new things

This morning Elfi, the girl that rented me one of her rooms, and I went running in a little park just down the street. It is cold here and I don't have any running pants but at least my shorts are long =) but my knees were red. It felt really good to do some exercising and i plan on running there as much as i can.
Helping the Perrys pack is definitely a lesson in German culture. Germans don't move much...and i can see why. you can't throw things away here like you can in the states...and i don't just mean you aren't supposed to, i mean that you will be fined mucho dinero if you throw things away in the wrong receptacles or without the proper stickers or on the wrong days...etc. it is insane the rules surrounding trash here! in a persons house there are at least 5 different trash receptacles...plastic, glass (sometimes broken down into different colors), paper, newspaper, and bio (food trash). Yea, inconvienient but they are all about reducing our impact on the earth here...in fact, instead of the very benign, p.c. kind of label Global Warming, in german it is called the "climate catastrophe" how fitting.
today I went with Dwane and Annalisa and Johnmark to Walmart...yes, it is even here. for some plastic bottles, you can get money back if you recycle them...there's even a special machine for that purpose where you put the bottle in and it adds up your total, gives you a reciept and you can go to the cashier and get money or have that amout taken off your total bill.
efficiency.
There is something to be said for their methods though...for example...the Perrys have given away a good percentage of their stuff because it is easier to find someone to take it than to figure out how to dispose of it or to pay for it to be disposed of. I think sometimes we just throw things away in the states because it's easy...easier than trying to find someone who wants it or transporting it to the nearest secondhand store or something like that. I know when I moved in october there were somethings like that. We did give a lot away, but sometimes it's just easier to toss it.
Funny thing happened: today i went shopping but right when i'd gone down the 4 flights of stairs and out the building door i remembered that I'd forgotten bags (you have to pay for bags at the store if you don't have your own) so i turned around and a post man was putting mail in our boxes. He asked me If I lived here and I said I was just renting for a couple months and he said ok so i went upstairs. Elfi was taking a shower and just when i walked in the door of our apartment the doorbell from downstairs rang (you have to ring to get the building door open and there's a speaker and a button to opend the door) so Elfi comes out in her towel and answers it and it's the postman..apparently he was looking for her because there was some mail that was too big for her mailbox and so she has to pay a euro for it. so she asks me to pay him since she's in her towel and the postman comes up and...it's me! =) he thought this was the funniest thing and i had to tell him that i was renting from Elfi and she was in the shower. And then he had to help me with the money because i still can't ever seem to get the right coins...he laughed and laughed...so that is just one example of german humor...komisch!
ok, my arms are tired and i've got to catch the train back into the city
love ya'll,