Regensblog

For those of you wondering: Po & Susie got here just fine, pretty much on schedule on Monday and they fought the jet lag like champs, staying up all day until dark. This set us up for a delightful Tuesday (see below) and what looks like a similar Wednesday (check back later).

We’ve been living here for four years now, so we finally decided it’s time to finalize the move from back in March 2004. That is to say, we’ve gotten rid of as much of the crap left over from the move as possible — mostly cardboard boxes. Our collection of big pieces of styrofoam has also grown over the years from purchases of items like lamps and television sets and printers and computers and all that stuff, and we decided this was the right time to get rid of it. And some big furniture items not elegible for street-level pickup.

So we

1. rented a van from Europcar by reserving online a couple days ago
2. got up shortly before six in the morning (on my day off!)
3. got all our crap together
4. took the bus out to Europcar to pick up our van — an Opel model with an Italian name
5. brought the van back to the parking lot am Evangelischen Krankenhaus
6. schlepped all our stuff down from the apartment to the ground level
8. brought the van up closer to the apartment (pretty sure this was illegal, but what else am I going to do?)
9. crammed our bigger items in first, then the smaller items in around them
10. headed out to Regensburg’s Recyclinghof
    

    I was a little nervous, not knowing much about town dumps and stuff like that in general, let alone in deepest Oberpfalz, but we took a co-worker’s advice, were super-polite to everyone we encountered, and we got along just fine, dumping all our stuff into quite precisely labeled dumpsters and compactor machines. Check out the pictures snapped by Sarah with her phone.

    If you’re good at sorting your trash at home, you’ll be fine here. It’s the same concept, but simultaneously more specific and more flexible:

    • separate styrofoam and plastic film (think grocery bags, cellophane, and all that) waste out from other kinds of plastic
    • bring your old computer or telephone or other electronic junk; you can pitch it here!
    • yard and construction waste are also acceptable
    • and of course the ability to get rid of desks, bedframes, full-length mirrors, and other stuff that the normal garbage collection doesn’t cover.

    It was, for both of us, oddly exhilarating. Probably for at least one of several reasons:

    • We expected much more hassle, knowing Germans and their systems like we think we do
    • We are agog at the implication of it going smoothly: we must have beaten the system over the past four years!

    
    

    Or maybe not. We still get worked up about stuff like this (below). Click the pictures for a bigger view and our comments on them.
    

Waffnergasse 6 - 8
93047 Regensburg

Telefon +49 (0)941 / 28 04 33 - 0
http://www.fuerstlichesbrauhaus.de

Been there twice now — both times amazed by the quality and the quantity of the food for the price.

This evening we took out Tammy and Matthias for dinner, with

• an appetizer shared among us
• 5 beers and a mineral water
• 4 entrees (one from the daily specials board

All for less than €50! I’m so glad Natasha and Tommy took us here on Thanksgiving 2007 for dinner!