Fun Stuff Around the House

So, some things are just the same in Germany, while some are quite different. There are a few things I hate about this house, but a lot of things I love, and I wish I could bring back to America. So, now we'll give you a tour of a German home!

Kitchen - The appliances are tiny! We have a tiny oven, a tiny fridge, and a tiny dishwasher. But, they all work. :) Luckily, we have a big American fridge in the basement. The dishwasher takes several hours, which can be frustrating, but at least there's a dishwasher. There isn't a garbage disposal, which might drive me nuts. We'll see.

Speaking of tiny ovens, some of my pots & pans won't fit! My beloved Pampered Chef stoneware bar pan has been relegated to a box in the storage room for the next three years, as are a good number of my cake pans. A bunch of my other pots & pans have, as well, because there simply isn't enough room in the kitchen for all of them.

One of the things we love is the way the windows open. You can turn the handle one way, and they open like a door, or you can turn the handle another way, and hinges on the bottom make them lean out so they're open at the top. That's the way we open them, because the cats can't get out! The only bad thing is that there aren't any screens. We have a bee graveyard in our bedroom, because we constantly have bees flying in and not flying out. There are also cool rolling shutters on the outside that you open from the inside. They are excellent!

The one on the left is open at the top, and the one on the right is like a door. You can also see the rolling shutters on the outside.

The Bathroom - The first thing you notice is that the toilets look very different. The tanks are inside the wall, so you don't see them at all. There isn't a handle to flush, there's a huge button on the wall. The coolest thing is that you can stop the flush if you decide it has flushed enough. One thing you may notice is that some of the toilets have what can only be described as a poop shelf. It is so you can, if you feel it necessary, make sure that your output matches what you feel it should be. We, however, consider ourselves to be lucky that only one out of three of our toilets has a shelf, so we can do our number twos in one of the non-shelf toilets.

Funny looking toilet

Trash -Recycling is a must! There are different colored bags for each kind of trash/recycling. Plastic & cans is yellow, paper is blue, and regular trash is green. There are even what appear to be biodegradable bags for biodegradable trash. One kind of yogurt we bought had cups that were made to be pulled apart so you can recycle the plastic and paper separately. Some of our neighbors have glass bins, but we don't, so Max takes them to work to recycle them there. They're even further broken down into brown glass, green glass, and clear glass. Big plastic bottles can be taken back to the store for money back, much like you can recycle cans in the US. The difference is that people actually do it here. There will be big lines to recycle your bottles.

We need to empty the yellow one, and the blue bags we bought are too small for the holder, but here are our different trash cans.

The best thing about the trash is that our garbage guys bring our bins back and even put them in the little bin corral for us. I don't know if that's a Germany wide thing or just our area, but I love it. I don't have to worry about them blowing away like I did in MD.

Emma says - I love my yard. It has a pond and fairies. It takes 60 steps from the basement to Mom's bed on the 3rd floor.