The Joy of Neighbors

I've explained the concept of Kehrwoche before - we have to clean the landing and the stairs down to the next landing in the common stairwell of our apartment building. We do this every second week, alternating with our neighbors.

Lots of people (including myself) are not very diligent about remembering Kehrwoche. But my husband, being the good Schwab that he is, always remembers Kehrwoche. The Saturday we got married, we came home from our reception at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning and Marc did Kehrwoche.

And having lived here for 1.5 years, we have never seen/heard our neighbors do the Kehrwoche on their week. And on the Sunday after their Kehrwoche, it doesn't look so clean. But being the trusting people that we are, we just take it for granted that they do it most of the time.

Well, last weekend, we had Kehrwoche. And as Marc was faithfully cleaning the stairwell, he found some powdery substance under the neighbors' doormat. Now, we've heard stories of neighbors putting threads or powder under their doormat to check that the others are doing their Kehrwoche, but we really thought these were a type of urban legend.

Well, not any more. It's happened to us personally. Take a look...

So, what do you do when something like this happens? Just clean it up and throw it away. Oh no, not Marc. He wanted them to know that we knew what they had done. So he made a little pile and left it in front of their door.
It was the neighborly thing to do, right? Maybe they lost it and were looking for it and didn't think to look under the mat. Or maybe they can use it again in two weeks when we're back on for Kehrwoche.

And cleaned the rest of the stairwell so loud that the whole house must of known that we do Kehrwoche!

Harbor Town

Two weeks ago, we visited Hamburg for the weekend. Marc has a friend who moved there about 6 months ago, so we headed up to visit him. We took the train, a ride of about 5.5 hours. This is pretty comfortable, although even on the train you can end up sitting in traffic (the ride home took about 6.5 hours). But since neither one of us had to drive, we could work on our website, read, sleep, whatever. It's a good, relatively inexpensive way to travel - taking the car would have cost more.

Hamburg is really pretty. It's on a harbor, the 2nd biggest in Europe. We took a tour of the harbor by boat. There were giant freighters and some really big luxury yachts. Roman Abramovich, the fifteenth richest man in the world, was having a yacht built that cost 200 million per meter and was 100 meters long. It had a lot of bathrooms and other crazy features, that you just cannot imagine needing on a boat.
Hamburg also has several seas, where you can go boating, kayaking, etc. It's really something special to live on the water, I think. Maybe you take it for granted once you've been there for a while, but for me it has a special charm.Saturday, we checked out the town and found that the Stuttgart wine festival happened to be in Hamburg while we were there:

Marc snapped this:
And I took this one:
It's not a memorial to Rex. After I took this picture, a homeless man came up to Marc and told him that these are the shoes of a volunteer from the Maltesers. The volunteer said he had been running around so much, that his shoes were smoking and needed to cool off...

While downtown, the police started blocking off the streets and then there was a demonstration. I know that one of the topics was against deporting illegal immigrants. Oh and they demonstrated, because Hamburg does not do a good enough job of protecting the environment. And I think they threw in a few other topics, too. I think it's great that people march for things that they believe in, but there didn't really seem to be a cohesiveness between the topics they had chosen for their demonstration, which made it a little difficult to understand what the primary goal of the demonstration was. The police escorted the demonstraters through. And filmed them, in case something happened, so that they could then have video evidence. (The banner says "No deportation, jail or camps. The right to stay for all!") It was a peaceful demonstration, but the police were dressed in riot gear anyways. Even though they do this regularly any time there will be a large crowd (European Soccer championships as an example), I still can't get used to it, it makes me nervous every time.

While the streets were still closed, some guy in a little sports car went around the barriers. As he came to the end of the demonstration, there was a police man on a motorcycle, who indicated that he should pull over. Instead of pulling over, he made a screeching U-turn and drove very quickly in the other direction. Now, you have to understand that practically the whole Hamburg police force was in this general vicinity. He did make it around the corner, but ended up having to stop at a red light. And there in front of him, was the big police riot van. So he didn't get any farther. Genius, huh?

Saturday night, we grilled. Marc's friend works on the 6th floor of a parking garage. Well, he doesn't work in the parking garage, but on the 6th floor there are offices. And not your normal, everyday offices. Little two room offices rented to a bunch of random companies, mostly in the IT area. And then they have a common area with a piano, a fish tank and books. And a big balcony with a picnic table and a grill. The whole thing is kind of random. But it had a good view!
During our visit in Hamburg, we did eat Hamburgers. Did you know that the Hamburger was actually started in Hamburg? And the German immigrants, who often passed through Hamburg, brought it with them to the US, where it was then premiered at several fairs and somehow made it's way to becoming an American tradition.
All in all, Hamburg was well worth the weekend trip!