In a German Bed

This is a topic that many expats write about, but somehow it just never gets old. I wrote about it already as well, in my second year here. Recently BerLinda at Expat Eye on Germany covered the topic, and the ensuing discussion M and I had led to this post.

Ordnung muss sein

I have to admit, I love our separate Federbetten (duvets). There is no way M and I would ever have the same thickness of blanket at any time of the year - while I am snuggling under a thick fluffy blanket (even still, and it's June), he's bursting into flames under the thinnest blanket we have. He probably doesn't even need the actual Federbett and could probably just use the empty duvet cover during all but the coldest of months.

Theoretically the husband is never in danger of having his blanket stolen, because the wife has her own all to herself. But I did actually steal M's once, so the German system isn't fail-safe. I had kicked off my own blanket one night during a warm spell, and when I got cold I grabbed the nearest one (his - I apparently tore it right off his peacefully slumbering body), burrowed in, and went back to sleep. I woke up when he started fumbling around, asking if I knew what happened to his blanket. I cosily said, "Nope."

Some people have wondered how a couple snuggles when they each have their own blanket rather than one double-wide that spans the whole bed. We have no trouble snuggling, but since my college-age kids read this blog, I don't want to go into detail. To be honest, snuggling is nice and all, but we both need our own space when we're sleeping. I like to be warm at night, but cuddling with M is like cuddling with the smouldering embers of a camp fire. It's best that we have our own blankets.

The thing that causes more confusion than the separate blankets is the separate mattresses. We also have this - a double bed frame into which are nestled two single mattresses, each with its own fitted sheet. This system allowed for us to get two different grades of mattress with the firmness we preferred - the poor man's Sleep Number bed!

This is Germany, where lines are clearly defined and property borders are marked by hedges, fences, or stone walls. "This is my dance space, that's your dance space," Baby. If you're coming over into my space, you better have a good reason."

I know this looks like 2 single beds pushed together,
but it's one frame with edges to keep the mattresses where they belong.

And guess what? There's a German word for the cravasse between the mattresses. No lie - it's called the Besucherritze (visitor's gap or, if you prefer, visitor's crack). If you check out that link to the dict.cc online dictionary, you'll see that Besucherritze is officially defined as "the space between two double [sic] beds; humorous suggestion that a third person could sleep there."

First, they're not two double beds - they're two single mattresses. In a proper frame the two beds are held together, so they don't slide apart like they would on American-style bed frames and box strings.*

Secondly, M said last night,

"It's not about a third person. It's that if you want to visit the other person, you have to cross that canyon first." 

A college friend of mine who works for a German company once told us his understanding of the pillars of German engineering, which fit to the German double beds thing pretty well, I think, especially the first one.

The Three Pillars of German Engineering:

1. Why would you do it any other way?
2. If we don't make it, you don't need it.
3. It was difficult to make, therefore it should be difficult to use.

So there you have it - your guide to spending time in a German double bed. This is all I know here (except in the fancy-schmancy hotels where the Federbetten are still separate but the king-size mattress is one piece), and it never occurred to me to be troubled by it. [Pillar #1]  When we bought our bedroom set, this two-mattress thing was all we saw in the furniture store. [Pillar #2]  The furniture makers put a lot of thought, time, and effort into creating a bed that is practical and functional, and if we have to put some effort into learning how to use it effectively, that's ok with them. [Pillar #3]


M pondered last night writing a guest post about how much he hates sleeping in American beds. I will happily publish it if he writes it!



*We did stay once in a hotel that didn't have the mattresses fitted into a frame that held them together, and...well...that didn't work well for anything besides sleeping.

Mid-month Confessions

This is a weird time of year. I don't particularly like January or February, and March isn't anything to look forward to, either. Christmas is over, the weather is dull, gray, and hopeless, there are too many months between now and the end of the school year, and my feet are always cold which makes me as discontented as a cat stuck out in the rain. I am sure I will never understand Fasching/Fasnet, but I should be able to get others' enthusiasm for the tomfoolery. At least it livens up the drabness of winter.

In an attempt to get back my sense of humor, I thought I'd offer a few confessions.

In the last few days or weeks, I may or may not have...

