! gram-baking! arbeitslosigkeit!

SO: i am continuing on the great jobsearch with some small successes; mostly everything is sort of hovering around presently: i have sent out a great number of applications and i have received several email-interview forms and i have a telefon interview next week. at this point i'm applying for everything: i would prefer an english-teacher job but what i need Most is an employment-visa and for that i need a letter from an employer. so.



sunday was anna's birthday! there was a really lovely party with aunts and uncles and cousins, etc. and cakes!

i baked some of them. . . with the metric system!! it's very efficient. you put the mixing bowl on a scale and add the ingredients by weight: 200 grams flour, 150 grams sugar, etc. and set the scale back to zero after each addition. you don't even have to wash any measuring devices!




1. sadly: sarah and anna left on monday (anna to munster, sarah to zurich). 2. buena: we will probably go to zurich on the 22nd, which is also a monday, to visit her for a few days! and anna lives much closer to us and can therefore come home on the weekends, which she does often to work on her master's thesis.




i can't remember ever being in zurich before (i was in switzerland once, i think, with the ef tour) and it's allegedly a very beautiful city although i'll probably not be able to understand anyone because they speak a very strange sort of german there.


yesterday phil & i took the train to Köln, which was very nice. it has a very intense history: the city was founded by the romans in the year 38 BC and is therefore one of the oldest german cities. i've been there before with sarah & etc. (it's very close to solingen); however, phil has not, and so we had a sort of mostlyuntouristy tourist-day. [it is important to take breaks in one's greater work, such as job-finding].


we went to midday prayer at the Kölner Dom & met a very interesting polish lady who invited us to visit her in poland (i think she thought i was polish, at first), and of course climbed the Dom tower. . .

and then we went to the very important: CHOCOLATE MUSEUM!!!

it was wonderful.

well. it's time to eat. xoxo!

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kitchens and other information.

news: something i have only just learned: in germany apartments are typically rented without kitchens. thatistosay that when you rent the apartment, it has kitchen connections but no kitchen appliances connected to the kitchen. strange.

however: according to sarah, it is becoming more and more common to rent apartments with kitchens in, which is less immediately frightening. i can’t really understand how this is logical or efficient. i suppose thisway one avoids the sad lonely unbeautiful kitchenpieces that come with old apartments, but it seems like it might add some slight expenses onto our grand project (moving to berlin)

sarah and anna arrived today via zug! (train). it was suddenly very bright and full and noisy here: a sudden diversion. it has been sort of as though something was missing without them. thisevening we went to a really interesting streetcarnival that was sort of like a cross between a fair and a fleamarket, and i got really nice sunglasses. anna also. we look very awesome and also very fantastic. (see picture).

phil became a professional street performer: we came out of the shop and saw him sitting on the sidewalk playing his newly acquired harmonica-flute-device and it was altogether and immediately hilarious and good. i feel better about berlin now that at least one of us has some sort of professional income. sarah bought this romertopf and will probably make quasidelicious foods full of dead animals inside of it.

as of this moment: still no job, but as this is only the end of my first week and really the end of only a few days of semiserious looking, i suppose it is mostly ok. being myself i am getting somewhat panicky regarding nonjob status: i would really like one, really. . . i have, however, great hopes. also, i’ve been realizing lately how i do really want to go back to school. practically everyone i know is studying or about to be studying for more important degrees and i feel a sort of sadness because i think i would do so much better thistime: i mean to say that having lived outside of school for awhile, i would appreciate it somewhat more. and i think it would be fun. maybe nextyear. i think. at the moment it’s sort of financially unfeasible, especially since phil has to go to languageschool to stay legal and it’s not exactly cheap.

plans for the immediate future: we might be traveling to berlin at some point over the next few days to stay with a friend of sarah’s and to jobsearch/etc. in person, which i suppose will probably be an adventure. also i think we might try to go to bohn to the german history museum for the day so that phil can feel more informed. it’s very interesting to see german history from a nonamerican perspective.

that is mostly all i can think of.

airplanes! & pre-airplanes!

ahoy!

the most important thing, i suppose, is that i (we) are finally here: that is, in germany (for awhile i was beginning to think i'd never make it!) and everything is 100% buena/gut/good.

we arrived in duesseldorf on sunday at approximately seven in the morning (german time) after a really fantastic First Class flight (really!!! thanks to dana; it was wholly fantastic). anna met us at the airport. we're staying with fred and regina (sarah's parents) and hopefully we'll get to see sarah (and meet boyfriend rene) this weekend (they currently live and study in zurich, switzerland). everyone is so wonderful! there was a small amount of terrible jet-lag (in that i thought i might temporarily die from exhaustion) but it was not very long and i seem to have mostly recovered.

we spent a little bit of time roaming around the city- people can actually understand me (and i can understand them!) so my german is ok although still a little bit dusty from disuse: i anticipate great improval over the next few weeks. phil is making great progress. he can say whole sentences! we hope to visit schlossburg in the next few days although mostly i suppose we will be focusing on plans for the future:

before we left america, we made a sort of farewell-tour through the southeast: attached are a few photos of some of the people we visited (for the curious!). i am making a serious effort to take more pictures in the future.


first stop: we visited phil's cousins in atlanta: this is a photo of phil & trisha in the (very lovely) parkinglot.

our next stop was tampa, florida, where we visited my awesome grandparents and my very young and pretty cousin kathy: unfortunately i didn't take any pictures. alas. (this does not mean they aren't still the best ever!)


after tampa we visited venice, florida,
the alleged shark tooth capital of the world.
we found so many sharkteeth!
phil counted around 500 teeth! it was strenuous
but important activity.







we then drove across to west palm beach & visited phil's grandmother nancy, aunt & uncle (sandy & george), and his great-grandmother.






our last stop before returning to
raleigh was outside of charleston,
where we visited phil's friends
rich & ginger.

everyone was so very nice!
it was an excellent predeparture
adventure. many thankyous to everyone.




so: i anticipate further adventures in the future and so will post more interesting informations as they occur. avast!

now i should probably go back to writing german resumes, which is much more difficult than american resumewriting. also very strange: one has to include things like birthdate, family status (ie single, married, number of children) and a photo! apparently they can't use them to discriminate but it seems very odd coming from america where everyone takes such great steps to avoid even the idea of discrimination in the workplace. i have a few ideas so far and will keep everyone updated on my success. we are mostly focusing on finding ways to stay here legally, which will probably involve phil enrolling in some kind of school/university/language course and me getting a job teaching english: i anticipate all the success, however, as we have lots of help from fred & regina and some friends that are helping us with all the important details.

i miss everyone lots (hugs to velocirex!) bis spater, tschuess! xoxo. etc.