10 Years

The day before we were set to leave Germany, the German portion of the company that Darren works for (Climax Portable Machine Tools) celebrated its 10-year anniversary. They had a big party, opening its doors to customers, vendors, board members and employee families and invited them to come celebrate in an open house with live music, dancing, a golf simulator, free food, and lots of free beverages of all sorts. They did a great job in setting up for the event and completely transformed the warehouse portion of the business into a nice place for a party.

The night before, Mikayla and I joined Darren, people from the German portion of the company, people from the USA portion of the company that had flown in, and some of the board members for dinner at a nice steak house in Düren. It was wonderful food and fun to meet some more of the people that Darren works with.

On Thursday, the day of the open house, I spent the morning trying to clean up the apartment some, do a little packing, and get things ready to leave the next day. We needed to be in Düren, though, at a little after noon so that we could join some of the board members for a tour of Düren. The tour lasted for a few hours and included a meeting with the deputy mayor (the mayor was in Berlin that day), a tour through some of the important buildings of the city by one of the directors of the city, a tour through a paper museum (that is one of the major industries of the city), and a tour through a moated castle near the city (I hadn't known it was there). It was nice to learn a bit more about the city we had been living by and working in, even though a lot of the information came on the last day we were there. I spent much of the tour walking around with Mikayla since she wasn't really up for sitting through meetings, but I still learned a lot.

The party

Part of the photoboard display that was set up. This picture shows the people who work in the German portion of the company, and Darren's coworkers for the time he was here.

Yes, it is an engineering company

Mikayla as she wandered around City Hall while the meeting with the deputy mayor was taking place. She had fun peering over the railing to the floor below.

It was a little hard to say goodbye at the end of the day, even though we knew that we needed to head back to Embken and finish packing and getting the apartment ready to leave. Darren really enjoyed working with all the people here and we appreciated how much they reached out to us and made us feel welcome in a foreign land. We hope that we can see them again in the future.

Trip to Aachen

On the second weekend we were here, the first after Darren started work, his some of his coworkers invited us to go to Aachen with them. At first the outing was supposed to be with his coworker Waldemar and his wife and their two daughters, the youngest of which is the same age as Mikayla. They had told us of a park near Aachen that they thought would be fun for the girls, and then we were going to head to dinner. However, when we woke up on that Saturday morning, it was raining pretty heavily and was not predicted to get much better throughout the day. Because of the weather the park plans were abandoned and we decided to just head to Aachen and dinner there.

We got a later start than we had originally planned since Mikayla slept late and actually got a good nap and we didn’t want to wake her up. Then we headed to pick up Alexandra near Düren, where Darren works. She is from Warsaw, Poland, and is interning at the company for a month. She had been pretty bored since coming to Germany since she had come alone and didn’t have anyone near her own age in the company to do things with in the evenings. We also speak more German than she does, which is saying quite a bit. She sounded pretty glad to be able to get out and do something with us.

It took us quite awhile to get to the little town that Alexandra’s hotel was in because we got lost a few times. At one point we were driving along a little rutted dirt road alongside the railroad tracks, trying to follow what we thought were the signs to the town. We ended up having to turn around before our car high-centered on the weeds and mounded dirt in the middle of the road. We had kept on the road originally because it looked like on the map that it came out at the right place, but we couldn’t keep going and had to back track a ways to get on a more main road before we could get to her hotel and pick Alexandra up.

Alexandra

And then we were off on the autobahn to Aachen. The area between Aachen and Düren does have a speed limit posted (some areas do not), so we weren’t able to go as fast as we had heard about, but we were able to go faster than we usually drive back home. There was some confusion as to which gas station, exactly, we were supposed to meet Waldemar and his wife at, but we did finally meet up with him, although much later than we had originally said we would meet. They ended up leaving their two daughters at home with a babysitter since we weren’t going to the park. It would have been fun to meet them, but we understood that it is a lot easier to get out and do things if you do not have two young kids in tow.

Once we got to Aachen, we toured around the old part of the city. They bought us a traditional Aachen pastry called Printen, which is a type of chewy gingerbread made into large bars. We had Printen with chocolate, Printen with nuts, Printen with glaze. It was very yummy. We did a little shopping and looked at the cathedral there. It is much smaller than the one in Cologne, but it is much more ornate inside. The stained glass in the windows was amazing. We don’t have any pictures of this trip, since we had left our camera in the car and didn’t notice until we were fairly far away. We hope to get back to Aachen at some point on this trip so we can post some pictures.

After shopping for a bit, we met two more of Darren’s coworkers, Olaf (who had picked us up from the airport) and Andreas, and their girlfriends, Britte and Katherine, for dinner. The place we ate was in a very old and beautiful building, and they had some very good traditional German foods. The dinner ran a little long, and Mikayla got pretty restless by about the middle of it, but it was wonderful. These people that we had dinner with love to laugh and joke, and they made us feel very welcome. They had a good time entertaining Mikayla and trying to get her to talk to them and say words in German. I hope that we get to see them again before we leave.

