Blumen/blooming in Baden-Württemberg

What a lovely easter weekend! We've been blessed with sunshine, warm weather (super warm, 28 degrees, who knew Germany had it in him!) and nothing to do but go for a walk thanks to shops being all completely closed 3 out of the 4 days.... luckily we had a well stocked fridge.

We took a few walks around the neighbourhood and found what seems to be endless blossoming flowers in planted gardens and untamed fields. How a couple of nice days can help you forget the cold miserable ones (unsure if this memory loss will be permanent but here is hoping!).

Spring is definitely here… but whats with the Seagull?

I never liked birds. Never. These feelings flourished years ago when my parents got my sister a bird. This bird managed to learn the most annoying ways to annoy any human in shrills and shrieks. Since then, my dislike has only grown.

I have found for my first spring in Germany, although living in the middle of a city, the birds come back for the spring and chirp full force at the crack of dawn. As an aussie, from a bushy suburb of Sydney, I was used to bird noises at 4am and always slept through usually without caring. I became accustomed to this noise. But living away for 3 years, and I think I got more used to sleeping through drunk people at 4am in the centre of Vancouver than bird noises, I've forgotten these early morning 'songs' and its actually waking me up of a morning.

Aside from the bitterness of sleep loss, what surprised me most was this mornings not so pleasant chirp. It sounded exactly like a seagull. We are at least 6-7 hours drive away from anything resembling ocean and as far as our town goes in drawing seagulls here - we don't have any fish & chip shops. Much to my dismay, this 'seagull' went on for about an hour at 5am making noises like I was hiding the salted fries somewhere in my room and deliberately making sure he wasn't going to get any.

Other than this wonderful spring revelation of renewed bird dislike (borderline hatred), its turning out spring here is pretty dam nice. From about mid march, we started getting temperatures of 23 degrees, almost daily and I haven't put on a winter coat since! We've only had one day of rain, and we got a supposed 'cold snap' two days ago, which still was round 16 degrees and bright sun (mostly night rain). As much as I complain about the winter here, they do have the most decent spring I've come across so far.

I'm sorry to say Vancouverites / Canadians, your spring has got nothing on over here. I've seen your weather report, and you've been having one or two nice days, but consistent rain and sitting around the average 10 degree mark. I never understood the concept of spring living there although most of you tried to tell me how wonderful it was. Here, I really understand it, it was a quick turnaround of cold and dark days to bright sunshine, eating outdoors, no coat wearing and even getting a tan!

And PS for those cherry blossom lovers, if you can't/won't get to Japan this year (for not so obvious reasons...), come here, its blossoming out of control!

Mum, Weddings and good ol' fashioned German customer service

I've been off the blogging radar for a while as my Mother came over to visit to kindly help me go wedding dress shopping. This is not an easy feat here when 80% of the shops didn't speak english (and my German is admittedly pretty bad), customer service is usually average and what is in style here, was in style everywhere else in the 90's.

What I found most intriguing was that wedding dress shops here all have yellow interiors. Walls are painted yellow, floors are often yellowy wooden and even the lighting has this yellowish glow. I'm not quite sure what they are trying to achieve. I thought maybe it makes you look more tan if you try on a bright white dress, or it has slimming properties… but neither of these seemed to work for my pasty skin and newly chubby figure (thanks to german salami, wurst, cheese and chocolate).

Returning to my point above, customer service here has never had a good reputation. I read about it before I arrived, I've experienced it whilst living here, and most of the time just put up with it. Its like they are stuck in the 50's when products were gleaning things that all consumers want - and if you don't want to buy the thing the sales person tells you to buy, you can just piss off.

Wedding dress shopping was no exception. To be fair, most of the time the ladies were lovely, understanding with my slow broken german and friendly towards helping us find a dress. On other occasions, sales ladies were slightly more bitter and less willing to help if we didn't like the first dress they pulled out as a suggestion. But I did have to mention here my favourite low point was when we emailed one shop to make and appointment with them. My man wrote the email in german to them saying nicely that I found some dresses on their website and would like to make an appointment to try some on. Also, I don't speak very much german and my mother joining me doesn't speak any. They responded a few days later - directly translated "All our discussions are conducted in German, so you should brides who do not speak the German language, make an appointment elsewhere. For this reason, we cannot make an appointment with you"

There was no polite "could you bring a translator" or "we'd be happy to try with the little german you speak although none of us speak english" … but no, please take your business elsewhere (even though in the other 80% of wedding shops we went to I managed fine to communicate only in german).

Surprisingly and luckily, we found my wedding dress a few days later (also at a shop that only spoke German but were more than happy to do business with me). We decided to ring around just to check prices before purchase. We rang the shop with the terrible customer service to compare prices, and the same dress to purchase from them was 500euros more. Double glad they didn't get our business now.

Seeing I can't exactly put photos up of my dress, here are a couple of photos from my mums visit that she took whilst we were traipsing around looking for the dress.

(Also, a special shout out to my mum, thanks for coming to help me buy a dress! Couldn't have done it without you!)

My street with all the leaves out

At the Graduation Tower (wikipedia that)

In france for the day

Little french river

Worlds biggest wine barrel (never used for wine... tourist trap mainly)

At the castle in schwetzingen

The garden in Schwetzingen

Cute cafe seating

The stairs up to the Heidelberg Castle that mum will tell you aren't fun

At the Heidelberg Amphitheatre after a long walk up the hill to get there