08.07.06
So I left Manchester last Tuesday night and arrived in Frankfurt. Denny DePriest, an American coach (with T3 Coaching) living with the military community in Kaiserslautern, Germany, picked me up and we drove about an hour to his nice house in a little village called Schneckenhausen. The drive was in the dark but it was still kind of fun... we passed through a half dozen little villages with narrow streets and towering stone churches. Denny told me about how Germans don't really enforce the speed limit, but if you're in an accident where speed was a factor, you can get fined. You can also be fined for talking on the cell phone when driving, and for running out of gas on the Autobahn (a high speed highway). I basically went right to bed because we had to get up early to go to swim practice in the morning.
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| Otterberg | Otterberg, nestled in the valley |
Denny coaches a team of mostly American military kids and we swim in a 50 meter unheated pool with no lane lines. It's pretty chilly in the mornings and the water temp has apparently been between 22 and 24 degrees Celcius. To put that in perspective, elite triathletes are allowed to wear wetsuits when it's 20 or below... so a 2 hour swim practice is pretty miserable unless you don't stop for more than 1 minute.
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| Leaving Schneckenhausen | I forgot what this village was called... |
My bike rides have been very interesting... I always take a map and either come up with a loop with Denny's help or I go exploring. The roads around here aren't really named, they just are like, "the road that goes from Otterberg to Otterbach." They have signs that say what town you've just left and which one is next and how far. The roads are pretty narrow and twisty/turny with no shoulder but the drivers are used to manuevering around parked cars so everyone can handle pretty well. In the villages they label which direction of traffic has "priority" with a yellow diamond, because sometimes it's so narrow only 1 car can fit through. Plus all the cars are really small... I definitely don't miss the excessively huge pickup trucks and SUV's that dominate the roads in the US. The villages are neat - many have really old buildings and every village has a church (usually massive, old buildings) and a cemetery. The Schneckenhausen church is right next to our house, so when the bells chime (about every 6 hours), it's VERY loud.
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Pretty much all the houses are painted concrete blocks, not wood or siding. They look all cute and quaint on the outside but inside it's actually huge. And they have these electric blinds over the windows and doors that completely block out the light, so even though the sun comes up really early, it's still pitch black in your room. I actually slept in until 9:45 am on Saturday!! |
| the crazy blinds | |
They have really small refrigerators, washer/dryers, and dishwashers. It seems like produce goes bad really fast here too. The Germans are really big on recycling also - there are 3 bins for every household, for paper, biodegradable, and plastic/aluminum/other trash. And then glass is all sorted into brown, clear, green. It's pretty crazy but this is the cleanest place I have ever been!
Running around here is awesome also. I'd say around here it's kinda like West Virginia, with rolling hills and lots of green and really dense forests. They do a lot of logging here but they aren't totally wiping out the forests. There are footpaths, paved and gravel, that network all over the place - through the woods and fields. Cars aren't supposed to be on them but many people use them as shortcuts and to bypass road construction. I got very disoriented in the woods on one of my runs but it was sorta neat because that hasn't happened to me in years since I haven't run on such neat trails in awhile.
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| in Rockenhausen | Me at Italian restaurant | Another village |
I haven't learned any German but I've gotten along fine. I will maybe learn a few phrases to try out on some German folks sometime. But with the mini-America that the military base provides, I can get along easily without knowing much.
Yesterday on my bike ride I discovered that from 7am until 7pm one of the major roads was shut down to car traffic and they had this huge cycle/skate/walk/run festival. Sooo many people came out for this, it was awesome! Along the way, food and drink stands were set up and those were full of people with their bikes parked along the sidewalks. This would NEVER happen in the US! It was crazy.
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| Bike festival | Bike festival |
