Week 8 - Germany
We've gotten more settled in, the kids are over their colds, and we've started exploring. Within walking distance from our house is the north sea coast. It's too cold to swim and the coast is mud flats instead of sand, but you can walk along the dike and see the ocean. There is a sandy area they call a dry beach or trockener Strand that has really fun playground equipment.
This was our first excursion.
We then took the bus to Greetsiel, a fishing village which has twin windmills and another playground. It turned out to work just fine taking our wagon on the bus. We use it to carry stuff, including whatever groceries we end up picking up, and the kids can ride if they get tired. Interestingly, they've been better about walking since we've had it along. They don't ride that much, but knowing they can makes a big difference.
We've been to Emden twice (a bigger town in the opposite direction), once to drop off big C's shoe for repair (the other one, not the one we got fixed in Edinburgh), and once to pick it up. Emden has a fun harbor with historical ships you can board and look at. We messed up on the timing and a lot of them were closed, but we got to go on a coast guard rescue cruiser from the 1950's. The boys loved this, and the guide made an effort to talk with us with Google translate. I forgot to take pictures though.
Emden has an Arabic grocery store, much to my delight. I knew that many Syrians have ended up in Germany, but I wasn't expecting to see so many up here, I thought they'd be in the bigger cities. It's been nice, I've been using Arabic and enjoying that culture as well.
We continue to find that very few people speak English, which is fine. It's certainly not their responsibility to speak English for the comfort of American tourists. It's just a bit of a surprise, when we found almost everyone in Austria to be fluent when we were there 10 years ago, and naively assumed the same would be true here. I'm sure it would be different if we were in more metropolitan areas — actually, even the German spoken here is low German which we've learned is not just a dialect, but an independent language from high German. So when we use Google translate we're still conversing with folks in their second language. We find lots of smiles and thanks to work fine, and people are quite interested in us and helpful. It's a touristy region, but more for German tourists. They clearly don't see a lot of Americans. Think in terms of rural New England or upper Michigan- popular vacation spots for Americans, but not many international visitors. Two people have asked if we're tracing our ancestral routes here, apparently a lot of folks emigrated to America from the region around the turn of the century. My great-grandma on my mom's side was a first generation child of German immigrants, but we're not sure where they came from and think it was pretty far south of here. People just seem to be trying to figure out what the heck we're doing here. Actually, it was random, but I think it's a good spot for really getting immersed in the culture, which is definitely a goal for us.