•  ...published a blog post I really liked about my favorite island, only to discover while I was looking for something else in my archives that I had already published a post about the island in October. No wonder I couldn't find the draft I'd thought I'd written.


• ...regifted (to the Sternsinger and my students) some of the candy from M's and my Adventskalender because we couldn't eat that much chocolate every day!


• ...let loose an audible anguished groan upon noticing the sixth mistake/typo in 12 pages of what appears to be a printed copy of the E-book version of an American classic I've been longing to read, which I ordered from Amazon. Good my lord, who types these things?!?


•  ...fished a piece of tin foil out of the gelber Sack (I'd only put it in there 2-3 minutes before) to reuse on the leftovers headed into the refrigerator. If you were a Swabian, you'd understand.


•  ...written two scathing emails to two different people on the same day and then jetisoned them both because some people are just too stupid to bother with.


•  ...spent €101 on home decorations (2 pillow covers, 1 small table cloth, and 6 placemats) because they had owls on them and I love owls. I was disappointed in the quality of what arrived. And I had to spend €10 on pillows to go into the pillow covers.


•  ...apologized to M for spending €111 on useless, cheap (but kind of cute) owl crap in the same month that he made an additional house payment.


•  ...left a stove burner on level 4 all night after boiling potatoes at 22:00 for the next day's Bratkartoffeln. M found a nice warm kitchen when he went for his coffee the next morning.


•  ...celebrated silently because I have a 3-week break from one of my volunteer jobs. I want to like the work but don't.


• ...had a conversation with M about the gender of the German word for orgasm. Masculine, feminine, or neuter: one guess, folks.


•  ...lost this entire blog post after it was nearly finished because I had unplugged the network cable to sit in the living room to write, got an error message when I tried to add a photo that wouldn't go away even after I plugged in again, and hit the big red X because I was too proud to ask M to fix my problem for me.


•  ...apologized to M for bitching about losing my blog post when I could have asked him for help before hitting the big red X.


•  ...eaten an entire package of licorice I brought back from the States. Apparently I miss licorice. And now it's gone.


• ...thrown a semi-major hissy fit because my Nexus required a system update and now everything looks different. I HATE change!!!

Owl in the center isn't new - he traveled in my suitcase from the U.S.
when I moved here.

Well hell, I have to admit, this was fun!!

Ok, fellow bloggers and dear readers - what are your mid-month (or end-month...whatever) confessions?!? Let's liven up this dull season.

German Double Beds

Despite the fact that modern German kitchen designers have all but done away with double sinks making me wonder if they have ever spent any time actually using a kitchen, in other areas of home and furniture design, the Germans have stumbled upon brilliance. One such masterpiece is the German double bed. It's such a simple idea, really, and probably something most Germans take for granted unless they've traveled to the U.K. or the U.S. for several overnights. Perhaps double beds are like the American and British style everywhere else in the world as well - I really don't know. I just know that the German bed designers really nailed it.

So here it is. "Big deal," you say. "It's a bed. And in fact it doesn't look like a double bed, it looks like two singles."

Even though our head board is split, the bed frame is one piece. There are two mattresses, and I assume they are both single-bed size. The fitted sheets go over each mattress, and so if one's wife is off traveling in America for several weeks, he can wash his own sheet without having to strip the entire bed. There are no flat sheets to tuck in, which makes making the bed a breeze.

The covers are Federbetten (feather beds), which the Brits call duvets. When it's time to wash the sheets, the duvet cover - which is like a pocket or sleeve which closes on the one end with buttons or a zipper - is removed and washed. To make the bed, I fluff up the Federbett, fold it in half, lay it on the mattress, and I'm finished. No retucking, no folding down of the flat sheet, no straightening of the sheet because it's touching the floor on one side and hardly covering the mattress on the other... (all those devilish annoyances that make children grumble about having to make their beds in the morning).

And here's another brilliant thing: M is almost always warm. He sleeps with his window open and the heat in the bedroom off all winter long.  (Germans like and need as much fresh air as they can get, no matter how cold it is.) That's one reason why he likes not having the flat sheet we had on the bed in Wisconsin - if there's no flat sheet trapping his feet, then when it gets warm at night he can just stick a leg out. I, on the other hand, am almost always cold. As I sit here in the office typing this, I'm considering getting my winter slippers because my feet are starting to go numb despite the fact that it is not cold in here!  Is it time to bring out the winter blanket? I'd say yes, but not for M. So this is how couples living in Germany solve that little issue:

Guess which side I sleep on?


