Fruehlingszeit in the German Corner - chat continues here

[SSSandy2]

"Deutsch or English
Native speakers, expats, anyone
From Brezeln to Bier

Please don't ask if you join in, everyone is welcome "

Never heard of Roger Boyce. Will have a google. Wondering if Vladimir Kaminer is funny in English. Will have to investigate.

I think just going over for a holiday would be a bit cold IYSWIM, I will go over but can't easily just yet. Will be a little later on if his health holds out. Called his surgeon and we're keeping an eye on it.

Glad your kg -dramas are sorted thequietone.

Sssandy, sorry to hear about your dad.

I would imagine that Good-bye Lenin would be a good choice of film to send him. Another nice one (especially if he likes football or is interested in life Germany in the 50's) is Das Wunder von Bern.

Califrau - why on earth did you and Berolina have to move?! Most inconsiderate of you IMO.

Thanks trockodile - where are you? Interestingly DS now says (read shouts) 'No, Nein and Noi' (Swabish) typical of a toddler to find three different ways to refuse everything!!

SSSandy2 - sorry you are having such a tough time.

The Quiet one - thanks also, I am sure I will be looking to you later when DS is 2.9 and we have to go through the same with kindergarten! There is a really nice one in our village but I gather places are extremely sought after.

Glad to be here (on the thread I mean!) you have all been so lovely already I am just annoyed I didn't find you earlier.

You are right, Baden Württemberg is gorgeous Taipo if a little er, strange in some ways in out part of it. Anyway, we have had Feiertage today so all is well in the world. May is a great month from that point of view, so many extra days off!

Thanks HHM and Taipo. Just wish my dp hadn't taken it into their heads to move as far as possible to the other side of the world when they retired. Still there you go, I am always saying I want to leave Berlin, aren't I?

Calif is known as The One Who Got Away, she very cleverly got herself and the family over to California and is living the high life when she isn't whacking mountain lions with her handbag. In comparison we live very tamely here.

Well, we have been to sign the contracts for the flat today(near Schloss Charlottenburg, very nice!). It was a bit of a strange feeling because we were told to meet up with a colleague of the Maklerin as he would be in Berlin so it would save us coming to Hannover just to sign. But we also had to hand over some money in cash. We signed the papers then he put them all in an envelope and said he was sending them to the Verwaltung and they would send us our copy next week or am I being paranoid? Anyway if he is a con man he's a very good one because he rang the Verwaltung infront of us and the Maklerin must be in on it too...and all his documents seemed 'real' but now have to wait 'til next week to see if the Contract arrives.

He gave you a receipt?

sounds a bit strange but it'll probably be alright.

Dh was telling me that once they had some deal on with this Australian guy and he told the law firm handling it to make the guy pay up cash in advance because he had a habit of ignoring bills. So when they went in for some consultation or other, dh tells him in Germany you have to pay law firms cash in the hand before they'll raise a finger and this totally bewildered Aussie bloke starts counting out his 1,000 Euro notes onto the table. Afterwards dh said he came out all wide-eyed, saying these bl* German law firms are fierce sharks and he'd never had to do that before!

Welcome Hummahummamumma

I'm not too far from you, in Rheinland-Pfalz, but near BW. My dh works in Mannheim which is our nearest big city. And I do so understand missing speaking English. We're rarely short of words here

I am enjoying the last of the Feiertage - isn't Corpus Christie usually in June? Everything's so early this year. Today, no school, no kindergarten and dh has finally started tiling the porch, a year after we bought the tiles. I took the children swimming this morning and left him to it.

