I Got to Wash that Man Right out of My Hair

Ah German engineering!  You gotta love it.  I did my first load of laundry today and I felt like Harrison Ford's character  in Regarding Henry, right after he recovered from getting shot and had to relearn everything.  There are more so many wash programs on the damn thing - easy care, easy iron, delicate rinse, cotton/linens, energy savings, delicates, etc., it even has a temperature control which ranged from 30 to 90 celsius. For those of us who are fahrenheit-centric, that is about 90 fahrenheit to- core- of- the- sun- hot. Am I washing clothes or storing nuclear plutonium rods?  Mind you, all this is written in German so for a while, I was going back and forth on the computer translating.  I finally had to write everything down on a sheet of paper and tape it to the machine!  That worst part is the a normal wash cycle is about 2 hours long.  I guess the Germans want everything CLEAN.  To be honest, my whites have never been so white and without bleach.  Take that Clorox!

I didn't do much yesterday.  B is in Budapest till Saturday morning so it was an opportunity for me to walk around the neighborhood and get oriented.  Our apartment is in front of a park which overlooks the Rhine.  We are in the Golzheim area which I am told is one of the best neighborhoods.  For my next entry I will look up  information about Düsseldorf and give you folks more of an idea about this city.  This neighborhood is nice but the one thing it lacks is the convenience of having a neighborhood market around the corner or restaurants that one could pop into.  I have to schlep myself about half a kilometer to get to those kind of places.

Oh!  Some of you have asked about television and what I'm doing to keep myself entertained...B has satellite service through Sky TV in the UK so we have about 300 channels to choose from.  The programs vary widely in the daytime from old British TV series like the long running Coronation Street to old episodes of Bewitched, Cagney & Lacey (currently playing the first season that had Meg Foster as Cagney before Sharon Gless replaced her), to  OLD episodes of Days of our Lives -  it's hilarious to watch Dr. Marlena Evans terrorizing the town of Salem as a serial killer but it turns out she's been killing androids and the real people have been placed in suspended animation on a remote island (I am not kidding).  the evening broadcasts are a little better, with episodes of Lost and Grey's Anatomy being only a season behind (it gives me a chance to catch up).  As I'm typing this, the TV is showing an old episode of Gilmore Girls, before Rory turned into a sniveling, whiny idiot...I just realized that I need to get a life...

One last thing, Barack Obama was in Berlin yeterday.  There -  I feel a little better writing about something with some depth and meaning...I wonder if Marlena will get caught? hmmmm