I did it! I passed the A1 with a level of 2.

That is a step below 1 the best you can do. I have had to learn so much in a short time. I have been actually working on learning the language for 2 months. The first month here was about finding an apartment, moving in and buying stuff for for it. Now I have to continue  to schnell learn (as I call it), I want to get as fluent as possible in the shortest time possible. Not easy for German, I found out after we moved that this is one of the more difficult languages to learn. For anyone getting started with the language, if you don’t already have one, get a German friend who is willing to help you out and make you speak the language.

Susanne would say to me-”use all the words you know”. She also will  talk only in German, if I want to talk back, I had better do likewise, or she won’t respond. She now will stop talking when we get in stores and the train stations, I have to do the asking and buying. I am getting more confident now. I do the same thing that many people do and not talk because I am afraid of making a mistake. But if you don’t talk, you don’t learn. Another thing that helps is to watch tv, especially if you can find a movie or show with subtitles. Then either take a class or get an tutor, at least for a week or two, either is invaluable.

I have a few workbooks, geared towards learning enough for the A1 test, but they are in German. I had to first figure out what the book wanted me to do for the exercise, then figure out how to to it. I have a English-German dictionary that I use constantly with the books. These books helped me to be able to read and write but they are not good for speaking, and they are the slow approach to the language. The other thing that slowed me down is that I have forgotten what dative, genitive accusative cases are in English. I really don’t care. I avoided English in college (I still have to find an online class), because the classrooms did not have After Effects and Final Cut or Photoshop  or some 3D program on the computers- BORING! I used to cringe whenever I would walk into a classroom and it didn’t have computers. I would think “what in the hell am I gonna do now?’ Get 3 Redbull’s I guess.

I’m getting off the subject here.  Enough about learning German. I’m taking a break. I think I’ll go watch the French channel for a while.

What  a day, I am worn out! I took my test and I think I passed it. I did great on the speaking part. I am glad I studied for it. There is a great practice test online (Links) for some of the tests given here. It is the same format as the real test, the example questions are the same on the real test. It helped immensely as did having a friend  go over it  word for word with me and a teacher to help me speak better and conjugate. It is nerve wracking though. The listening questions are very tricky and I had to listen carefully to what was being said. A couple I just didn’t get (didn’t know some of the words and they talked fast) so I did what any person would do- I guessed.  Taking tests in college were nothing compared to this. College was for letters A,B,C….This is so I can continue to be here, I fail and I am probably gone, even with the extension, this is a legal requirement. As with probably any country, if you can’t speak the language, you won’t get far.

So I will continue to study and learn the language, I can take classes providing I passed the test. I will know tomorrow when I call. Other than getting my test results over to the Ordnungsamt along with a biometric photo – a digital photograph taken only at specified places here, after it is taken it goes immediately into a database-  I am taking the next few days off. I deserve it and so does my partner, we have been going non-stop since before we moved here. Hopefully I wll figure out how to get my mp3 player on the blog so visitors  can hear my nephews music!

Big day today! I got an extension to stay in the country this morning for 3 months! Thank you Herr Gewert for being so nice! HE is the man I see at the Ordnungsamt.  As an American citizen, I can stay here for 3 months without a visa.Well. on Thursday. the 30th, my 3 months was up, would have had to leave here for I am not sure how long. The stories vary. I think 90 days is the legal time limit  before I could come back. So last minute scrambling, an internship offer from a small film  production company and a freelance English teaching possibility at Berlitz school helpd me stay.More on this later, I am taking a break, I have to go take and pass my A1 test at 3pm as part of my being able to stayhere too.It is a basic language test, well not so basic, to see if I can understand enough to function here in Deutschland.

Will post later, the results can take a few days to come in, I’ll have a sense of how I did though.

Did you ever have a feeling like you walked into a time warp? That’s what it feels like moving from America to Europe. We were zipping along at light speed and now we are on impulse power (yea, trekkie talk). What I am trying to say is that things happen at a different time here. Lets take hooking up the phone and internet for example. In America it takes max a couple of days. It took 2 weeks here, from ordering it to when the man came and spent all of 10 minutes to turn it on at the apartment. Wanna order a book at the library from another branch? 2 weeks. The guy at the library assured us that it would be in “schnell, schnell”!  2 weeks is scnhell (quick) for here. The printer I talked about earlier? Two weeks to get it repaired. It takes time here for things to get done and it takes a bit of getting used to. It’s something you don’t think about when your moving, it’s like an extra (unexpected) surprise at the bottom of a box of surprises. When you get to the 2 week surprise what do you do? Jump and down on the box, scream at the box, kick the box, then go sit down and patiently wait….. for 2 weeks. That’s what I did. Some things only take a week, surprisingly. I did something stupid and crached my laptop. At the time we were told it was my hard drive, it was kaput. It took only a week to get a new hard drive, which I ended up not needing. (That’s one of those laugh/cry moments). It only takes a week for stuff we ordered on amazon.de and ebay.de to get here. That’s good. So yes, we are moving along at impulse speed (creeping), it’s okay now that I have been here a while and  and know what to expect and not every single thing takes 2 weeks.