Tiling is officially Hard Work and I have to admire every tile and appreciate how Difficult it is. And he had to even out the doorstep first which is Over and Above the call of duty.
Haven't figured out why my spending 2 days cutting down a tree and having to move all the wood myself (as h was busy with a computer game) goes under "Well you wanted a big garden," whereas h smears a bit of Polyfilla and calls me down to applaud his diligence and skill

Talking about speaking English, do you lot know this website for cheaper phone calls?

here

For newcomers who are still learning German :

You go to Schnellrechner
Ziel (e.g. GB, they do tarifs for mobiles too which can be v pricey otherwise)
Zugang: check the "Call by Call" box
Abrechnungstakt: check "Minutentakt 60/60"
Optionen: check: "nur ohne Anmeldung", "nur ohne Grundgebuehr", "nur ohne Verbindungsentgelt".

Then click "berechnen" and you can call e.g. the UK atm for 88 cents a minute which is heaps less than the major providers.
I call overseas every couple of days often and have been known to spend an hour on the phone to my mum at a time (she talks a lot ) and rarely pay more than 5 euros a month for overseas calls.

Thought I'm mention it as I met a Finnish woman at the pool this morning and she said her h was fuming about their phone bill from Deutsche Telekom which was v high as she'd called her mum a lot... so she'd let him fume and come to the pool too. With these Vorwahl numbers it's all billed through Telekom, so nothing to change, just cheaper. And I speak as one who used to wince when the phone bill came.

I note the way you always drop the d from dh when talking about your (d)h finknottle! Don't they always need loads of praise and encouragement though when they do things - we would just get on with it but men are really like small children who you can get to do anything with the right sort of praise! I suppose if you know how to work it right you can also wrap them around your little finger though!

I guess the agent has maybe had trouble with people not paying up once they've got the flat - or maybe mietnomaden have caused him trouble. He did sign 'Betrag erhalten, date and name' at the bottom of the bill. Just got a first quote from removal comapany (950Euro festpreis) but I told them on the phone that I was waiting for quotes from several other places before I decided. My dad has a good trick, he gets quotes, waits for the lowest then calls the other places and says he has an offer at such and such a price and could they better it. Usually the others come with better offers after that and you can get the price down like that (he had his own business so knows how to handle things like that). Still 950 isn't bad is it?

By the way we pre dial 01015 for UK and get calls for about 2,4 cent a minute.

Ahh, meant 0.88ct a minute! It costs me less to ring my mum than my friend up the road or h at work 20 km away, odd isn't it?

It's nothing against my beloved husband, admylin (not atm anyway!) just find the "d"s a bit twee, esp when I talk about other people's children who aren't particularly "dear".
The h/s1/s2/d abbreviations also work, oder?

I think increasingly agents etc. have been cheated hence the cash element which I'd find odd too, esp as I never have cash - being a walking ATM for 3 c and an h () but if you get a copy of the Betrag erhalten then it must be OK.
Don't envy you the move, must say.

And mobile charges, our last provider had a 5-Minuten Takt which h hadn't noticed
This Finnish woman has been paying nearly 200 Euros a month in phone bills, no wonder her h was fuming....

I see! Some days I write dh but I really don't mean it!

It is worth looking every day isn't it on that billigtelefon thing. We are to olazy so we just saved the one number - still so cheap. Don't feel guilty when I chat to my sister for an hour either!

I know, I'm trying to stay calm but I don't really want to move - it's so stressfull and the new work place in Hannover has already pre-warned us not to bother applying for Umzugskosten as they will not pay it. Which means I have to pack and get everything ready as a luxury Umzug it will not be. We'll need a couple of months to recover from it all once we've forked out for the move, the deposit and double rent for August, this bloody USA holiday and the dreaded kitchen problem.

Just had the Finnish woman on the phone thanking me for the info (I copied & pasted here) and she was in fits because having lectured her about the Telekom bills, it turns out her h was unwittingly dialling into those awful pop-up sex sites that appeared on his computer, causing huge bills too.
She's so funny, shame she's leaving in the autumn, the joys of the expat community, heh.

She was brave to admit that to you! I'm off now, dc are waiting for popcorn so they can watch a dvd that ds got for his birthday. His ne wbike still didn't arrive. I hope it comes tomorrow and not too early - saterday is the only day I stay in bed with my eye mask on so it's nice and dark!

