Valuable Lessons

1.  Curry is in everything.  I know....you say to yourself (much like I did) it can't be in EVERYTHING.  No, it is in everything.  Just this week I learned that curry is in ketchup, chinese lo mein, cream of broccoli soup and Old El Paso taco seasoning.  I thought for sure taco seasoning from Texas wouldn't have curry in it, but I was wrong.  You put that spice in the taco meat expecting to smell chili powder and you get this P U of curry.  Note to friends:  Please include packets of taco seasoning with all shipments of corn tortillas.

2.  Everthing is recylced here and don't even think of putting it in the wrong place or throwing it away at the wrong time.  There's a yellow bag, black bag, blue trash can, special neighborhood cans for green glass, white glass, brown glass and paper.  Make sure you know all the german words for those colors prior to arriving at the designated trash can.  By the way, you can NOT put trash in the neighborhood trash cans on Sundays.  Sundays are quiet days and you cannot make noise emptying your garbage.  This was very hard for Greg to accept since he doesn't like to be told what to do.  The rebel wanted to throw paper in the universal paper garbage can on Sunday but I had to convince him that it was a major rule breaker and we didn't want to be "THOSE" neighbors our first month here.  The great news is that everything has a place and gets recylced.  The bad news is that you walk around the kitchen with garbage in your hand for 5 minutes trying to figure out where to put it.

3.  Banking is very different here and seems to be much for efficient.  No checks.  Everything is done by account transfer.  When you get a bill you also get an account number of where to transfer the money to.  If I owe you $100 you just give me your account number and I transfer it to your account.  All you need to be able to do this is a pin number.  Everyone gets a personal banker when they open an account so this should all run smoothly you would think.  We've had our account for 2.5 months and much like our furniture we still haven't gotten our pin number.  Now everyone knows that Greg can get anything from anybody even if he has to call the president of  Marriott.  Unfortunately people don't understand that here and although he wants to tell them that he will be sharing with all our friends and neighbors (of which we have 1 of each) that they should not do business with Deutsche Bank, nobody seems to care.  If he could just tell people off as well in German as he does in English I know we would be getting somewhere.