Getting hired at a new job and actually starting that job takes about a month!

Hi all,

First up, as promised I’ve added the links to the Freight services we used in the US and in Germany. Tim Rankin rankint@servicebyair.com was the guy we worked with in the US and Jergen Paulus  jp@cargo-marketing.de here in Germany. Links to the companies themselves are on the right, in Links.

This week was all about more job searchs and dealing with our brand new broken printer. About a month ago we were out printer shopping over MediaMax a electronics – computer store and bought an Epson printer, the price was right for the budget and the salesguy said “oh yea this is a good brand!”. We wanted an HP, we loved our last one, we never had a problem with it. But there were not that many to choose from. So, we bring it home, it works until we put the second ink cartridge in, which was an Epson cartridge. Then it would’t recognize the new ink cartridge and stopped working. Susanne tales it back, and they refuse to give money back. So they fix it (or so they think). Susanne brings it home, I print 6 pages and it stops again. Back to the store, now we talk to the guy back in the fixit area. He also refused to return the money or exchang it, he said he HAD to send it to Epson so they could fix it. Susanne asks how long it will take. Of course- 2 weeks. Mind you, we are trying to get resumes out and we have been having to go to the internet cafe around the corner to make copys because our new printer won’t print. He didn’t seem to care about that which made me want to I wanted to take my umbrella and smash both the guy and the printer. She gave up talking to him and left the thing there to be sent to Epson. Long story short, after we left we thought to ourselves “what would our friends Ellen and Gail do? They would go to the manager!” They wouldn’t take this s**t. So Susanne went back to speak with a manager, I went home to fix dinner.  A short time later Susanne came home with a brand new printer. The manager was out so she waited for the next decision maker and he have her a new printer. So another lesson in not taking the crap from sales people, and going to the people that can actually make a decision.

As for cutsomer service, the two snotty guys at MediaMax get a big F.

Hi All!

It has been almost 3  months since we moved and now it’s time to share the experiences of moving to a new country with friends and family. I’ll start at the beginning, which I have categorized in my mind as simply- stuff. How much stuff? Too much stuff, that’s how much! I cannot believe the amount of stuff Susanne and I have gotten rid of in order to move and I’m not talking about the recent move. We started getting rid of stuff in Oregon, when we were getting ready to move to Florida in 2005. The amount is staggering for two people who thought they didn’t have much. I could go on for a while about this, but like the stuff we have gotten rid of, I need to throw these thoughts in the yard sale pile and move on.

We shipped what little we had kept to Germany by cargo boat. When I say little I mean 52 boxes, a small hand made shoe shelf and a secretaire desk and a rug that belonged to Susanne’s aunt. These last two items have traveled more than most people, having crossed both the Atlantic and the United States twice. U-Haul was our best friend, we made numerous trips to the store around the corner in Oakland Park to buy packing tape, bubble wrap, dish boxes, etc…

I gotta tell you, it was exhausting, at one point I didn’t think we would get everything ready in time to ship, nor would we get rid of all the stuff we were not taking with us in time. Can I say this?  “I’LL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!” I am not as young as I used to be and this damn near killed me! But we did it and on Monday afternoon, April 27, around 6pm, the truck-with-no-name came and took our stuff away. Great right? Yes and no. We had only a few suitcases, my drum and the cats left. For once no stuff to look at. But on the other hand, where was our beloved stuff? On the truck-with-no-name, that’s where. Going to some warehouse, waiting to be loaded on some freighter, handled by lord-knows- who. Would we ever see it again, and the million dollar question, WHEN?

Well, I won’t keep you in suspense, our stuff made it okay. After a month and a half, a side trip to a North Carolina port and a week in Hamburg customs, our stuff arrived at our doorstep on June 11th. Susanne had to go through a lot of hoops proving that she was who she was and that she had actually lived in US for customs to release our stuff. That was scary. But in the end, everything arrived safely, nothing broken, all boxes accounted for. Both shipping companies, the US and the one we used here to get our stuff in Hamburg were excellent. I highly recommend both and will provide the names and links to their sites in the next post.

It was like Christmas again when we opened up the boxes. After a move like this, one tends to forget exactly what one packed and what one has gotten rid of. It is more than a pleasant surprise seeing something I was not sure I had kept. It was also nice to have more than a couple of pairs of jeans and a coat. It is not warm here. Someone told me it was summer, I don’t believe them. I’ll believe it when I see it!

So what have I learned from all of this? Too much stuff is not good. Susanne and I were being smothered by our own stuff. “Can’t throw that out, might need it one day”, “”I can just fix this up and yatta, yatta”, “I can’t throw that out, it belonged to my long dead…….”. Sooner or later one has to go through the STUFF one has accumulated throught out one’s life and say “DO I REALLY NEED THIS?”. I found the answer to be, no-probably not. I really don’t miss the stuff I have gotten rid of, hell I can’t even remember most of it. It’s  like getting rid of old baggage, I felt myself getting lighter, not being dragged down by material things. Life is better without a sea of STUFF. Plus I get to buy some new stuff! WOOOHOOO!