Wine festival and a christening

So when we moved back to Neustadt, there was a wine festival going on. We also had a christening for Hubbys nephew where he was the godfather. Some things blog worthy to note of the christening with pictures: 

- more professionally made cakes for 40 people at a christening party than a wedding of 200 people! (5 to be exact)

- I was the only person in the church not singing the hymns (they were in German!) and not crossing myself - because I'm not catholic - but I was sitting in the 1st row in front of the priest - slightly awkward... (pic of hubby and the baby/god-son)

- The after celebration was so infested with bugs, I couldn't drink my beer before they got into it - this was after 10 mins of leaving it alone...

Highlights of the wine festival:

- people dressed like they were at a rodeo or one really strange guy who was in shorts so high his man parts were dangling out (tried to get an inconspicuous shot below...)

- drinking out of huge glasses

- 70% of people were over 50, we were definitely the minority

 

 - and some ones of us...

Registering in Germany

There is a procedure in Germany where you must register with the town that you live in. They must have your name, address, marital status and religion for their records. When you move town, you unregister there and tell the next town.

Now as much as I keep asking "why" this is necessary and I keep getting the answer (mainly from locals and government workers) as "Because it is law", to me, this still isn't enough of a reason. Especially, why do they need to know what religion I am. I'm told that is for taxing purposes (you pay a tax to your church here), but I still find it a little intrusive for the government to be tracking my religion. I also was told, that its a good way to find me if the government needs me from this information, its how the German government can track me down 'if they need me'…. 

The only other reason I could find was stated on a random website that:

"Registering is also necessary for getting power, water, phones etc hooked up and correctly billed. While these folks do not demand to see proof of registration, they do all tie their records together once you are signed up. As an example, if you buy a pre-paid mobile phone ticket, you must give an address and, if that it not registered, the pre-paid phone will not work!"

But that still doesn't quite answer why..? Then the government needs to know your water, power and phone usage also depending on where you live?

I'm sure there are people out there who actually have the facts, and good ones as to why the government needs this exact information for every movement in your life - that are less conspiracy theory sounding that what I have stated above - and feel free to post that reason below, but it would be nice if everyone knew this reason rather than just telling me "because it is so". 

Side note: This "because it is so" is a common answer to many of my questions.

Moving house - not so easy

What a pain in the arse (in a nutshell). Moving house is normally a pain (and I thought moving in was hard), but here, you must return your house 'as new'. No wear and tear as the normal expectations are when people live in a place - it must be as new. Therefore, not only do you move out and do a thorough clean, you have to tighten all the hinges on any cupboard doors you may have used, remove all existence you were there (remove lights from the roof and blinds/curtains from the windows) and you must also paint. And oh lord, if you aren't prepared for what painting a unit is like (like me), its a nightmare.

Lets start with a fun little picture of the first painting mishap we had…. We decided to sell our bed, and to our accidental misfortune, we had previously decided to sticky-tape the mosquito net to the back of our bed headboard. On removal, it pulled all the paint off… oooops! So then we had to repaint (for selling). Our first idea was to sand and then spray paint. Our mistake was we thought if we laid out some plastic sheet in the lounge room and just put the head board on that to paint, all would be ok… Well, we didn't realise that spray paint goes into the air, and then eventually settles later - anywhere outside the sheet, ANYWHERE in the room. Here was the result… (as you can see, the squares are from other moving objects we had on the floor in the room).

Thankfully our couch was white - so that wasn't noticed and thankfully with some seriously powerful elbow grease we managed to scrub it all off. 

Then we realised the spray paint didn't actually work, so we bought some real paint, used a roller, and painted it outside (that worked). Then the bed was sold so we slept on our blow up mattress from Aldi. Many visitors have slept on it and been comfortable, but just for me, just when I want to sleep on it, it decides to change form (and of course, on my side of the bed)… and here is the very uncomfortable lump it grew. I found the floor more comfortable.

Then came house painting. We bought the wrong colour white to the original (more than once... 3 times), so ended up having to paint almost 60% of walls - that we hadn't even left a scratch on - just to make it blend. Below is our 'different whites' and 2 of the 4 buckets of paint we tried to match with (not an inexpensive task).

Hubby's wonderful painting skills also came with an extreme amount of splatter, so I spent most of the time scrubbing it off the floors whilst he continued to paint all the walls.

(I had to put two pictures of the hubby up because of those wonderful arms to look at!)

(Note the small splatters on the floor everywhere...)

And finally, we were out, it was clean and surprisingly (well, for me), I was happy to be out of there. The house did us good, but the moving process really wore us out (not to mention the inspection process to check the 'as new' condition).