Our lives have slowed down quite a bit since we have come to Düsseldorf. In Canada, our lives were so very busy preparing for Germany and once in Berlin, we were trying to pack everything into two weeks. Now that we are in Düsseldorf, we have all the time in the world (it feels like) and so we take it one day at a time. We relax and enjoy our stay which is very nice but also makes for a boring blog. We woke up late yesterday and spent the day in our pajamas. I have a courier package arriving and so we spent the day waiting for it...we needn't have bothered. The package never arrived and so we wasted the day. I had another dinner with my Au Pair family that night and so I left Steph to her own devices for a couple hours. Since my Au Pair family eats very late, they also stay out late. 10:30 at night is still an appropriate hour to have guests over. I felt rude telling them I needed to catch a train home right away but I was falling asleep at their house...not a very good impression. They had a previous au pair come for dinner as well. She is from Winnipeg and so we immediately became friends. I believe that when Canadians meet other Canadians in a different country, you automatically have a safety net/personal connection. We had a very nice chat about the family and our lives in Germany. She came here as an au pair for 11 months and then came back on a traveler's visa and is trying for a work visa. She is very nice and easy to talk to. As it turns out, the au pair with the family fell through. That is alright. Instead, I shall spend a couple weeks learning the language through my school and then apply at my highest calling: Starbucks in Germany. Today, we went grocery shopping. We hadn't done any grocery shopping in a few days and so we were scraping the bottom of the barrel for food. It felt so nice to be able to have food in the cupboard again. We bought some more fruit and so I shall have to cut up the pineapple once more for Steph. Hopefully it will all get eaten this time. I have discovered that there is a reputation about Canadians. Everyone says we are so polite and easily manipulated...this has never been clearer to me until grocery shopping in Germany. There is no time to ask someone to move in Germany, you just roll your cart right over them. A tall German man mowed me down with his cart in the seasonings aisle. It is also customary for two people to stick their carts side by side, blocking the entire aisle with said carts and not moving for anyone until they are done examining every last ingredient on the food item. It is also customary for people who have only a few items to budge in front of people with more than 5 items. Some German woman budged right in front of us, said something about us having too many items, then turned around with a fake sweet face and thanked us! I was appalled. We tried to switch lines but then another German woman speed up and pushed her cart in front of us again only to move to a different line five minutes later. Maybe Canadians are too polite for the rest of the world. That or I need to grow a backbone. After putting away the groceries, we sat and had some lunch at our dining room table for the first time ever. It was much nicer to sit and talk instead of shoving food in our faces in front of the tv. It was a nice sunny day, the first in quite a few days, and so we went for a walk into town. Steph has found her new favourite hang out: World Coffee. She loves to go in and buy her White Chocolate Wocochino. I feel like we are betraying Oranium. It consists of the white chocolate coffee-mocha drink with whipped cream in a glass. It is very good. After that we went home and enjoyed a lovely German meal of Currywurst. We continued to watch our Grey's Anatomy as the storyline gets much better as the seasons go on. We had wanted to spend our "Sunday In Deutschland" baking as I wanted to make Boterkoek to celebrate our moving in but we forgot the ingredients of course.
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