Settling into German Life

Thursday May 19^th

We arrived today in Germany.  We are staying with some friends of ours who live in Waldorff, a small town midway between Heidelburg and Mannheim.  Waldorff is the world headquarters of SAP and the Schmids lived near us in Wayne for several years while Roland was on overseas assignment with SAP.  We met them because Luzie swam with Katie at the Y.  I was very friendly with Karin, Luzie’s mom and have stayed in touch. They moved back to Germany at the end of second grade, so we have not seen each other in a while and the girls have grown up a lot since then.  So the girls were both apprehensive about the visit but it is off to a very good start.  Karin and I reconnected easily, as adult friends do after a gap, and with some prodding the girls are doing fine as well.

Karin met us at the train station around noon and brought us back to the house to get settled.  Vrenni, the younger Schmid daughter got off school at 1 pm and we all had lunch together.  It is common in Germany to have a hot meal at lunch, and then just rolls and cold cuts for dinner, so we had spaghetti for lunch. Vrenni doesn’t speak much English, but does understand some of what we say.  It is really nice that the Schmids are talking primarily in English for us for the next few days.  It is really great to hear English all the time rather than French!

Luzie came home from school around 2:30.  Luzie attends the gymnasium and Vrenni goes o the elementary school.  Vrenni is in third grade, and Luzie is in 6^th. The elementary schools go from 1^st-4^th grade and then based on the grades that the kids achieve in 4^th grade they get assigned to one of several types of schools for 5^th grade and up. The kids with the “higher” educational potential are assigned to a gymnasium which is grades 5 - 12 and leads to a university degree.  The school used to go through the 13^th grade, but it just recently reduced to 12 grades.  However, Karin said that they are still trying to cram in 13 years of content into 12 years, which is challenging.  Luzie just started learning her third language, which is French.  They start English in elementary, and then started French in 5^th grade.

The kids which do not attend gymnasium are assigned to a middle school, which then leads to a school which can lead to an associate degree.  I think there was a third option, but I forget what it is called.  This system is supposed to change soon, and Karin is very happy about the changes.  Most importantly, parents will be able to help select what type of school their child goes to in 5^th grade instead of it just being based on grades, which is a lot of pressure on a 9 year old.  Karin expects it to change quickly, perhaps even in time for Vrenni for next year.

After Luzie got home, she and Katie started to get reacquainted and soon warmed up to each other.  We hung out around the house for a while, and Vrenni went off to a friend’s house so the four of us walked into town.  The town of Waldorff is very small, about 15,000 people.  It is only a few blocks to the center of town through a nice quiet residential area.  We walked past Luzie’s school and the local tennis courts, and then down past where the Schmids lived until recently.   We soon reached the center of town which is a nice pedestrian main street lined with a few restaurants, small shops, ice cream stores and bakeries. We dropped Luzie’s bike at the repair shop and got the girls some ice cream.  The ice cream was only 80 cents here whereas it had been up to 3.50 euros in Paris!  We stopped at a bakery to get rolls for dinner and picked many kinds of really nice rolls like cheese, sesame, poppy seed, rye, multi-grain and carrot. The carrot bread come with a raw carrot tied to the top of it!

When we got home, Karin and I sat outside and visited as Katie and Luzie played on Luzie’s ripstick, or as they call it here a waveboard.  The ripstick is a type of skateboard but with only one wheel in front and one in back and you wiggle back and forth to get it to move.  This is also popular at home but Katie had never tried one.  The Schmids also own two unicycles, which was the craze before the ripsticks.  That we’ve never seen at home, except at circus camp!

We had a nice dinner out on the deck later after Roland and Vrenni came home, with the rolls, a lot of different cheeses and some sausages that Roland grilled for us. Everything was really delicious.  My favorite was the small sausages which I ate with a  spicy mustard.  So good.  They were thinner than hotdogs, and it is custom to eat six of them on a roll as a sandwich.  The kids had hotdog like sausages instead put each hot dog was scored multiple times across it side to side and cut in half the long way.  When it cooked it curled up into a curlique.  After dinner we all just sat around trading stories and having a great time together.