It's perfect - he can go on using his summer blanket until January when it actually gets cold, and I can use my "Wolke 7" ("Cloud 9") blanket from now until May. Everybody's happy.



One other marital issue that is solved by this bed design is something men must grumble about a lot, judging from cartoons and comedians' jokes - the wife stealing the blanket (which I've surely never done). This way, she has her own! She can wrap up and snuggle in to her heart's content, and he doesn't have to worry about waking up shivering because she is hoarding the warmth. I recently saw a cartoon of a couple lying in bed, and the husband had nailed his side of the blanket to the floor on his side of the bed. We don't have to resort to such measures here in Germany!

Now if only the bed designing team could help out the guys designing kitchen sinks...!

Rolladen

Today is projected to be the hottest day of the summer in Germany, at least so far. It will get up to 36° (98.6° F) with high humidity. Many are heading to a beach, river, lake, Schwimmbad, or local fountain to cool off, some are filling blow-up pools in their yards, and others toughing it out and going about their regular business.

Central air in public places (including stores, restaurants, and movie theaters) and in homes is not common here, so going shopping on a beastly hot day can be a rather miserable experience for someone like me who hates shopping even when it's a comfortable temperature. So today, I'm pulling a Hemingway and staying home, inside, in the dark, alone.

In our former house in Wisconsin, a day like this would be awful inside without the central air running. The heat permeated through every window and wall of the house. But our house here is made mainly of concrete, and the temperature inside takes longer to change. Granted, it does get very stuffy when the windows are closed, which is why even in the chilliest part of winter we need to turn off the heat and open all the windows for 10 minutes or so to move the air around every few days.

But this blog post is about Rolladen.

If not for the Rolladen, the sun would be heating the bedroom like a sauna

These things are amazing. Judging from the movie "The Holiday," rich people in California have these on their windows, but I never knew anyone in Wisconsin who had them.  "Rolladen" translates to simply "shutters," but they are so much more than the shutters I knew of in Wisconsin, which were decorative rather than functional.  These puppies roll down from a hidden pocket in the wall above the window and close out as much light as I want to. If I want to leave room for some air to get in, I close it most of the way, leaving an inch or so of space at the bottom, which also leaves cracks open between the slats. If I need to sleep in the middle of the day, I can close the Rolladen all the way and make the bedroom dark as a catacomb.

In the living room a little air can get through, but there's not much moving today anyway.

All of our windows have these, so on a day like today, I have closed all of them on the east, west, and south sides of the house, and every room is - at least for the moment - a very comfortable temperature. It's not too warm, and not at all too cold. I swear, the heat and humidity in Wisconsin feels even worse than it is because so many places are chilled like an ice box with air conditioning. I can't go anywhere on the hottest day in Sheboygan without bringing a sweatshirt along, because I feel like a bag of shock-frozen peas when I step through the front doors of a store, restaurant, or friend's house.

I think the body deals better with consistency than extreme and sudden changes. The Germans are convinced of this. Many, many times I have heard Germans say that they frequently get sick in the States in the hot summer, which they attribute to constantly going out into the heat, back into an icebox...out into the heat, back into an icebox.  Just today on the morning news show, people were being interviewed and asked how they will deal with the heat. One woman said it's best to drink warm liquids like tea and coffee because it's less of a shock to the body, and drinking cold beverages makes one sweat more in the heat. I don't know if that's true, but that may very well be why American tourists often say that the beer (and soda)  in Germany is served warm. It's not warm - it's just not chilled to the degree that it is in the U.S..

So anyway, I'll stay inside and relax today (I cleaned the house yesterday, so I don't even have any chores to do except for garden work, which doesn't sound tempting at the moment). I'm keeping the lights off, too, because they produce enough heat to defeat the purpose of keeping the Rolladen down.  I might watch a movie if I can figure out how to turn on the darn system, which has 6 components and 12 remotes...

I'd read, but it's too dark.

