Germany: Chapter 2 Nüremberg

Nürnberg

I ended my last post remarking that Europe has not been as “easy” as we thought it might be. Of course, this is relative to the other countries we’ve moved to. In rural Tugela Ferry, South Africa we drove 3hrs for groceries. I hung our laundry to dry on the fence of our yard while stamping fire ants off my feet. And we slept under a mosquito net because the mosquitos there carry diseases that could kill us. In Myanmar, we had to turn on, and off, the pump to have water in our apartment. Once we went out shopping and forgot to turn off the pump. We came back to a flooded apartment and narrowly avoided being electrocuted. In Delhi, India, the air quality is the 2nd worst in the world. We had three air filters that ran 24/7. Masks were a must any time we left the apartment. I even dried all our clothes indoors, despite the dry heat outside, to make sure as little pollution as possible got into our clothes and linens. And to top it off the washing machine was outside the apartment! By comparison, Germany, we thought, would just be incredibly easy. 

Which made me think about the cultural immersion concept my Whitworth professor introduced me to. I’ve referred to the “W-Curve” a lot during our international experiences over the years. The first time I ever wrote about the “W-Curve” was a week in to our move to South Africa. Click here to read what “falling off the W-Curve means”. 😳 At this point, I can add more complexity to the process of cultural immersion, given my personal experiences in a number of countries now. My professor’s W-curve theory was probably only an introduction to cultural immersion, helpful to college students taking their first trip abroad. Still, I find it a useful starting point for thinking and writing about what it’s like to immerse myself in a new country and culture.

To recap the “W-curve”…

Entering a new country is full of excitement and anticipation {the first high point in the W}. But after some time, provided you engage with the local culture and local people, things start to feel less fun and you start to long for the familiarity of your home culture {the first low point of the W}. But gradually, you start to accept what’s different, learn to deal with the challenges, and even embrace the newness and uniqueness of the country you are visiting/living in {the middle high point of the W}. The last low point is after your trip has ended and you return home. At first, upon returning to your home country you feel happy-both about your adventure abroad and being home {still at the middle high point of the W}. But, if your experience abroad was a good one, there comes a point where you start to miss things about your adventure abroad {the last low point on the W}. Generally, people mesh their lives back in their home country with the memories of their international adventure and they get back to the top of the W, completing the letter.

Something, cultural immersion just beckons. And that’s what led Stephen and me to seek this new adventure in Germany. In many ways, we are starting to feel more “at home” living in another country. 

To apply the “W-Curve” to our German adventure…

Once all the work of getting ready to leave was done and we were finally waiting to board our first flight, I felt joyful and light. We flew out of an airport I hadn’t been in for 35 years. Needless to say, it was quite different! In the new addition there was a grand piano with a sign on it that read “Please play the piano”. Although we stopped taking my digital piano with us after South Africa, and I rarely get the chance to touch a piano, let alone practice any more, there’s still a lot of muscle memory in my fingers and music in my ears from all those years of lessons and study. It was a bit out of character for me, but for some reason, I just wanted to play the piano. With an airport full of strangers to hear, both the good and the bad of whatever I played, I sat down at the grand piano. Without any warmup, I played Für Elise by Beethoven, a German composer. It was fun! When I finished playing, people nearby clapped. {You’ll notice I’m wearing a mask in this photo. My infusion was only a week before our flight. I was still immunocompromised and couldn’t risk getting sick.} 

Even though Für Elise is a children’s piece and I’ve been playing it since the 5th grade, it’s a crowd pleaser. When I was a piano teacher, my students and their parents enjoyed hearing me play it. And recently, Jon Batiste released his Jazz take on Für Elise for his Beethoven album. {link here}

So that was the start of our journey.

Then the flights were good. I half expected them to be worse, given that I’ve experienced some pretty awful flights and now my mobility is terrible. But our journey ended in Europe this time. For our other international moves, Europe was only halfway to our destination. Then our first night in a hotel in Nürnberg was amazing. The beds were just right, we each had individual duvets (a lovely European habit) and the sandwiches Stephen bought for us from the airport bakery were delicious. I ate three of them! (Not all at one time. 🤣😂🤪)

Not only that, my walker arrived that evening. Airport staff brought it over to the hotel. We didn’t even have to go retrieve it!

From the Movenpick airport hotel, we took a taxi to our new hotel in the center of Nǔrenberg. The drive was so fun. I saw crops as we drove and marveled that they were so close to the town. Zero food miles. 

As we checked in, the staff were incredibly nice and then the complimentary breakfast on the first morning was delicious.

But little challenges started to present themselves. The hotel room turned out to be a little tight for my walker. I had to maneuver carefully to get around, making several little turns to get from the kitchen, around the bed, to get to the couch. Think about operating a car on a narrow street or other small space. 

The appliances are multi-purpose: a microwave oven, a washer/dryer combination machine. And everything is labeled in German. Stephen found a manual for the microwave oven and which buttons to use for the microwave and which ones to use for the oven. Only neither of us could see the buttons very easily. The print is faint and they aren’t backlit. So I put little stickers above the buttons to make things less difficult. 

Then there was the washer/dryer. I used a Google translate app to get some translation to English. This was only moderately helpful. I was able to run the washer but I could not seem to get the dryer to work.

Trocknen mean dry and when I turned the knob there were only two choices out of all the different labels! And both of those two choices only gave me 13 minutes of dryer time. I kept running the dryer 13 minutes at a times until I had run the machine for a total of more than an hour. Still, the clothes felt just as damp as when I started trying to dry them.

Our first thought was to just give up on the dryer and air dry the clothes, so Stephen took some of them out and draped them various places around the room. But I was indignant, “This is Germany! If the dryer doesn’t work, surely we can get it repaired for goodness sake!” Still we both were a bit reluctant to ask the hotel for help. Our experiences, in all the other countries we’ve moved to, had taught us we were pretty much on our own. Just like Mark Watney in The Martian. He did get some help from NASA, but mostly he had to figure things out on his own.

I did eventually call, and the hotel was really prompt. The repair guy came to our room in less than an hour, spoke fluent English, and showed me quickly how to add time for the dryer. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of the combination washer/dryer, but having a machine right in the room is a definite plus. I’ll take it! 

I’m also happy to report that I went back to the hotel café, ordered a cappuccino “extra hot” from the same waiter, and it was a perfect coffee! Not only that, we went into a local bookshop, I practiced my German (Deutsch) a little bit, and as we were leaving the shopkeeper said to me, “Your German is great.” 😊 

If it were only these little challenges we had to problem-solve, I might have not had my first slide down the “W”. A larger challenge was the tipping point. But as that’s a longer story and this post is already pretty long, I’ll end here and leave you with some photos of this beautiful city.