He's not the first foreigner I've come across who's had problems with them even though the authorities have clamped down. Often through embarrassment as how do you explain it if you barely speak German? 2 Americans I know took the providers to court. As soon as she mentioned pop-ups he was sure he'd clicked "away", I knew and asked!

Any way, for the newcomers among us, I hope you are getting fleeced by Telekom et al.

It's great that site, isn't it? I always use it for phoning abroad and if people phone me I usually offer to phone them back because it's so much cheaper.

Thanks for putting the site up finks, it's taking ages to load on my crap pc but I have often wondered how you find those numbers out.

Dh definitely not d here at the moment. Feel I'm sailing very close to the ultimate rift in fact.

I think you did very well Finks getting dh onto the tiling. Mine is like a heart surgeon at work if he has to change a light bulb. I have to stand by like a surgical nurse the whole time while he calls for instruments and makes grunting noises like it's violent physical exertion involved.

I've started going through papers and need to know: how long do you keep old pay slips in Germany? Dh just ripped a load of his bank statements up the other day too - are you meant to keep them? Who does the paper work in your house? Here it's me but I don't have it in much of a logical order, all mixed up with rentenversicherung, sozialversicherungsnachweis, pay slips, Krankenkasse etc.

Help me get it in order. what can I chuck and what do I really need?

arent you supposed to keep everything for 10 years?

That's not what I wanted to hear Nighbynight! Dh hates paper work and he reckons if anyone really needs his bank statements he'll phone his bank and tell them to give him a print out for the last how ever many years. I don't think so - best not to even ask him his opinion on the other stuff. I'm going to start today and try to get it sorted. I'll be at it all day.

Worst thing is we haven't got a study - that's why it's bugging me, if I could have it all in a different room I would keep it all but even our new place won't have a study as it's a 4 Zimmer Wohnung. It is quite big but he'll still be infesting my living area with his office work corner and my study will be the space of floor next to my bed! At least the dc will have loads of room in their own bedrooms.

dh does it here, yes you're supposed to keep all that stuff

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. I spent my 2 days sorting papers and filing them all - ready for teh move. Gave myself a headache so was on regular asprin tablets too.

I have to fight my way through a curtain of spiders webs next week to get at my umzugs boxes which are all neatly stacked in the basement so I can start the packing of winter stuff and some files and books. Also have to try and go clothes shopping for the upcoming wedding and I'm watching my Auftrag on MyHammer.de where I'm auctioning for the best priced Umzug - had some quite good offers up to now or atleast 150 less than the best quote I had been given. It's a good website if any of you are looking for painters, handy men or builders (finknottle wonder what your h's patio work would have been worth!) Did you enjoy sitting out there this weekend?

Went shoe-trying-on on Saterday evening with dh - the shock that he actually took time off at the weekend to go round shops didn't help as neither of us found a pair of shoes in the 6 shops we went in. The dc were erschöpft and my hopes of geting decent shoes before we fly to the US have gone down to maybe 30 percent.

Is the wedding straight away after you get there? If not, why not buy clothes here and look for shoes in the US? What kind of shoes are you after? Did you look in Leiser? They always have some nice classic style shoes if that is what you're after.

Hi SSandy, no the wedding is too soon after we arrive so I have to be prepared! I think I might look in Galeries Lafayette, maybe the french style will be nice. Just worried about the price in there, it's alot of Dior and Yves St Laurent!

My thing on MyHammer.de is working well, so far the ofers are 150 Euro down from last night. I think I'm going to ask for offers for a party service to do the dc's Abschiedfest in the garden. I thought if I got someone to come and barbeque and just invite the dc friends and a few parents it would be nice. It would save me having to buy a grill set and do all the work anyway. Dh could invite all his work croneys later on and we could get it all done in one swipe!