Week One

I've been living in Horb (southern Germany) for about a week now. I am originally from Wisconsin – grew up in Sheboygan, went to college in Appleton, and lived and worked most of my adult life in Fond du Lac.  My husband is German and has lived in southern Germany all his life. We have been good friends for 22 years.  He and I were married in June 2006 and have been living apart for more than 6 years, with one or the other of us flying overseas several times a year for visits, holidays, family occasions, and so on.

But now, after what seems like a very long wait, we are starting our married lives together in a lovely little house Martin found for us in the perfect location.  It's about a 4-minute walk to his office, where he spends most of his daytime hours, and a 20-minute walk for me to the shopping area where I can buy just about everything we need for day-to-day life.  We have a rather elaborate garden with roses, lavender, mint, rhododendron bushes, a fountain, and an angry artificial owl that sits on a stone pedestal and oversees the goings-on of the yard.  The garden and yard are surrounded by a tall hedge, so typical in southern Germany, to prevent passers-by from peeking at one's lawn. We also have a pergola on the far side of our patio – a 3-sided garden shed in which we store Martin's Weber grill and the lawn furniture when the weather is bad and during the winter.  It's a lovely place to sit during rain storms, as well.

Our house has three bedrooms and an office, so we have more space than I would have anticipated.  Nearly everything here is on a smaller, more conservative scale than in the States.  Kitchens are smaller, bedrooms are smaller, and yards and garages are tiny in comparison.  There is just not the space to spread out here as there is in America, and land costs much more.  Still, our yard is much bigger than we need, and I'm not complaining - until it's time to do yard work, which I've never enjoyed.  Perhaps I can learn to enjoy it here.

The garage makes me laugh.  We have a two-car garage, which is not at all common here. Most homes have a one-car garage, and some also have a carport.  German garages are just a bit larger than their cars. One has to squeeze into the driver's seat and hold one's breath backing out (at least I do, fearing what will happen if the wheel was turned at any point after entering the garage).  If one has a car of a reasonable size, there may be some space in front of it for a bike.  Germans must be flabbergasted by American garages and the junk with which we fill them.  When we put our house in Wisconsin on the market before my move here, one of the things we were told was that our 2.5-car garage was a negative point.  Americans buying houses today want 3-car garages, because even if they don't have 3 cars, they have another garage-full of stuff they need to store in there.

We have a Wintergarten (sun room) on the south side of the house with windows as three of the walls (two face outside to the back yard and patio and one faces into the living room), and I'm sure we'll be using that room often during all seasons.  But perhaps the best feature of the home is the very German Kachelofen (tiled stove or masonry heater)! This is in the Wohndiele, which is the main entrance area, or foyer.  Martin has made a fire for me in there nearly every night since I arrived. The wood goes into a little metal box inside the tiled "fireplace", and once it's burning the box is closed – so unlike fireplaces in the States, one doesn't see the flames.  They heat up the tiled walls of the heater from the inside, and the heat from the tiles warms the whole room.  When I get a slight chill, all I need to do is sit down on the bench of the Kachelofen and lean my back against it.  Hmmmmm…. it warms me straight through in no time.  I'm very lucky that Martin has not yet tired of building me fires.

One last interesting feature of German homes is that when a buyer moves in, he typically finds the rooms empty. Totally empty.  There are few – if any – closets, and the sellers usually take the lights, including the ones fixed to the ceilings.  The sellers usually take the kitchen cupboards and counters with them, and often the sink as well.  A buyer may come in and find only a faucet sticking out of a kitchen wall. This is the case in the bathroom as well. There are no cupboards under the sinks, or counters - those go with the sellers. In the bathroom are only sinks, the toilet, and the shower and/or tub.  The woman from whom we bought this house was down-sizing to an apartment, and she included the kitchen sink, cupboards, and counter tops with the house. She also left the curtains in all the rooms, which was really nice for us.  We can change them gradually as we like, but at least we didn't have to add those expenses to our move right away.

This week has been mainly about getting used to the house and making it feel like home even though our shipment from the States isn't here yet.  I'm getting there, and once the shipment arrives, I'm sure the house will feel completely ours.  There will be plenty of work to do, and I'm looking forward to being productive and truly settling in.