july 5

Today we went to the fabric store. I'm not sure what the name of it is, but we finally found one. Fabric here. My gosh! A meter of plain brown cotton fabric was $12 Euros! That's like, $16 per yard in the US. I also had to buy a rotary cutter and ruler because I apparently didn't send one here. The cutter: $17 Euros. The ruler: $15 Euros. Wow. What else? I haven't driven yet. The car is a stick shift, the streets are narrow, everyone drives fast, and there's nowhere to park anyhow when you get there. I tend to walk to the markets. There are fresh fruit and veggie stands everywhere. They have wonderful cherries, and apricots that actually smell and taste like apricots! There is a store I go to for meat, which costs a lot more than in Oregon, but beef and chicken is good. The milk, I haven't really tried yet. It comes in a box on a shelf, in the unrefrigerated section. I've used it in hot chocolate, but not on cereal yet. Mostly I eat oatmeal every morning. And orange juice. Lunches--I've found some gluten free crackers at "reformhaus" and I found a pimiento cheese spread. I even found some Dr Pepper, but it costs $1.15 Euros per bottle, so it's more of a luxury. Tonight for dinner Rob made his famous orange chicken. Unfortunately, it would have been better if we had realized that vinegar here is 5 times the strength of vinegar there. The chicken tasted a bit pickled. My mouth felt a bit pickled too. Otherwise, it was good! We have taken a bike ride and many U-bahn rides, which is the underground train system. We rode our bikes to a big outdoor market last Saturday. We took the Ubahn to get to the sewing machine store. We didn't know that the shop actually had customer parking so we carried the machine in its big box all the way home on the train, and then had to walk several blocks. Oh! I hear a reminder of something else that is different here. We don't have window screens. We don't have air conditioning. So we have the windows open a lot. We get moths and little bugs, but no birds or bees yet. My mom told me that when her sister lived in Germany years ago, birds used to fly in and take butter off their table. Our butter dish is covered. No worries. Then my dad mentioned bats. I hope we don't have bats. Ok, that's all for this post. I have to figure out how to do paragraphs. It's not just a return. Perhaps Meg can tell me.