Culture Shock

This has been quite a bit different than all of the other trips we have taken. I think that the longest we had been gone before was 3 weeks, so the mindset once we got here has needed to be different. Usually on our trips, we just go-go-go and try to see as many things as we can possibly see while we are here because we know our time is short and we can sleep later. This trip has not been like that since we not only have much more time to see things, but we also have to fit Darren working and life with a toddler into the schedule. It has been a little hard to get used to the fact that most days I am just here in the apartment or around our little village and not out seeing different sights. I know that we will get to it, but I have had to keep reminding myself of that.

Another big change is that although when we traveled before we tried to blend in as much as we could into the cultures that we visited, I see now just how untouched by the culture we were. We never had to do the every day things such as grocery shopping, or trying to translate packages of food, or even just figuring out how to use a cell phone that is programmed in a language we can't yet read. It took me quite awhile to make dinner the other night because I had all my books and the computer on to try to translate what the back of a package of spaghetti mix was telling me.

Although culture shock might be putting a bit strongly, here are a few of the funny stories of the mishaps that have happened to us so far.

We went to the grocery store to pick up a few items on the second day we were there. I knew that we needed sugar for our coffee, which is very strong, and I was pretty proud of myself for knowing the word for "sugar" was "zucker." So, while in the store, I picked up a package with this word on it and we bought it. After using it, we noticed that it didn't mix very well into the drinks and Darren thought that it tasted a little sour. I had noticed that there was the word "Gelier" in front of the word "zucker" on the package, but wasn't able to translate the word from any of the books we had brought or any of the online translation sites that I had found. It wasn't until about a week later that I was having breakfast with my landlady that I thought to ask her about it. She laughed and said, "That isn't for you to eat!" It turns out that it is used for making jam. She very nicely told me that she would trade me for my Gelierzucker and give me some regular sugar for my coffee since she said she would be making jam in the fall anyway.

When we were in the city of Aachen with some of Darren's coworkers, we decided to buy a better German-English dictionary. We found a place that sold them and had practiced out how to ask how much the book cost in German, since it wasn't marked on the book. So, he went up to what he thought was the cashier and said out his German phrase, all while his coworker were snickering behind his back. He said the phrase perfectly, but he wasn't asking at the right place and had to do it all over again.

The last time that we were in the store, Darren picked up what he thought was chocolate milk. He got a surprise when he opened it up and tried to drink it, though, because it turned out to be chocolate pudding in a milk carton.

Getting Here

The trip over here was actually much easier than expected. After all the hassle of packing and repacking our bags to make sure that we came in under the 50-lb airplane limit and at the same time remember to bring everything we wanted to bring for our 3-month trip, and after trying to get our house ready for Amy, who is renting our house while we are gone, we were finally able to get on the airplane and be on our way. We need to give a big thanks to Paul, Darren's dad, for all his help in organizing our garage so we could park our car in there while we were gone, for driving us to the airport, and for helping us lug our many bags through the airport to get them checked in. We had to do that by ourselves once we got to Germany, and it sure made us appreciate his help even more than we did already.

Mikayla did really well on the flight over. She only threw one screaming/ kicking/ rolling on the ground fit, and that was on the way onto the airplane. When that happened, and the flight attendants had to help us carry our stuff back to our seats because I had my arms full with a flailing toddler, I was bracing myself for a horrible flight. But, God was merciful, because once we actually got back to our seats and she was able to sit in her car seat and play with the video monitor in front her her she did amazing. She played and she slept a little and she watched "Bolt" on her video monitor about 4 times (she loved the doggy, and pointing him out on the screen whenever he came on). Luckily, there was a little girl about her age in the seat in front of her, so she didn't mind that Mikayla was constantly kicking her seat. The older gentleman that was in the seat next to Mikayla was pretty entertained by her and was understanding about the occasional foot in his food or flying toy. Our flight was a direct one from Portland to Frankfurt, so we had it easy in that we could just settle in and stay there and not have to change planes.

Once in Frankfurt, we were able to get through customs with little difficulty. We did have to wait around for quite awhile for our stroller, which we had checked at the gate in Portland. The gate-checked items had accidentally been sent to the baggage claim with the rest of the luggage and had to be picked up and sent back. We waited for about 45 minutes and it wasn't there yet. Since we were starting to get worried about missing our train to Cologne, we decided to just leave the without the stroller and take the chance that we would have to buy a new one when we were here. It was nice that I had the Ergo toddler carrier with me, so that I could strap Mikayla to my back and not have to worry about my arms getting tired while we were walking. It turned out perfectly, though. We met up with the guy who was carrying our stroller to the train terminal, and we were able to retrieve that and the rest of our luggage and get down to the platform for our train with about a minute to spare.

When we arrived in Cologne, we were met by Olaf, one of Darren's coworkers here in Germany. We didn't really have any time to look around Cologne or see any of the sites since he needed to take us where we were going and then get back to work. I am sure that we will get back there to look around at some point on this trip. We somehow managed to squeeze all of our luggage and ourselves into the car, although there were a few moments when I thought we might need to leave some of it in a locker at the train station. And then we were off on the Autobahn. As Mikayla slept peacefully, we flew down the road at about 110 mph, passing other cars like they were standing still. What a welcome to Germany.

Olaf took us through the city of Düren, where Darren works, and then from there to the little village where the apartment that they rented for us is located. The village is called Embken, and it is located about 16 km south of Dueren. It takes Darren about 20 minutes to drive to work in the morning, so he actually has a little bit better of a commute here than he did in Oregon.